Watch Out, Journos: Kofi Annan's Censorship Proposal

By: Mark Fitzgerald Bad ideas never truly die at the United Nations. Like a B movie monster, authoritarian notions dressed in high-flowing rhetoric -- such as mandates for "developmental journalism" or a "New World Information Order -- lurch to life repeatedly, the wooden stakes of free-press watchdogs past still plunged deeply in their chests.

What's most annoying about the U.N. is that it's not always the usual suspects selling the snake oil, but the usually sensible as well.

And so it is that this week U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has loosed before the General Assembly of nations governed by the good and the genocidal, the democratic and the demonic, 32 pages of recommendations on how the international community can combat terrorism.

Censorship of the press -- voluntarily, of course -- turns out to be a key method.

As journalist Betsy Pisik pointed out in The Washington Times last Friday, Annan's report "breaks ground in emphasizing the role that the 'media' can play in curtailing terrorism by 'countering the hypernationalistic and xenophobic messages that glorify mass murder and martyrdom.'"

It turns out that we in the media can counter "hypernationalistic and xenophobic messages" by just shutting up, OK?

Here's what U.N. General Assembly document A/60/825 says in its 25th paragraph: "Mass media may also wish to study the experiences of those countries that have adopted voluntary codes of conduct for journalists covering terrorism, including, for example, bans on interviewing terrorists. The United Nations stands ready to work with journalists' associations and press freedom organizations on this issue, including by convening an international conference to facilitate consideration of this topic, if so desired. In turn, Member States must give due attention to the need for measures to promote the safety and security of journalists."

As the World Press Freedom Committee (WPFC) points out, one of the countries pushing this "voluntary" code of conduct is Russia, wherein its attempts to keep its own conduct in pursuing its war against Chechen separatists by keeping journalists from reporting anything from the rebel's side.

WPFC noted Monday that Annan's recommendations are similar to a code the Russian delegation has been distributing to major U.N. delegations. This code, adopted last year by the pro-Putin group of newspaper publishers known as the Mass Media Industrial Committee, bans interviews with terrorists, unless approved by police, and it calls on journalists to give the police "without delay" any information "that may be used for the purpose of saving human lives," WPFC reported.

Expect this nonsense -- in which the police and government effectively deputize the press as enforcement agents - - to get a respectful hearing at the General Assembly. After all, only last week, the U.N. re-launched its discredited Human Rights Commission as the Human Rights Council -- and promptly elected as members such well-known lovers of press freedom as Cuba, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia.

Kofi Annan is a smart man, and knows that there are times when even a diplomat must speak undiplomatic truths. Years ago he spoke in front of a general meeting of the old Organization of African Unity, and said it was time that African states must stop embracing those who take power through the barrel of the gun.

But he and others in the international community seem never to grasp the fundamental notion that one of the most powerful weapons against terrorism is, to quote the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the right to "hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

The Russian media's craven self-censorship of the Chechen war did nothing to prevent the 2004 massacre of hundreds of children at the hands of Chechen terrorists at a Beslan schoolhouse.

Similarly, the United States has repeatedly seen the failure of attempts to limit "hate speech" in the press in Bosnia, and more recently in Iraq. The bloody uprising by radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr's Shiite militia in 2004 was triggered when the former U.S. civilian administrator, L. Paul Bremer, shut down the weekly Al-Hawaza. The newspaper, you see, violated a Bremer-imposed "code of conduct" on the Iraqi press.

And Kofi Annan should well know by now that self-censorship is rarely truly voluntary. Self-censorship is depressingly common right now among much of the rural press in Colombia, or in Mexico's border cities with the U.S. That's not by choice of editors who think their silence improves things -- it's because narco-terrorists have intimidated them with murder and kidnapping.

Further, authoritarian governments love it when international bodies adopt these kinds of "codes." We Americans tend to give the jaw-jaw at 760 United Nations Plaza about the same weight we do a heated debate in the Faculty Senate at the local land-grant college, but these words have consequences for local and foreign journalists. Consider, for instance, the paranoid government of Tunisia, which could unleash cops to prevent foreign reporters from contacting non-government organization (NGO) activists, even as it hosted the U.N.-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society.

Democratic governments must make it clear that the U.N. cannot sanction censorship. Canada's delegation has gone on the record as saying "the prohibition of incitement must not be misused to limit freedom of expression," according to the Washington Times' Pisik. So far, the U.S. delegation has not specifically addressed the media part of Annan's recommendation. As quickly as possible, the U.S. should help stick another stake into this monster.