(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has voiced outrage over the action of the Sudanese state security police in banning an entire issue of the English-language “Khartoum Monitor” newspaper in the earlier hours of 21 May 2005. The action came after the editor refused to withdraw a report and an editorial. The security police officers returned the following […]
(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has voiced outrage over the action of the Sudanese state security police in banning an entire issue of the English-language “Khartoum Monitor” newspaper in the earlier hours of 21 May 2005. The action came after the editor refused to withdraw a report and an editorial. The security police officers returned the following evening to scrutinize the content of the next day’s issue.
“The signing of peace accords in Sudan must not be allowed to mask what is a very difficult situation for journalists in Khartoum, where the state security police monitor and censor the privately-owned news media, and where it is now the ‘Khartoum Monitor”s turn to receive very special treatment,” RSF said.
“If the Sudanese authorities want people to believe in their declared desire to restore peace and build a democracy, they must start by respecting their own laws and the treaties they have signed, and that means they must stop sending the police to newspapers,” the organisation added. “If the international community, in its efforts to put an end to the massacres in Sudan, forgets about the country’s journalists, we would have a right to say that peace has not really been restored.”
State security police went to the “Khartoum Monitor”‘s printing press on the night of 20 May and ordered the withdrawal of a Reuters dispatch and an accompanying editorial that were to have appeared on the front page. The articles concerned an 18 May riot in a camp for displaced persons at Soba Aradi, south of the capital, in which six civilians, including a baby and a teenager, and 14 policemen died.
Fighting broke out at the camp when police tried to forcibly “relocate” its inhabitants, most of whom are from Darfur or the south, in accordance with a vast government plan to reorganise reception centres for the hundreds of thousands of refugees in Khartoum state. Refugees reportedly attacked a police station after the police fired tear gas and real bullets at them.
At around 3:00 a.m. (local time) on 21 May, after the newspaper’s editors refused to withdraw the dispatch and editorial, the police ordered the cancellation of the entire issue. Acting editor-in-chief William Ezechiel said the cancelled edition would mean a loss of 6 million Sudanese pounds (approx. US$25,140; 20,000 euros) in advertising and sales.
The state security police returned to the newspaper on the evening of 21 May to examine the content of the next day’s issue, announcing that they would henceforth come every evening to ensure that no articles “cross the red line.”
Reuters quoted an unnamed state security official as saying, “We follow the newspaper but there is no censorship. We talk on the telephone with them because there are some subjects which we ask them to treat responsibly.”
Sudan is still under a state of emergency, with many civil liberties suspended. The “Khartoum Monitor”, which has consistently defended the population of the south, has already been the target of coercive measures in the past, as have many other journalists and newspapers. The Arabic-language daily “Al Adwaa”, for example, was forced to withdraw an article criticising the continuation of the state or emergency and the behaviour of the state security police from its 12 May issue.