Asia still dangerous for journalists
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
Bangkok, Thailand, Oct. 30 (IPS) — It may have one of the
most vibrant media environments in Asia — with journalists having
freedom to write just about anything — yet the Philippines ranks
after Iraq as one of the deadliest places for reporters.
Eight journalists have been killed in that South east Asian archipelago
this year, one more than the seven who were murdered in 2003.
In Iraq, on the other hand, 18 journalists have been killed while on
duty this year.
This disturbing reality is one of the revelations made this week by
the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF) or Reporters Without
Borders, in a report that has condemned Asian countries for having one
of the most hostile environments for journalists in the world.
Other Asian countries where journalists were killed in 2004 included
Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the media watchdog noted
in its third-annual “Worldwide Press Freedom Index.”
The global death toll of journalists is 44 this year, four more than
the 40 killed in 2003 and 18 more than the 26 killed in 2002, according
to RSF.
Besides the high number of murdered journalists, Asia also gains notoriety
for having some of the world’s “biggest prisons for journalists”
— with close to half of the 128 journalists jailed worldwide being
from this region.
Cyber dissidents in the region are in a worst climate, states the RSF
report, with 66 of the 68 such dissidents in prison being Asians.
The main offender is China, which has imprisoned 26 journalists, including
Chen Renjie for over 21 years, and placed 59 cyber dissidents behind
bars.
Its Southeast Asian neighbors Burma and Vietnam have also been singled
out by the media watchdog for locking away journalists and cyber dissidents.
While Burma has imprisoned 11 journalists, including Thien Tan, since
1990, Vietnam has imprisoned three journalists and four cyber dissidents.
“There was so much hope towards the end of the 1990s that the situation
for journalists in the region would improve, but it has turned to be
a disappointment,” Philippe Latour, Southeast Asia representative
of RSF, told IPS.
“The little progress we witnessed has stagnated and I don’t
think things will get better in places like Burma,” he added.
The threats to journalists have come from many quarters, Kulachada Chaipipat
of the South-east Asia Press Alliance, a regional media watchdog, told
IPS. They include governments, powerful business interests and even
the judiciary.
What is worse, she adds, the perpetrators of crimes against journalists
are rarely brought to book. “We have not seen the people behind
the killings of journalists in the Philippines taken to court.”
In some countries, a weak judiciary has done little to enforce laws
dealing with media freedom or to deliver judgments that enhance the
growth of a free press in the region.
The most recent victim was Bambang Harymurti, chief editor of Tempo,
a leading Indonesian news magazine. He was sentenced to one year in
prison in September for libeling a millionaire businessman in a report
that revealed the tycoon’s role behind a fire that destroyed a
textile market in the Indonesian capital Jakarta last year.
The decision was “a sham,” wrote Kavi Chongkittavorn, an editor
and columnist on Asian affairs in The Nation, an English-language daily
in Thailand, soon after the verdict was given. “Simply put, the
ruling went against the vibrant democratization process that has been
going on in Indonesia since the downfall of [Indonesian] president Suharto
in 1998.”
“It is imperative that the regional media community be pro-active
and work to ensure that the region’s governments abolish defamation
laws,” he added.
The prevalence of such a paradox in Indonesia, where RSF notes there
are growing signs of a free media culture, like the Philippines, is
true in other realms across Asia, too.
For instance Singapore, by far the most developed and wealthiest of
the Southeast Asian countries, is ranked among the countries having
the worst press freedom records by RSF.
The city-state rubs shoulders with communist-ruled Laos and Vietnam
as it finds itself 147th out of 167 countries, with the worst offenders
being North Korea, ranked 167th, Cuba, 166th, and Burma, ranked 165th.
“In these countries, an independent media either does not exist
or journalists are persecuted and censored on a daily basis,” states
the report. “Freedom of information and the safety of journalists
are not guaranteed.”
On the other hand, two of South-east Asia’s poorest countries,
East Timor and Cambodia, earn a place among countries where there is
a healthier media climate. The newly independent East Timor is 56th
in the RSF ranking and Cambodia is 109th.
“Singapore is hostile to a free media,” says RSF’s Latour.
“There is a monopoly on the press and the controlling company is
linked to the state. And there are a number of taboo subjects.”
It is much better in Cambodia, he added, where there is space for a
free press to function but “there are limits on the freedom of
expression.”
China also conveys the paradox of media freedom that runs through Asia,
states the RSF report. “China still scores very low (162nd) despite
the growth of print and broadcast media, since the ruling Communist
Party has used violence to indicate the lines that must not be crossed.”
Missing the evidence on missing explosives
Oct. 29 — When the New York Times reported
on Oct. 24 that over 300 tons of high-explosive materials appeared to
be missing from an Iraqi weapons facility, it was no surprise that the
Bush administration and conservative pundits would quickly challenge
the story. But recent reporting has taken this spin as proof that the
facts of the story are in dispute — even though new evidence disproves
the administration’s rebuttals.
On Oct. 28, ABC affiliate KSTP released footage that was shot by its
embedded reporters on April 18, 2003, showing members of the 101st Airborne
Division searching the Al Qaqaa bunkers. Clearly visible on the tape
are containers marked with labels that indicate the barrels contained
the high explosives in question. ABC World News Tonight broadcast the
footage on Oct. 28, noting that soldiers opened the bunkers that had
been sealed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), discovered
the high explosives, and then left those bunkers open and unguarded.
Given that the tape was shot nine days after the fall of Baghdad, it
would appear to prove that at least some of these explosives were looted
after the US invasion — a scenario that is consistent with statements
from Iraqi officials and witnesses to the looting (Agence France Presse,
10/27/04; New York Times, 10/28/04). As ABC’s Martha Raddatz put
it, “It is the strongest evidence to date the explosives disappeared
after the US had taken control of Iraq.”
On the other hand, on the same day the Pentagon released satellite images
that they claim show vehicles near some of the bunkers at the Al Qaqaa
site on March 17, 2003. That would seem to be an attempt to bolster
the administration’s claim that the explosives were removed by
Saddam Hussein prior to the US invasion, though there is no evidence
that the trucks did anything at all with the explosives in question.
Indeed, the fact that trucks were in the vicinity of bunkers that contained
large amounts of battlefield weapons (in addition to the high explosives)
just before a war seems hardly newsworthy. Certainly the presence of
trucks near the bunkers does nothing to undermine the footage of explosives
in the bunkers days later.
But despite their dubious relevance, the Pentagon images — along
with the White House’s continued criticism of Kerry for bringing
up the issue at all — seemed to leave some news outlets uncertain
about the facts. A subhead above a Los Angeles Times story read, “Reporters
Taped Troops Apparently Finding Munitions. A Pentagon Photo Implies
Otherwise.” The actual article, however, noted that the Pentagon
photos implied very little: “The photograph reveals little about
the fate of the 377 tons of explosives, part of an estimated 600,000
tons of explosives believed to have been scattered throughout Iraq at
the time.”
And even though ABC’s network newscast had broadcast the KSTP footage,
ABC’s Ted Koppel reached a very different conclusion on the Nightline
broadcast later that evening (10/28/04). Koppel explained that “a
friend” in the military had reminded him that he was actually at
Al Qaqaa during the war, and that “my friend, the senior military
commander, believes that the explosives had already been removed by
Saddam’s forces before we ever got there. The Iraqis, he said,
were convinced that the US was going to bomb the place.” For some
reason, the theory advanced by his military friend was apparently more
credible to Koppel than the television footage ABC had aired hours earlier
that debunked his thesis.
Instead of reporting on this newly discovered footage from Al Qaqaa,
the Washington Post (10/29/04) pursued a different angle: “This
week’s assertions by Sen. John F. Kerry’s campaign about the
few hundred tons said to have vanished from Iraq’s Qaqaa facility
have struck some defense experts as exaggerated.” The story’s
point, that the invasion allowed vast quantities of weapons to be looted
all over Iraq, would hardly seem to undermine Kerry’s critique
of the Bush administration.
Ignoring the evidence released the day before that explosives were on
site after the fall of Baghdad, the Post instead reported that “Pentagon
officials, reconstructing a timeline of what might have occurred at
Qaqaa, believe they have narrowed the window for the disappearance to
a two-month period between mid-March 2003, when the IAEA verified its
seals were still in place, and May 2003, when US military search teams
arrived at the site and found it had been looted, stripped and vandalized.”
If the Post had reported on the KSTP footage, though, the paper would
have been able to shut much of the Pentagon’s “window.”
Not surprisingly, Fox News Channel continued to aggressively challenge
the explosives story, even after the KSTP footage surfaced. On Special
Report (10/28/04), anchor Brit Hume told viewers that “officials
cite further evidence the material had been moved before US troops arrived”
— apparently a reference to the inconclusive Pentagon satellite
images. Special Report did not even mention the KSTP footage. But Fox
campaign reporter Carl Cameron claimed that the news of the day was
damaging to the Kerry campaign, since “the Iraqi explosives may
have disappeared before the invasion, undercutting Kerry’s attack
on the president.” Cameron added, “The Democrat hoped the
explosive story would be explosive. But the president is already calling
it a dud, accusing Kerry of saying anything to get elected.”
The Los Angeles Times followed a similar tack with an article (10/29/04)
headlined “Munitions Issue Cuts Both Ways.” The only evidence
the paper found to support the idea that the issue would be harmful
to Kerry were the claims of White House strategist Karl Rove, Bush communications
director Nicolle Devenish and George W. Bush.
That the subject of a scandal gets to decide how important it is is
an odd notion — but many journalists seemed to put more faith in
administration pronouncements than in videotaped evidence.
Source: FAIR
Freedom of the press is only relative
in some states
By Diego Cevallos
Mexico City, Mexico, Oct. 27 (IPS) — While the Mexican
government boasts that the country enjoys full freedom of the press,
journalists in some states have to risk their lives to exercise this
right.
So far this year alone, four Mexican journalists have been murdered
— either stabbed, shot or tortured to death — while a great
many more have been threatened and intimidated. The situation has become
so critical that hundreds of Mexican journalists took to the streets
in protest earlier this month.
These threats to freedom of expression have created a state of alarm
among those who work in the media, according to journalists’ associations
and others involved in the sector.
There are even some who say that freedom of the press is actually more
limited today, under President Vicente Fox of the conservative National
Action Party (PAN), than it was during successive administrations of
the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico uninterruptedly
from 1929 to 2000.
Yet the matter has gone completely unnoticed by the vast majority of
the population, since none of the country’s major mainstream media
have reported on the situation.
In the meantime, the government continues to repeat that the right to
free expression is fully guaranteed to journalists in Mexico, and numerous
international organizations claim that there is a relative climate of
freedom for the exercise of their profession.
But Mexican journalists themselves disagree. “The situation of
press freedom is worse under Fox,” Teodoro Rentería, president
of the Federation of Mexican Journalists’ Associations (FAPERMEX),
which represents 9,000 of the country’s 25,000 journalists, told
IPS.
“It’s true that journalists can speak out more and denounce
things more than before, but it doesn’t really count for much if
the government doesn’t pay any attention, and journalists are threatened
for doing it,” he added.
In the three years and 10 months that Fox has been in power, there
have been 10 documented murders of journalists, as compared to 19 during
the six-year term of Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000) and 57 under Carlos
Salinas (1988-1994), both members of the PRI.
The majority of these killings remain unsolved and unpunished, although
numerous investigations have directly implicated former government officials,
police officers and drug traffickers.
Between January 2002 and July 2004, the Mexican National Human Rights
Commission, an independent government agency, received 48 complaints
of threats against journalists.
On Oct. 11, in an unprecedented act of protest, scores of Mexican journalists
took to the streets in 10 of Mexico’s 32 states to demand “guarantees
for full freedom of expression and exemplary punishment for the crimes
and attacks against journalists.” A public declaration was signed
by 232 of them.
The government’s response to the protest — sparked by the
murders of four journalists in less than a year — was to propose
the creation of a working group to study their demands.
Eréndira Cruz, director of the non-governmental National Center
on Social Communication (CENCOS), told IPS that the media enjoys greater
freedom today than during the years when the PRI was in power, but at
the same time, “objectively speaking, a state of alarm and of warning”
has been created by the impunity surrounding those who threaten and
kill journalists.
CENCOS joined with other similar organizations and independent journalists
to organize the protest held on Oct. 11, which ironically was either
totally ignored or given minimal coverage by most of the mass media
in Mexico.
A writer with a major Mexican newspaper, who preferred to remain anonymous,
“so they don’t label me as anti-union,” told IPS, “I’m
a moderately well-informed journalist, and I didn’t see anything
about the protest.”
He added, however, that in his view, the events that led to the demonstration
“are somewhat isolated occurrences. Given all of the pressures
and dangers facing this profession, I would say that there is in fact
freedom of the press in Mexico, because we have won it, and it isn’t
in any danger.”
But according to Leonarda Reyes, director of the Center for Journalism
and Public Ethics (CEPET), the freedom of the press that exists in Mexico
is promoted by the federal government, while there are individual states
“where it doesn’t exist, and that is what worries us.”
“Mexico is not a single, uniform entity, and there are many problems,
for example, on the northern border [with the US], where drug trafficking
is a major presence, and a lot of journalists have begun to practice
self-censorship as a way of ensuring their own survival,” Reyes
told IPS.
In the four cases of the journalists killed this year, the available
evidence indicates that their deaths were linked to investigative work
they were carrying out. In addition, all four had reported, in different
ways, that they were being threatened.
Roberto Javier Mora, editor-in-chief of El Mañana, a local newspaper
in Nuevo Laredo, near the US border, was stabbed to death on Mar. 19,
while Francisco Ortiz, editor of Zeta, a weekly publication in Tijuana
— also on the border with the United States — was gunned down
on Jun. 22. Both murders have been attributed to drug traffickers.
On Sept. 1, Francisco Arratia Saldierna, a columnist for a number of
newspapers in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas, was found dead
after having been kidnapped and tortured.
Leodegario Aguilera, editor of the magazine Mundo Político (Political
World) in the state of Guerrero, was kidnapped in May, and his body
was later found dumped in a ditch.
The Inter-American Press Association, a non-profit organization which
represents newspapers and magazines from Alaska to Patagonia and is
dedicated to defending freedom of expression and of the press throughout
the Americas, expressed its concern to the Mexican government over these
killings and asked for prompt investigations.
A large number of other international organizations devoted to the
freedom of expression and human rights in general have also publicized
and demanded action on these cases.
In response, the Fox government called on the Mexican General Attorney’s
Office to investigate the murders, independently of state police agencies,
who are suspected by some journalists’ associations to be involved
in the crimes.
Nevertheless, FAPERMEX president Rentería maintains that the
government has yet to adopt any effective action to end the impunity
of those who murder and continue to issue threats against journalists,
and that the situation has actually worsened under the current administration.
In July, the National Human Rights Commission issued a general recommendation
to the government, with particular emphasis on public prosecutors and
state authorities throughout the country, to bring an end to the practice
of calling on journalists to reveal their sources, “as a means
of intimidation aimed at inhibiting them from reporting the news.”
By contrast with Rentería, the directors of CENCOS and CEPET
believe that there is greater press freedom in Mexico today than during
the years of PRI rule, but they warn that the murders of the four journalists
this year demonstrate that these rights are being weakened.
Similar views have been expressed by international organizations like
Reporters Without Borders and the Latin American Federation of Journalists
(FELAP).
While noting a general improvement in press freedom, they nonetheless
stress that threats continue to be made against journalists in numerous
states, and that some reporters are still pressured to reveal their
sources, while other are sued for alleged defamation.
Up until the 1980s, most of the media outlets in Mexico expressly prohibited
their reporters from criticizing the government and the PRI, and the
editors of most major newspapers were active members of the ruling party.
