By Isaac Massaquoi
The recent brutal murder of two American journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff has definitely badly shaken the confidence of young people aspiring to make a career in international journalism - especially in the West. The two Americans were slaughtered like sheep in front of a camera and the pictures put on social networking sites for the world to see - well those who are strong enough to watch the gory details of someone being beheaded. I haven't stopped wondering how the world came to this.
The geopolitical issues raised by that cruel man behind the mask who murdered Foley and Sotloff are too complex to deal with in this article. To be honest, I don't think I understand what happening is in that part of the world anymore - there are just too many non-state actors and political and economic interests at play.
In fact that is not my concern here. I am seriously alarmed that ordinary men and women, who make it their job to report events and help people make sense of their world are being targeted in this way because, according to the killer's propaganda, the so-called Islamic State doesn't like the foreign policy path being followed by the governments of the countries the journalists come from.
To me this kind of warped thinking is based on the false assumption that the journalists, some of them freelancers, are an extension of the foreign policy machinery of those governments. How simplistic!
Sometimes, even as journalists, we engage in fanciful arguments about global media institutions being the new missionaries of Western foreign policy and all that. Justifying that with clear-cut evidence is impossible but even if we stretched our convictions to that extent, how can that explain the beheading of Foley and Sotloff?
Unless God personally intervenes, a British aid-worker is next in line, heading to the slaughter house that is Islamic State territory which straddles Syria and Iraq . This is very dangerous indeed.
I have to confess that because of the important role the media play in any society, a lot has been done by governments and non-governmental agencies to provide support and protection to practitioners. May be unlike any other field of human endeavour. That's a fact. But there's a lot more to do.
In the last two weeks as I recovered from the shock of the beheadings, I have had cause to repeatedly read an old document about the place of the media in society especially how state actors relate with the media. I did it more from a desire to figure out what in the world is happening to colleague journalists in the conflict zones than in preparation for writing a newspaper article.
There are many such declarations around the world but, for me, this is the most detailed and specific.
At the Inter-American Press Association's Hemisphere Conference on Free Speech held at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, 1994, a declaration was signed. The first article of that declaration says this:
"No people or society can be free without freedom of expression and of the press. The exercise of this freedom is not something the authorities grant, it is an inalienable right of the people."
Please don't dismiss me by saying the so-called Islamic State are non-state actors. I know where that argument would lead. I can argue, however, that even some of the delegates around the table in that castle, only went along with the others because they were too shy or weak to speak out against the force of the values being captured on paper for their signatures.
They absolutely believe that the freedom to express oneself is granted by governments and when those governments find themselves on the wrong side of world opinion, they fall back on so-called national security legislation. This is how they have managed to sustain seditious libel provisions in Public Order laws in only a handful of countries now, including Sierra Leone.
Despite repeated promises to repeal or "review" those laws, president Ernest Koroma has maintained the status quo. There's no journalist in this country who believes those laws will be "reviewed" or repealed during what is left of Koroma's presidency. Even at the last SLAJ congress, there was a quiet sense of resignation that once again, a firm manifesto promise from a ruling party has gone unattended to. Kabbah did the same.
The same Chapultepec declaration says this:
"No news medium or journalist may be punished for publishing the truth or criticising or denouncing the government."
If this declaration was taken seriously, we wouldn't be talking today about Norbet Zongo, Dele Giwa, Carlos Cardoso or Deyda Hydara in Africa and many others around the world - from Sri Lanka to Russia.
The world has a long history of the state and its dark forces getting at journalists in furtherance of the objectives of a dictator. Sometimes I am encouraged to think that they fundamentally misunderstand the place of journalism in society but the real truth is many governments just can't stand the scrutiny and critical edge sections of the media bring to the national debate.
About a decade ago, I read the autobiography of a respected British Journalist, Kate Adie titled The Kindness of Strangers. Kate made her name covering many wars including the war in the Balkans and the Gulf War. In the postscript of that book she captures a moment when her life and bright career were close to being brought to an end by an official in Ghadaffi's Libya. Here's what she wrote:
"Occasionally you get a little too close to stories and your fellow man tries to swat you out of existence. I have been lucky - three bullets doing little damage and a fourth fired by a Libyan army commander who was in two minds (both of them drunk) whether to murder me or not for refusing to act as an intermediary between the Libyan and British governments.
"Eventually he shot at me from point-blank range, nicked my collar bone and demolished a sizeable slab of his drawing-room wall. I stalked off at best I could and - sounding like a British nanny delivering a ticking-off - announced: 'We don't behave like that in my country' - and anyway, I'm only a reporter."
Even as I write, Peter Greste and his colleagues from Aljazeera are languishing in an Egyptian jail after being convicted for offences relating to terrorism following a very ludicrous trial that puts a blot on Egypt's recent democratic pretensions. I honestly believe the Muslim Brotherhood had little respect for the democratic process by which they came to power, but frankly, how can any court convict ordinary journalists of terrorism-related charges based on their reports and contacts with sources?
And it's the ambivalence of Western powers that disturbs people like me. Yes, some governments have grumbled about the locking-up of journalists for reporting things as they see them, the usual media defence organisations have also complained but there's a lot more those Western powers and their allies in the Middle East and Africa can do, to get those Aljazeera journalists out of illegal detention.
The UN cultural agency, UNESCO, is meeting in the next few weeks in the wake of these beheadings and according to official documents "one of the major topics to be discussed will be dedicated to an extremely grave and disquieting problem: the majority of crimes committed against journalists and other media professionals remain unpunished.
In the last 15 years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, about 85% of all journalists’ murderers faced neither investigation nor prosecution for their crimes. “Even when murders were more fully investigated and some convictions obtained, the masterminds were brought to justice in just seven percent of the cases", CPJ says.
What comes to my mind immediately, is that the killers of Deyda Hydara have still not been found let alone punished in tiny and tightly-controlled Gambia; same for the killers of Dele Giwa in Nigeria and Norbert Zongo in Burkina Faso, while the convicted killer of Carlos Cardoso of Mozambique has escaped from a maximum security prison in Mozambique at least three times. Would you believe that!
How can anybody convince any journalist that the world truly cares about them?
(C) Politico, 11/09/14
