October 2009 Archives

On a day when Western media focused on the ramifications of the official visit of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Islamabad, I got a heads-up email message from Mazhar Abbas in Islamabad this morning. 

Swathed in the traditional black face veil, or niqab, Yemeni women brandish banners with images of disappeared and imprisoned journalists. Every Tuesday, in Yemen’s capital city of Sana’a, Tawakul Karman, chairwoman of Women Journalists Without Chains (WJWC), leads these women into Freedom Square to demonstrate.

Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade has written a response to a recent CPJ protest letter. While we welcome his attention to the issues we raised about press freedom last month, we note with great concern the president’s comments about the ongoing criminal case of two journalists assaulted by police in 2008.

Nearly six months after my arrival in the U.S., most of my family has finally joined me in Arizona. Making the trip from Baghdad was my father, who turned 63 in October; my mother, who is 50; and my 16-year-old brother, Anas, who is very eager to discover this big country.

David Rohde’s gripping five-part series on his abduction in Afghanistan and Pakistan ends today with his dramatic escape from his abductors.  His series—and the reaction to it—bring into high relief the challenges that journalists face as they confront growing risk around the world.  Rohde, for example, felt the need, both in his article and in a Q and A with readers hosted on the New York Times Web site, to defend his decision to undertake a risky interview with a Taliban commander as the final piece of his research into a book on Afghanistan.

Last night’s scenario was breathtaking: a circular hall with high ceilings, marble columns, tables draped with heavy tablecloths and soft bouquets, and journalism personalities elegant in cocktail dresses and tuxedos. And poised behind a wood podium, a black screen silently reminding all those present of who was not there.

On Monday, two weeks before her October 26 due date, Paola Gourley, the wife of jailed Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, at left, was rushed to the hospital after she suffered bleeding due to stress. From the London Metropolitan Hospital, her pleas for the release for her husband—who is nearing his 120th day in prison in Iran—on humanitarian grounds so that he may be there for his child’s birth, a potentially complicated one, have taken on new urgency.   

When CPJ issued its recent special report Anatomy of Injustice: The Unsolved Killings of Journalists in Russia, we called on world leaders to join us in engaging Russian leaders on human rights, press freedom, and impunity. We were pleased to hear Secretary Hillary Clinton do just that today when she spoke about impunity at a town-hall style meeting today in Moscow. 

The fighting along the border in Pakistan is a classic counter-insurgency: a large military force trying to oust an entrenched group from its base. Such armed conflict will always be risk-filled—especially for local journalists—but government leaders, military officials, and media executives can take basic steps to improve security.

Reporter Jolly Kamuntu is more than eight months pregnant, but she joined hundreds of Congolese journalists today in nationwide protest marches against insecurity and threats. Kamuntu, who is based in Bukavu, where three reporters have been murdered since 2007, was cited recently in an anonymous text message threatening to kill her and two other local journalists, Delphie Namuto and Caddy Adzuba, if they did not stop “interfering in what does not concern them.” That did not stop her from undertaking a recent reporting trip to Goma, north of Bukavu, where she interviewed refugees displaced by the conflict afflicting the minerals-rich region. “I’m still here. God is keeping me,” she told me.

On Monday, Venezuelan Judge José Oliveros announced that he would begin a new trial against journalist Gustavo Azócar, an outspoken Chávez critic, who has spent two months in prison without being sentenced. Oliveros, the local press reported, also upheld a decision to hold the television host and blogger in custody throughout the new trial. The news prompted press freedom advocates to express concern that the measure is intended to silence Azócar. CPJ spoke to him from prison today.

Three days after the Honduran interim government led by Roberto Micheletti lifted a September 27 decree that allowed them to shut down Radio Globo and Canal 36, broadcasters loyal to ousted President Manuel Zelaya, the two stations were still prevented from resuming normal transmissions, according to local and international news reports. 

Local reporters like those in Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Swat, and Mingora are crucial to accurate, fully formed news coverage. Their importance was evident in August, when reports began to emerge that prominent Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud had been killed by a U.S.-launched missile apparently fired from an unmanned drone over South Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. As Reuters noted in the middle of the dispute, “independent verification of the claims and counter-claims is extremely difficult as the Mehsud lands where the U.S. missile struck the house of Baitullah’s father-in-law are remote and inaccessible.” It was up to local reporters to get the information firsthand. Eventually they did, confirming Baitullah Mehsud’s death. 

More than two weeks have passed since the cold-blooded killing of Bayo Ohu, assistant news editor and political reporter for the Lagos, Nigeria-based The Guardian. The 45-year-old, soft-spoken workaholic opened the door to his home early on Sunday, September 20, as he prepared for church. According to eyewitnesses and local reports, five gunmen and one female ringleader shot Ohu repeatedly in his doorway while his children hid inside. One of his children told The Guardian that from her hiding place she heard one of the men shouting in Yoruba, “Olori Buruki e ti ku”—“The fool is dead.” Curiously, the killers took only Ohu’s laptop and cell phones.

Yesterday, CPJ received the Thomas J. Dodd Prize for International Justice and Human Rights at an outdoor ceremony at the University of Connecticut. It was one of those perfect, crisp fall mornings in New England with a strong wind blowing clouds across the sun and shaking the first leaves from the maples, which have already turned red and orange. CPJ co-founder Michael Massing and I accepted the award, selected by the national advisory board of the Dodd Center. Journalist Mariane Pearl spoke at the ceremony and described how her husband, Daniel Pearl, once told her he "loved life" but was prepared to risk it for his work. She spoke inspirationally about journalists around the world who are willing who make sacrifices to tell stories that must be told. 

It’s been a couple of weeks since I left Gabon, and a month since elections to pick a successor to Omar Bongo, who ruled Africa’s fourth-largest oil producer for 41 years. There are unresolved questions about the ballot count and the number of people killed in post-election violence.