SANAA, Yemen -- For 27-year-old Nabil Subaye, an independent freelance journalist, the last six months have been rough.
Since writing a series of articles last summer accusing Yemen's longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh of grooming his son for succession, he has been taken to court for "insulting the president and harming national interests" and accused by government-linked publications of being a foreign agent, a homosexual and an apostate.
In November last year he was ambushed, beaten, and stabbed by two masked men armed with jambiyat, Yemen's ubiquitous curved daggers. The identity of the culprits remains unknown: the Interior Ministry says they were mere criminals, but Subaye, who had made enemies in high places and received threatening phone calls for weeks in advance, suspects government agents.
And he's not alone.
"Over the last several months, a growing number of Yemeni journalists have been the victims of brutal assaults, arrests, intimidation, and government-sanctioned newspaper closures," the Committee to Protect Journalists announced in a press release issued on January 26, after sending a special delegation to Sanaa.
"Journalists who covered protests, reported on official corruption, criticized the president or government policies, or discussed the possibility of President Saleh's son succeeding him as president have been targeted."
In late August Jamal Amer, editor of the weekly newspaper Al-Wasat, was abducted, threatened, and beaten by four men driving a truck with military license plates. Two months later two cameramen, one working for the Al-Arabiya satellite network, were beaten and arrested by uniformed police after trying to film a protest outside a textile mill.
Yemeni journalists claim press freedoms hit an all time low last year, with one prominent editor calling 2005 the worst year for press freedoms in the country's history. In an attempt to respond to the growing tide of criticism, the government has proposed a new press law. However, the measure has so far won little if any support among members of the Journalists Syndicate, who mostly view it as a step backward.
Besides targeting journalists with the standard tools of state repression, Saleh's regime, which was quick to join the U.S. "war on terrorism" in 2001, has been employing the controversial practice of takfir, the Islamic equivalent of excommunication, to intimidate its critics. In conservative Yemen the accusation of apostasy is a virtual death warrant, not only because it is on the books as a capital offense, but because it invites retribution from radical Muslims.
Although the government itself lacks the kind of religious authority necessary to make its own takfir stick, its large presence in the media market ensures that its claims resonate throughout the country. It can also amplify the more reliable takfir of others, a tactic it employed last fall, when an internal dispute broke out between two members of the Islamist Islah (Reform) Party, the country's largest opposition group.
The conflict erupted when Nabil al-Sofee, editor in chief of News Yemen, an independent Web site, published an article on the legal troubles of Abdul Majid al-Zindani, a radical sheikh accused by the U.S. State Department and the Security Council of aiding Al-Qaeda. The Yemeni government, which to date has refused to take any action against Zindani, was due to discuss the matter in Washington during an upcoming presidential visit.
The article's publication was immediately met with a blistering press release from the office of Zindani, which accused Sofee of "lacking journalistic ethics" and of "spreading baseless accusations." After thanking the rest of the Yemeni media for "standing on the side of truth and fulfilling their religious and national obligations in defending a brother," the press release closed by saying that "surely the accusations of the Americans ... depend on [News Yemen's] journalistic lies."
In the political and religious climate in which it was issued, the sheikh's message was clear: Sofee had betrayed a fellow Muslim to an unjust outside power; he was at best a traitor and at worst an apostate.
The pressure on Sofee intensified as the government proceeded to publish the press release on the front pages of its four daily newspapers, nearly a week before the opposition party weeklies came out. "I went back and forth with Zindani over this, and in fact most of my party sided with me," Sofee said in a recent interview, "but the government papers only published his attacks."
According to Stacey Philbrick Yadav, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania currently writing a dissertation on Islamism in Yemeni politics, the government's propagation of takfir is part of a two-pronged strategy to silence critics.
"The originators of the statements are very often members of the Islah party," Yadav explained, so "this feeds into the criticisms of the extremism of the Islamist parties. To secular or more leftist critics the government can point the finger at Islah while at the same time they can discredit people using that language."
Yet the stakes are high. Everyone in Yemen knows the story of Jarallah Omar, a prominent liberal politician who was assassinated by an extremist at an Islah conference in 2002 following a long personal campaign against him, both from radical elements within the Islah Party and the government itself. The killer, coincidentally, was a former student at Iman University in Sanaa, an institution founded and headed by Zindani.
Although the killing served as a wake-up call to the problem of using takfir in the press, it also insured that politicians and journalists alike would never again take such accusations lightly. "Jarallah's assassination could not have occurred outside of the context of takfir," Yadav says. "Government and non-governmental use of takfir creates an environment permissive to violence."
Many journalists expected the international community, particularly the United States, to show a greater interest in their plight. "We expected that America would act faster, that it would intervene in a bigger way on our behalf," Subaye said in a recent interview. "Here in Yemen it seems like they are only interested in fighting terrorism, not in defending liberal values."
That's regrettable, because it appears the Yemeni government is interested in neither.
Joseph Krauss is a freelance journalist based in Cairo. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.