Court suspends two newspapers in continuing anti-media offensive

A Bishkek court has ordered the temporary closure of two newspapers, Achyk Sayasat and Nazar, and fined them 5 million som (82,000 euros) for publishing an opinion piece by a government opponent in exile accusing President Kurmanbek Bakiev, who became president after a coup d’état, of lacking legitimacy. In a ruling issued on 18 March, the court found the two newspapers guilty of libelling the president. Their owner, Babyrbek Jennbekov, said he would publish them under another name pending the outcome of an appeal. He added that he would begin on 26 March to publish Achyk Sayasat’s content in Alibi, a newspaper that was itself sentenced to pay a heavy fine in 2007. Meanwhile, Centrasia.ru and Azattyk.org, two websites that had been blocked since 9 March, are again accessible within Kyrgyzstan but pages are slow to load and some features are not working properly. ------------------------------------------------ 17.03.2010 How far will government go in its escalation of censorship? Reporters Without Borders is dismayed by an unprecedented wave of harassment of independent and opposition news media, coinciding with the 5th anniversary of the Tulip Revolution. Coming after a year marked by biased coverage of a presidential election and violence against journalists, it seems to dash any lingering hope of democratisation and confirm that Kyrgyzstan is falling into line with its autocratic central Asian neighbours. The leading independent news websites and the Kyrgyz-language radio and TV broadcasts of Prague-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) have been inaccessible for the past week, while the list of local journalists who have been harassed by the authorities gets longer by the day. Kyrgyz Internet users have been unable to access three leading news and information portals since 9 March. They are Ferghana.ru, Centrasia.ru and Paruskg.info (whose editor, Gennady Pavlyuk, was murdered last December). Local broadcasters that normally retransmit RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz-language programmes were forced to stop on 10 March. The privately-owned national TV station Echo of Manas said it was forced to break its contract with RFE/RL because they authorities threatened that they would not renew its licence if it continued to retransmit the RFE/RL programmes Inconvenient Questions and Azattyk Plus, Four local radio stations in the capital, Bishkek, and the northern city of Naryn that had been retransmitting RFE/RL’s radio programmes since they were dropped by the public broadcaster also stopped doing so. Finally, retransmission of the BBC’s news programmes was suspended by the state broadcaster NTRK on 15 March, ostensibly for technical reasons. All these media had reported that a businessman close to the president’s inner circle, Yevgeny Gurevich, was arrested in Italy last month on suspicion of mafia links. This new scandal, coinciding with a re-energising of the political opposition, has fuelled growing criticism of the way power is allegedly monopolised by a corrupt clan of presidential associates It was similar criticism that helped to fuel public exasperation and bring down the previous regime in the Tulip Revolution of March 2005. The opposition is now demanding President Kurmanbek Bakiev’s departure and called for major demonstrations today, when it is holding its national congress (Kurultai). The opposition press has also been targeted for publicising these calls. All 7,000 copies of the newspaper Forum were seized by the police in Bishkek on 15 March without any explanation, while its editor, Ryskeldi Mombekov, and five other journalists were briefly detained. The editors of two opposition newspapers, Babyrbek Jeenbekov of Ashyk Sayasat and Kenjebek Arykbaev of Nazar, were summoned by the prosecutor-general’s office yesterday and questioned about recent articles. Independent journalist Abduvakhab Moniyev, the editor of the Presskg.com website, was meanwhile attacked in the south of the country yesterday with members of the Ata-Meken opposition party. Already the victim of an attack last summer in Bishkek, Moniyev had just covered a demonstration in support of Ismail Isakov, a former defence minister who has been jailed in the district of Alay, when he was attacked on the outskirts of the town of Karool, in the district of Uzgen. Urging Moniyev to “behave,” the assailants broke the windows of his car, beat him and the two people with him and took his audio recorder and camera. “Press freedom violations seem to be increasing in frequency and intensity,” Reporters Without Borders said. “By harassing independent and opposition media and allowing those responsible for physical attacks on journalists to go unpunished, the authorities are assuming a decisive share of the blame for the extremely worrying deterioration in the situation.” The press freedom organisation added: “We urge the president’s office to quickly calm down and stop making the media suffer because of its paranoia. We also call on Kyrgyzstan’s international partners, especially the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, to remind the authorities of the undertakings they have given to respect press freedom.” A demonstration in defence of press freedom was held outside the OSCE’s office in Bishkek on 15 March. The demonstrators brandished placards with such slogans as “Don’t touch the truth” and “You cannot close all the mouths” in Russian, Kyrgyz and English. Gurevich, who is accused by the Italian judicial authorities of helping to embezzle large sums from several Italian companies and laundering mafia money, was a financial consultant to the Central Agency for Development, Investments and Innovation, which President Bakiev created last November and which is run by his son, Maksim Bakiev.