Concerns mount following beating of journalist

The Yemeni Journalists Syndicate (YJS) has said that it is increasingly worried about local press freedoms after a journalist writing for an opposition newspaper was beaten up by unknown assailants. "Assaults against journalists have increased because the security services have failed to identify and bring to justice the perpetrators of such attacks," said YJS Deputy Chairman Saeed Thabet. The latest case involves Qaed al-Tairi, an employee of the information ministry and a writer for the newspaper Al-Thawri, the mouthpiece of the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP), of which al-Tairi is a central committee member. On 11 March, al-Tairi was abducted in the capital, Sana, and beaten up before being released in a remote village. "While I was going to my office, a group of people seized me and bundled me into a car, putting a mask on my face,” al-Tairi recalled. “They immediately started insulting me, beating me and even used an electric club to hit me." Al-Tairi was reluctant to blame anyone for his ordeal, but he pointed out that he had openly criticised the regime in two recent NGO-sponsored workshops. At those events, he had held the government accountable for the "miserable situation which led to the 1994 civil war and the consequent alliance between the regime and traditional tribal forces." "The kidnappers asked me to stop writing against tribalism and the republican system,” said al-Tairi. “They accused me of being a secessionist and they threatened to exile me to a remote tribal place where no one could reach me." Afterwards, he recounted, the attackers drove him to Wadi Dahr, a mountainous village outside the capital. "After removing the mask, I found blood dripping from my mouth and nose and felt pain in different parts of my body," he said. In a 12 March press statement, the YSP declared that the attack was meant to "silence and stop journalists from reporting on corruption", warning that the "dramatic deterioration” of Yemen's march towards political pluralism could result in a return to “totalitarianism”. The Ministry of Information also condemned the attack on al-Tairi, the first time the ministry condemns a case of aggression against journalists. "This act is hostile to the values of the state, society and security,” said the ministry in a press statement. “It also harms the freedom of opinion and expression." In a 9 March report on the media in Yemen, the New-York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) noted: "At least two dozen outspoken Yemeni journalists have been assaulted, imprisoned or subjected to spurious criminal lawsuits in the past two years, signalling a dangerous escalation in the government's crackdown on the country's independent and opposition press." The CPJ statement added: "Witnesses and evidence point to involvement by government forces and state agents in a number of recent assaults."