CPJ MOURNS DEATH OF DANIEL PEARL

Background and Analysis:

"Daniel Pearl's Essential Work," by Ann Cooper

"He Took a Risk in Pursuit of Truth," by Terry Anderson

"A New Kind of War, a New Kind of War Correspondent," by Joel Simon

"Dear Little Pearl," by Clarence Page

"This was a cruel and pointless murder of a man who spent his life giving a voice to the voiceless," said CPJ honorary co-chairman Terry Anderson. "It served no purpose, political or otherwise. It gained his killers nothing, not even publicity for their views. On the contrary, it further discredits those who try to justify violence in the name of religion. The kidnapping of a journalist, or any civilian, is truly an act of terrorism. The perpetrators must be swiftly caught, convicted, and punished to the fullest extent possible."

The war on terrorism has been a very dangerous assignment for journalists — a reflection of how wars, and the way they are covered, have changed over the last half century.

Freelance photographer William Biggart died on Sept. 11 while covering the World Trade Center collapse, eight reporters have been killed during the military conflict in Afghanistan, and now Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl has been abducted and murdered in Pakistan. Some of these journalists faced the traditional danger of war correspondents: being caught in the cross fire. But because the war is being waged across the globe and with unconventional means, reporters could face a terrorist attack far from the battlefield. They also face being deliberately targeted. Four of the journalists killed in Afghanistan were executed after being forced from their car on a road outside Kabul. Pearl's killers seem to have sought out a U.S. journalist to lure into a trap by promising an interview with an Islamic militant leader.

Journalists reporting from the newest front in the terrorism war, the Philippine island of Basilan, also confront the specter of kidnapping. More than 600 U.S. troops have been deployed to Basilan to help the Philippine military fight the Abu Sayyaf guerrilla group. Journalists on Basilan have been told that Abu Sayyaf may try to kidnap them, and they are taking the warnings seriously.

Abu Sayyaf has been linked to the al Qaeda network and claims it is fighting for an independent Islamic state. The group has kidnapped at least 15 foreign journalists during the last several years. The risks war correspondents face have changed in the last 60 years. During World War II, U.S. war correspondents wore military uniforms while accompanying U.S. forces. They reported the war largely from the perspective of soldiers. Journalists captured by enemy forces risked being shot as spies.

By the Vietnam era, the nature of war reporting had changed dramatically. While some U.S. journalists wore uniforms while covering U.S. military operations in Southeast Asia, most reported on the war as civilians, traveling unaccompanied to villages and hamlets. Reporters covered U.S. forces but also sought out other views, including those of the enemy.

Increasingly, wars are fought not by armies but by guerrilla forces and ethnic militias; battle lines are fluid and civilians are often deliberate targets. Journalists must rely on their perceived neutrality to keep them safe.

It's a strategy that has been generally effective, since all sides in a conflict generally see an advantage in using the international press to air their grievances to the world.

Groups that embrace terror tactics — ranging from Colombia's right-wing paramilitary forces to Hamas militants in the Palestinian territories -routinely talk to the Western press. Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic understood the value of having international journalists document the effects of U.S.-led bombing campaigns. In other conflicts, however, armed groups may seek to prevent reporting on atrocities committed by their forces — and journalists have often been casualties of this policy. Islamic militants in Algeria killed dozens of journalists in the early and mid-'90s. Rebels in Sierra Leone hunted down and executed journalists when they briefly occupied that country's capital in 1999.

Journalists covering the war on terrorism are similarly vulnerable. They cannot (and should not) wear uniforms and simply report on military battles. Nor can they rely too much on their civilian status since terrorist groups routinely target civilians.

Pearl's murder made clear that some militant groups go further — they are not interested in using the international media as a conduit for their views, something even Osama bin Laden found useful. They see U.S. journalists not as neutral observers but as "spies" and adjuncts of the U.S. government.

Pearl's murderers sought to terrorize the press, to scare journalists away from the story. They have not succeeded, and they cannot be allowed to. Journalists have reported on every war for the last two centuries. They must report on this one with the same courage and resolve.

Joel Simon is the deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Dear Little Pearl:

By the time you read these words, God willing, you will not be a "Little Pearl" anymore. As I write these words, you are not yet born. It is March and you are due in May.

Last weekend President Bush mentioned you at the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club. The 117-year-old organization of Washington-based newspaper reporters and columnists invites our nation's president and Cabinet to a dinner each year so we can make fun of each other with songs and dance. This year Bush broke with tradition to ask us to do one serious thing.

He asked us to help you to know a little about Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the father you will not have a chance to know.

He asked us to write letters to you, his soon-to-be-born son, and he would add one of his own.

"You better than anyone know what Daniel Pearl was doing in Afghanistan," he said. "You better than anyone can explain the larger purpose he was serving. Someday you'll help a little boy understand his father a little better, and what a great gift that would be."

Well, young Pearl, our president and I do not always see eye-to-eye politically, but we agree on the value of good fathers. We also have a good idea of how eagerly your dad awaited your arrival and how proud of you he would have been.

I did not know your father, but, like a lot of other Washington-based journalists, I feel as though I did because so many people I know knew him.

By the time you read this your may have learned in school that Washington is a very powerful capital. But spend a little time here and it will feel like a very small town, one in which you never feel more than one person removed from knowing everybody else.

So judging by what I have heard about your father, I think he'd want to give you, among other facts of life, this important piece of advice:

Don't let people cram you into their little box.

From what I gather, your father was what we used to call a "free spirit" back in the 1960s. It helped make him a great reporter and a thoroughly likeable human being.

He only spent a couple of years in Washington in the mid-90s, mostly covering telecommunications. But after his death, hundreds of people paid tribute to him in Madam's Organ, a Washington music bar where your father would sometimes perform fiddle, guitar or mandolin with groups that had names like Bob Perilla's Big Hillbilly Bluegrass Band.

But Dan Pearl is known to have enjoyed John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and other jazz greats, too. He worked overtime chasing a good story, but always found time for some basketball with friends and neighbors on Saturday mornings at a District of Columbia gym. By all accounts, he refused to shut his eyes or ears to any of the wonders the world had to offer. He found the story everyone is waiting to tell about themselves.

"People who we believed were the epitome of boredom, he found to be interesting, even intriguing," his father, Judea Pearl, said at a memorial service Sunday in Los Angeles, according to news accounts. "Little did we know that talking to strangers would one day invite this tragedy."

Yes, your father appears to have been pursuing a very important story when he was kidnapped and killed. He was investigating possible links between Richard Reid, a British man who reportedly tried to blow up a jetliner with explosives in his shoes, and the Al Qaeda and radical Islamic elements of Pakistani intelligence.

It appears that your father trusted his contacts and they double-crossed him. In the end, they killed him to make some sort of sick, perverted political statement. They forced him to declare on videotape that he was a Jew and then they killed him.

The horror, yet also the banality of such evil defies words. Your father was a self-described citizen of the world. He was born in the United States, married to your mom Mariane Pearl, a Frenchwoman, and a committed world explorer, determined to provide the bridge between people that only comes from sharing their stories with the rest of the world.

But to his captors, he was simply an American and a Jew, both of which mean "enemy" in their twisted way of viewing the world these days. To the radical Islamists, all of us Americans are "Jews," the enemy they do not understand and therefore view as an irredeemable threat.

The sad lesson of all that, young Pearl, is that, no matter how hard you try to be your own man, as you should, there always will be someone who will try to remake you into their image of what they think you are. Someone will try to cram you into his or her box. They live in the past. You must live in the future.

Your father lives on, too, in our hearts and in your life. Don't let your dreams be smothered by the nightmares of others. Don't listen to their labels. Know yourself, then be yourself.

Your mom, Mariane Pearl, is understandably saddened by your father's death. Yet she also sounds strong in spirit and remarkably free of guile or resentment. She is an inspiration to us all. Let her be an inspiration to you, too. Take it from me, no one will ever love you more than she does.

Yours in peace and freedom,

CP

Clarence Page writes for the Chicago Tribune. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists.