The Afghanistan government has ordered a TV station to suspend broadcasts of Al-Jazeera’s English-language programmes, the station’s director said Tuesday. A statement from Lemar TV said the Ministry of Information and Culture, which oversees media in Afghanistan, did not provide reasons for the order.
The station complied, but contested the order before the Supreme Court on Tuesday, the Associated Press (AP) reported. The Lemar statement said the ministry sent a letter to the attorney-general’s office stating that Al-Jazeera is “inflicting a killer blow to the cultural order and the legal authority of the government.”
Cable operators in Afghanistan are still free to broadcast Al-Jazeera.
Lemar’s director, Saad Mohseni, e-mailed a copy of Minister of Information and Culture Abdul Karim Khurram’s letter to AP, but its authenticity could not immediately be verified. Ministry officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
The minister also said Lemar TV and Tolo TV had not paid their taxes. An earlier request by Khurram to end the retransmission of Al-Jazeera International was rejected by the justice minister, who said Lemar TV had done “nothing wrong.”
Reporters sans frontières (RSF) criticised as “unacceptable” the ministry’s censorship of Al-Jazeera International’s TV programmes and demanded that the ban be lifted at once. “The ministry’s charges against Al-Jazeera are inappropriate and groundless,” RSF said. “The ban is obviously part of a wider drive by elements in the government trying to stifle any dissident voice it does not like.”
Ahmad Sameer Samimi, chief of staff at the attorney-general’s office, would not confirm the authenticity of the letter and declined to comment, saying the office is working on the case.
Mohseni said the attorney-general’s office sent a letter on Sunday ordering Lemar to stop broadcasting Al-Jazeera. Lemar, which for five months has featured about three hours of Al-Jazeera news programming per day, suspended the shows Sunday afternoon, the AP report said.
Mohseni said there was no legal justification for the ban, but the station decided to suspend programming for now. “Given that we promote institution building and the importance of abiding by Afghanistan’s laws, we felt it may be best to comply with the demands of the attorney general’s office,” Mohseni told AP.
The Lemar TV chief told RSF he had dropped the programmes “to avoid violent reprisals by security forces” and that he would bow to the president’s good judgement so as to end the dispute.” He noted that the programmes had been legally retransmitted and contained nothing blasphemous.”
A spokesperson for Al-Jazeera English in Doha, Qatar, said it also had received a letter from Khurram, which stated that the suspension was a licensing issue and has nothing to do with programming. “It is absolutely not related to the nature of the programmes aired,” she said, quoting Khurram’s letter. “We will be pleased to welcome (the programs) in our country.”
Mohseni said that the station delivered a four-page submission arguing the legality of transmission to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, and that Lemar will try to bring back programming as soon as possible, acording to AP.
The Al-Jazeera programmes Lemar had broadcast included news programmes, documentaries and talk shows, including “Frost over the World,” hosted by veteran British broadcaster David Frost.
The ban on Al-Jazeera comes amid widespread concern that media rights were being quashed by the government. A proposed media law that will soon go before Parliament would make it illegal for journalists to report stories “that harm the physical, spiritual and moral well-being of people.”
Doha-based Al-Jazeera began English newscasts on Nov. 15 to an estimated 80 million homes on cable and satellite TV. The station, an offshoot of the Arabic-language Al-Jazeera, mainly reaches viewers in the Middle East and Europe.
