Freedom, yes, but not for the media in East Europe

The movement for change in Eastern Europe was led by writers. It was about dissident novelists and playwrights, of Samizdat literature, of poets and the freedom to express themselves. It was about creating a civil society where citizens, informed by a free press, would take informed decisions.

But 10 years after the fall of the Wall, the one thing that is rare indeed in Eastern Europe is a free press and freedom of expression.

Right across the former Iron Curtain countries, and not just in Europe but also in what was Soviet Central Asia, the media have remained to a large extent tightly controlled and often highly repressed. Media laws, originally designed, on paper at least, to allow the development of a free media, have been used to control. Laws on registering media outlets, taxation laws, libel laws, and laws forbidding any insult of high officials have been used against the media, especially the press.

It is not uniformly black, though. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have as free a media as most countries in the West. The threat in those countries is probably more from media monopoly and foreign ownership than from authoritarian tendencies. At one stage as much as 70 per cent of Hungary's media was owned by foreign media interests.

In Poland, for instance, the old Solidarity newspaper, Gazeta Wyborza, edited, by the former dissident, Adam Michnik, is now selling 500,000 copies daily. According to the New York Times, Gazeta Wyborza "accompanied the Polish transition, and buttressed it, with the same intensity as El Pais in post-Franco Spain".

For much of eastern and south-east Europe, the experience has not been as happy. In Croatia, the Tudjman regime continues to harass the independent media, ensuring they remain vulnerable with libel actions and other forms of control. Members of the ruling party hold all the senior positions in the official press and in much of the radio and television.

In Yugoslavia, the war was made possible by media behaviour. Mark Thompson, whose book, Forging War, on the media in Yugoslavia has just been updated, wrote in the current issue of the journal, Index On Censorship, that media manipulation was central to the strategies of various leaders and that the most influential media were used to "obtain public support or mere tolerance for policies which, at best, were bound to threaten the peace, security and property of all peoples in the region".

In Belarus, the former collective farm manager and now President, Aleksandre Lukashenka, is almost universally shunned, primarily because of his policies towards the media. He cannot even get membership of the Council of Europe, a body willing to embrace Turkey, Croatia and Ukraine. The largest-selling independent newspaper, Svoboda, has to be printed in Vilnius, across the border.

There is little or no investment in independent media in Belarus, hardly surprising given the use of law to harass the media. Newspapers have to use state-owned printing plants and state-owned distribution system and the electronic media are almost all in the hands of the state. One newspaper, Nasha Niva, was warned that it has violated the laws on press and other media for deviating from the accepted form of spelling and punctuation in Belarussian. Members of the Belarus Association of Journalists agree Lukashenka could close down the independent media if he chose, but believe that that he would prefer just to make their lives a misery.

NEIGHBOURING Ukraine now looks as if it is seeking to vie with Belarus for the worst case for press freedom in the former Soviet Union. Media monitor bodies were appalled at the biased coverage of the recent elections where President Kuchma's opponents hardly got a look-in at all.

A Ukrainian newspaper editor, attending a reception in a US diplomat's apartment earlier this year, casually remarked that he had been fined $1 million by the state. His newspaper was operating without phones. He was not worried. A fine of $500 would have worried him; that he would have to pay.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, Alexei Simonov, of the Glasnost Defence Foundation, which monitors media abuse and provides legal help to journalists, summed up the position for this writer. The "least bad" situation is in Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova. It is getting worse in Ukraine, which like Kazakhstan, appears to be closing ranks with Belarus. Turkmenistan, he added, is the very worst case. "There is no problem with freedom of speech in Turkmenistan because there is no such thing. In Armenia there is a free press of sorts, but there are no laws. In Azerbaijan, as in Belarus, there is one-man rule and little room for press freedom."

For so many former communist countries, change has meant moving from one form of authoritarianism to another. Many of the strong men of Eastern Europe sell themselves as above national politics and as champions of the national interest. This may be why they often regard the independent media as a greater threat than Opposition politicians, because the media challenge that view without being part of the political system.

It is also the case that where the media are most vibrant the political system has been marked by the lack of one strong leader, where there have been hard fought elections and a number of regimes over the past 10 years. Even in Slovenia, considered democratic enough to be part of the EU's enlargement debate, its long-time President, Vladimir Meciar, increasingly sought to stifle and control the press. Recently a group of Irish journalists there were stunned when it became clear that far from being interested in a free press, their hosts wanted to know how the media could be further controlled.