Too many red lines: Pressure on Sudan media freedom increases
Since the secession of South Sudan last year, the Sudanese government has increasingly pressured local media and threatened press freedoms. They are using the South Sudanese connection as an excuse and attempts to suppress coverage of recent anti-regime protests in the country also seem to causing more media repression.
Over the past six months the Sudanese security forces have ordered the suspensions of more than 16 local journalists.
The Sudanese Journalists Union expresses its position: No pens shall be prevented from writing by the security service.”
Usually this happens through a directive issued by security forces to the newspapers’ administrators. And often that directive says that if the named journalist is not suspended or fired from his or her job, then the newspaper may be forced to cease publication.
Suspending publication would obviously see the newspaper suffer financial losses, especially at a time when printing costs are rising in Sudan.
Nonetheless very few editors-in-chief have agreed to do what the state asks. In practice they tend to get around it by continuing to give the journalists their salaries but putting them in positions where they may not be writing for the newspaper directly.
Journalist Mujahid Abdullah, of the Alwan newspaper, explains how this happens. The Alwan paper has been targeted three times over the past 24 months because the state said it ran too many stories that opposed the Sudanese regime.
Mujahid Abdullah, a suspended journalist from the newspaper Alwan.
An officer from the Sudanese security service came to the headquarters of the newspaper and told the managing editor, Essam Jaafar, that he and I should no longer be writing in Alwan or in any other newspaper,” Abdullah explains. But editor-in-chief, Hussein Khojali, told us that he would not dismiss us. Rather, he would deal with us in his own way. Up until now, we are still working at the newspaper and Khojali has not fired us,” Abdullah says.
Local journalist Osman Shabouna was not so lucky: he said he had to meet with the editor of the newspaper he worked for three times, before the editor finally confessed that he had been pressured by security services to dismiss Shabouna.
They said they would shut down the newspaper forever,” Shabouna says. There are no independent or even semi-independent media agencies in Khartoum and the Sudanese press is now exposed to daily control, on an extreme level,” he notes.
One of the justifications security services provide for their directives is that the publications, or their writers, have crossed a red line”. That is even though the law doesn’t specify what makes for a red line and that it should be up to a court of law to decide whether a journalist has crossed one or not.
And the red lines seem to be increasing. The right of expression is guaranteed to all, except those who cross the red lines,” the spokesman for Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party, Badr Al-Din Ahmad Ibrahim, said. The state doesn’t suppress freedoms,” he continued. But there are journalists who do not distinguish between personal interests and the national interest.”
Journalist Dora Gambo.
Another earlier reason given for the closure of newspapers or suspension of journalists is the South Sudanese connection. After South Sudan seceded, local law required that newspaper owners be Sudanese. Various newspapers, including the daily Ajras al-Hurriya and some English-language publications, were closed down on this pretext. State security said there were South Sudanese in management and that the law didn’t allow foreigners to own newspapers in Sudan.
The Sudanese Journalists Union, which organised a protest in Khartoum this week against ever-increasing curtailment of media freedoms, held a meeting of various top editors. Afterwards it issued a statement demanding that, if the authorities felt that certain writing or reporting had crossed the red line” then they should take the case to a court of law. The Union also planned to send a committee to discuss the issue with Sudanese authorities.
Salah Habib, editor-in-chief of the Al Mijhar Assiassi newspaper.
At the moment there are a lot of lines that should not be crossed because the authorities deem them related to security and economy,” Salah Habib, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, al-Mijhar Assiassi, says. But the security services are supposed to notify journalists, or call them to discuss what they deem a violation, before they make the suspension decision.”
The Reporters Without Borders organisation, which monitors international press freedoms, ranks Sudan 170th out of 179 on its index of press freedom.
