Mogadishu, Somalia – National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) welcomes Ahlu Sunna waljama release of the two journalists arrested in the Somalia’s central town of Dhusomareb two days ago were illegally sentenced to three months in jail by the Sufi militia run local court. They were submitted to the central prison in the town but later released with the help of The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) on Thursday.

But after much contact with the Sufi Ahlu-Suna rulers in Dhusomareb, the NUSOJ officials succeeded in convincing the court judge that the charges against the journalists were baseless. They were released on Wednesday at 06:00 PM local time.

The journalists were arrested with false charges accusing them of a news coverage describing the Ahlu-Suna fighters as clan based militia bandits, but the case lacked any evidence.

The chairman of Ahlu-Suna Sheik Ibrahim Sheik Hassan Guureeye told NUSOJ that he will intervene in the case and correct the faults within the administration. Ibrahim has apologized over the journalists’ arrests and pledged for NUSOJ that this won’t happen. He also stated that those who were behind it will be brought before justice.

The man behind the reporters’ arrests – the chairman of the security board in Dhusomareb town -Farhan Sheik Ali has himself given an excuse over this order stating it was a mistake which became a misunderstanding.

Journalist Abdirahman Moalim Ahmed described their arrest as a violation of their freedom. They were beaten and tortured to confess to crimes that did not exist or with which they were not involved.

Militias loyal to the local Sufi militias, Ahlu Suna Wal-Jama raided the offices of the Radio Voice of Central Dhusamareb (Idaacadda Codka Bartamaha Dhusamareb) based in Dhusamareb on Tuesday morning around 6:20am local time, where they have seriously beaten and arrested Bashir Mohamed Salad Aka Bashir Sanka. Sanka contributes to both Dalsan Radio, a privately owned independent radio station based in Mogadishu, and Idacada Codka Bartamaha, an independent radio station based Dhusamareb. Abdi Jamal Moalim Ahmed, who is the correspondent of Radio Bar-Kulan, a UN Funded radio, was also beaten.

The Shabab, which is affiliated to Al-Qaeda, looted the Radio equipment twice after raiding the town and briefly taking it over. There have been similar fears within the residents after the Ahlu Sunna Waljama militias supported by the Ethiopian troops abandoned the town of Elbur, a strategic town in central Somalia this weekend.

On 5th June, 2012, The Deputy Security Chief of the town’s Security Committee, Mr. Nor Elmi Hoosagale threatened the journalists after the town’s people evacuated the town.

On June 8, 2012 Two unknown assailants armed with pistols shot Mohamed Noor Mohamed better known as Mohamed Sharif – reporter for the Bar-Kulan Radio – twice below the heart which penetrated the back and the stomach. The shooting occurred on Friday evening June 8, 2012 around 7:30pm local time near Horn Cable Television office in Hamarjajab neighborhood as he was returning from work. The attackers fled the area immediately, according to witnesses.

Image Courtesy of  homeros / Shutterstock.com

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Tbilisi, Georgia - Two days after he appeared at a Tbilisi press conference warning that media freedom in Georgia was under attack by the Saakashvili government, Georgian authorities detained, interrogated, and allegedly physically pushed, shoved, and bruised U.S. citizen Alexander Ronzhes as he was about to board a plane to leave Georgia.

Rondzhes is the 17-percent shareholder of Georgian cable provider Global TV, an independent television network whose largest shareholder is Alexander Ivanishvili, the brother of Georgian Dream opposition coalition Bidzina Ivanishvili.

On June 14, unidentified Georgian authorities who said they were affiliated with the Georgia prosecutor’s office stopped Ronzhes, who lives in New York, at Tbilisi International Airport. After seven hours of interrogation, during which he says he sustained visible bruises after being shoved into a security office at the airport, and separated from his Georgian attorneys, and after direct intervention by U.S. consular officers based in Tbilisi, Ronzhes was released.

Ronzhes had arrived in Georgia earlier in the week following a pattern of Georgian government actions against Global TV, the country’s major independent cable and satellite station, which included claims by government authorities – rejected by the independent network – that the television station was broadcasting illegally by reaching citizens on the wrong frequency.

On June 12, Georgian media companies Global TV, Channel 9 and Stereo conducted a press conference with Ronzhes which highlighted the campaign being waged by Georgian authorities against the companies and other media in the lead up to Georgian Parliamentary elections scheduled for October. During the hour-long press conference, Ronzhes discussed the harassment, detention and abuse of supporters of opposition candidates, ongoing arrests of reporters, and other attacks on political freedoms in Georgia, in addition to the pattern of attacks against Global TV.

Local representatives of Global TV debriefed by Ronzhes at the airport following his release stated that he was stopped at 15:25 at passport control by four people who did not identify themselves, and who claimed they wanted to question him about a money laundering case. They told him that they had informed the US Embassy, that everything was fine, and that he would make his flight. In fact, according to the Global TV representatives, the U.S. Embassy was not notified by the Georgian authorities, who only found about the detention of the U.S. citizen from Global TV.

Ronzhes was then subjected by the unidentified Georgian officials to extensive questioning regarding a property he sold during the current visit which he had owned since 2004. During that questioning, three officials restrained him and two pushed him behind, allegedly leaving physical bruises on his body, which were later filmed by a Channel 9 film crew that rushed to the scene. The officials interrogated Ronzhes about money from the sale that he had placed in a safe deposit box, repeatedly demanding that he provide them with access to his safe deposit box, where a portion of the proceeds were stored in cash.

Following interventions by local attorneys and the U.S. consular office, Ronzhes was released from detention shortly before midnight, and thus remains in Georgia.

On June 7, U.S. Congressman Howard Berman (D-Calif.), ranking member on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs expressed  concerns about Georgian authorities “preventing a prominent political opponent from running in the parliamentary election and reported attempts to intimidate local opposition leaders, including denying them access to media.”

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New York, U.S.A – The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the campaign of harassment and intimidation against a newspaper in South Africa after it published a photo of a painting of President Jacob Zuma more than two weeks ago.

On May 13, local private weekly City Press published an art review of an exhibition in Johannesburg that featured a painting of a Soviet-era propaganda poster casting Zuma in the mold of Vladimir Lenin with exposed genitals, according to news reports. After a series of criticism and threats against the paper in the week of 28 May, the paper’s editor-in-chief, Ferial Haffajee, announced the removal of the photo from the website on Monday, she said in an op-ed.

Haffajee told CPJ 31 May 2012 that she had received a letter from a government official that said the paper’s coverage could instigate a race war if they continued to report on Zuma. Days before City Press removed the photo, news accounts reported that a City Press reporter was obstructed from covering a local union meeting on Saturday, while others said that on Sunday, protesters from Zuma’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party had burned copies of the paper that featured the painting.

The ANC released a statement on May 24 saying that City Press had singled itself out as being against Zuma, the ANC, “our democracy, and the majority of South Africans.” Jackson Mthembu, a spokesman for the party, called the newspaper “a perpetrator of injustice and slander,” and told supporters “to indefinitely boycott buying the City Press Newspaper … until the removal of the insulting portrait of President Jacob Zuma from their website.”

On 31 May 2012, the Goodman Gallery announced that it had reached a deal with the ANC to remove the painting permanently, according to news reports.

“We condemn acts of intimidation and threats against City Press, as they undermine the rule of law in South Africa and curtail the freedom of the press to report on speech critical of the authorities,” said CPJ Africa Advocacy Coordinator Mohamed Keita. “As head of the ANC and the ruling coalition, President Jacob Zuma must call his supporters to restraint. We hold the government responsible for the safety of the staff of City Press.”

Zuma had filed a complaint at the Gauteng High Court on May 18 seeking the removal of the painting from both the gallery and the newspaper’s website, arguing that the artwork depicted him as a “philanderer, a womanizer, and one with no respect.” In court, City Press argued, as shown in an affidavit published online, that its decision to publish the photo was lawful and “amounted to the publication of legitimate criticism” in light of the president’s public admission of extramarital affairs and involvement in several sex scandals in office, the newspaper reported.

The Film and Publication Board also summoned City Press for a meeting, but then referred the case 30 May 2012 to the Press Ombudsman, who could take disciplinary action against the publication, according to news reports.

“It is a view I still live by and have never claimed that my or City Press’ freedom of expression is limitless. But our right to publish and to free expression is constitutional,” wrote Haffajee in an earlier Sunday op-ed.

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WASTE CRISIS: did you know that Neapolitans are dirty people? That they do not have any attitude for the separate collection? that they are so selfish not to allow us to build new dumps in the area? Do you want to bet that, even this time, the North will be given the unfair burden to sort out the new scandalously astonishing problem of the South? Essentially, it is above all the Southerners’ fault if such bad rumors – and photos – are circulating about Italy, isn’t it? If these thoughts crossed your mind recently, there is no need worry: it is one of the several collateral effects of the usual media-feeding frenzy. Notwithstanding being a highly cloudy situation, still pending clarification, what you might have superficially come to know about is likely to be factious. In fact, at stake is an important and thorny question of silence and policing narratives.

The Nobel Prize for literature Toni Morrison wrote in one of her most famous book Playing in the Dark: ‘Silence from and about the subject was the order of the day. Some of the silences were broken and some maintained by authors who lived with and within the policing narrative. I am interested in the strategies for maintaining the silence and for breaking it.’ Unfortunately, this is even more true for a country, such as Italy, where a sort of great ‘videocracy’ is in force and which has been confirmed to be a ‘partly free” country by the ‘Freedom of the Press 2011 Survey Release’ provided by the international NGO Freedom of the Press.

You may be surprised to learn that the news of the day is that Naples’ “rubbish emergency” – threatening population with a wave of cholera similar to that of 1973 – has suddenly returned.  Thanks to the prompt government intervention, however, it will be solved in a very short time. On another note, it is an incontrovertible fact that in such a “crisis” is anything but unexpected. In fact, since 1994, an integrated waste management has always missed the area. In Campania dump sites are increasingly overflowing. For the last twenty year, heaps of rubbish have started to pile up along the road, with extremely detrimental effects on public health. The result? The smell is unbearable, all windows are closed, and when exasperation hits the limit, untold trash fires erupt, making the dioxin level in the air rocket in a quite disquieting way.

It might seem the distressing scenario of a so-called third world country, yet it is actually the hard reality of a marvelous Italian region like Campania. It has literally been reduced to black fetid powder because of a diabolic connivance of political, industrial and criminal interests, which appear alarmingly determined in keeping the refuse crisis alive. It needs to be pointed out that garbage is always a business, either in the case you create an emergency or you are at pains to smooth things over. Moreover, it shouldn’t be neglected that included in the tons of rubbish invading the insufficient dumps of Campania, there is, above all, industrial waste, which big firms of Northern Italy and parts of Europe quickly and inexpensively disposed off thanks to organized crime.

We decided to discuss these issues with Salvatore C. He was born in Naples in 1984, but soon emigrated to Bologna, where he will graduate in Cinema, television and multimedia productions. Hugely talented and a bit reserved, Salvatore has agreed to share his opinions about Neapolitans, media and refusal crisis in English for the Toonari news public:

In your opinion is there any kernel of truth in the common places (criminality, trash…) circulating about Neapolitans?

Well, it is difficult to reply: of course, they are generalizations and it is very convenient to think that we have such problems because of genetics. But it is absurd. Politics and history have always played a key role. If you read a capital book such as ‘The southern question’ by Gramsci, you will find a lot of answers.

What did that book teach you regarding our topic?

That the northern bourgeois class has subdued the South, reducing it in a real golden colony: despite of this fact, the main ideology tries to make us believe that the Southerners are almost lazy barbarians, maybe because of the hot climate.

According to you, Italy still has forms of communication capable of telling the complex story of your region. How?

Unquestionably television has always been the worst narrator, because of clear reasons dealing with political propaganda. On the contrary, many good books keeps on giving me interesting and honest perspective of the facts, for example Saviano’s ‘Gomorra’. Maybe I could also reply that at the cinema nowadays you can find lots of independent and original movies about the South, such as ‘Passione,’ the recent movie by John Turturro. I found it really really gorgeous: Naples is a city where, in spite of all, people keep on singing: indeed, where singing is the only truthful form of expression.

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