Three Nobel Peace Prize winners will take part in the forthcoming General Assembly of the International Press Institute, to be held in Cape Town, South Africa from 13-16 February 1994.
Messrs. F. W. De Klerk and Nelson Mandela will speak at the Opening Ceremony, while Archbishop Desmond Tutu will preside over a function held at the University of the Western Cape, of which he is Chancellor.
The General Assembly will focus on a range of media issues in Africa and the world. It will also hear from political leaders contesting South Africa’s first-ever fully free democratic election.
In its IPI Board Meeting held in Vienna, 28-30 October 1993, the IPI’s Executive Board expressed concern that press freedom in South Africa is not guaranteed in the proposed interim Constitution and Bill of Rights. The IPI calls on all representative organisation in South Africa to adopt an unequivocal stand on media freedom and to press for this basic right to be enshrined in the Constitution, in order to promote and safeguard democracy.
IPI also supports the position taken by journalists in Turkey in condemning the behaviour of the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party), which terrorizes the press into shutting out information they do not like and insisting on publishing threats and demands which the press does not wish to propagate. It is not to be tolerated that the lives of journalists and their families are threatened if they do not comply with the PKK’s demands. Support that is offered to newspapers in sympathy with the Kurdish people’s point of view should not be confused with the attitude of the PKK that they can force their violent and undemocratic positions upon the Turkish press by terrorist threats. It is to be hoped that such threats and violence will cease.
For further information, please contact IPI Secretariat in Vienna (Tel: +43 1 512 90 11; Fax: +43 1 512 90 11 14