Posts

The Legacy of Berta Cáceres: What Environmentalists Can Learn From Human Rights Groups

The murder of the environmental activist and indigenous leader Berta Cáceres in Honduras in March came as a shock. Shortly after, I was asked to address the question of security for environmentalists at the annual meeting of theWaterkeeper Alliance, a U.S.-based conservation group started in New York’s Hudson River Valley that today includes members from Colombia to Bangladesh.

Photo_bertacaceres

Waterkeepers asked me to address the meeting because of my experience in advising journalists, human rights defenders, and activists on security matters. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to realize how much the environmental community can learn from press freedom and human rights groups.

Cáceres was shot dead in her own home and a fellow activist was wounded in the same attack. Less than a year before, she had been honored in San Francisco and Washington with the prestigious Goldman Prize, giving her a measure of international recognition and, one might have hoped, a measure of protection from such a brazen attack.

Alas, no form of protection or deterrence has worked. In fact, no fewer than a hundred and eighty-five environmental activists around the world were murdered last year — more than three a week — according to a report issued last month by the group Global Witness. That’s more than double the number of journalists killed worldwide over the same period of time. Nearly two-thirds of the murdered environmentalists were indigenous activists like Cáceres. Brazil, host of the Summer Olympic Games, the Philippines, and Colombia topped the list of countries with the most environmentalists killed, followed by Peru, Nicaragua, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Last year’s death toll represents an increase of 59 percent from the year before, and the trend has been moving in the wrong direction. Indeed, Global Witness reports that no fewer than 1,176 environmental activists worldwide have been killed since 2002. Even the conservative figure is more than the number of journalists documented to have been murdered over the same period. Mining, logging, and other extractive industries were the focus of many of the murdered activists, along with government-backed development projects like the proposed dam in Cáceres’ case that would have destroyed a pristine river and the indigenous lands through which it flows.

Nearly all the killings were pre-meditated homicides; nearly all the killers enjoy blanket impunity. In Cáceres’ case, five men, two of whom have ties to the Honduran construction industry and one of whom is a former Honduran military intelligence specialist, have since been arrested — itself a rare development. It remains to be seen, however, whether justice will be served on the men who shot her or the more powerful, shadowy figures who may have ordered her assassination.

I began my Waterkeepers’ talk with a confession. Early in my career, I was torn between working for social justice in “hard” places like El Salvador or environmental causes in familiar places like Montana. I chose the former, concluding that green issues were fundamentally “bourgeois” concerns. (In my home state of New Jersey, environmentalism was all the rage in both major parties back then due to widespread dumping of hazardous materials that was threatening home property values across the state.)

I realize now I could not have been more wrong. The murders of Cáceres and so many others prove beyond a doubt that not only are “green” activists on the frontlines of social justice and human rights struggles around the world, they are being targeted at a greater rate than journalists or human rights or LGBT activists.

This is going to be a long struggle, I told the audience, so prepare yourselves. But don’t despair; there are reasons for optimism.

First, however, we need to understand that if environmental activists are going to do their work, and do it well, they need to be safe. And safety begins with solidarity. As the director of the leading U.S.-based hostile environments training provider, I could simply tell you the solution to enhanced safety is to hire my firm. Training, along with the use of security cameras and other technologies, can and does make a difference. But no amount of training or technology can ever do as much to protect frontline environmentalists as the kind of protection that comes from collective advocacy, both inside and beyond the countries where the problem is most urgent.

Second, solidarity, as important as it is, is no panacea. Take the enterprising Irish journalistVeronica Guerin, the subject of a Hollywood film by the same name. Guerin was shot dead in her car in 1992 just seven months after she had been honored by the Committee to Protect Journalists at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Recognition can help protect the lives of those who are in danger, but it isn’t enough. Instead, advocates must build networks and promote green activism in ways that raise the profile of at-risk activists — both within their own communities and abroad.

Third, we must recognize that the root of the problem is the impunity of powerful interests, as well as the corruption and incompetence that undermines functioning judiciaries in almost every developing nation.  Less than two weeks after Cáceres’ murder, one of her fellow activists, Nelson Garciá, was shot dead near his home. Last week, the body of another of Cáceres’ colleagues, Lesbia Janeth Urquía, was found in a trash dump with signs of blunt trauma injury to her head.

In such a lawless environment, and even in the face of seemingly incontrovertible evidence, powerful actors, especially those with ties to government, can stop a case before it gets started. In Colombia in 2001, a team of prosecutors brought charges, based on eyewitness testimony and documentation, against an Army general accused of okaying the use of paramilitary groups to commit massacres in remote villages and assassinate trade unionists, community leaders, and human rights activists. By the time the case collapsed, six regional prosecutors and twenty-two investigators had been murdered and the two lead prosecutors on the case, along with twenty other prosecutors and investigators, had fled the country.

Mustering the political will to compel institutions to change can take decades. It can, and has been, done, however. Guatemala was long one of Latin America’s most violent and corrupt nations. But in recent years, in a sharp break from its past and with the support of a UN-backed anti-crime commission, the Guatemalan government has managed to prosecute two former presidents, albeit with mixed results, and a host of other once-powerful figures for crimes ranging from money laundering to sexual slavery.

Bringing change to other nations will be harder. Take Bangladesh. There, environmentalists are up against the same kind of collusion between powerful private interests and corrupt government officials faced by activists elsewhere. But in Bangladesh it occurs in a climate where independent bloggers, human rights activists, foreigners, and LGBT Bangladeshis are routinely bombed, shot, and hacked to death in the name of Islam.

How can we protect them? asked one Waterkeeper. I told them about Peace Brigades International, a UK-based NGO with an office in the United States that for decades has deployed teams of observers from the U.S. and Western Europe to provide “protective accompaniment” for threatened human rights activists in areas of conflict. The mere presence of the observers has kept many local activists and their families alive — without a single foreign observer having been lost in the process. And while I wouldn’t recommend that kind of assistance in a country like Bangladesh at the moment, in many countries around the world protective accompaniment for frontline environmentalists is an idea whose time has come.

The effectiveness of many environmental groups is predicated on their ties to, and passion for, the waterways and lands they work so hard to protect. Too often, however, these groups seem to exist in a bubble. The Waterkeepers publish a glossy print magazine for donor-subscribers. But unless every issue is searchable online, where other passionate environmentalists can find them, the magazine isn’t going to be much help in terms of building a global solidarity movement. Similarly, no environmentalist wants to spend more of her time indoors than she has to, but Twitter and other social media platforms need to be embraced on a 24-7 basis if a movement hopes to cut through the noise and maintain and grow its presence.

The environmental movement also needs more groups capable of providing the kind of rigorous documentation we have come to expect from the likes of Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

For sure, Global Witness deserves credit for stepping up and pioneering the documentation of threats and violence against environmental defenders. But the initial data it has generated raises as many questions as it answers: Why are activists killed? Who are the suspected perpetrators? What is the status of government investigations into the murders? And which international interests are doing business with national or regional entities suspected of having ties to the murderers? Small grassroots groups such as Canadian-based Rights Action are doing their best to answer these questions in countries like Guatemala and Honduras and, together with Global Witness, have begun to shine a spotlight on the work that needs to be done.

At the same time, today’s environmental movement has one advantage that, if nurtured, could provide frontline activists with a measure of the solidarity and protection they so desperately need. The movement to curb climate change is still an amorphous and largely leaderless jumble of competing interests (as was so wonderfully on display in Paris last fall), but it enjoys the backing of most Western governments. It is also the largest movement of its kind the world has seen.

Does anyone doubt that there is a direct link between the work of frontline environmentalists and the campaign to slow global warming? Yet how many climate change activists, let alone the public at large, are aware of the intimidation and violence that has been brought to bear against local environmental activists in recent years? Running a poll or two along these lines would be illuminating and a good place to start. But raising awareness about these slayings and the ongoing threat to environmental and indigenous activists is essential.

I have long thought of myself as an environmentalist, and I pay close attention to conservation issues. And yet I had no idea that so many environmentalist activists were being murdered until I was alerted to that fact by mutual friends’ status updates about Berta Cáceres’ murder on Facebook and then a call prompted by her murder from the Waterkeepers.

One way we can honor Cáceres’ legacy is to take the hard but necessary steps needed to bust open our comfortable cocoons and forge alliances between environmentalists, climate change activists, and the donors, foundations, and governments that support them. Only by building a unified international movement will we be able to protect fearless activists like Berta Cáceres who are doing the kind of work that inspires and benefits us all.

Headshot_FrankSmythFrank Smyth is the founder and executive director of Global Journalist Security, the leading U.S.-based hostile environments training and consulting provider. A former arms trafficking investigator for Human Rights Watch and the author of the HRW report Arming Rwanda, Smyth has written for The Nation, The Village Voice, Foreign Affairs,The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal and has testified before the U.S. House and Senate, the Organization of American States, and the United Nations Human Rights Council.

This article originally appeared here: http://pndblog.typepad.com/pndblog/2016/07/the-legacy-of-berta-caceres-what-environmentalists-can-learn-from-human-rights-groups.html

“This is War”: How the CIA Justifies Torture

By Frank Smyth on December 10, 2014

Editor’s Note: This piece by Frank Smyth on the use of “negative incentive” methods in Central America was originally published in our August 1987 issue, under the title “El Salvador’s Forgotten War.” From Frank:

The Senate Intelligence Committee report released this week concluded that the CIA engaged in the torture of terrorist suspects in the years following 9/11 without obtaining any significant intelligence information, contrary to claims by former U.S. intelligence and Bush administration officials. The panel concluded that the CIA techniques included waterboarding or nearly drowning suspects, prolonged sleep deprivation, and other techniques including making suspects wear diapers, putting insects in their cells, and subjecting detainees to mock burials.

The revelations have cast the United States in a harsh light 25 years after the end of the Cold War. But such techniques have been employed by U.S. intelligence agencies, in fact, going back even longer. In the 1980s, during the Reagan administration’s effort to repel Marxist guerrilla movements in El Salvador and Guatemala, and to ultimately help oust a leftist revolutionary government in Nicaragua, U.S. intelligence agencies agencies used similar tactics then against Marxist guerrilla suspects that they used two decades later against Islamist terrorist suspects.

U.S. intelligence officers coined such techniques as applying a “negative incentive,” using an Orwellian euphemism for torture that echoes that kind of double-speak like “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by U.S. officials in the 2000s.

Below is my 1987 story in The Progressive about the use of torture by U.S. intelligence agencies in Central America. It has a personal resonance for me. I interviewed many torture victims in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s. In 1991, I found myself in an Iraqi prison run by intelligence agents from the regime led by President Saddam Hussein, and listened night after night as they tortured Iraqis suspected of having tried to overthrow his regime.

Torture knows no political bounds. No matter who the abuser is, it is employed more often for revenge and deterrence than to gather information. It is abhorrent in all forms. It must be called by its proper name. And it must be resisted always. Torture by U.S. officials has done much harm to many human beings. It has done irreparable harm to us.”

The U.S. Congress, like the American mass media, seem notoriously in­ capable of focusing on more than one international troublespot at a time. A few years ago, all eyes were on El Salvador, its infamous Death Squads, and the U.S. Government’s role in sustaining a brutally repressive regime. Today the spotlight is on Nicaragua and El Salvador is all but forgotten, despite a resurgence of political violence and new evidence of U.S. com­ plicity in assaults on human rights.

“The democratic revolution has just begun,” President Jose Napoleon Duarte told the Salvadoran people in his third an­nual state-of-the-union address on June 1. But one day earlier, labor leader Julio Portillo was shot at an anti-government dem­onstration near San Salvador. Three days before that, the offices of the Co-Madres (Committee of Mothers and Relatives of Political Prisoners Disappeared) were de­molished by a bomb. And earlier in May, the tortured, headless body of peasant leader Antonio Hernandez Martinez was found in San Miguel.

Hernandez, Portillo, and the Co-Madres were active participants in a labor-led op­position coalition that has been challeng­ing the Salvadoran government to pursue genuine reforms and negotiate an end to years of insurgent warfare. Instead, the Duarte government has chosen to dismiss the opposition as a subversive communist front.

The murdered Hernandez Martinez was last seen being led off by government sol­diers on April 16. He had been on his way to arrange for a loan to his peasant co­ operative.

Julio Portillo, who heads a high-school teachers’ union, was leading a peaceful anti-government protest outside Mariona prison when he was struck by one of the shots directed at the protesters from the direction of the Salvadoran army’s First Infantry Brigade.

Duarte ignored these developments when he traveled in a heavily armored eighty-car convoy to deliver his state-of-the-union address in the small northern town of Sensuntepeque. He unveiled fifty- four new proposals to rebuild El Salvador and promised to open a dialogue with left­ist guerrillas, provided they first laid down their arms.

The Salvadoran government maintains that the Farabundo Marti National Lib­eration Front (FMLN) is prolonging the conflict. But classified CIA documents re­veal that it is Duarte’s U.S.-backed government that has no interest in ending the civil war. In fact, these documents—pre­pared by the Office of African and Latin American Analysis in coordination with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations—dis­miss Duarte’s previous call for peace, is­ sued last year, as a meaningless “public-relations gesture.” Salvadoran govern­ment officials “see little to be gained in a dialogue with the rebels while the Salva­doran military has the initiative in the war,” says a CIA report dated September 2, 1986.

The Salvadoran military say they can win the war, and U.S. authorities believe the government has taken the upper hand. “Although they have not been decisively beaten,” the September CIA report states, “the guerrillas, in our view, no longer have the capacity to launch and sustain major offensives.”

Such assessments have often been made in the course of the eight-year-old conflict, and they have always turned out to be un­founded. Early this spring, at a time when the insurgents were believed to be in de­cline, the FMLN mounted a surprise at­tack on an army garrison at El Paraiso, killing sixty-nine government soldiers and one U.S. Army Special Forces adviser.

The FMLN has expanded its opera­tions to all fourteen provinces of El Sal­vador, increasing the likelihood that the struggle may continue for many years. The conflict has already claimed some 60,000 lives—more than 1 percent of the Salva­doran population.

Duarte, who has neither the will nor the power to oversee an end to the war, did offer two symbolic concessions in his June 1 speech: He said that he would allow sev­enty-eight wounded rebels to leave the country for medical treatment and that he might grant amnesty to 400 political pris­oners. At the same time, however, he re­jected out of hand a bold new FMLN peace initiative.

Three days before Duarte’s speech at Sensuntepeque, the FMLN had proposed to enter into direct negotiations with the government on July 15. Their offer in­cluded pledges to stop using land mines and to suspend their campaign of eco­nomic sabotage in exchange for an end to aerial bombing by the government and a halt of summary executions by both sides.

Guerrilla-planted mines cause up to 70 percent of government casualties and are, along with the economic-sabotage cam­paign, the insurgents’ most effective weap­ons. Government bombing missions are targeted on areas of high rebel activity, but most casualties are inflicted on civilians rather than FMLN fighters. The steps pro­posed by the FMLN would, therefore, go a long way toward reducing civilian cas­ualties.

But the Salvadoran government, backed by the United States, is interested only in a military solution. The Reagan Admin­istration has tried to make El Salvador a showcase for containment of communism in the Hemisphere, and has undertaken highly publicized steps to “professional­ize” the Salvadoran military.

In 1981, when unarmed civilians were being murdered at the rate of thirty-five a day, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Brigadier General Fred Woerner to con­duct a survey of the Salvadoran armed forces. His report, which called for the ex­pansion, equipping, training, and modern­ization of the Salvadoran military, set the tone for Reagan Administration policy toward El Salvador.

However, State Department sources confirm there was considerable friction within the Administration over its indif­ference to human-rights considerations. Under mounting pressure from church and human-rights groups, the Administration began in 1983 to express concern over the operations of the Salvadoran Death Squads.

“The idea,” says a former State Department official, “was to play by their rules”—”their” meaning such human-rights organizations as Amnesty International and Americas Watch, which had long crit­icized U.S. policy. Congress, mindful of El Salvador’s blatant disregard for human rights, had blocked or reduced Adminis­tration requests for an escalation of mili­tary aid. However, the new training effort undertaken by the U.S. Government was directed less at restoring human rights than at developing more sophisticated forms of interrogation.

The first group of 470 Salvadoran of­ficer cadets received training in a three-month course at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1982. Another 600 arrived in 1983, fol­lowed by even more in 1984. Additional units, particularly elite battalions, were trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and smaller units received special instruction at the U.S. Southern Command in Pan­ama. In 1985, 250 Salvadoran military personnel were sent to the Pentagon’s Re­gional Training Center in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Last year, training shifted to a new center in La Union, El Salvador.

A Defense Department spokesman, Marine Captain Jay C. Farrar, said it is “highly doubtful” that these courses of­fered instruction in abusive interrogation techniques. But according to U.S. Army Special Forces advisers formerly stationed in the region, small courses for selected Salvadoran soldiers regularly included training in “negative-incentive” methods.

“Torture in El Salvador,” Americas Watch reported last year, “consists in­creasingly of physical abuse that does not leave physical marks, such as the capucha (hood to suffocate) and immersion in filthy water. . . . The most prevalent forms of abuse of detainees at present are sleep dep­rivation, food deprivation, and threats against family members. These practices, like the capucha and immersion, leave no physical marks.” State Department sources say abuse of this kind now occurs in about 20 percent of all prisoner interrogations.

A Pentagon intelligence officer who spoke on condition that his name not be published said such techniques “are ex­actly the kind of thing that the Special Forces are teaching in El Salvador.” He added that methods inappropriate for use by the police in the United States can be justified in El Salvador because “this is a war and a different situation.”

Even as the use of “negative-incentive” techniques has increased, blatant physical abuse continues. Few armed guerrillas have ever been taken prisoner, and it is gener­ally assumed that they are executed when captured in the field. According to former U.S. advisers, Salvadoran officers com­plain that they don’t have time for lengthy interrogations on patrol.

Military intelligence documents sent from El Salvador to Washington give an indication of how interrogations are con­ducted in the field. In mid-1985, three combatants of the FAL—a guerrilla group led by the Salvadoran Communist Party—were captured coming off the Guazapa Volcano near the capital. The interroga­tors were able to learn the pseudonyms of about thirty members of that guerrilla unit, their titles and functions, and the pseu­donyms of the three clandestine operatives who had recruited the prisoners.

The documents explain, in euphemistic terms, the interrogation of one combatant: “In the beginning he didn’t say much, due to his companeros who had told him that the FAL would beat or kill him [if he talked]. But once he saw that this was false, he opened up a little more.” The prisoner, it seems clear, was persuaded that his cap­tors would inflict greater harm if he didn’t talk than his comrades would if he did.

One goal of Reagan Administration policy is to avoid the kind of wholesale slaughter that used to lead to questions in Congress and public protests. But if the Duarte government’s current policy of selective repression were to fail to keep the domestic opposition un­der control, the military might resort to more obvious methods. Indeed, five un­armed alleged “FMLN collaborators” were murdered by the army’s Arce Battalion on May 22, their bodies thrown into a well.

CIA analysts fear the FMLN is trying to provoke violence between civilians and security forces, and have expressed con­cern that in the future the military may exercise less restraint: “Increasing violence will fuel the insurgency by alienating Duarte’s primary constituencies in the lower middle classes and the urban poor, or by provoking a coup and military crack­down.”

The extreme Right continues to play an active role in Salvadoran politics. Ultra-conservative parties, backed by the coun­try’s intransigent private sector, control El Salvador’s supreme court. For four months earlier this year, they boycotted the legis­lative assembly, which is dominated by Duarte’s Christian Democrats. A new rightist organization, the Movement for National Action, has entered the fray, call­ing for Duarte’s resignation and berating the military for failing to crush the insur­gents.

In the past, such rhetoric has preceded the unleashing of new Death Squad offen­sives. In fact, one of El Salvador’s notor­ious right-wing Death Squads resurfaced on June 16. The Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez Brigade accused fourteen teach­ers and students at the National Univer­sity of having guerrilla links, and gave them forty-eight hours to leave the country.

The ultraconservatives enjoy backing within the armed forces, especially among U.S.-trained oficiales de la guerra (war of­ ficers), including Colonel Sigfrido Ochoa, former commander of the Fourth Infantry Brigade in Chalatenango, and Colonel Mauricio Staben of the Arce Battalion. For these officers, there is no distinction be­tween the insurgents and the domestic po­litical opposition.

That may explain why opposition po­litical figures have come under violent po­litical attack in recent months, and why Duarte’s effectiveness has been markedly reduced. In the past few months, the mil­itary has grown increasingly independent in El Salvador, and another round of po­litical violence may be in the offing. •

Frank Smyth, a freelance writer in Wash­ington, D.C., has reported from El Salva­dor.

– See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/12/187936/war-how-cia-justifies-torture#sthash.MQpg3p8Q.dpuf

Practicing journalism in a smaller, riskier world

Practicing journalism in a smaller, riskier world

By Frank Smyth

                I’m old enough to have handled Moveable type — long, rectangular pieces of steel or lead with a letter, character, number, punctuation mark or space forged at one end. In 1976, at 15, I had a part-time job as a letterpress clerk at my hometown weekly. I worked the metal pieces of type into clamped blocks to fit into a letterpress machine. It sat in the basement near the newer, bigger printing presses that inked the newspaper. My old machine was about 5 feet tall and weighed maybe a ton. Each time I pulled down its handle, it inked out onto an envelope the mailing address of a college student or someone else who still wanted to read the town paper even though they lived out of town.

                I’m young enough to have never used anything but a computer to file from overseas. Nearly every foreign correspondent by 1988 used a Tandy 200 from Radio Shack. A laptop before anybody coined the term. It had no hard drive and only 24 Kilobytes of RAM –just enough to save one story at a time. There was no Internet. The Tandys had a built-in modem with settings for pulse or tone that we used to direct dial a newspaper’s main frame computer. Pulse was about the only setting that worked abroad. You had to pay out of pocket and hope to get reimbursed later for long distance calls, and you had to exactly match the settings of stop bits, character bits, and parity each time to get in.

                Printing presses inked out text in different written languages for over a 1,000 years, and, in more recent centuries, gave rise to the term we still use for news outlets: the press. Computers have been around for about 30 years, and they have revolutionized the world of news and information. The craft of journalism is the same: attempting to verify information before reporting it, being transparent about what could and could not be verified, and providing context. But many other things are different.

                Technology has made the impact of reporting and other communications more immediate. Earlier this year, Egyptian police and militia detained or attacked foreign correspondents from every conceivable outlet. Before he fell, President Hosni Mubarak tried to literally unplug Egypt, shutting down satellite connections, cell phone service and the Internet. Back in the 1960s it took at least a few days for film shot in Vietnam to be flown to New York, developed and broadcast. Now what may be a fresh report to the public back home may serve as a real-time intelligence report to combatants.

                The public perception of journalists has changed, too. At home Americans have steadily lost respect for journalists over the past quarter century. Little more than a quarter of Americans say news organizations get their facts right, and about 60 percent say they are biased. Overseas actors of all kinds have grown increasingly hostile to journalists. Back in the 1980s in Central America journalists routinely wrote TV in large letters in masking tape on their vehicles to help deter attacks. Today few journalists would be so bold to do so in almost any region of the world.

                Many journalists in the past also operated with the sense that they were journalists first. But in recent years many journalists have been targeted over their nationality, ethnicity or religion. Everyone knows the case of then-Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl. But Western journalists comprise only a relative handful of all journalists killed anywhere around the world. Atwar Bahjat was an Iraqi correspondent for Al Jazeera and later Al-Arabiya, based in Doha and Dubai, respectively. In 2006, Bahjat and her TV crew were reporting at a major Shi’ite shrine right after it was bombed. Gunmen in a white car arrived on the scene demanding to know the whereabouts of the on-air correspondent. Her remains and those of two crew members were found the following day bearing signs of torture.

                One’s nationality, in particular, can be a two-way street. Stephen Farrell is a British national working for The New York Times. In 2009 he and an Afghani journalist working as his fixer, Sultan Munadi, were captured by Taliban combatants. (Hostage takers, too, have learned how to Google to glean information about their captors.) British authorities told Farrell’s family member and New York Times editors that they were weighing options before ordering British special forces to mount a surprise rescue operation. U.K. authorities said they did so to try and save the one British national. U.K. soldiers rescued Farrell but the Afghani journalist Munadi was killed along with an Afghani woman and one British soldier. This and other cases show how hard it is for journalists to maintain that they are journalists first anymore.

                But one thing has stayed the same. Local journalists continue to be, and have long been the journalists most at risk. Nearly 90 percent of journalists killed around the world are killed within the borders of their own nation. The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya repeatedly exposed human rights abuses before she was shot to death in the elevator of her apartment building. The Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga criticized his own government and foretold his own death before eight helmeted men on four motorcycles beat him with iron bars and wooden poles. He died a few hours later.

                Consider these two rarely reported facts: A local journalist is murdered somewhere around the world at least once every 11 day; the murderers get away with it in nearly nine out of 10 cases. Journalists tend to be violently attacked in open states or nations that are at least nominally democratic. They include Iraq, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Afghanistan, Nepal, Russia, Mexico, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.  Here’s another underreported statistic: Government officials of one kind or another have killed nearly as many journalists as have terrorist groups and other armed rebel forces, according to research by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, from which other data here not otherwise attributed is taken.

                In closed societies or nations run by a single political party or another absolute entity, outright censorship and imprisonment of journalists is common. Iran, China, Eritrea and Burma each top the latest list with the most journalists in jail. About half of them are behind bars on anti-state charges like terrorist collaboration, espionage, or propagandizing against the state.

                Two more trends reflect other new changes in news and information. More online journalists are behind bars today than either print or broadcast journalists, and nearly half of all the journalists languishing in jails around the world are also freelancers.

                At the same time, wars remain dangerous beats to cover. Many journalists have been killed or injured on the battlefield. More than 200 journalists and media workers have been killed or injured in Iraq alone since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Fire from U.S. military forces killed 16 journalists among them. That figure also includes two Iraqi photojournalists working for Reuters killed in a helicopter attack firing in an area that included armed men. The U.S. military’s own video of the attack later surfaced on the anti-secrecy information network WikiLeaks. The video showed the helicopter killing or critically injuring other civilians, including children.

                Sexual assaults and rapes of female journalists is another concern that has recently been brought to light. The sustained sexual assault of CBS Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan in Cairo during anti-government protests in Egypt shocked many observers, but some were less surprised.

                Women who are veteran journalists came forward one after another detailing their own experiences with groping and more severe sexual assaults by crowds of men in different nations.

                Technology has no doubt made the world a smaller place. But it is one at least as dangerous, if not more so, than before.  “Why then do we do it?” asked Sri Lanka’s Wickramatunga, a husband and father of three children, shortly before his own murder. “But there is a calling,” he answered, “that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience.”

———-

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist and the journalist security coordinator of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Smyth’s clips are at www.franksmyth.com. Visit CPJ at www.cpj.org.

This piece originally appeared in the Montana Journalism Review, Vol. 40, Summer 2011
http://issuu.com/montanajournalismreview/docs/mjr2011