(CPJ/IFEX) – The following is a CPJ press release: NAMIBIA: CPJ releases special report New York, October 30, 2002-The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) today released a special report about Namibia, a country once considered a model of press freedom in southern Africa. The report, titled “Undoing Press Freedom in Namibia” is now available on […]
(CPJ/IFEX) – The following is a CPJ press release:
NAMIBIA: CPJ releases special report
New York, October 30, 2002-The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) today released a special report about Namibia, a country once considered a model of press freedom in southern Africa. The report, titled “Undoing Press Freedom in Namibia” is now available on CPJ’s Web site at http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2002/Namibia_oct02/Namibia_oct02.html
Written by CPJ’s Africa research associate Adam Posluns, the report details the increasingly antagonistic relationship between President Sam Nujoma and the Namibian press in recent years.
After the president declared himself minister of information in August, local journalists began to worry that Nujoma is modeling his policy toward the media on that of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, whose rhetoric Nujoma has used freely-and whose draconian crackdown on the press has been widely documented.
“Right now, the Namibian press enjoys great liberties,” Hannes Smith, editor-in-chief of the independent weekly Windhoek Observer, told Posluns. “But we are heading most certainly to a situation like Zimbabwe.”
CPJ is a New York-based, independent, nonprofit organization that works to safeguard press freedom worldwide. For more information about press conditions in Namibia, visit www.cpj.org.
