Revolution of the press
By Ibrahim Mansour
President Hosni Mubarak's decision to abolish the detention of journalists -- a practice that dates back to the issuing of the so- called assassination-of-the-press law of 1995 -- is but the culmination of the journalists' own struggle to oppose it. Talk of the success of the fourth Journalists Conference should therefore focus not on the president's inaugural address to the conference, in which the decision was announced, but on the wider implications of the journalists' struggle for reform, which now begins to yield benefits. Constitutional reform, the scrapping of emergency law and independence of the trade unions are among the pieces of a puzzle that also includes the freedom to publish newspapers without prior permission and wide-ranging cooperation between the Journalists Syndicate and other unions.
Only through freedom of expression -- and the press remains one of its principal fora -- will a true democracy arise, in which basic human rights are upheld and the individual citizen's dignity maintained. Many feel it is time to stop speaking self-congratulatingly of a "margin of freedom" and instead institute freedom as the rule. Such freedom must be extracted from the ruling elite before those who work in the press can maintain even the vaguest semblance of self-respect or credibility in the eyes of a public itself struggling for the same goals. It is therefore in the strict implementation of the Journalists Conference's recommendations that the conference's success will be tested. We may be pleased with the abolition of the aforementioned law, but we can hardly consider our task done. In fact, the most important phase of the struggle is only just beginning, and it is up to journalists to use what support they receive from the public at large in bringing about genuine democracy.
This week's Soapbox speaker is a member of the executive council of the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate.
