Unacceptable danger
By Richard Tait Posted Mon, Jan 1 2001
(The following is an edited excerpt from Richard Tait’s speech on journalist safety at the News World 2000 conference in Barcelona.):
Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora, an Associated Press Television Network photojournalist, was killed in Sierra Leone on May 24, 2000. Miguel’s death was a terrible shock to everyone in television news who knew him and his work. His was a unique talent. But his death was not an isolated incident. It came during a period of terrible violence against the media. The soldiers who killed Miguel also killed Kurt Schork, the respected Reuters war correspondent. The day before, in another conflict on another continent, Abed Takkoush, who had worked for the BBC as a fixer and driver for a quarter of a century, was killed when an Israeli tank shelled his car in Southern Lebanon.
I get all too clear a view of what is happening to news reporters, crews and photographers in my role as vice chairman of IPI. Our profession has become unacceptably dangerous.
In January in a joint report with the International Federation of Journalists, the IPI called 1999 an infamous year for violence against the media with more than 80 journalists killed. It was the second worst year on record for the murder of journalists. There were 24 deaths in 2000.
We need to make our industry safer. But we do not want to send a message to the teams on the front line that we are no longer committed to enterprising, courageous and original journalism.
We also need to ensure that such journalism continues to be commissioned and broadcast. And when we do assign to a conflict zone, we need to resist attempts by politicians, regulators and would-be censors to sanitize our coverage of these conflicts.
The reporters, producers and crews on the front line have rights as well as responsibilities. They are entitled to expect us to have the will to show as full a version as possible of what they have witnessed.
So how do we continue our commitment to journalism on the front line, while at the same time reduce the risks to our staff? At last, there are signs that we are all beginning to realize radical action is required worldwide to stop the killings.
In the United Kingdom, in response to the wish of Miguel Gil’s family that his death should act as a spur for higher safety standards, the primary news agencies, APTN, Reuters, BBC, CNN and ITN, have come together to set up a safety group. We have agreed to adopt common safety policies. Our guidelines cover assignment, training, protective equipment, post-traumatic counseling and insurance.
Although we’re often competing with one another, we’ve agreed to pool information on potentially dangerous assignments. We hope others may want to join us or pursue similar initiatives.
And there’s also been an important scheme to help freelancers who don’t always find it easy to get training. It has always been my belief that broadcasters should wherever possible ensure that everyone working for them on the front line, whether staff or freelance, should have the proper training. In the last seven years, we at ITN have given 164 people, staff and freelance alike, hostile environment training. Earlier this year the Rory Peck Trust, which was set up in memory of Rory Peck, a fine cameraman killed in Russia in October 1993, joined with a group of broadcasters and newspapers to ensure that freelancers could have access to affordable training.
Although these are important steps in the right direction, I believe there is another dimension to ensuring safety on the front line. Many of the television journalists and crews who have been killed in the last few years were well-trained, experienced, had safety equipment and good professional back up.
There is always the danger of truly accidental death or injury, of being caught in the crossfire or hit by bullets or shells intended for others. The nature of modern conflicts makes covering them all the more dangerous. Increasingly, these conflicts do not involve disciplined armed forces with officers whose training reflected the influence of Soviet and Western military academies. They are often likely to involve ill-disciplined militias under the control of warlords. And the stories we are covering are increasingly not of military conflict between troops, but crimes against humanity where the video evidence of camera crews may be the only unchallenged evidence of what armed men have done to civilians.
In this truly hostile environment, accidents do happen, and the untrained or inexperienced are more vulnerable. Yet many of our colleagues weren’t killed by lack of experience or by accident. They were killed deliberately by soldiers because they believed they could kill journalists with impunity.
And history would suggest that few of those who kill reporters and crews are ever brought to justice. On Oct. 16, 1975, militia under the command of Indonesian officers entered the village of Balibo in East Timor. Five Australian-based television journalists were murdered. Eyewitnesses have named the commander of the operation as an Indonesian Special Forces officer who later became a government minister. He denies involvement.
An Australian journalist, Roger East, discovered that the five had been deliberately killed. He in turn was murdered by Indonesian forces on the first day of the Indonesian invasion of Dili in December.
Until very recently, the Australian government had apparently put little or no pressure on the Indonesians to find those responsible. Now, finally, the United Nations police in East Timor have opened the first judicial investigation, and the truth, perhaps, will come out.
What is so terrible about the unsolved murders in Balibo is that they established a pattern that has been repeated in the Balkans, in Africa, in South America and in the Middle East. It is a disgrace that so many deaths remain unsolved, that so little has been done to investigate them, to identify those responsible and to bring them to justice.
Journalists are civilians. They have the right under Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights to ‘seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’ Official indifference endangers everyone reporting and filming in conflict zones.
This is not a situation that we can allow to continue. The media themselves need to be much more active in pressuring governments to take action.
We report conflicts; we do not take sides. We are rightly cautious about getting too close to politicians in our own countries or in anyone else’s. We may well have stringers, bureaus and relationships in countries that we do not wish to damage or even endanger. But there is surely a difference between getting involved in other people’s conflicts and politics, which we absolutely should not do, and using whatever influence we can muster to try and make the world a safer place for our frontline teams.
I believe we need to increase political pressure on undemocratic governments to protect news teams as a responsibility that they must take seriously. We must hold them accountable for abuses.
We also need to increase the pressure on democratic governments to make the investigation of such killings a priority and punish those responsible.
I do not pretend that this will transform the situation overnight. But I have a little evidence to suggest that this approach could do some good. In May 1999, a group of journalists from Asia, Africa, North America and Europe went on a mission to Jakarta, ahead of the Indonesian elections and the East Timor referendum. It stressed the damage that would be done to Indonesia’s international standing if journalists and crews from the Indonesian or international media were harassed or killed.
We saw the president and other senior ministers and urged them to do whatever they could to control their armed forces. I think we had some effect. There is some evidence that the Indonesian army and militia were under orders to show more restraint than they had in the past. However, there was still intimidation and violence. Sander Thoenes, the brilliant Financial Times correspondent, was killed in Dili.
This year a multi-national lobbying effort, involving an international group of broadcasters, African newspaper editors and politicians, including Jesse Jackson and Nelson Mandela, succeeded in getting a team from Britain’s Channel Four television out of the central prison in Monrovia. They were being held on a ridiculous charge of espionage and were in real physical peril.
The development of powerful corporate media groups, which do have real global influence, gives us the opportunity to use that influence for good. Safety is everyone’s concern, from the newsroom to the boardroom and the governments of the world.
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Recommendations to news organizations for journalists’ safety
-Preservation of human life and safety is paramount. Staff and freelancers should be made aware that unwarranted risks in pursuit of a story are unacceptable and must be strongly discouraged. Assignments to war zones or hostile environments must be voluntary and should only involve experienced news-gathering practitioners.
-All staff and freelancers asked to work in hostile environments must have access to appropriate safety training and retraining. Employers are encouraged to make this mandatory.
-Employers must provide efficient safety equipment to all staff and freelancers assigned to hazardous locations, including personal-issue kevlar vests or jackets, protective headgear and properly protected vehicles, if necessary.
-All staff and freelancers should be afforded personal insurance while working in hostile areas, including coverage against death and personal injury.
-Employers should provide and encourage the use of voluntary and confidential counseling for staff and freelancers returning from hostile areas, or after the coverage of distressing events. (This is likely to require some training of media managers in the recognition of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder).
-Media companies and their representatives are neutral observers; they don’t carry firearms in the course of their work.
-Media groups should work together to establish a data bank of safety information, including the exchange of up-to-date safety assessments of hostile and dangerous areas.