Saudi-led coalition ministers of information meeting probes ways to block critical coverage of Yemen war
“That
was the last time I saw Hashem,” recounted Mohammed Al Humran,
a local Yemeni journalist, as he told MintPress how his 21-year-old
son Hashem was killed in a double-tap airstrike while filming Saudi
bombing raids in Dahian, north of Sadaa.
Hashem
was one of the 180 journalists who have been killed in Yemen by
Saudi-coalition forces, according to a report by the Union of Yemeni
Journalists.
Since
the U.S.-backed Saudi-led coalition’s war on Yemen began on March
26, 2015, journalists have been a preferred target, a fact that Saudi
Arabia doesn’t shy away from acknowledging. Former coalition
spokesman Brigadier General Ahmed Asiri said in a March 2015 press
conference that opposition media outlets would be targeted by the
coalition and just three weeks ago, at a press conference in Riyadh,
the Saudi-led coalition’s spokesman reiterated Saudi Arabia’s
willingness to target journalists. MintPress News journalist Ahmed
AbdulKareem was injured by a Saudi airstrike in 2015 while covering
clashes near the Yemen-Saudi Arabia border.
Although
the coalition’s war in Yemen barely registers in the international
mainstream news, the Saudi coalition and its allies have been
desperate to curb negative coverage of the war, which the U.N. has
called the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.
Aside
from a coalition-imposed moratorium on foreign journalists entering
Yemen, a recent report by the Yemeni Media Union highlights a great
deal of coalition activity aimed at controlling the narrative
surrounding the unpopular war, including: “five cases of cloning
‘tv’ channels, 22 cases of destruction of ‘media’ facilities,
30 cases of targeting radio and television broadcasting centers,
seven cases of suspension from broadcasting on Arabsat and Nilesat,
and seven cases of blocking and disturbing channels.”
Despite
the coalition’s efforts, ongoing work by local journalists and
attention from international human-rights organizations continues to
draw the ire of coalition leadership, who recently held a meeting of
the coalition’s Ministers of Information in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to
discuss strategies to curb what they see as a threat posed by local
and international media.
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