05/03/06

North Korea, Myanmar and Turkmenistan top list of 10 'Most Censored Countries'

By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press Writer

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- North Korea's media praises "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-Il every day but never reported the country's famine in the 1990s. Myanmar bans anti-government sentiment in the media. Turkmenistan's dictator approves the front pages of major newspapers -- and they always include a photo of him.

The three nations topped the list of "10 Most Censored Countries" issued by the Committee to Protect Journalists on the eve of World Press Freedom Day. The other countries were Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Eritrea, Cuba, Uzbekistan, Syria and Belarus.

"People in these countries are virtually isolated from the rest of the world," CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said Tuesday. "They're kept uninformed by authoritarian rulers who muzzle the media and keep a chokehold on information through restrictive laws, fear and intimidation."

"We call on the leaders of these most censored countries to join the free world by abandoning their restrictive actions and allowing journalists to independently report the news and inform their citizens," she said.

The list is the first on censorship issued by the committee. Its regional staff, which researches press freedom abuses around the world, rated the degree of censorship according to 17 different benchmarks, including censorship regulations, jamming of foreign news broadcasts, imprisonment and harassment of journalists and the degree of state control of media.

The report noted that Equatorial Guinea's state-run radio has described the president as "the country's God," and its only private broadcaster is owned by his son.

In Libya, which has the most tightly controlled media in the Arab world, no news or views critical of Moammar Gadhafi are allowed, and one critic who wrote for a London-based opposition Web site was killed last year, it said.

Most countries on the list are ruled by one man who has remained in power by manipulating the media and rigging elections, the report said. Cooper said the media fosters personality cults in Equatorial Guinea, North Korea and Turkmenistan, where President Saparmurat Niyazov's image is constantly displayed in profile at the bottom of television screens.

The committee cited another pattern which it called the "big lie." In North Korea, for example, the official news agency said Kim was so beloved that after a munitions train exploded in April 2004, people rushed into burning buildings to save his portraits before searching for family members or saving household goods. The international press was barred from the scene, where 150 people died and thousands were injured, it said.

The report also "underscores how countries that censor so heavily show a cynical disregard for people's welfare," Cooper said, citing Myanmar's "stifling of coverage of the effects of the December 2004 tsunami."

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Uzbekistan started to develop some independent media. But the dozen journalists who witnessed the massacre of anti-government protesters at Andijan in May 2005 have been forced to flee the country, she said.

"All independent media and foreign media have been squeezed out of Uzbekistan and we're now back to a situation that looks pretty much like the Soviet era," Cooper said.

She called Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko's jailing of reporters who covered the opposition's efforts to unseat him in recent elections part of his government's "shameful record" -- and she singled out Russia for refusing to criticize it.

Other countries considered for the list included China, which has been the world's leading jailer of journalists, and Zimbabwe, where most of the independent media has been forced to flee by President Robert Mugabe's government, Cooper said.