"The purpose of this handbook is to lay out some principles that could function as guideposts for journalists in Afghanistan as they seek to grapple with the evolving complexities of democracy in action. It seeks to provide concrete suggestions on how global best practices in political reporting and
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election coverage could be adapted for the Afghanistan context. Interactions between the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and the Afghan Independent Journalists Association (AIJA) have arrived at several conclusions about current media awareness of the democratic electoral process. Journalists find they have little access to the inner workings of the electoral process. They think that political leaders do not want to face journalists who ask difficult questions. The referee of the electoral process, the Independent Election Commission established under the constitution of Afghanistan, also is in need of media oversight, as are the election observers deployed by international agencies. Journalists are keen to join debate about the most appropriate pattern of electoral democracy for Afghanistan, in terms of assessing the presidential and the parliamentary system, and all the variants on these basic models. Journalists want an agreed charter of rights regarding their powers of scrutiny over the electoral process, so that they can report irregularities that ordinary people and public authorities can then seek to correct. Journalists want to understand better the principles of neutral and non-partisan reporting. In the specific situation of past and present conflict in Afghanistan, journalists want to understand how they can expand the limits of “safe reporting”, particularly in relation to the influence and coercive power wielded by erstwhile “warlords." (Introduction, page 3)
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"Independent media have expanded and diversified in Afghanistan, though the country remains a precarious and hazardous place for journalists and media organisations. Nine journalists have been killed between January 1, 2007 and the writing of these lines (though one case remains a little unclear), w
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hile abductions, physical violence, threats and intimidation against journalists continue with worrying frequency. While the establishment of a number of print, broadcast and online media outlets creates an atmosphere of hope for the growth of free media in the country, attacks on journalists, death threats and intimidation from armed insurgency owing allegiance to the Taliban continue. Worryingly, there has also been an increasing trend of official and governmental sources, not to mention the various armed groups that continue to have immense influence in the national houses of parliament, to threaten and harass media and media workers. The threats are clearly intended to silence debate about the new Afghanistan, and to stifle the development of an independent and critical media through which such debate would be conducted.
Religious hardliners continue to apply pressure on the Government of President Hamid Karzai to impose or support harsh measures against individuals and institutions who do not bow to fundamentalist ideas about the direction of Afghan society. This is despite the clear guarantee in Afghanistan’s Constitution of the right of citizens to freedom of expression. The most prominent example is that of Sayed Parvez Kambakhsh, a young journalist with the Jahan-e-Naw weekly and a student at Balkh University, Mazar-e-Sharif, who was sentenced to death after a four-minute closed-door hearing in January 2008, on charges of blasphemy." (Page 3)
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