Referring to comments made by South Sudanese President Salva Kiir on Sunday, the CPJ’s East African representative told Anadolu Agency on Friday that 2015 has been a deadly year for journalists in South Sudan.
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“I would appeal to the president to give a press statement against his words so that the people of the Republic of South Sudan will get convinced of what he has said because now we have already started losing journalists”, Oliver Modi, head of the Union of Journalists of South Sudan (UJOSS), told Radio Tamazuj.
Peter Julius Moi, who worked with the independent New Nation newspaper in Juba, was shot as he headed home after work, his colleagues at the paper said.
“The leader of any country threatening to kill journalists is extremely unsafe and utterly unacceptable”, the CPJ’s Tom Rhodes said in a statement.
“At the moment it’s Peter, tomorrow is another person”, Modi stated. “If anybody does not know that this country will kill people, we will demonstrate on them”.
Peter was gunned down three days after President Kiir warned journalists that “freedom of the press does not mean that you work against your country”.
We are being taken one by one.
Gatwech commended Media houses, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the Union of Journalists in South Sudan for their commitment to press freedom despite facing daily threats. Five journalists died in a roadside ambush in Western Bahr el Ghazal in January and another journalist was killed in Jonglei state in May.
“Increasingly more unbiased voices are being silenced in South Sudan at this crucial time within the nation’s historical past, when the general public desperately wants unbiased, neutral info”, stated Rhodes. Security agents have shut down two privately owned newspapers and a popular radio program earlier this month, according to BBC.
South Sudan’s civil war began in December 2013 when Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar of plotting a coup, setting off a cycle of retaliatory killings that has split the poverty-stricken country along ethnic lines. Mr Kiir has also been under fire from diplomats for failing to sign a peace deal on Monday.
President Salva Kiir issued a warning to journalists before flying to peace talks in Ethiopia.
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On Wednesday, the US proposed that the UN Safety Council after Kiir’s determination to not signal the peace deal.
