The Forces of Darkness

1960 may have been a big year for independence, but it was less of a year for freedom.

In 1960 Cuba's press stood in chains fresh-forged by Fidel Castro. On Formosa, Newspaper Publisher Lei Chen was imprisoned for daring to be critically independent of Chiang Kaishek. Indonesia's President Sukarno commanded editors to swear allegiance to his regime ("Our publication is duty-bound to support guided democracy") or lose their licenses.

Strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized--i.e., confiscated--the Egyptian press; and in Ceylon, a self-styled democracy, newly elected Prime Minister Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike threatened to seize the country's two largest news paper groups for opposing her during the campaign. Of 17 new African states, just one -- Nigeria -- was born with a free press.

Where freedom of the press vanished in 1960, without exception it vanished from countries whose constitutions guarantee a free press. Press freedom is constitution ally warranted by nearly every nation on earth -- including all those behind the Iron Curtain. But for all the pious pledges, the world's press is slowly losing its freedom.

Today only 35 of the world's countries, now about 145, allow a press that can be called truly free.

Methods of Repression. Paradoxically, wherever the new spirit of national free dom is on forced march -- in Africa, Asia, the Middle East-- freedom of the press is usually trampled underfoot. Once freed of their countries' colonial occupiers, the new rulers of Africa often modeled them selves not on libertarian standards but on the example of Africa's oldest black republic, Liberia, which has kept the press subjugated for 134 years.

There are degrees of freedom and pressure, and often nations that subdue their own' press will allow foreign correspondents free passage--while censoring their findings in incoming papers and magazines. Last week, for example, Ethiopia, annoyed by factual accounts in U.S. magazines of December's short-lived revolt against Emperor Haile Selassie, turned back the magazines at customs.

Some of the noisiest protesters at the U.N. of other people's freedom denied are. in their own homelands, unwilling to allow their newspapers to report fact and truth. Indonesia has reared an imposing machine, involving agencies called Paperpu, Paperda and Perperti, which comb the slightest intransigence from the press.

Last October the government summarily canceled the licenses of all 65 Indonesian papers, reissued only 55; the missing ten were papers whose performance as advocates of the administration did not meet Sukarno's exacting standards. South Viet Nam arrests not only offending journalists but pressmen, compositors and Linotypists as well--together with their families.

In tiny Yemen, the Imam personally censors all outgoing cable copy.

Living by Sufferance. Press control comes in many other gradations and forms. It can be wildly irrational, as when L'Echo du Maroc was suspended for three days in Morocco for dropping an m from King Mohammed V's name. South Africa has a free press, but over the heads of South African newsmen hangs a legal threat: editors can be fined, imprisoned and flogged for minor offenses. India's newsmen enjoy a freedom comparable to that of U.S. journalists, but partly on the sufferance of Prime Minister Nehru, who does not choose to invoke the country's punitive press laws. "Nehru allows me to abuse him," ponders a leading Indian journalist. "Will the next government?"

The French press is ostensibly free. But suppressing papers has become a postwar governmental habit, one that De Gaulle pursues more stubbornly than any of his predecessors. In the prevailing official state of emergency, articles judged inflammatory about the Algerian war are forbidden, and the press is kept in line with the threat of Article 30 of the constitution, which allows even local prefects to take "all necessary measures for the control of the press."

Still other countries suborn their press by buying it, or manipulating the supply of newsprint. In Ghana, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah has sustained his pet propaganda outlets, the Evening News and the Ghana Times, by pumping some $8,000,000 into them over the past three years. When this did not daunt Accra's Ashanti Pioneer, an opposition paper, Nkrumah tamed the Pioneer with suspension and censorship. The Irish press, otherwise free, applies a stern and moralistic self-censorship to avoid all possibility of offending the country's dominant Roman Catholic Church.

Urgent Instinct. Even where press freedom exists, it is rarely secure. Last year Argentina, so recently liberated from Peron's yoke, nervously muzzled its press on several occasions during anti-government riots staged by diehard Peronistas. The U.S. press is obviously one of the world's freest, but the International Press Institute, a dogged opponent of press control, left the U.S. of its 1956 list of countries where full freedom prevails, on the grounds that a growing Government tendency to suppress and manipulate the news is an indirect form of control.

For all that governments may do, the public appetite for truth the world over is insatiable. The walls of Asuncion are widely known as "Paraguay's only free press"; there, nightly, appear messages that the country's papers dare not print. East Berliners, who may visit West Berlin but may not bring back its newspapers, smuggle copies home in their underclothing. In Russia, during the interlude of the thaw when relatively outspoken Polish Communist papers were allowed to be sold at kiosks, comrades queued patiently for hours to buy them. In the young state of Israel, a defiant press has resisted successive efforts to whip it into line. Last year, when Secretary to the Government Katriel Katz angrily suggested that "the public itself should demand for its own good that press freedom be limited somewhat," he was hooted down by the public and the press.

Such shows of courage and of a yearning for truth form the press's main barricade against suppression. If press freedom is to survive, it will survive as a shareholder in man's will to be free.

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