Ten years ago, on May 3, 1991, African publishers and journalists gathered at a United Nations' Unesco conference in Namibia drew up a manifesto proclaiming the need for an independent, pluralistic and free press as an essential component in democratic and economic development.

This manifesto - the Declaration of Windhoek - called on the international community to outlaw censorship as a grave violation of human rights and on states to provide constitutional guarantees for freedom of the press.

The call did not fall on deaf ears, at least at inter-governmental institutions. Within months, the General Conference of Unesco had endorsed the declaration, shortly followed by the General Assembly of the United Nations, which formally declared May 3 as World Press Freedom Day.

On May 3, 2001, media worldwide will celebrate the 10th edition of World Press Freedom Day. To what extent have the aspirations of the press to freedom been realised, in Africa and elsewhere, in the past decade?

The dismantling of the former Soviet bloc and the creation of many new democracies in the early 1990s provided momentum and significant potential for a free press worldwide. Freedom House, an American human rights monitoring institute, estimates that countries with a press at least 'partly free' have increased by two thirds in the last decade.

In Eastern Europe in particular the media were quick to seize their new freedoms and have become, in countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, a strong and diverse counterbalance to authority and its abuse.

Still struggling

There were many press freedom advances in the 1990s. In South Africa, for example, the end of apartheid and democratic elections in 1994 led to the abolition of all vestiges of control and censorship.

In Indonesia and Nigeria, new civilian governments in 1999 returned their countries to democracy and press freedom, bringing an explosion of new publications. A diversified and relatively vigorous press has also emerged with the new constitutional monarchies of Thailand and Nepal during the 1990s, and democratic elections in Benin, Tanzania and Ghana brought similar developments in their wake.

But the 1990s have also proved, if indeed it still needed to be proved, that the 'formal' introduction of democracy provides no guarantees at all for the development of a strong and truly free press, which is a much more laborious and complex process than many imagined.

While, we repeat, the political conditions for press freedom have improved significantly in many countries, there has often been a shift towards more subtle forms of repression, persecution or harassment.

As it has become more and more unacceptable for governments seeking international recognition and approval to be seen to be crushing free expression and other human rights, more of those with autocratic tendencies have transferred their repression into the hands of the pliant judicial authorities under their control, giving 'legal' approval to what remain as press freedom violations.

Dead journalists

At the same time, violence against media employees and their publications and companies has seen a dramatic increase over the decade. The collapse of totalitarianism states has often engendered civil conflicts which have brought journalists into the line of fire (the civil war in Tajikistan, for example, in 1993 cost the lives of more than 50 media employees); reporters have frequently been the victims of religious conflicts (57 Algerian press men and women were murdered in the worst years of fundamentalist violence); with an increase in investigative journalism and exposure, mafia, drug traffickers or other criminals, often abetted by politicians, the police or judicial authorities have 'taken over' the job of silencing curious reporters (over 200 have been killed in Latin American democracies since 1990, 100 of them in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico).

One region which has remained virtually hermetic to positive change for the free press and democracy over the past 10 years is the Middle East; not one Arab leader in place today has been chosen in a totally free and fair election.

As though trapped in a time-warp, the major Arab powers have held on tenaciously to their more or less total domination over the information they believe is fit for their peoples. From Tunisia, to Iraq, to Syria, to Libya, to Saudi Arabia, free journalism is a rare, virtually non-existent, commodity.

But there remains hope, particularly from the airwaves. The Al Jazeera satellite television station, based in Qatar, for example, is sending shock waves throughout the Arab world with its remarkably open and free debates and news about Arab issues.

Internet impact

No discussion of press freedom in the 1990s can fail to applaud the advances, and above all the new opportunities, brought by the technological breakthrough of the Internet.

An information flow, however policed and controlled, has been created in countries like Burma, China, Cuba, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria and Vietnam, where the press is totally muzzled, and one can only hope that free information providers will get better and better at outwitting the security authorities.

In the meantime, many of the pioneers are paying a very severe price for their efforts. In China, for example, where the regime appeared to have completely won the battle against free information on political and other sensitive issues in the press, the Internet has brought an entirely new challenge in the repression of dissenting voices.

Heavy jail sentences have been inflicted on the brave souls who hoped either that the Chinese authorities would embrace this modern form of communication more liberally or that they could escape the attention of the ubiquitous information police.

But few governments can ignore the necessity, for economic progress, of developing their Internet infrastructures and journalists in some of the autocratic regimes of both the Middle East and Southeast Asia, in particular, have been getting around traditional controls by putting banned stories on the Web.

International opinion matters

What, then, can we expect, or hope for, in the decade ahead? International 'opinion', perhaps for the first time, is clearly weighted against those governments which continue to violate the human right to free information.

This has not yet translated into a real determination and commitment either to encourage real change by helping free press development in foreign aid programmes, or in completely excluding aggressive states from the 'club' of respectable nations with which one can do business.

It is on both these fronts that progress is necessary in the 10 years ahead of us. As many democratic, industrialised nations continue out of either genuine philanthropy or economic, political and military self-interest to help less fortunate countries in their progress towards democracy, human rights and a better economic and social environment, renewed emphasis must appear on aiding, at a much more significant level, the emergence of free and independent media as a precondition for all durable economic, political and social change.

TIMOTHY BALDING is director-general of the Paris-based World Association of Newspapers, the global organisation for the newspaper industry, representing 15,000 newspapers world-wide. The above article is part of a malaysiakini 's month-long focus on the state of the global media in conjunction with World Press Freedom Day on May 3.