About 70 foreign reporters and local citizen journalists died during the months of the revolution. The regime’s shells and tanks do not differentiate between one who holds the camera and the pen, the demonstrator who holds banners, or the child who holds his future in his small hands. Everyone, without exception, is a target of a destructive, insatiable machine. It does not distinguish between Syrians and non-Syrians, as long as they have the vocabulary of freedom and truth in their dictionary: Marie Colvin, Rémi Ochlik, Mazhar Tayyara, Basil Shehadeh, Rami al-Sayed, Anas Tersheh, Mika Yamamoto, Hassan Azhari and dozens of others. We often followed their reports and videos and spread their news, without paying attention to those behind the camera, handset or computer screen. It was only later that we realised they were always in the grip of death.

It is said that the shoes of Marie Colvin led to her death. She removed them upon entering the hall of the building that was used as a revolutionary media centre in the area. When the shelling began, Marie rushed to retrieve her shoes in order to flee with the others, but the shell did not wait. She and her colleague, Rémi, and others were killed. It seems a shameful, humiliating fact, yet also demonstrates, Anna, the reality of a country where practicing any form of life, with the daily, trivial minutiae that make us ordinary human beings, has become impossible. The number of martyrs is over thirty thousand, including about 2,650 children and more than 1,700 women. We are working hard to collect their photos and curiously intervene in the details of their lost lives, desperately trying to keep mementos of their existence. This is a fraction of our duty toward them, but is also an important part of resisting death,carried out by us, the living.

There is not a stone left unturned in my country — the government army’s relentless destruction has made sure of that. Normally, we hear the roar of a plane, and after a few seconds, we hear the sound of shelling. We wait a little bit to start counting the martyrs and watch a video showing that what was once a building with floors, apartments, furniture, child beds, family pictures and toys has become a pile of dust and stones. Ancient neighbourhoods and markets, that store our memories and are part of our history, and lanes, a womb of our memories, were burned to the ground and our hearts burned with them.

Maybe I do not have the right to complain, Anna. You paid with your life for what you believed in. Marie, who we honor today in your name, paid the same price. As did your friend and the first recipient of the award, Natalia Estemirova, in Chechnya. However, I just cannot fathom the dull stupidity of the world, of governments and regimes east and west! I feel there is no difference between your government, which was responsible for your death, Anna, through shameful standing with a criminal and murderous regime, and the governments that condemned your killing, as they have condemned the killing of thousands of my people. They do not find an “incentive”, a sufficient interest, to defend human lives by more than a few trite words. Words are yours alone, Anna, you and Marie Colvin, Rami al-Sayed, Jel Jakiye, Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, Mohammed Badie al-Kasem, and all the others who gave a new meaning to words and images, with a lot of love and determination.

Finally, let me, in your name, Anna Politkovskaya, honour your courageous colleague, Marie Colvin. I would like also to honor everyone carrying the obsession of freedom and truth in their heart; in Syria, which is tired and sad but determined to realise freedom; in occupied Palestine; in Chechnya; in Darfur; in Afghanistan; in the countries of the Arab Spring; in states where people do not have a chance of resurrection; in Iran, where the people aspire to be liberated from tyranny; and in every corner of this world, where people are still suffering to live in freedom and dignity.

Razan Zaitouneh is a Syrian human rights lawyer

The post From Anna Politkovskaya to Marie Colvin appeared first on Index on Censorship.

In February 1663, the London printer John Twyn waited in Newgate prison for his execution, the unique horror of being hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, the place known today as Marble Arch. This medieval agony was the recently restored monarch King Charles II’s terrifying lesson to his subjects: do not write, or print, treason against the state.

Even more cruel, Twyn’s offence was merely to have printed an anonymous pamphlet justifying the people’s right to rebellion, “mettlesome stuff” according to the state censor (the King’s Surveyor of the Press). No one suggested that Twyn had written this treason, only that he had transformed it from manuscript to print. Perhaps he hadn’t even read it. Never mind: he was sentenced to death.

Pressed both to admit his offence and reveal the name of the pamphlet’s anonymous author (and thereby save his own life), Twyn refused. In words of breathtaking courage that echo down the centuries, he told the prison chaplain that “it was not his principle to betray the Author”. Shortly afterwards, Twyn went to his doom. His head was placed on a spike over Ludgate, and his dismembered body distributed round other city gates.

Words can be weapons, and the pen challenges the sword. Writers, and printers, “the troublers of the poor world’s peace”, in Shakespeare’s phrase, have always seemed a danger to the state. Across Europe, for the first three centuries of the printing press, questions of religion and politics were usually settled by the authorities of the day with rare and explicit savagery. As John Mullan has shown in his excellent monograph Anonymity, the safest course for the dissident writer was a pseudonymous or anonymous cloak of identity.

Eventually, the Romantic assertion of the heroic individual’s place in the world at the beginning of the 19th century ended this prudent convention, but slowly. The scandalous first two Cantos of Don Juan were printed without naming either Lord Byron or his publisher, John Murray. Despite the risks, the poet soon found fame irresistible. “Own that I am the author,” he instructed Murray, “I will never shrink.” By the reign of the fourth George, Britain’s liberal democracy was never likely to eviscerate, hang or decapitate a transgressive writer, though some terrible penalties did remain on the statute book for decades to come.

Abroad in Europe, as repressive states, notably Tsarist Russia, grew harsher, the fate of writers worsened, but hardly varied. The essential predicament was unchanged from John Twyn’s day. Putting black on white, words on the page, as accurately and truthfully as one could, would never fail to make trouble with vested interests, arterio-sclerotic authorities and evil despotisms. Dostoevsky was marched before a firing squad, but reprieved. The distinguished list of writers, before the Cold War, who died for their art includes Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel, possibly the greatest loss of all.

Writers and despotic regimes

By the middle of the 20th century there was, in the words of Graham Greene, a fairly general recognition that “it had always been in the interests of the State to poison the psychological wells, to encourage cat-calls, to restrict human sympathy. It makes government easier when people shout Gallilean, Papist, Fascist, Communist.” In the same essay, on “the virtues of disloyalty”, Greene expressed the writer’s credo in an age of growing state control. “The writer is driven by his own vocation,” he said, “to be a Protestant in a Catholic society, a Catholic in a Protestant one, to see the virtues of the Capitalist in a Communist society, of the Communist in a Capitalist state.” Greene concludes this celebration of opposition by quoting Tom Paine: “We must guard even our enemies against injustice.”

Confronted by the intractable collision of the creative individual of fiery conscience with the frozen monolith of the powers that be, there is one essential question: What Is to Be Done? In 1968, the poet Stephen Spender, sickened and dismayed by reports of literary repression in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Brazil and South Africa (as well as several recently decolonised African states), responded to the spirit of a revolutionary year. He decided to organise a fight-back, setting the pen against the sword, based in London.

George Orwell had already pointed out, in his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature”, that “literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian”. In fact, it was the totalitarian regime of the USSR, and its trial of Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, that proved the tipping-point for Spender. He was joined by Pavel Litvinov, the Soviet scientist, dissident and human rights activist, who wrote an open letter asking if it might not be possible to form in England an organisation of intellectuals who would make it their business to publish information about what was happening to their censored, suppressed and imprisoned colleagues abroad. Litvinov was inspired by the fates of fellow Russians, but he insisted that such an organisation should operate internationally and not just concern itself with victims of Soviet oppression, though their plight was possibly the worst in those dark days of the Cold War.

Spender, who was exceedingly well-connected, organised a telegram of support in response to Litvinov’s appeal, signed by an awesome roll-call of the great: Cecil Day-Lewis, Yehudi Menuhin, WH Auden, Henry Moore, AJ Ayer, Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, Mary McCarthy, JB Priestley and his wife Jacquetta Hawkes, Paul Scofield, Igor Stravinsky, Stuart Hampshire, Maurice Bowra and George Orwell’s widow, Sonia. These, and subsequently many others, declared they would “help in any way possible”.

This initiative led, in turn, to the formation of the Council of WSI (Writers and Scholars International), whose founding members included David Astor, editor of the Observer, Elizabeth Longford, Roland Penrose, Louis Blom-Cooper and Spender himself. Index on Censorship was born when Michael Scammell, an expert on Russia, came up with the idea of founding a magazine. Thus was the ongoing battle for ‘intellectual freedom’ moved onto new terrain best suited to writers and scholars — the printed word published in a little magazine. Soon, the advantages and benefits of fighting oppression from a dedicated bastion of free expression became obvious to both sides, free and unfree alike.

A clarion voice in the fight for free speech

Index, whose first issue appeared in 1972, declared that its aim was to “record and analyse all forms of inroads into freedom of expression”. Further, it would “examine the censorship
situation in individual countries” and would publish “censored material in the journal”. In the long and bloody history of the fight for intellectual freedom there had been many impassioned statements of principle about the writer’s role as a piece of grit in the engine of the state. No one, however, had ever thought to jam a whole toolbox into the machinery of power, and place a fully-funded institution (such as WSI) in direct opposition to the repressive intentions of despotic regimes. This was the unique and historic importance of Index. But its success was not a foregone conclusion. Spender, its founder, was fully alert to the potential for windbaggery and failure inherent in such a venture. There was, he wrote, “the risk that the magazine will become simply a bulletin of frustration”.

Actually, the opposite came to pass. Index became a clarion voice in the cause of free expression. The abuses of freedom worldwide in the 1970s were so appalling and so widespread that the magazine rapidly found itself in the frontline of campaigns against repression and censorship in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Latin America and South Africa. Alongside Amnesty International and the PEN Club, Index gave vivid expression to the truth that “censorship” today takes many cruel forms: writers who are sent to labour camps, or blackmailed by threats to their families, or harassed into silence and isolation.

Perhaps the most important thing Index did, from the beginning, was to universalise an issue that was in peril of becoming a special interest: freedom was not “a luxury enjoyed by bourgeois individualists”. Along with self-expression, it was a human right, and an instrument of human consciousness that should be fought for worldwide.

Historically, the classic polemical statement against censorship, John Milton’s Areopagitica, a pamphlet against the Licensing Order of 1643, had focused on the English Parliament’s threat to a free press. Milton, writing in the midst of Civil War, was less worried about blood than ink: “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image,” he writes, “but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.” Three centuries later, Index would concern itself with both the breath of the oppressed writer but also the lifeblood of liberty, namely, free expression.

In an astonishingly short time, barely a generation, from 1972 to 1989, the magazine established itself as a force to be reckoned with. At first, it took up the issue that had inspired its beginnings: Soviet oppression. In defence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Index published part of a long, autobiographical poem, “God Keep Me from Going Mad”, composed in 1950-53 while Solzhenitsyn was serving a sentence in a labour camp in North Kazakhstan, the setting for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This was followed by a scoop in 1973, the unexpurgated text of an interview Solzhenitsyn had given to AP and Le Monde in which the writer revealed that “preparations are being made to have me killed in a motor accident”.

Václav Havel, Solzhenitsyn and the Iron Curtain

The importance of this document, one of the writer’s very rare accounts of his predicament, is that it described in horrifying and particular detail the true nature of the Soviet regime’s campaign against him, especially the constant surveillance and the unrelenting menace of the state’s agents. Solzhenitsyn was also able to draw attention to the persecution of Andrei Sakharov. In the bleakest depths of the Cold War, taking up the cause of Russia’s dissident community made the difference between international recognition and utter oblivion.

As the magazine grew in confidence, it began to focus on other, related injustices behind the Iron Curtain, notably in Czechoslovakia (as it was). It was among the first to publish the banned playwright Václav Havel in English. In 1976, a retrospective on Czechoslovakia eight years after the Soviet invasion of Prague described how Havel was being “constantly harassed and persecuted by the authorities”, the beginning (as it turned out) of a long assault on Havel’s liberty.

When Charter 77 was formed the following year, Index became a vital link in the chain of communication between the samizdat literary community in Prague and the wider world. The exiled Czech journalist George Theiner, who succeeded Michael Scammell as editor, strengthened this link. Context and continuity, the steady accumulation of a body of work and opinion, are vital ingredients in any effective campaign on behalf of oppressed writers. Index now provided both a sober and authoritative framework for its protest and also, through the office in London, a team of journalists dedicated to monitoring the devious and sinister machinations of oppressive regimes worldwide.

In the 1980s, the magazine spread its wings. There were exposés of repression in Latin America and persecution in Africa (Kenya, Nigeria). Roa Bastos, who had suffered so badly in Paraguay, found a new champion. Nadine Gordimer, who had supported Index from the beginning, published a story about the romantic dilemmas of a secret policeman in South Africa. In Europe, Samuel Beckett became so engaged with the plight of Václav Havel that he dedicated a short play, “Catastrophe”, to his fellow playwright and allowed Index to publish it in its pages, another notable scoop. By the end of the 1980s, the idea of standing up for the abstract idea of ‘intellectual freedom’ by reporting censorship and publishing banned writing had become a recognised part of the common discourse within the libertarian community.

The influence of Index on the literary world has been at once subtle and impossible to overstate. In my mind, there is no doubt that its example became an inspiration to those British publishers, like Faber, Penguin and Picador, who (especially in the 1970s and 1980s) published banned or oppressed writers such as Milan Kundera, Václav Havel and Josef Skvorecky. The literature that came from behind the Iron Curtain added a new dimension to the reading of the West. Translations of novels like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting were so exceptional that the book would briefly become, ex officio, as it were, almost a part of the Anglo-American literary tradition.

The institutional importance of Index is hard to overstate because, in the words of André Gide, good sentiments do not usually generate good literature. Just because a writer is committed to fighting injustice in his or her society, there’s no guarantee that his or her work will have artistic value. But once the role of literature as “witness” is established in the minds of the public, it makes it more difficult to dissociate literary merit and the social or political value of the text. Index provided a forum for banned writers to demonstrate the role of literature, both good and less good, as unsubmissive, contrarian, transcendent and instinctively transgressive.

Perhaps it was as well that the Index model was so firmly set by Spender and its founders. After 1989, the strength and security of WSI (notwithstanding a constant search for sponsors) was crucial. The fall of the Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union gave every indication that the raison d’être of Index — opposing Soviet oppression — had been trumped by History.

New frontiers for free expression — and censorship

In fact, the reverse was the case. Writers and free expression continued to be persecuted worldwide. Russia did not cease to be despotic with the disbanding of the KGB. In some ways, the condition of everyday life for Russian writers grew significantly worse, and certainly far more dangerous. The war in Chechnya gave the authorities a new pretext to crush free journalism. Anna Politovskaya became just one of many who turned to Index to make her plight better understood in the West.

With the millennium, meanwhile, the rise of the internet and the IT revolution inherent in the development of digital communications offered a new challenge. The old barriers to state control were coming down. Frontiers that had once been impenetrable were suddenly porous. Secret policemen could continue to terrorise writers, printers and publishers, but it was much harder to stop the free flow of information on the worldwide web. What place would Index have in the new world order of “free” content shaped by Google, Wikipedia and Amazon? The answer, of course, is as a research institution, a memory bank and a continuing moral example, along with publishing online as well as in print.

Index in the new century has made the fight for “intellectual freedom” normative as well as liberating. WSI remains the tool of one very simple, good idea. Its historical board members are unchanged: Milton, Paine, Wilkes, Zola and, possibly, Orwell. Index knows that such an achievement is not lightly won. The history of state repression shows that the individual writer and artist and scholar is vulnerable on his own. He, or she, needs the committed support of independent organisations that cannot be crushed by state terror. Furthermore, the plight of writers especially should not be at the mercy of intellectual fashion or the caprice of a Twitter feed. Free expression needs its gatekeepers: publishers, editors, booksellers, and independent columnists. And this community needs a place to meet, a forum for ideas and debate. This is what Index provides. More serious than Twitter; better organised than Facebook, it’s a forum that can exploit the social media, but not become its prisoner.

In the 21st century, this can be virtual, articulated through Google or Wikipedia. But it also needs to be orchestrated by people, standing apart from fashionable trends, who understand the nuances of the fight for intellectual freedom and who know what they are talking about. This, in a sentence, is the unique Index proposition: ideas honestly and freely expressed and writers worldwide uninhibited by the censorship of the mind or tyrannical restrictions on the printed word.

This article appears in 40 years of Index on Censorship which marks the organisation’s 40th anniversary with a star line-up of the most outstanding activists, journalists and authors. Click here for subscription options and more

Robert McCrum is an associate editor of the Observer. He has been a member of the advisory board of Index on Censorship since 1983

The post Grit in the engine appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The post A former police officer detained for murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The post Russia: Suspect arrested in Anna Politkovskaya murder appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The post Russia: Circle of Politkovskaya murder suspects widens appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The post Russia: guarantee to pursue journalist murder cases appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Putin called the murder an “unacceptable crime which cannot be allowed to go unpunished” but quickly added that Politkovskaya’s “influence on political life in the country was extremely insignificant in scale. She was known in journalist and human rights circles, but her influence on political life in Russia was minimal.”

For Politkovskaya’s friends and colleagues in Russia and around the world, Putin’s words were more than a slap in the face. They would likely be interpreted by prosecutors and other high officials in Russia as a signal that the president wanted a perfunctory inquiry, not a real effort to find the killers of a journalist whom he viewed as a personal enemy.

Politkovskaya, a reporter with the fiercely independent Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta, had reported on human rights abuses in Chechnya and attacked Putin personally for indifference, ineptitude, incompetence and cruelty. She was the 13th journalist to be murdered since Putin had come to power in 2000, and at the time there had not been a single conviction. This record of impunity was producing fear and self-censorship among Russian journalists, undermining efforts to report on a variety of controversial issues, from corruption to human rights abuses.

A month later, hundreds of leading journalists from the United States and around the world gathered in the grand ballroom in New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel for the annual dinner of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Even as four courageous journalists received awards, Politkovskaya’s recent murder cast a pall over the evening. Paul Steiger, chairman of Committee to Protect Journalists, and at the time the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, asked guests at the dinner to sign a petition expressing outrage and calling on Russian authorities to prosecute the killers of journalists.

In January 2007, Steiger and I travelled to Moscow as part of a CPJ delegation to deliver the 400 petitions gathered at the dinner. We handed them to Ella Pamfilova, chairwoman of the Russian Human Rights Council, who promised to deliver them personally to President Putin. We also met with representatives from the Russian foreign ministry, who told us that officials were investigating individuals in the Chechen police as possible suspects in the Politkovskaya murder. That news made headlines, especially after the Russian authorities denied that they had said it.

Soon after our visit, during his annual press conference, Putin delivered a new message. “For our country . . . the issue of journalist persecution is one of the most pressing. And we realise our degree of responsibility in this,” Putin said. “I remember not only Anna Politkovskaya – she was a rather sharp critic of authorities, and this is good – I remember other journalists, too, including Paul Klebnikov.” Klebnikov, an American of Russian descent, was the editor of Forbes Russia. He was gunned down outside his Moscow office in July 2004.

While we did not believe that Putin had suddenly had a change of heart and we had no illusions about how difficult it would be to achieve justice in any of the journalists’ murders, the president’s dramatic about-face seemed to demonstrate that international pressure could make a difference. Our meetings with journalists, officials and the families of those who had been killed, led us to conclude that we had to take a more systematic approach to battling impunity in Russia. What was at stake was the shaky Russian democracy that had emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without information, Russian citizens were losing the ability to hold their leaders accountable.

The decline in the Russian media also had international implications. If Russia could simply ignore basic human rights standards and still keep its place on the world stage, what message would that send to aspiring democracies around the world? More alarming still, a similar pattern could be observed in every country in which crimes against journalists go unpunished, from Mexico to Pakistan. According to CPJ research, 89 per cent of the 700 or so murders carried out on journalists around the world since 1992 have gone unpunished. In order to advance the cause of press freedom, CPJ had to find a way to beat back the culture of impunity on a global scale. But how?

In Latin America, the Inter-American Press Association — or IAPA — had been battling impunity for more than a decade. With support from the Miami-based John S and James L Knight Foundation, the organisation had launched an ambitious effort to investigate murders, track progress, mobilise public support through a hemisphere-wide media campaign, directly pressure public officials, and push for legal remedies through both domestic and international institutions. The effort had begun to show results. Since 1992, 143 convictions have been obtained in journalists’ killings in Latin America, according to IAPA statistics. Ninety-two people are currently jailed, most of them hired killers.

Between 1998 and 2004, Alberto Ibargüen, then publisher of the Miami Herald, had served as the chairman of the IAPA’s anti-impunity campaign and had spearheaded many of these successes. Over breakfast near Central Park, I asked Ibarguen if he believed the IAPA’s tactics could be replicated in other parts of the world. Ibargüen, now the president of the Knight Foundation, recognised that the dynamic in each country would be different, but that certain aspects of the Latin America effort would probably overlap. We made a deal: If CPJ could bring together the relevant expertise, including that of the IAPA, then Knight would fund a pilot project to test the viability of a global effort to combat impunity.

Over the next year, we began a widespread consultation, talking to journalists around the world, and hosting a strategy meeting at CPJ. At the end of the process, we identified two countries where we would test our efforts: Russia and the Philippines. Both countries were among the most murderous for journalists, according to CPJ research. Both had abysmal records for bringing the killers to justice.

But in nearly every other regard the situation in these two countries could not have been more different. In Russia, where power is highly centralised, the economy was booming, and the government was firmly in control. The media, once rambunctious, had largely been tamed through a series of politicised lawsuits and hostile takeovers that had brought the broadcast networks under Kremlin control. The government, enjoying widespread popular support, was highly resistant to both international and domestic pressure.

In the Philippines, meanwhile, there is a vital and critical national press with a long history of independence. But there is also a dark underside. In the provinces, many journalists are under the sway of local political bosses who pay them to engage in reckless denunciations of their rivals. This form of journalism had become so pervasive that it even has a name: AC/DC journalism, for Attack Collect/Defend Collect. With guns rampant in the provinces, disputes are often settled with violence.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, while democratically elected, is hemmed in by powerful military and regional political bosses. Prosecutors are subject to political pressure and lack resources. Overcoming these obstacles to a successful prosecution would require the full engagement of the federal government. We had to find a way to tighten the screws.

In February 2008, CPJ joined forces with the Open Society Institute, the Bangkok-based Southeast Asian Press Alliance and the Manila-based Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility to co-sponsor an international conference on “Impunity and Press Freedom” in the Philippines. The conference, which took place in the Peninsula hotel in Manila’s malled-over business district, brought together nearly 200 participants, including representatives of the Philippine government, to discuss the issue of impunity and seek solutions.

CPJ helped arrange for the participation of representatives from Latin America, including Ricardo Trotti from the IAPA. Trotti urged the Philippine media outlets to underwrite the kind of public awareness campaign that had been successful in many Latin countries.

The conference’s keynote address came from Supreme Court chief justice Reynato Puno, who declared, “Bullets fired in the direction of journalists pierce not only human flesh, but also our republican ideals.” His remarks indicated that we would have the clear support of the highest levels of the judiciary if we confronted the country’s political leaders on the impunity issue.

At the end of the two-day event, I announced that CPJ would be joining forces with a unique local press group, the Freedom Fund for Filipino Journalists, or FFFJ, to campaign against impunity in the Philippines and The daughter of Marlene Garcia-Esperat (centre) grieves over her mother’s coffin, Tacurong, Philippines, 9 April 2005 that this would be part of a global effort. The FFFJ is an association of press freedom groups, publishers’ associations, and individual media outlets dedicated to supporting journalists who are victims of attacks.

I noted that the existence of a critical press, an active and engaged press freedom community, and a government that while resistant was vulnerable to domestic and international pressure presented “a unique and fleeting opportunity to make a difference on an issue that has deep implications for the future of Philippine democracy”.

One of the lessons of the IAPA campaign in Latin America was the need to humanise the issue of impunity by highlighting key cases. In Russia, Politkovskaya had become the symbol of our struggle. In the Philippines, Marlene Garcia-Esperat would play this role. Garcia-Esperat, a crusading columnist from the volatile island of Mindanao, had been gunned down in front of her family in March 2005. At the time, Garcia-Esperat had already earned a national reputation in the Philippines for her fearless work exposing corruption. The particularly heinous nature of her killing garnered enormous public sympathy. Garcia-Esperat’s personal friend, lawyer Nena Santos, spearheaded the legal quest for justice and her efforts helped produce convictions against three gunmen. A middleman, who had turned state witness, had fingered two agricultural officials whose corruption Garcıa-Esperat had exposed as masterminds in the killings. They remained at large.

Now, CPJ and FFFJ would step up support in an effort to bring them to justice. We recognised that the anti-impunity campaign would be energised by a victory and that the Garcia-Esperat case would be our best shot. But it would not be easy to achieve.

Likewise in the Politkovskaya case, although there was progress. In August 2007, in an apparent breakthrough, Russian prosecutors had announced the arrest of ten suspects. That same month, five members of a criminal gang in the republic of Tartarstan were convicted of carrying out the 2000 murder of Novaya Gazeta reporter Igor Domnikov. These were the first convictions in a journalist’s killing since Vladimir Putin had come to office.

Two months later, in November 2007, CPJ honoured Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov with an International Press Freedom Award. The murders of three of the paper’s reporters had taken a terrible toll. “Igor Domnikov was murdered for investigating corruption,” Muratov told a sombre audience at the awards ceremony. “Yuri Shchekochikhin, my best friend, deputy, and a nationally famous journalist, was murdered. Anna Politkovskaya was murdered. Three of the most important people in my life. And I am the one who gets to stand here in a tuxedo and receive an award. It’s not normal. I feel no joy. I never will.”

Even if he could take no pleasure in the award, Muratov’s drive for justice was undiminished. He believed international pressure was crucial and made his appeal not only in the US, but in Germany, a country with a deep commercial relationship with Russia and therefore some political influence. In February 2008, as part of an event at the American Academy in Berlin, Muratov and a delegation from CPJ met with the national security adviser to Chancellor Angela Merkel, and asked and received assurances that Merkel would pursue the issue of impunity in bilateral meetings with President Putin. It was this kind of international pressure that helped push the Russian government to move against Politkovskaya’s alleged killers. By the end of the year three young Chechens who had been arrested back in August and had been accused of serving as lookouts for the gunmen were on trial in Moscow.

Even as we developed on-the-ground capacity in both the Philippines and Russia, we asked ourselves a fundamental question. How could we measure progress? And could we use an objective barometer of impunity as a means of goading recalcitrant governments toward action?

Since 1992, CPJ has compiled the most comprehensive and detailed list of journalists killed around the world. We pored over this data, breaking down the numbers, and looking for a way to document impunity. After consulting a variety of experts, including statisticians, and carrying out months of additional research, we developed a formula.

We would look at a ten-year period and include on our list only those countries with at least five unsolved murders. We defined “unsolved” generously – these were killings in which there had not been a single conviction. Recognising that the murder of a journalist would have a different impact in a country like Mozambique, which has a tiny press corps concentrated in the capital, than in Brazil or India, where the media is both enormous and diverse, we sought to find a way to weight our findings. Since it was impossible to determine the size of the press corps in any given country we used population figures. We divided the number of unsolved murders by the size of the population to come to an objective figure based on careful research – a number that governments couldn’t challenge. We called it the Impunity Index.

As we crunched the numbers a clear picture emerged. Iraq, with 79 murders at the time and an Impunity Index of 2,821, was far and away the most deadly country for journalists. It was followed by two other war-ravaged countries, Sierra Leone and Somalia. Then things got interesting. Most of the remaining countries on the list were democracies, including Mexico, India, Colombia, and of course Russia and the Philippines. Their inclusion, we believed, would be deeply embarrassing to their governments. And while we wanted to highlight their terrible records, we also sought to present the governments in these countries with a way to get off the list or at least improve their standing.

In our previous tallies of murdered journalists, we had ranked countries by the number of journalists killed. Since governments could not undo these murders, there was no way for them to improve their record. By including only unsolved killings on the Impunity Index, our goal was to provide an incentive to bring the killers to justice. In subsequent years, we hoped that countries we had targeted for campaigning would begin to move down the list.

We launched our first Impunity Index at a press conference at the United Nations. We talked about the overall impact of impunity, the fear it engendered, and the toll it took in terms of self-censorship and public accountability. We highlighted the records of Russia and the Philippines. CPJ board member and renowned Filipino journalist Sheila Coronel spoke about the failure of the Philippine government to win convictions. “The justice system is compromised,” she said. “Judges are corrupt or afraid to prosecute the killers or they are under the sway of powerful patrons – police and law enforcement agencies are in the same situation and, in some cases, the killings have been by rogue policemen or rogue military officers.”

The launch of the Impunity Index was, for us, year zero in our campaign. The basic elements were now in place. We created an advisory board of experts, including Ricardo Trotti from the IAPA, and internally we appointed an impunity campaign co-ordinator, Elisabeth Witchel, to oversee our efforts. We developed a link on our website outlining the campaign and our goals and enlisted CPJ board member Christiane Amanpour of CNN to record a video highlighting the issue.

We distributed the Impunity Index to officials at the World Bank and the IMF and encouraged them to begin using it as a yardstick for measuring democratic development. We met with UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon and asked him to speak out about the issue. We co-ordinated our efforts with our many colleagues on the international and domestic level — groups like Reporters Sans Frontieres and the International Federation of Journalists. In a relatively short period the word “impunity” had entered the press-freedom lexicon. The next step was turning the growing public awareness into action.

In the Philippines, the FFFJ rolled out a publicity campaign featuring radio spots and newspaper ads to increase awareness about impunity. They hired lawyers to file legal appeals. They invested money in protecting threatened witnesses. And in endless meetings they kept the pressure on police and prosecutors. CPJ backed them up by challenging Philippine government claims that the problem of impunity had been exaggerated and that many of the killers had been arrested. As CPJ and other press freedom groups spoke up in international circles — including in the US Congress and the United Nations — the issue of impunity for the killers of journalists became a regular feature in foreign aid discussions. In Russia, we began working with reporters on the ground in Moscow to lay the groundwork for a major report on impunity to be released the following year.

In March 2009, we released our second annual Impunity Index, this time in Manila. We timed the release for the fourth anniversary of the killing of Marlene Garcia-Esperat as a way to dramatise our concern and highlight the failure of the Philippine criminal justice system to achieve justice in her case. Through legal manoeuvres, the two agricultural officials implicated in her murder, Osmena Montaner and Estrella Sabay, had so far eluded arrest. But a few months earlier, Santos and the FFFJ had won a key legal victory when a judge reinstated the arrest warrant against them.

Overall, there were only modest changes between the 2008 and 2009 Impunity Index. This was consistent with our view that improvements would come incrementally, and only as a result of sustained engagement. Yet what changes we observed were significant. Colombia, for example, had dropped a spot on the list, from fourth to fifth, as its Impunity Index rating declined more than 20 per cent. A dramatic improvement in the country’s security situation led to a decline in violence against the press, while the attorney general’s office had won the first ever conviction of the masterminds of a journalist’s killing. In January, the former mayor of Barrancabermeja was sentenced to 28 years’ imprisonment for the 2003 murder of a radio commentator. International and domestic pressure, including the IAPA’s campaign, certainly played a role.

In the Philippines, aside from the modest progress in the Esperat case, there were few successes to highlight. The country remained in sixth place on the list with 24 murders documented by CPJ and no successful prosecutions in the previous year. Not surprisingly, violence against journalists was continuing and concern among the media was growing. Seventy reporters packed into Annabel’s restaurant, a local media haunt, for the Impunity Index event.

Surprised by the level of public attention, the Arroyo government sought to downplay our findings. A presidential spokesman texted the press corps calling our presentation “a bit of exaggeration”. But the Arroyo administration was treating our ranking as a public relations problem. We pointed out that no amount of spin could change the numbers. That could only be done through a successful prosecution. One key to achieving this was to protect the witnesses in the cases, nearly all of whom faced threats and intimidation.

In July, CPJ’s senior Asia consultant Shawn Crispin travelled from his base in Bangkok to General Santos City on the troubled southern island of Mindanao. In 2008, radio commentator Dennis Cuesta had been gunned down in front of his friend and fellow reporter Bob Flores. Immediately after the killing, Flores was threatened and also labelled a suspect by the local police. This was not surprising given the fact that Flores was able to identify the alleged shooter as a local police inspector, Redempto “Boy” Acharon, the first cousin of the local mayor. Only after entering the witness protection programme and being relocated did Flores feel safe enough to provide sworn testimony. A local court duly issued arrest warrants against the suspect and two accomplices but they have not been executed. In fact, Acharon has been spotted dining out openly in local restaurants. He has denied the allegations. Acharon’s lawyer, Rogelio Garcia, insists that his client is not guilty of the crime: “We are exploring all legal avenues to protect the interests of my client.”

The CPJ report issued in August and titled “Under Oath, Under Threat”, documented deep flaws in the witness protection programme, ranging from underfunding to a failure to relocate trial venues to protect witnesses from intimidation. After a flurry of media coverage, however, the Supreme Court suddenly moved to grant changes of venues in three cases, including the Cuesta and Esperat cases. These were hugely significant steps on the road to successful prosecutions. Underlying these efforts were the unrelenting campaigns by Philippines press groups, including the FFFJ, which meticulously filed changes of venue petitions while fighting a seemingly endless array of legal challenges put forward by well-funded defence lawyers.

The release of the Impunity Index also received widespread attention in the Russian media, including on many widely read websites. But as in the Philippines, the increase in public awareness has not immediately translated into effective action. Russia remained mired in ninth place on the list, with prospects for improvement dim. Two journalists have been murdered in 2009, both from Novaya Gazeta. In January, gunmen brazenly executed a prominent human rights lawyer and 25-year-old reporter Anastasia Baburova on a Moscow street corner. In July, four men forced renowned human rights worker Natalya Estemirova into a car in Grozny, Chechnya, executed her, and dumped her body. Estemirova was a contributor to Novaya Gazeta and other publications. President Medvedev condemned both murders, and even took the unprecedented step of meeting with Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov. But there was no reported progress in either investigation.

Meanwhile, the case against the alleged accomplices in the Anna Politkovskaya case had fallen apart. The trial was marred from the outset by a ham-fisted effort to bar the media, and the suspects walked out of the courthouse in February when a jury found them not guilty. Politkovskaya’s family and colleagues blamed the prosecutor’s office for failing to present sufficient evidence but more broadly for focusing on minor figures in the conspiracy at the expense of the masterminds. Not a single one of the ten suspects arrested in August 2007 remains in custody.

On 15 September, a CPJ delegation arrived in Moscow to present a detailed 72-page report on the failure of Russian authorities to achieve justice in the killing of 17 journalists since Putin first came to power in 2000.

Anatomy of Injustice, which included contributions from a variety of Russian and international experts, identifies incompetence, secrecy, conflicts of interest, corruption, and political interference as the primary impediments to successful prosecutions. “Let us be perfectly plain,” wrote CPJ board member and author Kati Marton in the preface. “Any state that turns a blind eye — or worse — toward the assassination of reporters cannot call itself a democracy. When journalists are threatened, democracy itself is threatened. Along with the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and an autonomous civil society, free media is one of the essential pillars of a healthy society. Remove one, and the whole structure may collapse.”

Immediately following the Moscow press conference, the CPJ delegation of Marton, Europe and Central Asia programme co-ordinator Nina Ognianova and senior adviser Jean-Paul Marthoz met with a team of 11 investigators looking into the murders. The meeting was contentious at times, but compared with previous responses the mere fact that the Russian government was willing to engage with us on the issue was encouraging. Two weeks before our visit, in what we viewed as a positive development, the Russian Supreme Court returned the Politkovskaya case to the prosecutor’s office for further investigation and ordered that the case against the triggermen and masterminds be merged.

The premise behind CPJ’s global campaign against impunity is that public advocacy puts pressure on the authorities to investigate murders and investigations lead to convictions. The increased likelihood of punishment serves as a deterrent to future killings, and eventually the pace of killing slows. If our hypothesis is correct, these changes will be captured on our Impunity Index over time.

What have we achieved in the first year and a half of our campaign?

Because of intensive media coverage, the issue of impunity for the killers of journalists has entered the public consciousness in both Russia and the Philippines. It is also firmly on the international agenda. Both the Arroyo and Putin/Medvedev governments have spoken out publicly against impunity and taken a variety of steps, from creating a special police task force in the Philippines to appointing prominent prosecutors in Russia, to address the issue. But these steps have not necessarily translated into significant progress on the legal front. There are encouraging signs in both countries — venue changes in the Philippines, and a vigorous investigation of the Politkovskaya murder. But convictions are a long way off.

If and when convictions are obtained, we will seek to determine if this leads to a decrease in violence. We believe that this correlation exists, but will only emerge over time. Ultimately, it may be that the culture of impunity cannot be defeated outside consolidation of the rule of law and an overall improvement in security. While President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia has been justly criticised by human rights groups including CPJ, there is no question that the security situation has improved under his administration and this has had a positive impact on all sectors of society, including the press.

Like crime itself, impunity can never be entirely eliminated. But even if justice in an individual case does not correlate with an immediate reduction in overall levels of violence, we are bound by a moral imperative to seek justice on behalf of our colleagues when they are killed. In a globalised world, we must ensure information moves freely across borders and that the many enemies of press freedom do not have the ability to censor the global dialogue. Standing up to the killers of journalists in Russia, the Philippines, or wherever they strike, is the primary obligation of those fighting for a free press.

Joel Simon is executuve director of the Committee to Protect Journalists

The post Impunity: stopping the killers appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The post Politkovskaya family to appeal again appeared first on Index on Censorship.