By Stephanie Horton
SH: Can you give us a historical overview of the founding of The Analyst?
SEAKOR: The Analyst newspaper, a subsidiary news entity of the Liberia Analyst Corporation, was established in June 1997. It was established as a result of the desire of two Liberian media professionals, B. Ignatius George and myself, to provide in-depth, analytical reports to the reading public that were visibly frustrated by superficial reportage. Following months of preparatory works that included registration with the Press Union of Liberia and obtaining of operational permits from the Ministry of Information, Culture Affairs and Tourism, The Analyst finally appeared on the newsstand on August 13, 1998.
SH: What were the major challenges in starting the paper?
SEAKOR. The major challenge was funding. We had a big dream to start a newspaper that would break from tradition and help the government see and understand the impact of its policy on the citizens as well as provide an opportunity for the views of the citizenry to be heard. But unfortunately we had very little funds and external assistance was virtually impossible to get. The country was in a transition and things were difficult even for the business sector.
SH: What are your current day to day challenges and impediments to pursuing news stories?
SEAKOR: The country still remains virtually impassable both for security reasons and bad roads; news gathering is certainly difficult under these conditions. More than that, it still remains a tug-of war to gather information from public officials. There is no law in Liberia at the moment that will force public officials to release information.
SH: Considering that most Liberians neither read nor write, do you employ any strategies to reach the non-literate public with important news stories?
SEAKOR; At the moment no such mechanism is in place. What we do to help those with poor reading habits is to append our stories with exhaustive backgrounds. We include a lot of photos in our publications; we believe this may help non-literate members of the public to have a gist of what is happening elsewhere in the society.
SH: There seems to be a lack of news coverage about certain inflammatory subjects. As a specific example, pornographic videos and magazines are said to be everywhere in Liberia these days, and these are sold or rented to children. Set against the sexual degradation of women and children we have witnessed and that has become entrenched, why isn't The Analyst covering this and other such stories?
SEAKOR: Yes, pornographic materials are almost ubiquitous in Liberia, but that has not lessened public objection to using them in serious periodicals such as The Analyst. We are a serious news house and we would prefer engaging the public in serious matters bordering on their future, rather than engaging in trivialities which pornography is. Our motto, "For those who strive for a better Liberia," says it all.
SH: Can you walk us through the physical and emotional horrors of your experience of being harassed, hounded, arrested and held at police headquarters by the Taylor regime? How were you treated? Were you beaten and tortured? What were the conditions like for prisoners?
SEAKOR: Honestly we were never held for more than few hours all through our struggle for press freedom under the Taylor regime. Our only real contact with the arbitrariness and disregard for human rights and civil liberty that characterized the Taylor administration was the detention and torture of our Editor-in-Chief, Hassan Bility. The story of Hassan is well told and so we will not bother to go into it. But the detention thing aside, we went through real horrors and all through our more than four times of summary detention at the police headquarters, we saw detainees (crammed together in small smelly cells) who were in desperate situations, some begging for mercy even though they were yet to be told their crimes. For us we were sitting ducks waiting to be swooped upon any minute for unexplained reasons. All the four times we were "invited by the chief" (euphemism for the police director), we were bundled up and heaved into the back of a waiting police vans and whisked off to the police headquarters. We were never told our crimes. But the constant security surveillance on our activities was more horrifying: disappearance of news scripts, plainclothes people moving into the office at odd hours of the night and pretending to be seeking information, tailing staff to their residences, and the seizure of our equipment on the allegation that subversive materials were being sent to unknown enemies of the government abroad. All that was too much for a young newspaper that barely had funds for printing and salary payment.
SH: What are your personal views on press freedom, censorship, and the role of the press in embattled African societies such as ours?
SEAKOR: Press censorship is antithetical to press freedom. The press should be left alone to inform the people because where the citizens are prevented from knowing, illiteracy abounds and tyranny reigns. There are libel laws on the books that take care of the breach of that freedom. There is absolutely no need for police action; the court will do the job. The press, through its vanguard organizations, must ensure that censorship is a thing of the past in millennium Africa.
SH: How would you characterize The Analyst? As conservative, a mainstream paper, alternative news, independent media, or advocacy journalism? Why?
SEAKOR: A little bit of all because our strategy is to treat society holistically in the absence of specialized media houses. We are conservative where the law is concerned, offer alternative views in controversies, maintain independent stance where necessary, and advocate where the welfare of the disadvantaged is concerned. But we prefer to project the image of a disinterested, independent news media dedicated to making Liberia a better place to live, grow, and work happily and unmolested.
SH: Reporters Without Borders (RSF, Reporters Sans Frontieres) reports that more journalists were killed in 2003 alone than in the previous decade, and almost two thousand journalists were persecuted and jailed. The United States of America's armed forces, according to RSF, is culpable for the deaths of five journalists in Iraq. Journalism is without question a dangerous profession. Your own experiences with the Taylor regime confirm this. What ideals, motivations or principles drive you to pursue this profession?
SEAKOR: Why, the desire to see Liberia move away from the culture of impunity and the abuse of human rights and civil liberty to a democratic nation built on the principles of the rule of law. Liberia was conceived in the slave mentality where the welfare of the governor reigned paramount. The press must help to change this way of thinking by bridging the world through its reportage.
SH: What do you feel is the responsibility of journalists to the country in the midst of corruption, abuse of power, myriad social problems and the denial of basic social services to the people?
SEAKOR: Journalists have no choice but to present both sides of any issue to the public, to expose wrongdoings, and suggest the way forward through editorial comments. Those who reject advocacy journalism will have to endeavor this a little bit.
SH: What are your thoughts on the representation of Liberia as reported in the international press?
SEAKOR: It is mostly fair. But oftentimes there are comments based mainly on prejudice and the poor understanding of the culture of the Liberian people.
SH: There is no in-depth analysis in The Analyst of American foreign policy with relation to events in Liberia. Why this hands-off policy? Is this conservatism, lack of access, or fear?
SEAKOR: Mainly we have been busy finding a way out of the Liberian political quagmire. This gives no room for an honest appraisal of the foreign policy of the United States of America. Having said that, we believe there has been no US foreign policy on Liberia since the Cold War. The US has simply been keeping Liberia at arm's length, periodically coming in for a rescue. The US welcomed the Taylor presidency in Liberia even though he was a wanted criminal in the states. We saw that when Taylor was flouting any and everything that has to do with international law, all America did was adopt a laissez faire approach by allowing individuals opposed to Taylor to take up arms, notwithstanding their own rotten democratic credentials. Today, no one in Washington is prepared to take responsibility of the insurgency that devastated the land. Can you call this foreign policy?
SH: How do you assess the effectiveness of Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations Security Council, Jacques Klein?
SEAKOR: Klein would make a good representative of the secretary general if he stops and listens to Liberians. He doesn't. He targeted forty thousand ex-combatants for the DDRR programme, now he has "disarmed" seventy-five thousand with no end in sight and with little or no money to commence the rehabilitation and resettlement aspect. He rejected calls for collaboration with faction leaders and the commanders on the field. He calls the ex-combatants "ragtag criminals" and believes that by offering them three hundred USD each, they will come running to the cantonment sites with all they have. From all indications that is not working as expected and all he thinks about doing now is to end the process without completing the disarmament.
August 2004
