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	Secrecy law provokes media outcry in South Africa by Justice Malala Guardian News & agencies   In South Africa the ruling ANC has been accused of attempting to roll back the country"s cherished democratic freedoms by passing a new media secrecy law.   On the eve of the bills being voted on in Parliament, Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu labelled it as insulting, and the office of the former President Nelson Mandela called it a threat to democracy. Ginny Stein reports.   The African National Congress showed no sign of backing down in its attempts to muscle the bill through parliament. But when it came to making a decision not all of its members were so convinced. Many ANC MPs joined forces with a united opposition to reject it. But not in sufficient numbers to prevent the bill being passed.   The bill allows for 25 year jail terms for those found in possession of classified government documents. It"s the question of what is a state secret and who has the power to declare a document classified that has outraged many.   The fact that the bill has come before parliament at the same time as allegations of serious corruption amongst ANC leaders have surfaced once more has escaped no one.   Prominent apartheid era journalist Allister Sparks , said "This law will do more damage than anything else that has happened since 1994. The whole world knows that press control is the first step towards authoritarianism. They"ve seen it elsewhere in Africa. They see it around the world".   President Jacob Zuma"s spokesman Mac Maharaj has recently filed a lawsuit against one of the country"s leading investigative newspapers preventing it from publishing information linking him to a 1991 controversial arms deal. The media broke the arms story using secret documents, but under the new law journalists and their editors could face stiff jail sentences for similar disclosures.   A law that shames South Africa, by Justice Malala.   On Tuesday morning my friend Stefaans Brummer, arguably South Africa"s best investigative journalist, sent me a text message. "When I"m incarcerated at Parkview police station, please bring me coffee, a muffin and a hacksaw blade," he wrote. I don"t do coffee or muffins, I replied jokingly, but I might deliver the hacksaw.   It was easy banter between friends, but there was a chill in our bones. Last Friday Brummer"s newspaper, the Mail & Guardian, had been prevented by President Jacob Zuma"s spokesman from publishing a story. It had alleged that the spin doctor had lied to investigators about his role in the taking of bribes in South Africa"s notoriously crooked arms acquisition in the late 1990s.   Brummer and his colleagues were threatened with 15 years in jail. In response, they blacked out the front page of the paper and the story. This proud anti-apartheid paper looked last Friday exactly as it would have in 1989, at the height of apartheid censorship and harassment of journalists.   It is not the first time that journalists have been harassed and threatened with jail. Last year an investigative journalist who exposed multimillion-pound police corruption was arrested, driven through the night to a remote location and questioned at 2am.   Over and above the petty harassment, the ANC has vigorously pursued attempts to set up a government-led media appeals tribunal to regulate the print media. Since the ascent of Zuma and his coterie to power in 2009, we journalists have been living with our hearts in our mouths, afraid that the party of Nelson Mandela would veer away from the open society it had fought for and join the likes of Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea – countries whose secrecy laws allow them to jail journalists at will.   For years we had pointed to the north, saying such draconian laws would never arrive here. Not in the land of the ANC, Africa"s oldest liberation movement, steeped in the values of openness and dedicated to the fight against corruption.   The new South Africa is not comparable to the evils of old. But on Tuesday, when parliament passed a state secrecy law, we were shamed. The party of Mandela ignored the man himself and muzzled whistleblowers, journalists and its own citizens. It defied its trade union allies and civil society, and used its majority to ram through the protection of information bill, which gives the state power to classify information and criminalise whistleblowers, journalists and anyone who comes into possession of such classified information. Journalists such as Brummer and their sources face up to 25 years imprisonment.   The bill also seals off state security agencies from any kind of scrutiny or accountability to the public – meaning that any investigation that, for example, mirrors the work done by American journalists to expose Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal would be criminal. Crucially, the bill has no public interest defence.   After the legislation was passed, members of the South Africa National Editors Forum – all dressed in black – left parliament.   Power and incumbency have not been easy for the ANC. The party, which turns 100 in January 2012, is riven with divisions. Corruption allegations surface every day, with the World Economic Forum pointing out that corruption is among the top four concerns of potential foreign investors.   This has led to paranoia and fear in the party. State security agencies have been used to target political opponents, with the latest scandal leading to the head of domestic intelligence being fired for spying "for the wrong side" (opponents of Zuma) two months ago. In such a climate, the media and civil society have become the enemy.   But for those of us who have watched the passage of this bill with a growing horror, the battle is not over. The bill goes before the second house of parliament and, if passed, to the president for signature. We are hoping that Zuma will throw it back. Should he sign it into law then a constitutional challenge awaits.   For now, though, we feel betrayed by a party that once made media freedom one of its pillars. The ANC has blinded itself. For us, it is time to prepare for a new, long and hard struggle.   * Below is a link to NGO Pulse, delivered by the Southern African NGO Network (SANGONeT), an NGO in Africa providing civil society with a range of ICT services. Visit the related web page
	The days of innocence in Japan are well and truly over by Rick Tanaka Japan   Mar 2012   Rick Tanaka, a journalist and broadcaster speaks from Tokyo to Radio National.   Rick Tanaka: Some people think the media should talk more about the devastation of the tsunami and earthquakes rather than the Fukushima nuclear accident, but I don"t like getting sucked into this kind of dichotomy, because, to me, it"s trying to compare the incomparable. While others want to portray the nuclear accident in the past tense, it is very much current and ongoing. People outside Japan may think the problem has somehow been resolved, or at least contained, but the opposite is the case.   Sure, we heard the Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda on December 16 last year that the reactors were in the state of "cool shutdown". But that statement is as reassuring as George W Bush"s "Mission Accomplished" proclamation aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. We all knew then the Iraqi war was far from over. In the same way we knew at the time that the reactors at the Fukushima plant were far from stabilised. To begin with, we still don"t know where the molten mess of nuclear fuels are, let alone what state or shape they are in. How can we, if we don"t know where they are?   Despite various government enquiries, we still don"t know exactly what happened on March 11 last year. The official explanation is that the tsunami flooded the emergency diesel generators, failing to keep the reactors cool. But accounts from some of the workers fleeing from the plant suggest the damage had already been caused by the preceding earthquake.   Despite these eye-witness accounts, the authorities have stuck to their story. If they admit an earthquake caused the accident, they will have to raise the quake resistance level of all other reactors. The "stress test" the government is carrying out on the other reactors is based on this assumption that the reactors at Fukushima withstood the quake but not the tsunami. In other words, until we know exactly what happened at Fukushima, a similar accident could occur anywhere in Japan.   Then there is a problem of the radioactive substances released from these reactors. The radioactive plume has resulted in a lot of contaminated areas well beyond the government-designated evacuation zones and, in some places, contamination is much higher than parts of Fukushima prefecture.   For example, in the city of Kashiwa, a commuter suburb about 30 kilometres east of Tokyo, incredible amounts of radiation contamination are still being discovered. Last October, a gutter in a residential area was found contaminated with cesium emitting 57.5 micro sievert/hour, nearly 15 times the "tolerable" level of 3.8 micro sievert/hour.   This hotspot was discovered by local residents and, once properly measured by a government agency, the dirt was found to contain more than 450,000 Bq per kilogram of cesium. It was only last week a decontamination took place. They dragged up the offensive soil, put it into bags within a concrete box, and then buried this back into the ground, hoping that residents would stay away for a long time. This is the standard "decontamination" procedure.   This kind of urban concentration of cesium and other radioactive substances occurs in all sorts of places. Because they can be carried through water, on a wet day like yesterday, the reading on my Geiger counter goes up. In the flat I"m lodging in, just east of Tokyo, the reading on a fine day is about 0.04 micro sievert/hour. But it jumped to 0.09 when the rain came down. Around houses, the bottom of downpipes is said to be the hottest spot, while in the city, the stormwater collection points and rivers, where the urban run-offs end up, are the suspects. Naturally, sludge from stormwater treatment accumulates so much radioactive stuff. But where does this radioactive sludge go?   Apparently 35% of sludge is used in creating construction cement. The rest of the sludge is dried and goes into landfill or is used as fertiliser. The government decided ash containing less than 8,000 Bq per kilogram is safe to go into landfill, but what should local councils do with the stuff above that level? At the moment, they are just stored on site, waiting for a decision. In Kanagawa prefecture, to the west of Tokyo, more than 20,000 tonnes of sludge ash has piled up.   Other urban hot spots are waste incinerators. It is a common practice in Japan to burn garbage, minimising the amount of landfill. Leaves, garden clippings and other green waste all get burnt. The radiation from green waste becomes more concentrated in the incinerators and the ash becomes too hot to be buried. Some ash from Kashiwa contained 70,000 Bq per kilogram of cesium, about nine times above what can be "safely" buried.   While the urban radioactive concentration is increasing, the affected area is also getting wider and the radioactive substances are creeping everywhere. Food items, from baby formula, mothers milk, seafood, beef, rice, tea leaves, leafy vegies, mushroom, fruits and many other items are found contaminated. Over and over we are assured that only "safe" food items are being distributed, but it is hard to be convinced when the testing is done by industries with vested interests, such as the milk industry, or where small insignificant sample tests are made, as was the case with rice. Facilities to measure radiation levels in food are significantly lacking, and you cannot help believing that it shows the lack of willingness, from a country that is supposed to be so technologically advanced.   This is why bestseller lists contain books detailing how to minimise your radiation intake by choosing the right foods to eat and how to cook them properly. The government and orthodox academics only talk about the external exposure to radiation, but the effects of lower internal radiation exposure is said to be as bad, if not worse.   At the supermarket, you would notice shoppers seem to be more careful when reading food labels. They seem to avoid products from the northern prefectures. But the food from the western part of the country may not remain so safe. Beef, for example, from all but two prefectures was found to be contaminated last year because they were fed with rice straw from the contaminated areas. Some farmed fish from Kyushu down south were found last week to be radioactive because their food also came from the contaminated zones. Noodles made in Okinawa, farthest south from the troubled reactors, were found to be contaminated last month, because the ash used in the production originated from firewood in the Fukushima area. In this very complicated way, radioactive substances released from the Fukushima reactors are still spreading far and wide. The shoppers can no longer detect safe food from just reading the labels alone.   The nuclear crisis is suffocating people and the days of innocence in Japan are well and truly over. Every time it rains or snows, you have to think twice about getting wet, or if you do get wet, you need to take a shower to decontaminate yourself. Some people have been completely overwhelmed and find it too difficult to cope, living as if there are no harmful substances out there. For these people, it"s a convenient line, because radiation is invisible and tasteless. You can"t smell it, touch it or hear it. But that"s why Fukushima is not over and should be heard about all the time, because the offensive radioactive materials won"t be going away for a long, long time.
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