Journalists in Peril

Nancy J. Woodhull, Robert W. Snyder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351510547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Threats to journalists carry many different lessons, but one is constant: People who would intimidate or kill journalists are usually terrified that someone might find out. Journalists who want to protect one another need do nothing more than what should come naturally to them: report on threats to journalists--big threats and small threats, whether they are directed against the international luminaries of the profession or small timers. Non-journalists can also play a big part in the fight to protect journalists. Next to tough and timely reporting that establishes the facts of a case, nothing protects a journalist so much as public outrage and public support. Ordinary citizens can play an enormous role by pressuring thugs and tyrants who would like to stifle the freedom of the press. The freedom of journalists is consequently the bedrock of freedom for all people. Chapters and contributors to 'Journalists in Peril' include: "The Clash of Arms in Exotic Locales" by Peter Arnett; "Press Freedom--Balkan Style" by Kati Marton; "Grim Prospects for Hong Kong" by John Schidlovsky; "Russian Reporters--Between a Hammer and an Anvil" by losif M. Dzyaloshinsky; "Defiant Publishing in Nigeria" by Dapo Olorunyomi; "Turkish Journalists on Trial" by Ahmet Emin; "In America, Justice for Some" by Ana Arana; and "Blood and Fear in Italy" by Candida Curzi. The tragic accounts detailed in 'Journalists in Peril' are poignantly written and are important reading for all concerned with democracy in the world, especially political scientists, government officials, and those involved in the various communications professions.

Part I
Overview

1
The Meaning of the Murders

William A. Orme Jr.

Djilali Arabidou was one of Algeria’s best-known photojournalists. The weekly newsmagazine where he worked, Algeria-Actualité, was known to be editorially sympathetic to the military government and its war against Islamist insurgents. In March 1996, in a quiet residential district outside Algiers, Arabidou was intercepted and shot dead by rebel gunmen.

Later that month, villagers in Chechnya discovered the blindfolded body of Nadezdha Chaikova, a correspondent for the Moscow weekly Obshchaya Gazeta, who was known for her hard-hitting coverage of Russian military atrocities. Chaikova had been beaten and executed with a bullet to the back of her head.

In May, Parag Kumar Das, the editor in chief of the largest newspaper in the Indian state of Assam, was picking his son up from school when gunmen opened fire from a passing car. His death was widely seen as a reprisal for his editorial advocacy of Assamese secession and denunciations of human rights violations by state security agencies.

Investigative reporter Veronica Guerin was driving near her North Dublin home in late June. When she stopped at a traffic light a motorcycle pulled alongside her, and a gunman on the back took aim. She was shot five times and died as the motorcycle sped off. An outraged Irish public immediately assumed that her killing had been ordered by one of the powerful local crime bosses whose rackets she had exposed.

In July, Kutlu Adali, a Turkish Cypriot newspaper columnist who had urged peaceful accommodation with the island’s ethnic Greek majority, was shot dead near his home by the self-styled Turkish Revenge Brigade. The shadowy far-right terror faction had earlier vowed to “punish” all those it deemed unfaithful to the Turkish nationalist cause.

Arabidou, Chaikova, Das, Guerin and Adali worked in vastly different environments, with varied professional responsibilities and contrasting reporting styles. But they are now all linked as five of the 26 journalists slain in political assassinations in the first eight months of 1996.

These killings were tragically typical of the violent deaths the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has documented over the years. The murdered journalists were local reporters, not foreign correspondents. They were not casualties of the battlefield or victims of fatal accidents or random acts of violence. They were all killed in cold blood by assassins who knew exactly who they were, and whose unambiguous intent was to silence a critical voice or put a stop to independent reporting.

There is another common factor in these and the other murders confirmed by CPJ in 1996: No suspects have been officially identified, much less arrested and prosecuted.

The seeming inability or unwillingness of national authorities to find and punish those responsible for these deaths is not in itself an indictment of a political system. Contract murders and political assassinations are notoriously hard to solve even in peaceful, developed democracies. Despite a recently revived investigative effort, the U.S. Justice Department has still failed to arrest any serious suspects in five different but possibly related murders of Vietnamese-American journalists stretching back more than a decade.

Veronica Guerin’s murder, though without precedent in the British Isles, is another case in point. In response to the intense public outrage at her killing and the resulting political pressure on the government to do something about it, the Republic of Ireland’s national police force embarked on one of the biggest investigative efforts in its history. In addition, Guerin’s employer at the Sunday Independent, publishing baron Tony O’Reilly, has offered to pay 100,000 Irish pounds—about $160,000—for information leading to arrest and prosecution of the killers. No arrests had been made as of when the journal went to press, however. And Ireland’s strict libel laws and evidentiary procedures prevented the police (and therefore journalists as well) from naming as a suspect the crime boss believed by investigators to have ordered the murder.

But in most of the murders of journalists that CPJ has closely examined, there was never ever any serious, sustained attempt to identify and punish those responsible, and little political pressure on authorities to do so. Even when local or national authorities clearly had no prior knowledge of or involvement in the crime, it is sometimes in their real or presumed political interest to let local journalists operate in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.

The perception that officials are less than vigorous in their investigations into crimes against journalists only fuels suspicion, fairly or not, of links between the murderers and local political interests or state security forces. Cynicism about such cases can transmute quickly into real fear. Whatever their intentions, the failure of authorities to vigorously and visibly respond to these politically motivated murders intimidates reporters and inhibits the development of a free press.

In Algeria and Chechnya, where thousands of civilians have died, the failure to mount a serious investigation into the death of a reporter is an arguably understandable consequence of the chaos of civil war. Yet the failure of Algerian authorities to arrest and charge even a single individual in connection with any of the 59 murders of journalists there for three years calls into question their interest in combating this reign of terror. The Algerian government has benefited, both internationally and domestically, from the justified opprobrium directed at the journalists’ assassins, as well as from the understandable tendency of many previously democratically minded Algerian journalists to accept the military regime as the lesser of two evils. (Some experienced observers are convinced that several of these apparent Islamist murders have been carried out for propaganda reasons by state security forces. These suspicions have not been allayed by the government’s inability or unwillingness to mount investigations.)

And in Chechnya, the Chaikova homicide is just one of five known deliberate murders of reporters covering the war there, out of a total of 10 documented deaths of reporters through August of 1996. (There are undoubtedly more: At least four other reporters are missing and feared dead). Making the trend even more disturbing, two of those five murders—both unpunished to date—were by uniformed Russian soldiers at official army checkpoints. Given the Yeltsin government’s inability or unwillingness to take a hard investigative look into the murders of eight journalists elsewhere in the Russian Federation over the past two years, Russian reporters say they now operate under the assumption that there is official tolerance for and perhaps even active complicity in such crimes.

Every year the Committee to Protect Journalists releases its carefully documented list of journalists who have been killed “in the line of duty,” to use the shopworn police department phrase. This includes not just murder victims, but also journalists who have died while dispatched on dangerous assignments. Reporters always ask if things are getting better or worse. The figures alone do not tell the story. There were no deaths from combat cross fire in the first half of 1996, for example, a stark departure from the previous five years. But that is a result of the cease-fire in Bosnia, not an indication of diminishing dangers for journalists on post-Cold War battlefields. Six journalists were murdered in Russia since January, a shocking statistic for a country that hadn’t registered a single such assassination five years ago. But would anyone seriously contend that Russian journalism is more controlled or intimidated today than it was under the Soviet Union? Paradoxically, the deaths of journalists are as much a testament to the emergence of a free press as they are a gauge of the limits of press freedom.

Between 1986 and 1995 CPJ documented 453 violent deaths of journalists killed on assignment (in an accident or in a cross fire) or in apparent reprisal for their reporting or media affiliation. The great majority of these cases fell into the latter category. As in 26 of the 27 deaths documented through August 1996, these were victims of assassination.

Covering combat is inherently dangerous, but even in Bosnia, Somalia and Chechnya the deaths of journalists are often the result of seemingly deliberate executions of clearly identified reporters by armed combatants. These incidents are often impossible to prove definitively—was the sniper aiming at that cameraman, or just out to kill anything that moved?—but reporters covering these conflicts feel less and less protected by their theoretically recognized status as noncombatants. Rebel gunmen at combat-zone checkpoints are rarely versed in the fine points of the Geneva Convention.

Increasingly, insurgent factions in multilateral conflicts appear to see Western journalists as integral—and uniquely visible and vulnerable—components of the international military and political forces arrayed against them. For a Bosnian Serb sniper or a Somali machine gunner working the back of a warlord’s “technical,” the foreign press was at least as legitimate a target as their local ethnic or political enemies.

An examination of the past decade’s figures reveals several overlapping trends, some extremely disturbing and others quite encouraging.

When CPJ was founded in 1981, the most dangerous area of the world for working journalists was Latin America. We now know of nearly 100 documented cases of state-sponsored killings of journalists in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Argentina alone. Army-linked death squads also murdered scores of reporters in El Salvador and Guatemala in that period. With few exceptions, the victims in Central America and the Southern Cone were local, and the motivation explicitly ideological.

Now state-sponsored violence against Latin American journalists is extremely rare, and its decline corresponds directly to the replacement of military regimes by increasingly stable electoral democracies with lively, independent news media. (The real physical danger to journalists in Latin America today comes from criminal forces, who, though often in league with state security agencies, do not represent the same kind of institutional threat to journalists and press freedom in the region.)

Globally, however, the homicide rate among journalists should not be misread as a kind of inverse press freedom index. In the most repressive societies, murders of journalists are extremely rare because journalists themselves are extremely rare. In the past decade CPJ has not had a single confirmed killing of a working reporter in North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Libya, Syria or Myanmar. This is hardly an indicator of press freedom.

Conversely, in countries with a large and aggressive press corps, there are abundant motives and opportunities for violent attacks on journalists. Examples include India, where 16 reporters were killed in the past 10 years, and Brazil, where 10 were murdered. And there are many countries, such as China and Ethiopia, where journalists are rarely killed but are routinely imprisoned for long terms under gruelingly harsh conditions.

Societies that have only recently emerged from autocratic or totalitarian rule—places as culturally and politically diverse as Russia, Cambodia and Peru—are the real press freedom battlegrounds today. These are political systems that let independent publications circulate freely, but that rarely investigate—much less prosecute—violent attacks against reporters and editors and publishers.

Even when journalists are targeted by the government’s declared enemies—armed separatists, nationalist zealots, drug traffickers—the chilling effect of the attacks may be welcomed by those with the power to combat them. A frightened reporter is rarely an aggressive reporter.

A detailed look at the murder of journalists over the past decade also sheds disturbing light on the varying pathologies of countries that have succumbed to criminal violence or civil war. Algeria, the most extreme case with 59 journalists killed from May 1993 to August 1996, is unique in scale but not in kind. Reporters and editors of the “secular” press are increasingly targeted for harassment and worse by fundamentalist insurgents throughout the Islamic world.

The former Yugoslavia, in aggregate, had the second largest number of press casualties in the past 10 years with 45 documented deaths. That grim statistic would surprise no observer of the Balkans carnage. Again, however, most of these deaths were not accidental. And most of the victims were local journalists, not foreign correspondents. Most appear to have been personally targeted, both because of their ethnicity and their profession. As in Rwanda, local journalists were singled out in the early stages of genocidal attacks because of their local prominence and influence.

Colombia, with 42 confirmed cases, had the third largest number of documented deaths over the past decade. Most were apparent drug-cartel contract murders. This is certainly an underestimate. Many reported murders of provincial print and radio reporters in Colombia simply could not be confirmed, an endemic problem for a country with the world’s highest reported homicide rate. Most of these murders remain not only unsolved but uninvestigated. So inured is the Colombian press to these killings—and so intimidated are many local publishers—that these cases rarely make the front page, if they are indeed covered at all.

The Colombian plague has spread to its immediate neighbors: Journalists from Central America to the southern Andes say coverage of narcotics corruption is now a riskier enterprise than reporting about leftist insurgencies or human rights abuses. That is saying a great deal in countries where the penalty for aggressive political reporting in the past has often been assassination.

Criminal gangs are also targeting journalists in Russia, Central Europe, Central Asia and Indochina. The only murder in memory of a New York City journalist—that of Manuel de Dios Unanue—was a contract hit ordered by the Cali cocaine cartel. As of press time, we don’t know if Veronica Guerin’s murder had international implications. But we do know that her presumed murderers are the local partners of transnational drug barons who consider the murder of a reporter an appropriate response to unwelcome publicity. In the coming decade, threats to journalism from organized crime are likely to become an even more deadly problem than political persecution.

In Asia, where leaders of both the left and right proclaim that press freedom is inimical to indigenous “values,” the dangers faced by journalists are typically imprisonment or legal harassment. The murders of journalists, in proportion to the size of the working press, are relatively rare. This may be more of an indication of the caution exercised by the Asian press than of the restraint or broad-mindedness of the region’s rulers.

In both the Philippines and Tajikistan, CPJ has confirmed 29 violent job-related deaths of journalists over the past decade, almost all of them apparently deliberate, politically motivated murders. Politically and culturally, however, these two countries are atypical of Asia.

The Philippines, marked by a legacy of Spanish colonialism and U.S. military rule, has a history and social structure arguably more akin to Latin America than to Asia. The pattern of unprosecuted murders of provincial Filipino journalists who uncovered corruption and human rights abuses by local landowners and security chiefs is disturbingly similar to death-squad killings of reporters in Central and South America. (Though common in the Marcos era, these homicides continued under the Aquino and Ramos governments—in part, it seems, because local publications were emboldened by the restoration of democracy to touch subjects they would have avoided in the past. Another common denominator with Latin America is a continuing counterinsurgency campaign against Marxist rebels, which has also claimed casualties in the press corps.)

The case of Tajikistan is more distinctive still. Though geographically Asian, this neighbor of China and Afghanistan has never been part of the continent politically. Nominally independent since 1991, Tajikistan remains firmly within Moscow’s shrinking sphere of influence. A CPJ investigation demonstrated compelling circumstantial evidence of government complicity in most of the 29 murders of Tajik journalists that we documented since May 1992. Though the government in Dushanbe is wholly dependent on Russian economic and military support, Moscow is rarely taken to task for sustaining a regime that has ruthlessly eliminated all traces of an independent press. The Tajik government resolutely refuses to undertake even cursory investigations into these killings.

The pattern has been consistent over the past 10 years: Somewhere in the world virtually every week a reporter or editor or broadcaster dies a violent death. Still, by any objective global standard, this does not make journalism a particularly hazardous profession. New York taxi drivers have been murdered at nearly the same rate in recent years. Many other professions are statistically more dangerous. Most journalists face no more danger in their working lives than any other ordinary urbanite.

Cynics eyeing the news business from afar could be forgiven for suspecting that accounts of these deaths would not be carried if the victims were, say, firefighters, and not the colleagues (and perhaps the friends) of the journalists writing about them. In most cases they would be right—but not because of collegial favoritism.

A reporter’s murder is in itself an important news story if, as is usually the case, the intent of the murderers was to suppress criticism or information. Whether the report comes from a news organization or a press freedom group, it is essential that we as journalists avoid the implication that we believe that the murder of a reporter is inherently more tragic or significant than the killing of any other innocent victim.

When a journalist is slain, it is the political context of the crime that counts. Reports of these deaths do not always make that context clear, but the salient facts are that homicide is the leading cause of job-related deaths for journalists and that such killings take place disproportionately in countries or communities where an independent press is just beginning to take root.

Tragic as they are, the murders of journalists around the world are the by-product of the growth of an independent press around the world. For most of the world, press freedom is an achievement of the late 20th century, the result (and often the catalyst) of democratic revolutions that ended both Soviet communism and military rule by the anti-communist right. The sudden emergence of aggressive, independent news media in such societies is almost invariably resented and combated by authoritarian forces who are losing power and also by new, ostensibly democratic leaders who owe their positions in good part to the power of the press.

These newly won freedoms are fie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Overview
• Part II: Reporting from War Zones
• Part III: Government Repression
• Part IV: Civil Unrest
• Part V: Organized Crime
• Part VI: Portfolio
• Part VII: Solutions
• Part VIII: Interviews
• Part IX: Review Essay
• For Further Reading
• Index