Dangerous Assignments Spring/Summer 2008 by Virginia Anstett

DangerousAssignments covering the global press freedom struggle www.cpj.org

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Spring | Summer 2007

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George Packer on our debt to Iraqi journalists C o m m i t t e e t o · P r o t e c t J o u r n a l i s t s

Nina Ognianova on a battling Moscow paper

Save the Date: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 CPJ’s 17th Annual International Press Freedom Awards Dinner Tuesday, November 20, 2007 Waldorf-Astoria, Grand Ballroom New York City

Dinner Chairman: David Schlesinger Editor-in-Chief , Reuters

Join us as CPJ honors courageous international journalists and defends press freedom worldwide. For ticket information, email development@cpj.org or call 212-465-1004 ext. 122.

Thousands of mourners march down the street during a funeral procession for the late Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink in Istanbul, many carrying placards reading, “We all are Hrant Dink. We all are Armenians.” Reuters/Ahmet Ada

Contents

Dangerous Assignments Spring | Summer 2007 Committee to Protect Journalists Executive Director: Joel Simon Deputy Director: Robert Mahoney Dangerous Assignments Editorial Director: Bill Sweeney Designer: Virginia Anstett Printer: Photo Arts Limited

As It Happened The top press freedom stories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 In Focus A Turkish nationalist kills a prominent editor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 First Person By George Packer A reporter honors Iraqi journalists. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Q&A By Matthew Hansen A Moroccan publisher on corruption and calculations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Copy Editor: Barbara Ross Proofreader: Joe Sullivan Board of Directors Honorary Co-Chairmen Walter Cronkite Terry Anderson Chairman Paul E. Steiger Andrew Alexander, Franz Allina, Christiane Amanpour, Dean Baquet, Tom Brokaw, Sheila Coronel, Josh Friedman, Anne Garrels, James C. Goodale, Cheryl Gould, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Gwen Ifill, Steven L. Isenberg, Jane Kramer, David Laventhol, Anthony Lewis, David Marash, Kati Marton, Michael Massing, Geraldine Fabrikant Metz, Victor Navasky, Andres Oppenheimer, Burl Osborne, Charles L. Overby, Clarence Page, Norman Pearlstine, Erwin Potts, Dan Rather, Gene Roberts, Sandra Mims Rowe, John Seigenthaler, Paul C. Tash, Mark Whitaker, and Matthew Winkler. Published by the Committee to Protect Journalists 330 Seventh Avenue, 11th Floor New York, N.Y. 10001 On the Web: www.cpj.org E-mail: info@cpj.org Phone: (212) 465-1004

The List CPJ names 10 “backsliding” countries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 CPJ Remembers By Aaron Berhane Fesshaye Yohannes gave his life to write. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Cover Story Static in Venezuela By Carlos Lauría and Sauro González Rodríguez The Chávez administration seeks to pull the license of Venezuela’s oldest broadcaster, casting doubt on its commitment to free expression. . . . . 10 Viewpoint: Beyond the Rhetoric By Victor Navasky Envisioning true media diversity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Faded Colors By Alex Lupis The “Color Revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan lead to modest gains but few lasting reforms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Anya’s Paper By Nina Ognianova After spurring more than 30 criminal investigations, Moscow’s Novaya Gazeta is investigating its own journalists’ murders. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Viewpoint: Rose-Tinted TV Screens By Lynn Berry Kremlin-controlled television has an upbeat picture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Thailand at a Crossroads By Shawn W. Crispin Thousands of community radio stations are taking the heat after last year’s military coup. The junta promises press freedom but imposes censorship. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

A Killing in Mexico By Monica Campbell Why has there been no justice in the case of Brad Will, gunned down as he documented civil unrest in Oaxaca? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 On the Web By Robert Mahoney U.S. Internet companies try to write a code of ethics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 On the cover: In Caracas, a giant poster of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez trumpets his candidacy for re-election last fall. Chávez, who easily won another term, has set his sights on strengthening state media. AP Photo/Leslie Mazoch

Justice Project By María Salazar A slain reporter’s family fights for justice in Peru. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Correspondents By Elisabeth Witchel and Mohamed Keita Threats force a bold reporter to flee Rwanda. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Update By Heather Bourbeau The longest-jailed journalist in U.S. history explains how he got there. . . . . . 48 Drawing the Line By Mick Stern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Dangerous Assignments

As It Happened January

March

3 Thirty-two journalists are killed in connection with their work in Iraq in 2006, CPJ reports, the deadliest year for the press in a single country that the organization has ever recorded. Worldwide, CPJ finds 55 journalists killed for their work in 2006. (Related column, page 4.)

2 Ivan Safronov, a well-known defense correspondent for the business daily Kommersant, falls more than four stories from his apartment building in Moscow. Authorities initially call the death a suicide.

12 Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein (below) marks one year behind bars in Iraq. Despite the lengthy imprisonment, U.S. forces fail to charge him or disclose any evidence against him.

23 In Moscow, authorities tell a CPJ delegation that police officials in Chechnya may have been behind the October 2006 murder of reporter Anna Politkovskaya (below). (Related story, page 26.)

4 The Taliban abduct Afghan journalist Ajmal Nakshbandi, Italian reporter Daniele Mastrogiacomo, and driver Sayed Agha in Helmand province. Nakshbandi and Agha are later killed. Mastrogiacomo is released in exchange for five Taliban prisoners. 7 The Mexican Senate passes a landmark bill decriminalizing libel. President Felipe Calderón (below) signs the measure into law the next month, making Mexico the second Latin American country to repeal criminal libel laws. El Salvador was first.

May

Novaya Gazetta

3 Marking World Press Freedom Day, CPJ names the 10 “backsliding” countries where press freedom has most deteriorated. Ethiopia, the Gambia, and Russia lead the dishonor roll. I

As They Said

February AP

1 Independent Sudanese daily AlSudani is banned indefinitely for violating an official ban against publishing articles on the 2006 murder of AlWifaq Editor Mohammed Taha.

April 3 Freelance journalist Josh Wolf, the longest imprisoned journalist in U.S. history, is released from federal prison in California after agreeing to disclose unedited videotape to prosecutors. (Story, Page 48.)

22 Egyptian Internet writer Abdel Karim Suleiman (below) is sentenced to four years in prison for insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak. He is the first Egyptian blogger to be sentenced to prison for his work.

Reuters

6 In Casablanca, a CPJ delegation raises alarm about a pattern of punitive court decisions that have threatened Morocco’s independent press. (Related story, Page 6.)

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9 Ethiopia's High Court acquits eight editors and publishers of Amhariclanguage newspapers who had been jailed on antistate charges for nearly 18 months. CPJ had called the charges groundless.

“The issue of journalist persecution is one of the most pressing. And we realize our degree of responsibility in this. We will do everything to protect the press corps.” —Russian President Vladmir Putin at a February 1 press conference. “Mr. Wolf is the latest addition to a club whose growing membership should trouble us all.” —Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller in a New York Sun column on the jailed blogger Wolf. “For this government, information is about creating one sole truth, one sole communication, one sole culture.” —Analyst Marcelino Bisbal, critiquing the Venezuelan government’s aggressive media strategy. (Story, page 10.)

In Focus

s Hrant Dink lay on the cobblestone walk outside his newspaper office, blood pooling around his body, a 17-year-old ultranationalist named Ogun Samast ran through the streets shouting: “I killed an Armenian.” Dink, 52, felled by three shots to the head and neck, had edited Agos for all of the newspaper’s 11-year existence. Agos, the only Armenian newspaper in Turkey, had a circulation of just 6,000 but its political influence was vast. Dink regularly appeared on television to express his unpopular view that the mass killing of Armenians during the Ottoman Empire was genocide. Less than a week after the January 19 murder, more than 100,000 people (middle) gathered in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square to demand justice and chant: “We are all Armenians.” Protesters carried red carnations and pictures of Dink with the inscription, “My dear brother” in Turkish, Armenian, and English. Dink knew he was vulnerable in Turkey’s explosive political environment. He was prosecuted several times for the crime of “insulting Turkish identity.” In his last column, Dink predicted that 2007 would be a difficult year. “The trials will continue, new ones will be started. Who knows what other injustices I will be up against,” he wrote. Yasin Hayal (bottom), a nationalist implicated in other violent attacks, admitted inciting his friend Samast to kill Dink. As he was brought to a courtroom on January 24, Hayal issued an apparent threat against Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, who has also criticized the Armenian mass killings. “Orhan Pamuk,” he cried, “be smart, be smart!” It’s a threat Turkish journalists take seriously. “There is,” said Nadire Mater, head of the press freedom group BIA, “a broad feeling of insecurity among dissidents and critical columnists.” I

AP/Osman Orsal

AP/Murad Sezer

ISTANBUL, Turkey

Dangerous Assignments

Our Debt to Iraqi Journalists Support their work, honor their sacrifice, help them to safety. A reporter pays tribute to local journalists in Iraq. By George Packer

ince the war began in 2003, 115 Iraqi journalists and support staffers have been killed—more than four-fifths of the total in this category of war dead. Among the most recent was a woman named Khamail Khalaf, a reporter for Radio Free Iraq: On April 5, three days ago as I write, her body was found after she was kidnapped in western Baghdad. ThenumbersmakeIraqthedeadliestconflictfor journalists in modern history, but what is more disturbing is the nature of the deaths. Relatively few Iraqi journalists have been blown up by roadsidebombsorkilledincrossfire.The overwhelming majority of the dead were murdered for being journalists. In the first year of the war, the killers targeted those Iraqis who worked for foreigners as interpreters and fixers. Butsince2004,asmoreandmoreIraqislearned the trade and took on responsibilities as reporters, photographers, and producers, the victims have been employees of Baghdad newspapers or local satellite television networks. The campaign of killing—conducted largely by insurgents and militias—has been systematic. Itspurposeistomakejournalism impossible,justasthetargetedmurdersof doctors, professors,writers,artists,politicalfigures, andsocialactivistshavehelpedtomakemedical

George Packer is a staff writer with The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, which won awards from the Overseas Press Club and the New York Public Library. His most recent article for The New Yorker, "Betrayed," described the fate of Iraqis who have worked with Americans in Iraq.

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care, intellectual and artistic life, independent politics, and social change impossible in Iraq. This war on Iraqi society has been spectacularly effective. Of the Iraqi journalists I know best, one has sought refuge with his young family in America, another is waiting in Baghdad for a scholarship to study journalism in the States and meanwhile has all but stopped working, and a third moves back and forth between New York and Baghdad while spending less and less time in the latter city. Others, including the staff of the indispensable Institute for War and Peace Reporting, have pulled up stakes in Baghdad for the safety of Kurdistan, or else have fled to neighboring countries

with their families. Almost no one I met on my most recent trip in January seemed to think that anything resembling normal journalism will be possible much longer, and most are making arrangements to get out. That Iraqi journalists are continuing to work at all is a testament to their courage, because every one of them is marked for death. It isn’t just the deliberate assassinations by militants or the reckless firepower of American soldiers that Iraqi journalists have to fear. Increasingly, the threat comes from their own government, which has begun to restrict, harass, jail, and even eliminate those who produce what it considers to be unfavorable coverage. The elected

Iraq by the Numbers 84 percent of media deaths have been Iraqis. 72 percent of all media deaths were murders. 28 percent were killed in crossfire or combat-related circumstances. 79 percent of killings were committed by insurgent forces. U.S. forces were responsible for 12 percent of deaths. 59 percent of victims worked for Iraqi news organizations. 41 percent worked for international news organizations. 23 employees of the Iraq Media Network, which includes Al-Iraqiya and Al-Sabah newspaper, have been killed, the highest death toll among news outlets. For a complete database of all journalist deaths, visit www.cpj.org/deadly.

First Person

Lives Lost

Al-Sharqiya

The faces of Iraqi journalists recently killed …

Ahmed Hadi Naji Died January 5, 2007

Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah Died December 12, 2006 Othman al-Mashhadani Died April 6, 2007

Iraqi government’s attitude toward the press looks more and more like that of its predecessor, Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. Recently, at a conference on Iraqi journalism in Paris, when participants commemorated the “martyrs of the Iraqi media,” a leading Iraqi member of parliament named Ali alAdeeb, a close ally of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said, “Yes, but how many of them were spies and agents?” art of what makes the death of Iraqi journalism so painful is how recently and hopefully it was born. Writing last fall in The New York Times, an Iraqi friend and journalist named Ali Fadhil described the excitement in 2003 of joining the first truly free Iraqi press: “Just like American reporters, we could embed ourselves with the United States Army and we could attend coalition press conferences, where we addressed critical questions to American officials as well as to Iraqi officials. Many of the biggest stories were either written by Iraqis or reported by them. With American encouragement, Iraq produced a generation of young journalists who are decades ahead of their counterparts elsewhere in the region.” Over the next several years, Fadhil

found himself targeted by every armed side in Iraq—Sunni, Shia, government, and American—until he finally left the country. He concluded, “Iraqis were first inspired to become journalists because of the United States. Now the United States has turned our fate over to Iraqi politicians. If our government continues to be dominated by militias and to draw closer to the insurgency and the Islamic extremists, then in just a few months, no news will be reported from Iraq at all.” A few months ago, I was reminded of the intensity with which some young Iraqis have tried to create a free press in their country, and why it matters to them, what makes it so personal. I got an e-mail from a journalist whose younger brothers had just been kidnapped by militants and threatened with beheading before being released because they belonged to the “right” sectarian group. The journalist wrote me a harrowing account that ended: “I’ll spend my whole life fighting those people and the religion they claim they are fighting for. I am more determined now to be a journalist and I hope I can get the scholarship and after that I’ll teach them the lesson and get revenge

Iraqi Media Network

Khamail Khalaf Died April 5, 2007

Dorgham M. Ali

RFE/RL

Muhammad al-Ban Died November 13, 2006

Naqshin Hamma Rashid Died October 29, 2006

for my family from all the suffering we have from BOTH the Sunni and the Shia.” For this man, journalism is the best and maybe the only weapon with which he can fight murderous fanaticism; after years of violence, he is more committed to it than ever. But he can no longer fight in Iraq, and he is hoping to study in the United States this fall, if he can survive that long. What can Western journalists do for our Iraqi colleagues? Support them in their work, honor them in their death, and help them in their departure. Just as the U.S. government has an obligation to resettle here its Iraqi employees and affiliates who can no longer live safely in Iraq, news organizations and individual journalists should help bring Iraqi journalists and staff to America for training and, if necessary, safety. It will be a hard decision, because they’re still needed in their country. Let them be the judges. From working in Iraq, I know that I owe them at least my life. I

Dangerous Assignments

The Moroccan Equation Former publisher Aboubakr Jamaï discusses corruption, harassment, and government calculations. Interview by Matthew Hansen

ou resigned as publisher of Casablanca’s Le Journal Hebdomadaire and left the country in January to insulate the newsweekly from $350,000 in libel damages that you were ordered to pay. What were the circumstances surrounding the decision?

I was sentenced in a defamation case that had been cooked up by the regime, the most recent of many political lawsuits. The sentencing was an amount that I could not pay. It was another smear campaign, basically, like the rumors that we were financed by Algeria, by the Mossad, by the Islamists. Though I was obliged to leave the country, it could have been much worse. [Journalist] Ali Lmrabet was sentenced to three years in jail and almost died from a hunger strike. I’m not speaking of the ’60s or ’70s; this was 2003. And now he is banned from working. Can you imagine that? Now, in Morocco, a judge can ban a human being from journalism—for 10 years! So my case is not the only one and certainly not the most egregious. The suit against you stemmed from an article suggesting that an ostensibly independent study on Matthew Hansen is a Washingtonbased freelance writer. His most recent piece in Dangerous Assignments, “Deadly News,” appeared in the Fall 2006 edition.

Spring | Summer 2007

the Western Sahara had simply mimicked the government’s position. How did it feel to remove your name from the masthead of your newspaper? It was immensely difficult on a personal and professional level. Le Journal has been my life for 10 years— I was eating, sleeping, and living the newspaper. … But I am optimistic about the fate of Le Journal. Though people who read the paper may not always agree with its ideas or its editorial lines, there is a consensus that this is an honest paper. That is an enormous victory for us, a big win. Le Journal has been called an incorruptible voice in a corrupt society—one reason CPJ named you an International Press Freedom Award winner in 2003. Was there a struggle to remain independent and hard-hitting amid an environment of payoffs and bribes? The press is more corrupt than many other sections of society because the attraction is so great. You have a measure of power as a journalist that you can basically commercialize. Picture this: In Morocco, you have a massive market downtown. Everyone shops there. This market is almost 100 percent smuggled goods from Spain, and you have police surrounding it, allowing it to take place. So cor-

ruption in this case is a policeman who earns around $250 a month asking the guy making $1,000 a month selling pirated DVDs for a payoff. So when the Moroccan government allows the guy to sell smuggled goods from Spain, they are basically telling their policemen: Go take your share. This daily corruption manifests itself at all levels of society, especially in journalism. Moroccan authorities previously tried to silence you with fines, imprisonment, and the seizure of your newspaper. Does this mean your work at Le Journal has had an effect on King Mohammed VI’s regime? You have to understand the equation that the regime plays with the press in Morocco. On one hand, the regime hates us; on the other hand, they need us. If you visited Morocco’s Royal Cabinet and you told the guys there, “You are an autocratic regime,” do you know what they would say? They would say, “Look at Le Journal, look at this crazy Aboubakr Jamaï and what he is writing. How can you say we are not a free country?” So we serve them, in a sense. The cost to them is that we are trying to do good journalism, meaning that we investigate corruption, investigate and condemn human rights violations. It’s important to understand this equation. Some mornings, they would come in and say, “Well, they are really

Q&A annoying us with their journalism, but we are getting more benefits than costs here.” … Other mornings, they would say, “Oh, that is too much, that is too costly, even though their existence is allowing our ambassadors in Washington and Paris to claim that we have a free press. Let’s clamp down on them.” You’ve spoken of the “legalistic” harassment of journalists in Morocco. Among other things, Le Journal was banned in 2000 for publishing a letter about an assassination plot against King Hassan II.

or—who was, so to speak, the Darth Vader of Morocco—and nothing happened to him. So things in the regime have changed. … Still, King Mohammed VI does not understand that in order to let society evolve in a modern way you need to have political, not just economic, changes. You need to have political liberalization,

where you allow a society to decide for itself what it should do—and a major part of this is allowing a free press. If you don’t do that, all the efforts you are working on elsewhere won’t be worthwhile. I For updates on the Jamaï case and Morocco’s press freedom record, visit www.cpj.org.

CPJ/Joel Campagna

Yes, when we become too much for the regime, they respond by using legal harassment, as they did just two or three months after the paper returned from its 2000 ban. After a lawsuit by the minister of foreign affairs, I was sentenced to jail. In the end, the judgment was overturned, but we had to pay huge fines—more than $200,000. Of course, since then, the damages have multiplied. I’m in the United States today because of a legal case that was fabricated by the regime. You’re a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University now, but you and your family have invested much in Moroccan journalism. Your father was a journalist who suffered for his work. Have you seen any improvement in the situation for critical journalists? When my father went to jail in 1973, he was kidnapped and kept incommunicado without trial in a basement of the police station in Rabat. He was savagely tortured. Yet my father, 20 years later, wrote an open letter to the minister of the interi-

Dangerous Assignments

The List Directorate is suspected in some abductions.

7. Egypt

Ten countries where press freedom has deteriorated.

1. Ethiopia Leader: Meles Zenawi Indicators: Imprisonments rise from two to 18. Dozens forced into exile. In 2006 alone, authorities ban eight newspapers, expel two foreign reporters, and block critical Web sites. Key fact: Only a handful of pro-government private newspapers now publish.

2. Gambia Leader: Yahyah Jammeh Indicators: Editor Deyda Hydara murdered in 2004. The Independent, a leading newspaper, is targeted by arsonists and closed by the government. Criminal penalties instituted for defamation. Key fact: Eleven journalists jailed for extended periods in 2006.

3. Russia Leader: Vladimir Putin Indicators: All three national television channels now under state control. Eleven journalists murdered in last five years; no cases solved. Imprisoned journalists rise from one to three.

Spring | Summer 2007

Key fact: New law defines “extremism” as including “public slander toward figures fulfilling state duties.”

4. Democratic Republic of Congo Leader: Joseph Kabila Indicators: Two journalists slain since 2005. Attacks increase from three to nine. Criminal libel cases rise from none to nine. Imprisonments climb from three to 11. Key fact: Leaders of press freedom group Journaliste en Danger forced into hiding in 2006.

5. Cuba

AFP

rom Ethiopia, where the government launched a massive crackdown, to Russia, where the Kremlin tightened its grip on the press, here are the 10 nations where press freedom has declined the most in the past five years. CPJ examined conditions in seven categories: attacks, threats, deaths, imprisonments, censorship, judicial harassment, and criminal libel. Figures are annual unless noted. CPJ named these “Backsliders” on World Press Freedom Day, May 3.

Interim leader: Raúl Castro Indicators: Twenty-nine journalists imprisoned in massive 2003 crackdown. Five foreign journalists expelled after covering 2005 opposition meeting. Another 10 barred entry when Fidel Castro becomes ill in 2006. Key fact: Cases of government harassment increase in the past year.

6. Pakistan Leader: Pervez Musharraf Indicators: Eight journalists killed in last five years. At least 15 journalists abducted in that time. Government security agents interrogate reporters who interview Taliban figures. Key fact: Government’s Inter-Services

Leader: Hosni Mubarak Indicators: Government agents assault reporters covering demonstrations. Editor Reda Helal disappears in 2003. First Internet blogger sentenced to prison. Key fact: Egyptian Organization for Human Rights says 85 criminal cases launched against press between 2004 and 2006.

8. Azerbaijan Leader: Ilham Aliyev Indicators: Editor Elmar Huseynov slain in 2005. Criminal defamation cases rise from one to 14. Imprisonments climb from none to five. Two top journalists kidnapped in 2006. Key fact: Reporter Eynulla Fatullayev receives death threats after investigating Huseynov murder.

9. Morocco Leader: King Mohammed VI Indicators: Morocco joins Tunisia as Arab world’s leading jailer of journalists. Authorities banish three top journalists through politically motivated lawsuits. Spanish daily El País banned. Key fact: Editor Ali Lmrabet barred from profession for 10 years.

10. Thailand

AFP

Backsliders

Leader: Surayud Chulanont Indicators: New military junta nationalizes Thailand’s only private television station and orders radio stations to broadcast military-prepared news. Foreign news broadcasts blocked when former prime minister is mentioned. Key fact: New constitution is being drafted. Press guarantees uncertain. Read the full report at www.cpj.org/ backsliders.

CPJ Remembers

Fesshaye Yohannes In Eritrea, a reporter and Renaissance man dies cruelly in prison. By Aaron Berhane

TORONTO, Canada oshua was a Renaissance man—a poet, playwright, theater director, and newspaperman. He was humble, energetic, sociable, and committed to improving people’s lives with his powerful pen. That’s why it is so hard to accept that Fesshaye “Joshua” Yohannes, who cared so much for so many, died without his family and friends in cruel and inhumane conditions. I met Joshua when he joined us on the editorial board of the Eritrean twice-weekly newspaper Setit at the end of 1997. A veteran of Eritrea’s long struggle for independence from Ethiopia—as a teenager he fought alongside his countrymen—Joshua had much to offer our small nation on the Horn of Africa. “Do you think the government is even paying attention to the land issue?” I asked him one day after I became frustrated with the lack of official response to a series on villagers’ dissatisfaction with land distribution. Joshua, always the optimist, said, “Let’s keep on writing. One day they will respond.” He was, it seemed, born to write. Anyone could identify his talents by reading his poems and short stories, Aaron Berhane, an Eritrean journalist in exile, is a freelance writer and assistant researcher at Sheridan College outside Toronto.

Courtesy Aaron Berhane

Fesshaye Yohannes had a smile to match his powerful pen.

or by watching the plays he wrote and directed. He had great skill in presenting complicated topics in simple, engaging ways. And he used these skills to cover the pressing issues of the day in our young nation—from poverty to the plight of handicapped war veterans—even though he knew it would put him at odds with the government. During his four-year journalism career, Joshua often challenged the government for its mismanagement of housing and land issues. “Why is the land sold illegally? Why does the government allow houses to be built on fertile farming land?” Joshua wrote in October 2000. Eritrean authorities grew ever more intolerant of critics such as Joshua. On September 18,

2001, authorities shut down seven independent newspapers and arrested senior officials who were calling for reform. Five days later, Joshua and nine other leading journalists were arrested. A few of us managed to flee. Joshua, then 47, and the others were accused of “jeopardizing national security,” but no formal charge was ever filed against them. They staged a hunger strike in March 2002 to protest their detention—only to see their conditions worsen. My sources say that officials transferred the journalists from Asmara to Embatkala, then to Eiraeiro, one of the warmest places in Eritrea. Mistreatment and torture were standard practice. The reports that trickled out to the diaspora were harrowing: Joshua’s nails were ripped out, we heard, and he suffered partial paralysis due to beatings. Joshua, a father of three, was denied visits from his family and, we fear, proper medical attention. “They should have at least allowed us to visit him,” said a relative who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. Even during the Dergue regime, the violent military junta in Ethiopia that imprisoned or killed opponents from 1975 to 1991, “we were allowed to see our loved ones,” she said. “But this government is totally inhumane.” Last year, a detailed and credible online report claimed that three other Eritrean journalists—Yosuf Mohamed Ali, Medhanie Haile, and Said Abdelkadir—had died in prison since the 2001 crackdown. Cruelly, the government has refused to confirm their condition. Joshua was reported dead on January 11. Most people were infuriated by the way Joshua died; the “crime” that put him behind bars; the government’s refusal to hand over his body to his family. We can take solace in knowing that his captors could never kill Joshua’s spirit or erase his powerful words. Heaven welcomes Joshua with open arms, but, oh, how we miss him here. I

Dangerous Assignments

Static in Venezuela The Chávez administration pulls a broadcast license as it asserts media muscle. By Carlos Lauría and Sauro González Rodríguez

CARACAS, Venezuela scantily dressed Blanca struck a seductive pose and rubbed her foot against Daniel’s muscled leg when— surprise!—her ex-husband, Esteban, burst into the room to start an invective-hurling, furniture-jostling brawl. “How to Get a Man,” a soap opera-style drama on Radio Caracas Televisión, or RCTV, Venezuela’s oldest private television station, was filling the nation’s TV screens with its popular tales of lust and love on this January afternoon. One of those screens was in the office of Willian Lara, Venezuelan minister of communication and information, whose gaze this day passed over an entire bank of television monitors carrying broadcasts from across Venezuela. It was around 5 p.m. as Lara was meeting his visitors, a

AP/Francisco Batista

President Hugo Chávez says he will not renew RCTV’s broadcast license, calling it a “coup-mongering” station.

Carlos Lauría is CPJ’s senior program coordinator for the Americas. Sauro González Rodríguez, CPJ’s former Americas consultant, is a Miami-based journalist.

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time slot that government regulators say should be tailored to family viewing. “Just for this reason,” Lara said, “RCTV doesn’t deserve a broadcast concession.” Though standard dramatic fare by regional standards, such RCTV programs have been assailed as “pornography” by government officials—one of many shifting and often unsupported public accusations made against the station. Barring a last-minute reversal—something RCTV is pursuing in court—the government says it will not renew the station’s license to use the public airwaves when the term expires on May 27. The license—or concession, as it is known in Venezuela—would be the first to be effectively pulled from a private broadcaster by the government of President Hugo Chávez Frías. As Chávez continues to move toward what he and his supporters call “socialism of the 21st century,” his administration’s decision could have broad implications for free expression in this South American nation of 26 million. Officials from the president on down have accused RCTV of violating the constitution and the country’s broadcast laws—not to mention, they say, collaborating with planners of a 2002 coup against Chávez. But a three-month investigation by the Committee to Protect Journalists has found that the government failed to conduct a fair and transparent review of RCTV’s concession renewal. Instead, CPJ found, the evidence points to a predetermined and politically motivated decision. Chávez himself announced the decision in a December 28 speech, in which he said the government would not renew the “coup-mongering” RCTV’s license. In the months before and after the announcement, the government held no hearings, followed no discernible application process, and provided RCTV no opportunity to respond to assertions made by top officials in press conferences, speeches, and interviews. In late March—three months after the decision was

AP/Fernando Llano

Cover Story

Reporter Miguel Ángel Rodríguez tapes the show “The Interview” at RCTV. On the monitor is Willian Lara, minister of communication and information.

announced—the government released a 360-page paperback book that sought to explain the decision. Part documentary and part polemic, the White Book on RCTV devotes chapters to corporate media concentration, a history of Venezuela’s broadcast concessions, its view of RCTV’s role in a failed 2002 coup, and what it describes as the harmful effects of concentrated media ownership. The book lays out the administration’s position that it has full discretion on whether to renew the broadcast licenses first granted to RCTV and other broadcasters for 20-year terms under a 1987 decree. Jesse Chacón, a top telecommunications official, said at a March 29 press conference that the RCTV decision was not a sanction against the station but simply the “natural and inexorable” product of the concession’s expiration. Yet the White Book, published by the Ministry of Communication and Information, does include 45 pages of documents outlining alleged RCTV violations of broadcast laws. The citations on their face appear to be minor; the book offers no means to gauge their severity, to judge them against established government standards, or to compare them against the records of other broadcasters. The government, for example, cited RCTV for covering a wellknown murder case in a “sensational” manner and for showing alcohol consumption during a professional baseball game. The government also chided the station for calling the Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television—

which sets broad content restrictions on broadcasters—as the “content law” in its news broadcasts. Other accusations against RCTV—such as promoting “pornography”—are not cited in the book even though they were made publicly by top officials. Founded in 1953, RCTV has long been known for its strident opposition views, but it disputes the government’s

About this Report To examine press conditions in Venezuela, a joint delegation from CPJ and the Peru-based Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS) visited Caracas from January 7 to 13. The CPJ-IPYS delegation met with members of private and state-owned media, government officials, media executives, press freedom advocates, lawyers, and scholars during its weeklong mission. The delegation included the authors, CPJ board member Victor Navasky, IPYS Executive Director Ricardo Uceda, and IPYS-Venezuela Director Ewald Scharfenberg. Its preliminary findings were presented in Caracas in January. This report, which represents CPJ’s conclusions, was compiled from dozens of interviews conducted during the delegation’s meetings and in subsequent telephone interviews.

Dangerous Assignments

assertions of illegality and says the Chávez administration is engaging in political retaliation and suppression of critical news coverage. RCTV said it was never penalized for any violation, only warned. By contrast, RCTV said, the government left intact the licenses of other stations that have been penalized. This record, CPJ found, reflects an arbitrary and opaque decision-making process that sets an alarming precedent and casts doubt on Venezuela’s commitment to freedom of expression. The threat of losing access to the airwaves hangs over dozens of other television and radio stations whose concessions have also come up for renewal, prompting some news outlets to pull back on critical programming. The RCTV case also comes as the Chávez administration is moving aggressively to expand state media and amplify its voice. The government says it will take over RCTV’s frequency with plans to make it a public broadcasting channel. hávez has interpreted his landslide victory in the December 3, 2006, presidential election as a mandate to accelerate his socialist agenda. He immediately called on the political parties that make up his ruling coalition to dissolve and fold into one,

AP/Leslie Mazoch

and he recommended the appointment of a commission to reform the constitution—to include, possibly, indefinite presidential re-election. In January, the National Assembly—its seats filled entirely with pro-government legislators since the opposition boycotted the 2005 legislative elections—unanimously approved a law granting Chávez power to legislate by decree for 18 months in key areas such as national security, energy, and telecommunications. Since Chávez first took office in 1999 promising to implement what was widely considered a reformist, nationalist agenda, he has developed a highly contentious relationship with the press. Although he was elected in 1998 with the support of some media outlets, Chávez soon broke ties with them. As his agenda became more radical (or authoritarian, in the view of media executives), private media outlets took an openly partisan role, actively seeking his ouster and embracing the positions and language of his opponents. Some analysts say that private media, particularly television broadcasters, contributed to the country’s polarization with one-sided coverage of the political crisis that overtook Venezuela from 2001 to 2004, and with their hostility toward the government and its supporters. “Television turned into

Workers and supporters of RCTV rally in Caracas. The sign reads: “For 53 years, and more, RCTV.”

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Cover Story one of the elements that accentuated the polarization of the country; a powerful sector used the stations to overthrow the government,” said Teodoro Petkoff, editor of the Caracasbased daily TalCual and a leading opposition politician. The April 2002 coup against Chávez was a watershed for the administration, according to Marcelino Bisbal, a professor at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello who has written extensively on press issues in Venezuela. That was the moment when Chávez realized the government’s communications apparatus—composed of a radio network, one TV channel, and the official news agency—was at a disadvantage with respect to commercial media. Since the coup, the administration has undertaken an ambitious plan to beef up the government’s communications portfolio. Chávez has used this growing state-owned sector as a government megaphone, stacking its personnel ranks with sympathizers and influencing content to ensure that he receives vast amounts of uncritical coverage. In addition, he has used cadenas—presidential addresses that preempt regular programming on all stations—to counter the private media’s news coverage and to single out individuals for censure, often lashing out at journalists and media owners. His aggressive rhetoric has reinforced hostility toward journalists among his supporters, and officials have repeatedly made unsubstantiated charges linking local journalists to purported U.S. attempts to destabilize Venezuela. From 2000 to 2004, coinciding with peaks of political conflict, scores of Venezuelan journalists were attacked, harassed, or threatened, for the most part by government loyalists and state security forces. The violent animosity has not been one-sided: Opposition sympathizers have attacked or harassed reporters and photographers working for state media. One photographer, Jorge Tortoza, was shot and killed while covering clashes between opposition demonstrators and government supporters that preceded the 2002 coup. The government’s rhetoric has been accompanied by a legal offensive against the news media. In 2005, the National Assembly drastically increased criminal penalties for defamation and slander while expanding the reach of the penal code’s desacato provisions, which criminalize expressions deemed offensive to public officials and state institutions. The Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television, which took effect that year, has been widely criticized by press freedom advocates for its broad and vaguely worded restrictions on free expression. Article 29, for example, bars television and radio stations from broadcasting messages that “promote, defend, or incite breaches of public order” or “are contrary to the security of the nation.”

ong before Chávez came to power, other Venezuelan presidents had attempted to silence critical news coverage. Their methods ranged from threats and overt censorship to denials of preferential exchange rates for the import of newsprint. Some media outlets were known to quietly cave in to pressure and accommodate government demands; others denounced those pressures. For instance, after a failed military coup in February 1992—this one led by Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel—at least five media outlets in Venezuela were raided, censored, prohibited from circulating, or had copies confiscated by authorities. Chávez administration officials told CPJ that they pride themselves on promoting free expression. While the democratic period from 1958 to 1998 was marked by media self-censorship and acquiescence to government demands, they said, free speech has flourished under Chávez. “In Venezuela, we are recovering the freedom of expression that until now has been confiscated by large corporate groups. The very moment in which Venezuela is accused of violating freedom of expression is the moment when there is the most freedom of expression,” said José Vicente Rangel, a Chávez ally who served as vice president until this year. For proof of their commitment to free speech, officials note that no journalist has been imprisoned or expelled and that no newspaper or TV station has been seized or suspended during Chávez’s eight-year tenure. “There’s an authentic democracy in Venezuela in the property of media. It’s not true that private media are being smothered,” said Lara, the communications minister. The administration also points to state-supported community media—low-power, limited-range stations that are billed as independent, nonprofit entities serving the communities in which they are based. According to government figures, regulators granted licenses to 193 community radio and TV stations between 2002 and 2006, while the 2007 budget allocates approximately US$1 million for community media. The government trumpets these stations as evidence it supports greater media diversity, but analysts say that much of the programming thus far has been homogeneous and government influenced. At the same time, journalists, media executives, and free speech advocates told CPJ that authorities have sought to marginalize the traditional private press by blocking access to state-sponsored events, government buildings, and public institutions; by refusing to give statements to reporters working for private media; by withholding advertising; by denying access to public information; and by filing criminal defamation complaints. “There are two different perceptions about what a jour-

The law of social responsibility bars broadcasting messages that “are contrary to the security of the nation.” Dangerous Assignments

nalist’s job should be, from inside and outside the government, and those perceptions are mutually exclusive. Every time the media reports on government mistakes or acts of corruption, they are accused of becoming involved in politics,” said Gregorio Salazar, secretary-general of the national press workers trade union. All of the journalists and media executives who spoke with CPJ agreed they could express their views but said they risked retaliation in the form of tax harassment, administrative inspections, official silence in response to their requests, and verbal attacks aimed at discrediting them. Executives with the independent channel Globovisión, for example, said that their station had asked the government repeatedly for permission to expand the station’s signal but had received no answer. The print media, which are not covered by the social responsibility law, are less vulnerable to direct government pressure. Instead, newspaper editors told CPJ, they tend to see state advertising pulled in retaliation for critical coverage. “In our business model, we’ve decided that official advertising does not exist,” said El Nacional’s publisher and editor, Miguel Henrique Otero. roadcasting a mix of news, sports, soap operas, talk and game shows, RCTV has long been a leading network in Venezuela. Its weekly satirical program, “Radio Rochela” has been a Venezuelan institution, lampooning politicians well before Chávez was first elected in 1998. The station has also been among those closely associated with the political opposition, actively promoting a partisan agenda and harshly criticizing Chávez. The administration has long reminded RCTV and other private media of their cheering for the April 2002 coup that briefly unseated Chávez, as well as their participation in a failed, opposition-led general strike in late 2002 and early 2003 that sought to force his resignation. Chávez has regularly threatened to review or revoke the broadcast concessions of private TV channels, which the government has labeled golpistas, or “coup mongers,” but whose executives have never been charged with involvement in the coup. The situation escalated in June 2006, when Chávez threatened to block the license renewals of unnamed television and radio stations that were waging “psychological war to divide, weaken, and destroy the nation” as part of an “imperialist plan” to overthrow the government. Days later, Lara announced that the government was legally entitled to refuse license renewals to stations it deemed in violation of the law. Broadcasters, he said, had demonstrated “a systematic tendency to violate” the social responsibility law. After having won re-election, Chávez singled out RCTV

in a December 28 address to Venezuelan troops. “There won’t be any new concession for that coup-mongering channel that was known as Radio Caracas Televisión,” Chávez said. “Venezuela must be respected.” That applies to international observers, too, he made plain. When José Miguel Insulza, secretary-general of the Organization of American States, expressed concern that the action was unusual and could have international implications, Chávez publicly called him an “idiot.” Several free speech advocates, some of whom are highly critical of RCTV’s programming, told CPJ that the government was clearly punishing the station for its editorial stance—and that the effect on unbiased reporting would be enormous. They said the non-renewal of RCTV’s concession was a political decision with the thinnest of legal veneers. “My interest is not [defending RCTV chief] Marcel Granier but defending the people who want to follow and watch RCTV’s programming—even if the government finds it annoying,” said Carlos Correa, director of Espacio Público, a nongovernmental organization that promotes free expression and journalism ethics in Venezuela. Lara said the RCTV ruling was not a politically inspired act of retaliation. “The elite always assume they are above the law, above the constitution,” Lara said. “We don’t need any process because their concession is not being revoked; their frequency becomes free after May 27. A TV signal in Venezuela must have a social function—that’s a constitutional mandate.” But licensing, CPJ found, is wrapped in ambiguity and ripe for political manipulation. The government’s White Book says the 1987 broadcast decree and the 2000 Organic Law on Telecommunications form the basis for handling renewals. But neither document spells out in detail the criteria or process by which applications are to be evaluated. RCTV argues that the government ignored one crucial provision of the broadcast decree, which says that current license-holders should be granted preference when they are seeking renewal. The station has pressed a number of other arguments in favor of its concession renewal. Granier, the station president, told CPJ that the National Telecommunications Commission (Conatel), the agency in charge of broadcast concessions, failed to respond to RCTV’s formal application to update the license—first filed in 2002—and thus the concession should automatically roll over. “We are being accused of being golpistas, of pornography, but we haven’t seen one single file containing those accusations so that we can defend ourselves,” Granier said. Indeed, some public allegations made against RCTV went undocumented in the government’s own White Book.

Officials note that no journalist has been imprisoned or expelled during Chávez’s eight-year tenure.

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Cover Story

AP/Ricardo Mazalan

An April 2002 coup briefly unseated Chávez and led to public demonstrations. Government opponents wave flags in a Caracas neighborhood, while Chávez supporters race toward the presidential palace.

transmitters, antennas, and towers, although Chacón later said it would purchase and install its own equipment. he 2002 coup attempt is central to all discussions about government-media relations. On April 11, 2002, following three days of opposition protests, the government preempted broadcasts by local television stations for a message from Chávez. During the address, private stations continued covering the protests using split screens. Chávez accused the stations of conspiring to overthrow his government and ordered them closed. At around midnight, the president was ousted by a group of high-ranking military officers, and Pedro Carmona, head of the country’s most powerful business group, was appointed leader of the new, military-backed cabinet. News of the coup resulted in protests by Chávez supporters, and within 48 hours military officers loyal to Chávez had reinstated him. During his ouster, the four main private TV channels featured scant coverage of pro-Chávez demonstrations and instead showed cartoons and movies. Many analysts alleged that private media executives had colluded to impose a news blackout, heeding instructions given by Carmona. The executives claimed that they could not cover the story for fear that Chávez’s backers, who had harassed several media outlets earlier in the year, would attack their staff or their offices. No media owner or executive has ever been charged with involvement in the coup. And in a controversial decision, the Supreme Tribunal of Justice ruled that what happened on April 11, 2002, wasn’t a coup d’etat at all. Coup or not, it’s had a lasting effect on the news media. Venevisión, RCTV’s main competitor as Venezuela’s top-

AP/Ricardo Mazalan

T Lara, for example, said that the station had violated the social responsibility law by airing shows such as “How to Get a Man” during daytime hours. The law on social responsibility does spell out an array of content restrictions, CPJ found, but it does not explicitly forbid such programs during the daytime hours. A number of other Venezuelan stations, in fact, have similar daytime broadcasts. RCTV has appealed the decision to the Supreme Tribunal of Justice, asking the court to ensure its right to due process and to issue an injunction blocking the government’s actions. Termination of the license could be a devastating blow. In an interview with the daily El Nacional, Granier said the station “lives on its permit to operate broadcast frequencies.” Moving RCTV to cable or satellite does not hold great commercial promise in Venezuela, where only one in five homes has access to such transmissions. Using RCTV’s frequency, the government plans to create a public service channel by allowing independent producers, community and social organizations, and cooperatives, to design programming, said Chacón, head of the newly created Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technology. The government initially said it would expropriate RCTV’s

Dangerous Assignments

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other broadcasters whose 20-year terms expire this year under the 1987 decree. At various times, telecommunications minister Chacón has suggested that the government would have the right to take over frequencies at some undetermined point in the future. More recently, he’s said that concessions will be renewed for five-year periods. These ominous and shifting standards, journalists say, are certain to dampen critical coverage. s the Chávez administration moves assertively on licensing, it is building its own media structure. Until 2002, the state communications apparatus was composed of the Radio Nacional de Venezuela network, Venezolana de Televisión (VTV), and Venpres, the official news agency. Since then, the government has challenged the private media’s influence through investment in state-owned and community media projects, for which it has budgeted 362 billion bolívares (US$169 million) in the last two years alone. VTV, which had been neglected by previous administrations, received an infusion of technology that allowed the channel to improve the quality and reach of its signal. The government has also invested in new national broadcast and cable outlets and the creation of alternative and community media, including TV and radio stations, newspapers, and Web sites. Since 2003, it has financed the startup of ViVe TV, a cultural and educational television network with nationwide coverage; ANTV, which broadcasts National Assembly sessions on the airwaves and on cable; and Ávila TV, a regional channel run by the city of Caracas. In July 2005, the Chávez government launched its most ambitious media project to date: Telesur, a 24-hour news channel that officials see as an alternative to CNN. Venezuela owns 51 percent of the channel, while the governments of Argentina, Cuba, Uruguay, and Bolivia own minority stakes. Telesur currently has several news bureaus

Reuters/Jorge Silva

El Universal/Carlos Hernandez

rated TV channel, appears to have escaped the government’s ire for the time being. Once among the Chávez administration’s favorite targets, Venevisión, led by media mogul Gustavo Cisneros, had opposed the government and championed the opposition’s cause. Officials had previously alleged that Cisneros was a leading figure in the events surrounding the coup. But in June 2004, a private meeting between Chávez and Cisneros, mediated by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center, produced a ceasefire of sorts. “There was a mutual commitment to honor constitutional processes and to support further discussions between the government of Venezuela and the country’s news Business leader Pedro Carmona led a transitional government media to ensure the most when Chávez was ousted for appropriate climate for two days. this constitutional process,” the Carter Center said in a statement. Venevisión subsequently removed opinion and news shows that were highly critical of Chávez, and it now focuses almost exclusively on entertainment programming. Today, government officials cite Venevisión as a model of behavior. Venevisión executives did not return messages from CPJ seeking comment on programming. Without RCTV, local journalists and free speech advocates predict there won’t be any national broadcaster left to criticize the government. (Venezuela’s other critical TV station, Globovisión, can be seen as a broadcast channel in metropolitan Caracas and the state of Carabobo only.) The remaining private broadcaster with national reach, Caracasbased Televén, is widely believed to have followed Venevisión’s steps in curbing its criticisms of the Chávez administration. In an October 2005 report, the Peruvian press freedom group Instituto Prensa y Sociedad said Televén had dropped four opinion programs since September 2004. Televén executives did not respond to CPJ’s requests for comment. A report on the 2006 presidential election by European Union observers found yawning gaps in broadcast coverage of the campaign: “The tone of the coverage on Televén and Venevisión was generally not very critical of either of the leading coalitions, but from a quantitative point of view both openly favored the [Chávez] position.” Venevisión, the observers said, devoted 84 percent of its political coverage to the Chávez coalition; Televén, 68 percent. Uncertainty hangs over the concessions of dozens of

RCTV President Marcel Granier, seen here in a camera viewfinder, says the government did not give the station an opportunity to make its case.

Viewpoint

Beyond the Rhetoric Can diversity and public access be promoted without damaging press freedom? A worthy ideal may lie in Venezuelan debate. By Victor S. Navasky

hen President Hugo Chávez announced a few days before our mission that the government did not intend to renew the license of RCTV, which was due to expire in May, he explained that Venezuela would “not tolerate media at the service of coup-plotting against the people, against the nation, against national independence, and against the dignity of the republic.” This naturally gave Chávez critics the world over the occasion to criticize some more. The Washington Post, for example, editorialized: “If he follows through on his threats, [Venezuela’s 26 million people] can look forward to steadily diminishing freedom. …” RCTV and the Chávez opposition denounced the government’s action as censorship. Chávez and his supporters said it was no such thing; it was simply a decision not to renew the license of a station that had failed to earn the right to continue broadcasting because, among other things, it had broken Venezuela’s (problematic) Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television. Besides, the minister of communication and information said, there is no automatic right to renewal. Our delegation didn’t believe we had sufficient facts to say whether or when the nonrenewal had turned into de facto censorship. But we unanimously condemned the arbitrary and opaque way in which Chávez and his government appeared to have acted, said it would have a chilling effect, and respectfully called for openness, transparency, and due process in the future. But, for me, the most intriguing part of our mission was less what we found when we got there than the questions I left with: Was the decision not to renew RCTV’s concession (as licenses are known) merely the latest power grab by Caudillo Chávez, who will turn out, like Castro, to be hos-

Victor Navasky is a founding member of CPJ, publisher emeritus of The Nation, chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review, and director of the Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Parts of this essay appeared in a different form in The Nation in February.

tile to the requirements of free expression? Or is it a sign that he is serious in his plan to empower the poor, and to use his missions, decrees, and revised laws to guarantee bottom-up democratic access and ownership of the various modes of communication? Of course, it could be a little bit of both. Nevertheless, the issue remains: Is it possible to reconcile Chávez’s socialist ideal of empowering the people with the ideals of free speech, First Amendment values, and the absence of government interference and prior restraint? Chávez’s talk of “socialism of the 21st century” has been dismissed by his critics as vague, and so it is; but surely it’s a more noble and ambitious aspiration than carrying forward the media concentration of the 20th century. The issue is particularly complicated where broadcast media are involved, since the allocation of broadcast frequencies is inevitably a political process. In our own country, for instance, the Communications Act of 1934 required that broadcasting be carried out “in the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” And yet from the outset, with rare exceptions, the Federal Communications Commission has routinely renewed broadcast licenses without any serious attempt to inject “civil society” content into this highsounding (and vague) formula. For better or worse, our broadcasters were not even able to live within the mild strictures of the old Fairness Doctrine, which sought to ensure balanced coverage of controversial subjects. Wouldn’t it be something if every time a Venezuelan broadcast concession came up for renewal, Conatel—the Venezuelan version of the FCC—sought honest, transparent, and open bidding, with the goal of achieving true media diversity and public access (and I would throw balance and fairness into the mix)? Chávez and his cohorts have talked much of stations owned by cooperatives, by communities, by public-private partnerships—stations like Telesur, which, along with Venezuela, is jointly owned by Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, and Uruguay. I don’t underestimate the difficulty of identifying the various criteria by which stations and networks might be allo-

Dangerous Assignments

candidates for office or to devote more than a small percentage of their resources to influencing legislation, but these and other provisions ought to be subject to review, with the interests of civil society in mind. The point is that news and opinion gathering may be undermined, distorted, or suppressed by the state (the ministries of information and education in totalitarian states come to mind). Or, without for a moment suggesting moral or political equivalence between the two, by the market (for example, the half-dozen Big Media companies that currently dominate our own media environment). Chávez claims to be trying to do something about that. Perhaps his talk of 21st-century socialism is empty rhetoric, but it’s certainly worth thinking about. I prefer to think of it as his version of magic realism—still a fiction, but one to be nourished as an ideal to pursue. I

AP/Francisco Batista

cated and evaluated. But perhaps a place to start would be a comparative analysis of the many ownership models—both in broadcasting and in print—that are already out there. In the United Kingdom alone, there is the BBC, The Guardian (which is owned by a nonprofit trust), and The Economist (where three independent trustees from the House of Lords, no less, have veto power over appointment of the editor). In the United States, there is the Government Printing Office, C-SPAN, public television, NPR (which in 2003 received a $230 million bequest from the estate of philanthropist Joan B. Kroc), listener-supported Pacifica, and endowments for the humanities and the arts. Why not an endowment for the news? And then there is the entire nonprofit sector—what author Jeffrey Scheuer has called “the love-child of capitalism and democracy”—financed by government and private enterprise, yet independent of both. In our own country, nonprofits are not permitted to endorse

Chavez is interviewed in the Caracas studios of Telesur, which is owned by the governments of Venezuela and four other nations.

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AP/Leslie Mazoch

Cover Story

Workers erect a sign for Telesur as the regional news channel gets set to launch in July 2005.

in Latin America, the Caribbean, and in Washington. It plans to start a news agency and open bureaus in London and Madrid later this year. Telesur is broadcast from Caracas via satellite link, and its signal can be received in Latin America, in most of the United States, and in Europe. Cable systems in a number of Latin American countries have signed agreements to distribute the network’s programming, and in Spain, several small TV stations will carry its news programs. Telesur said it intends to launch its own station in Spain later this year. Last December, Telesur bought Caracas-based broadcast television channel CMT in order to expand its reach beyond cable and satellite subscribers. On February 9, the network began transmitting its signal to all major Venezuelan cities, including Caracas. In the rest of the country, it’s available through DirectTV’s satellite system, cable providers, and community TV stations. In a January 8 interview with El Nacional, Andrés Izarra, former minister of communications and information and Telesur president, said the Chávez administration is building “information hegemony.” “For the new strategic scenario that is discussed, the struggle that falls in the ideological field has to do with a battle of ideas for the hearts and minds of people,” Izarra stated. “We have to prepare a new plan, and the one we are proposing is aimed at achieving the state’s communication

and information hegemony.” He insisted that this hegemony did not mean the end of dissent, and that media not aligned with the government would continue to exist. By expanding state and community media, Lara and other top officials say, the government is fulfilling its constitutional mandate to guarantee Venezuelans’ right to information. Media analysts such as Bisbal say that approach has been self-serving. “For this government,” Bisbal wrote in a 2006 analysis, “information is about creating one sole truth, one sole communication, one sole information, one sole culture.” Without ensuring due process in the RCTV case, the government reinforces that viewpoint. The record shows that, first, a decision was announced, and then a flurry of public allegations made. But thus far, there has been no fair and transparent process whereby evidence could be scrutinized and the station could present its case. Instead, the record reflects the actions of a government motivated by political considerations to suppress critical coverage. Because the broadcast concessions of many radio and television stations are due to expire this year, the RCTV case is forcing other outlets to soften their coverage and rid their programs of critical voices. The Chávez administration appears to be replacing what it considers to be corporate domination of the airwaves with state domination. I

Dangerous Assignments

Faded Colors Some press gains are reported in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, but the Color Revolutions have yet to deliver lasting reforms. By Alex Lupis

TBILISI, Georgia hen 30 National Security Ministry agents tried to raid the independent television station Rustavi-2 in October 2001, days after it had reported explosive allegations of government corruption, Station Manager Nika Tabatadze refused to let them in. Instead, he broadcast the standoff live, and declared: “This is all happening on political orders from authorities.” Hundreds of supporters thronged the building—and the agents retreated. The following day, as 3,000 people gathered outside parliament to protest the raid—ordered, ostensibly, as part of a tax probe but seen widely as political retaliation—government leaders were contrite. National Security Minister Vakhtang Kutateladze resigned, and President Eduard Shevardnadze announced on public television, “As president, I consider myself guilty as well.” The station’s influential and hard-edged coverage over the next two years helped mobilize public outrage against the pervasive corruption and poverty that marked Shevardnadze’s rule, leading to his eventual ouster in November 2003 in what came to be called the Rose Revolution. This stirring success emboldened opposition movements in Ukraine, where the Orange Revolution of November 2004 ushered in new, open elections; and in Kyrgyzstan, where the Tulip Revolution of March 2005 opened the way for a new coalition government. The reformists who took office in the “Color Revolutions” pledged far-reaching

Alex Lupis, a Moscow-based freelance journalist, was CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator from 2000 to 2006.

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democratic changes, including policies to promote independent news reporting. Yet for all its promise, the post-revolution era in these former Soviet states has so far failed to bring about lasting transformation of news media as independent sources of information, a CPJ analysis has found. Some modest improvements have been seen: Government officials in all three countries have used less overtly aggressive measures to control the news media; legislative gains such as the decriminalization of libel in Georgia have been achieved; and, at least for a time, physical attacks on the press declined in both Georgia and Ukraine. But the countries’ new leaders have implemented few broad reforms to insulate the media from political influence, CPJ found after conducting dozens of interviews with journalists, analysts, politicians, and others in all three countries. In Ukraine, presidential promises to remake Soviet-style state broadcast outlets into publicly funded but politically independent stations have gone unfulfilled. Kyrgyz officials still place government loyalists in important state news media positions. Government harassment continues in Georgia, where questionable tax investigations have been launched against critical media outlets. Economic factors are intertwined. In Georgia and Ukraine, much of the national media are owned by businesspeople with close government ties. It’s not suprising, then, that the Georgian government has successfully pressured or persuaded private media owners to tone down coverage and to replace critical journalists. Rustavi-2 is a good example. Its sharply critical news coverage has been dulled after two politically inspired business takeovers. Tabatadze,

AP/Sergei Grits

Protesters celebrate Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze’s resignation in November 2003. The Rose Revolution has led to only modest press gains.

the station manager whose defiance helped lead to revolution, lost his job in a 2006 shake-up. His replacement: a presidential ally who had no broadcast experience. “New authorities have this mentality that either you are with us or you are against us,” said Sofia Chaava, a former Rustavi-2 reporter who was among six journalists who resigned from the station in 2006 to protest government influence. “They understand and are afraid of broadcast media because of the role journalists played in the revolution.” Media consumption is similar in the three nations—citizens overwhelmingly rely on television news—although political conditions differ. The revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine stood out for having relatively cohesive and proWestern movements with clear reform programs and charismatic leaders. The more chaotic and violent upheaval in Kyrgyzstan relied in part on pro-Russian politicians who lacked such clearly defined programs. To varying degrees in all three countries, “one faction of a divided elite took over from another,” said Martha Brill Olcott, a Washingtonbased analyst for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in testimony to the U.S. Congress. To be sure, these coalitions were forming governments in chaotic circumstances, attempting to take control of cor-

rupt and ineffective bureaucracies while confronting regional rivalries that had been suppressed for decades. Kyiv sought to balance Ukraine's pro-European western regions with its pro-Russian eastern areas. Tbilisi worked to reintegrate ethnic Abkhazians and Ossetians living in two Kremlin-backed separatist regimes in northern Georgia. And Bishkek had to reconcile the politically dominant, Russified north with the more religious, impoverished, and culturally Uzbek south. While these new central governments have been less aggressive in harassing the media, the continuing lack of judicial and regulatory reform has nonetheless left media outlets in need of influential patrons. Political parties, the business elite, and senior government officials have moved assertively to fill the vacuum. “Both the ruling and opposition parties all look at television as a tool to solve their own political problems ... not as a business but as an instrument used for bargaining and pressure,” said Tatyana Lebedeva, director of the Kyiv-based National Council for Television and Radio Broadcasting. GEORGIA n late 2003, a coalition of young pro-Western politicians, prodemocracy groups, and local media rallied Georgians to

Dangerous Assignments

Georgia’s Mikhail Saakashvili has made some press freedom improvements, but his administration exerts behindthe-scenes pressure on news outlets.

Rustavi-2 anchor Eka Khoperia resigned on the air after Georgian officials tried to dictate her programming.

02 AP/Georgy Abdaladze

gia. “Many businessmen invest in media to protect their business interests.” The independent television channel 202 briefly emerged as a prominent source of opposition views until it was undermined by a scandal of its own: Authorities convicted station executives Shalva Ramishvili and David Kokheridze in 2006 on charges of extorting 54,000 lari (US$32,000) from parliamentarian Koba Bekauri in exchange for suppressing critical coverage of his business activities. While the president sometimes spoke in defense of press freedom—“If someone dares to put pressure on the media, I would be his worst enemy,” he said in September 2005—he also defended politicians who abused journalists. In December 2005, Imereti Gov. Akaki Bobokhidze brutally beat Rioni TV journalist Irakli Imnaishvili following a live debate. Bobokhidze resigned but was not criminally charged in the attack—which left Imnaishvili with a concussion and a broken nose—and he enjoyed vigorous support from Saakashvili, who praised the governor as someone who “never betrayed his principles or his country.” Ana Dolidze, director of the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association, said her group urged that charges be filed against Bobokhidze, “but the prosecutor decided not to open a case because he said the journalist’s injuries were ‘very slight.’” “Saakashvili’s comments sent a message to politicians that if you feel cornered by the media, you can do the same thing,” she said. The president’s approval ratings have since dropped amid public dissatisfaction with a low standard of living and continued corruption. That, in turn, has led to greater government pressure on the media in the past year, numerous journalists said. Badri Patarkatsishvili, reportedly the country’s wealthiest tycoon, accused Saakashvili’s adminis-

01 AP/Shakh Aivazov

protest against Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister whose decadelong rule as president was characterized by bureaucratic incompetence and two brutal wars with Russian-backed separatists in northern enclaves. Against this backdrop, a U.S.-educated lawyer named Mikhail Saakashvili burst into parliament—and into the public’s imagination—in November 2003, carrying a rose to protest that month’s fraud-marred national elections. In the peaceful revolt that followed, Shevardnadze resigned, and Saakashvili swept the rescheduled presidential election in January 2004. During his first year in office, Saakashvili and his National Movement party improved media freedom by decriminalizing libel and the publication of state secrets. Attacks against journalists declined during the new government’s honeymoon with the independent media. News coverage seemed to observe a ceasefire as well. “For about a half year after the revolution, the media reported on the new government’s actions without criticism, which was understandable because [journalists and the opposition] were so close to each other in the last years of Shevardnadze’s rule,” said Tamara Chikovani, a journalist with the Tbilisi bureau of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). During the first several months of Saakashvili’s administration, the country’s influential television stations— including Rustavi-2, state television Channel 1, Imedi, and Mze—all canceled popular political talk shows amid speculation that senior government officials had asked media owners to ease critical programming. In summer 2004, Rustavi-2 owner Erosi Kitsmarishvili quietly sold the channel after then-Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania denounced the station for covering corruption allegations linked to Zhvania’s brother. Politicized regulation of broadcast media also rewarded those who supported the government. The Georgian National Communications Commission—whose top members are appointed by the president—revoked Lomisa TV’s license for failing to meet an application deadline, but allowed the more docile Rustavi-2 to keep its license when that station missed the same deadline, according to local press reports. With advertising revenue low, media companies relied on investment from businesspeople who often influenced editorial policies to promote their commercial activities. Control of Rustavi-2 was sold first to Kibar Khalvashi, a businessman with ties to Defense Minister Irakli Okruashvili, and then to a holding company known as Geotrans, which has continued on a tack sympathetic to the government. “When the media owners are pro-government, journalists are not protected from bureaucrats who interfere in their work,” said Genadi Uchumbegashvili, director of the Tbilisi-based media training organization Internews Geor-

Political parties, wealthy businesspeople, and senior politicians have moved aggressively to control news media. 22

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tration of harassing him with tax inspections after Imedi TV, part of his radio and television broadcast company, reported accusations that Interior Ministry officers fatally beat a banker. In July 2006, Rustavi-2 anchor Eka Khoperia abruptly resigned during a live broadcast of her political talk show “Free Topic” to protest government officials’ dictating which guests could appear. “Several senior people in the government would regularly call me and tell me how to prepare upcoming programs,” Khoperia said. The next month, Rustavi-2 dismissed Tabatadze and appointed Koba Davarashvili, an advertising executive and a friend of Giorgi Arveladze, Saakashvili’s chief-of-staff. Six prominent journalists resigned to protest the dismissal and the owner’s close association with the Saakashvili administration. A week after the resignations, Imedi announced that it had formed a partnership with Rupert Murdoch’s U.S.-based News Corporation, partly as a buffer against the Saakashvili administration. “We have been very eager to have a Western partner,” Imedi News Director Giorgi Targamadze said. “Not just for economic reasons ... but we also wanted additional guarantees that the government won’t interfere in our editorial policies.” Saakashvili’s hand in media management may be strengthened later this year, when parliament is set to consider a controversial bill that would impose a code of conduct on broadcast media. The proposed code would broadly regulate the content of broadcasts and the manner of their production, while setting up complaint mechanisms. The bill’s vague language is itself a cause for alarm in the view of many journalists. “Journalists expected a lot more from this government,” said RFE/RL's Chikovani. “We’re still in a transitional period, and it is not clear how this will all end.”

GEORGIA Positives: Libel is decriminalized. Reporting of state secrets also decriminalized. Assaults on journalists decline slightly. Negatives: Government still harasses media, using such methods as retaliatory tax investigations. Administration pressures media to tone down coverage, replace critical journalists. Pending bill would set a “code of conduct” for news media.

UKRAINE n 2004, President Leonid Kuchma used pro-government television stations to support a rigged election intended to hand over power to his loyal protégé, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. Though he had plenty of tools—Kuchma directed

the message on state channel UT-1 and effectively controlled the private stations 1+1, Novy Kanal, STB, and Inter—the vote-fixing was so extensive that news of it trickled out, and hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Kyiv to demand a new election. The public protests set the stage for challenger Viktor Yushchenko to win the rescheduled vote in December 2004. Inaugurated a month later, Yushchenko pledged to implement media reforms—and, in fact, his new government immediately stopped issuing to editors covert directives known as temnyky, a tactic the Kuchma administration had relied on to control news coverage. Yushchenko also said he would prosecute officials implicated in the September 2000 beheading of muckraking Internet journalist Georgy Gongadze, whose death became a symbol of the Kuchma administration’s abuses. Three police officers are now on trial for the murder—a fourth suspect fled—but the prosecution has not pursued the top government officials who may have ordered the killing. Yushchenko himself was silent after a parliamentary report concluded that Kuchma had ordered the murder. The journalist’s wife, Myroslava Gongadze, is among many who have criticized the narrow focus of the inquiry. “I’m afraid that I do not see a political will in Ukraine today to bring the officials accused of ordering this crime to justice,” she told CPJ. Disillusionment with Yushchenko’s unfulfilled pledges contributed to a poor third-place showing for his Our Ukraine coalition in March 2006 parliamentary elections. Yushchenko’s political problems, in turn, appeared to stall his efforts to privatize regional state media and transform the National Television Company of Ukraine, the country’s Soviet-style state broadcaster, into an independent public service broadcaster. The 2006 parliamentary vote also marked a dramatic comeback for Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, which captured 186 out of 450 seats. Yushchenko named Yanukovych as prime minister, and the men temporarily put aside their political rivalry by signing a so-called Declaration of National Unity. By spring of this year, the “unity” team had unraveled amid calls for a new government, but the Party of Regions appeared as strong as ever. “The Party of Regions will have a more assertive role with state television and the government’s overall information policy, and it will have a more aggressive policy toward the independent media,” said Natalia Ligachova, editor-inchief of the Kyiv-based magazine Telekritika. The Party of Regions appeared intent on proving that point immediately. Oleh Kalashnikov, a party deputy, and several aides seized a videotape from two STB journalists covering a July 2006 rally, while, ominously, fellow party deputy Vasily Kiselyov introduced a bill to re-establish libel as a criminal offense.

Dangerous Assignments

UKRAINE Positives: Assaults on journalists decline slightly. Suspects charged, tried in Gongadze slaying. Government stops issuing directives dictating news coverage. Advertising market is growing. Negatives: Judicial system remains politicized. Prosecution in Gongadze case does not include suspected masterminds. Pending bill would make libel a criminal offense. Yushchenko has not followed through on promises to reform state media.

dictate what to write about and what not to write about.” KYRGYZSTAN skar Akayev, the former physicist who in 1991 became Kyrgyzstan’s first post-Soviet president, may have had some democratic instincts initially, but he eventually abandoned them in favor of an authoritarian approach. Akayev appointed family members to high-level government posts and allowed them to take over certain sectors of the economy. Kyrgyzstan’s five million citizens—known for their independent, nomadic tradition and moderate practice of Islam—became increasingly resentful of these nepotistic policies, which had left them impoverished. A popular uprising named the Tulip Revolution erupted in early 2005, after Akayev tried to manipulate parliamen-

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Myroslava Gongadze says the Ukrainian government lacks the will to prosecute those who plotted the murder of her husband, Georgy.

tary elections and silence criticism in the independent media. Angry protesters forced Akayev to flee the country, clearing the way for a loose coalition of opposition politicians led by former Prime Minister Kurmanbek Bakiyev. The coalition vowed to privatize state media, create a public service broadcaster, and decriminalize libel. While a better press freedom climate emerged in the following months, journalists continued to face political pressure and occasional physical attacks. One of Bakiyev’s main goals was to transform state broadcaster Kyrgyz National Television and Radio Corporation (KTR) into an independent public-service broadcaster and to privatize state media in the country’s regions. As a result of this and other anticipated press freedom reforms, KTR and several private media outlets supported Bakiyev in the ensuing presidential vote, which he easily won. By the end of 2005, however, authorities were putting increasing pressure on editors to stem criticism of the Bakiyev government. In January 2006, Prosecutor General Uchkun Karimov threatened to bring charges against two newspaper editors—Bermet Bukasheva of Litsa and Aleksandr Kulinsky of Komsomolskaya Pravda v Kyrgyzstane— for allegedly defaming Bakiyev by publishing reports of government corruption. Bakyt Orunbekov, editor of the state newspaper Kyrgyz Tuusu, was fired for publishing articles that criticized Prime Minister Feliks Kulov. With the country beset by crime, corruption, and economic woes, Bakiyev has clung to power, sometimes tenuously, throughout the past year. Under intense public pressure, he agreed last fall to constitutional changes limiting his power but backed away from his pledge to remake KTR. Ulugbek Babakulov, media analyst at the Bishkek office of Freedom House, a U.S.-based human rights organization, said the embattled president feared losing the outlet as a “weapon to promote his policies.” In March, public pressure again mounting, Bakiyev finally signed a decree that transformed KTR from a state owned and controlled outlet into an independent, publicly financed broadcaster. But details were sketchy, and some

03 Reuters/Vladimir Pirogov

Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych was defeated in a landmark presidential election but resurfaced as a hard-line prime minister.

02 AP/Efrem Lukatsky

01 Reuters/Sebastian Derungs

News executives have been left to seek political shelter. “Media owners are trying to gain security in different ways, by collecting compromising information on the police, forming associations, or being careful about what they publish,” said Irina Sadova, director of the Kyiv-based Association of Regional Newspapers. “Some owners are going into local politics because they feel vulnerable and realize they need some additional protection.” Individual journalists also remain vulnerable to outside pressures, since police, prosecutors, and the courts are still politicized. “You can write what you want, but I don’t feel this is a stable situation because the court system can still be manipulated against you, just like in Kuchma’s time,” said Gazeta Po-Kyivsky Editor-in-Chief Serhiy Tihiy. “The method of pressure can be more indirect—like sending fire inspectors after you.” One potential bright spot: The advertising market has grown rapidly over the last few years, reflecting increased economic growth and rising consumer spending, the news agency Interfax-Ukraine reported. “This is creating conditions for media to work more as a profitable business and less as an instrument of politics,” said Oleg Homenok, a media adviser for the Kyiv-based media training organization IREX-Ukraine. “But this also means that advertisers can

analysts questioned how independent the station would become. Other press reforms have been victims of Bakiyev’s shaky status. “The authorities have still not decriminalized libel—even 03 though they were calling for it when they were in the opposition—because they Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev has ceded some are worried about criticism powers but retains a tight they will face if the law is grip on state media. changed,” Babakulov said. Privatization of local and regional state media stalled partly because of opposition from journalists working for the state. “Strangely, a lot of journalists in the state media don’t want independence from the government because they are more afraid of going bankrupt or of the oligarchs who would buy them,” said Tolkun Sagynova, a journalist in the Bishkek bureau of RFE/RL. As Bakiyev and parliament were locked in a struggle over constitutional reform last fall, the state broadcasters KTR, KOORT, and El TV aired coverage that was supportive of the president. By contrast, the private—and independent-minded—television station Pyramida was knocked off the air in fall 2006 when vandals destroyed $200,000 worth of transmission equipment.

KYRGYZSTAN Positives: Bakiyev administration shows a more tolerant attitude toward press coverage. President agrees to transform state broadcaster KTR into an independent public station. Negatives: Administration names loyalists to top state media positions, pressures media to tone down coverage. Attacks on journalists and press facilities continue. Bakiyev fails to follow through on pledge to decriminalize libel.

OUTLOOK he more moderate policies of reformist leaders in Tbilisi, Kyiv, and Bishkek have led to some improvements in media freedom. But these politicians also remain intent on keeping Soviet-era prerogatives to limit independent reporting. All three countries face the economic and political influence of neighboring Russia, which has consistently opposed Western-oriented democratic reforms. The Kremlin has selectively restricted natural gas supplies to Ukraine

and Georgia, backed two separatist regimes in Georgia with weapons and financial subsidies, and actively supported conservative, pro-Russian policies in all three countries. Such influence has encouraged reformist leaders to rule in a more secretive and centralized manner. Some lessons can be drawn from the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—the three post-Soviet states that have promoted Western-style press freedom. In each nation, strong public support for joining the European Union during the 1990s made EU-required legal and judicial reforms popular. That, in turn, created a stable, safe working environment for the media. But the Baltic countries had emerged from the Cold War less scarred than other former Soviet republics. Traditionally oriented toward the West, they had endured only 50 years of Soviet occupation, having missed the Revolution of 1917, the civil war of the 1920s, and the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The Color Revolution nations face differing challenges. Ukraine’s geographic proximity to the European Union and cultural affinity with neighboring EU member Poland make the country more open to political and economic reforms. Georgia appears committed to joining Western institutions if only because of its vulnerable location between Russia, immediately to the north, and Iran, little more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the south. Prospects for serious reform are less likely in Kyrgyzstan, which is bounded geographically by repressive Central Asian regimes and influenced politically by a Soviet-style political elite. While revolution has undoubtedly spurred the media to play a greater role in each of these societies, without further government reform and greater tolerance for criticism, many journalists in these countries will remain dependent on bureaucrats and oligarchs for financial support and political protection. The ingredients for lasting reform are both political and economic, local and international. Curbing corruption and undue outside influence in the judicial and regulatory systems would make it far more difficult for politicians to repress the independent media. Economic growth to reduce financial dependence on politicized businesspeople would increase editorial freedom. A greater editorial emphasis on professional, ethical news reporting would enhance the public trust. Western powers and international organizations could be more consistent and vocal in condemning abuses against the media—even when they are committed by pro-Western governments. Greater support in the West for local organizations that assist journalists with legal defense, advocacy, and training could help independent media become more active in fighting for their rights. “There is definitely more pluralism today, but a lot remains to be done,” said Lebedeva, head of the Kyiv broadcasting association. “If you don’t strengthen the gains, they can easily be taken away.” I

Dangerous Assignments

Anya’s Paper Long before Anna Politkovskaya was slain, her newspaper suffered devastating losses. Yet Novaya Gazeta pushes ahead, investigating corruption, abuse, and the deaths of its own reporters. By Nina Ognianova

MOSCOW yacheslav Izmailov, Novaya Gazeta’s military correspondent, leads a visitor down a long, dark hallway to Anna Politkovskaya’s locked office. Things are mostly as she left them, he says, pointing to a desk covered in newspapers and folders. A delicate vase is filled with fresh flowers. At Novaya Gazeta, Moscow’s twice-weekly independent newspaper, the staff’s pain is fresh even now, months after an assassin gunned down Politkovskaya—Anya, as colleagues called her—in her Moscow apartment building in October 2006.

Nina Ognianova, CPJ’s program coordinator for Europe and Central Asia, led a delegation to Moscow in January 2007.

Spring | Summer 2007

In a country where 80 percent of the public gets its news from state-controlled television, Novaya’s dogged coverage of social and political issues has won it devoted readers and passionate enemies. Two of its top journalists have been assassinated and a third has died under mysterious circumstances in the past six years; all reported on risky topics before their deaths. In the face of such peril, it would have been natural for the paper to tone down its tough coverage. But resilience has long been a trademark of Novaya, known by many these days as “Anya’s paper.” The news staff of 60 can boast of coverage that has spurred more than 30 criminal investigations over the years. Politkovskaya’s work alone resulted in 15 such cases and more than 20 convictions. Now, staffers are turning their attention to the deaths of their own colleagues. “The truth is, we cannot back down,” says Izmailov, whose office

Novaya Gazeta

Save for the fresh flowers, Anna Politkovskaya’s desk is undisturbed months after her killing.

is brimming with files on the journalists’ murders. “It is they who must fear us, not vice versa. Only then do we stand a chance at uncovering the truth.” While the paper has made progress in probing all three cases, he said the biggest challenge is getting authorities to prosecute. “We have to make sure our cases are solid so prosecutors would have no choice but to consider them,” Izmailov says. n July 2000, Novaya reporter and special projects editor Igor Domnikov, 42, died in a hospital bed, two months after sustaining severe head injuries in an attack. Four suspects are now on trial for his murder in Kazan, the capital of the Russian republic of Tatarstan, but the suspected

Novaya Gazeta

Politkovskaya said the truth could rid the public of its cynicism.

masterminds walk free. Domnikov published articles critical of a regional governor before his death. Izmailov, who is investigating the case for the paper, said Novaya is gathering evidence to convince prosecutors to open a separate criminal probe into the suspected masterminds. If Novaya succeeds, Domnikov’s case would be the first in Russia in more than a decade in which both killers and masterminds were brought to justice for killing a journalist. Persuading prosecutors to investigate the mysterious death of Deputy Editor Yuri Shchekochikhin has been more challenging. “We recently received yet another denial from the prosecutor general’s office to our appeal,” Izmailov says. Shchekochikhin, 53, had long covered sensitive subjects such as military corruption and alleged atrocities by Russian troops in Chechnya. In July 2003, he fell gravely ill with what authorities said was “a rare allergy” and died in a hospital only a few days later. Hospital authorities sealed his records, saying only that they were “a medical secret,” and refused to grant access—even to his immediate family. Both Novaya and Shchekochikhin’s relatives suspect he was poisoned to prevent him from further covering an intricate scheme involving money laundering, weapons trafficking, and illegal oil smuggling—allegations that reached into the

The staff’s coverage has prompted more than 30 criminal investigations. Dangerous Assignments

in June 1998 in the southern Russian republic of Kalmykia. “Neither the prosecutor’s office nor the justice ministry would answer a simple question for us: Where is the culprit being held? They tell us they have him. So where is he?” he asks. At least two Novaya journalists have received death threats in connection with their investigation of Politkovskaya’s murder. One received an anonymous text message that noted his home address and warned him to stop digging into the case. Editor Muratov says a personal guard has been assigned to one staffer, whom he declined to name. he paper has come a long way. In 1993, five years after leaving the popular daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, Muratov and Sokolov joined with 50 colleagues to start Novaya Gazeta (fittingly, in English, the New Newspaper). The Novaya Web site, which devotes a section to the newspaper’s history, says its founders wanted to create an “honest, independent, and rich” publication that would reach one million readers and influence national policy. It was a lofty goal considering they began with two computers, one printer, two rooms, and no money for salaries. Sokolov and several colleagues handed out copies of Novaya’s first issue to passersby near the Pushkinskaya subway station in central Moscow. It was April 1, 1993— April Fools’ Day, the skeptics pointed out. “We had to work without salaries and publish each issue as if it were our last,” Sokolov says. An initial boost came from former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who donated part of his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize award to pay for computers and salaries. In 1994, former first lady Raisa Gorbachev bought Muratov his first mobile phone, according to press reports. By 1996, Novaya’s circulation had risen to 70,000 from its initial run of 10,000 copies. There were bumps along the way, though. The paper

Novaya Gazeta

Vyacheslav Izmailov, Novaya Gazeta’s military correspondent, says the paper cannot back down.

prosecutor general’s office and the Federal Security Services (FSB). A month before the mysterious sickness claimed his life, Shchekochikhin questioned the independence of the judicial system handling the case. “Do not tell me fairy tales about the independence of judges,” he wrote. “Until we have a fair trial, documents will be purged, witnesses intimidated or killed, and investigators themselves prosecuted.” The prosecutor general’s office says there is no evidence of foul play in Shchekochikhin’s death. At the same time, Novaya is investigating the latest murder of a staffer. In an editorial published immediately after Politkovskaya’s assassination, the staff pledged, “While there is a Novaya Gazeta, her killers won’t sleep soundly.” Four days later, they published Politkovskaya’s unfinished article about torture committed against Chechen civilians by security units loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov, then prime minister and now acting president of the southern republic, along with photos of the torture victims. And in early January, Novaya investigative reporter Igor Korolkov published a lengthy article that blamed security agents for killing government critics as a matter of “state interest.” “When Anya was killed, I called an emergency editorial meeting and wanted to close down the paper,” Editor Dmitry Muratov says. “I told my staff no story is worth dying for. But they wouldn’t let me do it. … We had to go on.” Novaya Deputy Editor Sergei Sokolov, a tall, thin man with an energetic manner, works long hours investigating Politkovskaya’s murder, as well as other Russian journalist murders. In Novaya, he has pressed authorities to report publicly where they are holding the convicted killer of Sovetskaya Kalmykiya Segodnya Editor Larisa Yudina, slain

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Russia by the Numbers 3rd most dangerous country for journalists. 44 journalists killed in Russia since 1992. 24 of them were murdered. (Others died in combat or other dangerous assignment.) 87 percent impunity rate in journalist murder cases. 0 journalist murder cases solved since 1998. View a database of all journalist deaths at www.cpj.org/deadly.

Viewpoint

Rose-Tinted TV Screens Kremlin-controlled television paints an upbeat picture of the president, a Moscow editor reports. And it’s a depiction many Russians can live with. By Lynn Berry

ostRussiansgettheirnewsfromtelevision,butforsomepeopleIknow, ithasbecometoopainfultowatch.Allthreenationalchannelsareunder statecontrolandservetheKremlin,whichusestelevisiontopromote itsagendaanditsviewoftheworld.Theprincipalheroofalmosteverybroadcast isPresidentVladimirPutin,whoisshownatlengthwhetherhehasspenttheday scoldinggovernmentofficials,skiingwithschoolchildren,ormakingastatevisit abroad.Heisneverquestionedorcriticized. One Russian friend, a former journalist, told me that she no longer turns on the news because the Kremlin’s propaganda “exceeds the limits of what my nervous system can stand.” Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the liberal Yabloko party, said in a recent interview with Noviye Izvestiya that he had stopped watching because, “even after 20 years in politics, I have not learned to be unemotional, and at times I get such a signal from the television news that I am unable to concentrate on anything else afterward.” Perhaps I have a stronger stomach, but I tune in whenever I can. I watch not to learn the latest news, but to try to better understand Putin and the country that has given him its full support. Kremlin-controlled television is one of the few remaining tools for comprehending the inner workings of a government institution that once again has retreated behind closed doors. Putin is in the final year of his second four-year term. He is expected to orchestrate a transition of power to a loyal successor, and the big question in Russia today is whether he will be able to find someone capable. Television is already playing a major role in “Operation Successor.” While Putin still receives the lion’s share of airtime—serving to dispel any doubt that he remains in charge—the two government officials thought to be frontrunners to replace

Lynn Berry has been a journalist in Moscow since 1995. She was the editor of the Moscow Times from 2001 to 2006.

him are also shown almost nightly. The officials, Sergei Ivanov and Dmitry Medvedev, both of whom are ranked first deputy prime minister, are given equal airtime down to the minute as they attempt to build up their images. In recent months, they have grown more confident and “presidential” in front of the TV cameras, and their popularity has increased along with their media exposure. The leaders of some opposition parties are allowed to appear on the air in measured doses. The frequency of their appearances reflects their relationship to the Kremlin and how many votes for their parties the Kremlin is willing to accept. Opposition leaders who are openly hostile to Putin are never shown, unless the aim is to discredit them. Television coverage gives an indication of the Kremlin’s intentions in the run-up to national parliamentary elections in December, which will set the stage for the presidential vote three months later. Criticism of certain officials is occasionally heard on state television, but usually as part of a smear campaign that has high-level approval, and rarely as the result of investigative reporting by independent journalists. Watching these reports is a little like reading tea leaves, since they provide a few clues about political infighting in Russia. What is less difficult to read is Russian television coverage of foreign news. Newscasters seem to take immense satisfaction in reporting catastrophes and crises in Western countries. Protests that turn violent are given an inordinate amount of coverage, as if to play on Russians’ fear of unrest and to underscore the Kremlin’s message that Putin, on the whole, has brought order. The violence in Iraq is shown in all its gore, the overriding theme being that America is bogged down in the war. Reporting on the United States often carries a sarcastic tone. And Russia’s neighbors, including the Baltics, Ukraine, Georgia, and Belarus, are

Opposition leaders who are openly hostile to Putin are never shown on Russian television—unless the aim is to discredit them. Dangerous Assignments

Four out of five Russians get their news from television, a medium that has proved extremely effective in forming public opinion. And it is not clear the public wants to know the truth, at least as Kasparov sees it. Russia’s economy has been growing steadily under Putin, who has restored a sense of national pride. After the uncertainty and financial crises of the 1990s, most Russians simply want to enjoy life. They want to believe their lives are getting better, and in many ways their lives are. They want to believe in a strong Russia and a strong president. Not long ago, I was talking to another Russian friend, a photographer, about a Web site called Inosmi that is run by the state information agency and provides translations of U.S. and European newspaper articles about Russia. “If this site had existed in Soviet times,” he said, “the Communist Party would never have collapsed.” I had expected the sentence to end differently, with his saying that the Communist Party would have collapsed much earlier, and I am not sure he is right. Yet he and many other Russians today see Western reporting as anti-Russian. They bristle at criticism from the West, though critical reporting in the Russian press is not well-received either. In Russia, journalists who condemn the Kremlin are more likely to receive hate mail than public gratitude. When journalists are killed, there is little public outrage. Few people have an appetite for the kind of reporting that Anna Politkovskaya made her life’s mission. Most want to believe the rosy picture they see every evening on their television screens. I

AP/Misha Japaridze

increasingly painted as enemies. Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion who now leads an opposition coalition, gave a sharp assessment of the Kremlin’s use of television to cultivate anti-West feeling when we spoke earlier this year. “They need these sentiments to be very much alive to pretend that they are defending national interests,” he said. “It’s all a game. They can survive only with this virtual reality. The moment this virtual reality is broken, the Putin regime is out of business.” Kasparov’s theory is that Putin’s high popularity ratings, which continue to hover around 80 percent, are based on the Kremlin’s control over the media. He believes that if Russians were to learn the truth, particularly about the high level of corruption in the Kremlin, they would send Putin and his team packing. While there are other sources of news in Russia, they are limited. There has been a proliferation of independent news Web sites in recent years, but Internet use remains low, especially outside the big cities, and there have been signs that the Kremlin is looking for ways to limit the free flow of information online, too. Most of the large newspapers, including Izvestiya and Kommersant, have already been taken over by companies that are Kremlin-controlled or Kremlin-friendly. While some independent newspapers and political weekly magazines still provide hard-hitting reporting, their circulations are small and their impact on public opinion minimal. Articles exposing official corruption or other abuses are rarely followed up, either by other papers or through official investigations. On the few occasions when aggressive reporting has had an impact, editors and reporters have often paid with their lives.

Putin, now in his final year in office, dominates television news in Russia.

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Novaya Gazeta

was never popular with advertisers, who preferred highermillion to raise staff salaries, upgrade the paper’s offices circulation, more commercial publications. It struggled and equipment, and turn Novaya into a daily with a nationfinancially and briefly shut down in 1995. In 2002, a series al reach. (It now has a circulation of 171,000, about 40 perof libel lawsuits carrying hefty fines almost caused another cent of which is based in Moscow.) When Politkovskaya was suspension. Muratov said the paper was targeted by dismurdered, Lebedev immediately announced a reward of gruntled officials who were accommodated in politicized US$1 million for information about the killers. Russian courts. The financial backing will no doubt keep Novaya Unlike most other liberal media, Novaya did not comreporters working. But being a muckraking reporter in Ruspromise its independent stance in the early 1990s, even sia, the world’s third-most dangerous country for journalwhen the paper’s position was unpopular. When then-Presists, is a risky proposition. The public overwhelmingly ident Boris Yeltsin ordered a violent crackdown on commuapproves of President Vladimir Putin’s policies, and it nist hardliners who rose against him in October 1993, Novaya condemned his actions, which left scores of people dead, including six journalists, according to CPJ research. And in 1996, when liberal media backed Yeltsin’s re-election, the paper kept its balanced coverage. That kind of editorial integrity preserved Novaya’s credibility, sustained its readership, and attracted some of Russia’s top journalists. The paper’s independence has been boosted by the fact that, until recently, Novaya journalists owned 100 percent of its stock. In June 2006, to secure an infusion of capital, Muratov persuaded his staff to sell 49 percent of their stock to longtime benefactor Gorbachev and a partner, Aleksandr Lebedev. Lebedev, a billionaire Moscow banker and member of the ruling, pro-Kremlin party United Russia, bought 39 percent of the shares while Editor Dmitry Muratov says he wanted to close the paper, but the staff Gorbachev received 10 percent. Though Lebedev would not let him. has assured the staff he shares their values and appears unmoved by attacks on the press, Muratov won’t seek to influence editorial matters, there are skeptics acknowledges, so every assignment begs the question, “Is in and out of the newsroom. A number of government-conthe story worth the risk?” nected businesspeople have bought into media properties Politkovskaya, who seemed energized by public apathy, in recent years. Less than two months after Lebedev’s paraddressed this in the prologue to her 2002 book, A Small tial purchase of Novaya, the Kremlin-friendly businessman Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya: “People call the Alisher Usmanov, general director of Gazprom subsidiary Gazprominvestholding, bought the business daily Kommnewspaper and send letters with one and the same quesersant, one of the last independent newspapers with tion: ‘Why are you writing about this? Why are you scaring national reach. Two years before, the popular independent us? Why do we need to know this?’ I’m sure this has to be daily Izvestiya was purchased by Gazprom; it no longer critdone, for one simple reason: As contemporaries of this war, icizes the Kremlin. we will be held responsible for it. The classic Soviet excuse Muratov says he is not worried. Support from Gorof not being there and not taking part in anything personbachev and Lebedev, he says, would only strengthen the ally won’t work. So I want you to know the truth. Then paper. “I am sure that with his authority, Mr. Gorbachev you’ll be free of cynicism.” wants to protect us from all possible forms of pressure,” he Muratov said Novaya’s staff has pulled together, again, told Russian papers. “We want this newspaper to serve not after a colleague’s murder. “We are putting together a team the state, but society.” of four journalists to take her place,” he says, then pauses. According to news reports, Lebedev will invest US$3.6 “It takes four people to replace one Anya.” I

Being a muckraking reporter in Russia is a risky proposition. Every assignment begs the question: Is the story worth the risk? Dangerous Assignments

Thailand at a Crossroads After a military coup, community radio stations bear the brunt of official repression. By Shawn W. Crispin

CHIANG MAI, Thailand hen news spread on September 19, 2006, that a military coup had overthrown Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s elected government, Thardsak Jimekitwattana replaced his local radio station’s news programs with pop music.

Shawn W. Crispin is a Bangkok-based journalist and consultant to CPJ’s Asia program.

The 40-year-old station director had good reason to reformat: Before the coup, Radio Wihok 89.15 FM frequently aired news that favored the ousted prime minister, who had strong popular support across Thailand’s northern provinces, including in his hometown of Chiang Mai. The next day, 10 soldiers entered Radio Wihok’s offices, pointed M-16 assault rifles at Thardsak and his staff, and demanded he report to military headquarters for a private discussion, according to Thardsak and an office assistant.

The Thai military ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a September 2006 coup.

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Community radio stations have sprouted across Thailand’s countryside, filling an important role.

CPJ/Shawn W. Crispin

democracy demonstrators The military authorities on the streets of Bangkok. had picked a high-profile With critical television target for harassment: news already dampened, Thardsak is a leader of the the junta’s blanket curbs on Thai Journalists Associathousands of local and comtion’s northern branch and munity radio stations was for nearly two decades reflect the next major threat a print journalist at some of to press freedom in Thaithe country’s best known land. Many media reform Thai-language newspapers. advocates fear the military “They thought in the will choose to focus on past my station cheered cases such as Chiang Mai’s Thaksin, so I was ordered FM 92.5 as it drafts new to change or close down,” media laws, tentatively Thardsak said from his stascheduled for a national reftion, situated along a back erendum in October. alley in Chiang Mai. “I’m Thardsak Jimekitwattana’s Radio Wihok is among the local staFM 92.5, which operproud they thought my stations that were ordered to air military-prepared news. ates out of a dingy fourthtion was so important. floor hotel room in central Chiang Mai, previously aired They obviously knew we were close to the people.” programs strongly in support of Thaksin and his grassThailand’s broadcast media, from which an estimated roots policies. The CNS believed the station’s pro-Thaksin 80 percent of the population receives its news, has been bent could represent a threat to national security; the particularly hard hit by last year’s military intervention. day after the coup, soldiers entered its small office and Radio Wihok was one of more than 1,000 community and arrested Manager Mahawan Kawang. He was told the stalocal radio stations that had recently begun operations tion could remain on the air only if his programs never across the country’s northern regions. All received strict mentioned the ousted premier by name. According to new marching orders from the ruling Council for National Mahawan, authorities now closely monitor his programs Security (CNS) immediately following the coup. In order to and sometimes call to instruct him to “tone down” the stay on the air, stations had to stop reporting news that political nature of his broadcasts, including his commenmentioned Thaksin and halt all call-in programs. They also tary in mid-March criticizing the current constitutionhad to broadcast military-prepared news three times a day, drafting process. as well as the national anthem twice a day. “They have the guns, they have the power, so we can’t he night of the coup, the military pulled the plug on one prispeak freely anymore,” said Mahawan, who told CPJ that vate and five state-run television stations and replaced their if censorship of community radio stations continues, he programming with images of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the may close down FM 92.5 and return to working a plot of country’s long-reigning monarch. Soldiers and tanks were land he owns on the outskirts of Chiang Mai. deployed in front of certain television offices for weeks after the Mahawan’s fiery talk programs reportedly resulted in bloodless putsch. attacks on opposition Democrat Party leaders during a camMilitary censors have since moved to block television paign swing through Chiang Mai in the run-up to the 2005 news footage of the former prime minister, including stock general elections, though he denies the charges. “This isn’t images and interviews aired globally by international democracy—and I have a democratic heart,” he said, broadcasters such as CNN and BBC. More recently, the junta lamenting Thaksin’s overthrow. nationalized Thailand’s only privately run television staThailand’s progressive 1997 constitution included tion, iTV, after it said the station owed the staggering sum measures that not only guaranteed press freedom but also of 100 billion baht (US$3.1 billion) in unpaid broadcasting aimed to break the government’s monopoly on national license fees and fines. The station was established specifiradio and television frequencies. Section 40 of the 1997 cally to guard against a repeat of the military-led news charter mandated that 25 percent of the national radio airblackout in 1992 that kept millions of Thais in the dark waves must be transferred to private hands, including when soldiers opened fire and killed hundreds of procommunity radio stations.

Dangerous Assignments

It wasn’t long ago that Thailand’s freewheeling media were viewed as regional models. Still, the armed forces control and collect lucrative concession fees from all private news operators who rent television and radio frequencies on renewable one- or two-year contracts. The short-term nature of those contracts has allowed the military to play a behind-the-scenes censorship role over the broadcast media—a power they frequently exercised during Thailand’s transition from military to democratic rule in the 1990s and throughout Thaksin’s soft authoritarian tenure. Since 2000, thousands of new community radio stations have mushroomed across Thailand’s countryside and in its provincial towns. They often filled important news gaps left by the nationally oriented broadcast media, including local coverage of natural disasters, public health, and agriculture—especially in remote areas, where local newspapers are not circulated and Thai language literacy rates are low among ethnic minority groups. According to Panaporn Phaibunwatanakit, a regional director for the press freedom advocacy group Campaign for Popular Media Reform, villagers were able to establish their own stations with investments of as little as 40,000 baht (US$1,250). “Many of these stations were born of communities that had grievances with the government,” she said. “They were bringing rural communities together in a new, powerful way.” At the same time, local politicians, many of them affiliated with Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai party, received government funding to launch their own community radio stations as a means of casting favorable light on the ruling party’s various populist policies. Rather than distinguish politically neutral from politically charged stations, the military has now issued blanket restrictions that have hindered many community radio stations’ ability to broadcast news, according to Panaporn. he offices of Radio Neu Keun FM 90.75 are in the rural outskirts of the provincial town of Hot, approximately 62 miles (100 kilometers) from Chiang Mai. Established by a group of ethnic Karen villagers in 2002 to provide programs aimed at protecting the minority tribe’s unique culture—which includes distinctive dress, language, music, and customs—the station broadcasts to roughly 30 nearby villages. When Hot and its outlying areas were inundated by floods for months last year, Neu Keun aired crucial aroundthe-clock emergency response messages to local communities, where thousands had abandoned their homes for makeshift structures on higher ground. “We let people know when the water would be up, and when it would be down; which roads were usable, and which were washed out,” said Boonchan Chanmot, the sta-

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tion’s manager and a full-time elementary school teacher. “Many have since told us they wouldn’t have survived without our news.” Even with a strong public service track record, Neu Keun’s ability to broadcast local news has been severely curtailed since the coup. The station was closed for three weeks after the takeover. As a condition for reopening, military officials demanded that all news broadcasts be translated from the Karen language into Thai, and that they be vetted by the prime minister’s public relations department. Because Neu Keun is run by volunteers, many of whom don’t read or write Thai, the station has curbed news programming and aired more music since the coup, according to Boonchan. “We’ve never broadcast critical news, only news that’s useful to the local community,” he said. “They thought if it’s in a language they don’t know, it’s a risk and we might be criticizing them. Now we’re even scared to air music that they might misunderstand as critical.” Other community radio stations that broadcast solely in Thai also feel pressure to self-censor the news. “We’re scared that if we say something they don’t like, we’ll be closed,” said Udom Waraha, senior news manager at Kamphaeng Phet Community Radio. “Previously, we aired a diversity of views: some were for the government, some were against. Now everything must be for [the government], without criticism. There’s not as much freedom.” Not that long ago, in the early 1990s—when democracy seemed to be on a march across much of Southeast Asia— Thailand’s freewheeling print and emerging broadcast media were viewed as regional models of press freedom. Hard-hitting Thai newspaper reports were pivotal in turning public sentiment against the previous military dictatorship, resulting in the fateful 1992 street demonstrations that eventually led to democratic reform. With that track record, Thailand’s news media came under immense pressure to censor itself during Thaksin’s five-year tenure. Journalists and editors who refused to toe the official line often faced intimidation, and occasionally, punitive criminal and civil defamation charges: A series of complaints filed by the prime minister himself, against media firebrand Sondhi Limthongkul, sought a total of 2 billion baht (US$60.6 million) in damages. Sondhi had led massive street protests against the Thaksin government. Paradoxically, many Thai journalists had hoped that the 2006 coup would result in a freer media environment. The country’s print media has been largely unaffected by restrictions, judging by the increasingly critical reports about the interim government’s lackluster performance. Yet the broadcast media appears more constrained under the CNS than they were under Thaksin. Since nearly all of the rural popu-

lation receives its news through broadcast media, authorities are worried about lingering pro-Thaksin sentiment and the potential for destabilizing public protests. Sondhi told CPJ that his news talk show, broadcast on state-controlled Channel 11, was knocked off the air in February soon after he criticized the central bank’s financial policies. “When it comes to critical television news, [the CNS] doesn’t want to hear it any more than Thaksin did,” Sondhi said. Last October, a senior military officer threatened to shut down iTV after the station’s editors aired a report about a Bangkok taxi driver who committed suicide in protest against the coup, according to an iTV employee. In March, the government rescinded the station’s operating concession, and it is now managed and financed by the prime minister’s office.

urrent Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, a former army commander, told members of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand in November that his interim government was committed to upholding press freedom, and that it would not adopt the same “carrot and stick” approach to media management as Thaksin’s government had used. Former journalist Chavarong Limpattamapanee, who joined Surayud’s Political Development Council, said the new draft constitution will include press freedom guarantees “more liberal” than those included in the abolished 1997 charter. In particular, he said, a new clause will bar politicians and public officials from suing journalists if the report in question relates to their public duties and activities. Yet the glaring contradiction between the junta’s words and its actions has many media reform activists on edge, particularly in relation to the future status of the country’s community radio stations. Because so many grassroots stations that previously supported Thaksin’s government felt free to challenge the central authorities over assorted local governance issues, many activists fear the current restrictions on community stations could be institutionalized as part of the new constitution. “Thailand is heading toward a landmark moment,” said Jiraporn Witayasakpan, a professor of mass communications at Chiang Mai University. “The 1997 constitution was the first in Thai history to give the people the right to national broadcast frequencies. But with all the fears of conflict and agitation, we fear the military government has a very different set of reform goals.” I

CPJ/Shawn W. Crispin

When natural disasters struck the village of Hot, Boonchan Chanmot’s Radio Neu Keun aired crucial emergency messages.

Dangerous Assignments

A Killing in Mexico Brad Will was shot down while documenting civil unrest in Oaxaca. No one has been charged. Is the government covering up? By Monica Campbell

OAXACA, Mexico t was a scene played out numerous times during the months-long conflict that embroiled this southern city, the state capital of Oaxaca. Antigovernment protesters, manning street barricades and armed with clubs, bottle rockets, and pistols, clashed with heavily armed plainclothes men working for the embattled state governor. At the ready: Bradley Roland Will, a 36-year-old independent documentary filmmaker from Illinois and longtime reporter for the New York-based news Web site Indymedia. For nearly four weeks, he had fulfilled his goal of interviewing the everyday folks at the protest encampments. But on the afternoon of October 27, as he covered the barricade in the Santa Lucía del Camino municipality, on the city’s outskirts, things turned deadly. Within minutes, a street battle erupted near the protest site, down a residential side street. Will stuck close to the activists and other reporters. Moving swiftly, the armed men fired at the protesters. Will crouched near the side of the street, letting his camera roll. The chaotic scene shows protesters jockeying for position and hurling rocks, with a series of gunshots and exchanges overheard, including somebody shouting, “Stop taking photos!” Then a gunshot is heard whizzing toward Will; the bullet hits him in the center of his upper abdomen. He screams, falls, and utters “Help me” in Spanish. More gunshots follow. A second bullet soon hits Will’s right side, gliding underneath the skin and eventually lodging itself in his left hip, according to Luís Mendoza Canseco, who, as Oaxaca’s chief medical examiner, performed Will’s autopsy. Neither bullet left Will’s body. Monica Campbell is a freelance journalist based in Mexico

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Brad Will

This image from Will’s raw video was taken moments before he was shot. He is filming along a side street where a number of other journalists were stationed.

he armed men shooting at the protesters were photographed, and the 9mm bullets found in Will’s body matched the type of weapon carried by at least one of them, according to the Will family. Yet the investigation has gone nowhere. Days after Will’s death, two men accused in the shooting—local town councilor Abel Santiago Zárate and his security chief, Orlando Manuel Aguilar—were detained. But they were released on December 1 after state Judge Victoriano Barroso Rojas ruled that they had used .38-caliber pistols and were not close enough to have shot Will. The men said they had only fired into the air. Ballistics reports show that the two bullets that hit Will came from the same weapon, Canseco said. He estimates that the shots were fired from a distance of no more than 16 feet (5 meters), which corresponds to the distance cited in witness accounts of men shooting as they charged the protesters. None of the other men photographed alongside

El Universal/Raul Estrella

Raúl Estrella, a photographer with El Universal, took these photos of gunmen, believed to be government agents, rushing toward protesters and journalists on the outskirts of Oaxaca on October 27. Brad Will, working near Estrella, was killed by gunfire that witnesses said appeared to have come from the direction of the gunmen.

Zárate and Aguilar, including some who were carrying pistols and AR-15 rifles, were interrogated or detained. His family’s grief mingled with rage as they saw authorities in Oaxaca start a campaign that would allow the guilty to go free and “twist everything around,” said Will’s mother, Kathy, in an interview in Mexico City. Sitting beside her, Will’s father, Howard, said: “There are lots of witnesses, lots of photographs. And you’ve got prime suspects … at least five individuals photographed with weapons who have been identified. It’s just preposterous.” That astonishment grew on November 15, when Oaxaca State Attorney General Lizbeth Caña suggested that the second shot may have been fired point-blank by a protester transporting Will to the Red Cross. “That was clearly impossible,” Canseco said in an interview in his office, shaking his head. The investigation in the Will case was “sloppy from the start,” he added, with state prosecutors drawing unsupported conclusions from his autopsy. Further, Canseco said, the second bullet was fired at no less than 13 feet (4 meters), and struck Will almost immediately after the first. “There is no doubt in my mind that both shots occurred before Will was picked up and put in a vehicle,” he

said. Amid mounting criticism, Caña later distanced herself from theories that blamed Will’s death on the protesters. At least eight journalists were in the same area as Will that day, including a reporter, six photographers, and a television camera operator. Journalists interviewed by CPJ described a hectic scene: As the armed agents charged at protesters, Will maintained a more exposed position even as his colleagues pulled back. “Brad wasn’t trying to be a hero,” said Diego Osorno, a reporter for the Mexican newspaper Milenio. He was a few feet from Will during the confrontation, attending to Milenio photographer Oswaldo Ramírez, who was shot below the knee. “Brad was in a dangerous position like the rest of the photographers and reporters there,” Osorno said. “What is clear is that officials dressed as civilians, armed with pistols and rifles, were photographed firing into a crowd. Somebody is dead, others are injured, and the guys who did it are still working.” Raúl Estrella, a veteran El Universal newspaper photographer who was on the scene, said he barely escaped death during the confrontation. “Zoom! Zoom! A bullet whizzed by each ear,” Estrella said.

Dangerous Assignments

The heated political climate in Oaxaca raises questions about the independence of the local investigation. Federal intervention has been sought. he conflict in the colonial city of Oaxaca started May 22, when a routine teachers’ strike over more pay and better working conditions snowballed into a catchall antigovernment protest movement. The simmering unrest boiled over when Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, a member of Mexico’s old-guard Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), ordered police to break up protest camps in the city’s main plaza on June 14. The dislodging of protesters turned violent and strengthened the protest movement, which was eventually led by a leftist umbrella group called the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO). The protesters left their own trail of aggression, essentially taking over the capital, clashing with pro-government groups, and seizing a dozen private radio stations. Journalists covering the conflict were beaten by both the protesters and gangs of police dressed in civilian clothes. In all, some 20 people died during the unrest, most of them protesters. No one has been indicted in any of the deaths. Will’s killing drew worldwide attention and transformed the conflict overnight into a bigger international story. His death also sent a shock through independent media circles in New York. In Latin America, Will was known for his coverage of social movements in Brazil, Bolivia, and Chiapas, Mexico, among other places in the region. In late March, his parents, along with his older brother, Craig, went to Mexico City and Oaxaca to face officials and demand that Will’s killers face justice. “We want a real investigation,” said Kathy Will. The family hired a Mexican attorney and arrived in the country armed with photographs that appeared on the front pages of Mexican newspapers— pictures that appear to show men shooting at protesters in Santa Lucía del Camino on October 27. The heated political climate in Oaxaca has raised ques-

Mexico by the Numbers 15th most dangerous nation for journalists since 1992. 92 percent impunity rate in journalist killings since 1992. 6 journalists killed directly for their work since 2000. 11 more killed in unclear circumstances since 2000. For a complete database of journalist deaths in Mexico, visit www.cpj.org/deadly.

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El Universal

Brad Will, center, seen here working in Oaxaca, had spent nearly four weeks documenting the unrest.

tions about the independence of the criminal investigation. During the conflict, Attorney General Caña repeatedly labeled APPO members as “terrorists” and voiced her allegiance to Gov. Ruiz. The conflict eased only after then-President Vicente Fox ordered federal forces into Oaxaca in December to restore order and dismantle most of the barricades erected by protesters in the city center. During the Wills’ three-day visit to Oaxaca, they toured the Santa Lucía del Camino neighborhood and placed a large, black wooden cross against a white concrete wall on Juárez Avenue, where their son died. About 100 protesters accompanied the family, with some shouting, “The assassins are from the PRI!” Delia Ramírez, a 55-year-old housewife who spent time at the Santa Lucía del Camino protest camps, said she offered Will a cup of water shortly before he died. “He died trying to document the truth, and that’s something our government doesn’t appreciate,” Ramírez said. “That’s why there’s been no justice.” The Wills’ visit may produce some positive results. When they met with Caña in Oaxaca, the state attorney general announced her request that the Brad Will case—along with 10 other homicides related to last year’s conflict—be taken

AP/Luis Alberto Cruz

over by federal authorities. Murder is typically a state crime in Mexico, but cases that involve certain firearms, such as AR-15 rifles, can be considered federal crimes. Pressure from Washington may also be behind the state prosecutor’s move. A letter dated March 16 and signed by four members of the U.S. Congress—Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, Hilda Solis of California, and Raúl Grijalva of Arizona—blames state police and government-affiliated agents for the deaths of 20 protesters during the Oaxaca conflict. It states that “civilian-clad municipal police officers and other state officials” were implicated in Will’s death and calls on Mexico’s attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, to ensure a “prompt and impartial investigation.” Local and international human rights groups, including CPJ and Amnesty International, also expressed their concern that government agents had escaped justice.

ederal authorities had begun a preliminary inquiry before the state handoff. “We hope that the federal authorities now take up a serious, objective investigation,” says Miguel Ángel de los Santos, the Will family’s lawyer. In Oaxaca, he brought forward new witnesses in front of federal investigators. Among the witnesses are reporters, including Osorno of Milenio, along with individuals who saw the shootout and are just now feeling secure enough about their personal safety to testify. But doubts linger. Key elements are still missing, namely, the weapons carried by the men who were photographed shooting in the direction of protesters. Further, domestic political pressure may stonewall the investigation. Though unpopular among many Oaxacans, Ruiz remains in office. And Mexico’s new president, Felipe Calderón, who took office on December 1, is counting on the PRI, Ruiz’s party, to support his agenda in Congress. The indictment of Oaxacan officials, a move that could discredit Ruiz, would not help Calderón gain favor among PRI legislators. If the Will case does move forward, it would represent a breakthrough in addressing crimes against journalists in Mexico, one of the region’s most dangerous places for journalists. At least six journalists have been slain in Mexico in direct reprisal for their work since 2000; CPJ is investigating the circumstances surrounding the slayings of 11 other journalists during that period. The majority of the victims covered criminal gangs, drug trafficking, or, in the case of Will, social conflicts. None of the killings have been solved. In February 2006, the Fox government created a special federal prosecutor’s office to pursue crimes against the press. But the office’s jurisdiction is limited. In the case of state crimes, which include homicide, the special prosecutor can only intervene at the request of state authorities. In the Will case, the special prosecutor provided ballistics analysis and reviewed the case file, according to Octavio Alberto Orellana Wiarco, now head of the office. “We have to respect the chain of command at the state level,” Orellana said in an interview in Mexico City. With the case now reaching the federal level, the special prosecutor’s office may be able to show some teeth. The Wills vow that if nothing is accomplished at the federal level, they will take their son’s case to the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights, an autonomous judicial branch of the Organization of American States. “You know, when Brad was killed and a week later people were taken into custody, we assumed that everything was going along properly,” said Kathy Will. “Now, we’ve seen how they’ve muddied it up so badly. We’re outraged … there’s no way we’re giving up.” I

Watch the video that Will shot moments before his death. Visit www.cpj.org/bradwill. Will’s parents, Howard and Kathy, and his brother, Craig, take part this spring in a march to the site where the journalist was killed during violent protests in Oaxaca.

Dangerous Assignments

Writing (Ethical) Code U.S. Internet companies, caught up in overseas repression, seek to draft a code of ethical conduct. The Sullivan Principles are eyed as a model. By Robert Mahoney

s Chinese journalist Shi Tao spends his third year behind bars, he’s probably unaware that his imprisonment has helped push U.S. Internet companies toward drafting a code of conduct that could prevent reporters like him from being jailed as easily in the future. Shi, who received CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award in 2005, was convicted in part with the help of information supplied to Chinese authorities by Yahoo. He used a Yahoo e-mail account to send notes and news to a U.S.based Web site. In China, this earned him a 10-year prison term for “providing state secrets to foreigners.” Shi’s case enraged many in the Internet industry who see the Web as a means of widening, not restricting, free expression. Yahoo was swept up in a maelstrom of criticism and sought to defend its disclosure of account holder information by saying it had to comply with national laws. This explanation did not satisfy human rights groups, and legislation was proposed in the U.S. Congress last year to prohibit U.S. companies from disclosing the identity of Internet users in an “Internet restricting country.” The Global Online Freedom Act, reintroduced in the House this year, has not made much progress, but the prospect of legislation has spurred efforts to safeguard free speech and privacy online through voluntary guidelines. In 2006, Yahoo joined with fellow U.S. Internet giants Microsoft and Google, and with British-based communications company Vodafone, to work on a code of ethics for technology companies operating in countries such as China and Vietnam that practice censorship. The four corporations began unpublicized meetings with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and human rights groups, socially responsible investment funds, and international legal experts. The aim was to draw up a voluntary code of conduct for technology companies along the lines of the Sullivan Principles, which set socially responsible goals for

Robert Mahoney, CPJ’s deputy director, represents CPJ at the Internet ethics forum.

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companies in the 1970s during the battle against South African apartheid. CPJ joined the group in November 2006 and urged it to go public with its work. In January, it did so, although the discussions themselves remain confidential. The forum has been organized by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), a San Francisco-based association of leading corporations, and the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit public policy institution in Washington. “We want to do the right thing,” said Michael Samway, vice president and deputy general counsel of Yahoo. “As an Internet company, we are about open access to information.” The question for Yahoo and other Western telecommunication and Internet companies is how to uphold the values of free speech and freedom of information while working in restrictive but highly profitable markets. ntil a couple of years ago, Internet companies and those who invested in them weren’t paying much attention to the human rights implications of their operations, according to Rebecca MacKinnon, assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Hong Kong University. Socially responsible investment funds could assess the environmental or labor rights fallout from multinational companies’ practices, she argues, “but before 2005 these investors thought technology was ‘clean.’” Now, the jailing of Shi Tao and infringement of the rights of online journalists in other countries from Egypt to Vietnam has put the spotlight on core questions of trust and confidentiality for Internet users everywhere. “This is not just about China,” said MacKinnon. “The Internet companies are realizing that the way they treat a user in China has an impact on the way users globally will perceive them. How they behave here says a lot about how they value their users elsewhere.” MacKinnon hopes that the companies will recognize that doing business ethically makes sound commercial sense. Human rights groups and ethical investors hope they can reproduce in the technology sector the success

On the Web

Dunstan Hope, spokesman for Business for Social Responsibility, said steps to ensure accountability are on the table. “If you look at the history of other voluntary codes … they all retrospectively put in an enforcement framework,” he told CPJ. “We want this in from the beginning.” here are other formidable obstacles. Many big technology players are not even at the table. Networking supplier Cisco Systems of the United States is a notable no-show, along with Internet and telecommunication titans from China, India, Japan, and South Korea, all of which harbor dreams of becoming multinational operators. Cisco spokeswoman Jennifer Greeson told CPJ that the company is “open to further dialogue” but felt no need to join the forum because it was not an Internet service provider or content manager. “Both the process and the principles would be stronger with more companies,” said Yahoo’s Samway. “We have engaged in outreach … and we may see others joining.” There is no announced deadline for the talks to produce a code. Some of those taking part in the discussions are guardedly optimistic about the prospects of success, noting that having the big U.S. operators in the tent at all is an achievement. However, no one has any illusions about the complexity of the task. “This is a long-haul process,” MacKinnon said. “Drafting the principles is only the beginning.” I

AP/Vincent Yu

CPJ

they helped achieve in raising awareness of “corporate social responsibility” among traditional manufacturing and extraction industries. They point to advances in reducing child labor and environmental pollution achieved through voluntary codes or practice. What worked with sneaker manufacturers and oil companies can work with e-mail providers, they argue. The reasoning behind the principles is that, together, the Internet and telecommunications industry will be better able to resist the demands of governments seeking to censor information. Some 25 countries actively filter Internet traffic, according to Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which is part of the forum. CPJ research shows that one in three journalists in jail worldwide worked online, with 49 bloggers, online editors, and Web-based reporters behind bars at the end of 2006. Those drafting the industry code are bound by confidentiality rules not to discuss their work. But several leading participants noted progress, and said they hoped the talks—still known as the headline-unfriendly “multi-stakeholder process”—could produce a set of principles with bite. Key questions for the group will be benchmarking, accountability, and governance. Who will decide whether a company has fallen short of the agreed principles, and how will it be held accountable? Skeptics say that technology companies could sign up to the voluntary code and use it as a fig leaf to pursue business as usual. Congressional legislation “has forced them to the table to a certain extent,” said MacKinnon. “But it’s up to the other parts of the process, the NGOs, to ensure it is not a fig leaf.”

The Yahoo Web site displays search results for imprisoned Chinese journalist Shi Tao. Shi, convicted of e-mailing “state secrets” overseas, was jailed after Chinese officials told Yahoo to hand over his account information.

Dangerous Assignments

A Mayor and a Murder In Peru, a surprising reversal by the Supreme Court leaves a slain reporter’s family seeking justice. By María Salazar

About this Feature Dangerous Assignments begins a new feature, “Justice Project,” in this edition. Each installment will examine an unsolved murder case, the government’s legal and investigative response, and the continuing efforts to bring justice.

n the night of July 21, 2006, Dina Ramírez Ramírez—a kindergarten teacher in Yungay, a small town just north of Lima—received a startling telephone call from a friend in the capital: The Peruvian Supreme Court had just released the five people who had been convicted in her husband’s murder. Her husband, radio journalist Antonio de la Torre Echeandía, had died after being stabbed 10 times on a street in Yungay, in the western province of Áncash, in February 2004. After a police investigation and trial that stretched out over nearly two years, a Superior Court panel convicted local Mayor Amaro León León and four others of plotting and carrying out the slaying. The three-judge panel based its decision on the testimony of witnesses, a dying utterance by the victim, and the self-incriminating statements of three of the accused, court records show. The judges deemed that the motive—silencing de la Torre, a constant critic of the mayor—was supported by a well-documented history of animosity between the two and a series of previous attacks against the journalist and his family. The defendants appealed to the Supreme Court, Peru’s highest judicial body. The Supreme Court’s written ruling—and the reasoning for its decision—would not be released for more than a month, but León and the others were freed immediately. The mayor retook office, and his supporters threw a party

María Salazar is research associate for CPJ’s Americas program.

Spring | Summer 2007

in Yungay’s central square “with beer, fireworks, and balloons,” Ramírez said. León, she said, publicly threatened her with jail if she pressed the case further. Menacing notes were slipped under her front door, and anonymous callers threatened to kill her, “like a dog, just as my husband.” When it was finally released, the court’s 18-page ruling essentially swept aside the prosecution’s case. The defendants’ statements were obtained through coercion, the remaining evidence was circumstantial, and the motive was insufficient because the journalist had criticized many politicians, the high court found. De la Torre’s family and colleagues were stunned. The trial court had probed the coercion allegation but determined that the defendants’ lawyers were present when the statements were given and that no physical evidence supported the complaint. De la Torre had indeed criticized other politicians, but only León’s entourage was with the journalist on the night he died. As Ramírez continued to seek answers and press for a reopening of the case, threats against her family escalated. Fearing for their safety, she and her three children moved to Lima with help from the local press freedom group Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS) and emergency funds from CPJ. Ramírez and IPYS have now lodged a complaint with the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging that the Peruvian government violated the rights of de la Torre and his family by allowing threats, harassment, and ultimately murder to go unpunished. León, who later lost a bid for re-election, did not return messages from CPJ seeking comment for this story. Lawyers for León and the other defendants also did not return messages seeking comment. Since 2004, CPJ has documented a rising incidence of threats and attacks against provincial reporters in Peru; two other radio journalists critical of local authorities have been murdered in the last three years. For many Peruvian journalists, then, the outcome of the de la Torre case has great significance.

Justice Project Interviews and court documents depict an escalating series of attacks, but there is little evidence that local police seriously investigated. he journalist and the mayor had met 10 years prior to the murder and, according to Ramírez, were close friends for some time. León and his wife were godparents to de la Torre’s youngest daughter; de la Torre had volunteered in two of León’s mayoral campaigns. But a rift arose after the journalist went to work as León’s spokesman in January 2003. Within months, he was dissatisfied with León’s management, confronted the mayor, and was demoted to guard. Days later, de la Torre returned to his job at Radio Órbita. Back at the radio station, he aired regular reports on alleged corruption in the local government. “We had proof for every accusation,” said his co-host, Rory Huaney Rodríguez. “We had documents that supported everything we said.” Nonetheless, in September 2003, León filed a criminal defamation suit against Huaney and de la Torre. By then, a pattern of threats and violence had emerged. CPJ interviews and a review of hundreds of pages of police records and court documents from the trial and the appeal depict an escalating series of attacks.

Antonio de la Torre Eche-

Dina Ramírez Ramírez

El Comercio

Inset photos courtesy of de la Torre family

For almost a year before the killing, León regularly called de la Torre’s house and confronted him in the street, threatening to kill him or send him to jail, Ramírez told CPJ. Anonymous threatening notes were pushed under the front door, and menacing calls were placed to the radio station. Peruvian National Police records show that by October 2003 the threats had turned violent: Unidentified individuals drove a car into de la Torre’s home; León’s wife allegedly beat the journalist with a cane; a homemade bomb exploded outside de la Torre’s house; a shack owned by the journalist was set on fire. De la Torre lodged official complaints after each attack, but there was little evidence that local police seriously investigated, Ramírez told CPJ. “He was too brave,” Ramírez said of her husband. “Even though everyone asked him to stop [his commentary], he said that he had to keep going.” On February 14, 2004—a Saturday—de la Torre left home shortly after noon intending to do some work at the radio station. Along the way, he met an acquaintance, local

The central square in Yungay was given over to “beer, fireworks, and balloons” after five local men were freed in the slaying of reporter Antonio de la Torre Echeandía.

Dangerous Assignments

teacher Antonio Torre Camones, and the two spent much of the day together at a neighborhood bar, according to witnesses. Around 7:30 p.m., court documents say, the two went to another bar, where León, his daughter, her boyfriend, and three drivers from the mayor’s office had gathered for a small party. A videotape introduced by the prosecution shows an altercation between the journalist and one of the drivers, Hipólito Casiano Vega Jara. As de la Torre and Torre walked away from the bar at 8:30, court documents say, two men emerged from bushes about 200 feet away to attack the journalist. An autopsy found that two weapons were used in the stabbing. Torre ran away; prosecutors later alleged that he took part in the murder plot by luring de la Torre to the party. By 9 p.m., a hysterical neighbor was rapping on Ramírez’ door and crying: “Your husband was stabbed and he’s bleeding.” Ramírez and her eldest son, José, found de la Torre on the ground, nearly unconscious, covered in dirt and blood. Ramírez said her husband told José, “Casiano [Vega] is the one who did this” as they drove in a taxi to a local clinic. De la Torre died on a gurney moments after arriving at the clinic.

Local police soon arrested Vega, the driver accused by the journalist, and Torre, the teacher. Suspect began to turn on suspect, and, though none would admit involvement in the slaying, their statements portrayed a politically motivated series of attacks leading up to the night of the murder. Vega told investigators that Antenor Alfonso Figueroa Mejía and Pedro Demetrio Ángeles Figueroa, fellow drivers from the mayor’s office, had information on the killing. According to court documents, Vega said the co-workers had earlier vandalized the journalist’s home and the radio station. Figueroa and Ángeles denied involvement in the slaying but confessed to the earlier harassment and accused León of masterminding those attacks. In his statement, Figueroa said the mayor had wanted to stop the journalist’s radio commentary. Ángeles also told authorities that Moisés David Julca Orillo, boyfriend of the mayor’s daughter, had spent February 14 with León and later vowed to kill de la Torre. Julca fled Yungay after the slaying and, though charged, was never apprehended. At the party, Vega said, he overheard the mayor saying, “Let [de la Torre] enjoy the end of his life.” León was arrested on March 17, 2004. ational police conducted the initial investigation and a criminal judge oversaw the collection of evidence. During the probe, Léon, Torre, Vega, Figueroa, and Ángeles were sent to the same prison in Huaraz, capital of Áncash. Soon after their imprisonment, Ángeles and Figueroa recanted their statements, claiming police had coerced them. The Public Ministry ordered an immediate inquiry into coercion and torture allegations, which were brought forward by León as well. In medical documents reviewed by CPJ, the ministry found no physical evidence of brutality in León and Figueroa’s cases. In Ángeles’ case, investigators found a small scrape. The court concluded that there was no evidence of torture. Following their convictions, the mayor, his three drivers, and the teacher were each sentenced to 17 to 20 years in prison. By summer 2006, the Supreme Court had docketed their appeal. In accordance with the Peruvian legal system, the case was randomly handed to a judge—one of five on the high court assigned to criminal cases—who was charged with reviewing the file and presenting his findings to the others. In this case, Judge Robinson Gonzáles Campos was placed in charge of the case. Following a private vote, the court ordered the release of the five defendants and reserved the right to issue a ruling in the case against Julca, who had fled. Ramírez recalled being “scared, really scared,” but also angry that the high court withheld its written ruling for several weeks. “I didn’t want to believe that his murder would go unpunished.” The decision, when it was finally made public, was widely criticized by the Peruvian press. Asked by the lead-

El Comercio

Supreme Court Judge Robinson Gonzáles Campos wrote the controversial decision that freed the five suspects.

Spring | Summer 2007

El Comercio

Justice Project

Amaro León León, mayor of the Peruvian town of Yungay, was convicted in the slaying but later cleared by the country’s highest court.

ing Peruvian daily El Comercio about the decision, Gonzáles said he would not comment. “Imagine the amount of time I would lose,” he said, “if I answered questions about every process that involves a journalist.” Gonzáles did not return messages from CPJ seeking comment. Press freedom advocates are concerned about the tone set by the high court and its potential effect on a similar case—the 2004 murder of Alberto Rivera Fernández, a host on Radio Frecuencia Oriental. Five men have been convict-

Peru by the Numbers 5 4 3 3

Peruvian journalists murdered since 1992. journalist murders unpunished since 1992. victims were radio commentators. victims were threatened before slain.

View a database of all journalist deaths at www.cpj.org/deadly.

ed of the crime. Pucallpa Mayor Luís Valdéz Villacorta, whom Rivera had linked to drug trafficking, is among three defendants still facing conspiracy charges. Ramírez and IPYS are asking the Inter-American Commission—the human rights monitoring arm of the Organization of American States—to review the de la Torre case and urge that it be reopened. The Peruvian constitution would allow the case to be retried if new evidence surfaced that refuted the Supreme Court’s ruling. If, for example, the alleged accomplice Julca were arrested, his testimony could pry open the case again. They are also asking the commission to find that the Peruvian government failed to ensure justice, and to order unspecified damages. Restitution, Ramírez told CPJ, would allow her family to permanently relocate to Lima, where they would be safe from intimidation and threats. The commission’s decision could take up to a year. In the meantime, Ramírez has asked the commission to urge the Peruvian government to provide her with police protection. Regardless, Ramírez said, she will not keep silent. “I don’t want my husband’s death to disappear.” I

Dangerous Assignments

Out of Africa A bold Rwandan reporter is forced to leave the country. For the press, a broad pattern of intimidation emerges. By Elisabeth Witchel and Mohamed Keita

hen men in a white four-by-four pulled up in the middle of the night to the friend’s house where Lucie Umukundwa was hiding last August, she slipped out the back door, hailed a taxi, and ordered the driver to take her from Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, to Gisenyi, near the Democratic Republic of Congo border. Though that was as far as the cab would take her, Umukundwa’s journey had just begun. Umukundwa, a journalist for Voice of Africa and other news services in Rwanda, was known by colleagues for boldly reporting on sensitive subjects. For years she endured harassment by Rwandan security agents and government supporters, but the danger hit home on August 14 of last year. First, her brother was brutally assaulted by three unidentified men who told him: “If your sister refuses to shut her mouth, we will kill you and she won’t be spared.” “I was already used to arrests and intimidations, but this was the first time my family was attacked,” Umukundwa said. Following the attack on her brother, Umukundwa lay low for two weeks, hoping the police investigation or a supportive statement from the country’s High Council of the Press would bolster her security so she would not have to leave her country, children, job, and friends. Instead, the unknown men arrived at her friend’s door—and her flight had begun. She stayed in Gisenyi for several days until she received enough money from colleagues to pay people at the border to ease her crossing into the DRC. There, a guide brought her to the border of Uganda through eastern DRC’s conflict zone, terrain rife with armed rebel factions and soldiers from neighboring Sudan, Angola, and Burundi. Once in Uganda, she made her way to Kampala, the capital. A friend and colleague, Sonia Rolley, Rwanda correspondent for Radio France Internationale (RFI) until she was expelled from the country in June 2006, contacted her alma

Elisabeth Witchel is CPJ’s journalist assistance coordinator. Mohamed Keita is CPJ’s Africa program researcher.

Spring | Summer 2007

mater, Université Robert Schuman, in Strasbourg, France. The school offered Umukundwa a place in its journalism program. Several journalist and human rights groups, including CPJ and the Rory Peck Trust, collected funds to underwrite a scholarship for Umukundwa and support her in Kampala for three months while she finalized arrangements and obtained her visa. She arrived in Strasbourg at the end of November. Umukundwa can’t be certain who sped up to her friend’s house in Kigali that August night, any more than she can be sure who attacked her brother. But the incidents were part of a clear pattern. The day her brother was beaten, she had attended a press conference with President Paul Kagame, where she asked why she and the editors of two local independent newspapers, Charles Kabonero and Jean Bosco Gasasira, were under government surveillance and had received threatening text messages from telephone numbers linked to military intelligence officials. ucie Umukundwa, now 33, got her first taste of journalism writing about high school sports. Following the 1994 genocide—during which government-directed militias massacred about 800,000 Rwandans in a rampage of ethnic killing— Umukundwa recalled there was a shortage of journalists in the country. “Some were assassinated; some who were in the hate media were in exile or in prison.” The media played a notorious role in fomenting as well as directing the killing, with government-supported radio vilifying the Tutsi minority and exhorting violence. Kagame came to power as the leader of the Tutsi rebels, who toppled the Hutu-dominated government that carried out the genocide. While promising justice and reconciliation, he has increasingly demonstrated an authoritarian streak, justifying repressive measures, including restrictions on the press, as necessary to prevent the recurrence of genocidal violence. Umukundwa, whose mother was Tutsi and father Hutu, took a job as an assistant press officer for Rwanda’s office

Correspondents of tourism following the genocide. Later, she took advan“I was worried about Umukundwa because she dared tage of the many media training opportunities then availspeak about topics other journalists don’t touch,” Kamilindi able. “There were many NGOs helping the country rebuild said. In 2002, he and Umukundwa interviewed former Presby training young journalists. That’s how I started at Voice ident Pasteur Bizimungu, who was in the process of forming of America in September 1999,” Umukundwa said. Since a new political party. Following the interview, police seized then, she has worked for VOA’s French and Kinyarwandan Umukundwa and told Kamilindi that they would release her services, and has reported for RFI, the Syfia news agency, only if he turned over tapes from the interview. Kamilindi and Reporters Without Borders in France. said he relented, and Umukundwa was released. Umukundwa, the mother of two young children, faced oday, in Strasbourg, Umukundwa studies television jourpersonal tragedy that year when her husband died of natnalism. She worries about her children, an 8-year-old ural causes. She also received the first of many warnings from government security agents to curtail her reporting. The day after she aired a VOA report on the incarceration of street children, some of whom died because of poor detention conditions, the president’s security adviser summoned her. “He said, ‘If you begin like this, bad things will happen to you,’” Umukundwa recalled. “All those who wrote critical articles were compared to [the] hate media. We didn’t have the right to talk about arbitrary arrests, we couldn’t talk about vengeful crimes, and to this day, it is the same thing. … I was still young and didn’t care too much about danger.” In Rwanda, certain topics remain off-limits to the media, and only a dwindling number of independent journalists will approach them. CPJ has assisted 10 Rwandan journalists affiliated with local independent In exile in Strasbourg, Lucie Umukundwa faces an uncertain future. newspapers or foreign media outlets who have been forced into exile over daughter and 11-year-old son who live with relatives back home. the last four years. She plans to return to Africa this year after completing her studArnaud Royer, Africa researcher at Amnesty Internaies in June—though not to Rwanda. “When I initially left Rwantional, said Umukundwa was one of the very few journalists da, I thought I’d return within a year, that it would be over and in Rwanda to pick up his organization’s reports. Early last that I would return to work with VOA,” she said. “But with the year, she and BBC correspondent Jean-Claude Mwambutsa current situation, things are worse.” asked questions at a government press conference about a Since Umukundwa left Rwanda last fall, RFI has been critical Amnesty report, said Royer, and they were labeled taken off the air. Bonaventure Bizumuremyi, editor of the pritraitors and threatened. vate bimonthly newspaper Umuco, has been driven into “There are many subjects we are not allowed to cover,” hiding. Agnès Nkusi-Uwimana, director of the bimonthly said Thomas Kamilindi, a prominent radio journalist who Umurabyo, has been detained. And in February, Jean Bosco left Rwanda in 2005 and won asylum in the United States. Gasasira, editor of the Kinyarwanda-language weekly UmuvuThese include corruption and nepotism among high-ranking gizi, was assaulted by three men with iron bars. Gasasira, who officials, criticism of Kagame’s administration, and ethnic was in intensive care following the attack, is still recovering. relations. “People who write about those topics meet securiUmukundwa and other colleagues in exile are pessity problems. They might be arrested, tortured, beaten, and mistic that things will improve soon. “In a few years, indeharassed,” he said. Beate Bader

Kagame’s government has demonstrated an authoritarian streak. Dangerous Assignments

The Longest Term Josh Wolf, the longest-imprisoned journalist in U.S. history, is finally a free man. How did an ‘archivist and activist’ land in jail? And why was a federal grand jury investigating, anyway? By Heather Bourbeau

SAN FRANCISCO osh Wolf is polite if a bit harried this April day as he responds to the dozens of interview requests and well wishes flooding his cell phone. He’s a free man after 226 days in a federal prison—though, ironically, he’s without the computer hard drive that helped make him one of the best known bloggers in the United States. “It’s with one of my attorneys, and he’s in a foreign country right now,” Wolf says, laughing at the temporary absence. Jailed for refusing to cooperate with a federal grand jury investigating a 2005 anarchist demonstration that turned violent, Wolf was freed April 3 after finally disclosing the unedited video footage at the heart of the dispute. The U.S. attorney’s office, in turn, agreed to drop contempt of court charges, along with its demand that Wolf testify before the grand jury. The footage shows protesters, some masked, marching in this city’s Mission District, chanting and carrying signs such as “Destroy the War Machine.” Police are shown dispersing the demonstrators and, in one instance, subduing a protester. Criminal activity seems to be confined to demonstrators dragging newspaper vending boxes across the street. One protester can be heard saying “a cop car” is on fire. Not a lot, it seems, to have inspired a major press freedom standoff. So how did Josh Wolf end up being jailed longer than any journalist in U.S. history? The government declined comment in the aftermath of the case but made clear in court filings that it thought little of his claims of professional privilege. Wolf says the case was political: “This is really about identifying people outside the Ameri-

Heather Bourbeau is a journalist living in Oakland. She was most recently a contributing writer to Not on Our Watch: A Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond (Hyperion, 2007).

Spring | Summer 2007

can political norm. U.S. history has shown there has been a campaign of intimidation of people who protest against the government.” efore becoming an inmate, Wolf was an independent filmmaker, reporter, and blogger. Growing up in Wrightwood, Calif., a small town north of San Bernardino, he worked on his high school newspaper. In college, he wrote briefly for the student paper at the University of California at Santa Barbara before taking an internship at the weekly Santa Barbara Independent. Wolf moved north in 2004, studied film, and began contributing to news outlets such as the Haight Ashbury Beat and the Indymedia Web site. He launched a blog, “The Revolution Will Be Televised,” describing himself as “an artist, an activist, and an archivist.” By 2006, he had quit his day job at the Gap, was working as a television outreach and promotions coordinator for Peralta Community College, and had earned a degree in psychology from San Francisco State University. It’s the sort of résumé that countless journalists have accumulated by the time they reach Wolf’s age of 24. But Wolf’s résumé got more interesting on July 8, 2005, when he taped a small anti-globalization march organized by the group Anarchist Action to coincide with the G8 economic summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. About 100 people took part in the protest, which turned violent as some participants began vandalizing buses and storefronts. San Francisco Police Officer Peter Shields suffered a skull fracture when he was assaulted; a police cruiser was damaged. Wolf posted edited footage of the march on his blog. Local independent television KRON soon bought rights to the clip, followed by local network affiliates, including CBS 5. The greater interest came a few days later, when two FBI and two San Francisco police investigators arrived at Wolf’s door to ask for the unedited tape. Wolf refused, and in February 2006 he was served a federal subpoena to turn over his unpublished footage and to

AP/Benjamin Sklar

Update

Wolf speaks to reporters outside U.S. District Court in San Francisco last year. Judge William Alsup found Wolf in contempt in August 2006.

testify before a grand jury. When he again refused, saying his compliance would have a chilling effect on his recurring coverage of anarchist activities, Judge William Alsup found him in contempt of court and ordered him jailed on August 1, 2006. Briefly released on bail, Wolf offered to show his unedited tape to a judge to determine if it was indeed evidentiary, but the court declined. By September 22, Wolf was back at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Calif., where he remained for

another six months. His term surpassed the record set when writer Vanessa Leggett was jailed for contempt of court in 2001–02. Wolf, like Leggett, is a freelancer, and as such had neither the instant credibility nor the legal backing of an established news organization. A journalist who worked for the “large corporate press would probably have received a quicker level of support from the community,” Wolf said in an earlier, telephone interview conducted while he was still in prison. “And the

Federal guidelines require prosecutors to tread carefully before issuing subpoenas to journalists. It’s unclear whether authorities followed them in the Wolf case. Dangerous Assignments

AP/Steve Ueckert

Vanessa Leggett, a University of Houston lecturer and freelance writer, was jailed for 168 days after she refused to turn over research for a book on a Texas murder.

government, seeing this broad-base support, would possibly have thought twice before pursuing this.” uch of the debate surrounding Wolf’s case centered on whether he should be considered a journalist at all. Organizations such as CPJ, the National Press Club, the National Writers Union, and the Society of Professional Journalists have said that he is. “If Wolf had been doing what he was doing in China, or Uzbekistan, or Zimbabwe instead of San Francisco, there would be no question about his journalistic credentials,” says Joel Simon, CPJ’s executive director. The U.S. attorney’s office disputed that status. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Finigan said in a January 29 court filing that Wolf’s desire to protect his contacts was “delusional.” The prosecutor said additional time in prison would help Wolf realize that “he does not even qualify as a journalist” and that he was “simply a person with a video camera who happened to record some public events.” No one has been arrested or charged with the attack on the police officer. The local district attorney’s office brought one criminal case related to the unrest, but it was dismissed in part because witness testimony conflicted

Spring | Summer 2007

with police accounts. The federal authorities who intervened hung their jurisdiction on a seemingly tenuous hook. The grand jury was not convened to probe the attack on the injured police officer—assault is typically a state crime—but was called instead to investigate the protesters’ possible intent to set on fire a police cruiser. The San Francisco Police Department declined to comment on the damage or on other aspects of the case. The U.S. attorney’s office based its jurisdiction on the claim that the San Francisco police received federal funding that, in turn, helped pay for cruisers. Yet an investigation by Dan Noyes, a reporter with ABC7 News in San Francisco, found that federal funds were likely not used to buy the damaged cruiser, which he said was purchased in 2001. Monique Zmuda, San Francisco’s deputy controller, confirmed to CPJ that no marked police cars were purchased using federal grants in the 2001 fiscal year. “No matter how you slice the situation, it is an inefficient way to investigate anything,” Wolf says. Justice Department guidelines also require U.S. prosecutors to tread carefully before issuing subpoenas to journal-

Update ists, but it’s unclear whether federal authorities followed them in the Wolf case. For example, prosecutors must exhaust other means to obtain the necessary information before issuing a subpoena to a member of the press. In addition, the subpoena must be personally approved by the attorney general. Contacted by CPJ, a Justice Department spokesman declined to say whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had approved the Wolf subpoena at the onset. Advocates at CPJ have said the prosecution’s tactics and the length of Wolf’s imprisonment were disproportionate to the potential crime being investigated. Bringing the full weight of the federal government against a freelance journalist, CPJ said, sent an intimidating message to all reporters. “No more purpose is served by keeping you in jail,” CPJ Chairman Paul Steiger told Wolf in a telephone meeting just days before his release. he Justice Department’s record under the Bush administration reflects a more aggressive approach in compelling journalists’ testimony than that used in prior administrations. As early as March 2001, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft approved a subpoena for Leggett, a freelancer researching a book about a Texas murder. She refused to turn over her notes, was jailed for contempt of court, and was released only when the grand jury term ended after 168 days. The U.S.-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reported that the attorney general had approved 65 media subpoenas between 2001 and 2006—a figure consistent with the annual average of 14 since 1991. But throughout the 1990s, subpoenas rarely involved requests for notes or source identification, instead focusing on basic verification of reported material, according to a 1998 American Journalism Review interview with Frederick Hess, a Justice Department official responsible for reviewing such requests. And none ended in long jail terms. Before Leggett, the last time a federal court jailed a journalist was in 1991, when four reporters were imprisoned for eight hours for refusing to testify in a corruption trial, according to the Reporters Committee. (Six other journalists were confined by state or local courts for brief periods between 1991 and 2000, the Reporters Committee said.) But since 2001, federal courts have imprisoned four journalists for refusing to reveal sources or unpublished information. Along with Leggett and Wolf, they include Jim Taricani, a Rhode Island television reporter who served four months for refusing to reveal the source of a leaked FBI videotape; and Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter who spent 85 days behind bars because she would not say who leaked to her the identity of a CIA operative. Wolf says the case points to the need for shield laws,

although legal opinions vary. California has a shield law that provides legal protection for journalists to maintain confidentiality of unnamed sources and unpublished information. Thirty-one other states and the District of Columbia have shield laws that provide some level of protection, but there is no federal equivalent. In fact, a 1972 Supreme Court decision, Branzburg v. Hayes, ruled that journalists have no absolute privilege under the First Amendment to refuse to appear before grand juries. Legislation introduced in Congress last year would have given journalists a qualified privilege to protect confidential sources and information, but it was never brought to vote and the effort appears to have stalled. The Wolf case, for all its troubling aspects, does not have the mainstream sheen that might draw wide support. “The best-case scenario would be if Dana Priest of The Washington Post were subpoenaed for her information on the Walter Reed story,” says Jane Kirtley, professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, referring to Priest’s recent exposé on substandard care at the famous veterans’ hospital. “If that were to happen, there would be no problem getting a federal shield law. But with so many other cases involving subpoenas in situations that are ambiguous, I’m not too optimistic.” As in many court disputes revolving around press freedom principles, the resolution was a compromise. Wolf handed over his unedited footage as part of an agreement with prosecutors, while having it posted immediately to his Web site (www.joshwolf.net). Although Wolf did not have to testify in front of the grand jury, he agreed to answer two questions in writing and under oath: Did he witness anyone throw or shoot an object at a police car or learn of anyone doing so? And, did he know whom Shields was trying to arrest when the assault took place? His response to both was “No.” In the end, did he simply capitulate by turning over the tape? Wolf notes that he had already offered to show the tape to the government. “Although I feel that my unpublished material should be shielded from government demands,” Wolf says, “it was the testimony that I found to be the more egregious assault on my right and ethics as both a journalist and a citizen.” Now, as he settles back into civilian life, Wolf has causes to promote. He plans to lobby in favor of a federal shield law and report on what he calls “the prison industrial complex.” And once his hard drive is back where it belongs, Wolf will blog. I

Wolf has causes to pursue. He plans to lobby for a federal shield law and to report on prison conditions. And, of course, he plans to blog. Dangerous Assignments

Mick Stern

Drawing the Line

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Attacks on the Press in 2006 A Worldwide Survey by the Committee to Protect Journalists Preface by Anderson Cooper Introduction by Joel Simon paper, 978-0-944823-26-2, $30.00

Rising Star China’s New Security Diplomacy Bates Gill cloth, 978-0-8157-3146-7, $28.95

Building a New Afghanistan Robert I. Rotberg, ed. Copublished with the World Peace Foundation cloth, 978-0-8157-7568-3, $44.95 paper, 978-0-8157-7569-0, $18.95

Journey into Islam The Crisis of Globalization Akbar Ahmed cloth, 978-0-8157-0132-3, $28.95 Includes black & white photos

Brookings Institution Press Phone: 800-537-5487 or 410-516-6956 Fax: 410-516-6998

Available at your local bookstore or online at www.brookings.edu/press

Savage Century

State of the Struggle

Back to Barbarism

Report on the Battle against Global Terrorism

Thérèse Delpech Translated by George Holoch A Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Book cloth, 978-0-87003-233-2, $27.95

Lee Hamilton, Bruce Hoffman, Brian Michael Jenkins, Paul Pillar, Xavier Raufer, Walter Reich & Fernando Reinares A Council on Global Terrorism Book paper, 978-0-8157-3411-6, $16.95

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Fall | Winter 2008

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