Status: 18.09.2021 1:38 p.m.
More than 100 Afghan journalists appeal to the international community to save freedom of the press in their country. The most urgent are protection guarantees for media workers.
More than 100 Afghan journalists have anonymously through the organization “Reporters Without Borders” (RSF) an urgent call for help to the international community directed. In their appeal under the title “Journalism in Afghanistan is critically endangered”, they express the fear that journalism and media pluralism are in danger of disappearing completely from the country.
A total of 103 media representatives, including 20 women, from different political and ethnic backgrounds signed the appeal. Most of them are currently still working in the capital Kabul or in the Afghan provinces, RSF said. Some went underground out of fear for their safety, ten of the 103 signatories had managed to flee the country.
Demand for guarantees of protection
What they most urgently need are guarantees of protection, especially for journalists. Just as important is concrete support that enables Afghan editors to continue or resume their work. Refugees must also be helped so that they can continue to work as journalists outside the country. Those who urgently need refuge must be able to count on the full support of Western countries.
All of them decided to remain anonymous because they feared reprisals against themselves or against family members still living in Afghanistan.
“The dramatic appeal underlines what we and other organizations have been demanding for weeks: unbureaucratic help, protection guarantees, especially for journalists, and concrete support for refugee media workers,” said RSF managing director Christian Mihr. “The Taliban have shown that they will not tolerate a free press, neither in Kabul nor in the provinces. Reporters and journalists in Afghanistan are threatened with a relapse into the dark five years of the first Taliban rule.”
The 103 media professionals call on the international community to urgently develop measures to support freedom of the press in the country. The many attacks against photographers, cameramen and reporters in the past few days, the “increasingly blatant interference by the Taliban in media work” and the fact that an immensely high number of female journalists could no longer work raised the fear of the worst.