The report, titled 'The Fight Goes On', was officially released here on Wednesday during a two-day seminar organised by the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC) in association with UNESCO and the Maldives government.

The IFJ report documents murder and harassment of journalists in almost all countries in South Asia, with Bangladesh having the worst record with at least 462 journalists reported attacked or harassed in 238 separate incidents. Nepal is the only bright spot where press freedom has improved since the signing of the peace accord between the government and the Maoist communists in November last year. In Pakistan, the report said, government officials, the police and military intelligence were often behind "systematic and frequently brutal, attacks on journalists."

"There is a tendency throughout this report to focus only on tragic, negative consequences of the exercise of freedom," noted Javed Jabbar, a former Pakistan information minister. "There is no adequate acknowledgement of the enormous growth in freedom of expression in the media (in Pakistan) by which most people who use that freedom are not subjected to persecution or harassment," he told IPS.

"To see it in only one perspective is to deny the readers of this report that essential requirement of fairness and balance," added Jabbar.

Kanak Dixit, publisher of Nepal's Himal magazine, agrees with IFJ's assessment that press freedom has improved in the Himalayan country since the signing of the peace accord last year. "Media is now free, but its challenges have become much more complex," he said in an interview.

This is a point endorsed by one of India's well-known investigative journalists Aniruddha Bahal. "There is a need to address threats faced by local journalists in small towns and provinces," he told IPS. "There is this tendency by district level administrations who are all powerful to intimidate journalists. That intimidation rarely filters to the national media nor is it reported upon."

The IFJ report did point out a number of attacks on journalists in districts, especially in the conflict-prone Indian states such as Kashmir, Assam and Manipur.

The report is scathing on Sri Lanka's press freedom record in the past year, saying it "has severely worsened." IFJ says that Tamil journalists in particular have been targets of murder, kidnapping and harassment; and the president and a number of government leaders have labelled journalists who are critical of government policy as traitors to the country working in collusion with the Tamil separatist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Sugeeswara Senadhira, media advisor to the government of Sri Lanka, after reading the report told IPS that the biggest violator of press freedom in Sri Lanka is the LTTE and there is only a passing reference to it in the IFJ report. He explained that the LTTE does not allow any Tamil newspaper to function in the areas it controls in the north and the east of the country. Even the three Tamil newspapers published in Colombo are not allowed to be distributed in their areas without subjecting to censorship.

"Every day LTTE cadres check the contents of the newspapers at their checkpoint before allowing it to pass through. So suppression of the media is in LTTE areas," he argues.

Senadhira also added that the report has exaggerated comments made by the environment minister Champika Ranawaka of the Buddhist nationalist Jatika Hela Urumaya party. "He has been misquoted and he has not made any death threats at all," he noted, adding that the said comments were made three months before he became a minister, not after, as indicated in the report.

For foreign participants at the Male event, a reality check was offered by the public confrontation between a small group of local journalists and the young, articulate Information Minister of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed after he expatiated on media reform moves in the Malidves .

Though the IFJ report, which was written by one of the dissident journalists present there, claimed that Maldives press freedom record was dismal with constant harassment of journalists, the minister said he had six bills in parliament designed to liberalise the media environment in this archipelago of 300,000 people.

"What has changed today is the media policy of the government,'' said Nasheed. "People should not expect us to achieve in one year, what took many countries 100 years to achieve.''

When one of the local journalists told the minister that he should take steps to stop police harassment of journalists on the beat, the minister fired back saying that the problem is with what he called "multi-task journalists" -- that is activists who masquerade as journalists.

"We have offered to have an accreditation scheme for journalists so that they could be protected but you people refused to accept it," he told the accuser. "How can we identify activists from journalists without an accreditation scheme?" asked the minister.

Source: IPS - Inter Press Service News Agency