FRANCAISReporters sans frontières - Comments
6) Links to politics
-RSF is on good terms with the French authorities. For all the sensitive affairs, explains Robert Ménard, it systematically contacts the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the press attaché at the Presidency of the Republic.
-On the other hand, the actions of RSF against Cuba and Libya have disturbed the United Nations and the NGO has been excluded from some summits and workshops. Hence the association was suspended during one year from the ECOSOC (United Nations Economic and Social Council) on the 20th of May 2003, and from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights on the 24th of July 2003. RSF was also declared persona non grata at the World Summits on the Information Society (WSIS) organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in December 2003 in Geneva and in November 2005 in Tunis. According to Jean-Guy Allard and Maxime Vivas, the association and its secretary-general Robert Ménard actually relayed the propaganda of Washington. The campaigns against Cuba coincided with the anti-Castro operations of the American government and the CIA. In the same vein, Robert Ménard was criticized for his support to the multimillionaire Gustavo Cisneros, a media mogul who backed the failed putsch of Pedro Carmona against Hugo Chavez in 2002 in Venezuela. During the war in Iraq, eventually, RSF was suspected of minimizing the killings of journalists or hostages by the troops of Washington. For Maxime Vivas, Robert Ménard did not defend properly Mohammed Al Jouni, the Syrian guide of the French journalists Christian Chesnot and George Malbrunot in 2004, while he was held prisoner, questioned and tortured by the American army without the press knowing it. According to the same author, again, RSF took for granted the explanations of Washington to justify why an Italian hostage, journalist Giuliana Sgrena, was injured and caught under American fire while being released. Last but not least, the association exonerated the military from their responsibility in the death of two war correspondents, Taras Protsyuk from Reuters and José Couso from Telecinco, during an attack led by the United States on the Hotel Palestine in Baghdad in 2004: in 2007, a judge from Madrid, Santiago Pedra, was not to be that lenient and issued an international arrest warrant against three of the American soldiers whom RSF had cleared. One should however have in mind that those accusations come from two writers, Jean-Guy Allard and Maxime Vivas, who are politically on the left. Native of Quebec, Jean-Guy Allard works at the international edition of Granma, the official newspaper in Havana. According to Vincent Brossel, in charge of the Asian desk at RSF since 2000, the association actually became a prime target for Latin-American left-wing movements when pro-Castro sympathizers saw their popular support undermined by the wave of arrests of opponents in Cuba in 2003.
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