Uganda has deported journalists working for a Canadian public broadcaster who were in the country to cover the 2021 General Election. The journalists consist of Margaret Evans, Lily Martin and Jean-Francois Bisson, a videographer. Evans said on her social media platform that they were arrested last week by Ugandan immigration officers and detained for 10 hours before being deported. Evans tweeted, “#Ugandan gov’t avoiding outside scrutiny of Jan elections already. We were deported Friday even though we had official media credentials.” Mr Ofwono Opondo, the executive director of Uganda Media Centre, had tweeted in response to Ms Evans’ tweet that: “Do we really need you to scrutinise our electoral process to qualify as credible? Uganda reserves the right to admit foreign persons, including journalists. Good, stay where you are.”
I hate to see the imprisonment of journalists in countries that have elections, because an election implies a democratic system, but imprisoning journalists is very undemocratic. I can imagine how much outrage there would be if journalists were being outright detained here in the United States. I think there would be civil unrest. In dictatorships, this kind of story wouldn’t seem unnatural, but Uganda having an election and silencing journalists isn’t right. It also shows how open they can be about it, since one of the journalists that got detained tweeted about what happened to them, and the executive director of Uganda Media Centre responded by basically saying that they got what they deserved. But since Uganda controls it’s media and imprisons journalists for trying to cover an election, it doesn’t seem very democratic at all.
In class, we were recently discussing Core Assumptions of Realism and the theory of Realism. More specifically, we have talked about long term elements of power and short term elements of power. One of the long term elements of power, but typically less stable, is political culture. I think political culture could be linked to this article in terms of the journalists reporting on the election and then being imprisoned, making them political prisoners. The political culture of a country is typically determined by the current leader and past ones. The current political culture of Uganda entitles leaders to think that they can violate a certain unspoken democratic rule to not violate the free press by imprisoning journalists.