In the crosshairs

Have you heard of Ivan Saforov? This reporter for Moscow's Kommersant newspaper fell out of his fifth-floor apartment window while working on a story about Russia's secret arms sales to Syria; the authorities gave him a nice warning to get rid of that business. Six months earlier, his colleague from "Nezavisimaje Gazeta" Ana Politkovska, whom you have probably heard about, was killed, as both the international and domestic press wrote about her. Unlike her, Saforov was not known outside his homeland, so there is no international pressure to shed light on his death (it is being treated as a forced suicide). It is almost certain, however, that in neither case will anyone be held accountable. Killing a journalist, namely, in a large part of the world is not a sin, and if it is not a world-famous person, there is usually no investigation, according to a recently published study by the International Institute for Media Safety ("Killing the Messenger", INSI, Brussels 2007). According to that study, exactly one thousand journalists have been killed in the line of duty during the last ten years, approximately two per week, mostly intentionally and almost always with impunity.

International journalistic associations regularly issue annual reports on the number of journalists killed in the past twelve months, but the mentioned study, which deals with a comprehensive analysis of professional risk over a longer period of time, reveals some new and very worrying trends. First of all, the victims of journalism this time also include technical personnel in the media (translators, drivers, organizers...) who are usually not mentioned at the ceremonial academies on the occasion of the World Press Freedom Day. Then, a relatively small number of victims are war correspondents killed in combat zones. In two-thirds of cases, journalists are killed in peace, in front of the house or the newsroom, sometimes in the newsroom itself. Safarov and Politkovska are typical examples, but there are worse ones: Jean-Leopold Dominique, a Haitian radio commentator, was killed in the studio, in front of the microphone.

Both examples given at the beginning of this text are from Russia, but Russia (88 killed) is only the second most dangerous place for journalists in the world: the first is convincingly Iraq, with 138. Followed by Colombia, the Philippines, Iran, India and Algeria, and then the countries of the former Yugoslavia, Mexico and Pakistan. It is interesting that, apart from Iraq, only one area out of the top ten - ours, with 32 dead - has been at war in the past decade, while the rest are officially at peace. In about half of the cases (456), journalists were shot; the rest were stabbed, blown up, beaten to death, tortured, run over by a car, disappeared without a trace or beheaded (in four cases). Ninety percent of the victims are local journalists, doing their own thing, while only one in ten is a foreign correspondent. The report gloomily states that this data "illustrates the well-worn saying that all news is local."

This is especially true for Iraq, where the death of a local journalist (as, after all, any Iraqi) is hardly recorded as news: the number of deaths among journalists since the beginning of the American invasion (110 in total, of which 84 were Iraqis) has greatly exceeded media victims from the Vietnam War, which lasted twenty years. An unspecified number were killed by the American occupation authorities, but the investigation is carried out only if it is a well-known journalist or a powerful media house. In one of the most famous incidents since the invasion, an American tank targeted the Reuters correspondent at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, killing two cameramen, a Spaniard and a Palestinian. The military investigated the case and concluded that the killing was "unintentional, though not inevitable"; no one answered. Only recently was it discovered that the ITN television crew (journalist Terry Lloyd, cameraman Fred Nerak and translator Hussein Osman) was killed in March 2003 by American soldiers, not Iraqi, as relatives were told. And again, no one was held accountable.

Probably the most harrowing part of the report warns that the killing of journalists is often a crime without punishment. Of the 657 cases in which journalists were killed intentionally, only four percent were processed in court and someone was held accountable for it, while in 573 the investigation was not even conducted. And even in the rare cases in which the murderers were convicted, it was only about the perpetrators, while the organizers and contractors remain beyond the reach of justice. Two well-known examples from Serbia - the murders of Slavko Ćuruvija and Milan Pantić - speak for themselves. There is no trace of either the perpetrators or the principals, and the public only recently learned that the case of Ćuruvija, before the eight-year anniversary of the murder, is still in the pre-investigation phase. From January 1, 2000 until today, no one in Russia, Colombia and the Philippines has been arrested for murdering journalists, although more than fifty have been executed in that period.

However, these grim statistics do not answer the question of why the position of the journalistic profession has deteriorated so much in the last ten years, despite the general swearing of freedom of speech and the growing financial and political power of large media houses. The report cites several reasons: one is that the nature of armed conflict has changed. Conventional conflicts, in which there is a clear chain of command on all sides, have given way to "low-intensity conflicts" in which some or none of the parties are internationally recognized and do not follow any rules. In addition, today there are many more countries that are only in name, while in reality there are no functional institutions, and the laws are ignored (Somalia, Colombia, Haiti, Guatemala...). The distinction between journalists, combatants and civilians has become blurred: combatants in modern wars are often in civilian clothes, while journalists are in uniform. The idea that journalists should be considered neutral observers of the conflict, which was formalized in several international conventions, has practically been abandoned. The example of the Qatari Al Jazeera television journalist from the Iraq war (see box) clearly shows that for America, as the "leader of the free world", this principle officially ceased to apply on September 11, 2001, and unofficially a little earlier. How then can we expect the white world dictators, warlords and guerrillas to respect the neutrality of the press?

In fact, the bombing of the Radio Television of Serbia building by NATO in 1999, when sixteen people died, was an ominous announcement of this change. The justification was that RTS "was in the function of Milošević's propaganda, and therefore part of the war machine and a legitimate target", but, unfortunately, a small number of international professional associations and human rights organizations found the strength to condemn the murder of Serbian colleagues. From there to the cannon fire on Reuters and the repeated bombing of Al Jazeera is just a small step.

There are other factors: the growing callousness of media houses that treat collaborators (especially foreign and local) as expendable goods, and the general decline in the credibility of the journalistic profession, for which the journalists themselves are no doubt largely to blame. "What all the victims have in common is that they believed in the importance of public speaking, but they did not, at least most of them, expect to die because of it," the report says. "They believed they were doing an honorable job."

In the end, of course, the question arises as to what should be done to prevent this gloomy trend from continuing. The report suggests several things: referring to United Nations Security Council resolution 1738 (from December last year) which defines the status of journalists in armed conflicts and places them under the protection of the Geneva Convention, insisting on the obligations of employers, more responsible behavior of journalists... Last year, the total number of journalists killed is slightly smaller than the previous two, which were records. And that is some hope.