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. 

We issued the following statement today in response to reports that the new Mexican Chamber of Deputies has not renewed the mandate of a special congressional committee on violence against the press appointed in 2006...

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.

We issued the following statement after Croatian and Serbian prosecutors announced that they have charged eight men in an October 2008 car bombing that killed Ivo Pukanic, owner and editorial director of the Zagreb-based political weekly Nacional, and Niko Franjic, the paper’s marketing director...

Three years ago today, an independent journalist named Bradley Roland Will was killed in Mexico while reporting on a heated protest movement in the capital city of the southern state of Oaxaca. Today, the crime remains unresolved. A man from Oaxaca, Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno, who many close followers of the case believe is innocent, was accused of the murder in October 2008. Martínez remains imprisoned awaiting trial. 

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.

We issued the following statement today after a regional court in Taraz upheld a lower court verdict and sentenced Ramazan Yesergepov, editor of the independent weekly Alma-Ata Info, to three years in jail for allegedly publishing state secrets...

Please join us for a free public event examining the killing of Natalya Estemirova, a journalist who exposed human rights crimes in Chechnya. Estemirova was kidnapped in the Chechen capital of Grozny in July 2009 and subsequently murdered.

The event, which features readings by Salman Rushdie and other prominent writers, will be held at 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 29, at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

For more information please visit our events page.

Twenty-three years ago, on October 19, 1986, the sun quite suddenly set at noon. In the brutal darkness, we lost Dele Giwa, just two short years after he and I, along with two other professional journalists, launched Nigeria’s first newsmagazine, Newswatch.

We've launched a new section of our Web site, and we hope you take a few minutes to read some of its pages. There is one, for example, on Russian reporter Natalya Estemirova, who dared to examine human rights crimes in Chechnya. Another is devoted to Francisco Javier Ortiz Franco, a Tijuana newspaper editor who exposed the workings of the Arellano Félix drug cartel. They are among the 758 journalists killed for their work since 1992. Our new database memorializes these women and men, most of whom were local reporters, photographers, producers, and editors who confronted the powerful or took unpopular positions.

Reacting to the release of Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari on bail in Iran today, we issued the following statement: “We are greatly relieved that Maziar Bahari is out on bail and at home with his family in Tehran,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “We hope the many journalists who remain jailed in Iran will also be released soon.” Bahari was arrested on June 21. His wife, Paola Gourley, is expecting their first child on October 26 and has experienced complications during her pregnancy.

Author and CPJ board member Kati Marton’s parents worked as foreign correspondents in Budapest during the Cold War in the 1950s, exposing Marton to the grit of living in a Communist state. She described feelings of alienation and displacement she felt as a child to an audience at CPJ’s New York offices today. “We lived a pro-American life,” she said. “We stood out like princesses in a concentration camp.” 

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. 

I'm a cartoonist so even when writing a story or working as radio correspondent, I'm checking out the empty half of the glass. As blogger it's no different; my inner cartoonist lurks in the dark. I've followed the Iranian "Bloggistan" since day one, and started my Persian blog after learning how to type. Funny? Not at all! Many Iranian journalists didn't start typing until 2002, when they found out that they could publish their censored stuff under different pseudonyms.

My country’s government brags unabashedly that it has not passed any laws that require government authorization to establish an electronic publication or a Web site or a blog on the Internet. Those that cheerlead for this government rely on this point to propagate the lie they call “the freedom to publish electronically” in Tunisia.

When the Gulf War broke out in 1990, the world watched the horrors of conflict on live television. It caused a massive leap in media. When the Internet became widely accessible later that decade, the exchange of information in a single second signaled the dawn of another new age. News not only proliferated, it could be seen by anyone with online access. At the start of the new millennium, blogs became an easy and open way for anyone to write free of restrictions or censorship, about any topic of interest, be it personal, technical, economic, politically oppositional, or in support of a specific cause.

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. 

On the third anniversary of the murder of Novaya Gazeta investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued the following statement:

During the height of the Pakistani military’s assault on militants, hundreds of local journalists were forced to flee the Swat Valley and neighboring areas. Coverage of the fighting was left in large part to Pakistani reporters from outside the region who had embedded with the military. These journalists faced their own set of challenges.

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.

We issued the following statement after Paris-based press freedom group Reporters without Borders (RSF) said its Secretary General Jean-François Julliard and a staffer were refused Russian visas to attend events marking the October 7, 2006 murder of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya...

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. 

Yesterday, I reported on the plight of Behroz Khan and Rahman Bunairee, two Pakistani journalists whose homes were destroyed by militants. Many other journalists in the North West Frontier Province, or NWFP, faced grave dangers and were forced to flee, undermining independent reporting in the region. The same early July night that Khan and Bunairee’s homes were destroyed, Pakistani officials claimed a clear-cut military victory and encouraged the refugees who fled the fighting—relief agencies put the number at 2 million or more—to start returning home.

The September 30 Daily Times in Pakistan headlined a story “Peace being gradually restored in Swat,” although daily skirmishes continue between the military and militants. A few days earlier, a massive car bomb in the heart of Peshawar killed at least 10 people and left some 70 wounded, while an explosion destroyed a police station in Bannu. Qari Hussain Mehsud, a Taliban commander in North Waziristan told The Associated Press that his organization had become only stronger after leader Baitullah Mehsud had been killed in a missile strike, most likely fired from a U.S. drone. Clearly, the government offensive that started in April to reclaim the Swat Valley and surrounding areas from militant groups has not marked the end of conflict. Journalists, many of them local reporters who are in the middle of this fighting, will continue to face extraordinary risks and difficulties.

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. 

Shadows of emerging skyscrapers in a neighborhood in Nairobi come alive as the sun glides down the western horizon. I am walking down one of the deserted streets in the city’s Eastleigh shantytown. Lately, Eastleigh has become a contradiction of sorts. While the roads remain as torn as ever and clean drinking water and other social amenities remain out of reach, there is a new aura of affluence among the numerous huge buildings that seem to be coming up overnight.