NEW YORK, Nov 21 (IPS) - Nearly 500 journalists have been murdered in the last 15 years, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), and about 85 percent of those crimes have gone unpunished.
On Tuesday, CPJ honoured five journalists who embody courage in the face of censorship with its 2007 International Press Freedom Awards.
The situation in the countries from which four of the five award winners were chosen (Russia, China, Pakistan and Mexico) exemplifies this ominous trend. There have been deaths, disappearances and arrests of journalists in all four countries and, as unique as each of the award winners' experiences have been, violent repression is the common thread among them.
"The main problem for journalists in Mexico is the impunity for the killers of journalists," honoree Adela Navarro Bello, 39, told IPS. "That puts us in a spot. If someone attacks a journalist in Mexico, you know he is not going to be punished."
Bello is the general director of the weekly magazine Zeta in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico. Created in 1980, Zeta is one of the only publications to regularly run investigative articles on organised crime, drug trafficking and corruption in Mexico's northern states, where self-censorship is rampant. Zeta's history in covering crime along the U.S.-Mexico border is as inspirational as it is tragic.
The co-founder of the magazine, Héctor Félix Miranda, was killed in 1988, and co-editor Francisco Ortiz Franco was murdered in 2004. In 1997, after an assassination attempt against J. Jesús Blancornelas, the founder and then director of Zeta, in which one of his bodyguards was killed, Mexican authorities provided Bello with a bulletproof vest and two bodyguards. But Bello was not fazed.
"I don't let myself think about the aspect of fear. If I do, I will close the paper and go home," she said in an interview.
Dressed in a black evening gown, Bello looked more like a glamorous movie star than a tough muck-raking reporter. But her eyes revealed the woman underneath: passionate and fearless.
"This is our profession, our job, and we love what we do," she said.
Bello recently wrote an article on the suspected links between Mexican police authorities and organised crime.
Across the ocean, in Pakistan, another kind of danger has been brewing. Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has been clamping down on journalists critical of his rule, even more so since he imposed a state of emergency on Nov. 5.
But for years, journalists like Mazhar Abbas have been defending the people's right to know. He is the deputy director of ARY One World Television, an Urdu and Hindi-language 24-hour news channel in Pakistan and the secretary-general of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists. Abbas refused to give up his profession even after repeated threats to his life and his family.
In May, he was one of three journalists who found bullets in white envelopes stuck to their cars when they came out of a late-night meeting at the Karachi Press Club. He was on the hit list of the Mohajir Rabita Council, an ethnic political group in Pakistan's southern province of Sindh, which is allied with President Musharraf.
Abbas was charged by police earlier this year after protesting the closure of three independent TV channels that had reported on anti-Musharraf demonstrations. "Winning this award is like winning the Oscar of journalism," he told IPS. "This is a great honour for all the journalists in Pakistan, particularly because the last few months have been very rough for us."
As Abbas attended the ceremony in New York, some 180 of his fellow journalists were being arrested in Pakistan for protesting the crackdown on freedom of speech.
"Pakistan is an intolerant society, and ethnic and political parties get annoyed with what we do. At the same time, within the Muslim world, Pakistan is the only country where journalists can write and protest against curbing of rights," he said.
He hopes that the recent protests by Pakistani journalists during the emergency will change the western media's perception of the country. "You can't portray Pakistan only as a country where Daniel Pearl was killed. It is also a country where 24 Pakistani journalists have been killed," he said.
As an AFP correspondent in Karachi, Abbas covered the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal South Asia Bureau Chief Daniel Pearl in 2002, and the following investigations and trials.
Dmitry Muratov, who lost three reporters with his Moscow-based Novaya Gazeta, said he had considered shutting down the paper but continued to publish, "Because our million readers share the values of democracy. Real democracy -- not its imitation," he said.
Novaya Gazeta is the only truly critical newspaper with national influence in Russia today. He founded the paper in 1993 and is still its driving force. From high-level corruption and abuse of power to human rights violations, the newspaper has uncovered many of the Vladimir Putin's administration's secrets. But the paper has paid a heavy price, most recently with the life of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
The last award winner Gao Qinrong, who completed an eight-year prison sentence in China on trumped-up charges, was not able to attend because the Chinese authorities would not issue him a passport. Gao had reported on corruption in an irrigation project in Shanxi province.
Tom Brokaw, NBC News anchor, reporter and best-selling author, received CPJ's Burton Benjamin Memorial Award for lifetime achievement.
Paul Steiger, CPJ's board chairman, announced a one-million-dollar grant to permanently endow CPJ's network of consultants around the world, known as the International Programme Network. Already, nearly 750,000 dollars has been raised toward the goal.
More than 900 people attended the benefit dinner, which raised more than 1.4 million dollars, a fund-raising record for the event. Brian Williams, anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News and CPJ board member, hosted the dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.
Presenters for the evening's awards included Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation, Scott Pelley of CBS News, Patricia Janiot of CNN En Español, Alan Johnston of BBC News, Cheryl Gould of NBC News, and Bill Wheatley, former executive vice president of NBC News.
