Asia

A basement in the gray, Gothic heart of the University of Toronto is home to the CSI of cyberspace. “We are doing free expression forensics,” says Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, based at the Munk Centre for International Studies. Deibert and his team of academics and students investigate in real time governments and companies that restrict what we see and hear on the Internet. They are also trying to help online journalists and bloggers slip the shackles of censorship and surveillance. Deibert is a co-founder of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a project of the Citizen Lab in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. ONI tracks the blocking and filtering of the Internet around the globe.

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. 

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'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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

An excerpt from Marked for Death: Dying for the Story in the World’s Most Dangerous Places, by Terry Gould:

At first glance there is nothing particularly threatening about Khulna. Like most regional capitals in Bangladesh, it is hot and crowded, but its remote location in the waterlogged southwest has preserved its rural nature. Around Khan J. Ali traffic circle, bicycle rickshaws outnumber cars a hundred to one. Down the palm-lined lanes where a million people live, roosters crow from every backyard. And the city air, even near the jute mills and brick kilns, smells like tropical heaven.