Monument to Veronica Guerin in Dublin Castle gardens. Credit: William Murphy / Flickr
This weekend marks 20 years since the murder of Irish award-winning crime and investigative journalist Veronica Guerin. On 26 June 1996, two masked men on a motorbike pulled up alongside her car at traffic lights on the outskirts of Dublin, opened fire and killed her instantly. Three men were subsequently convicted for their involvement in the murder.
Guerin, who had been working as a freelance journalist for Ireland’s Sunday Independent, made a name for herself investigating and exposing the crimes of senior members of Dublin’s criminal underworld. But such a reputation can be a dangerous thing for an investigative reporter to have. Guerin was subject to a number of attacks and threats, including against the life of her young son Cathal. In 1995 she was shot in her home but survived. Refusing to yield, she continued her work.
“Veronica was a late entrant to journalism; she trained and worked initially in accountancy so she had an instinct for business and understood money,” says Séamus Dooley, Irish Secretary, National Union of Journalists. “That was very useful in studying records and following the money.”
Her death prompted a wave of public anger culminating in the establishment of the Criminal Assets Bureau, followed by more than 150 arrests and a major hunt for organised criminal gangs. “The idea of a designated bureau with sweeping powers to target those with suspicious wealth was a direct response to her murder and caused havoc among those heading criminal gangs,” says Dooley.
Guerin’s death was described by then-Taoiseach John Bruton as a “an attack on democracy”. Unfortunately, this sentiment was echoed earlier this year when current Taoiseach Enda Kenny said: “Journalists and media organisations will not be intimidated by such threats, which have no place in a democratic society.”
The threats he was referring to were made in February 2016 by criminal gangs in Dublin against a number of crime journalists in the city who were reporting on a gangland feud that saw two audacious murders in the space of four days. Police informed Independent News and Media, which owns the Irish Independent newspaper, that the safety of two reporters — a man and a woman — was at risk.
Jimmy Guerin, the brother of Veronica, said at the time: “Successive governments have let down the memory of Veronica … by failing to provide the resources required to beat the gangs.”
So are we back to the way things were two decades ago?
“The situation has been simmering beneath the surface for a while, but the turf wars between the Kinahan and the Hutch families, along with the nature of the violence, is new,” says Dooley. “Gerry Hutch is someone Veronica would have covered in her time, so there is a direct connection with what came before.”
“However, there was this perception that Dublin was a city on lockdown following the killings and journalists are operating under fear,” adds Dooley. “This isn’t bandit country, and there aren’t large numbers of journalists fearful for their lives.”
This shouldn’t mean complacency, adds Dooley, who states that the NUJ has supported a number of journalists at risk in Ireland in recent years.
“One of the problems is that Dublin is a small city, so, naturally, the number of people covering crime is very small,” says Dooley. “Veronica was very well-known to the people she was writing about and so are today’s reporters.”
With crime reporting being such a small part of the market, there is great pressure to deliver stories quicker, which brings problems in itself.
“Today’s journalists are expected to take more risks, and freelancers — as Veronica was — take even greater risks than those in staff jobs,” says Dooley. “While I understand that there is also the commercial element of selling newspapers in order to survive, sensationalising crime coverage in such a high profile way and being overly provocative in the process of selling comes at a price.”
His murder remains an isolated case, but recent years have seen a spate of attacks and threats against journalists in the country. In 2014, Irish News reporter Allison Morris was called a “Fenian bastard” and a “Fenian cunt” as she left court by a gang who threatened to cut her throat.
These are not isolated incidents in either the north or south of Ireland.
If we are to learn anything from the death of Veronica Guerin all these years later, says Dooley, it is that “there needs to be greater recognition of the rights of journalists.”
Click on the dots for more information on the incidents.
Each week, Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project verifies threats, violations and limitations faced by the media throughout the European Union and neighbouring countries. Here are five recent reports that give us cause for concern.
21 June, 2016 – Freelance journalist Kastus Zhukouski and cameraperson Alyaksei Atroshchankau who work for Poland-based Belsat TV, were detained in the town of Loyeu, in Homel region, Belsat channel reported.
The two media workers were filming a local brick factory for a story about poor economic conditions in Belarus.
“The police came, and brutally detained me and my colleague Alyaksei. We were taken to the police department, to the control room. They seized the equipment from our hands, broke it. I was knocked down to the floor, handcuffed, a man pressed a knee against my head. He called himself Deputy Chief Henadz Madzharski”, Kastus Zhukouski told BelaPAN.
The journalist also said he had high blood pressure. An ambulance was called and he was given an injection.
Zhukouski and Atroshchankau spent six hours at the police station. No police documents were drawn up despite threats to do so, the channel reported. It is unclear if the journalists have been charged with anything.
Szukouski and Atroshchankau filed requests to the Investigative Committee of the Republic of Belarus asking them to investigate actions of the police.
20 June, 2016 – Belgian justice minister Koen Geens announced his intention to double the length of a prison sentencing for divulging confidential information, in cases where professional confidentially is breached, newspaper La Libre Belgique reported.
According to the Belgium General Association of Journalists, the move is meant to include it amongst the category of offenses which allow specific investigative methods such as phone-tapping or electronic tracing.
A second proposed law is also worrying journalists, which would enable the intelligence service to scrape the protection of a professional journalist if he/she is not considered a real journalist.
Gaspard Glanz, from independent website Taranis News, which covers clashes that take place during protests closely, and Alexis Kraland, were detained by police forces.
Ganz tweeted about the conditions, writing: “There’s 12 of us in total in the van. It’s 40 degrees. No water, no air”.
On Periscope, the people in the truck can be seen saying why they were arrested, generally because they were wearing protective material meant to protect them against tear gas.
22 June, 2016 – A new anti-terrorism law has come into effect on 22 June after it was ratified by the Polish President Andrzej Duda, wiadomosci.gazeta.pl. The law was successfully passed by two parliamentary chambers of the Sejm earlier this month.
The law gives Poland’s intelligence agency, the ABW (Agencja Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego), the right to “order the blocking or demand that the electronic open source service administrator block access to information data”, thereby giving the agency the right to shut down online media outlets, including websites and television programmes, Kulisy24 reported.
Websites can be blocked for up to five days prior to obtaining permission by higher prosecution authorities, and up to 30 days if permission is granted, with the option to renew it for up to three months.
Authorisation for a temporary access ban can also now be granted by the minister of justice. The legislation does not grant power to the source administrator to appeal against such a decision.
Lawyer and expert on surveillance legislation, Prior Waglowski, told the website money.pl: “Blocking…has to occur under judicial supervision… which is not given here. These propositions are taken out of the blue”. He underlined that the definition of terrorism provided is very loose and is up to the discretion by effectively two persons.
Watchdog website Kulisy24criticised the legislation, writing that it is not known how blocking will be executed and that the ABW is not obliged to publish its blocking order.
The Polish NGO Fundacja Panoptykon started a petition against the law in late April and collected just short of 8,690 signatures by 20 June. Together with the NGO e-Państwo, it also published a protest letter addressed to the Polish president, which was shared by a number of media and NGOs, including the Helsinki Foundation of Human Rights.
In a developing incident reported to Mapping Media Freedom on 18 May 2016 Turkish judicial authorities have opened an investigation against five journalists and trade unionists for participating in a solidarity campaign with the Kurdish daily newspaper Özgür Gündem.
The journalists include Ertugrul Mavioglu, Faruk Eren, Ayse Düzkan, Mustafa Sönmez and Melda Onur.
The Co-Editorship-in-Chief campaign was launched by Özgür Gündem daily on 3 May, 2016 for World Press Freedom Day (#WPFD) where up to 16 journalists participated.
Requests have been filed for the journalists and trade unionists to testify for articles that are being considered “terrorist propaganda” and an “incitement to crime” which were published whilst they participated in the solidarity campaign.
“This is another dark day for media freedom in Turkey,” said Johann Bihr, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk. “Erol Önderoglu has fought tirelessly to defend persecuted journalists for the past 20 years. He is a leader in this field because of his honesty and integrity, which are recognised the world over. It says a lot about the decline in media freedom in Turkey that he is now also being targeted.”
UPDATE: On 25 May, 2016 – Journalist Erol Önderoglu has been added to list of journalists being investigated for “terrorist propaganda” for participating in the solidarity campaign with Özgür Gündem, The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) reports. EFJ demands that all criminal charges be dropped against him and the other journalists involved in this campaign.
UPDATE: 20 June, 2016 – A prosecutor has issued a warrant for the pre-trial arrest of ad interim editor-in-chief Özgür Gündem Şebnem Korur Fincancı, Bianet journalist and RSF representative Erol Önderoğlu and author Ahmet Nesin.
Some say you can trace the origins of hip hop to a single room in New York City on 11 August 1973. At 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, the Jamaican-American DJ Kool Herc threw a party and, playing percussive funk on his speakers, noticed that the crowd danced most vigorously during the instrumental break. He then used two turntables and copies of the same song to keep the break going, while talking — or MCing — over it to engage the crowd.
By that time in the early 1970s, the historically middle-class Bronx was transforming. For decades it had been home to upwardly mobile black and latino families, and the borough was the most integrated community in the United States. That was until the accelerated post-war flight of white residents for the suburbs, falling house prices and the loss of so many manufacturing jobs, coupled with tens of thousands of mostly poor immigrants moving in.
Coming out of these conditions, hip hop has always been about inspiring the disenfranchised to overcome their obstacles.
Jason Nichols, aka Haysoos, is a hip-hop artist, professor and editor-in-chief of Words, Beats and Life, the first peer-reviewed academic journal of global hip-hop culture. He has been rapping since he was a pre-teen in the early 1990s when he first heard My Philosophy by Boogie Down Productions, a hip-hop group from the South Bronx.
“I remember seeing the video and hearing that acapella part, and deciding I want to try it,” Nichols tells Index on Censorship. “It really showed me that rap music and MCing was a platform to be heard, and everything in my life since has revolved around that, from expressing your opinions about the world and thinking ‘how can we make things better?’”
When people think of hip-hop culture, rapping, DJing, graffiti and breakdancing are all things that come to mind. “However, I always say that hip-hop academics is another element of the movement,” says Nichols, who is a lecturer at the African American Studies Department of the University of Maryland, where his interests include black masculinity, hip hop and dance, and black and latino identities and relations.
Media attention and commercial rap music have given hip hop an image problem. The genre is heavily associated with guns, gangs and prison culture. As many poor neighbourhoods of colour became further devastated in the 1980s or 1990s, hyper-masculinity became, for many, entangled with race or class. As Nichols explains: “It was, and still is, a matter of control and mastery of your environment.”
One of the main reason young black men identify so much with their neighbourhood, their block or the building they come from is because they are saying “this is mine”, Nichols explains. “They know their spatial freedom is contained and confined and that they world isn’t theirs, but this particular space is,” he adds.
In his lectures on masculinity, Nichols looks as people like Moms Mabley, the lesbian comedian who employed masculine forms of black humour and Amiri Baraka, the poet, author, essayist and critic, who wrote about masculinity and heterosexuality as representative of black nationalism in the United States. Nichols brings his analysis up to the modern day by looking at artists like Kehinde Wiley, whose paintings explore black images of masculinity.
“Whether male or female, every person expresses several different masculinities throughout the day, and in my class, we talk a lot about those being expressed through art,” explains Nichols. “And, of course, all these directions led to hip hop.”
However, he believes we need a deeper understanding of hip hop because the idea of “hyper-masculinity” in itself is “problematic”. “It goes back to the old tropes about black men, in general, being supposedly violent or hyper-sexual,” he adds.
As long as certain expectations of race persist, the perception of masculinity will always be more of a problem for black or latino men. “Look at a white rapper like Eminem, who, as Greg Tate wrote, had everything but the burden,” explains Nichol.
“Eminem can be angry, masculine and all that, while also being allowed to be vulnerable in a way black men are not. He has the freedom to talk about his mother and his troubled family life in a way men of colour don’t have room to do.”
Taking the example of Tyler the Creator, the black American rapper who was banned from entering the UK based on his lyrical content, we have to ask, would this have happened to someone like Eminem, who is just as offensive but happens to be white? “We have to recognise the privileges white artists have over black artists,” explains Nichols. “The thing we always hear about when Eminem says something is his right to free speech.”
Looking at Washington DC, where Nichols spends much of his time, hip hop – while deeply entrenched in the mainstream — still makes up one of the last truly underground music movements in the United States. A hardcore punk scene sprang up in the capital in 1979 and continued to grow a following into the 1980s and 1990s. DC’s rap scene came along a little while later, but the difference between both movements is that hip hop is still around.
“This is because black kids still face hardship in a way white kids don’t, and all of those punk guys, while still legendary, could much more easily be co-opted into the system,” says Nichols. “They can put on a suit and go to work, but for hip-hop artists, it’s been a little different.”
The DC metro area has seen a boom in development over the last decade, but that prosperity never made it across the river and one-quarter of the city’s black population is still living in poverty. While these conditions continue to exist, hip hop will be the outlet of choice for so many men of colour who feel they don’t have a voice.
“There’s also been a real concerted effort by the system to shut the city’s underground culture down,” explains Nichols, referring to the shutting how of venues. “But the strength of hip hop is that it is so broad that it’s almost impossible to do that.”
Honduran journalist Cesario Padilla is facing immediate detention and a possible five-year jail term after being present at student protests at the National Autonomous University of Honduras in Tegucigalpa.
A warrant was issued for his arrest on 7 June. He and five others have been charged with “usurpation” of university property during protests, which saw buildings occupied and classes shutdown at UNAH’s two campuses in Tegucigalpa and in San Pedro Sula. The students were protesting against the introduction of higher pass grades and rising fees, as well as calling for the student body to play more of a role in the university’s governance.
Padilla said he was at the protests to observe as a reporter. The other accused students – Moisés David Cáceres, Sergio Luis Ulloa, Josué Armando Velásquez, Dayanara Elizabeth Castillo and Izhar Asael Alonzo Matamoros – were reportedly not present at the protests, but it is thought they are being accused of playing an organisational role.
Padilla works alongside former Index on Censorship awards nominee Dina Meza on the news website she launched in April 2015, Pasos de Animal Grande (Steps of a Big Animal).
Padilla was also interviewed in a 2014 piece Meza wrote for Index on Censorship magazine about the struggles young journalists in Honduras face when entering a profession where fear and corruption have become the driving forces.
In 2014, Padilla and five UNAH students, including Cáceres, Castillo and Ulloa, were suspended from the university after taking part in similar protests. They were subsequently re-admitted after a ruling by the Honduran Supreme Court of Justice in February 2015.
