The realities of press censorship in Khartoum

By Andy Watkins

November 28, 2008 — November 18th was an interesting day. On the 17th, a group of over 60 journalists from papers across the political spectrum collectively and symbolically attempted to submit a letter of protest against the country’s stifling press censorship laws to the Sudanese Parliament in Khartoum. Subsequently, the journalists were rounded up and placed under arrest. The most interesting thing however was not that such a large number of journalists had been arrested, but rather that barely a word of the event made it into the newspapers the following day. This is the reality of press censorship in Sudan.

The root of the current press and media laws, augmented by security laws that give a free hand to the security organs when protecting the ‘security of the state’, lay in the coup d’etat that brought the New Islamic Front (NIF) and Omar Al Bashir to power. Supplanting popularly elected Sadiq Al Mahdi, Omar Al Bashir and his Islamist colleagues immediately suspended the constitution, dissolved Parliament and closed down the vast majority of the country’s newspapers. The 1999 National Press Council and Press act as well as the Press and Printed Materials act of 2004 work in conjunction with the much stricter National Security and Emergency acts to create a labyrinthine maze of muddled legislation all of which imposes crippling restrictions on the freedom of the press. These laws were what the journalists were protesting against on November 17th, 2008.

It can be difficult to actually get a copy of the press and media laws so it is instructive to judge their impact by looking at what is done by the government under their cover.

The most visible act of censorship in the media takes place before the paper is even sent to print. This pre-censorship, firmly enshrined in the press and media laws, allows a unit of the national security organs to be solely responsible for sending security officers out to each paper every night prior to going to press. For the Khartoum Monitor, as one example, the articles which have recently been removed include a piece on the sale of 12 Russian Mig-29 fighter planes to Khartoum, a piece about an Iranian minister with a forged Oxford diploma and a piece about Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s recent visit to Sudan. These articles never see the light of day. Each night across the city, handfuls of articles are removed from each and every paper if they cross the censor’s red lines. These lines are opaque and have been described by some journalists as being land mines planted by the security services in the sense that one only knows when they’ve crossed a line after they’ve already done it. These lines dictate that no articles may be published criticizing the President or his pending indictment by the International Criminal Court, Vice President Taha, the governments military action in Darfur or the casualty numbers from those actions and corruption in Sudan among numerous ill-defined others.

However Sudan, ranked by the NGO Reporters Without Borders as 135th out of 174 countries on press freedom, must do more than simple censorship to justify such a low ranking. This is where the financial and administrative arms of the national press laws come in. Every paper must be based in Khartoum with its Editor and Chief, management and the majority of its staff based in the city. Of this staff, a certain number must be state certified by a process owned and controlled by the government through the National Press Association under the auspices of the Ministry of Information. Recently, the papers of two of the countries main English language dailies, the Citizen and the Sudan Tribune, were shut down because of their failure to fulfill a number of these administrative requirements. Loosing the advertising revenue from this forced closure only compounds the financial pressures imparted on the Sudanese press by the stringent staffing requirements of the press and media Laws. The press laws also mandate an unspecified sum must be placed in an independent bank account in order for a paper to publish. The culminating affect of these administrative laws is to shut the door on smaller, independent media sources from publishing in the country while forcing significant strains on those papers able to meet the bare minimum financial requirements.

When articles get too invasive and financial requirements are not having the desired muting affects on the media, the police move in and confiscate entire editions of papers. This happened to six papers on April 17th of 2008. Tens of thousands of copies were confiscated having massive financial implications for those papers directly impacted and sending a very clear message to those that were not. When this doesn’t work, the security services resort to arresting journalists. The full extent of these crimes have been documented by both Reporters Without Borders as well as the free speech advocacy group Article 19. There are numerous reports of the country’s media men and women being arrested, tortured and in some horrible cases, killed over the span of the past 20 years of this government’s rule. These are only the most serious of a host of lesser violent, but equally repressive policies regarding the treatment of the country’s press.

Equally concerning is the fact that this censorship does not take place in Northern Sudan alone. The semi-Autonomous Southern region has been employing members of its own security services to pre-censor papers based in southern Sudan. These practices culminated recently in the arrest and detention for three days of Nhial Bol, Editor and Chief of the Citizen Daily, for publishing a story about corruption in the government. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the guerilla group turned political party now governing Southern Sudan, has since made an announcement saying it will halt this practice.

Following the mass arrests of journalists in Khartoum, the Sudanese spy chief Salah Gosh met with reporters and told them that “press censorship would not be lifted under pressure form anyone” and that the Sudanese press had “censorship lifted more than once and again imposed because of repeated violations by newspapers of the journalism code of ethics and [for] not considering the political interests, foreign and economic interests of the country.” Obviously these “breeches” of the journalism code of ethics were the recent reports of corruption in the government, particularly that of South Sudan, as well as investigative reports on Kharotum’s relationship with the rebels that attempted to oust Chadian President Idriss Deby from power in N’Djamena. Following these reports, the censorship that was previously relaxed was kicked back into high gear.

The vibrant press in Sudan has been able to survive this far under an increasingly stringent set of draconian press, security and media laws. As the country moves closer to national elections to be held in July of 2009 and then towards the referendum on Southern secession in 2011, a free press becomes ever more important for debating the positive and negative aspects of either side. Without this information, published by the press, rumors and speculation become the main methods of information dissemination. In a country that has been racked by war for the better part of its history since independence in 1956, the open discussion of ideas is much better than many of the possible alternatives.

Andy Watkins is a freelance journalist working in Sudan.