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MEDIA: Iraq Leads Another Bloody Year for the Press

Guthrie Gray

WASHINGTON, Feb 5 2007 (IPS) - It was another dangerous year for the press around the world as the number of killed and imprisoned journalists rose in 2006, according to an annual report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

The report, “Attacks on the Press in 2006,” documents numerous cases of violence and censorship directed at the press last year.

According to the report, 55 journalists were slain in 2006 for reasons directly relating to their work, up from 47 in 2005. For the second year in a row, the report says, Iraqi journalists represent the majority of those killed.

The numbers of imprisoned media workers and media censorship also continued to rise with 134 journalists behind bars around the world. Of those in jail, one in three is a web-based reporter, blogger or online editor, the report says.

In part of what CPJ calls “the biggest government crackdown since Tiananmen Square,” China leads the world, for the eighth straight year, in imprisoned media workers with 31.

The report also cites targeted assassinations in Russia, “the rise of popularly elected autocrats in Latin America, and the erosion of neutral observer status for war correspondents” as threats to press freedom.

The 323-page report, which details the circumstances of each attack, comes a week after a similar annual report by the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders).

“A disturbingly record number of journalists and media workers were killed or thrown in prison around the world in 2006,” RSF reports, “and we are already concerned about 2007, as six journalists and four media assistants have been killed in January alone.”

The RSF report cited a number of dictatorships including North Korea, Eritrea, Cuba and Turkmenistan as “major culprits” in the silencing of the press, but also examines democracies “where progress needs to be made, too.”

RSF report claimed that 65 journalists and media assistants were killed in Iraq. Violence in Iraq claimed the greatest number of journalists ever recorded by the CPJ.

CPJ’s compilation for Iraq was somewhat less. While four journalists were killed as the result of “crossfire or acts of war”, 28 were murdered, many of them after being threatened. Cross-fire and other “combat-related incidents” had been a more common cause of journalist deaths in the first two years of the conflict, the report says.

“Nearly all of these murders are done with impunity,” Joel Campagna, CPJ’s coordinator of the Middle East and North Africa programme, told IPS. “These attacks are an effort by insurgent groups to undermine the political order in the country.”

Iraq has been the leading source of slain journalists since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. Last year’s deaths bring the total number of journalists killed in Iraq since the invasion to 97, according to CPJ. Thirty-seven interpreters, drivers, fixers, and office workers have also been killed as a result of their collaboration with the press.

The report notes that 30 of those journalists killed last year in Iraq were themselves Iraqis, while only two foreign media workers, both London-based, died.

“This is part of a continuing trend in which local Iraqi journalists are enduring the bulk of the risk in this conflict,” Campagna said. “An increasing role for Iraqi journalists in reporting from the field has translated into increased risk, and since the Iraqi journalists have become the eyes and ears for reporting this conflict, as a result, they have suffered disproportionately.”

On Jun. 28, 2006, IPS reporter Alaa Hassan was ambushed and shot six times as he drove to work in Baghdad, in what appeared a random act of violence at a bridge crossing where many others had been killed before. Originally from Babylon, in central Iraq, Hassan, 35, left behind a new wife who was pregnant with their first child.

If, in Iraq, the murders of journalists represent an attempt to destabilise the country, imprisonment, censorship, and violence directed at the press are intended to provide stability in other parts of the world.

The report says that the government of President Hu Jintao “effectively silenced some of the best journalists in China.” The report notes the case of Zhao Yan, a New York Times researcher who has been jailed since 2004. Although international pressure may have contributed to his acquittal on charges of leaking state secrets, he remains in jail, sentenced to three years for fraud charges after being denied an open trial.

Some countries improved their performance during the year, according to the report. Saudi Arabia, for instance, is credited with easing constraints on the country’s “heavily censored domestic press.”

“Local journalists have seized the initiative to produce more daring reports on crime, drug trafficking, unemployment and religious extremism,” the report noted.

Both the RSF and CPJ reports note the rise in democratically elected leaders whose commitment to press freedom is questionable. In the introduction to the report, Joel Simon, executive director of the CPJ, includes Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Russian President Vladimir Putin in a “generation of sophisticated, elected leaders who have created a legal framework to control, intimidate, and censor the news media.”

“The rise of ‘democratators’ – popularly elected autocrats – is alarming because it represents a new model for government control of the press,” Simon writes. “The democratators tolerate democracy – a free press, opposition political parties, an independent judiciary – while gutting it from within.”