World Press Freedom Day commemorated

Already in 2004, 17 have died. Iraq remains the most dangerous place for journalists and Zimbabwe, one of the most repressive.

Included in the 2003 losses are 20 people who died covering the conflict in Iraq, and the Freedom Forum says that is more than have died in any one year since World War II. Iraq, which the Committee to Protect Journalists has named as the country most dangerous to cover, is a far different assignment than were the battlefronts and foxholes of 1944, when 26 members of the press died. There is no safe zone. The battlefront is on every street and country road, and reporters - like soldiers - are in constant peril from rioting crowds, insurgents, snipers, land mines, suicide bombers, kidnappers, and friendly fire from US troops. And it's not just Americans who are targeted. The names of journalists lost in Iraq read like a United Nations list - an equal-opportunity killing field.

Beyond Iraq, last year's casualties include Nicanor Linhares Batista, a 42-year-old radio political commentator in Brazil who was gunned down in his studio for angering local politicians. Ersa Siregar, a 52-year-old Indonesian television reporter, was shot covering a battle between soldiers and separatist rebels. Zahra Kazemi, 54-year-old freelance journalist and photographer, was beaten to death in an Iranian prison. Gyanendra Khadka, a 35-year-old reporter for a news agency in Nepal, was kidnapped, bound, and taken into a field, where abductors slit his throat.

The list continues through deaths in the Philippines, Russia, Somalia, Guatemala, India, Israel, Ivory Coast, Cambodia and Colombia. And this year the list will grow as foreign correspondents, doing what is often mistakenly considered glamorous work, put their lives on the line for a glimpse of the truth.

Southern Africa

The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) today also released its annual publication, "So This Is Democracy? State of media freedom in Southern Africa" in commemoration of World Press Freedom Day today, May 3.

This is the 10th consecutive year in which MISA has issued this publication which records incidents of media freedom violations monitored by MISA in the previous year (2003). MISA issued 188 alerts in 2003 about media freedom and freedom of expression violations in SADC countries. This is an decrease of 9.7 percent over the 208 alerts recorded in the previous year.
The countries monitored include Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. MISA is in the process of resuscitating its media freedom monitoring activities in Angola.

MISA's Regional Programme Manager: Media Freedom Monitoring, Zoé Titus, says that "although this figure (188) marks a decrease of 9.7 percent from the previous year, the nature of alerts and their bearing on the psyche of journalists have culminated into an environment in which journalists practice self-censorship, where media organisations are either closed down by governments through the application of repressive legislation or as a result of degenerating economic conditions and where the pursuit of independent journalism is often labelled as 'unpatriotic'.

"In Zimbabwe the forced state closure of the Daily News on September 12, 2003, on charges that it was publishing illegally without a state license, was undoubtedly the worst media freedom violation recorded in 2003," she says, adding that the application of the repressive Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act in that country has translated into Zimbabwe accounting for 54 percent of all media freedom and freedom of expression violations MISA recorded in 2003."

She warns, however, that it must be noted that those countries where the media freedom situation has not overtly deteriorated, there remains a need for media law reform as the environment is still littered with legal hurdles that stifle media freedom.

A breakdown of the 188 alerts issued in 2003 reveals among others, that 33 journalists were attacked, 53 detained, 37 censored whilst 8 victories – either through the adoption of positive legislation or where charges were dropped against a journalist – were recorded. No journalists were killed as a result of their work in 2003 in Southern Africa.

The alerts for 2003 reveal the emergence of new themes of professional importance to journalists and to MISA. These include the increase of civil defamation cases against the media and concerns about the high financial penalties being awarded to successful litigants, the emergence of more independent media councils (voluntary media complaints bodies) or attempts to do so, the establishment of national editors forums, increasing concerns about the wages and working conditions of journalists, the struggle for the appointment of statutory but independent broadcasting authorities, developments around the introduction of Access to Information legislation, and the rise of media civil society coalitions (including associations of journalists in the state owned media) for media freedom advocacy and legal reform purposes. All of these issues have a direct bearing on media freedom and the quality of journalism in the SADC region.

Download full publication at: www.misa.org .