Journalists across the region mark Press Freedom Day

The 14th World Press Freedom Day on Monday was marked in Central Asia by conferences, award ceremonies and opportunities for discussion and debate, at a time when media freedom in the region is in short supply. In Uzbekistan, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) organised a conference in the capital, Tashkent, to discuss the media situation in the country. OSCE said the conference brought together journalists, NGOs, state officials and diplomats. The OSCE Tashkent office organised the event along with Germany's Konrad Adenauer and Friedrich Ebert foundations, the United Nations, and the Tashkent-based International In-Service Centre for Training Journalists. An awards ceremony for contests conducted by OSCE and the Friedrich Ebert foundation is scheduled to follow the conference. Turkmenistan, the most reclusive Central Asian state and run with an iron fist by President Separmurad Niyazov, "is the most repressive of the former Soviet republics and its media are totally censored", according to Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters sans Frontieres' (RSF) annual report for 2003. Conditions for journalists are especially harsh in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, whose presidents are included on RSF's media "predator" list, which the group published as part of an annual report on Monday. "There is no press freedom [in Turkmenistan]. There is no independent press and all newspapers and TVs, etc. are used for propaganda purposes. It is totally under state control. So, even [when] comparing [it] to all the world's countries it is among the worst," Caroline Giraud of RSF's Europe desk told IRIN from Paris. Alex Ivanko, senior adviser to the OSCE representative on freedom of the media, said that the region contained some of the most anti-press governments he had seen anywhere in the world. "The region has everything you can find in the book, from your basic unsubtle methods in Turkmenistan such as imprisonment, beatings and even killings. The same [applies] in Uzbekistan." Ivanko added that some states in Central Asia employed more subtle methods of pressuring the media, like threatening calls or using the pro-government judicial system, which is neither fair nor independent. These methods had even been used in countries such as Kyrgyzstan, which is the most democratic and liberal of the five Central Asian states. "Libel suits are filed on a regular basis against journalists, and as a result a lot of the media are forced into bankruptcy, because the courts make decisions in favour of the plaintiffs, and this often results in the media being pushed out of business. One of the most critical newspapers in Kyrgyzstan was forced into bankruptcy by libel suits, and had to open under a new name." In Tajikistan, the OSCE Dushanbe office organised three days of activities. On 1 May, a ceremony was held in the northern city of Khujand to unveil a memorial for Maksud Khuseinov, a journalist who died in state custody during the country's civil war in the 1990s. After the ceremony, independent journalists, students, NGOs and officials gathered to discuss journalists' achievements and the press situation in Tajikistan. On Monday, an awards ceremony honoured the winners of journalism contests held by OSCE, the UN Tajikistan Office of Peace-building, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) and the Open Society Institute (OSI). On Tuesday, editors and media executives will meet government officials for a roundtable discussion on the development of press freedom in Tajikistan.