Too Early for Free Speech in the Caucasus?

Azerbaijan and Armenia now share a double billing for their “not free” media, if little else. At least by Freedom House’s reckoning.

“The time for free speech has not arrived yet,” Armenian Press Club Chairman Boris Navasardian told colleagues. The Committee to Protect Journalists partly blames the 2008 post-election clashes that split Armenian media along political fault lines, it says.

The view from Baku is no less merry. Civil society activists and reporters chastise the government for what they describe as attempts to intimidate independent media.

Meanwhile, Georgia (along with Ukraine) heads the Freedom House FSU pack with a tag of “partly free.” No news on how that hit President Mikheil Saakashvili, who recently declared international concerns about Georgia’s media freedom to be “total bullshit.”