Afghan Journalists Face Growing Pressure

An Afghan man reads a newspaper on a sidewalk in Kabul, Afghanistan Tuesday, March. 27, 2007. Journalists say that after bad press about corruption and war crimes surfaced over the past year, Afghanistan's fledgling democracy scrambled to stem the criticism by undemocratically tightening its grip on the press. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq) (Musadeq Sadeq - AP)

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Political talk show host Razaq Mamoon never held back with the cameras rolling. He railed at former warlords now in government and accused Afghanistan's Parliament of being a den of war criminals and drug smugglers.

Not surprisingly, he caught the attention of government leaders.

"I started receiving messages from them: 'We don't know who you're with or who you're against. You attack everybody,'" Mamoon said.

His employer, Tolo TV, came under intense pressure from government ministers, and soon Mamoon was fired, he said, though Tolo disputes that version.

Hailed as a major success of five years of democracy-building, media freedom in Afghanistan is under increasing pressures. Those include a proposed law that would cripple media rights, and threats and physical abuse of journalists by government and military officials.

"Effectively we've moved from an open media environment to a state-controlled media environment, which is a considerable turnaround from the direction media was heading in Afghanistan up until 2005-06," said Adrian Edwards, spokesman of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

The Afghan media has changed radically since Taliban times, when there were no television stations and only a handful of newspapers that were completely state-controlled. There was just one Taliban radio station _ broadcasting news and religious poetry but no music.

Now there are more than 40 private radio stations, seven TV networks, and more than 350 newspapers and magazines registered with the information ministry. Afghan TV broadcasts everything from breaking news to cooking shows and the local version of "American Idol."

But critics say the new legislation, expected to be debated in Parliament within weeks, is an ominous sign that Afghanistan's experiment with open media is on borrowed time.

Fazil Sangcharaki, chief of the Afghan Journalists' Association and former deputy information minister, said the proposed law is being pushed by former warlords-turned-politicians who would rather have past deeds be forgotten, and by Islamists worried the media is corrupting Afghan culture.

If passed, it would give the Ministry of Information and Culture direct control of state-owned Radio and Television Afghanistan (RTA) and increased power over private media. It would even make it possible to jail journalists such as Mamoon for reporting news deemed "humiliating and offensive."

Many journalists see it as a reaction to reporting on corruption and war crimes, and an attempt by President Hamid Karzai's elected government _ that succeeded the fundamentalist Taliban regime that fell in late 2001 _ to reel in the free press.