Bangladesh emergency government crackdown on pro-democracy media

Photo: Emotional breakdown of CSB news staffs on hearing the that the station would be knocked off the air

SALEEM SAMAD

AFTER "limited censorship" on electronic media, Bangladesh’s only private 24-hour news channel has been silenced, just days after being warned not to broadcast footage of pro-democracy riots.

CSB television said officials from the telecommunications regulator visited with armed law enforcement personnel and took it off the air.

The officials of Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has asked CSB to explain doubts over the allocation of the frequency and accused the station on charges of forging a no-objection certificate, and asked its authorities to respond to an official notice in seven days.

But a senior CSB official argued that he was not convinced by the reason. The authorities are avoiding comment.

Until the TV station administration explains their conduct, the transmission would remain suspended.

Off Air
The order that many of the channel's journalists and employees described as "a surprise" move made most of them emotional.

Niaz Morshed Quaderi, head of the editorial section, read out a statement on behalf of the channel authorities.

"We had requested the BTRC officials to give us some time to announce that we are going to stop our transmission. But they did not agree," an emotional Morshed told bdnews24.com.

Accused
Earlier, on August 23, the interim government served notices cautioning private TV channels CSB and Ekushey TV for ‘breaching emergency rules’ by showing student agitation and country-wide pro-democracy riot.

The student protests in Dhaka quickly spread into three days of violent demonstrations across Bangladesh demanding an end to emergency rule.

The violence posed the most serious challenge to the emergency government since it took power six months ago.

In a statement, the Press Information Department said the two TV stations had aired ‘provocative news, video footage and talk shows against the government’ for the last few days.

"Several news items broadcast by the two TV channels breached the emergency rules. The government will take action if they continue to do so," law adviser Mainul Hosein told bdnews24.com on Aug 23.

But neither the PID statement nor the adviser in the phone interview explained which news item of the TV channels had exactly breached the emergency rules.

Gained Popularity
The first and lone 24-hours news channel, which only began broadcasting from March, went off air about 1800 local time (1200 GMT) on Thursday evening.

The channel started broadcasting on March 26 and earned popularity in covering big news events such as the arrests of two former prime ministers Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia.

"It's quite unfortunate not only for us but for the entire media community that a popular station like ours had to be shut down without any notice," he said.

Watchdog Protest
Meanwhile, the international press watchdogs express grave concerns over the reported harassments, assaults and intimidation of journalists and gagging of the media in Bangladesh and denounces the repression of the journalists.

The law-enforcing agencies resorted to assaults of the journalists, both print and electronic, while they were covering the students protesting against the high-handedness of the army personnel and demanding the lifting of the state of emergency that suspended fundamental rights of the citizens.

The watchdog also notes that despite repeated government assurances of press freedom, the law enforcers resorted to detention, assaults, intimidation and humiliation of the media people particularly since the imposition of curfew on Aug 21.

Reporters Without Border (RSF), Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and Asia Media Forum (AMF) expresses concern over the government's overt intimidating two private TV channels — Ekushey and CSB, and covert attempts by telephonic instructions to media executives by the government agencies to gag the press.. #

The article was written based on reports of BBC online, Daily Star, The New Age and BDNews24.com

Saleem Samad, an Ashoka Fellow (USA) is a Bangladesh born journalist, presently living in exile in Canada for "crying wolf" when he discovered Jihadist sleeper cells in Bangladesh used by the remnants of Al-Qaeda and Taliban who fled the war torn Afghanistan after US led invasion in 2001. He presently edits DurDesh.net and also a blog BangladeshWatchdog

Bangladesh journalist Tasneem Khalil arrested

• Men from an army intelligence unit were behind the arrest, Khalil's wife said
• The men took Khalil's passport, cell phones, documents, wife said
• Human Rights Watch's Asia director expresses extreme concern
• Khalil worked on HRW report last year about alleged torture by elite forces

(CNN) -- The Bangladeshi army arrested a Bangladesh journalist at his home early Friday for unknown reasons, according to his wife.

Tasneem Khalil writes for the Dhaka-based Daily Star and also works part-time for Human Rights Watch and as a stringer for several news organizations, including CNN.

Khalil's wife Sharmin Afsana Shuchi telephoned CNN to say that the men who arrested him were from an army intelligence unit.

In a statement, she said that four men in plainclothes identified themselves as belonging to "the joint task force." They refused to tell Khalil on what charges he was being arrested and cautioned him to be quiet "if you don't want anything else to happen," she said.

The men searched the house, took Khalil's passport and cell phones, two desktop computers and "all the documents, notepads, piles of paper, CDs and everything," she said. "They took it all away."

The men allegedly took Khalil to the Sangsad Bhavan army camp outside the parliament building in Dhaka.

The Bangladeshi army has detained thousands of people since declaring a state of emergency on January 11, Human Rights Watch said. Many of them have been tortured, the group said.

"We are extremely concerned about Tasneem Khalil's safety," said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "He has been a prominent voice in Bangladesh for human rights and the rule of law and has been threatened because of that."

Khalil is a noted investigative journalist who has published several controversial exposes of official corruption and abuse, particularly by security forces. Last year, he assisted Human Rights Watch in research for a 2006 report about torture and extrajudicial killings by Bangladesh elite security forces, said HRW press director Emma Daly.

According to Bangladeshi human rights groups, the army has detained tens of thousands of people since a state of emergency was declared on January 11, 2007. A number of those detained are picked up in the middle of the night, as Khalil was, and then tortured.

In Bangladesh, security forces have long been implicated in torture and extrajudicial killings. The killings have been attributed to members of the army, the police, and the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite anti-crime and anti-terrorism force. The Human Rights Watch report Khalil worked on, “Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Torture and Extrajudicial Killings by Bangladesh’s Elite Security Force,” focused on abuses by the RAB.

Killings in custody remain a persistent problem in Bangladesh. To date, no military personnel are known to have been held criminally responsible for any of the deaths.

Khalil was called in for questioning by military intelligence last week, apparently as part of the military’s campaign to intimidate independent journalists ahead of May 10, 2007, when the army’s three-month legal mandate for ruling under a state of emergency came to an end.

CNN and HRW have been in contact with Bangladesh's Special Envoy to the United States, Farook Sobhan, and other officials in attempts to find information about Khalil. Sobhan told CNN it was the first he'd heard about Khalil's arrest and promised to make inquiries. #

Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Torture and Extrajudicial Killings by Bangladesh’s Elite Security Force

POSTED: 1:10 a.m. EDT, May 11, 2007

Copyright 2007 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report

'Democra-tators' aim at journalists

Western war reporters hog the glory, but, as Marina Jimenez writes, local watchdogs face the greatest risk

MARINA JIMENEZ

Saleem Samad, a genial refugee from Bangladesh, spends his days nabbing shoplifters and shushing disorderly customers as a security guard at a Chapters bookstore. But before he arrived in Toronto four years ago Mr. Samad, 55, was leading a very different kind of life.

A prominent journalist, Mr. Samad was forced to spend 55 days in a Dhaka prison, simply for having the audacity to criticize his own government.

The annual World Press Freedom Day, to be marked this Thursday, honours journalists who brave death or jail in pursuit of the truth.

Yet, all too often, the headlines focus on international stars such as Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped and killed by extremists in Pakistan. In fact, far more tortured or slain journalists
are not war correspondents but locals such as Mr. Samad, attacked at home or in their newsrooms, often by agents of their own governments.

Often those governments are, like that of Bangladesh, nominally democratic, even members of the Commonwealth. But they are led by what Joel Simon of New York's Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
calls "democra-tators," elected leaders with authoritarian streaks such as Vladimir Putin in Russia and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

These leaders have a deep mistrust for the institutions that limit their power, such as the judiciary and the press. Three journalists were killed in Russia last year, including Anna Politkovskaya, a Chechnya expert, last October.

In the case of Mr. Samad, he was behind bars from late November of 2002 until mid-January in 2003, and endured torture at the hands of military intelligence officers. When he asked his jailors what crime he had committed, they said he had smeared Bangladesh's good reputation with his exposes on Islamic terrorism, published locally and internationally, including in Time.

"They didn't like my writings on how the Bengali government was harbouring terrorists and jihadists," he says. "They wanted to know why I was trying to undermine a democratic government. They were trying to silence me."

Mr. Samad was lucky. He was released and in 2004 fled Bangladesh for a new life in Canada. Others are not so fortunate.

According to a report released last month by the Paris-based International News Safety Institute (INSI), the number of journalists killed on the job has escalated dramatically in recent years. In the past decade, more than a thousand media members have been slain, and in nine out of 10 cases, the perpetrators have never been prosecuted.

Reporters Without Borders tabulated the deaths of 81 journalists and 32 media assistants (drivers, translators, security and fixers) last year alone. It is the highest toll since 1994, when 103 died, half of
them in the Rwandan genocide. An additional 1,400 attacks or threats were carried out against journalists - many of them during election campaigns in Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe. Another record.
That is why the focus for this year's World Press Freedom Day is impunity, and the need to bring to justice those who target and kill journalists.

"With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the return to democracy in Latin America, we saw an explosion of press freedom," notes Mr. Simon of the CPJ. "But, in this decade, there have been some losses."

Among them is Hrant Dink, editor of Turkey's only Armenian-language magazine and a well-known critic of the Turkish government's treatment of Armenians. He was shot in the street as he left his office on Jan. 19 of this year.

"In many countries, murder has become the easiest, cheapest and most effective way of silencing troublesome reporting and the more the killers get away with it, the more the spiral of death is forced upwards," INSI director Rodney Pinder said last month.

Not surprisingly, Iraq is the most dangerous place to report from.

The United Nations has become so concerned about the deliberate targeting of journalists that the Security Council even passed a special resolution on Dec. 23, 2006, condemning such attacks and reiterating the right of war correspondents to be treated as prisoners of war and accorded the rights of civilians under the Third Geneva Convention.

Many journalists, though, are killed not in war zones, but covering local politics or crime in countries such as Mexico, Russia, Iran and India. Marlene Garcia-Esperat lost her life for her articles documenting embezzlement and corruption in the local government in Tacurong, the Philippines. She was shot and killed in front of her two children on Easter weekend in 2005. Her bodyguards were off-duty.

Since most of these homicides are never resolved, the sense of impunity only encourages more killings, advocates say. There is also surprisingly little public sympathy for these cases, as though journalists somehow deserve to die for writing about the drug trade, or for criticizing an official state religion.

"There is a sense of complacency when a journalist and their family are killed or are under attack. The public finds it easier to support police officers or firefighters who die in the line of duty," notes Anne Game, executive director of the Toronto-based Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE). "But it's so important to try to protect journalists because they're really on the front line. Their freedom to speak enables others to."

Ross Howard, a journalism instructor at Vancouver's Langara College and president of Media and Democracy, a non-profit Canadian group, has crisscrossed the globe training journalists in the developing
world - only to see them targeted as they become less partisan and more professional.

"There is a tragic irony in post-conflict states in emerging democracies that the better the journalist gets, the more dangerous it becomes for him [or] her," he said.

"In countries such as Iran, Cuba or Pakistan, you cannot criticize the supreme leader, question the country's policies or even the economic corruption among the power-holders," notes Maryam Aghvami, an Iranian journalist who is now living in Toronto, where she heads the 70-member Journalists in Exile.

"If you are brave enough to do so, you are accused of acting against the country's national security, spreading lies and spying for Western powers."

Another key difference today is the erosion of the neutral-observer status that journalists used to enjoy. Radical or revolutionary groups no longer view journalists as conduits of information, but as lucrative
kidnapping targets.

Local columnists such as Saleem Samad are seen as "enemies of the state," and international correspondents as representatives of their own governments.

While there is no meaningful global data comparing journalists killed on the job with, for example, firefighters, Julie Payne, CJFE's manager, says the consequences are more profound. The killing of a journalist undermines one of the primary means of holding people accountable - and serves to silence others.

That is why advocacy organizations have begun funding legal cases overseas. CJFE, the CPJ and a number of other groups helped fund the case against Ms. Marlene Garcia-Esperat's killers. Three hit men were finally convicted and received life sentences in October, 2006, in Cebu - though the true power-holding authors of her death remain at large.

CJFE also manages the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX), which issues daily alerts of threats and violations to journalists all over the world.

As for Mr. Samad, he, his wife and adult son were all granted asylum here. Today, in addition to working security at the local bookstore, he edits Durdesh.net, a news portal for the South Asian diaspora.

He also looks forward to a term this fall as a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Journalism.

Mr. Samad remains thankful to have escaped with his life. After he was released from prison, his house was put under surveillance, his phone lines tapped and his wife continually harassed.

"I kept a small bag ready, sure they would come back and arrest me," he recalls. "I was mentally prepared to pay with my life for my profession." #

Marina Jimenez is a senior feature writer with The Globe and Mail

Article first published in The Globe and Mail, Canada, April 28, 2007 Saturday

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