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Mon, 31 Jul 2006

If you question the situation of media, you may lose your access to it.

Sevgul Uludag wrote an article on July, 5th 2006 and this week-end (~July 29th) she distributed the following note:
"With this article, which was not published by Fileleftheros, I was told to `consider myself fired from the newspaper and not to send any more articles`. The efforts of the Cyprus Journalists’ Union to have a face-to-face meeting with Fileleftheros about the issue also failed. Fileleleftheros also refused to publish the article, even after the paragraph about Michalides was offered to be removed from the article."

The gist of the matter is that in Cyprus media is heavily controlled by political party affiliations and some (let's say) "traditional" alliances. Alternative magazines, news-sources flourish from time to time (for example see Hamamboculeri.Org that I am involved in) but they are generally marginal in their audience and rely on the dedication of few individuals. Even newspapers such as Afrika/Avrupa that have a very turbulent history of bombings, court-cases, heavy governmental and non-governmental pressure can not really be treated as bastions of freedom of expression. There are cases of columnists being forced away, news-pieces/announcements censored for no good reason except that they challanged the pre-defined notions of those "in power" in the paper. This sad truth that I just outlined for the Turkish Cypriot community unfortunately extends to the Greek Cypriot media, i.e. the whole Cypriot population in general. It is kind of ironic that the article is about the mainstream media!

Full text of Sevgul's article follows.

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