As security forces in Tajikistan hunt for suspected Islamic militants in the Rasht Valley, the country’s Defense Ministry is lashing out at media outlets that have questioned the government’s crisis-management skills. Far from cowering in the face of a government attack, however, media outlets are preparing to fight back.
The opening of the trial of Voice of America reporter Abdumalik Boboyev is being pushed back, apparently to give his new defense lawyer time to get up to speed on the case. But the defendant tells EurasiaNet.org that he expects a guilty verdict whenever the trial concludes.
As Kazakhstan prepares to host an OSCE summit in December, it is facing criticism of its record on press freedom. One watchdog group is contending that Astana’s restrictive policies risk undermining the organization’s credibility.
An outsourcing deal designed to enhance the reach of a government-run Russian-language television channel in Georgia instead threatens to bog down the station in controversy.
Reporter Irfan Aktan quoted Piling, a member of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, a Kurdish rebel group that has been fighting the Turkish state since 1984, in a long article he published last September in a Turkish magazine about divisions within the PKK between hawks and doves.
An irreverent novella in Tbilisi has provoked a culture war that has Georgians fighting over the limits of individual freedom.
The work, titled Saidumlo Siroba (Holy Crap), takes swipes at the Georgian Orthodox Church, Georgian patriotism and Georgian mothers. It has become a William Burroughs-style bizarro bestseller, generating more shock and outrage than literary acclaim.
A game of free-speech cat-and-mouse is moving into another media sphere in Azerbaijan, where officials in Baku are mulling the introduction of a licensing system for online radio and TV operations. Media rights advocates are decrying licensing plans as a means of control over the free flow of information.
As Kazakhstan’s annual Eurasian Media Forum opened in Almaty on April 27, officials seemed keen to showcase the Central Asian nation’s qualifications for chairman of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). But civil society activists ended up seizing on the occasion to publicize alleged violations of free speech.
Earlier in April two imprisoned youth activists and bloggers in Azerbaijan, Emin Milli and Adnan Hajizade, were transferred from a Baku detention facility to separate prison colonies. Conditions in the two prisons vary widely, local human rights organizations say.
In a significant victory for free speech in authoritarian-minded Azerbaijan, the European Court of Human Rights on April 22 called on Azerbaijani officials to release jailed journalist Eynulla Fatullayev and to pay him 25,000 euros (about $33,000) in damages for "wrongful conviction."
