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Deadly year for journalists
10/03/2004 13:19 - (SA)
New York - A total of 36 journalists were killed worldwide as a direct result of their work in 2003, with the war in Iraq triggering a sharp increase from 19 the previous year, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said.
Thirteen journalists, more than one third of the year's casualties, were killed in hostile actions in Iraq, while six others died from illness or traffic accidents while covering the war, the CPJ said in its annual report Attacks on the Press.
It was the highest annual total from a single country since 24 journalists were killed in Algeria in 1995 at the height of civil strife between the government and Islamist militants.
The CPJ report also highlighted the plight of 136 journalists imprisoned around the world, 36 of them in China and 29 in Cuba.
Of the journalists who died in Iraq, at least four were killed by US fire, most notably in the April 8 shelling of Baghdad's Palestine Hotel and the air strike that hit the Baghdad bureau of the Qatar-based channel Al-Jazeera the same day.
Avoidable
A CPJ investigative report published in May concluded that the shelling of the hotel, while not deliberate, was avoidable since US commanders knew that journalists were in the hotel but failed to relay the information to soldiers on the ground.
While the conflict in Iraq posed many dangers for journalists, the CPJ stressed that the post-war scenario also threw up an "assortment of hazards," including bomb attacks, shootings, car hijackings, hold-ups and abductions.
"Western correspondents, who stand out and can be mistaken for coalition personnel or foreigners in general, were particularly vulnerable," the annual report said.
The majority of journalists killed in 2003 died far from any battlefield.
Five were killed in the Philippines for their coverage of local corruption or criticism of public officials. Four more died in Colombia, three of them murdered for their reporting.
And in Russia, the editor-in-chief of a provincial newspaper was stabbed to death outside his house - the paper's second editor-in-chief to be murdered for his work in 18 months.
"Most murders of journalists continue to be committed with impunity," said CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper.
Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States and the conflict in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq also reinforced what CPJ called a "troubling" climate in which it had grown easier to curb independent reporting in the name of fighting terrorism or defending national security.
The watchdog cited the example of Morocco, where a long record of relative tolerance for critical media was broken last year by the arrest of several journalists under a new anti-terrorism law.
CPJ said the outbreak of the Iraq war also provided a cover for Cuba to launch a major crackdown on political dissidents, which left 29 journalists behind bars by year's end.
China remained the largest jailer of journalists for the fifth year in a row.
- AFP
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