The Toll: Journalists Killed 1992-2001
Instead, they were hunted down and murdered, often in direct reprisal for their reporting. In fact, according to CPJ statistics, only 62 journalists (16 percent) died in cross fire, while 298 (77 percent) were murdered in reprisal for their reporting. The remaining journalists were killed in conflict situations that cannot be described as combat-while covering violent street demonstrations, for example.
CPJ's publishes a list
Each year in January, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) publishes a list of journalists killed in the line of duty around the world. This list has become the most widely cited press freedom statistic and is often seen as a barometer of the state of global press freedom.
While the correlation between the number of journalists killed and the state of press freedom in a particular country is far from exact -no journalists have been killed in Cuba, for example, and only one has been killed in China during the last decade-the annual list does give some sense of the range of risks that journalists face in reporting the news.
To provide a more complete statistical picture, CPJ is releasing a list of journalists killed during the last decade. The list has been broken down by year, country, and a variety of other categories.
Murdered with impunity
Since 1992, CPJ has recorded only 20 cases in which the person or persons who ordered a journalist's murder have been arrested and prosecuted. That means that in 94 percent of the cases, those who murder journalists do so with impunity.
What are the motives behind the killings? In many cases, journalists are murdered either to prevent them from reporting on corruption or human rights abuses, or to punish them after they have done so. The brazenness of the killers is suggested by the fact that 53 of the 298 journalists who were murdered during the last decade were threatened before they were killed.
In 25 cases since 1992, journalists were kidnapped -taken alive by militants, criminals, guerrillas, or government forces-and subsequently killed. The kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl highlighted this terrible phenomenon. (Pearl was killed in early 2002 and is therefore not included in the 10-year list, which covers the decade from 1992 to 2001).
Algeria and Turkey
In several cases, notably in Algeria and Turkey, journalists have simply "disappeared" after being taken into government custody.
Who are they?
Photographing combat is probably the most dangerous assignment in journalism, and during the last decade 50 cameramen and photographers have been killed. The majority of them died in cross fire in places such as Somalia, Georgia, Bosnia, and Russia.
But others were deliberately murdered because of images they had captured. In January 1997, the charred and handcuffed body of Argentine photographer José Luis Cabezas was found in a rental car in a resort city near Buenos Aires. He had been killed because he had managed to photograph a reclusive business tycoon reputed to be the head of the Argentine mafia.
Forty-nine radio reporters were also killed during the last decade. The surprisingly high number highlights the importance of radio worldwide, particularly in poor, isolated regions and in places where literacy is low.
Local radio reporters are exposed to heightened risk precisely because they are largely invisible to the outside world while being extremely visible in the communities where they report. This may explain why 11 of the 49 radio reporters killed since 1992 worked in Colombia, many of them in rural areas. Violence is endemic in the Colombian countryside, where political and personal disagreements are routinely settled through force, and Colombian authorities have virtually no ability to enforce the law.
At the other end of the spectrum are American journalists, either in the United States or overseas. U.S. reporters working abroad tend to be extremely visible, to be employed by powerful news outlets, and to work in danger zones for relatively short periods of times. While murders of U.S. journalists understandably generate intensive media coverage in the United States, they are relatively rare.
In fact, only 14 of the 389 journalists killed during the last decade were American -.36 percent of the total.
Most dangerous years / most dangerous countries
The single deadliest year in the last decade was 1994, when 66 journalists were killed, primarily in Algeria, Rwanda, and Bosnia.
Fifty-seven journalists were killed in 1993; 51 in 1995; 43 in 1992; and 37 died last year, including eight journalists who were killed in Afghanistan. (A ninth died in 2001 from wounds he suffered covering the Afghan conflict in 1999.)
Algeria
The most deadly country for journalists during the last decade was Algeria, where 60 local journalists have been killed (several more media workers have also been killed). Fifty-eight of them were murdered between 1993 and 1996, when Algeria was at the height bitter civil conflict that began after the government canceled elections in 1992 to prevent the Islamic Salvation Front from winning power.
In response, religious extremists launched a brutal insurgency campaign that included targeted attacks on journalists, intellectuals, and other civilians. Militants are responsible for the bulk of the journalists' killings, but government security forces are believed to be responsible for a number of disappearances. Algerian authorities have failed to conduct a serious investigation into the deaths and have refused to allow independent international inquiries.
Russia
In Russia, where 34 journalists have been killed during the last decade, 14, or almost half, were targeted in retaliation for their work, in many cases by the mafia. Successive wars in the breakaway republic of Chechnya have also been dangerous for journalists. While 11 were caught in cross fire or killed by mines, at least four journalists were killed for their reporting on the conflict, usually for investigating human rights abuses by the Russian military.
Colombia, Balkans, Turkey
Lawlessness and war are also major threats to press freedom in Colombia, where 29 journalists have been killed since 1992. Leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, drug traffickers, and corrupt government officials have all been implicated in attacks. Twenty-nine journalists have also been murdered covering the separatist wars in the Balkans, 19 of them in Bosnia when snipers sometimes targeted journalists riding in vehicles clearly marked as "press."
Turkey, where 18 journalists have been killed during the last decade, rounds out the top five most lethal countries for the press. Almost all of the 18 journalists killed there in the last decade were targeted for their reporting on the controversial Kurdish question.
What does it mean?
Local journalists covering crime, corruption, and human rights violations are extremely vulnerable, particularly in countries where conflict is widespread and impunity is the norm. Those are the facts suggested by CPJ's statistics over the last decade.
Covering combat is risky, but a much greater threat than a stray bullet are the murderers who kill journalists deliberately, using the generalized violence associated with war to cover their tracks.
Increasing safety for local journalists working in dangerous places means giving them greater visibility, and that means publicizing attacks against them. Doing so is one way to fight impunity for those who murder journalists, which is the single greatest threat to the physical survival of the press around the world.
Methodology
As with all of its casework, CPJ applies strict journalistic standards when investigating a journalist's murder. We only consider a case "confirmed" if our research confirms or strongly suggests that a journalist was likely killed in direct reprisal for his or her work or in cross fire while carrying out a dangerous assignment. We do not include journalists who are killed in accidents-such as car or plane crashes-unless the crash was caused by bellicose human action (for example, if a plane were shot down or a car crashed trying to avoid gunfire).
If the motives are unclear, but it is possible that a journalist was killed because of his or her work, CPJ classifies the case as "unconfirmed" and continues to investigate to determine the motive for the murder. For this 10-year statistical analysis, we used only confirmed cases.
While we believe that this list is both comprehensive and accurate, we generally have more detailed information about more recent cases. Our staff has grown over the years, and new information technologies such as the Internet and e-mail have made it much easier to report on the killing of journalists, even in remote places. (NM)
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* For more information about global press freedom conditions, visit www.cpj.org. CPJ is a New York-based, independent, nonprofit organization that works to safeguard press freedom worldwide.