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During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, has always been lucky enough to pursue his craft in a free environment, but now comes MORE disturbing details of how the opposite is the case in other parts of the world.
As journalists in the UK we are fortunate because we are largely left alone by the state.
Yet sadly that cannot be said in other parts of the world – and one in particular is making the headlines for all the wrong reasons now; Georgia.
There, enormous protests against the Russian-backed dictator have rocked the country, and journalists have been beaten as well as imprisoned – with one on hunger strike.
The immediate demands of the protesters are new elections and the release of all political prisoners, including Mzia Amaglobeli, a prominent journalist who has been on hunger strike since January 12.
The spark for the latest round of protests is a breaking off of accession talks to the European Union (EU) by the government.
But what is really at stake is Georgia’s future. Is it to be a modern European country or, should Bidzina Ivanishvili have his way, a backwater under Russia’s domination?
Mr Ivanishvili is a billionaire businessman and oligarch, whose party Georgian Dream ‘won’ the General Election of 2012 and subsequently those afterwards, including the one in 2024 – the result of which has been vigorously disputed by monitors.
But I’m afraid that Ms Amaglobeli is not the only one, and Russia, as well as its satellite states (or ones that support it), have often been at the heart of things.
One such is Evgenia Kara-Murza a Russian human rights activist and journalist who, the Index on Censorship has announced in London, is the winner of the 2024 Freedom of Expression Trustee Award.
She is Advocacy Director of the Free Russia Foundation and wife of the political prisoner Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was poisoned and then imprisoned on April 11 2022 for protesting about Russia’s war in Ukraine. As a result of Ms Kara-Murza’s tireless campaigning, her husband was finally released from prison in the Summer as part of a prisoner exchange deal.
Meanwhile when Viktor Orban won power in Hungary in 2010 he adapted Vladmir Putin’s blueprint, transforming the state media agency MTVA into a propaganda organ.
The group was restructured into a shell company in a fashion that exempted it from the law governing public media, and during the European Parliament (EP) elections in 2019, editors at MTVA were recorded instructing reporters to favour Mr Orban’s Fidesz party.
In Belarus at least 16 journalists are behind bars, and riot police are singling out reporters for arrests and beatings at protests as the media is intimidated.
The dictator there, Alexander Lukashenko, forced a Ryanair passenger plane to make an unscheduled stop in his capital in order to arrest the editor of an internet channel, NEXTA, that has been reporting on his crackdown.
Roman Protasevich was taken off the plane, which was flying from Athens to Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital.
Citing what it said was ‘evidence’ that there were explosives on board, the authorities forced the aircraft to land in Minsk as it passed through Belarusian airspace on its way to neighbouring Lithuania, sending a MiG fighter plane to escort the Ryanair jet down.
The state news agency later reported that no explosives had been found, and it seems certain that the incident was invented purely as a way of arresting the journalist.
The alarming details came after Marina Zolotova, the editor of Tut.by, an independent news website in the counrry, said: “Blue press jackets and press badges have become targets. When journalists go to cover a protest they cannot be sure that they will come home. This is a real war by the authorities against independent journalism and their own people.”
It is clear that Mr Lukashenko is waging a war against journalists who have dared to report on his regime’s brutal crackdown against peaceful protesters.
At least eight protesters have been killed and hundreds more have alleged torture and rape, in police custody.
Among the most high-profile of those in prison is Ekaterina Bakhvalova, who was arrested as she filmed riot police firing stun grenades into a crowd demonstrating against the death in police custody of a fellow protesters.
Several years ago Ms Bakhvlova was sentenced to an additional eight years in prison for “state treason”, when she had already been serving a two-year sentence for “violating public order”.
The prime example, of course, of a brutal crackdown on independent journalism is Russia itself where RT (Russia Today) is accused of being a mouthpiece for the Kremlin. By the mid-2000s Russian news shows’ agendas were being set at government-led meetings.
Mr Putin signed a law that will allow Russia to declare journalists and bloggers “foreign agents” in a move that critics say will allow the Kremlin to target government critics.
Under the vaguely worded law, Russians and foreigners who work with the media or distribute their content and receive money from abroad would become ‘enemies of the state’, potentially exposing journalists, their sources, or even those who share material on social networks to foreign agent status.
These sort of appalling ‘laws’ are only one example of a brutal crackdown on a free media.
Ms Amaglobeli knows this only too well – she is on hunger strike in her campaign against them…
The memories of Phil’s, astonishing award-winning career in journalism (when he was lucky enough to operate in a free media environment) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
Tomorrow – why outrage over alleged Home Office (HO) foot-dragging in changing the rules to allow forces to sack rogue cops, once again shines the spotlight on failings by South Wales Police (SWP), amid growing concern that the small country has FOUR forces
