(RSF/IFEX) – In a letter to President Nursultan Nazarbayev, RSF expressed its concern following the head of state’s threats against independent and opposition media. RSF Secretary-General Robert Ménard noted that “it is intolerable that a head of state who claims to want to ‘develop a democratic society’ would simultaneously attack press workers.” RSF also recalled […]
(RSF/IFEX) – In a letter to President Nursultan Nazarbayev, RSF expressed its concern following the head of state’s threats against independent and opposition media. RSF Secretary-General Robert Ménard noted that “it is intolerable that a head of state who claims to want to ‘develop a democratic society’ would simultaneously attack press workers.” RSF also recalled that the president’s statements contradict Kazakhstan’s constitution, which guarantees press freedom (in Articles 5, 12, 18 and 23).
According to the information collected by RSF, in a 24 April 2000 televised speech, Nazarbayev stated that the State “will not tolerate divergences, wherever they may originate,” particularly “excesses in speech or the incorrect interpretation of freedom of expression and press freedom.” He also threatened to close media which “oppose the system and blacken this State in the eyes of the world.”
There has been a marked increase in pressure against independent and opposition media since President Nazarbayev’s re-election in January 1999, in a ballot which was criticised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). On 31 March, Tatiana Deltsova, a journalist with the private Almaty television station Channel 31, was dismissed. A short time earlier, she had made mention of the intimidation against a number of opposition leaders on her programme “Informbureau” (see IFEX alert of 24 April 2000). According to the station’s directors, in January, two journalists working on the same programme had been dismissed following pressure by the authorities. On 25 January, a court in the Ust-Kamenogorsk region (in the country’s east) suspended the newspaper HBC-Press after accusing it of “inciting rebellion”. On 30 November 1999, the programmes of local television stations TV 29, Ispat Sfera and 43 Kanal, as well as those of the private radio station Radio 102, were suspended by the authorities in Termirtau (in the country’s north-east), under the pretext that they were operating without a licence.
