Government crackdown puts Bangladesh media on guard

 

Kaushik Shankar Das

 

 

Reprinted from OneWorld South Asia

 

 

The unrelenting government crackdown on the media in Bangladesh has put journalists on guard, with both the national and international press now opting for discretion rather than valor.

 

The December 13 arrest of Enamul Haque Chowdhury, 45, a Reuters stringer in Bangladesh capital, Dhaka, forms the latest in a cycle of media detentions.    Chowdhury was imprisoned for allegedly misquoting Bangladesh Home Minister, Altaf Hossain Chowdhury after the horrific December 7 cinema hall bomb blasts in the northern town of Mymensingh.  The minister was quoted as saying that the Islamist group al - Qaida could have been responsible for the explosions, a statement later flatly denied by him. Reuters later said they could not guarantee the accuracy of the report.   BBC correspondent in Dhaka, Moazzem Hossain confessed that the tide of media arrests have made journalists extra cautious.  As he put it, " Earlier we may have rechecked the information one more time, but now we reconfirm it with our stringers over and over again. Earlier mistakes were seen as mistakes, but now they are being misconstrued as part of a big conspiracy against the government.  So we have to be more guarded and cautious than before."    He refused to admit, however that reporters had begun to compromise in their reports.

 

A reporter of a leading vernacular daily, who preferred to remain anonymous, echoed Hussain’s views, " The government seems to have become extremely suspicious and paranoid. They are suspecting every bit of criticism against them. So we are writing our reports in such a way that we can’t be accused of any ulterior motives or on charges of sedition."

 

 The editor of leading English daily, The Daily Star, Mahfuz Anam, strongly criticized the government’s ruthless attitude towards a group of journalists outside the National Press Club in Dhaka last Wednesday. The police baton charged them without any provocation, preventing them from taking out a procession to protest against the recent arrests and harassment of the media.  Anam said, " There seems to be an atmosphere of lack of tolerance on the government’s part.  They appear to be targeting only those who are well known critics of the government, and this is contrary to the democratic right to speak and protest freely and publicly."

 

But some feel that the journalists themselves should share part of the blame.  As freelance columnist Afsan Choudhury said, " The case of the Reuters stringer clearly shows the declining standards of reporting in the country. If a reporter can’t own up to his reports himself, and in this case it was a serious matter involving a terrorist group like al-Qaida, then such irresponsible stories would only give the authorities an upper hand."

 Abdul Mannan Bhuyian, minister and Secretary General of the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which came to power in October 2001, told a group of journalists, "There is a conspiracy against the country and some reporters are part of it. Criticize the government, but don’t write anything that could go against the country."

 

  Half a dozen media persons arrested over the past one month under the stringent Special Powers Act enacted in 1974, three years after Bangladesh got independence, remain incarcerated in jail despite being granted bail by the High Court.   Those arrested include prominent journalist Shahriar Kabir, columnist and university teacher Muntasir Mamun, and Reporters Sans Frontieres correspondent Saleem Samad.

 

  Human rights activist Priscilla Raj who was released from Dhaka Central Jail Sunday, four days after the Dhaka High court granted her bail, alleged that she was given electric shocks during interrogation.

 

 Raj was charged with sedition for assisting foreign journalists Zaeba Malik and Bruno Sorrentino, who came to Bangladesh to make a television documentary on Islamism for Britain’s Channel 4. Both of them were later deported with the undertaking that they wouldn’t use their footage or reveal anything they had learnt during their three-week stay there.

 

  However, government intolerance of media criticism is hardly new to Bangladesh. Ever since Independence, the media has been a pet government target. According to a research study, during the 1971 war for independence, many reporters were captured and later killed by the Pakistan army irrespective of their political allegiances.

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 Over the years, journalists working with the 30 odd dailies published from different parts of the country have been victimized for writing anti-government reports.  Perhaps the most prominent example is that of twenty something Tipu Sultan, a reporter working with a vernacular daily in the southeastern district town of Feni.   In the late nineties, Tipu almost died after being thrashed by henchmen of his local Member of Parliament for writing a critical report on the latter.    Sultan received a prestigious Committee To Protect Journalists (CPJ) award in New York for his bold reports.

 

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