21 December 1999
TALIBAN CONTINUES TO SILENCE MEDIA
The press continues to exist under siege in Afghanistan under the Taliban's rule, states Masood Farivar in "Dateline Afghanistan: Journalism under the Taliban," an article recently published by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). According to Farivar, news coverage in Afghanistan is limited to "official announcements, accounts of Taliban military victories, and anti-opposition propaganda," and the newspapers and media are mainly state-owned. The public is denied access to even these newspapers as no news stands exist and the newspapers are mostly distributed only to government offices. While the Taliban does not officially oppose independent media, Farivar states, "Taliban officials say privately that they oppose independent newspapers because these could become propaganda vehicles for the opposition." Further, all women journalists are banned from working under the Taliban's order that no women can practice a profession. In his article, Farivar documents the case of a Peshawar-based Afghan woman journalist who was jailed when visiting Afghanistan earlier this year.
While Farivar says that some local journalists have found the Taliban to be slightly more "tolerant" of criticism by the press than the former rulers in Afghanistan, he documents the harsh conditions in which members of the press have worked for the past couple of decades. The Taliban is but one in a series of governing bodies in Afghanistan who have imposed a harsh clampdown on the media and human rights in general. Farivar says, "Afghanistan's last and only free press flourished during the so-called decade of democracy from 1963 to 1973 when it ground to an abrupt halt with the overthrow of King Zahir Shah." Since that time, the press has been tightly controlled by governing parties, and the media has often been used to spread propaganda and the government perspective on different events. Also, from 1978 until 1992, when Afghanistan was under the rule of the Communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, it was a crime to listen to Western radio broadcasts. Since the Taliban seized control in 1996, the majority of journalists fled to Pakistan, Iran, Central Asia and elsewhere. Afghan journalists in Pakistan, where more than two million Afghan refugees now live in exile, have launched an independent Afghan press. Farivar's article can be viewed on CPJ's website at
"Dateline Afghanistan".
Other members of the independent Afghan press in exile in Pakistan and Russia who can not be named for safety reasons, confirm that currently in Afghanistan, "no specific journalistic activity is visible." They told Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) that foreign journalists are routinely denied entry into Afghanistan to cover any events and that journalists from within Afghanistan have been forced to risk their lives by smuggling information out to their colleagues outside of the country. They state that "in the last days of 20th century, when most of the world is entering the next millennium with the latest information technology and other sources, those in the Afghan nation still do not have the right to read a foreign publication inside Afghanistan." The journalists clarify that since the Taliban have been in power, no outside newspapers or magazines have been allowed into Afghanistan.
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