A fatal job. How many journalists have to die?

If you tell people that journalists are being murdered daily, they usually think of war correspondents working in conflict areas.

But you are not talking about war correspondents, though regrettably they too at times are killed. You are talking about media people who are being deliberately murdered. These journalists die because they are doing their job: their reports and comments have angered a government, the military, or some other local power which demands a stop to the flow of critical reporting. An order is given for the journalist to be eliminated. Increasingly, such executions are carried out in a street, in broad daylight, much in the public eye. This in itself is a message to other media people: Toe the line or else.

The lethal message is frequently delivered at the hand of gunmen on motorcycles, usually when a journalist is on the way to and from home. Other methods include organising a group of thugs to corner and beat up media people, break or seize their equipment, ram their cars, or await the victim on home ground. In some cases, the family home is invaded during the dark hours of the night.

Records of such deaths are faithfully kept by several international media organisations, together with Amnesty International. They strive to focus the attention of the world - and world leaders - on the blatant murders and attacks to get something done about them. Since January 1 this year up to the day of writing, April 29, the number of journalists killed totalled 23.

Figures published by the International Press Institute’s Death Watch show them as: Kenya 1, Madagascar 1, Somalia 2, Afghanistan 2. India, 1, Nepal 1, Pakistan 5, Sri Lanka 2, Russia 2, Iraq 2, Palestinian Territories 1, Guatemala 1, Honduras 1, and Venevuela, 1.

Other media organisations involved in keeping watch include the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders (Reporters San Frontières/RSF) and the South East Asian Press Alliance. They also track imprisonments, detentions, non-lethal bashings, death threats, abductions, disappearances and the use of defamation writs to bully. A visit to their websites makes sober reading. Numbers and details provided by the different organisations occasionally differ somewhat, possibly because of varying criteria, but the message they collectively give is horrifying.

The International Press Institute Death Watch website publishes an annual list of those killed. The details are:

The IPI Death Watch includes journalists deliberately targeted because of their profession - either because of their investigative reporting or simply because they were journalists - but also includes journalists who were caught in crossfire while covering dangerous assignments.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that in March 2009 at least 125 journalists were behind bars around the world, and at least 30 had “disappeared”.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) recorded that in 2008, in addition to journalists killed, 929 media people were physically attacked or threatened; 673 journalists were arrested; 353 media outlets were censored; and 29 journalists were kidnapped.

On April 27 the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) reported another brutal murder: journalist José Everardo Aguilar was killed when he answered the door of his home in the south western town of Patia, 450km south of the capital Bogotá, Colombia. He was 72 and the father of ten.

According to the director of Radio Súper Popayán, an unknown man came to his house and said he wanted to show him some documents and photographs. When José Everardo Aguilar asked to see them, the man drew a gun and shot him six times at close range. He died on the spot and the killer walked away and escaped.

"This is the gravest in a series of attacks against colleagues all around the country," Eduardo Márquez, president of the Federation of Colombian Journalists (FECOLPER) said. "Since the beginning of the year 2009, we have now registered 40 attacks against journalists in Colombia."

Appalling though these details and statistics are, such killings and attacks still have not yet punctured the public conscience. The general public is not yet stung into action and until it is, politicians are not likely to do much.

As IFJ General Secretary Aidan White says in its 2008 annual report, "We often see politicians, even in democratic countries, showing callous indifference to the threats posed by attacks on journalists and media”.

In London in June 2008, the United Nations Secretary Ban Ki-moon unveiled a 10m glass and steel cone on top of BBC Broadcasting House to shine a beam of light into the sky every night at 2200 GTM.

The memorial is dedicated to all news journalists and those who have worked with them, including drivers and translators. At that time it was estimated that in the past 10 years an estimated two war reporters a week had died, with many more killed while covering tales of corruption.

Mr Ban said the light memorial stood "in tribute to all those who have sacrificed their lives so that the rest of us could be informed … But it is also for those who survive, those who are out there right now - risking their lives to report what they uncover in the face of deadly threats."

Rodney Pinder, director of the International News Safety Institute (INSI) which works for more safety for journalists, added: "These men and women are the unsung heroes of democracy, for without a free press there can be no freedom. This shaft of light in the capital of international journalism is a visual reminder of their sacrifice."

As the sculpture, “Breathing”, by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, lit up for the first time none present could have have guessed how many more journalists were soon to die, nor how blatant some of those murders would be.

Lasantha Wickrematunge, editor of Sri Lanka’s The Sunday Leader, knew he would be assassinated. Before he was killed on January 8, 2009, he wrote a last editorial, posthumously published in his own paper on January 22.

He wrote:

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack.

Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

I have been in the business of journalism a good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be The Sunday Leader's 15th year. Many things have changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and it does not need me to tell you that the greater part of that change has been for the worse. We find ourselves in the midst of a civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by protagonists whose bloodlust knows no bounds.

Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty. Today it is the journalists, tomorrow it will be the judges. For neither group have the risks ever been higher or the stakes lower.

Why then do we do it? I often wonder that. After all, I too am a husband, and the father of three wonderful children. I too have responsibilities and obligations that transcend my profession, be it the law or journalism. Is it worth the risk? Many people tell me it is not. Friends tell me to revert to the bar, and goodness knows it offers a better and safer livelihood.

Others, including political leaders on both sides, have at various times sought to induce me to take to politics, going so far as to offer me ministries of my choice. Diplomats, recognising the risk journalists face in Sri Lanka, have offered me safe passage and the right of residence in their countries. Whatever else I may have been stuck for, I have not been stuck for choice.

But there is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience.

UNESCO has recognised Lasantha Wickrematunge with its world press freedom prize, acknowledging his work in criticising government conduct and highlighting the dangers of the ongoing war to civilians.

An increase in such murders appears to have shifted to South Asia and South East Asia, where media people are losing their lives at the will of rogue governments, at the hand of so-called religious movements or because a drug lord has sent thugs to beat up a reporter. Of 33 journalists killed in the region in 2008, 23 were victims of premeditated murder, an IFJ report shows.

In addition to the killing of Lasantha Wickrematunge, several assassinations since the beginning of the 21st century have marked the dreadful danger in which some journalists work. This is also true for people who associate with them and for people who advocate human rights.

Anna Politkovskaya’s murder in Moscow in 2006 did penetrate world consciousness for a while, perhaps because she had predicted her own assassination on television. A journalist, author and human activist, she became well known for her opposition to the Chechen conflict and for her books, including Putin’s Russia.

In an unrelenting description in The Guardian in January 2009, Luke Harding reported how a close friend of Anna’s, lawyer Stanislav Markelov, one of Russia’s most noted human rights defenders, was walking near the Kremlin with Anastasia Baburova, 25, a freelance journalist for the courageous Novaya Gazeta newspaper. A killer came up from behind them, shot Mr Markelov twice in the back of the head, using a pistol with a silencer. Ms Baburova tried to grab him, so he stopped and calmly shot her in the head. He then jogged off along the street towards the metro, 100m away, vanishing into the crowd.

Luke Harding reported the incident as “similar in its brazenness to the murder of Politkovskaya … It also echoes the death of Alexander Litvinenko, who died from polonium poisoning in London the following month.” He added that the murders of Kremlin foes - journalists, lawyers and critics of Russia's security services - have a common theme: “Nobody is ever caught and punished.”

Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2002 while investigating an alleged link between shoe bomber Richard Reid and al-Qaida and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Based at Mumbai (Bombay), he was the South Asia Bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. A shudder of revulsion went through the general public when it was learned he had been beheaded by his captors. Mr Pearl was born in 1963 in Princeton, New Jersey. His mother was of Iraqi Jewish descent; his father was Judea Pearl, an UCLA professor. Daniel Pearl’s wife, a Buddhist; gave birth to their son shortly after his death.

Afghani university student and journalist, 24, for the daily newspaper Janan-e-Naw, Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh found himself facing death by hanging in January 2008 on charges of “blasphemy” for allegedly downloading articles from the internet related to women’s rights. After a great deal of international protest, led in great part by media organisations, his sentence was commuted to 20 years in prison.

In April 2009 the United Nations agency with the task of upholding press freedom condemned the killing of Raja Assad Hammeed, a senior reporter for Pakistan’s daily newspaper, Nation, and the Waqt TV channel, who was shot dead by unidentified assailants as he arrived home in Rawalpindi, in northern Pakistan, on March 26.

“I trust that the authorities will press ahead with a thorough investigation of this crime which undermines journalists' inalienable human right to freedom of expression and society's right to enjoy press freedom,” said Koïchiro Matsuura, Director-General of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) commented.

Earlier, the Intergovernmental Council of the International Program for the Development of Communication (IPDC) requested UN member states to assume responsibility for monitoring investigations into all killings condemned by UNESCO. In March 2008, the IPDC also asked all states to inform UNESCO of actions taken in each case as well as the status of judicial inquires. UNESCO Director-General had publicly condemned the killings of 121 journalists - 68 in 2006 and 53 in 2007.

In March 2009 all 39 IPDC council members requested the UNESCO’s director-general to provide updated information on the responses received from member states in which assassinations of journalists had occurred, and to make this report widely available.

According to its website, UNESCO uses lobbying and monitoring activities to highlight media independence and pluralism as fundamental to the process of democracy. It provides advisory services on media legislation and by making governments, parliamentarians and other decision-makers aware of the need to guarantee free expression.

It seems some governments and decision-makers do not choose to listen.

In Fiji currently, it has been reported that government minders have moved into media offices to make sure journalists only write what “the government” wants published. It is preferable to being shot but under such suppression, journalists cannot do their job.

These few examples serve to show that in a disquieting number of countries, freedom of speech and independent reporting are in serious trouble. Reporters there work in peril of their lives.

Media organisations and journalists need to hammer home to the public that some of the news they read or receive in the safety of their sitting rooms may well have cost someone their life. The great, noisy public needs to be roused into action to prod leaders around the world to get these executions stopped.

Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard in the RWB 2008 annual report wrote angrily: “The spinelessness of some Western countries and major international bodies is harming press freedom. The lack of determination by democratic countries in defending the values they supposedly stand for is alarming.”

So, how many more journalists have to die?