This isn’t getting much attention at all in the English media, but the Yemeni government seems to be in the middle of a serious smackdown on the Yemeni press. I was first alerted to this earlier today after watching a brief news report on Al-Jazeera, but even that outlet doesn’t have anything on it either on the English or the Arabic version of its website. (A note for those who depend on Al-Jazeera’s English site: the two are almost entirely different; only the main Arab world-related stories make it into the English version, which is clearly designed for a global audience.)

Apparently, Yemen is closing newspapers and suing journalists in order to put them out of business. I did find this article from Middle East Online from a few weeks ago which is in English. This is what the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi wrote today, quoting a Yemeni official whose comments were probably more revealing than intended (Note that Al-Quds for whatever reason does not use quotation marks, but I’m pretty sure that much of this paragraph was a quotation rather than a paraphrase. Al-Quds is an independent Islamist newspaper that does not support the Yemeni government.):

…The Yemeni Information Minister Hussein al-Awadi confirmed the importance of the media and remarked that he who controls the advanced media outlets, it is he whou will rule the world, thus there will be a conflict between the reactionary media and another which is developed and advanced, emphasizing the need for the press to be true in its facts and that it put the news forward in a clear, easy language so that its message will make a connection by means true to its goals, warning at the same time that it is a press which is not clear and responsible for what it publishes that engenders crises and exacerbates them.

I’m sure al-Awadi didn’t mean that to sound so Leninist (but then again Lenin won, so maybe he did). The Al-Quds article also quoted sources from the opposition which accused the government of abusing the press in order to promote its “fraudulent election campaigns.” It also noted that the opposition is looking to found a satellite TV station to get around the recent press restrictions.

I searched through a Yemeni newspaper, Al-Ayyam, and found an article on this which also quoted al-Awadi, using many of the same words, but it must not have been able to locate any opposition sources by press time, since none were cited. It did, however, quote the Interior Minister as saying that there was a “crisis of trust” between the Yemeni people and the government’s security forces. A translation of the headline sums it up nicely: The Interior Minister Admits a Crisis of Trust between the Citizens and the Security Forces and Confirmed the Punishment of Those Causing It.