Climate of Impunity is Deadly for Journalists

Climate of Impunity is Deadly for Journalists

by Una Hardester
Internationalist
April 16, 2007

In the spring of 2002, I was in a sophomore journalism class. As part of an assignment, I had to follow the story of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who had been kidnapped in Pakistan. As the weeks of Pearl’s imprisonment dragged on, I learned more about him: he had a French wife named Marianne, he stretched deadlines, and he was known for being upbeat under even the worst circumstances. The Pearl case pulled me in. I prayed he would be freed unharmed. Then, his murder was confirmed with a ghastly execution video.

As I am writing this, the fate of another kidnapped journalist, Alan Johnston of the BBC, is not yet known. Johnston, who was stationed in the Gaza Strip, went missing over a month ago. A previously unknown Palestinian group calling itself the Al Tawhid Al Jihad brigade has claimed responsibility for Johnston’s kidnapping, and yesterday said he had been executed. There is no indication that this is true, and I dearly hope it isn’t.

War correspondents and investigative journalists have long understood that theirs is a dangerous line of work, especially in countries where press freedom is limited or mass violence is taking place. “The price of truth has gone up grievously,” Harold Evans of the International News Safety Institute recently wrote in an article for the Guardian. “We pay every week with the life of a reporter, a cameraman, a support worker.”

The number of journalists killed has risen steadily over the past five years. According to Reporters Without Borders, eighty-one journalists were killed in the course of their work in 2006, and twenty-three have been killed in the first three and half months of 2007. Eighty-five percent of journalist deaths worldwide in 2006 were murders, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

This grim trend is fed by political conditions that make killing journalists an easy and virtually risk-free business. Take Russia for example.

Russia is now the third most deadly country for journalists, just behind Afghanistan and Iraq. Since Vladimir Putin became president, thirteen Russian journalists have been murdered, nearly all in contract-style killings. None of these cases have been solved. Several other journalists have died under suspicious circumstances. A climate of impunity has been fostered by the Kremlin’s thinly veiled approval of journalist killings. After Anna Politkovskaya’s death, Putin issued a canned condemnation but tartly added, “This journalist was a sharp critic of the government in Russia, but the level of her influence on political life in Russia was very minor.” Politkovskaya’s killer was caught on camera. Six months on, he has yet to be identified, nevermind arrested and charged. This tale of murder and impunity is hardly unique to Russia.

Here are the stories of several other journalists who were killed in the past year:

On May 31st, 2006, Ali Jaafar, a twenty-four-year-old sports correspondent for the television channel Al-Iraqiya, was shot and killed by gunmen outside his brother’s auto shop in Baghdad. His murderers have not been identified. Jaafar’s friends and colleagues believed he was killed because he worked for Al-Iraqiya, which is associated with the current Iraqi government. Jaafar was one of thirty-two Iraqi journalists killed in 2006, up from twenty-two in 2005.

Sometime during the first week of September, 2006, Ogulsapar Muradova, a journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty died in prison in Turkmenistan. Muradova’s body showed evidence of beatings and a severe head wound, her children said. Turkmenistan remains one of the most closed countries on Earth, where press freedom is virtually nonexistent. The Turkmen government denies any involvement in Muradova’s death, and insists she died of natural causes.

On October 27th, 2006, Bradley Will, a documentary filmmaker for New York Indymedia was shot and killed in the Mexican city of Oaxaca while filming teachers’ strike that had turned violent. Will’s last moments were captured on a sixteen-minute film that Indymedia has made available online. Near the end, it’s almost too painful to watch. The men responsible for shooting Will have not been arrested, but are widely believed to be local officials from Oaxaca.

On Januaury 19th, 2007, Hrant Dink, a well-known Turkish-Armenian journalist was shot dead by an ultra-nationalist teenager in Istanbul. Dink became a target after he was tried two separate times for the crime of “denigrating Turkishness” under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. He was facing a third charge at the time of his death and had appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. Since Dink’s murder, increased pressure has been exerted on the Turkish government to repeal Article 301.

Killing journalists has long been taboo in even the worst regimes. Journalists' deaths are more public than those of ordinary dissidents, or even foreign humanitarian workers. The murder of a journalist is seen as a manifestation of rot within the body politic. Not every government believes in the principles of human rights, but every government cares about its reputation, and killing a journalist is one of the surest ways to gain a very negative reputation. For this reason, journalists have historically faced harassment and imprisonment far more often than death. Even today, there are many times more journalists imprisoned than killed each year, but the increasing number of deaths, and the erosion of the taboo surrounding journalist murders is alarming.

Non-state actors —rebel groups, terrorist organizations, gangs, crime syndicates— don’t have to worry about treaties and trade agreements, and thus have fewer reasons to spare journalists’ lives than states do. However, even non-state groups have historically refrained from killing journalists, if only because journalists represented the possibility of media exposure. This has changed in recent years, with the proliferation of the internet and the rise to user-driven media content. Now, kidnapped journalists are less valuable to their kidnappers, and less likely to survive.

Journalists’ deaths are regularly deaths foretold long in advance. The majority of journalists murdered worldwide receive threats beforehand. Local authorities often turn a blind eye. When the threats come from the state, this is especially true. Investigations into killings are few and far between, and prosecutions even fewer. Until this international climate of impunity is challenged, violent attacks on the press will continue to increase. As consumers of news that too often comes to us at a terrible price, we should demand justice, and lend whatever support we can to organizations like Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Una Hardester is a political analyst for Americans for Informed Democracy. She writes about current issues in human rights, European affairs, and international law. She can be contacted at una@aidemocracy.org