Introduction: President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf visited Toronto in September of 2013 to celerate the WE Day annual festivities that drew celebrities from arround the world. In a rare departure from diplomatic niceties which usually greets the Liberian president [in western media] on her foreign travels given her stature as a world leader and a peace laureate, the Toronto newspapers were a rare exception, with both the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail in the mix with strong worded commentaries and news articles about press freedom and corruption in the Western African country under Liberia's 24th president. The Liberian leader would respond also...below are both pieces...
Liberian leader passively allows assault on free press
Rachel Pulfer
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Nobel Peace Laureate and president
of Liberia, arrives in Toronto Friday as part of a three-day official trip to
Canada.
Until recently, Ellen, as she’s known in her home
country, has been a darling of the international community.
The country’s first democratically elected leader since
it emerged from a decade of war, Johnson Sirleaf is internationally acclaimed
for stewarding Liberia through a difficult post-conflict transition. Since her
election in 2006, the country has had its international debts forgiven, secured
significant foreign investment, experienced a relatively peaceful transfer of
power and passed West Africa’s first Freedom of Information Act, in 2010. For
her leadership, Johnson Sirleaf was awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.
Strange, then, that one of Africa’s most respected
journalists, Rodney Sieh, editor of FrontPage Africa, is currently in jail in
Liberia. His crime? Faithfully reporting the findings of an official corruption
commission initiated by the president herself — part of her administration’s
ongoing war on corruption in the world’s most corrupt country.
The newspaper that Sieh heads is well known among
international donors and investors as an important pipeline of reliable
information from Liberia. Sieh’s personal reputation is one of accuracy and
fairness. He is regarded as impervious to bribes.
Back in 2010, Frontpageafrica published the results of
two investigations conducted by the General Auditing Commission, Liberia’s
independent corruption watchdog, into the agriculture ministry’s accounts. The
investigations found nearly $6 million unaccounted for, and raised questions
about the then-agriculture minister, Christopher Toe.
Toe was quietly dismissed. He reacted by suing the
newspaper for libel, arguing that because he’d never been prosecuted, he could
not be at fault. A civil court ruled in favor of Toe. (In an op-ed published in
the New York Times two weeks ago, the jailed editor claims that two jurors
admitted they had been paid to rule against the newspaper.)
FrontPage Africa was charged $1.5 million in damages. At
30 times the newspaper’s annual operating budget, it’s a fine no newspaper in
Liberia would be able to pay. The court used nonpayment of the fines as grounds
to put Sieh in jail and shut down his outlet.
The president has elsewhere indicated she does not always
trust the capacity of her courts to reach fair verdicts. But in this case,
Johnson Sirleaf’s administration says it is respecting the court’s decision and
staying out of the process. Since he was jailed three weeks ago, Liberia’s
Nobel laureate president has been deaf to entreaties to release him. Yet in the
last analysis, Sieh has been jailed for simply doing his job.
The optics of the situation are terrible. Johnson Sirleaf
comes off as more inclined to condone the behaviour of allegedly corrupt
ministers than to act on the findings of her own commission. The point of a
corruption commission is to ensure donor dollars are used to benefit people who
are among the poorest in the world. Yet corruption in Liberia is rampant: this
year the country was ranked the most corrupt on the planet, according to
Transparency International’s 2013 Global Corruption Barometer.
The international community can and will think twice
about investing in a country marching the wrong way up international corruption
indexes — one that, rather than take action on corruption, prefers to jail its
most internationally respected journalist.
A worldwide campaign is now under way to get Sieh
released, co-ordinated by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Canada’s own
Canadian Journalists for Free Expression has lent its weight to Sieh’s cause.
Freedom House, the Doha Center for Media Freedom, the World Association of
Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and the World Editors Forum, Human
Rights Watch and Amnesty are just some of the international organizations on
the case.
The power to turn an international embarrassment for
Liberia into a good news story now rests in the hands of the woman who just
arrived in Toronto.
Simply standing by while the country’s toughest
journalist is jailed and his newspaper muzzled is not the kind of statesmanship
the world expects of a Nobel laureate.
Freeing Rodney Sieh would send a strong message that
Johnson Sirleaf will not shelter malfeasance or condone corruption, and that it
does not pay in Liberia to steal from the poorest of the poor.
Whether the president can show that leadership in this
instance is another question entirely.
Rachel Pulfer is
executive director of Journalists for Human Rights, an international media
development charity based in Toronto with operations across sub-Saharan Africa.
Liberia’s recovery: flawed, but hopeful
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Ten years ago this month, Liberia began its journey from
peace to recovery. The peace accords signed in Ghana ended the second of two
devastating civil wars, leaving more than a quarter of a million dead, my
country’s infrastructure destroyed and the lives of exhausted survivors
shattered. The task before us seemed overwhelming
Today Liberia is recovering. A renewed sense of hope,
strong economic growth and the development of a vibrant civil society have been
possible through the work of the international community, but most importantly,
the tenacity of Liberians themselves.
Yet judging progress is not always an exact science. Some
indicators cannot be debated: economic growth and many of our Millennium Goals,
such as the reduction of child mortality and action to reduce the spread of
HIV/AIDS, show clear, audited improvement. Other developments can only be more
subjectively viewed, such as the impact of judicial reforms and laws on freedom
of speech.
There has long been a debate within the international
media as to whether economic growth must be the priority for post-conflict
countries, or whether freedom of speech and justice founded on the rule of law
should come first. Many developing nations, including those in Africa, have
found this debate puzzling. Of course, say some, how can a hungry man care for
democracy or the right to assembly when he is starving?
In Liberia we find such arguments without merit. We see
liberty and dignity as the ability to enjoy both economic opportunity and the
right to criticize those in power. No man can be truly free when he enjoys only
one, but not the other. We believe it is the inalienable right of anyone,
whether an individual citizen or the holder of high office, to expect equality
of justice from the courts if they believe they have been wronged. There can be
no justice at all if some in society are exempt from the law through the office
they hold or the profession they practise.
To that end, Liberia is a signatory to the Table Mountain
Declaration on press freedom in Africa, the second African nation to sign. We
have instituted a Freedom of Information Act so Liberians can question the
decisions of government at all times. We have worked with international legal
experts to ensure that our courts operate independently outside of the
influence of the executive. Giving the government and elites the right to
intervene in cases considered by an independent judiciary would be to continue
the powers of impunity that previously led Liberia down the road to disaster.
Recent calls for the government to intervene in a libel case between a leading
journalist and a minister taken to court in a private prosecution would be to
act against the laws we have instituted separating the powers of the executive
from the judiciary.
We welcome a debate on the benefits of libel laws, and
whether our own U.S.-style first amendment protection would better serve
Liberia. No legislation can be judged as timelessly perfect, as the demands of
any vibrant society must include the capability for change. But intervention in
one case would inevitably lead to intervention in others, reasserting the
ability of the strong to use public office to bend the law against private
citizens.
The debate over this case, and the discussions in Liberia
and beyond over the developments of the past 10 years should also be considered
in a wider context about how African progress should be judged. There is an
argument whether it is possible to judge the continent through the same prism
as development in the West. Certainly, there is little in the West that is
comparable to the devastation from which Liberia and other postconflict
countries in Africa have had to rebuild. For that reason it can be argued we
should be judged differently, or perhaps less harshly, when goals are not
achieved or incidents such as the recent libel case present themselves.
Liberia and most nations of Africa are striving to be
successful and full members of the international community. To be treated as
equals requires us to be held to the same standards as others. It would be
strange for us to want to be considered by different measures when all we wish
for are the same standards for our citizens in opportunity and progress as in
the more developed nations of the world.
But this also means we should be expected to uphold those
changes we have made that provide similar equalities before the law for all our
citizens, rich and poor, not contradict them. We should not expect Africans to
act differently; but by the same turn we should not be judged differently.
Liberia’s progress is therefore rightly being considered,
10 years on from the ending of our civil wars. We are proud of the advances we
have made, but we do not dwell on our successes, just as we redouble our
efforts to address where we may have fallen short. We simply ask to be judged
the same as others. Liberia seeks equality for all and, over our nation’s next
decade of development, we plan to move closer to achieving it.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is the President of Liberia and a
winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
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