Kazakh journalist Guljan Yergaliyeva has chosen an attention-grabbing way to promote the new media outlet she launched today, called Guljan – by stripping on YouTube.
“It’s necessary to act,” Yergaliyeva tells the camera as she removes her jacket to reveal a spotted bra. She then turns her back and walks away from the camera while taking off all her clothes – with the exception of a teetering pair of shiny stilettos.
“We’ll overcome all barriers and look truth in the eye,” Yergaliyeva says, before walking away from the camera naked with a cheery wave.
This is a controversial way to launch a website, but then Yergaliyeva – who resigned as editor of the Svoboda Slova newspaper earlier this year – is no stranger to controversy: She’s known for her hard-hitting reporting, frequently critical of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s administration. In 2006 she was briefly imprisoned for taking part in an unsanctioned rally protesting the murder of opposition leader Altynbek Sarsenbayev.
Daniyar Moldashev, director of the ADP Ltd company (Respublika’s registered publisher) went missing last week after being beaten up and robbed of documents belonging to the paper. Now, his brother Askar says, he’s been in contact -- but his phone call has only increased his relatives’ misgivings. Askar Moldashev has now filed a statement with police urging them to get to the bottom of the mystery.
According to the statement, lodged on April 2, Daniyar Moldashev called his brother at noon on April 2 and said “that he was in Minsk on his own business, that everything was fine with him, that I shouldn’t make a statement, and that he’d explain everything to me later.”
This was the first time Daniyar Moldashev had been in contact since March 30, his brother said, and in the intervening period his telephone was switched off and he didn’t reply to SMS messages.
“His behavior looks very strange, there’s never been anything like this before,” Askar Moldashev commented, adding that he only waited so long to file a statement because the police themselves -- who visited Moldashev’s relatives on March 30 to investigate -- advised him that he had to wait three days.
Earlier this week EurasiaNet.org reported on the trials and tribulations faced by Respublika newspaper, which is often highly critical of President Nursultan Nazarbayev's administration, and the samizdat publishing methods the newspaper uses to reach newsstands.
Now it seems a fresh misfortune has befallen Respublika: The director of the paper’s parent company has gone missing just days after being beaten up and robbed of documents belonging to the newspaper.
Daniyar Moldashev, head of Respublika’s registered publisher, ADP Ltd, was brutally attacked near his home on March 26 after returning from a trip to Moscow to visit Respublika’s editorial office there, deputy editor Oksana Makushina told a news conference in Almaty on March 31.
Moldashev was left with a broken arm and a concussion, and the attackers stole a camera and documents he’d brought from Moscow: items related to the newspaper’s investigative reporting.
Moldashev was supposed to be at home recovering, but since March 29 he’s been unreachable by telephone and isn’t to be found at home, Makushina said.
The only communication from him since then has been an enigmatic call from an unidentified number to the cellphone of a colleague, Guzyal Baydalinova, the evening of March 30. Moldashev said he was, all of a sudden, in Minsk – and then hung up.
In another mysterious twist to the tale, staff in Respublika’s Moscow office suspected that Moldashev was under some sort of surveillance in the Russian capital, Makushina said. The spooks were so amateurish that the Moscow journalists spotted them and even managed to take some photos.
Kazakh police say they’ve solved the brutal Almaty murder of a Kyrgyz journalist after well over a year. Anyone expecting that the killing was linked to the work of renowned investigative reporter Gennadiy Pavlyuk will be surprised: Kazakhstan’s cops have reached the conclusion that the journalist was hurled to his death, hands and legs bound, from the sixth floor in a robbery gone wrong.
“It has been established by the preliminary investigation that the suspects lured G. Pavlyuk to Almaty through an Internet exchange, booking a room in the Kazakhstan Hotel, after which by deception they took the journalist to an apartment on Furmanov Street,” Interior Ministry spokesman Kuanyshbek Zhumanov told a briefing March 24 in remarks quoted by Kazakhstan Today news agency.
They then tied him up and tried to extort valuables, Zhumanov continued, “but, not achieving what they desired, they threw the journalist out of the apartment window.”
This story appears to raise more questions than it answers. Why did the three suspects (two citizens of Kazakhstan and one of Kyrgyzstan) consider it worthwhile to lure a journalist not known for his lavish lifestyle 200 kilometers from Bishkek to obtain his worldly goods, and then defenestrate him when they failed? The casual observer might suppose that the extortionists would have been better off picking on a wealthy Kazakh businessman or even a random client leaving one of the city’s swish nightclubs, rather than duping an investigative reporter.
The ongoing investigation into Ergenekon -- the name given to an alleged plot by ultranationalists to topple the Turkish government -- has led to the arrest of several journalists since it started a few years ago. Many of these were controversial figures from less savory corners of the Turkish media, so there was muted outcry about their arrest.
But the arrest yesterday of a group of some 10 journalists has led to protests and strong denunciations by international observers. Among those arrested were Nedim Sener, an award-winning investigative journalist at Milliyet, one of Turkey's leading newspapers, and Ahmet Sik, another investigative journalist who is well respected in human rights circle for work that exposed several years back military plans to overthrow the government. Sener, who has done important work investigating police involvement in the 2007 murder of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, was declared a World Press Freedom Hero by the International Press Institute (IPI) this past summer for his investigation of the Dink case.
Turkish government officials have denied that the arrests of the journalists have any political motive.
The authorities had denied blocking LJ, but observers were skeptical. As a motive for the government to deny access, they pointed to the LJ blog of Rakhat Aliyev, the disgraced former son-in-law of President Nursultan Nazarbayev who fell out with the president in 2007, was divorced by his daughter Dariga Nazarbayeva, and was later sentenced to 40 years in prison in absentia on charges he denied.
Now, all of a sudden LiveJournal is accessible again in Kazakhstan – but Aliyev’s journal can’t be seen here, or anywhere else for that matter. In a twist that’s most convenient for Astana, Aliyev’s blog was suspended by LiveJournal itself on November 9.
Visitors to his page now see a sign saying “Suspended Journal” and an incongruous picture of a goat wearing an eye patch and a skull and crossbones hat. “This journal has been suspended,” a message says. “Its contents are no longer publicly visible. LiveJournal cannot discuss the reasons for a journal suspension with anyone except the journal owner.”
Freedom House's "Freedom of the Press, 1994-2010" chart
A previous post referred to the increasing number of Turkish journalists facing legal pressures and the recent Reporters Without Borders "press freedom" index, which saw Turkey go down several notches from the previous year.
Aengus Collins of the "Istanbul Notes" blog has an interesting post that takes another view on the subject. Looking at Freedom House's "Freedom of the Press" index over the last 16 years, it appears that Turkey has made significant strides on the issue, especially during the period between 2002 and 2005, when the current government's European Union-oriented reform program was at its height. Still, Collins also provides Freedom House's more detailed comments on Turkey for the post-2005 period, which contain a load of worrying material The post can be found here.
Bianet, meanwhile, has a disturbing report about a Turkish news broadcaster that has been find by Turkish government's media watchdog for basically broadcasting the news. The report is here.
The recent press freedom index released by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was very kind to Turkey, listing the country at 138th place out of 178 countries surveyed. One of the main reasons for the low ranking was the growing number of Turkish journalists facing legal problems for basically doing their jobs. As RSF put it, Turkey is in the midst of a "frenzied proliferation of lawsuits, incarcerations, and court sentencing targeting journalists."
The Associated Press takes a look at some of these cases and what might be behind them in a new article, here. And an excellent resource of freedom of expression issues is the Bianet website, which can be found here.
No one ever said Central Asia is a safe place to be a journalist. So it’s not surprising when media rights watchdogs issue annual reports detailing just what a rotten region it is for press freedom.
This year's OSCE chair, Kazakhstan – which is about to hold a prized OSCE summit – ranks an embarrassing 162, only a spot above Uzbekistan and following both Libya and Somalia.
Turkmenistan is still competing with North Korea and Eritrea for bottom place.
He gave no more details about the suspects or how they might have been involved in the murder last December, but the arrests will inspire some hope that Pavlyuk’s killers may eventually be tracked down.
This was a particularly brutal killing: Pavlyuk was hurled to his death from the sixth floor of an apartment block in Almaty with his hands and legs bound, and many of his colleagues suspected he’d been killed for his investigative reporting. Some sources said Pavlyuk – who wrote under the pseudonym Ibragim Rustambek for the independent Kyrgyz outlet Beliy Parus, and for the Kyrgyz editions of some Russian newspapers – had arrived in Almaty chasing a story, and the discovery of an empty laptop bag at the crime scene led many to believe that incriminating material that could have pointed to the murderer's identity may have been stolen.
