Africa closing doors on free flow of news

Press, 24 May 1977, Page 18

Africa closing doors on free flow of news

Contemporary African story. An American reporter called Stanley is trekking through the jungle in search of a missing Scots medical man. He has a money belt stuffed with dollars and a letter of introduction from the “New York Herald” in the top pocket of his bush jacket. At the next village he shows the chief his credentials. The chief isn’t sure what reporters are exactly, but he’s heard that they’ve been known to say bad things about people. He tears up his letter from the newspaper, steals the dollars and throws Stanley into a hole under his hut. Here he discovers the missing doctor — his papers were out of order too. For how much longer will we have any real knowledge of what goes on in Africa and other Third World areas before paranoia . and ignorance closes them off from all' but the most suicidal of reporters? In Zaire this month one of the least reported of the past decade’s “little wars” is drawing to a close. Amply backed by France, Morocco, and the United States in men and materials, President Mobutu’s forces have pushed

the Soviet-sponsored rebels back into Angola. Meanwhile, a steady stream of local civilian refugees are entering Zambia because, rightly or wrongly, they fear terrible reprisals at the hands of Government troops. Aleady there is talk in the area of several My-lais. Two weeks ago I and six other filthy newsmen from Spain, France, and Germany, all of us newly released from Newgate-like jails, were being paraded before our colleagues at a “press conference.” We were accused of being spies and mercenaries. Shortly before we were due to go before the cameras we were ushered into a neat, pannelled conference room in Kinshasa’s modem TV centre. Here an elegant Zairois, in what looked like a Pierre Cardin suit, was trying to ignore how badly we smelt while he questioned us for the umpteeth time from moderately close quarters. Why had we proceeded directly to the war zone 1200 miles to the south instead of joining our colleagues in less arduous imprisonment in the Kinshasa Intercontinental? For apart from one “Newsweek” man, who heroically talked himself into

the back seat of a Macchi fighter on an air strike, few foreign reporters could claim to have seen much of the war. TV crews flown down to Kolwezi, the copper mining town in Shaba province the rebels were bent on capturing, were reduced to pursuing small Zeroise clerks about the place, hopefully accusing them of being the tallest of the pigmy bowmen reputed to have routed the enemy. At the TV station we tried to explain to our questioner that we had merely wanted to .find out what was going on, a point of view he apparently found incomprehensible. . Of course, Zaire is by no means the only Third World country to be hostile towards the Western Press even when receiving military aid from their Governments. In New Delhi last July it was one of 12 non-aligned nations who pledged to fight “communications imperialism.” Their proposal, designed to break the

monopoly of the Western news agencies, was that news should be relayed by a pool of Government-controlled agencies. At the non-aligned conference held in Colombo the following month it was enthusiastically endorsed. At the same time proposals were being made to a U.N.E.S.C.O. conference in Costa Rica for a pool of Government-controlled agencies. It has since been established that the original U.N.E.S.C.O. directive was proposed in 1972 by the Soviet Union. In the end, after considerable opposition from the Western nations, the matter was shelved until the next U.N.E.S.C.O. conference in 1978. The World Press Freedom Committee commented: “Many governments in U.N.E.S.C.O. and other international organisations are wittingly or unwittingly seeking to undermine the main cornerstone of freedom — man’s right to receive information freely.”

It is, perhaps, understandable that Third World countries should feel that their predicament is not properly reflected by the international press, Western or Soviet. In these days of shrinking budgets, the number of full-time, resident correspondents is diminishing. The danger is that governments not exactly renowned for their tolerance of free speech will want to develop a Third World news agency as an “alternative” to reports on their affairs fronr'foreign correspondents. Everybody concerned with the widening rather than diminishing free communications should be concerned about this. In the Third World harassment of the press, both domestic and foreign, is on the increase. We are simply not being permitted to do our job. From Singapore to Malawi and beyond reporters are in jail. Ugandan journalists have disappeared and nobody expects to see them alive again. The whole of Indo-China, and particularly Cambodia, is impenetrable to journalists who are not sympathetic to the area’s regimes. Much of the more mindless harassment has to do with ignorance — take the Spanish journalist held up for hours at the immigration desk in one former British colony because a suspicious official refused to believe that the “Espana”. on the

man’s passport and the “Spain” on his list of countries were the same. Or the two British reporters, Stewart Dalby of the “Financial Times” and Bruce Loudon of the "Daily Telegraph,” jailed in Lusaka 18 months ago just after they had sent stories over the public telex about the declaration of a state of emergency. “Don’t think you can come here treating us as a colony,” they were told. They were kept in a cell with six people and two beds and released three days later. Ethiopia has expelled all Western journalists, apparently because it finds it easier to murder its people without them around. South Africa arrested a white Rhodesian reporter who turned up at Jan Smuts airport having been kicked out of Zambia. They said he had “communist connections.” Manila has barred the Associated Press, Indonesia “Newsweek.”

In Vietnam, the United States Government granted journalists remarkable access to the war. The result was a mounting press campaign against United States involvement in Vietnam, American public opinion gradually turned against the war. Had the press not been there, the wilder generals could conceivably have succeeded in their plan to bomb North Vietnam back into the Stone Age.

COLIN SMITH, of the “Observer,” London, was jailed recently in Zaire while attempting to report the war there. On his release he asks: Is the Third World determined to shut out reporters?