At least 262 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war against the besieged enclave, marking one of the deadliest periods for media workers in recent global history, reports Al Jazeera.

Despite newsrooms being destroyed and reporters losing their lives, coverage continues through a new generation of young, often untrained correspondents determined to document the conflict.

With international media access severely restricted, the responsibility of reporting increasingly falls on local journalists who work in makeshift shelters and tents amid rubble, facing constant danger.

• READ MORE: Foreign press access to Gaza: RSF and partner organisations call on Israeli Supreme Court judges to accelerate proceedings
• Other Gaza media reports

For many, journalism has shifted from profession to urgent responsibility.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reports from Gaza City on the new generation of journalists, many of them young women.

Gaza’s young journalists document Israel’s war crimes       Video: Al Jazeera

A former US diplomat, Nabeel Khoury, says President Donald Trump’s decision to launch attacks against the Houthis is misguided, and this will not subdue them.

“For our president who came in wanting to avoid war and wanting to be a man of peace, he’s going about it the wrong way,” he said.

“There are many paths that can be used before you resort to war.” Khoury told Al Jazeera.

• READ MORE: US bombs Yemen, killing 31, after Houthis threaten Israel over Gaza
• Other Gaza genocide reports

The danger to shipping in the Red Sea was “a justifiable reason for concern”, Khoury told Al Jazeera in an interview, but added that it was a problem that could be resolved through diplomacy.

Ansar Allah (Houthi) media sources said that at least four areas had been razed by the US warplanes that targeted, in particular, a residential area north of the capital, Sanaa, killing 31 people.

The Houthis, who had been “bombed severely all over their territory” in the past, were not likely to be subdued through “a few weeks of bombing”, Khoury said.

“If you think that Hamas, living and fighting on a very small piece of land, totally surrounded by land, air and sea, and yet, 17 months of bombardment by the Israelis did not get rid of them.

‘More rugged space’
“The Houthis live in a much more rugged space, mountainous regions — it would be virtually impossible to eradicate them,” Khoury said.

“So there is no military logic to what’s happening, and there is no political logic either.”

Providing background, Patty Culhane reported from Washington that there were several factual errors in the justification President Trump had given for his order.

“It’s important to point out that the Houthi attacks have stopped since the ceasefire in Gaza [on January 19], although the Houthis were threatening to strike again,” she said.

“His other justification is saying that no US-flagged vessel has transited the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden safely in more than a year.

“And then he says another reason is because Houthis attacked a US military warship.

“That happened when Trump was not president.”

Is the world waiting for hundreds of thousands of people to die of hunger in Gaza to do something to save them ? pic.twitter.com/xMFJBNzJNY

— Ahmed Hassan أحمد حسن زيد (@Ahmed_hassan_za) March 14, 2025

Down to 10,000 ships
She said the White House was now putting out more of a communique, “saying that before the attacks, there were 25,000 ships that transited the Red Sea annually. Now it’s down to 10,000 so, obviously, sort of shooting down the president’s concept that nobody is actually transiting the region.

“And it did list the number of attacks. The US commercial ships have been attacked 145 times since 2023 in their list.”

Meanwhile, at least nine people, including three journalists, have been killed and several others wounded in an Israeli drone attack on relief aid workers at Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, according to Palestinian media.

The attack reportedly targeted a relief team that was accompanied by journalists and photographers. At least three local journalists were among the dead.

The Palestinian Journalists’ Protection Centre said in a statement that Israel had killed “three journalists in an airstrike on a media team documenting relief efforts in northern Gaza”, reports

“The journalists were documenting humanitarian relief efforts for those affected by Israel’s genocidal war,” the statement added, according to Anadolu.

In a statement, the Israeli military claimed it struck “two terrorists . . .  operating a drone that posed a threat” to Israeli soldiers in the area of Beit Lahiya.

“Later, a number of additional terrorists collected the drone operating equipment and entered a vehicle. The [Israeli military] struck the terrorists,” it added, without providing any evidence about its claims.

‘Liberation’ poetry
In Auckland on Saturday, protesters at the Aotearoa New Zealand’s weekly “free Palestine” rallies gave a tribute to poet Mahmoud Darwish — the “liberation voice of Palestine” — by reciting peace and justice poetry and marked the sixth anniversary of the Christchurch mosque massacre when a lone white terrorist gunned down 51 people at Friday prayers.

This was one of more than 20 Palestinian solidarity events happening across the motu this weekend.

Paris-based global media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has recalled that 20 journalists were killed during the six-year Philippines presidency of Rodrigo Duterte, a regime marked by fierce repression of the press.

Former president Duterte was arrested earlier this week as part of an International Criminal Court investigation into crimes against humanity linked to his merciless war on drugs. He is now in The Hague awaiting trial.

The watchdog has called on the administration of current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr to take strong measures to fully restore the country’s press freedom and combat impunity for the crimes against media committed by Duterte’s regime.

• READ MORE: Rodrigo Duterte, how the powerful turned powerless — by a target
• Duterte makes first appearance before ICC
• Other Philippines media freedom reports

“Just because you’re a journalist you are not exempted from assassination, if you’re a son of a bitch,” Rodrigo Duterte said in his inauguration speech on 30 June 2016, which set the tone for the rest of his mandate — unrestrained violence against journalists and total disregard for press freedom, said RSF in a statement.

During the Duterte regime’s rule, RSF recorded 20 cases of journalists killed while working.

Among them was Jesus Yutrago Malabanan, shot dead after covering Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war for Reuters.

Online harassment surged, particularly targeting women journalists.

Maria Ressa troll target
The most prominent victim was Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of the news site Rappler, who faced an orchestrated hate campaign led by troll armies allied with the government in response to her commitment to exposing the then-president’s bloody war.

Media outlets critical of President Duterte’s authoritarian excesses were systematically muzzled: the country’s leading television network, ABS-CBN, was forced to shut down; Rappler and Maria Ressa faced repeated lawsuits; and a businessman close to the president took over the country’s leading newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, raising concerns over its editorial independence.

“The arrest of Rodrigo Duterte is good news for the Filipino journalism community, who were the direct targets of his campaign of terror,” said RSF’s Asia-Pacific bureau director Cédric Alviani.

The repression carried out during Duterte’s tenure continues to impact on Filipino journalism: investigative journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio has been languishing in prison since her arrest in 2020, still awaiting a verdict in her trial for “financing terrorism” and “illegal possession of firearms” — trumped-up charges that could see her sentenced to 40 years in prison.

With 147 journalists murdered since the restoration of democracy in 1986, the Philippines remains one of the deadliest countries for media workers.

The republic ranked 134th out of 180 in the 2024 RSF World Press Freedom Index.

Source report from Reporters Without Borders. Pacific Media Watch collaborates with RSF.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says Israel has stepped up systematic attacks on journalists and media infrastructure since the start of its northern Gaza campaign.

Israeli strikes killed at least five journalists in October and Israeli forces began a smear campaign against six Al Jazeera journalists reporting on the north, the global media watchdog said in a statement.

“There are now almost no professional journalists left in the north to document what several international institutions have described as an ethnic cleansing campaign. Israel has not allowed international media independent access to Gaza in the 13 months since the war began,” CPJ said.

• READ MORE: Kamala Harris’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza ‘betrayal of true feminism’
• Silencing the messenger
• Other Israel’s war on Gaza reports

“It seems clear that the systematic attacks on the media and campaign to discredit those few journalists who remain is a deliberate tactic to prevent the world from seeing what Israel is doing there,” said CPJ programme director Carlos Martinez de la Serna.

“Reporters are crucial in bearing witness during a war, without them the world won’t be able to write history.”

“The situation is catastrophic and beyond description,” a camera operator for the privately owned Al-Ghad TV, Abed AlKarim Al-Zwaidi, told CPJ.

“We do not know what our fate will be in light of these circumstances.”

Media watchdogs have varying figures on the death toll of Gazan journalists, but the Palestine Media Office reports at least 188 have been killed in the Israeli war on the enclave.

This figure includes four more journalists who have been killed and have been named by the media office: Zahraa Muhammad Abu Sakhil and Ahmed Muhammad Abu Sakhil, siblings killed in an Israeli attack on Gaza City on Saturday; Mustafa Khader Bahr, a correspondent killed on March 31 near the Kuwait roundabout south of Gaza City; and Abdul Rahman Khader Bahr, a photojournalist killed on October 6 in al-Karama, northwest of Gaza

Rights groups say the Gaza conflict has been the most dangerous ever recorded for journalists.

Could not answer questions
The IDF responded on October 31 to CPJ’s email requesting comment on these killings, repeating previous statements it could not fully address questions if sufficient details about individuals were not provided.

The statement reiterated previous comments that it “directs its strikes only towards military targets and military operatives, and does not target civilian objects and civilians, including media organisations and journalists.”

CPJ is also investigating reports that two other journalists were killed during this time in northern Gaza.

Al Jazeera report on the Amsterdam clashes.  Video: AJ

Meanwhile, the UN Special Reporteur on the Occupied Palestine Territories, Francesca Albanese, has called for Western media to be investigated over their coverage of the clashes between Israeli football fans and locals in the Dutch city of Amsterdam.

The call came after some Western media outlets failed to report on or minimised the actions of the fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv ahead of and during the confrontations on Friday.

“Once again, Western media should be investigated for the role they are playing in obscuring Israel’s atrocities,” Albanese said in a post on X.

“In other contexts, international tribunals have found media figures responsible for complicity, incitement, and other international crimes.”

Once again. Western media should be investigated for the role they are playing in obscuring Israel’s atrocities. In other contexts, intl tribunals have found media figures responsible for complicity, incitement, and other intl crimes. https://t.co/YGBA9cpxNW

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) November 9, 2024

In one video from the clashes, Israeli fans were heard singing: “Let the [Israeli army] win, and f*** the Arabs!” while another showed them tearing down a Palestinian flag from a building.

A timeline distributed on social media clearly indicated how the Israeli fans provoked the attack by their own violence, but this was largely ignored by Western media.

We are witnessing the total collapse of journalism. Instead, cognitive dissonance and blatant falsehoods reign supreme. Did anyone expect anything different from Western and Zionist media? pic.twitter.com/7vPP4dnaxm

— red. (@redstreamnet) November 8, 2024

Israel is the world’s second-worst offender after Haiti in letting the murder of journalists go unpunished, according to a new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists, reports Al Jazeera.

According to the CPJ’s 2024 Global Impunity Index, released yesterday, Somalia, Syria and South Sudan round up the list of the top five countries allowing journalists’ killers to evade justice.

“What’s clear from our index is that Israel is not committed to investigating or punishing those who have killed journalists . . .  Israel has deliberately targeted journalists for being journalists,” CPJ chief executive Jodie Ginsberg told Al Jazeera.

• READ MORE: 5 more journalists killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza as death toll rises to 182
• Global media groups decry Israel labelling Gaza journalists as ‘terrorists’
• How impunity fuels Israel’s attacks on journalists in Gaza and Lebanon
• Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them — David Robie

She said that in some cases, Israel had announced the killings, claiming without evidence the reporters were “terrorists”.

In others, like the killing of three Lebanese journalists last week, it was clear they were targeted since nothing else was in the area.

The CPJ index also noted that globally, nobody was held accountable for 80 percent of cases related to the murder of journalists, and in at least 241 killings there had been evidence that the journalists were directly targeted for their work.

Rise of criminal gangs
The index — which was launched in 2008 — comprises 13 nations this year and includes both democracies and non-democratic governments.

Haiti, which tops the list, has been challenged by the rise of criminal gangs, who played a role in destabilising the country’s administrative and judicial institutions, resulting in the murders of at least seven journalists remaining unresolved in the country, the index said.

Meanwhile, Israel, which ranks second on the list, has appeared on the index for the first time since its inception.

The CPJ said the country’s “failure to hold anyone to account in the targeted killing of five journalists in Gaza and Lebanon in a year of relentless war”, had resulted in its ranking on the index.

While the press freedom NGO is investigating the killings of at least 10 journalists, the CPJ said the number of murdered journalists might still be higher, considering the scale of Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon.

Israel ‘deliberately targeted journalists’
At least 128 journalists and media workers are among the tens of thousands of people Israel has killed in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon over the past year — the deadliest time for journalists since the CPJ began to track the killings more than four decades ago.

However, some media freedom watchdogs put the death toll higher. The Gaza Media Office lists 182 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel since 7 October 2023.

The CPJ index also noted that Mexico has recorded the highest overall number of unpunished murders of journalists – 21 – during the index period and ranks eighth on the index because of its sizeable population.

Asian countries like Afghanistan, Myanmar, Pakistan and the Philippines have been appearing on the index regularly since its inception.

Calling on the international community to help journalists, Ginsberg said in a statement: “Murder is the ultimate weapon to silence journalists.”

“Once impunity takes hold, it sends a clear message: that killing a journalist is acceptable and that those who continue reporting may face a similar fate.”

Republished by Pacific Media Watch.

On the morning of April 15, I headed to a branch of Scotiabank in downtown Montreal to cover a pro-Palestine protest. Activists had chosen the venue due to the Canadian bank’s investments in Israeli defence company Elbit Systems.

I watched as protesters blocked the bank’s ATMs and teller booths and the police were called in.

Police officers showed up in riot gear. When it was announced the activists were going to be arrested, I didn’t expect that I would be included with them.

• READ MORE: Canada: RSF denounces “catch-and-release” arrest of Montreal journalist Savanna Craig
• Other media freedom reports

Despite identifying myself as a journalist numerous times and showing officers my press pass, I was apprehended alongside the 44 activists I was covering. It was inside the bank that I was processed and eventually released after hours of being detained.

I now potentially face criminal charges for doing my job. The mischief charges I face carry a maximum jail sentence of two years and a fine of up to C$5000 (NZ$6000). I could also be restricted from leaving the country.

Canadian police can only suggest charges, so the prosecution has to decide whether or not to charge me. This process alone can take anywhere from a few months to a year.

I am the second journalist to be arrested in Canada while on assignment since the beginning of 2024.

Arrested over homeless raid
In January, journalist Brandi Morin was arrested and charged with obstruction in the province of Alberta while covering a police raid on a homeless encampment where many of the campers were Indigenous. It took two months of pressure for the police to drop the charges against her.

Over the past few years, a pattern of arrests has emerged, with police specifically targeting journalists working freelance or with smaller outlets. Many of these journalists have been covering Indigenous-led protests or blockades.

Often they claim that the media workers they have come after “do not look like journalists”.

The Canadian police continue to use detention to silence and intimidate us despite our right to free speech under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. To specify, under section two of the charter, Canadians’ rights to freedom of thought, belief and expression are protected.

The charter identifies the media as a vital medium for transmitting thoughts and ideas, protecting the right for journalists and the media to speak out.

Furthermore, a 2019 ruling by a Canadian court reasserted the protection of journalists from being included in injunctions in situations where they are fulfilling their professional duties.

The court decision was made in the case of journalist Justin Brake, who was arrested in 2016 while documenting protests led by Indigenous land defenders at the Muskrat Falls hydro project site in Newfoundland and Labrador. Brake faced criminal charges of mischief and disobeying a court order for following protesters onto the site, as well as civil contempt proceedings.

Victory for free press
Despite Brake’s victory in the court case, journalists have still been included in injunctions.

In 2021, another high-profile arrest of two Canadian journalists occurred in western Canada. Amber Bracken and Michael Toledano were documenting Indigenous land defenders protecting Wet’suwet’en territory near Houston, British Columbia, from the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline when they were arrested.

They were held in detention by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) for three days until they were released.

In an interview, Toledano said he and Bracken were put in holding cells with the lights on 24 hours a day, minimally fed and denied access to both toothbrushes and soap.

“We were given punitive jail treatment,” Toledano explained. They faced charges of civil contempt which were dropped a month later.

Even though I knew about these cases, had analysed numerous press freedom violations in Canada over the last few years, and had researched the different ways in which journalists can experience harassment or intimidation, nothing prepared me for the experience.

Since I was arrested, I have not had the same sense of security I used to have. The stress, feeling like I have eyes on me at all times and waiting to see whether charges will be laid, has taken a mental toll on me.

Exhausting distraction
This is not only exhausting but it distracts me from the very important and essential work I do as a journalist.

I have also, however, received a lot of support. It has been genuinely heartwarming that Canadian and international journalists rallied behind me following my arrest.

Journalists’ solidarity in such cases is crucial. If just one journalist is arrested, it means that none of us are safe, and the freedom of the press isn’t secure.

I know that I did nothing wrong and the charges against me are unjust. Being arrested won’t deter me from covering blockades, Indigenous-led protests or other demonstrations. However, I am concerned about how my arrest may discourage other journalists from reporting on these topics or working for independent outlets.

I have been covering pro-Palestine activism in Montreal for eight years, and more intensely over the last eight months due to the war in Gaza. For years I have been one the few journalists at these protests, and often, the only one covering these actions.

The public must see what’s happening at these actions, whether they are pro-Palestine demonstrations opposing Canada’s role in Palestine or Indigenous land defenders opposing construction on their territory.

Regardless of its judgment on the matter, the Canadian public has the right to know what fellow citizens are protesting for and if they face police abuses.

Held to account
The presence of a journalist can sometimes be the only guarantee that police and institutions are held to account if there are excesses.

However, there is a clear lack of political will among officials to protect journalists and make sure they can do their work undisturbed.

Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante did not denounce my arrest or urge police to drop my charges. Instead, when asked for a comment on my arrest, her office stated that press freedoms are important and that they will allow police to carry out their investigation.

Just one city councillor wrote to the mayor’s office urging for my arrest to be denounced. Local politicians have also been largely mute on detentions of other journalists, too, with few exceptions.

The comment from the mayor’s office reflects the attitude of most politicians in Canada, who otherwise readily declare their respect for freedom of expression.

On May 3, World Press Freedom Day, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau put out a statement saying that “journalists are the bedrock of our democracy”.

Yet he never took a stance to defend Morin, Brake, Bracken, Toledano and many others who were arrested while on assignment. He, like many other politicians, falls short on words and action.

Until concrete steps are taken to prevent law enforcement officers from intimidating or silencing journalists through arrest, press freedom will continue to be in danger in Canada.

Journalists should be protected and their chartered rights should not be disregarded when certain subjects are covered. If journalists continue to be bullied out of doing their work, then the public is at risk of being kept in the dark about important events and developments.

Savanna Craig is a reporter, writer and video journalist covering social movements, policing and Western imperialism in the Middle East. Republished from Al Jazeera under Creative Commons.

Pro-Palestinian protesters dressed in blue “press” vests tonight staged a vigil calling on New Zealand journalists to show solidarity with the media of Gaza who have suffered the highest death toll in any war.

They staged the vigil at the Viaduct venue of NZ’s annual Voyager Media Awards.

Organised by Palestinian Youth Aotearoa (PYA) and People for Palestine (P4P), supporters were making a stand for the journalists of Gaza, who were awarded the 2024 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize earlier this month.

• READ MORE: Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them
• Media freedom award for the Gaza journalists who have paid a terrible price in Israel’s genocidal war
• Israel’s war on Gaza live news: ICJ to rule on Israel’s offensive in Rafah
• RNZ snags Voyager Media Awards wins for journalism, digital innovation

Fathi Hassneiah of PYA condemned the systematic killing, targeting and silencing of Palestinian journalists by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) throughout the war on Gaza that is now in its eighth month.

Global media freedom watchdog groups have had differing figures for the death toll of Gazan journalists, but the Al Jazeera network says 142 have been killed.

Often the families of journalists have been martyred alongside them, Hassneiah said.

A media spokesperson, Leondra Roberts, said PYA and P4P were calling on “all journalists in Aotearoa to stand in solidarity with the courageous journalists of the Gaza Strip who continue to report on what the International Court of Justice has called a plausible genocide”.

Māori journalists commended
She commended Kawea Te Rongo (Māori Journalists Association) for their support for their Palestinian colleagues in November 2023 with co-chair Mani Dunlop saying: “Journalists and the media are integral to ensuring the world and its leaders are accurately informed during this conflict …

“Daily we are seeing stories of journalists who face extreme brutality . . .  including the unconscionable worry of their families’ safety while they themselves risk their lives.

“It is a deadly trade-off, every day they put on their press vest and helmet to do their job selflessly for their people and the rest of the world.”

PYA spokesperson and musician Rose Freeborn appealed to journalists reporting from Aotearoa to critically examine Israel’s treatment of their peers in Gaza and called on “storytellers of all mediums to engage with Palestinian voices”.

“We unequivocally condemn the mass murder of 105 journalists in Gaza by the IDF since October 7, as well as Israel’s longstanding history of targeting journalists across the region — from Shireen Abu Akleh to Issam Abdallah — in an attempt to smother the truth and dictate history,” she said.

She criticised the “substandard conduct” of some journalists in New Zealand.

Media industry ‘failed’

“At times, the media industry in this country has failed not only the Palestinian community but New Zealand society at large by reporting factual inaccuracies and displaying a clear bias for the Israeli narrative.

“This has led to people no longer trusting mainstream media outlets to give them the full story, so they have turned to each other and the journalists on the ground in Gaza via social media.

“The storytellers of Gaza, with their resilience and extraordinary courage, have provided a blueprint for journalists across the globe to stand in defence of truth, accuracy and objectivity.”

A Palestinian New Zealander and P4P spokesperson, Yasmine Serhan, said: “While it is my people being subjected to mass murder and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, it is the peers of New Zealand journalists who are being systematically targeted and murdered by Israel in an attempt to stop the truth being reported.”

RNZ News reports that RNZ won two major honours tonight at the annual Voyager Media Awards, which recognise New Zealand’s best journalism, with categories for reporting, photography, digital and video.

RNZ was awarded the Best Innovation in Digital Storytelling for their series The Interview and longform journalist te ao Māori Ella Stewart took out the prize for Best Up and Coming Journalist.

Le Mana Pacific award went to Indira Stewart of 1News, and Mihingarangi Forbes (Aotearoa Media Collective) and Moana Maniapoto (Whakaata Māori) were joint winners of the Te Tohu Kairangi Award.

• The Voyager Media Awards and shortlist

After a week of violence that broke out in the capital of Nouméa following a controversial parliamentary vote for a bill expanding the settler electorate in New Caledonia, RSF said in a statement that the crisis was worrying for journalists working there.

RSF called on the authorities and “all the forces involved” to ensure their safety and guarantee the right to information.

• READ MORE: President Emmanuel Macron to fly to New Caledonia within hours
• Liberation for New Caledonia’s Kanak people ‘must come’, says media educator – Audio
• ‘You are not alone’ Pacific messages of solidarity for Kanaky
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

While covering the clashes in Nouméa on Friday, May 17, a crew from the public television channel Nouvelle-Calédonie La 1ère, consisting of a journalist and a cameraman, were intimidated by about 20 unidentified hooded men.

They snatched the camera from the cameraman’s hands and threatened him with a stone, before smashing the windows of the journalists’ car and trying to seize it.

“The public broadcaster’s crew managed to escape thanks to the support of a motorist. France Télévisions management said it had filed a complaint the same day,” RSF reported.

According to a dozen accounts gathered by RSF, working conditions for journalists deteriorated rapidly from Wednesday, May 15, onwards.

Acts of violence
As the constitutional bill amending New Caledonia’s electoral body was adopted by the National Assembly on the night of May 14/15, a series of acts of violence broke out in the Greater Nouméa area, either by groups protesting against the electoral change or by militia groups formed to confront them.

The territory has been placed under a state of emergency and is subject to a curfew from which journalists are exempt.

RSF is alerting the authorities in particular to the situation facing freelance journalists: while some newsrooms are organising to send support to their teams in New Caledonia, freelance reporters find themselves isolated, without any instructions or protective equipment.

“The attacks on journalists covering the situation in New Caledonia are unacceptable. Everything must be done so that they can continue to work and thus ensure the right to information for all in conditions of maximum safety,” said Anne Bocandé,
editorial director of RSF.

“RSF calls on the authorities to guarantee the safety and free movement of journalists throughout the territory.

“We also call on all New Caledonian civil society and political leaders to respect the integrity and the work of those who inform us on a daily basis and enable us to grasp the reality on the ground.”

While on the first day of the clashes on Monday, May 13, according to the information gathered by RSF, reporters managed to get through the roadblocks and talk to all the forces involved — especially those who are well known locally — many of them are still often greeted with hostility, if not regarded as persona non grata, and are the victims of intimidation, threats or violence.

“At the roadblocks, when we are identified as journalists, we receive death threats,” a freelance journalist told RSF.

“We are pelted with stones and violently removed from the roadblocks. The situation is likely to get worse”, a journalist from a local media outlet warned RSF.

As a result, most of the journalists contacted by RSF are forced to work only in the area around their homes.

“In any case, we’re running out of petrol. In the next few days, we’re going to find it hard to work because of the logistics,” said a freelance journalist contacted by RSF.

Distrust of journalists
The 10 or so journalists contacted by RSF — who requested anonymity against a backdrop of mistrust — have at the very least been the target of repeated insults since the start of the fighting.

According to information gathered by RSF, these insults continue outside the roadblocks, on social networks.

The majority of the forces involved, who are difficult for journalists to identify, share a mistrust of the media coupled with a categorical refusal to be recognisable in the images of reporters, photographers and videographers.

On May 15, President Emmanuel Macron declared an immediate state of emergency throughout New Caledonia. On the same day, the government announced a ban on the social network TikTok.

President Macron is due in New Caledonia today to introduce a “dialogue mission” in an attempt to seek solutions.

To date, six people have been killed and several injured in the clashes.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, who has been documenting the impact of the war in the Gaza Strip, has left the enclave for Qatar and gave his first interview there with the Doha-based Al Jazeera global news channel.

Azaiza announced on Instagram yesterday that he was leaving the besieged enclave before boarding a Qatari military airplane at Egypt’s El Arish International Airport.

However, it was unclear how he was able to leave Gaza or why he had evacuated, reports Al Jazeera.

• READ MORE: Israel’s war on Gaza live: ‘Collective punishment’ inflicted on Gaza – UN
• RSF condemns Israel over ‘silencing of media’ – 31 Palestinian journalists in jail, 80 plus killed
• Friendly fire may have killed hostages on October 7. These Israeli families want answers now
• NZ foreign policy critics warn over ‘inflaming’ Red Sea crisis, call for Gaza ceasefire

“This is the last time you will see me with this heavy, stinky [press] vest. I decided to evacuate today. … Hopefully soon I’ll jump back and help to build Gaza again,” Azaiza said in a video.

The 24-year-old Palestinian captured the attention of millions globally — including in the South Pacific — as he filmed himself in a press vest and helmet to document conditions during Israel’s war, which has killed more than 25,000 people in Gaza.

“Motaz Azaiza – A 24-year-old man from Gaza, in 108 days, did what CNN, Fox, the BBC, and all their ‘journalism’ predecessors refused to do for 75 years.

“Humanise a people!”

– Khaled Beydoun

Israel launched its offensive after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, killing 1,139 people and taking more than 200 people captive. However, there are demands within Israel for an inquiry into allegations that some hostages were killed by “friendly fire” from a tank.

In response, Israel has killed more than 25,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in a relentless attack on Gaza.

Azaiza’s coverage often took the form of raw, unfiltered videos about injured children or families crushed under rubble in the aftermath of Israeli air strikes.

He said he has had to “evacuate for a lot of reasons you all know some of it but not all of it”.

In his post, he was seen on a video about to board a grey plane emblazoned with the words “Qatar Emiri Air Force”.

I’m at Al Jazeera studios where they are streaming.
حلل يا دويري pic.twitter.com/fWoABDKD3t

— MoTaz (@azaizamotaz9) January 24, 2024

“First video outside Gaza,” he said in one clip, revealing that it was his first time on a aircraft. “Heading to Qatar.”

He also shared a video of the inside of the plane as it landed in Doha.

Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza leaves Gaza after his “heroic” humanitarian reporting . . . “we are all Palestinian.” Video: Al Jazeera

Since the start of the war, the photojournalist has amassed millions of followers across multiple platforms.

His Instagram following has grown from about 27,500 to 18.25 million in the more than 108 days since October 7, according to an assessment of social media analytics by Al Jazeera.

His Facebook account grew from a similar starting point to nearly 500,000 followers. He now has one million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter.

As well as his social media posts, Azaiza has produced content for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNWRA).

I left Gaza with a broken heart and eyes filled with tears.
There was no other option after 108 days of continuous massacres against us.
It’s time to move somewhere else so I can do more work and I pray that I can be a reason to stop this war and help rebuild Gaza again.
I’ve… pic.twitter.com/kg3FwTi38d

— MoTaz (@azaizamotaz9) January 24, 2024

Social media users thanked Azaiza for his coverage of the war, many saluting him as a hero.

“Thank you for everything you have done, you have moved mountains, what you have done in the last 100 days people can’t do in their whole lifetime. You were a pivotal voice in showing the world the Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Wishing you well and safety,” one user said on X.

Another, Khaled Beydoun, wrote on Instagram, “Motaz Azaiza – A 24-year-old man from Gaza, in 108 days, did what CNN, Fox, the BBC, and all their ‘journalism’ predecessors refused to do for 75 years.

“Humanise a people!”

“I’m so glad you had the opportunity to get out, God willing, YOU WILL RETURN TO A FREE PALESTINE,” wrote another.

“We love you so deeply,” American musician Kehlani wrote, adding, “Thank you for your humanity.”

“Frame that vest. It’s the armor of one of history’s greatest heroes,” comedian Sammy Obeid said.

Pacific Media Watch sourced from Al Jazeera.

Israel has arrested a total of 38 Palestinian journalists since the start of its war with Hamas on October 7 and is currently holding 31 — most of them without any charge, reports Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

The Paris-based global media freedom watchdog has condemning the use of detention to silence the Palestinian media and called for the protection of all journalists and the release of those detained.

Reporter Diaa al-Kahlout’s release on January 9 after more than a month in detention will not eclipse the scale of Israeli’s arbitrary imprisonment of Palestinian journalists, said RSF in a statement.

• READ MORE: Journalists need to ‘take a stand’ over the Gaza carnage after latest killings

At least 31 of those arrested since October 7 – 29 in the West Bank, one in Gaza and one in East Jerusalem — are still held in Israeli jails, in most cases without being notified of any charge.

“This unprecedented wave of arrests and detentions, while the war continues in the Gaza Strip, has clearly been carried out with the deliberate aim of silencing the Palestinian media,” RSF said.

All of the detained journalists work for Palestinian media outlets such as J-Media, Maan News Agency, Sanad and Radio al-Karama or are freelancers.

Massive crackdown in West Bank
Most of the arrests have been in the West Bank.

According to RSF’s tally, a total of 34 journalists have been arrested there since October 7, of whom only five have so far been released.

When the war began, two were being held. The detained journalists cannot receive visits and most are held in locations in Israel that have not been revealed.

Some of those who have been released, such as freelancer Somaya Jawbara, who was granted bail on November 22, 17 days after her arrest, are required to remain at home, are banned from using the internet or talking to the media, and have been placed under surveillance for an unspecified period.

Since the start of the war, Israel has been using the procedure known as “administrative detention” to detain journalists.

Under this procedure, a person is detained without notification of any charge on the grounds that they intended to break the law. They can be jailed for periods of up to six months that can be renewed on nothing more than an Israeli judge’s order.

At least 19 journalists are currently subject to “administrative detention.” The other 10 journalists are being held pending trial on “trumped-up charges of inciting violence”, said RSF.

“At least 31 Palestinian reporters are currently held in Israeli prisons in connection with their journalism,” said Jonathan Dagher, head of RSF’s Middle East desk.

“This intimidation, this terror, these endless attempts to silence Palestinian journalism, whether by chains, bullets or bombs, must stop. We call for the immediate release of all detained journalists and for their urgent protection.”

Inhuman treatment of detained journalists
Some of the detained journalists are being subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. This was seen in the case of Diaa al-Kahlout, the newly released reporter for the Al-Araby Al-Jadeed news site.

His family identified him in a video posted by an Israeli soldier in the north of the Gaza Strip on December 7.

#Gaza : RSF s’inquiète de la disparition depuis 4 jours du journaliste d’@alaraby_ar Diaa Kahlout. Il a été identifié dans 1 vidéo, publiée le 7/12 par des soldats , parmi des détenus déshabillés&agenouillés.RSF dénonce cette arrestation&exige d’Israël des infos sur son sort

— RSF (@RSF_inter) December 11, 2023

Al-Kahlout was seen kneeling in the street in the middle of a group of half-naked detainees.

An Israeli patrol had arrested him a few hours earlier at his home in Beit Lahia. His house was burned down.

His two brothers, who had been arrested with him, were released. The reporter was briefly held in Eshel prison in Israel and was subjected to torture, according to several RSF sources.

The Israeli authorities said nothing about his fate for more than a month, until his release on January 9. In almost all cases of detained journalists, the families are given no information about their arrest and their situation.

Terrible ordeal for detained journalists in Gaza
In Gaza, where two journalists are currently detained, many reporters have been subjected to arrests of less than 48 hours in duration that have been no less traumatic.

They include Said Kilani, a photojournalist who freelances for Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and other international media, who was one of the few reporters to remain in Beit Lahia.

On December 13, Kilani was covering the fighting as Israeli forces advanced on Kamal Adwan Hospital when he found himself being arrested along with a medical team.

“As I knew that journalists were being targeted by the Israeli army, I was afraid and I initially hid my helmet and my press vest,” he said.

Kilani was held for 14 hours at a military base in the north of the Gaza Strip.

“We were forced to take our clothes off, we were insulted and humiliated,” he said, although he insists that he immediately identified himself as a journalist to those holding him.

After being released, he found his wife and children, who had also been arrested and then released. While they had been held, their house had been set on fire, and the journalistic equipment that Kilani had hidden in the hospital had also been burned.

“The Israeli soldiers took everything from us,” he told RSF. “We are homeless, in the cold, with nowhere to go.”

Five days after his arrest, Kilani was with his 16-year-old son when the boy was killed by an Israeli sniper before his very eyes.

Huge tragedy for journalism
At least 80 journalists have been killed in the Gaza Strip since October 7 (Al Jazeera reports 113 killed), including 18 in the course of their work, according to information verified by RSF.

More than 50 media offices in the Gaza Strip have also been completely or partially destroyed by Israeli strikes since the start of the war.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with RSF.

No government likes to be called out for human rights abuses and it’s uncomfortable to do so, particularly when the abuser is either a friend or a country with which we have strong economic links.

In our relations with China, this is a difficult issue for us.

However, we should always expect our government to speak out for human rights and the case can be made that Chris Hipkins was too soft on his visit to China last week. The impression was of a laid-back Prime Minister failing to convey any of the serious concerns expressed by credible and principled human rights organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

• READ MORE: ‘A real massacre’: Israel’s attack on Palestinians in Jenin
• Israelis kill nine in attack on Jenin refugee camp
• Other Palestine reports

It seems New Zealand is leaving the heavy lifting on human rights to Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta who, in her own words, had a robust discussion with China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs on these issues earlier this year.

An Australian report said she was “harangued” from the Chinese side, although this was denied by Mahuta.

Hipkins, as Prime Minister, has our loudest voice and he should have publicly backed up our Foreign Minister.

If we want to be regarded as a good global citizen, we have to speak out clearly and act consistently, irrespective of where human rights abuses take place. This is where New Zealand has fallen down repeatedly.

Looking the other way
We have been happy to strongly condemn Russia and announced economic and diplomatic sanctions within a few hours of its invasion of Ukraine but we look the other way when a country guilty of abuses is close to the US.

In regard to the longest military occupation in modern history, Israel’s occupation of Palestine, we have been weak and inconsistent over many decades in calling for Palestinian human rights.

It hasn’t always been like that.

In late 2016, the National government, under John Key as prime minister, co-sponsored a United Nations Security Council resolution (UNSC2334 – NZ was a security council member at the time) which was passed in a 14–0 vote. The US abstained.

The resolution states that, in the occupied Palestinian territories, Israeli settlements had “no legal validity” and constituted “a flagrant violation under international law”. It said they were a “major obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace” in the Middle East.

Video shows the moment journalists said they were directly fired at by Israeli soldiers whilst they were covering the raid in Jenin refugee camp pic.twitter.com/OBQ5aS5c0A

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 3, 2023

So why does this matter now?

Because Israel has elected a new extremist government that has declared its intention to make illegal settlement building on Palestinian land its “top priority”. Early this week it announced plans for 5000 more homes for these illegal settlements, which a Palestinian official described as “part of an open war against the Palestinian people”.

Israel shows world middle finger
Israel is showing Palestinians, and the world, its middle finger.

At least nine people have been killed and scores wounded in the latest Israeli military attack on Palestinians in what is being described as a “real massacre” in Jenin refugee camp.

UNSC 2334 didn’t just criticise Israel. It called for action. It also asked member countries of the United Nations “to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967″.

In practical terms, this means requiring our government and local authorities to refuse to purchase any goods or services from companies (both Israeli and foreign-owned) that operate in illegal Israeli settlements.

This ban should also be extended to the 112 companies identified by the UN Human Rights Council as complicit in the building and maintenance of these illegal Israeli settlements.

The government should be actively discouraging our Superannuation Fund and KiwiSaver providers from investing in these complicit companies but an analysis earlier this year showed the Super Fund investments in these companies have close to doubled in the past two years.

Some countries have begun following through on UNSC 2334 but New Zealand has been inert. We have not been prepared to back up our words at the United Nations with action here.

West Papua deserves our voice
Following through would mean we were standing up for human rights for everyone living in Palestine. We could expect our government to face false smears of anti-semitism from Israel’s leaders and their friends here but we would receive heartfelt thanks from a people who have suffered immeasurably for 75 years.

Palestinians are the largest group of refugees internationally — 5.9 million — after being driven off their land by Israeli militias in 1947-1949. Every day, more of their land is stolen for illegal settlements while we avert our gaze.

The Indonesian military occupation of West Papua and Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara also deserve our voice on the side of the victims.

Standing up for human rights is not comfortable when it means challenging supposed friends or allies. But we owe it to ourselves, and to those being brutally oppressed, to do more than mouth platitudes.

These peoples deserve our support and solidarity. Let’s not look the other way. Let’s act.

John Minto is national chair of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa. This article was first published in The New Zealand Herald but is republished with the permission of the author.

One year after Al Jazeera’s well known Palestine correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh was fatally shot while reporting in the West Bank on 11 May 2022, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the lack of progress in the official investigations into her death and the failure to bring anyone to justice.

Several events are being held to pay tribute to Shireen Abu Akleh on the first anniversary of her death while covering an Israeli army raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.

But justice has yet to be rendered even though many expert reports pointed to direct Israeli Defence Forces responsibility and the IDF even acknowledged that the fatal shot was “very probably” fired by one of their soldiers.

“When there is a will there is a way. Although all the investigations clearly show that Israeli forces were responsible for Shireen Abu Akleh’s death, the absence of political will still prevents justice from being rendered.

The systematic Israeli impunity is outrageous and cannot continue. RSF will remain mobiliSed on all fronts until those responsible have been identified and brought to justice.”

SPECIAL REPORT: By Phil Thornton

In the two years since Myanmar’s military seized power from the country’s elected lawmakers it has waged a war of terror against its citizens — members of the Civil Disobedience Movement, artists, poets, actors, politicians, health workers, student leaders, public servants, workers, and journalists.

The military-appointed State Administration Council amended laws to punish anyone critical of its illegal coup or the military. International standards of freedoms — speech, expression, assembly, and association were “criminalised”.

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), reported as of 30 January 2023, the military killed 2901 people and arrested another 17,492 (of which 282 were children), with 13,719 people still in detention.

One hundred and forty three people have been sentenced to death and four have been executed since the military’s coup on 1 February 2021. Of those arrested, 176 were journalists and as many as 62 are still in jail or police detention.

The Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Myanmar as the world’s second-highest jailers of journalists. Fear of attacks, harassment, intimidation, censorship, detainment, and threats of assassination for their reporting has driven journalists and media workers underground or to try to reach safety in neighbouring countries.

Journalist Ye Htun Oo has been arrested, tortured, received death threats, and is now forced to seek safety outside of Myanmar. Ye Htun spoke to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) of his torture, jailing and why he felt he had no choice, but to leave Myanmar for the insecurity of a journalist in exile.

They came for me in the morning
“I started as a journalist in 2007 but quit after two years because of the difficulty of working under the military. I continued to work, writing stories and poetry. In 2009 I restarted work as a freelance video and documentary maker.”

Ye Htu said making money from journalism in Myanmar had never been easy.

“I was lucky if I made 300,000 kyat a month (about NZ$460) — it was a lot of work, writing, editing, interviewing and filming.”

Ye Htun’s hands, fingers and thin frame twist and turn as he takes time to return to the darkness of the early morning when woken by police and military knocking on his front door.

“It was 2 am, the morning of 9 October 2021. We were all asleep. The knocking on the door was firm but gentle. I opened the door. Men from the police and the military’s special media investigation unit stood there — no uniforms. They’d come to arrest me.”

Ye Htun links the visit of the police and army to his friend’s arrest the day before.

“He had my number on his phone and when questioned told them I was a journalist. I hadn’t written anything for a while. The only reason they arrested me was because I was identified as a journalist — it was enough for them. The military unit has a list of journalists who they want to control, arrest, jail or contain.”

Ye Htun explains how easy it is for journalists to be arrested.

“When they arrest people…if they find a reference to a journalist or a phone number it’s enough to put you on their list.”

After the coup, Ye Htun continued to report.

“I was not being paid, moving around, staying in different places, following the protests. I was taking photos. I took a photo of citizens arresting police and it was published. This causes problems for the people in the photo. It also caused some people to regard me and journalists as informers — we were now in a hard place, not knowing what or who we could photograph. I decided to stop reporting and made the decision to move home. That’s when they came and arrested me.”

In the early morning before sunrise, the police and military removed Ye Htun from his home and family and took him to a detention cell inside a military barracks.

“They took all my equipment — computer, cameras, phone, and hard disks. The men who arrested and took me to the barracks left and others took over. Their tone changed. I was accused of being a PDF (People’s Defence Force militia).

“Ye Htun describes how the ‘politeness’ of his captors soon evaporated, and the danger soon became a brutal reality. They started to beat me with kicks, fists, sticks and rubber batons. They just kept beating me, no questions. I was put in foot chains — ankle braces.”

The beating of Ye Htun would continue for 25 days and the uncertainty and hurt still shows in his eyes, as he drags up the details he’s now determined to share.

“I was interrogated by an army captain who ordered me to show all my articles — there was little to show. They made me kneel on small stones and beat me on the body — never the head as they said, ‘they needed it intact for me to answer their questions’”.

Ye Htun explained it wasn’t just his assigned interrogators who beat or tortured him.

“Drunk soldiers came regularly to spit, insult or threaten me with their guns or knives.”

Scared, feared for his life
Ye Htun is quick to acknowledge he was scared and feared for his life.

“I was terrified. No one knew where I was. I knew my family would be worried. Everyone knows of people being arrested and then their dead, broken bodies, missing vital organs, being returned to grieving families.”

After 25 days of torture, Ye Htun was transferred to a police jail.

“They accused me of sending messages they had ‘faked’ and placed on my phone. I was sentenced to two years jail on 3rd November — I had no lawyer, no representative.”

Ye Htun spoke to political prisoners during his time in jail and concluded many were behind bars on false charges.

“Most political prisoners are there because of fake accusations. There’s no proper rule of law — the military has turned the whole country into a prison.”

Ye Htun served over a year and five months of his sentence and was one of six journalists released in an amnesty from Pyay Jail on 4 January 2023.

Not finished torturing
Any respite Ye Htun or his family received from his release was short-lived, as it became apparent the military was not yet finished torturing him. He was forced to sign a declaration that if he was rearrested he would be expected to serve his existing sentence plus any new ones, and he received death threats.

Soon after his release, the threats to his family were made.

“I was messaged on Facebook and on other social media apps. The messages said, ‘don’t go out alone…keep your family and wife away from us…’ their treats continued every two or three days.”

Ye Htun and his family have good cause to be concerned about the threats made against them. Several pro-military militias have openly declared on social media their intention against those opposed to the military’s control of the country.

A pro-military militia, Thwe Thauk Apwe (Blood Brothers), specialise in violent killings designed to terrorise.

Frontier Magazine reported in May 2022 that Thwe Thauk Apwe had murdered 14 members of the National League of Democracy political party in two weeks. The militia uses social media to boast of its gruesome killings and to threaten its targets — those opposed to military rule — PDF units, members of political parties, CDM members, independent media outlets and journalists.

Ye Htun said fears for his wife and children’s safety forced him to leave Myanmar.

“I couldn’t keep putting them at risk because I’m a journalist. I will continue to work, but I know I can’t do it in Myanmar until this military regime is removed.”

Air strikes target civilians – where’s the UN?
Award-winning documentary maker and artist, Sai Kyaw Khaing, dismayed at the lack of coverage by international and regional media on the impacts of Myanmar’s military aerial strikes on civilian targets, decided to make the arduous trip to the country’s northwest to find out.

In the two years since the military regime took illegal control of the country’s political infrastructure, Myanmar is now engaged in a brutal, countrywide civil war.

Civilian and political opposition to the military coup saw the formation of People Defence Force units under the banner of the National Unity Government established in April 2021 by members of Parliament elected at the 2020 elections and outlawed by the military after its coup.

Thousands of young people took up arms and joined PDF units, trained by Ethnic Armed Organisations, to defend villages and civilians and fight the military regime. The regime vastly outnumbered and outmuscled the PDFs and EAOs with its military hardware — tanks, heavy artillery, helicopter gunships and fighter jets.

Sai Kyaw contacted a number of international media outlets with his plans to travel deep inside the conflict zone to document how displaced people were coping with the airstrikes and burning of their villages and crops.

Sai Kyaw said it was telling that he has yet to receive a single response of interest from any of the media he approached.

“What’s happening in Myanmar is being ignored, unlike the conflict in Ukraine. Most of the international media, if they do report on Myanmar, want an ‘expert’ to front their stories, even better if it’s one of their own, a Westerner.”

Deadly strike impact
Sai Kyaw explains why what is happening on the ground needs to be explained — the impacts of the deadly airstrikes on the lives of unarmed villagers.

“My objective is to talk to local people. How can they plant or harvest their crops during the intense fighting? How can they educate their kids or get medical help?

“Thousands of houses, schools, hospitals, churches, temples, and mosques have been targeted and destroyed — how are the people managing to live?”

Sai Kyaw put up his own money to finance his trip to a neighbouring country where he then made contact with people prepared to help him get to northwestern Myanmar, which was under intense attacks from the military regime.

“It took four days by motorbike on unlit mountain dirt tracks that turned to deep mud when it rained. We also had to avoid numerous military checkpoints, military informers, and spies.”

Sai Kyaw said that after reaching his destination, meeting with villagers, and witnessing their response to the constant artillery and aerial bombardments, their resilience astounded him.

“These people rely on each other, when they’re bombed from their homes, people who still have a house rally around and offer shelter. They don’t have weapons to fight back, but they organise checkpoints managed by men and women.”

Sai Kyaw said being unable to predict when an airstrike would happen took its toll on villagers.

Clinics, schools bombed
“You don’t know when they’re going to attack — day or night — clinics, schools, places of worship — are bombed. These are not military targets — they don’t care who they kill.”

Sai Kyaw witnessed an aerial bombing and has the before and after film footage that shows the destruction. Rows of neat houses, complete with walls intact before the air strike are left after the attack with holes a car could drive through.

“The unpredictable and indiscriminate attacks mean villagers are unable to harvest their crops or plant next season’s rice paddies.”

Sai Kyaw is concerned that the lack of aid getting to the people in need of shelter, clothing, food, and medicine will cause a large-scale humanitarian crisis.

“There’s no sign of international aid getting to the people. If there’s a genuine desire to help the people, international aid groups can do it by making contact with local community groups. It seems some of these big international aid donors are reluctant to move from their city bases in case they upset the military’s SAC [State Administration Council].”

At the time of writing Sai Kyaw Khaing has yet to receive a reply from any of the international media he contacted.

It’s the economy stupid
A veteran Myanmar journalist, Kyaw Kyaw*, covered a wide range of stories for more than 15 years, including business, investment, and trade. He told IFJ he was concerned the ban on independent media, arrests of journalists, gags and access restrictions on sources meant many important stories went unreported.

“The military banning of independent media is a serious threat to our freedom of speech. The military-controlled state media can’t be relied on. It’s well documented, it’s mainly no news or fake news overseen by the military’s Department of Propaganda.”

Kyaw lists the stories that he explains are in critical need of being reported — the cost of consumer goods, the collapse of the local currency, impact on wages, lack of education and health care, brain drain as people flee the country, crops destroyed and unharvested and impact on next year’s yield.

Kyaw is quick to add details to his list.

“People can’t leave the country fast enough. There are more sellers than buyers of cars and houses. Crime is on the rise as workers’ real wages fall below the poverty line. Garment workers earned 4800 kyat, the minimum daily rate before the military’s coup. The kyat was around 1200 to the US dollar — about four dollars. Two years after the coup the kyat is around 2800 — workers’ daily wage has dropped to half, about US$2 a day.”

Kyaw Kyaw’s critique is compelling as he explains the cost of everyday consumer goods and the impact on households.

“Before the coup in 2021, rice cost a household, 32,000 kyat for around 45kg. It is now selling at 65,000 kyat and rising. Cooking oil sold at 3,000 kyat for 1.6kg now sells for over double, 8,000kyat.

“It’s the same with fish, chicken, fuel, and medicine – family planning implants have almost doubled in cost from 25,000 kyat to now selling at 45,000 kyat.”

Humanitarian crisis potential
Kyaw is dismayed that the media outside the country are not covering stories that have a huge impact on people’s daily struggle to feed and care for their families and have the real potential for a massive humanitarian crisis in the near future.

“The focus is on the revolution, tallies of dead soldiers, politics — all important, but journalists and local and international media need to report on the hidden costs of the military’s coup. Local media outlets need to find solutions to better cover these issues.”

Kyaw stresses international governments and institutions — ASEAN, UK, US, China, and India — need to stop talking and take real steps to remove and curb the military’s destruction of the country.

“In two years, they displaced over a million people, destroyed thousands of houses and religious buildings, attacked schools and hospitals — killing students and civilians — what is the UNSC waiting for?”

An independent think tank, the Institute for Strategy and Policy – Myanmar, and the UN agency for refugees confirm Kyaws Kyaw’s claims.The Institute for Strategy and Policy reports “at least 28,419 homes and buildings were torched or destroyed…in the aftermath of the coup between 1 February 2021, and 15 July 2022.”

The UN agency responsible for refugees, the UNHCR, estimates the number of displaced people in Myanmar is a staggering 1,574,400. Since the military coup and up to January 23, the number was 1,244,000 people displaced.

While the world’s media and governments focus their attention and military aid on Ukraine, Myanmar’s people continue to ask why their plight continues to be ignored.

Phil Thornton is a journalist and senior adviser to the International Federation of Journalists in Southeast Asia. This article was first published by the IFJ Asia-Pacific blog and is republished with the author’s permission. Thornton is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

*Name has been changed as requested for security concerns.

Appalled by French reporter Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff’s death in Ukraine on Monday, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called for a transparent investigation into the circumstances of his death.

At the same time, RSF is stepping up its efforts to provide the best possible protection for journalists in the field.

It says that with the Kremlin “working tirelessly to spread its propaganda” about the war, journalists are needed for verified and independent information.

• READ MORE: Other reports on media covering Ukraine war

A video reporter for the French TV news channel BFMTV, Leclerc-Imhoff is the eighth journalist to be killed in the field in Ukraine since the start of the invasion. His body was reportedly still in Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region, but was to be transported to Dnipro for a forensic autopsy, according to a Ukrainian interior ministry adviser.

Leclerc-Imhoff’s BFMTV colleague, Maxime Brandstaetter, and their Ukrainian fixer, Oksana Leuta, who were both slightly injured in the shelling that killed Leclerc-Imhoff, are in the process of being evacuated to Dnipro.

Leclerc-Imhoff, 32, was sitting at the front of a humanitarian truck in Lysychansk when shrapnel from an exploding shell pierced the truck’s armoured windshield and struck him in the neck.

At the time of his death, he was filming the evacuation of around 10 civilians from the eastern front line to a safer location.

Reliable, honest and independent reporting
“Aged 32, Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff paid with his life in the quest for the reliable, honest and independent reporting that is vital for our democracies,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.

“We are saddened and appalled by this tragedy. RSF asks the Ukrainian authorities to display exemplary transparency and independence with the regard to the investigation by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) into this violation of the rules of war.”

The Kremlin, which has imposed total censorship on freely reported news and information in Russia and the territories its army occupies in Ukraine, used the state news agency TASS to attack Leclerc-Imhoff’s memory.

TASS called him a “mercenary” in the service of “Ukrainian far-right radical forces” in defiance of the facts.

Since the start of the invasion, RSF had already registered 50 events affecting around 120 journalists that qualify as war crimes.

It has just filed its fifth complaint with the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor and with Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, and is continuing to analyse attacks targeting reporters.

Present in Ukraine via its press freedom centres in Kyiv and Lviv, RSF also supplies security gear to news reporters in the field and provides them with safety training and psychological assistance.

The goal is to ensure reliable coverage of the Russian government’s war of aggression and war on information.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

This is not a lament for Shireen, nor is it a political article. It is not a press report, nor is it a study. It is not a tribute or condolence, because Shireen Abu Akleh deserves more than all of these.

These are mere observations and impressions of The Assassination of Shireen, of the deep sadness that has stricken people, all people, not only in Palestine, but across the world.

These are impressions of “real funerals” rather than metaphorical, of the sanctity of the casket and coffin, of the raised flags, and those that fell to the ground, of the capital and the conflict over the capital, of the tragic departure of a dear friend, an exceptional human at all levels.

• VIEW MORE: “Israel’s disinformation playbook: Delay, deflect, deny.”   Video: Al Jazeera’s Listening Post
• Other reports on the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh

I do not write this to praise her virtues, everyone has done so already, although she deserves a lot, and a lot from us.

Shireen Abu Akleh renewed Palestine and the values of the Palestinian people
Shireen was insidiously and aggressively assassinated. With her martyrdom, every Palestinian felt that they had lost their own someone dear.

Shireen, who had entered every house through Al Jazeera for a quarter of a century of hard, respectful, and professional journalism, is entering houses this time as a member of every Palestinian family, in the east, west, north, and south.

Every Palestinian felt personally touched by her martyrdom, and thus felt subjugated and humiliated. Everyone is asking “how could a well-known journalist be killed in the field dressed in such a way that clearly indicates that she is a journalist: a helmet and a vest with the word ‘PRESS’?”

This act targets those who tell the truth, the truth about daily killing in Palestine.

The assassination of Shireen, turning her into news, is an Israeli attempt to hide the truth; and to discipline, intimidate, and deter those who seek to show it. However, the reaction to her murder exceeded all expectations, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets to express their anger, not only in solidarity with Shireen’s small family, but because to most of them Shireen is family.

This large and massive participation in the funeral is but an expression of great anger, and the retrieval of the concept of Palestine, that is still under occupation, thus the retrieval of collective values of people under occupation, the most important of which is the collective sense of the need to be rid of this occupation and end it through resistance.

With all its political and religious diversity, including diversity imposed by the Israeli occupation (West Bank, Palestinians of lands occupied in 1948, and the Gaza Strip), the Palestinian people expressed unprecedented national and on-the-ground unity.

What made this unity special is that it was not emotional or sentimental, but an extension and an accumulation of what happened in May 2021 during attacks on the Gaza Strip and Sheikh Jarrah, an extension of the great solidarity with the prisoners of the Freedom Tunnel last September.

These heroic prisoners, whose heroic and courageous actions reverberated around the whole world, are still being punished by the occupation through the murder of their siblings.

Now comes the martyrdom of Shireen Abu Akleh, which served to crown, perpetuate, and define this moment of a great unitary struggle, which will inevitably be understood in the future as a moment of continuity with the events of the past year.

Jerusalem the capital
“Jerusalem is Arab”; this is not just a slogan that the residents of the West Bank shouted near Israeli checkpoints that surround the city, which they are forbidden from entering, these are the cheers of hundreds of thousands who shouted from the walls of the Old City, and in its alleyways.

This simply means that the conflict over the city has been resolved by Palestinian and Arab consciousness, by global popular consciousness and, will of course be introduced and reintroduced, in international forums.

As for the nuclear state, with a smart, powerful, and technologically advanced, “most ethical” army, as it claims, it proceeded for six consecutive hours to confiscate Palestinian flags carried by mourners, who not only raised the Palestinian flag, but also removed Israeli flags off their flagpoles at Jaffa Gate, one of the gates of the Old City of Jerusalem.

This means that 74 years on, this “strong” state is still not able to control neighbourhoods in its capital or in “the capital”, which says a lot.

This “strong” state attempted to limit the number of mourners participating in Shireen’s funeral, and planned to implement this order, demanding that the funeral be limited to religious rites, and that mourners would not raise Palestinian flags, and thus deployed police forces to the vicinity of the (St  Louis) French Hospital to tighten its control over the funeral.

This “strong” state permitted itself to do what no one in history has done, no matter their religion, and assaulted the casket in a very hideous way that will forever be engraved in people’s memories. With this assault, Israel assassinated Shireen Abu Akleh again, but in doing so, it strengthened the resolve of mourners to participate mightily in the funeral, in a manner deserving of a martyr from Palestine, and instilled in the minds of people in the entire world the most heinous picture of this occupation.

The heroes: Protectors of the funeral and coffin
Let’s imagine for a second the brutality with which young Jerusalemites and non-Jerusalemites who carried Shireen’s coffin on their shoulders were beaten. Let’s imagine the thick batons that the (Israeli) police used to beat them.

Let’s imagine the poisonous gasses that polluted the air of the funeral, the filthy wastewater that contaminated the area, on a sanitary level, since it was in the vicinity of a hospital, as well as on an ethical level, since it held the body of a martyr.

These heroes received batons, punches, and severe beatings, and yet held on to the coffin, they endured this much blind loathing and held on to the coffin, raised high on their shoulders, as a martyr from Palestine deserves, as Shireen Abu Akleh deserves.

The hero and heroes who saved Shatha Hanaysha and tried to save Shireen at the outskirts of the camp the moment of the crime
It is not only the brutal image of the occupation and its crimes that would remain engraved in our minds, nor just the pictures of the funeral, nor just the pictures of the young men who climbed the walls of the Old City, but the pictures of the heroes who could not care less about their lives, and insisted on reaching the site of Shireen’s martyrdom, with journalist Shatha Hanaysha, whom they saved from a certain death.

They managed to take Shireen to a hospital despite the intensity of the murderers’ bullets at the site. These young men, although not fighters, have turned into heroes in everyone’s eyes. Is there an act higher than the sacrifice they have made?

Walid, Guevara, Sandy, Wissam, Najwan, Samir, Elias and injured Ali Samoudi, as well as other al-Jazeera crew members working in Palestine
About those heartbroken by the death of a friend, colleague, sister and journalist, about their bravery to continue to report, pictures and news, despite their great loss, and about their heavy tears as they covered the news, and about their coherence in the funeral, during the burial procession, and in funeral homes.

It was as if they had agreed to postpone their grief until after they finished their duty of covering (the news) in a way that their colleague Shireen deserved. They continued their coverage for five days, covering not only the funeral route and the ceremony, but also the news of Palestine — specifically, the raids against the Jenin refugee camp on the day of the funeral.

Iman, Manal, Wasim, Carol, Jamal, Michael, Nadia, Nay, Marian, Rita, Malak, Faten, Fouad, Haitham, and other close friends
All of these friends concurred that Shireen had honoured them with her friendship, and that their loss was great and very painful; to Shireen they were family, and at the same time Shireen was family to them.

The impact of her loss was enormous, a great silence ensued, and their eyes reflected the entire sadness of this tragedy. But the determination of Shireen’s colleagues and friends to take part in her farewell from Jenin to Jerusalem, through all the cities and towns, to commemorate her, and the continued talk of her, gave them the strength to cope with the shock of her departure.

Her brother Antoine, his wife Lisa, son Nasri and daughters Lena and Larrain
Antoine, the brother who received the news of his sister Shireen’s injury, and then her martyrdom, via breaking news thousands of miles away from Palestine, for him to begin the risky return journey from Somalia, where he works with the United Nations, which was under complete closure due to general elections, he had to travel most of the distance to the airport on foot and reached it without a ticket or any preparation to travel in the times of covid-19 and its procedures.

On board, he saw everything happening in Palestine, he saw the Israeli police storming his home in Beit Hanina, he had to experience a thousand thoughts all while also experiencing this overwhelming sadness.

An only brother loses his only sister, his two daughters and son lost their only aunt, they were deprived of an aunt; Antoine’s wife, Lisa, lost her sister-in-law, her friend and her sister. What brutality is this?

What consoles Antoine, Lisa and their children is that Shireen regained the Arabism of Jerusalem, she united Palestinians, restored the spirit of international solidarity with Palestine, and redirected the compass to its rightful place.

Shireen conjured Palestine up with her death, and this may be a consolation for her small family and for all of us.

Finally, the murderer’s narrative
Shireen’s greatest passion was to expose the crimes of the Israeli occupation in Palestine, and through her work as a journalist, she exposed murders, confiscations, Judaisation, repression, and racial discrimination. She was always face-to-face with the Zionist narrative, exposing its lies and claims.

I do not want to go into the mazes of the investigation, nor the identity of who is behind the murderer, or the justifications they gave to media, let alone their ghastly confusion, their attempt to confuse the world’s public opinion in turn, the ensuing obfuscation, and so on.

There is a known murderer with a name and a commander, the commander has a higher commander, and the higher commander reports to a political official, all of whom decided on the 11 May 2022 to continue to shed Palestinian blood.

Those behind the crime are the occupation authorities who sent their special forces to practice what they do best: killing Palestinians wherever they are, regardless of profession.

Over time, the occupation has killed journalists, lawyers, doctors, children, young men, and women, without being prevented by any taboos.

I repeat that there is a known murderer, and when the occupation ceases to carry out daily killings in villages, cities and refugee camps in Palestine, it will lose its raison d’être.

The departure of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh entails a lot of work that the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian and international human rights institutions have to do to expose the practices of this occupation.

The forces of political and civil society have a lot of burdens to bear in order to maintain the momentum of solidarity that the departure of martyr Abu Akleh has left, an unprecedented international solidarity that must be preserved, observed, developed, and supported.

Khaled Farraj is the director-general of the Institute for Palestine Studies. This article was first published by the Institute for Palestine Studies on 17 May 2022 and has been translated for Mondoweiss and republished with their permission. Translated by Nina Abu Farha.

COMMENTARY: By Gavin Ellis of Knightly Views

Nothing justifies the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and the wounding of her colleague Ali al-Samoudi during an Israeli raid on Jenin in the Occupied West Bank. Nothing.

I believe the renowned reporter died at the hands of Israeli armed forces and that she was deliberately targeted because she was a journalist, easily identified by the word PRESS on the flak jacket and helmet that did not protect her from the shot that killed her. Her wounded colleague was identically dressed.

I am left in no doubt about the culpability of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on a number of grounds.

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Several eyewitnesses, including an Agence France-Presse photographer and another Al Jazeera staffer, were adamant that there was no shooting from Palestinians near the scene of the killing. Shatha Hanaysha, the Al Jazeera journalist who had been standing next to Abu Akleh against a high wall when firing broke out, stated they were deliberately targeted by Israeli troops.

Israeli spokesmen who initially laid the blame on Palestinian militants became more equivocal in the face of the eyewitness accounts, although they would go no further than saying she could have been accidentally shot from an armoured vehicle by an Israeli soldier.

That is about as close to an admission of guilt as the IDF is likely to get.

However, perhaps the strongest evidence of IDF culpability is the fact that the killing of Abu Akleh is part of a pattern of targeting journalists. Reporters Without Borders — which has called for an independent international investigation of the death that it says is a violation of international conventions that protect journalists — says two Palestinian journalists were killed by Israeli snipers in 2018 and since then more than 140 journalists have been the victims of violations by the Israeli security forces.

30 journalists killed since 2000
By its tally, at least 30 journalists have been killed since 2000.

Of course, those deaths are but one consequence of the IDF’s disproportionate response — in terms of the number of victims — to actions by Palestinian militants over the occupation of the West Bank. Since the present Israeli government took office last year, 76 Palestinians have died at the hands of Israeli forces.

There has been condemnation of such deaths, particularly when they include a number of children. So the reaction to the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh was sadly predictable. In other circumstances the outcry would dissipate and Israeli forces would continue to carry out their government’s wishes.

However, three things may make the condemnation louder, longer and more effective.

First was the fact that, although she was born in Jerusalem, she was a United States citizen. This could well explain the US Administration’s statement condemning the killing and its willingness to back a similarly reproachful UN Security Council resolution.

The second factor was that, although a Palestinian, Abu Akleh was not a Muslim. She was raised in a Christian Catholic family. It may not be a particularly becoming trait but the ability of the West to identify with a victim affects the way in which it reacts.

However, it is the third factor that may have the most telling effect on the long-term consequences of her death. I am referring to the desecration of her funeral by baton-wielding armed Israeli police.

Pallbearers assaulted by police
The journalist’s coffin was carried in procession from an East Jerusalem hospital to the Cathedral of the Annunciation of the Virgin in the Christian Quarter of the Old City where a service was held before burial in a cemetery on the Mount of Olives. However, shortly after the pallbearers left the hospital the procession — waving Palestinian flags and chanting — was assaulted by police.

Mourners were hit with batons, stun grenades were detonated, and a phalanx of armed police in riot gear advanced on the coffin. The procession scattered in disarray and, as the pallbearers tried to avoid the police action, the coffin tilted almost vertical and was in danger of falling to the road.

At that point, an Al Jazeera journalist providing commentary on live coverage of the funeral said an an anguished voice: “Oh my God. Such disrespect for the dead, for those mourning the dead. How is that a security threat? How is that disorderly? Why does it require this kind of reaction, this level of violence on the part of the Israelis?”

The horrifying scene was captured by international media and shown around the world

“The Israeli army is asking people if they are Christian or Muslim. If you’re Muslim you weren’t allowed in.” – @ajimran

Israeli occupation forces are attacking Palestinians during the funeral of killed Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. pic.twitter.com/Xq3VkeOCqn

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) May 13, 2022

Why did the police act as they did? Apparently because it is illegal to display the Palestinian flag and chant Palestinian slogans. Even after Abu Akleh’s coffin was transferred to a vehicle, police ran alongside to tear Palestinian flag from the windows.

The message was clear: There was no contrition on the part of Israeli authorities for the death of the Al Jazeera journalist. The justification for the police action was pathetic. There were lame excuses that stones had been thrown at them. In other words, it was business as usual.

That may not be the way the world sees it. Nor, indeed, the way it may be seen by many ordinary Israelis who would have been affronted by the indignity shown to the remains of a widely respected woman who died doing her job.

‘Time for some accountability?’
Yaakov Katz, the editor of the Jerusalem Post, an English-language Israeli newspaper, said on Twitter: “What’s happening at Abu Akleh’s funeral is terrible. This is a failure on all fronts.” In a later message he asked: “Is it not time for some accountability?”

The targeting of journalists aims to intimidate and to prevent them from bearing witness, particularly where authorities have something to hide. That is why, for example, we have seen seven journalists killed in Ukraine, 12 of their colleagues injured by gunfire, and multiple reports of clearly identified journalists coming under fire from Russian forces.

One might have thought the international community — and in particular Israel’s close friend the United States — would have put significant pressure on Tel Aviv to cease such intimidation a year ago after Israeli aircraft bombed the Gaza City building that was home to various media organisations including Al Jazeera and the US wire service Associated Press.

Israel claimed, without any evidence and contrary to AP’s own knowledge, that the building was being used by Hamas, the Palestinian nationalist organisation.

Associated Press chief executive Gary Pruitt said after that attack that “the world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today”. Aidan White, founder of the Ethical Journalism Network described the bombing as a “catastrophic attempt to shut down media, to silence criticism, and worst of all, to create a cloak of secrecy”.

That, no doubt, was what Tel Aviv intended.

Yet there were no recriminations sufficient to change the course Tel Aviv was on. As the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh so tragically illustrates, Israel has continued its policy of intimidation and violence against journalists.

Sooner or later, it will come to realise that such actions diminish a government in the eyes of the world. The death of Abu Akleh and the indignity shown to her remains have added significantly to the damage to its reputation.

Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes a website called Knightly Views where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

Several media crews have already come under fire and four reporters have sustained gunshot injuries in Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion as it enters its fourth week.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has reaffirmed its call to the Russian and Ukrainian authorities to comply with their international obligations to guarantee the safety of reporters in the field, and urges journalists to take the utmost care.

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The shots came within centimetres of Swiss photographer Guillaume Briquet’s head when presumed members of a Russian special commando fired on him shortly after he passed a Ukrainian checkpoint on a road towards the southern city of Mykolaiv on March 6, while covering the Russian advance in the region.

Despite the many “Press” markings on his car and his bulletproof vest marked “Press,” this experienced war reporter was then harassed by the soldiers, who stole 3000 euros and reporting equipment from him.

“As this incident clearly illustrates, reporters in the field are targets for belligerents despite all the rules protecting journalists,” said Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk.

“They are civilians, who are keeping the world informed about the progress of the fighting. They must be able to work safely. We therefore call on all parties to the conflict to immediately commit to protecting journalists in the field in accordance with international law.

“We also recommend that journalists exercise the utmost caution in the light of the many attacks by Russian commandos sent ahead as scouts.”

Under Russian fire
“They were less than 50 metres away,” RSF was told by Briquet, who was wounded in the face and arm by glass splinters from his windshield.

“They clearly shot to kill. If I hadn’t ducked, I would have been hit. I’ve been fired on before in other war zones, but I’ve never seen this.

“Journalists traveling around the country with no war experience are in mortal danger.”

A crew working for the London-based pan-Arab TV channel Al-Araby TV — reporter Adnan Can and cameraman Habip Demirci — came under Russian fire in Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv, on March 6. Shots were aimed at their car even though they had attached a white flag and “Press” signs to it.

Trapped in a town where fighting was taking place, the two journalists had to hide with residents.

A crew with the UK’s Sky News TV channel — consisting of four Brits and a Ukrainian journalist – came under fire from a Russian reconnaissance unit while heading toward Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, on the fourth day of the invasion, February 28.

The crew’s leader, reporter Stuart Ramsay, sustained a gunshot injury to the lower back while cameraman Richie Mockler’s body armour stopped two other rounds.

After shouting that they were journalists and after seeing that the shooting continued despite their press vests, the crew had to abandon their vehicle and run for cover.

Brush with death
Vojtech Bohac and Majda Slamova, two Czech journalists reporting for Voxpot, and two Ukrainian journalists with Central TV had more luck during a similar incident while travelling together in a car in Makariv, another town on the outskirts of Kyiv, on March 3.

They managed to escape uninjured in their car after coming under fire from Russian soldiers using AK-47 assault rifles, their media outlets reported.

“This shoulder wound missed costing me my life by just a few centimetres,” Danish journalist Stefan Weichert told RSF. He is now hospitalised in Denmark after being evacuated along his colleague, Emil Filtenborg Mikkelsen, who sustained four gunshot wounds in the same attack.

The two reporters for the Danish newspaper Ekstra-Bladet sustained these injuries in the northeastern town of Okhtyrka on 26 February.

“The gunman, who we weren’t able to identify, was located about 15 metres behind our car.” Weichert said. “He couldn’t have failed to see the ‘press’ sign that was clearly visible on our car.”

4 TV towers bombed
As well as firing live rounds at reporters, the Russian armed forces have also carried out strikes on telecommunications antennae to prevent Ukrainian TV and radio broadcasts. Four radio and TV towers — in Kyiv, Korosten, Lyssytchansk and Kharkiv — have been the targets of Russian attacks that abruptly terminated broadcasting by at least 32 TV channels and several dozen national radio stations.

Evgeny Sakun, a cameraman for the local Kyiv Live TV channel, was at the Kyiv tower at the time of the attack and was killed in circumstances that RSF is investigating.

Ukraine is ranked 97th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2021 World Press Freedom Index, while Russia is ranked 150th.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

“I have never had that fear before that I might get physically hurt,” says Patrice Allen, a Ngati Kahungunu and Newshub camera operator based in Wellington.

“You’re going down there, you don’t know what it’s going to be like. A person from Wellington Live got beaten up.”

Māori Television’s press gallery videographer David Graham (Taranaki Whānui and Waikato) started working as a news cameraman in Wellington in 1989. He was there for the seabed and foreshore protests, and “in the 1990s it was Moutua and Pakitore,” he recollects. “But this is the most volatile one I have seen.

“Back then we [the media] were part of the show. They wanted us to be there. Now we are a part of the ‘axis of evil’, along with the police and government.”

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Up against your own
“Now there are Pākehā calling you kūpapa [Māori warriors who fought on the British colonial troops side during the New Zealand Wars in the 19th century],” he says. He has just returned from filming with his phone in the crowd, and has heard protesters say things. Nasty things.

“Stuff like ‘you should be ashamed of yourself. You should be ashamed of your whakapapa!’”

“I just don’t engage,” says Graham. “And I am not a random man with a camera here. I actually have whakapapa back to this marae on my father’s side,” he says, referring to Pipitea Marae where Taranaki Whānui laid down Te Kahu o Raukura as a cultural protection over the surrounding land that includes the Parliament grounds.

The protesters had lots of livestreams and many of them kept filming media camera-ops who were filming them. (Below: David Graham finds himself in one of the live feeds while a protester in the crowd heckles him.)

Allen feels the mamae is stronger when it comes from your own people.

“This happened on the day of the last protests,” she says, referring to the protests in November where the crowd threw tennis balls and water bottles at the media. She was filming a timelapse of the crowd leaving when a mother-son duo walked up to her.

“He was a big dude and he was really getting in my face. I was not feeling very safe. And I thought, ‘how can I diffuse this?’” So she asked them where they were from.

“And they were like where are you from? What are you?”

“Oh, Ngati Kahungunu, just over the hill in Wairarapa,” she replied. The man said something targeting not just her but also her iwi. “And that just broke my spirit,” says Allen.

“It was one of the days I went home and cried.”

‘We’re the enemy now’
“We are the enemy now,” says Allen. “And there is nothing you can do or say that will change their minds.”

Her teammate Emma Tiller thinks the camera can be a beacon in the crowd. “As soon as you put it up, everyone knows who you are. And they hate you.”

And even though security cover has become standard practice for all news camera-ops filming in the crowd, there are times she feels vulnerable. “It’s hard to think back to protests when we were out there. We didn’t have security with us. It didn’t even cross our minds.

“But now who wants to risk the violence?” she says.

“They have thrown things at the police. If they can do that to them, what can they do to us?”

“The last time I had security was when I was filming in East Timor,” says Allen. It was a long time ago, she adds, and at a time and place when there were terrorists around.

“It’s really bad because it’s made it ‘us and them’, media against protesters, and it’s not supposed to be like that.”

‘Difficult to turn off’
Sam Anderson, 22, is TVNZ’s camera operator at the press gallery. “It has been difficult to turn off,” he says “ I have been there [on the Speaker’s balcony] from 9am to 6pm just streaming the whole day.

“It’s all you are doing – copping the abuse, being yelled at, having your morality questioned.

“I sometimes hide behind the pillars from the frontliners who can yell all day.

“And throw that in with reading all the signs around you,” says Tiller.

“And they yell at you. And you go home and you can’t switch it off.”

Anderson’s teammate, Sam von Keisenberg, was on that balcony on February 11 when police made many arrests. Shortly after they arrested someone at the forecourt and the crowd was yelling at the police, a lady pointed a finger at him and said “You! You are a paedophile protector!”

“At first I was like, ‘that’s new’. But then she said it 50 times, as loud as she could, just at me.”

He pulled his camera off the tripod. “It was getting to me”, he says. “I have children. I would never protect a paedophile.”

His colleague asked him where he was going. “Just to punch some lady in the face,” he said under his breath. “And I walked out and just went to the bathroom.”

Sweeping generalisations
“Sometimes you have to take a step back,” von Keisenberg says.

“I had never experienced hate [directed] at me before,” RNZ video journalist Angus Dreaver says. Especially this type, he says, where they think media are traitors, and they want them to know.

“Four months ago, I was doing kids’ TV.”

Dreaver thinks the generalisation works both ways. While the protesters see the mainstream media as a monolith and sweep them with one giant brush, “it’s important for us, conversely, not to see them that way.”

Von Keisenberg believes there were more moderates in the crowd than extremists. “I always felt there were enough people around me,” he says. And that made him feel safe in the first week when he was filming undercover, knowing that “if things did get violent, there would be some moderate ones who would stop them”.

He saw that in action, too. In his forays of the first week, when he joined the crowd unmasked to avoid attention. He saw a man there in his 70s wearing a mask.

“The first thing he said to me was that he was immunocompromised, which is why he was wearing the mask.”

“It’s fine, mate. It’s a freedom rally, do what you want,” von Keisenberg said. But another protester came up and “tried to pull his mask off and started berating him, saying he had no identity. The mob mentality started and people around the gate joined in and started giving him grief.”

Von Keisenberg intervened. “Oi! chill out man. It’s a freedom rally, he’s free to wear a mask!”

“A woman close by turned around and said, ‘Yeah, come on guys! leave him alone.’ And they did.”

Mainstream media
When people tell von Keisenberg that they don’t watch mainstream media, his follow-up is, “Well then, how do you know we are ‘lying’?”

“They say, ‘we get our news from Facebook, which is different’. Yeah, different, because there aren’t many rules around it,” von Keisenberg says.

“Mainstream media is held more to account than social media,” Allen says. “But they think the opposite.”

Some of Dreaver’s acquaintances have shared his photos on Instagram, in posts that read “Mainstream media are liars”. “Bro, that’s me!”, he says.

Trying to remain objective in the face of constant harassment is a real challenge.

“I am almost hyper-aware of that, where I am trying to capture the mundane and relax as much as the heightened states,” he adds. “And I am trying to not let my anger affect the pictures I take or how I cover it.”

But for camera operators, the task ends once they take the picture. “We only aim for clear sound and sharp, steady pictures,” Graham says. “The rest of the stuff is for other people to decide what to do with.”

Anderson thinks there are differences in perspectives within newsrooms. People who have watched the protests from a distance or from their desks often take a kinder view of the protesters, he says.

“But me and the other camera ops, we copped a lot of abuse over three weeks. We just have a more bitter taste in our mouths for this crowd.”

The PM in ‘disguise’
There have been the fun moments, though, Anderson admits. There have been “raves” with young people dancing on the frontlines and he found himself almost filming to the beat. And there was a protester who thought he was the prime minister in disguise.

“Now that is one theory I know is not true,” says his teammate von Keisenberg. But how does he know for sure?

“Because I have seen both of them in the same room at the same time.”

And von Keisenberg has had his fun moments in the crowd, too. In one instance when he was filming undercover, a woman went on the stage and started talking into the mic about electric and magnetic fields (radiation) and how crystals could block them.

“Bullshit!” von Keisenberg turned around and shouted.

“We are here for the mandates,” he added, not snapping out of character, and for the benefit of those around him who were listening to the woman speak.

A potential for volence
“The vibe changed every few days, and that was because people kept coming and going,” von Keisenberg says. “But there were always the elements who were there for whatever happened on day 23.”

One camera op I spoke to said there had been a “potential for violence” right throughout. And when someone like Winston Peters visits the crowd and says “the mainstream media have been gaslighting you for a long time,” it gives them validation, and lends credibility to their theories.

But for those on the ground gathering news amid a hostile crowd, it exacerbates the possibility for harm.

Added to this potential of violence is the constant anticipation of things to come. “You have to be always prepared for when something will happen,” as Tiller puts it. “And that is exhausting.”

Emma Tiller describes her experience of the Speaker’s balcony as, “You feel like you have to be prepared for if something is going to happen, and that is exhausting.”

“The day things turn to custard, you want to be there on the ground,” Graham said to me a few days before the police operation. “You don’t want to be at home watching it on TV.”

And turn to custard it did; the threat of violence became reality on day 23. While the “battle” raged between the police and the protesters, the media people found themselves being targeted.

Dreaver was in the crowd by the tent where a fire had started. “A Mainstream! We have got a Mainstream here,” a woman who spotted him started shouting.

Brandishing a camping chair, she told him to, “get out of here! Out! Out!” The riot police were advancing behind him and he stood his ground.

“She started hitting me on the back with it,” he said. “She didn’t have a lot of speed but it was still a metal chair.”

“It hurt a bit,” he reckons.

‘Not everyone’
“There were some protesters who were trying to stop the violence. Even right at the end,” says Dreaver, recollecting how when some people were breaking up bits from the concrete slabs to get smaller throw-able chunks, another person tried to physically get in the way and stop them.

“But the other guys had a metal tent pole and whacked him over the head with it.”

Throughout the three weeks of protests, there had been repeated calls from the protesters asking the media to talk to them. On the morning of day 23 when I was filming from the Speaker’s balcony, a TV reporter had just finished a live cross into the news bulletin.

A man’s voice rang out from among the crowd, on the PA, inviting the media on the balcony to “come down and talk to real people and report the truth.” The same voice went on to berate us for wearing masks, behind which we were allegedly smiling smugly.

Less than a minute after the initial invitation, he followed up with another call to step down so he could put a fist through the mask.

“Why don’t you come down to talk to us? Because getting bashed with a chair was always inevitable,” says Dreaver. “It’s crazy it took so long.”

Protesters whacked another protester with a tent pole as he tried to stop the violence. “It didn’t look as though it injured him, because the tent poles are quite light, but it looked quite gnarly,” Dreaver says.

The aftermath
Parliament’s grounds have been reclaimed. All but one street around the buildings is now open to the public. On Sunday, Te Āti Awa held a karakia to reinstall the mauri of the land. There is currently a rāhui over the Parliament grounds.

It is time for healing. And moving on.

“I was feeling sad last week. And then I look at Ukraine and realise there are bombs going off next to all these journalists and camera operators,” Dreaver says. “I got hit with a camping chair and I am going to sit around and complain about it?”

The effect of these protests linger though. Graham spent last Friday a week ago filming the hau kainga at Wainuiomata on high alert, and trying to keep the protesters from entering and setting up camp on their marae, as have other hapū around the capital.

The crowd has dispersed but not vanished, and neither has their kaupapa.

“I have seen some of their kōrero online,” Graham says. The mandates might be gone soon, but “there will be other stuff,” he reckons.

“It’s definitely not over.”

Rituraj Sapkota is Māori Television’s videographer in Parliament’s press gallery. Republished with permission from Te Ao Māori News.

Pregnant journalist Charlotte Bellis says her re-activated emergency MIQ application has been approved, and she will return to New Zealand in March.

Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson said yesterday afternoon that Bellis had been offered an MIQ spot.

The government has been defending its border controls after Bellis said she had to turn to the Taliban for help after not being able to fly home.

• READ MORE: Muzhgan Samarqandi: MIQ debate trivialises the plight of women and girls in Afghanistan
• Covid-19: NZ’s MIQ working but has tough trade-offs, says epidemiologist
• Charlotte Bellis’ open letter on MIQ to New Zealand – New Zealand Herald
• Taliban takeover: Charlotte Bellis faces perils outside ‘enemy territory’ – Pacific Journalism Review

Having been declined an emergency spot in MIQ, Bellis was assured by senior Taliban officials she would be safe in Afghanistan, where she and her partner have visas.

Bellis said her MIQ application had been met with “technicalities and confusion” and she had been asked to apply under a different category.

In a statement she shared on Twitter, Bellis said her and her photographer partner Jim Huylebroek were “excited” to return home and be surrounded by family and friends “at such a special time”. They are having a girl.

“We want to thank New Zealanders for their overwhelming support. It has been stressful and your kind words and encouragement helped Jim and I immensely. We are disappointed it had to come to this.”

Location risk factor
Bellis said the approval was not granted based on medical needs, but instead on the risk factor of their location — Afghanistan.

“I will continue to challenge the New Zealand government to find a solution to border controls to keep New Zealanders at home and abroad safe and their rights respected.”

Please find attached my response regarding Emergency MIQ Allocation. pic.twitter.com/mQ1R8W8eOd

— Charlotte Bellis (@CharlotteBellis) February 1, 2022

Bellis’ plight has attracted media coverage in many countries.

At a post-cabinet media briefing yesterday afternoon, Robertson urged her to take up the place in MIQ made available for her.

He said her case did not mean people would get preferential treatment if they were overseas and made a fuss.

Robertson said Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) staff dealing with emergency applications were handling difficult and challenging cases on a daily bases.

He added Bellis and her lawyer were considering legal action against the government so he would not comment further.

Medical treatment pathway
Bellis told RNZ Morning Report yesterday that she had signed up for an MIQ spot via the medical treatment pathway because it was the correct one and what pregnant women were told to apply under.

She said she had been asked to re-apply under a different category, which was for New Zealanders in a location or a situation where there was a serious risk to their safety.

Bellis and her partner submitted 59 documents in their application to gain an emergency MIQ spot, she said.

“As a New Zealand citizen, I have a legal right to return and I will do whatever the government wants in terms of quarantine or whatever, we’re boosted.”

Bellis said the government needed to explain “the ethics around that and how they’re prioritising, particularly, foreign citizens over their own who are in dangerous situations”.

She said if people tested negative and had the booster dose, then the government needed to revise its policy to allow them entry.

In a statement, head of MIQ Chris Bunny said Bellis had applied for an emergency allocation MIQ voucher on January 24, but the MIQ date requested did not meet the emergency criteria. Travel had to be time-critical and urgent, within the next 14 days.

Birth not a ‘scheduled event’
Bellis said the government failed to recognise that birth was not a “scheduled event”.

Shortly after her application, the team managing emergency applications contacted Bellis to provide her with additional information should she choose to change her flights, the statement said.

RNZ has also highlighted the case of a New Zealander in Australia who was forced to care for her premature baby in hospital alone after her multiple attempts at securing an emergency MIQ room were rejected.

Cabinet had discussions yesterday about reopening New Zealand’s border and the Prime Minister would speak about that tomorrow, Robertson said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and more than 60 environmental journalists of 34 different nationalities have appealed for respect for the right to cover environmental issues.

These journalists — who are from every part of the world and every kind of media, and who have all kinds of backgrounds and political views — have joined RSF in signing an unprecedented appeal coinciding with COP26 entitled “Climate emergency, journalism emergency”.

Men and women, some of them environmental experts and some of them more general reporters, some with a long history of covering “green” issues and some covering the environment more recently as it has become an increasingly alarming news story, they have denounced the obstacles that limit the right to provide information about these issues.

• READ MORE: Red alert for green journalism — 10 environmental reporters killed in 10 years
• Other COP26 climate reports

Climate change is crucial for all humankind.

The petitioners are asking governments to officially recognise that the right to information about these issues is inherent in the right to a healthy environment and the right to health.

The first journalists signing the appeal include Gaëlle Borgia, a 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner based in Madagascar, France’s Morgan Large, a food industry specialist, Russia’s Grigory Pasko, an RSF Press Freedom laureate who was awarded the Sakharov Prize in 2002, India’s Soulik Dutta, an expert in energy and land issues, South Africa’s Khadija Sharife, who investigates environmental crimes, and Lucien Kosha, a freelancer covering mining in the DRC.

Most of them have signed on an individual basis but the staff at some news organisations have wanted to sign collectively.

Environmental teams
This was the case with Afaq Environmental Magazine, a Palestinian media outlet, and Reporterre, a French news site covering environmental issues.

Crucially, the appeal points out that, although the right to cover environmental issues was established as a principle as early as the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, this right is still not being respected.

The signatories report that, in many countries, it is still very difficult to obtain information and scientific data about the environment, although such information is of paramount public interest. Their coverage can help change behaviour and help combat the unprecedented threat posed by global warming.

“Nearly 30 years after the right to cover environmental issues was proclaimed in the United Nations Earth Summit declaration in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, this right must finally become a reality, it must finally be applied and respected without exception, as something that is self-evident,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.

“At the hour of the climate emergency, this is a journalistic emergency. Environmental coverage is now vital.”

The dangers linked to covering environmental issues in some parts of the world has led to the killing of at least 21 journalists in the past 20 years for investigating these sensitive issues.

RSF and the journalists signing the appeal have also called for concrete implementation of international law on the protection of journalists.

For more information, see RSF’s report on the persecution of environmental journalists.

Auckland-based Pacific Media Watch is a collaborating project with Reporters Without Borders.

• Sign the citizen petition in support of the appeal Climate emergency, information emergency!

RNZ News

In just a few weeks the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated sharply as millions cope without desperately needed international aid, New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis says.

Bellis is Al Jazeera’s senior producer in Afghanistan and reported on the turmoil in August as the Taliban took over the government and thousands of people tried to flee.

She has dealt with Taliban leaders for a long time, and has sensed a change in their attitudes since they first ruled the country before being toppled 20 years ago.

• LISTEN: ‘I just can’t believe how quickly everything has deteriorated’ – NZ journalist Charlotte Bellis in Afghanistan (Duration 10′:12″)
• READ MORE: Taliban takeover: Charlotte Bellis faces perils outside ‘enemy territory’ — Pacific Journalism Review

She had to leave the country in mid-September because the network feared for her safety and Bellis noted on Twitter that the Taliban were detaining and beating journalists trying to cover protests.

Now she has returned and told RNZ Sunday Morning that she was not worried about her safety.

“The situation here is pretty dire and there are a lot of stories still to be told and I feel invested in what’s happening here and I also just love the country. It’s a beautiful place to be with amazing people and I genuinely like being here.”

However, the country is facing an uncertain future with its population suffering more than ever now that international aid has been cut off.

UN warns of humanitarian crisis
This week the United Nations warned that Afghanistan is becoming the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and Bellis agrees.

“The Taliban took over about two months ago and I just can’t believe how quickly everything has deteriorated.

“People cannot find food, there’s no money, they can’t pay for things, employers can’t pay their workers because there’s no cash, they can’t get money out even from the ATMs.”

Millions of jobs have disappeared, half of the population does not know where their next meal is coming from and already children are dying from malnutrition, Bellis said.

All the aid agencies are appealing to the world to listen.

23 million need urgent help
She is about to go out with the UN Refugee Agency whose teams are organising some aid distribution as the temperatures drop to 2 degC overnight as winter approaches. They are handing out blankets, food and some cash to thousands of the needy in camps in Kabul.

“But it’s such a Band-Aid. There is no way they can reach the number of people they need to reach — it’s  like 23 million people who need that kind of assistance,” she said.

Neighbouring countries such as Pakistan and Iran were very concerned, in part because they fear a huge influx of refugees. They have closed the borders to try and keep them away.

The process of getting money and food into people’s hands had broken down, she said, with a lot of it due to United States sanctions.

Three quarters of the country ran on foreign donations before the Taliban took over and that has dried up because no countries are recognising the Taliban’s legitimacy to govern.

Bellis has spoken to one senior Taliban official who said that at recent meetings between the Taliban and the US in Doha the Americans would not tell the Taliban what policies they needed to enact to unfreeze billions of dollars in funding.

“They [the Americans] are playing with millions of people’s lives.”

School problem for girls
She believes some Taliban leaders are pragmatic and would be willing to agree to high school girls being educated but are worried they will alienate their conservative base.

In the main, primary school age girls are able to attend their lessons but the problem is at secondary school level.

“If you’re a high school girl in Kabul it’s awful – sitting around thinking how did this happen. It’s really frustrating and really frustrating for everyone to watch and say this doesn’t make sense.”

Bellis said while she feels safe at the moment, the main problem is the terrorist group, ISIS-K, who have made threats against the hotel where she is staying.

The Taliban have said they will protect guests and have placed dozens of extra guards outside.

ISIS-K is believed to only number between 1200 and 1500 yet they are a potent force with their random attacks, such as beheading members of the Taliban, whom they hate.

She believes the Taliban’s biggest worry is that ISIS will appeal to its most fundamentalist members.

ISIS attracting recruits
ISIS is also believed to be trying to attract recruits who would be trained as fighters and be paid $400 a month which is a substantial amount of money in Afghanistan.

Bellis said she feels guilty staying at a hotel with the scale of poverty and deprivation she is witnessing.

“Right outside the door people are desperate,” she said.

She visited a major maternity hospital in Kabul yesterday and the only medication available for women giving birth was paracetamol.

“Imagine going into labour and thinking, OK if anything goes wrong I’ve got paracetamol. It’s just life and death on so many levels.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

For those of you wondering what you can do to help Afghans.. this @WFP project is the gold standard.
You donate meals direct to Afghans – choosing a set number of meals or month at a time. https://t.co/qgmuaTdpfo

— Charlotte Bellis (@CharlotteBellis) October 26, 2021

RNZ News

New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis, who works for Al Jazeera, has been visiting Kabul International Airport – until last Monday the only access point into and out of Afghanistan.

While locals and foreign nationals alike scrambled to leave the country for the past two weeks after the Taliban takeover, Bellis says she will be sticking around for as long as she can.

• READ MORE: Taliban says formation of new Afghan government in its final stages
• After US withdrawal, few answers for Afghans left behind
• Other Afghanistan reports
• LISTEN TO RNZ SUNDAY MORNING: The full interview with Charlotte Bellis

Bellis tells Jim Mora she was on the New Zealand evacuation list and saw first-hand how Western nations were trying to manage the chaotic situation.

“Most days you get an email saying, ‘okay, if you’re going to try to get out today, go to the North Gate’, then you get an email saying, ‘no, it’s dangerous, go to the South Gate’, and then an email saying, ‘no, don’t go at all, it’s too dangerous, we’ll get back to you’.

“And then finally an email saying, ‘I’m sorry the mission is over, if you didn’t make it, please email us and we’ll do our best to get you out somehow’.”

The danger reached a peak on August 26 and members of the media then agreed not to return to Kabul Airport, she says.

“A few hours later, there were the explosions.

“Even before that, the Taliban were in charge of guarding a perimeter. They were very tense, and firing in the air a lot, and beating people. I saw them running around with machetes… quite a few people left bloodied,” she says.

“A lot of people were scared off and decided not to even try to reach the airport even those who had the correct paperwork.”

Most people heading for the airport were aware of the security issues, Bellis says, but nevertheless many were that desperate to flee.

“A lot of the alerts we got were in English that were circulated in the expat community. Whether or not that filtered down to everyday Afghans trying to get out, I don’t know,” she said.

“There was a lot of confusion about who should’ve been allowed on the flight. You can imagine Taliban fighters who may or may not speak various languages, trying to read paperwork, I mean it was just an absolute mare.”

The last frontier against Taliban forces at Kabul airport was a group of CIA-funded militia known as 01 Units which have a “terrible reputation” in Afghanistan, Bellis says.

This group was also due to leave, she says.

“[Afghan president] Ashraf Ghani’s brother told me that [this militia group] are essentially bounty hunters. The Americans gave them a list of names of people they wanted killed and they did it, they did night raids and killed people from their homes.

“There’s been quite a few stories about them over the years, but they were incredibly secretive … they were running security on the north side of the airport for the last two weeks, I went down there and talked to them.”

The Taliban say Kabul Airport will continue to operate, but without air traffic controllers they have asked Turkey for “technical personnel”, Bellis says.

“But whether the Turkish airlines, Emirates, the companies that usually fly in and out, trust them enough to run the airport is another question.”

‘I will stay here for as long as I can’

Charlotte says that working for Al Jazeera, which is based in Qatar where negotiations with the Taliban happened, puts her in a better position than journalists working for American news services.

She has also built media relationships with the Taliban. The group have come to know her now, she says, and have even said they would help her safely evacuate if need be.

Being from New Zealand – a country the Taliban does not have major issues with – also helps, Bellis says.

She says she has told the Taliban she will keep asking questions about their actions.

“They’ve said go for it, as long as you’re objective and fair. We welcome criticism, we want to improve and if you ever have any problems, call us,” she says.

“Hopefully that all plays out and I will stay here for as long as I can.”

While the Taliban have claimed they will give women rights, Bellis was one of the first to speak up at their first press conference to ask about this.

“I’ve said to the Taliban, you’ve got a real problem here, because if you’re going to be successful in running the country you need people to trust you and you need to build that trust and you need to be transparent … I think only time will tell.”

The perception of the Taliban in the West is quite flawed, Bellis says.

“We think of them as this inhumane terrorist organisation when in fact, in the leadership at least, there are quite a lot of educated people, they’re quite rational. There’s also groups who just want to fight, then there’s also politicians who will just tell you what you want to hear.

“It depends on who ends up holding the reigns of the organisation.

“Hopefully it is some of the people who I’ve had dealings with, who are more objective, rational, willing to work with the West, and make compromises on certain things and aren’t as conservative as others.”

Challenges to governing

Lack of money and the departure of skilled workers are just a couple of the obstacles facing Afghanistan now, Charlotte says, as the IMF and World Bank hold off funds,” Bellis says.

“They’ve essentially put a stop to any money coming in … this country ran on donations and has done for 20 years and now that has stopped.

“Everyone is holding their money back and saying to the Taliban you have to play ball, we’re not going to give you money and then watch you close down girls’ schools.

“But the problem is how long will it take for them to trust the Taliban? Because in the meantime people aren’t getting paid and the economy is being run into the ground.”

Meanwhile, it appears the Taliban has been building a behind-the-scenes relationship with China for a few years now, Bellis says.

“There’s been a lot of little things happening, that signalled they are ready to build a relationship together. The Chinese, even before the Taliban took over, were preparing to recognise the Taliban as a government.

“The Chinese have had the rights to minerals here for some time, but they haven’t been able to mine because of the war and security. They’ve had reason to want to see the war end.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has staged parallel protests outside the Chinese embassies in Paris and Berlin, holding funeral-style processions to denounce the “killing” of Apple Daily by the Hong Kong government, and to raise alarm of the threats posed by the Beijing regime to press freedom globally.

Arriving at the Chinese embassy following a hearse, RSF representatives in Paris staged a mock funeral procession, delivering a coffin and funeral flowers with a placard inscribed “Apple Daily (1995-2021).”

In Berlin, RSF representatives staged a parallel action, “burying” the daily newspaper which was one of the last major independent Chinese-language media critical of the Beijing regime.

• READ MORE: The scrappy Hong Kong tabloid that refused to bow to Beijing
• AJF, RSF and other media freedom watchdogs condemn China’s ‘suffocation’ of free press

Two days prior, Apple Daily announced that it must cease all operations from June 27, with the last print edition of its newspaper to be published on June 24, due to the government’s decision to freeze its financial assets, leaving the media outlet unable to pay their employees and suppliers, reports RSF in a statement.

RSF condemns the killing of the outlet perpetrated by Chief Executive Carrie Lam by order of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and calls for the immediate release of all detained Apple Daily employees as well as the media outlet’s founder Jimmy Lai, RSF 2020 Press Freedom Prize laureate.

“We have gathered today to raise alarm about the urgent risk of death to press freedom in Hong Kong,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire told reporters gathered outside the Chinese embassy in Paris.

“Democracies cannot continue to stand idly by while the Chinese regime systematically erodes what’s left of the country’s independent media, as it has already done in the rest of the country.

International community ‘must act’
“Today’s funeral is for Apple Daily, but tomorrow’s may be for press freedom in China. It’s time for the international community to act in line with their own values and obligations and defend what’s left of the free press in Hong Kong, before China’s model of information control claims another victim.”

Deloire also called out China’s Ambassador to France Lu Shaye, who last week gave an interview labelling media critical of the Chinese regime a “media machine” and journalists criticising Chinese authorities as “mad hyenas”.

Lu Shaye believes there is no need for a plurality of media: “With two or three groups and a few people, we can become the vanguard of the war of public opinion and we can coordinate this war well.”

Lu Shaye has previously been critical of French media, stating last year at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemics: “I’m not saying the French media always tell lies about China, but much of their reporting on China is not true.”

Earlier this week, RSF submitted an urgent appeal asking the UN to “take all necessary measures” to safeguard press freedom in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong, once a bastion of press freedom, has fallen from 18th place in 2002 to 80th place in the 2021 World Press Freedom Index.

The People’s Republic of China, for its part, has stagnated at 177th out of 180.

Pacific Media Watch works in association with Reporters Without Borders.

As chaos flows in Burma, journalists are being forced to hide in plain sight by the Burmese military, writes senior journalist and Myanmar expert Phil Thornton.

Journalists in Myanmar are being hunted and arrested by the country’s military for trying to do their job. Independent media outlets have been raided, licences revoked and offices closed.

To avoid arrest, independent journalists have gone into deep hiding, taken refuge in ethnic controlled regions or fled to neighboring countries. The military and its paid informers trawl through neighborhoods, coffee shops and scan social media for evidence to justify arresting journalists.

The military appointed State Administration Council revised and inserted a clause in the penal code, specifically tailored to gag its critics, politicians, activists and journalists.

• READ MORE: Other Myanmar reports
• Fake photos in Myanmar ‘True News’ book

Clause 505a of the penal code carries a sentence of three years in prison for actions, criticism or comment that question the coup, cause fear, spread false news or “upsets” government workers.

To stop journalists, photographers and activists sending reports and images of security forces abusing and killing civilians, the military coup leaders ordered telecommunication companies and internet services to shut down their social media platforms.

Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun fronts the military’s press conferences – a list of his titles is impressive: Deputy Minister of Information, head of the armed forces True News Information Team and boss of the military appointed State Administration Council’s media team.

A look at his name card reveals a much darker role – Zaw Min Tun has working directly for coup leader and Commander-in-Chief, General Min Aung Hlaing. Not only does the card boast that General Zaw Min Tun is Directorate of Public Relations, but he is also head of the army’s Psychological Warfare department.

Deceitful work
A Reuters report in 2018 gave an indication of the deceitful work his department of public relations and psychological warfare gets up to when it revealed a book it published on the Rohingya, had used “fake” photographs to claim Muslims were killing Buddhists.

The Reuters investigation into the origin of the photograph “showed it was actually taken during Bangladesh’s 1971 independence war, when hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis were killed by Pakistani troops”.

The tactic might have been clumsily executed, but it worked, and helped ignite deadly racist attacks against Rohingya people and supported ultra nationalist views at a critical time.

In a more recent move, the Ministry of Information warned on May 4, viewers who watch or receive outside satellite broadcasts were now doing so illegally and were a threat to national security.

The military cautioned viewers on the state-owned television station, MRTV, that “satellite television is no longer legal. Whoever violates the television and video law, especially people using satellite dishes, shall be punishable with one-year imprisonment and a fine of 500,000kyat (US$320).”

Without the support of the shuttered, independent media outlets, getting paid work has been difficult to find, but many journalists took the tough decision to keep reporting, despite fear of arrest and of having internet and phone restrictions imposed on them.

Journalists who spoke to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ for this article vowed to find a way to keep working and to continue to find ways to deliver news to people both inside the country and to the international community.

Witness to a revolution
Since the coup began on February 1, independent press freedom has been destroyed. The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) estimates 84 journalists have been detained and as of May 3, 50 are currently detained, 25 of these have been persecuted and arrests warrants have been issued for 29.

A later AAPP report, on May 6, said that 772 people have been killed, 4809 arrested and 1478 are now on the run, since the beginning of the coup.

Despite journalists being jailed, tortured and spied on, Naw Betty Han, a journalist with the magazine, Frontier Myanmar, is determined to keep reporting and explained to IFJ why that is, “In the current political situation, it is very difficult for a journalist to live and work in the country. But I will not stop doing my job.

“We’re witness to a revolution. I want to remain at the front of these developments, report on human rights violations and hopefully see the end of the military dictatorship.”

Naw Betty stressed the freedom to report, despite the dangers, is why she keeps working. “Journalism is much more than my job, it’s my mission. I’m willing to take the risk to keep reporting.”

Reporters, citizen journalists, activists and householders have all recorded police and army patrols shooting at and beating unarmed young men and women, ransacking shops and firing live ammunition into homes regardless of who might be hit.

Naw Betty said the military wants to stop any proof of its violence being recorded, “Police and soldiers are everywhere, at temporary checkpoints, on patrols…they check phones, if they find proof of protesting, being a journalist, a photo or a news item that supports the CDM movement… a social media post… they immediately beat and arrest them.”

No journalist identification
Naw Betty said she and her colleagues still working can no longer identify as journalists, “We have to delete our phone data when we go out in the field gathering news. Police and soldiers break open houses at night to surprise check the guest list. If you do not open the door, they will break in and arrest you anyhow.

“A former DVB reporter was beaten last week at his home after a search of his home and no evidence was found.”

Naw Betty is well aware of the risks of being arrested. In 2020 while investigating a multibillion-dollar Chinese investment on the Thai Burma border she and a photographer colleague were detained by a Burma Army sponsored militia – masked, handcuffed, driven to a rubber plantation and beaten, before finally being released.

“I am scared of being arrested and faced with the violence in interrogation. But I am positive, I am more afraid that I would not be able to continue as a journalist. I know that I am in danger of being arrested, but I want to keep working as a reporter.”

Naw Betty told IFJ the military, aided by its paid informers, are systematically increasing its crackdown on its opponents, squeezing their ability to move and forcing them into taking more dangerous risks, not knowing who to trust.

Naw Betty said “I’m worried about them [informers], I moved to a different place as soon as the coup happened, hopefully I can stay safe. Journalists in Myanmar are now trying to be as low profile as possible, but when there is a compelling situation, we have to go out to report and take risks.

“We are targets…74 journalists have been arrested and charged under 505 (A). Arrested journalists face physical and mental violence during interrogation before being sent to prison.”

We’re willing and ready
The military’s revoking of licenses and outlawing independent outlets has made it hard for many journalists to find paid work. Naw Betty said journalists have turned to freelance to try to earn a living from their reporting, “Many journalists I know are now faced with financial problems as they have no regular income anymore.

“Some photojournalists have tried to string for international news agencies, but the opportunities are limited – most are struggling with no income.”

A scan of social media postings by advocates offers links to what could become stories of interest to international media, but military refusal to give unfettered access to verify or follow-up accusations of corruption, rumours of security forces looting and bomb attacks has made it to difficult to follow-up.

Naw Betty encourages international media organisations to hire local journalists: “Give locals the chance to work on part-time assignments. We all are willing and ready to support on the ground reporting with international and foreign journalists – we can work together.”

Our priority is to keep broadcasting
Than Win Htut, a senior executive with Democratic Voice of Burma, now working from the edges of a neighboring country, said his priority, after his Yangon DVB operation was shutdown and outlawed, was to get back to operating at full capacity.

“Many journalists are on the run or in hiding. We have to review our network. When they closed us down we lost a lot of our capacity to broadcast – our newsroom, studio, talk show, on-line, research and data analysis.

“We now have to reorganise, rebuild and reintegrate. We need a new studio, live reporting, get journalists on the street, it won’t be easy.”

Than Win Htut’s operation has a whole range of challenges posed by the geography and weather. The monsoon wet season is about to hit his new mountainous location, flooding small rivers into deep, fast flowing hard-to-cross torrents.

The wet season brings dengue fever, malaria and dysentery, difficult at the best of time, but highly dangerous when the nearest medical help is a day away.

Than Win Htut said while searching for new premises maintaining security is of critical importance during forced exile. “They’ve cracked down on mobile phone services, internet is limited, the independent flow of information is blocked, arresting journalists, they won’t stop. We have to take our security serious. Many young journalists don’t have the experience of having to work in secret, going underground. Constantly changing your name, location, passwords, sim-cards, even your phone.”

Than Win Htut is worried sophisticated cyber surveillance equipment and technology the military acquired from Russia, China, Israel, US and Europe is now being used by the military to track and hunt its opponents.

Risks taken
“We have to take the position, the more you know the more the risk you are to yourself and to others. If a journalist gets arrested, you don’t know what they’ve been forced to give up during interrogation.

“We also have to now reconsider how we use photographs and footage of people protesting and of journalists.”

Than Win Htut stressed, international correspondents can endanger local journalists by not knowing the context, especially when following up leads on those arrested.

“You might be trying to help, but the arrested will be trying hard to not identify as a journalist or activist, but by running stories and photos you might be confirming the military’s suspicion someone is a journalist – that makes it dangerous.”

Than Win Htut is concerned the unity between journalists who went to neighbouring countries and those who stayed behind doesn’t divide. “We mustn’t let divisions stop us being united. We need to support each other, whether we are working from inside or outside the country, we’re all in this together.”

You’re either underground or with them
Toe Zaw Latt, an Australia citizen and production director of DVB, spent more than 80 days covering the military coup. With the help of the Australian Embassy in Myanmar, Toe Zaw Latt managed to leave his Yangon place of hiding and return to Australia last week.

Now in the middle of his 14-day quarantine in Adelaide, Toe Zaw Latt talked with IFJ about the ongoing anti-coup protests and the hounding of journalists by security forces.

Since the beginning of the coup, Toe Zaw Latt has been in daily contact with IFJ. He explained: “Most of the independent media have been closed down. Only independent papers left on the street before I left were Eleven Media and Standard Times. Journalists have to face a new threat from plainclothes Special Branch using stolen civilian cars to patrol neighborhoods.

“They turned up at a freelance journalist’s house to arrest her. She wasn’t there, so they took her husband instead. If they can’t arrest the journo it looks like they’ll just take a family member in their place.”

Toe Zaw Latt explained how journalists cannot do anything that identifies them to the police or army.

“No cameras, no notebooks, disguise yourself each time and what you are doing, make sure you carry nothing that can be used to identify you as a journalist and learn how to hide your phone.

“Smart phones are still good in the field, but we need to train young journalists to become more adept with using them to report and they need to know how to get footage out to be broadcast.”

International media interest
“Toe Zaw Latt is concerned that international media continues to maintain an interest in what’s happening with the daily civilian protests and they buy content from local providers.

“It’s important international media agencies keep employing or buying footage from local sources. Freelancers are risking their lives to get footage, they should be paid for it.

“Media news agencies should make a paid contribution and not just lift content off the internet. Journalists are helping each other. Those who are getting paid are sharing with those who aren’t.”

Toe Zaw Latt is impressed by the enthusiasm and resilience shown by activists and students to publish and broadcast news despite military threats of long prison sentences.

“Lots of underground media has emerged since the coup. Student activists fighting the military’s internet blackout have published newsletters – Molotov, Toward and Revolution. The National Unity Government are planning Public Voice TV, underground ethnic youth are running Federal FM and ethnic Mon media produce Lagon Eain.

“I respect their courage in fighting the military’s version of the truth and rejecting their misinformation.”

A senior ethnic journalist spoke to IFJ about the restriction she faces on a daily basis.

“No one can work in the military government-controlled areas. Special Branch have our photographs and our personal details. We’ve put up with it for years. Our houses have been visited, family interrogated.

Risks too stressful
“Some of our colleagues resigned, because the risks were too stressful. They felt they’d be no use to their families if they were in jail.”

The senior journalist explained news coverage now has to be underground.

“It’s either that or you report according to their instructions and that’s total rubbish, just propaganda. All they want is for journalists to legitimise the coup. If you stand up to that your only choice is to go underground.

“Some might play the margins, start by not covering anything sensitive.”

The senior journalists said media could be split into two groups.

“Those willing to be mouthpieces for the military. They don’t run stories upsetting the military and use terms dictated by the State Administration Council. Then there’s what the military classify as radicals.

Our websites are usually blocked, our reporters cannot operate on the surface, we have to go underground and anyone against the military is a target.”

Ethnic journalist difficulties
To give an indication of the difficulties ethnic journalists are working under, from March 27 to May 5, the Karen National Union report its soldiers were involved in 407 armed battles with the Burma Army.

Ethnic journalists told IFJ fighter jets have flown into Karen controlled territory 27 times and dropped 47 bombs , killing 14 civilians wounding 28 and forcing as many as 30,000 people into makeshift jungle camps.

“This is an emergency, it needs reporting and international aid. Villagers’ rice stores have been destroyed as well as homes, schools and clinics.

“To report we have to avoid landmines, army patrols that shoot on sight and the military’s paid informers and special branch who we have to think have our photographs.”

Phil Thornton is a journalist, author and senior adviser to the International Federation of Journalists in South East Asia.

Victor Mambor, journalist and editor of the Papua-based Tabloid Jubi, has become the target of a terrorist act this week.

A car that he owns which was parked on the road near his home in the Papuan capital of Jayapura was vandalised by unknown individuals between 12 midnight and 2am on Wednesday, April 21.

The windscreen of Mambor’s Isuzu Double Cabin DMax was smashed by a blunt object. The rear and left-side windows were also damaged by a sharp instrument.

• READ MORE: Other Asia Pacific Report articles on West Papua media issues

The left-side front and back doors were also spray painted with orange paint.

The Jayapura branch of the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) chairperson, Lucky Ireeuw, suspects that the vandalism act was committed over reporting by Tabloid Jubi which a “certain party” disliked.

Tabloid Jubi and its website are known for consistently presenting the public with reports on human rights violations in Papua.

“This act of terror and intimidation is clearly a form of violence against journalists and threatens press freedom in Papua and more broadly in Indonesia,” said Ireeuw in a press release on Thursday, April 22.

‘Terrorism suffered’
“It is strongly suspected that the terrorism suffered by Victor is related to reporting by Tabloid Jubi which a certain party dislikes.”

Prior to the vandalism of his car, Mambor has suffered a series of attacks.

“Digital attacks, doxing, and disseminating a flyer on social media the content of which painted Tabloid Jubi and Victor Mambor in a bad light, playing people off against each other and threats of criminal attacks on the media and Victor personally,” Ireeuw said giving examples of the attacks.

The incident has already been reported to the authorities and Ireeuw is calling on the police to immediately investigate and arrest the perpetrators.

Ireeuw slammed the attack against Mambor and Tabloid Jubi and urged whoever committed it to stop such actions immediately.

“We appeal to all parties to respect the work of journalists and respect press freedom in the land of Papua,” he said.

Translated by James Balowski for IndoLeft News. The original title of the article was “Victor Mambor, Jurnalis Tabloid Jubi Papua Jadi Korban Aksi Teror”.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) demands the immediate and unconditional release of Lady Ann Salem, a Manila-based alternative journalist who was arrested on a firearms charge at the end of a raid on her home in which the police planted the evidence.

The co-founder of the alternative media network Altermidya and editor of the Manila Today news site, Salem – also known as “Icy” Salem – is now facing up to 20 years in prison on a trumped-up charge of illegal possession of firearms and explosives, a charge that does not allow release on bail.

When the police arrived at her home in a Manila suburb at around 9 am on December 10, they refused to let her contact her lawyer and made her turn her face to the wall while they carried out a search.

• READ MORE: Philippines media freedom stories

“While I was forced to turn my back for an hour, they planted the evidence,” she managed to tell another journalist as she was being led away to a police vehicle.

The police claim they found four .45 pistols and four grenades during the search.

“The police clearly planted the evidence to incriminate ‘Icy’ Salem in an utterly shameless manner,” said Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk.

“In view of their shocking methods, we demand this journalist’s immediate and unconditional release. This latest attack on independent media by the Philippine authorities just discredits President Rodrigo Duterte’s government on the international stage.”

‘Red-tagging’
The police used exactly the same method when they arrested Frenchie Mae Cumpio, the editor of the Eastern Vista news website in the eastern city of Tacloban on February 7. Police officers planted firearms in her home when carrying out her arrest.

Like Manila Today, Eastern Vista is part of the Altermidya network of alternative media outlets that are committed to independent journalism and to defending the most marginalised sectors of Philippine society.

As a result, they are routinely branded as communist by the authorities, a process known as “red-tagging.”

A hangover from the Cold War and, before that, from when the country was a US colony, “red-tagging” is a typically Philippine practice under which dissenting individuals or groups, including journalists and media outlets, are identified to the police and paramilitaries as legitimate targets for arbitrary arrest or, worse still, summary execution.

Relentless war
During a parliamentary hearing on December 1, the government-run National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) formally labelled members of the Altermidya network as violent communist activists without presenting a “shred of evidence” in support of this claim.

Altermidya is the latest victim of the Duterte administration’s relentless war against independent media. Its targets include Maria Ressa, the founder and CEO of the independent news website Rappler, who had to post bail and appear in court on December 4 as a result of a new warrant for her arrest on a charge of online criminal defamation.

Ressa is currently the subject of at least eight different cases by various government agencies.

Last July, the irascible and authoritarian president’s supporters in congress drove the final nails into the coffin of the country’s biggest radio and TV network, ABS-CBN, by refusing to give it a new franchise, after previously refusing to extend its 25-year franchise when it expired in May.

The Philippines is ranked 136th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2020 World Press Freedom Index.

Philippine authorities should independently investigate the circumstances surrounding the killing of journalist Ronnie Villamor and hold those responsible to account, says the Committee to Protect Journalists.

In the afternoon of November 14, Philippine Army soldiers shot and killed Villamor, a contributor to the local independent Dos Kantos Balita weekly tabloid, outside a military checkpoint in Milagros, a town in Masbate province in the central Philippines.

He was on his way to cover a disputed land survey, according to press reports.

• READ MORE: Gunmen shoot dead Philippines radio journalist outside his home

The troops, led by Second Lieutenant Maydim Jomadil, were investigating reports of armed men in the area, according to local broadcaster ABS-CBN.

Major Aldrin Rosales, the local police chief, alleged that the troops ordered Villamor to stop his motorcycle, and opened fire when the journalist drew a firearm, according to that report.

In a statement posted to Facebook, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines denied that version of events, saying that soldiers stopped Villamor and four surveyors he was accompanying despite the group having coordinated with police to be in the area.

When the five decided to call local police to assist them in passing through the army checkpoint, the soldiers opened fire and killed Villamor, the statement said.

‘Swift, independent investigation’ needed
“Authorities must conduct a swift and independent investigation into the killing of journalist Ronnie Villamor, and ensure that any soldiers who acted unlawfully are brought to justice,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative.

“Soldiers cannot simply gun down a journalist without fear that their actions will be thoroughly investigated and any wrongdoing punished. Prosecution of the perpetrators is the only way the cycle of impunity will be broken in the Philippines.”

Local English-language outlet Butalat reported that the army and police claimed Villamor was a member of the New People’s Army (NPA), an anti-government armed insurgent group active in the region.

The Presidential Task Force on Media Security, a government body tasked with resolving journalist killings, did not reply to CPJ’s repeated emailed requests for its assessment of Villamor’s killing and information on the status of any investigations into the case.

Villamor covered land disputes and other political issues for Dos Kantos Balita, according to the NUJP. The tabloid covers many hard-hitting issues, including illegal logging, drug trafficking, and illegal fishing in the region, according to a CPJ review of the publication’s Facebook page.

The Philippine Army did not immediately respond to CPJ’s emailed request for comment on the circumstances surrounding Villamor’s killing.

In October, CPJ published its annual Global Impunity Index, a ranking of nations where journalists are slain and their killers go free – the Philippines ranked seventh, with at least 11 unsolved journalist killings.

A radio journalist has been shot dead outside his home by two gunmen on a motorcycle, Philippines police said – four years after the provincial broadcaster survived a similar attempt to kill him.

Virgilio Maganes, 62, who lived northwest of Manila in the province of Pangasinan, was shot six times yesterday and died at the scene, police said, reports Al Jazeera.

Maganes is the 18th journalist to have been killed since President Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016, and the 190th since Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown in 1986, according to the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP).

• READ MORE: Philippines media freedom – more fear of warlords, corruption

Few of the perpetrators are ever brought to justice.

Maganes survived the previous attempt on his life by pretending to be dead.

“We demand that authorities work fast to solve his death, which could be related to the botched attempt on his life on November 8, 2016, when motorcycle-riding gunmen fired at him as he rode a tricycle,” the NUJP said.

On that occasion, the gunmen left a note at the scene saying: “I’m a drug pusher, don’t emulate me.”

Such messages were common in extrajudicial killings during the height of Duterte’s war on drugs that led to thousands of deaths.

Police said they had not established a motive for the attack on Maganes. At least two other journalists have been killed for doing their work in 2020, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), and both cases remain unsolved.

Reporters Without Borders said in a Tweet it was “terrible news” and called for an independent investigation to “find the culprits of this gruesome murder”.

Terrible news! In the #Philippines, radio journalist Virgilio Maganes was shot six times this morning in front of his house in Pangasinan (North). He was killed immediately. @RSF_inter calls for an independent investigation to find the culprits of this gruesome murder. @nujp pic.twitter.com/ASHkZFKnt8

— RSF (@RSF_inter) November 10, 2020

The Presidential Task Force on Media Security, which was set up to tackle media murders, described the killing as “an act of cowardice” and vowed to hunt down those responsible, while Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said both Maganes’s murder and the 2016 attack would be investigated to establish whether they were linked to his work as a journalist.

Media under pressure
The Philippines is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist and the media has found itself under increasing pressure since Duterte was elected president.

ABS-CBN, the country’s largest broadcaster, was ordered to close after the regulator failed to renew the channel’s 25-year operating licence while veteran editor Maria Ressa and her online news site Rappler, are facing numerous court cases on charges ranging from tax evasion to defamation.

Both ABS-CBN and Rappler have been critical of Duterte’s drug war and his government’s policies.

The country’s largest newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which has also published stories critical of the drug war, was pressured to be sold to Ramon Ang, an ally of the president, after Duterte threatened its owners with legal consequences.

The newspaper also reported on Duterte’s alleged hidden wealth in the run-up to the 2016 election.

The Duterte administration denies targeting media for its reporting.

Index on Censorship, which campaigns for freedom of expression, condemned Maganes’s killing.

“Press freedom has nosedived under Duterte who heads a constant campaign of harassment,” the organisation said on Twitter. “The world must come together in rage against these awful attacks.”

Today, October 16, marks the 45th anniversary of the Balibo Five – the five Australian-based Australian, British and New Zealand – journalists murdered in East Timor in 1975. Their case remains unsolved.

Roger East, a former ABC journalist, was later murdered when in Timor-Leste investigating the earlier killings and running a Timorese news agency.

This was a marked moment in press freedom history in Australia, yet after investigations were launched to find those responsible and prosecute them, after 1868 days – according to the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) – the AFP (Australian Federal Police) had not made one attempt to question the suspect identified by a prior inquest.

• READ MORE: The betrayal of the Balibo Five
• Other stories on the Balibo Five

The investigation was subsequently dropped.

Since then, nine other Australian journalists have also been murdered, again with complete impunity, reports the Brisbane-based Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom (AJF).

Globally, impunity in cases of journalist murders remains at almost 90 percent.

Professor Peter Greste, director and spokesperson of the AJF, said:

“This trajectory shows a broad and continuing failure of our judicial process, and a lack of political will to address one of the most egregious attacks on the media in our history.

“A liberal democracy stands on the shoulders of a sound legal system, a free press, transparent governance and security forces that protect both the people and the integrity of the system itself.

“Failure to hold those responsible for the Balibo Five murders and those subsequent to them is a failure of our democracy. If we hope to be a strong and flourishing country in the region in future, we must ensure this never happens again.”

Murdered were the three-man Channel Seven crew reporter Greg Shackleton, (29), New Zealand cameraman Gary Cunningham, 27; and 21-year-old sound recorder Tony Stewart; and the two-man Channel Nine crew Scottish-born reporter Malcolm Rennie, 28, and British cameraman Brian Peters.

Roger East opened a one-man news agency in Timor-Leste, stringing for both ABC Radio in Darwin and the AAP news agency in Sydney.

He filed reports on East Timor’s calls for international support and provided the first accounts of the killing of the five journalists at Balibo.

As the sole remaining foreign reporter in East Timor his stories described the approaching Indonesian forces and the plight of the civilian population.

Roger East’s final story for ABC Radio was heard on Correspondents Report on the afternoon of 7 December 1975.

The AJF promotes press freedom and the right of journalists to report the news in freedom and safety. This includes working with Australian governments to ensure legislation supports press freedom. Professor Peter Greste is a director of the AJF and is UNESCO chair in journalism and communication at the University of Queensland (UQ).

In its new report, Safety of Journalists Covering Protests – Preserving Freedom of the Press During Times of Civil Unrest, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural agency (UNESCO) says that between January and June this year, journalists have been increasingly attacked, arrested and even killed.

Launching the report, UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay underscored that the freedom to inform citizens on the causes of unrest and the response from state authorities, are of vital importance for democracies to thrive.

“Journalists have a critical role in reporting and informing audiences on protest movements”, she said.

READ MORE: The UNESCO Safety of Journalists Covering Protests report

UNESCO’s findings reveal a “wider upward trend” in the use of unlawful force by police and security forces over the last five years, with more than 30 protests impeded by police and security forces last year alone – double the 2015 number.

The report finds that during this period, global protests have been rooted in concerns over economic injustice, government corruption, declining political freedoms and growing authoritarianism.

It details a wide range of abuses journalists face when covering protests, from harassment, intimidation and beatings, to being shot at with lethal or non-lethal ammunition, detention and abduction.

‘Much greater efforts’ needed
Citing the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, UNESCO said that in some protests, up to 500 separate violations occurred. During demonstrations linked to the Black Lives Matter movement for greater racial justice, these included the use of rubber bullets and pepper balls, which led to the blinding of several journalists.

Azoulay pointed out that “for many years, UNESCO has been raising global awareness” to ensure that journalists can do their jobs, “without fear of persecution” and has continued to train “security forces and the judiciary on international norms in freedom of expression”.

However, the UNESCO chief warned the figures in the report “show that much greater efforts are needed”.

Ensuring better protection
The report also contains concrete recommendations for all actors – from media outlets and national authorities to international organisations – to ensure better protections for journalists.

Strengthening training for police and law enforcement on freedom of expression and appropriate behaviour in dealing with the media, is just one of the proposals outlined in the Safety of Journalists.

Others include providing appropriate training and equipment to journalists, including freelancers, sent to cover demonstrations as well as appointing national ombudsmen to hold police accountable for the use of force against journalists during demonstrations.

UNESCO provides technical assistance to member states, including training for police and security forces on upholding press freedom and freedom of expression.

“We call on the international community and all relevant authorities to ensure that these fundamental rights are upheld”, the UNESCO chief stated.

Key trends identified by UNESCO since 2015:

Pacific Media Watch Newsdesk

Malaysian police summoned six Al Jazeera media workers today for questioning relating to an investigation for defamation and violation of Malaysia’s Communications and Multimedia Act (CMA), reports IFJ Asia-Pacific.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and its Australian affiliate the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) have called on authorities to drop the case against Al Jazeera immediately.

The IFJ received reports that six media workers were called to Malaysia Central Police Headquarter in Bukit Aman about 8:50 am (GMT+8) on July 10.

They include senior producer and correspondent Drew Ambrose, producer Jenni Henderson, and the network’s bureau chief, executive producer, cameraman, and digital crew.

According to MEAA, five of the six media workers are Australian. The investigation relates to allegations against Al Jazeera for “sedition, defamation and violation of the country’s Communications and Multimedia Act” after airing Al Jazeera’s 101 East documentary Locked Up in Malaysia’s Lockdown that investigated why the covid-19 pandemic has forced migrant workers into hiding.

In its statement, Al Jazeera “strongly refutes” the charges, which criticised the documentary as being inaccurate, misleading and unfair.

The network “stands by the professionalism, quality and impartiality of its journalism”.

Al Jazeera emphasised the episode does not contain the personal opinions of any its staff, stating the network repeatedly requested and was denied interviews with several senior government ministers and officials.

Malaysia’s CMA is routinely abused targetting journalists despite the Communication and Multimedia minister’s commitment to review the act’s restrictions on press freedom.

Since March 2020, the IFJ has recovered 19 instances of authorities enforcing the CMA to intimidate media workers and freedom of expression advocates.

MEAA wrote to the High Commission of Malaysia in Australia noting: “Malaysia’s obligations under UN General Assembly resolution 74/157 The Safety of journalist and the issue of impunity adopted on December 18 2019 that states Malaysia, as a UN member state, should do its ‘utmost to prevent, violence, threats and attacks targeting journalists and media workers.’ MEAA calls on you to fulfil that obligation towards our colleagues.”

The IFJ said: “The IFJ deeply regrets Malaysian authorities abusing the Communications and Multimedia Act to silence and intimidate journalists. There has been a distinct pattern under the Covid-19 crisis of media workers targeted under Malaysia’s Communications and Multimedia Act and Penal Code for simply doing their job. It is urgent for Malaysia during the Covid-19 pandemic to prioritise the public’s right to know and for the media to be able to report freely and fairly without the threat of persecution.”

Three cartoonists had especially poignant takes on the tragic and toxic political aftermath of martyr George Floyd’s brutal killing under the knee of a white American policeman in Minneapolis last week.

The Boston Globe’s Christopher Weyant featured a split frame contrasting a red-capped “Make America Great Again” and a Covid Is A Hoax tee-short dangling his face mask while declaring: “You’re violating my freedom – I can’t breathe”.

On the other side of the frame is the accused policeman with his knee on Floyd’s neck as he gasps: “You’re violating my freedom … I … can’t breathe!”

READ MORE: US press freedom tracker records more than 300 incidents against journalists in the George Floyd protests

An unnamed Greek cartoonist shared by Elena Akrita showed the Statue of Liberty bearing the flame of freedom while extinguishing a life with a jackboot.

At the other end of the globe, in the South Pacific, New Zealand Herald’s Rod Emmerson depicted President Trump holding aloft a petrol can in his right hand instead of the Bible. In the background is the legend: In God We Trust: In Trump We Just Shake Our Heads.

His speech bubble says: “I’m completely out of my depth, and I’m not afraid to prove it.”

The disturbing week led the Herald to play on the infamous callousness of Emperor Nero as Rome burned with a digital update in its editorial: “Trump tweets while his country burns.” (The online version of the heading was much milder).

‘Darkest time for America’
“City and police officials are now more diverse than ever, yet America’s racial problems are deep-seated and there is a palpable impatience with incremental change,” lamented the Herald.

“It is probably the darkest time for America since 1968 when, amid the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, riots rocked the country, and Richard Nixon was elected.”

Amid the chaos, the savage treatment being meted out to the messengers was also unprecedented, with many media freedom watchdogs and news organisations condemning the attacks on reporters.

Among the most dramatic incidents was the arrest and handcuffing of a CNN news correspondent and his crew in Minneapolis – captured live on television – with the black reporter pleading what he had done to “deserve” being detained. It was an outrageous violation of human rights and the US First Amendment.

CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez and his crew were freed an hour later with a police apology but the harm had been done right in front of a global audience.

As he told a journalism colleague, his mother and grandmother were watching as the police manhandled him. And because he hadn’t been charged with anything there was no record of where he had been taken.

Paris-based global media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemned this and many other attacks in the strongest possible terms and called for immediate measures to protect journalists.

Trump’s ‘demonisation’ of media
It also blamed President Trump for his “demonisation” of the media for the attacks.

“Protests in at least 30 cities across the US following the police killing of George Floyd have resulted in violent attacks from police and protesters alike against journalists,” RSF stated. “Dozens of incidents have been reported so far, ranging from threats to serious physical assaults.”

At the time of a public statement on June 1, RSF said at least 68 incidents had been documented of attacks by police and protesters on media. Since then the US Press Freedom Tracker has recorded at least 300 incidents against journalists, including 44 attacks, 19 arrests, 17 case of damaged equipment and four examples of searched or seized equipment.

“They have been shot by rubber bullets and pepper balls, exposed to tear gas and pepper spray, beaten, threatened and intimidated and had their news vehicles vandalised, simply for doing their jobs,” said RSF.

“President Trump’s demonisation of the media for years has now come to fruition, with both the police and protesters targeting clearly identified journalists with violence and arrests,” said RSF’s secretary-general Christophe Deloire.

“It has long been obvious that this demonisation would lead to physical violence. RSF has warned about the consequences of this blatant hostility towards the media, and we are now witnessing an unprecedented outbreak of violence against journalists in the US.

“RSF calls on all US authorities to ensure the full protection of journalists and honor the country’s founding principles in respecting press freedom.”

Among serious attacks
Among the most serious attacks cited by RSF and circulated by Pacific Media Watch:

• “In Minneapolis, Linda Tirado, was left permanently blind in one eye after being struck by what she believes was a rubber bullet fired by police officers as she photographed protests.
• “In Pittsburgh, Ian Smith – a photojournalist for KDKA TV – posted to Twitter that he had been “attacked by protestors downtown by the arena. They stomped and kicked me. I’m bruised and bloody but alive. My camera was destroyed. Another group of protesters pulled me out and saved my life.”
• “In Phoenix, CBS reporter Briana Whitney was tackled live on air as a protester made a grab for her microphone.
• “In Washington, D.C., Fox News reporter Leland Vittert and his crew were punched, hit by projectiles, and chased by protesters who had gathered outside the White House.
• “In Minneapolis, Australian 9News US correspondent Tim Arvier was detained by police at gunpoint.”

In some “fresh horrors” reported by the independent Australian media website Crikey:

• “Austin police have shot three protesters with “less lethal” ammunition. These protesters included a pregnant woman, who was shot in the abdomen, and a man currently in critical condition.
• “Seattle police deployed pepper spray and fireworks on a crowd in what ended up looking like a war zone. Arkansas police were filmed doing much to the same to kneeling protesters.
• “Military helicopters were filmed by a New York Times journalist flying low enough around DC to kick up dust and break tree branches.”

Down Under rallies
Crikey also reported that “on the home front”, the ABC had reported that NSW police were investigating an officer after he was filmed “kicking the legs out of an Indigenous teenager”.

“The news comes as Nine reports that over a thousand people marched in Sydney last night ahead of even more protests this weekend, while CNN lists a number of other solidarity protests across countries, including New Zealand, England, Mexico, Syria and more.

“Just remember to wear your covid-19 masks, comrades!”

However, the week has ended with some media good news after the covid-19 shakedown and huge loss of jobs in both Australia and New Zealand – AAP Newswire has been saved at the 11th hour with a promised buy-out by a group of investors and philanthropists headed by former News Corp chief executive Peter Tonagh. Between 75 and 90 jobs may be saved as a result.

As the Australian media union MEAA says, the proposed purchase is a “crucial recognition” of the role AAP plays in the Australian – and Pacific – media ecosystem.

• RSF and 13 other groups call on US governors and mayors to ensure safety of journalists

Pacific governments across the region have put side their differences with media and are working alongside them in these difficult times, say New Zealand journalists covering Moana.

Most journalists who cover the Pacific come Pasifika backgrounds and have been pleasantly surprised by the change in attitude of governments.

“The Pacific is infamous for dodgy phone lines or elusive newsmakers but in this time of heightened alerts and information, for the most part countries/governments/authorities have been quite forthcoming about updating the Covid-19 situation,” says Koro Vaka’uta, a senior journalist with RNZ Pacific.

READ MORE: Al Jazeera coronavirus updates – Italy reports 812 deaths in one day

• Tahiti Covid-19 cases now up to 36
• Pacific Conference of Churches calls for ‘social distancing’
• Pacific Media Centre coronavirus updates
• Global coronavirus watch

“Funnily enough I haven’t noticed any higher degree of difficulty when it comes to contacting people than the norm.”

He is not alone in that assessment of regional governments being more co-operative with media.

Television New Zealand’s pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver, who has had her fair share of differences with Pacific governments over the years, says she has noticed a change in demeanour.

“I’ve found that governments have really stepped up with issuing regular media releases – sometimes Samoa issue several a day,” she says.

‘Huge change’
“It’s a huge change from normal media avoidance stand that many Pacific governments take.

“I believe it’s because there is a lot of inaccurate information and rumour driven by fear circulating on social media and governments are keen on getting as much accurate information out as quickly as possible to the public who they need to convince in some cases to adhere to measures put in place.”

TVNZ has partnered with Pasifika TV to deliver weekday daily Covid-19 Pacific Updates for the region.

“That is playing out on television stations across the Pacific, Facebook and One News Now Online. It is fortunate that Pasifika TV launched its free service to the Pacific last year as that has been a powerful tool in delivering to the region as a New Zealand government initiative,” she says.

RNZ Pacific manager Moera Tuilaepa-Taylor could not be more complimentary about her staff and how they have handled the pandemic.

“My team have been incredible – while under pressure they have come up with new ways to put content online and on air,” she says.

“Their biggest worry during the lead up to the lockdown was that we wouldn’t be able to deliver news bulletins or update our website from off-site.

Pasifika backgrounds
“Many RNZP staff members, including myself, are from Pasifika backgrounds. We know how important it is to get accurate information to our people.”

She says most of her staff are working remotely from home.

“As far as RNZ Pacific goes, currently all our staff are working offsite, for their own safety,” Tuilaepa-Taylor says.

“However, this has not affected our ability to compile bulletins. Our staff are in constant contact with each other via email and other digital methods.  Staff members are using a combination of phones and laptops to maintain contact, and record interviews.”

Vaka’uta says the strength of RNZ’s contacts through the Pacific has stood the organisation in good stead.

“We are fortunate to have a strong network of existing correspondents across the region who have provided updates throughout the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic. This means it hasn’t been an issue trying to get other voices on the ground,” he says.

“We are predominately using email and phone to keep in touch with our correspondents who send articles and accompanying images and also provide audio commentary of the situation on the ground at times.

Team spirits high
“The team’s spirits are relatively high, given the circumstances.

“Perhaps it is the novelty of the situation, but everyone seems to be highly focussed at disseminating as much accurate information as possible no matter the technical challenges.”

For Dreaver, it has brought new challenges of how she does her work, she relies mainly on social media because it is widely used in the Pacific.

However, she admits to being worried about exposure to Covid-19.

”As a reporter working on the ground in a Covid-19 situation we have strict guidelines and instructions to keep us all as safe as possible,” she says.

“We have divided into two teams and we cannot ever mix with anyone in the opposite team. We have masks, gloves, hand sanitiser and when we go to interview people, we set up a microphone outside their house and then move several metres back when we do the interview.

“We do interviews by Skype, Facebook messenger etc. We rely on footage people shoot on their phones.

Staying safe
“We do everything possible to stay safe we are extremely careful, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned about getting infected.

“But I have a sometimes overwhelming responsibility to my Pasifika community who sometimes can be invisible in New Zealand to ensure their stories are being told that they have a voice in these grim times.”

Meanwhile, RNZ has had to trim its offerings to the Pacific but the good news was its shortwave service was still operational.

“The technical operations of the shortwave service are still maintained by a couple of key staff,” RNZ’s Pacific manager Tuilaepa-Taylor says.

“The lockdown has made it necessary to scale back some of our operations. We have temporarily ceased production on our Dateline Pacific, Tangata O Te Moana, Dateline Nights and the World in Sport programmes.  We will not resume producing these programmes, at least until the lockdown has ended,” she says.

“Essentially, our content continues to go out on air and online.”

Dreaver says she finds Facebook works best for the Pacific region.

Social media best way
“As a reporter, social media, especially Facebook, is the best way of getting stories and information out to the pacific and helping people connect with friends and family,” she says.

“But Facebook can also be a hindrance to reporters because of the hugely inaccurate information floating around. As countries go into lockdown everyone becomes a keyboard warrior with opinion and self-belief, they are right and reporters who are reporting facts are wrong.

“It’s never been this crucial to be absolutely factual and not buy in to fear or unsubstantiated rumour.

“I have found Facebook useful for connecting with grassroots and personal stories, but great care needs to be taken.”

For John Pulu of Tagata Pasifika he has discovered the joys of using Zoom.

“We are doing everything via Zoom. Star [Kata] has been doing a few interviews on Zoom and recording them and sending them to our editor.

“For me, it’s just making sure the other person has the correct technology, phone with camera etc. I really like Zoom because you can record. Once you are connected you are good to go.”

The Timor-Leste authorities have to improve significantly the conditions in which journalists are working to cover the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

As the only foreign journalist in East Timor, I support the recommendations made today by the two associations of Timorese journalists.

In a statement sent to Lusa ndewsagency, the Association of Journalists of Timor Lorosa’e (AJTL) and the Timor-Leste Press Union (TLPU) have accused the country’s health authorities of not providing “adequate or credible information” over the past few weeks, making it difficult difficult to communicate important news to the society.

READ MORE: How a copyboy became Timor-Leste’s lone ranger foreign correspondent

Timor-Leste confirmed its first Covid-19 infection case last weekend.

There has been total irresponsibility, including the Ministry of Health, in the way they apply themselves, and in the way they are concerned, and over the rule of social distance.

I have mentioned this in the past, but it is vital that all the institutions change the way we work. Especially now that the state of emergency statement is coming.

My recommendations
I make these general recommendations:

• Announce press conferences in time;
• Distribute written communications every time;
• Communicate in more than one language so that the information can reach everyone in Timor-Leste;
• Distribute information at the same time to all journalists by Whattsapp or email;
• Ensure there is a spokesman to talk to the media that is always the one who transmits official information;
• Prepare to communicate in the distance with the media in case of isolation needs increase;
• Guarantee regular briefings where the information can be properly shared and where all questions can be asked and answered calmly. (Often journalists are in doubt that they represent the doubts of the population and they seek clarifications. Rejecting questions, as has been done by officials, is not acceptable.);
• Monitor social media to report fake news;
• Make information transparent to ensure everything is clear and people can get ready;
• Distribute all decisions that come out of the government, not only in the form of the short and insufficient communications of the Council of Ministers or in statements to journalists, but with detailed documents, especially in the state of emergency; and
• Ensure that journalists are protected and are not obliged to take on risky situations, such as having to share microphones to ask questions.

Collaboration can be useful between the authorities and journalists, but journalists are independent and cannot be used to pass on government information, especially when the information is not clear, or – as has already happened – it is wrong, to the rest of the world.

The photo I publish today has been taken in Timor’s Parliament. But it could be from so many other situations in the last few weeks.

We can’t keep working like this.

Antonio Sampaio is the Lusa newsagency correspondent in Dili. This personal view on journalist safety was expressed on his Facebook page.

Two Indonesian journalists who had reported on an illegal oil palm plantation in Sumatra have been found stabbed to death.

According to environmental news site Mongabay, the body of Maraden Sianipar was found on October 30 in a ditch in the concession of palm grower PT Sei Alih Berombang (SAB).

The body of Martua Siregar, 42, was found the next day in the bushes nearby.

READ MORE: Toxic smoke chokes region as Indonesian rainforests burn

Both men worked for a weekly publication, Pindo Merdeka, based in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra province.

Witnesses said the journalists had also been involved with a community dispute with the plantation company in which the community was attempting to take control of the oil palm once the local forestry office had ruled that the company’s expansion onto forested land was illegal.

While Mongabay reports that SAB’s concession was sealed off by authorities a year ago after it was found to have cleared 750 hectares of forest to plant oil palms, the plantation still maintained a detail of security guards who were known to violently confront locals seeking to harvest the palm fruit.

Witnesses said that the journalists had gone to the plantation on October 29 with a group of locals to harvest the palm fruit. According to one witness, he had warned Maraden that plantation guards armed with machetes were waiting for them.

Two people have since been arrested in Labuhan Batu in relation to the murders and police are hunting down another four, reports The Jakarta Post.

Labuhan Batu police chief detective Jama Kita Purba said the motive behind the murder was “revenge over a land dispute.”

While it is unclear whether the murders were a direct response to the men’s journalistic work or their activism work with the community, The Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) and the Indonesian Journalists Association (PWI) have weighed in, condemning the killings and called on authorities to further investigate the case.

In an editorial, The Jakarta Post wrote that: “Indonesia has become an increasingly dangerous place for journalists, and the consequences of this disturbing trend could be dire for the world’s third-largest democracy.”

“Regardless of the results of the investigation, the incident has again rung the alarm bell on the state of press freedom in the country.”

“We can’t afford to let this go on. To quote United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, ‘when journalists are targeted, societies as a whole, pay a price’.”

The murders come a month after another Indonesian activist, Golfrid Siregar was found dead in similar circumstances in Sumatra.

A human rights lawyer an activist for Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia, or Walhi, Indonesia’s largest environmental group, Siregar was a tireless advocate of communities threatened by oil palm plantations.

He had been engaged in a lawsuit against North Sumatra’s governor over his 2017 approval for the construction of the Batang Toru hydroelectric dam in the only know habitat of Indonesia’s critically endangered Tapanuli orangutan.

A cab driver found Siregar unconscious on a street in Medan and took him to a local hospital where he later died on October 6.

He had suffered multiple injuries and his wallet and other personal effects were missing.

Police ruled Siregar’s death the result of a drunken-driving crash, despite the contradictory nature of the injuries, his undamaged motorbike and testimony from his family that he hadn’t drunk alcohol that evening.

The cab driver and two others have since been arrested for robbing Siregar of his possessions.

Walhi colleagues said that Siregar had received several threats since they had filed the lawsuit against the Batang Toru dam.

According to Andreas Harsono of Human Rights Watch, the death and its investigation should ring alarm bells.

“All those concerned about Indonesia’s environment will be watching the authorities to ensure that a credible investigation occurs and that any crime associated with his death is appropriately prosecuted.”

A five-member film crew from 60 Minutes Australia has been in detained in Kiribati for what government sources claimed was false declaration by the team on arrival, reports PACNEWS.

The crew was detained shortly after they arrived on a flight from Nadi on Monday for allegedly providing “false and misleading information” over the purpose of their visit.

“From my understanding the 60 Minutes crew is still in Tarawa and will return on their intended flight back on Thursday. They are however being detained due to their entry into the country under false pretenses,” a senior government official told PACNEWS.

READ MORE: Taiwan’s Pacific allies dwindle as Kiribati follows Solomons’ China switch

The official who wished to remain anonymous said the Australian television crew was advised prior to their arrival to apply for a filming/research permit in order to get clearance from immigration on arrival.

“When they arrived they declared that they were here for a meeting and failed to mention their filming intentions thus the false declaration grounds. If they had applied for their permits before arrival as advised, this would not have happened,” said the official.

“During their detention, they are forbidden from carrying out any filming since they did not declare this activity to immigration upon their arrival.

The crew, led by 60 Minutes reporter Liam Bartlett was being held under house arrest at the Utirerei hotel until their flight.

According to The Guardian, the official said that while the team had been sent an application for a media permit to enter the country for reporting purposes, they had not sent it back to the office and therefore had not been approved to enter the country.

However, Channel Nine news disputed this version of events, saying: “The 60 Minutes crew traveled to Kiribati on Monday. Before leaving, they submitted applications for filming approval.”

“On arrival they arranged a meeting with authorities including the Executive Assistant of the President and a Senior Representative of the Immigration Department to discuss the application. Further forms were submitted and a request was made for expedited approval. That request was declined this morning and the 60 Minutes team was asked to remain in their hotel until the next flight out, which was their scheduled departure flight.”

“The crew is not under detention or house arrest as has been incorrectly reported, and the issue does not affect the story being worked on.”

However, the immigration official said that personnel had been stationed outside the hotel room to prevent the crew from leaving.

“They come here and lecture us on democracy, they come here and lecture us on how much we should charge people for the fee [for the media permit] and they come here because they think they can do whatever they want in the Pacific and beyond and we should follow suit. This is not acceptable,” he said.

“They insist on going out even though we ask them nicely to stay in the hotel, they ask for legal representation, they argue with officers.”

The crew were reportedly intending to cover the recent decision of the Kiribati government to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan and establish diplomatic relations with China.

The official said that the crew the crew was “intercepted” on Tuesday morning while filming at the closed Taiwanese commission.

According to RNZ Pacific, Kiribati’s Government tightened its criteria for media permits after a ferry sank last year, killing 95 people.

A crew from the New Zealand outlet Newshub were detained last year when they arrived in Kiribati to report on the ferry disaster.

Australians picked up their morning papers yesterday to find heavily blacked-out text instead of front-page headlines. This bold statement was instigated by the “Your Right to Know” campaign, an unlikely coalition of Australian media organisations fighting for press freedom and source protection.

A key reform advocated by a range of organisations and experts – including our research team at the University of Queensland – is the introduction of a Media Freedom Act. Unlike human rights or anti-discrimination legislation, there is no clear precedent for such an act.

So what exactly might a Media Freedom Act look like and is it a good idea?

READ MORE: Australian Attorney-General grants limited protection to embattled journalists

It was the June raids on the home of News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst and the ABC’s Sydney headquarters that revealed the fragile state of press freedom in Australia. Two parliamentary inquiries into press freedom are on foot, with public hearings before the Senate committee  starting last Friday.

Parliament will soon face the question: can we protect national security without sacrificing that cornerstone of liberal democracy, press freedom? If so, how?

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s immediate response to the raids was to state that journalists would be prosecuted if they received top-secret documents. A month later, Dutton issued a ministerial directive to the AFP that emphasised the importance of press freedom and the need for restrained action against journalists.

Attorney-General Christian Porter’s subsequent directive was more moderate, ensuring that he would have the final say on whether journalists would be prosecuted on the basis of their work “in a professional capacity as a journalist”.

These directives may reflect a burgeoning appreciation within government of the importance of the press in ensuring democratic free speech and accountability.

However, the laws that undermine press freedom by targeting journalists and their sources remain on the books. These laws include many of the now 82 (and counting) national security laws enacted since September 11 2001. This is more than anywhere else in the world and some of these laws grant the government uniquely severe powers of detention and interrogation.

A Media Freedom Act could serve three key roles, making it an appropriate and advantageous option in the protection of national security, press freedom and democracy.

Recognise the fourth estate
First, a Media Freedom Act would recognise and affirm the importance of press freedom in Australia. This recognition would support the fourth estate role of the media and demonstrate Australia’s commitment to democratic accountability and the rule of law. It would carry the weight of legislation rather than the relative flimsiness of ad hoc directives.

In this way, a Media Freedom Act would represent a clear commitment to the public’s right and capacity to know about how they are governed and power is exercised.

The act would also recognise that press freedom is not an absolute, but may be subject to necessary and proportionate limitations.

A culture of disclosure
Second, it would support a transition from a culture of secrecy to a culture of disclosure and open government across the public sector. This role could be served by requiring the public sector (including law enforcement and intelligence officers) to consider the impact of their decisions on press freedom and government accountability and to adopt the least intrusive option that is reasonably available.

This requirement echoes Dutton’s directive. It is already part of the law of Victoria, the ACT and Queensland, where free expression is protected within those jurisdictions’ charters of rights. Like the charters, a federal Media Freedom Act would aim to bring about a cultural shift and contribute to the gradual rebuilding of trust between government and the media.

At federal level, the parliament must already consider the impact of a new law on freedom of expression under the Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Act. A Media Freedom Act could reinforce the importance of parliament and the public sector considering the impact on press freedom when it debates and enacts new laws.

Journalism is not a crime
Third, and most importantly, a Media Freedom Act would protect press freedom by ensuring legitimate journalism was excluded from the scope of criminal offences.

It is important that this be in the form of an exemption rather than a defence. This has no substantial legal impact. But, crucially, an exemption conveys that the journalist had not engaged in criminal wrongdoing.

It also places the onus on the prosecution to prove the exemption doesn’t apply. This therefore alleviates the chilling effect on press freedom caused by the threat of court action.

The framing of the protection will attract debate (what, after all, is a journalist? And what is journalism?).

A good starting point is the existing journalism defence to the general secrecy offence in section 122.5 of the Criminal Code. For that defence to apply, the person must have:

• dealt with the information in their capacity as a “person engaged in the business of reporting news, presenting current affairs or expressing editorial or other content in news media”
• have reasonably believed that engaging in the conduct was in the public interest.

A single act or many amendments?
A Media Freedom Act is not a panacea; it would not avoid the need for a detailed review of Australia’s legal frameworks for their impact on press freedom.

In particular, protections for private sector, public sector and intelligence whistleblowers need attention. Suppression orders and defamation laws also have a serious chilling effect on Australian journalism. However, the present approach of considering dozens of individual schemes for their discrete impact on press freedom, and seeking technical amendments to each to alleviate that impact, is cumbersome, illogical and destined to create loopholes.

Australia’s national security laws are uniquely broad and complex. At present, an inconsistent array of (notably few) journalism-based defences and exemptions from prosecution are scattered across these laws. Inconsistency leads to confusion, and overlapping offences make it even more difficult for journalists to know when they are crossing the line into criminal conduct.

The imperative to protect press freedom is fundamental and deserving of general recognition and protection. In light of these concerns, our international obligations and the rule-of-law concerns for legal clarity, consistency and proportionality, it is time for a Media Freedom Act.

• Rebecca Ananian-Welsh is a senior lecturer at the TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland. This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

Journalist organisations in Indonesia have condemned alleged discrimination towards their colleagues by police in West Papua.

Three leading journalists in Papua were prevented from covering a protest by university students in Jayapura on Monday.

Monday’s unrest in Jayapura resulted in an Indonesian soldier being fatally stabbed, and three Papuan students shot dead by security forces.

READ MORE: Indonesian journalists ‘bought, broken and soul searching’, says researcher

Yet before events spiralled out of control, police blocked three journalists who work for The Jakarta Post (Beny Mawel), Suara Papua (Ardi Bayage) and Tabloid Jubi (Hengky Yeimo) from covering the student gathering.

The journalists reported being forced not to cover the events, verbally abused by police and taken to the police station.

Arnold Belau of the Papuan Native Journalist Forum said the police actions were discriminatory and violated Indonesia’s press law.

“The law guarantees the journalist to do their work, free from intimidation and restriction from any party,” he explained.

“What the police have done to the three Papuan journalists today is proof of how far police understand the tasks and functions of the press.”

Police officers were reported to have called some of the journalists “provocateurs” and “dogs”.

Belau urged police to provide guarantees for journalists to do their work without pressure from any party.

“Officials in Papua must change their perspective and stop having suspicion on the journalists in Papua, especially native Papuan journalists who are too often being victims when doing their job.”

This was echoed by Lucky Ireeuw from the Alliance of Independent Journalists in Jayapura who characterised the police actions as an affront on the public who have a right to know what’s going on.

“AJI Jayapura strongly regrets such arbitrary actions, moreover, it was carried out by police officers who are protector of the people,” Ireeuw said.

“Indonesia is a democratic country, where the press is the fourth pillar. In democracies, journalists at work are protected by the press law.

“Start looking for news, obtain, process, store, to convey the information received to the public.

“Moreover, what is conveyed by journalists is, of course, in the public interest.

“If journalists are intimidated, discriminated against and hindered by their work, the right of the people to obtain valid and accurate news will be impeded,” Ireeuw said.

The latest unrest in Jayapura came on the same day as deadly violence around a student protest in the Papuan city of Wamena which resulted in around twenty deaths.

Indonesia’s government has subsequently blocked access to the internet in Wamena.

• This article is published under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand

A well-known Kiwi journalist has said the New Zealand news industry is getting better at showing care for reporters who cover distressing stories.

Alison Mau, who started her journalism career in Australia in the 1980s, said the industry had changed a lot since then and is now better at considering the wellbeing of journalists.

Mau’s first front-page story was the 1987 Hoddle St mass shootings in Melbourne.

READ MORE: NZ journalists focusing on ‘tragedy prevention’, says CJR research

The incident left seven dead and 19 injured. Mau was assigned to interview one of the bereaved families soon after the shootings.

“I went back to the office . . . quite traumatised.

“It didn’t cross their minds that we were in some way in need of any care. It would have been just, like, ‘Harden up’,” she said.

Now Stuff’s editor of its #MeTooNZ project, she leads a team investigating sexual harassment cases in the workplace.

Mau said some stories kept her up at night in a fury.

“My bosses are always saying: ‘Are you okay?’”

On the journalism industry, she said: “In a lot of cases, it’s kind of lip service . . . and that’s as far as it goes. But I think the intent is there and that’s a good change.”

Several news organisations are also offering counselling services through confidential assistance programmes.

Former reporter Eli Orzessek said one of his first assignments as a young reporter was to interview a rugby coach after three players in his team died in a car crash.

“I had some coaching from editors . . . I guess I just tried my best to be very sensitive,” he said.

“At the end of the call, he actually thanked me and said everyone in the media had actually been really decent.”

Orzessek said while there was a lot “you have to just deal with” when reporting on upsetting stories, he found unwinding from work and talking to colleagues helped.

“Sometimes you just go home and, like, want to cry about it a lot. Other times, it doesn’t really affect you.”

Lyn Barnes, who completed her PhD at AUT on the effects of trauma on New Zealand journalists, said younger journalists were more willing to speak about their experiences than reporters in the past.

“The thick-skinned journos, as they call them, I think they’re kind of a dying breed and the younger ones who are keeping up now and have got quite good editorial roles are supporting younger staff,” she said.

“A trauma counsellor is needed, often, because unless you know what you’re dealing with, you can’t support someone through it.

“To know that employers are willing to pay for that sort of support is fantastic.”

• Irra Lee is a final year Bachelor of Communication Studies student journalist and is editor of Te Waha Nui

As four more journalists were assaulted in the Hong Kong area last Sunday, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called on the authorities to put an end to the violence against the press.

In the past two months, journalists covering the anti-extradition bill protests were increasingly the victim of intimidation and physical abuse by the police as well as pro-Beijing mobs (see the events in chronological order below).

“Violence against journalists has now become systematic and clearly aims to discourage them from covering the protests,” said Cédric Alviani, head of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) East Asia bureau.

READ MORE: Hong Kong protests disrupt airport for second day

He urged the Hong Kong authorities to “terminate the violence against the press and launch an independent investigation into the past acts of brutality”.

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong (FCCHK) yesterday wrote a letter to Hong Kong Commissioner of Police, Stephen Lo Wai Chung, expressing concern over the latest acts of violence.

Since early June, Hong Kong has seen massive demonstrations against a bill that would allow authorities to extradite residents or visitors, including journalists and their sources, to China.

Two weeks ago, RSF wrote to Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, detailing five proposals to restore full press freedom.

In the RSF World Press Freedom Index, China’s Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong has plummeted from 18th in 2002 to 73rd this year. China itself is ranked 177th out of 180.

Attacks against journalists in the past two months:

• 11 August 2019: Two journalists from Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) and daily newspaper Ming Pao were physically attacked by a group of pro-Beijing mobs in the North Point area, while a Stand News reporter was verbally assaulted and threatened.
• 5 August 2019: In the Sham Shui Po area, a student journalist fainted after being hit by a tear gas canister shot by the police. In the Wong Tai Sin area, a journalist from Sing Tao Daily was tear gassed in his face. A group of mobsters holding clubs attacked a photographer from online media HK01 in the Tsuen Wan area.
• 21 July 2019: Two journalists working for Stand News and Now TV are among the 45 people seriously injured in a large-scale attack perpetrated at the Yuen Long subway station by a mafia group dressed in white.
• 7 July 2019: In the Mongkok area, the police verbally and physically assaulted three journalists from Apple Daily, HK01, and Metro Radio.
• 1 July 2019: An independent broadcaster, Citizens’ Radio, was attacked and their equipment damaged in front of the staff by unidentified people carrying weapons.
• 30 June 2019: Multiple journalists from South China Morning Post (SCMP), Stand News and Next Magazine were insulted and kicked during a rally in support of the police in the Admiralty area.
• 12 June 2019: More than 12 incidents of assault against journalists were recorded in the Admiralty area, including 10 cases of police officers firing tear gas at close range.

• The Pacific Media Centre’s Pacific Media Watch project works in collaboration with RSF

Indonesian police have not been investigating reported cases of violence against journalists, reports Indonesian news magazine Tempo.

According to the Jakarta Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), there have been 26 cases of alleged violence against journalists reported to police in 2019 but not one has been fully investigated or taken to trial.

“They haven’t reached the criminal investigation stage, let alone the courts,” said AJI advocacy head Erick Tanjung.

READ MORE: Indonesia’s cover up over Papuan media freedom violations exposed

According to Tanjung, 20 of these reports were related to violence against journalists during the May 22 post-election riots in Jakarta. In one case the perpetrator was a police officer.

Five other cases related to an evening gathering of Islamic groups at the National Monument (Monas) in Central Jakarta dubbed the Munajat 212 on February 21, and another related to an assault on a journalist during a sentence hearing against notorious gang leader Hercules Rozario Marshal on March 27.

Tanjung said that the alleged cases of violence against journalists were both direct and indirect and took the form of physical assaults, the seizure of equipment, the forced deletion of photographs and persecution on the internet.

Meanwhile, in resolving the case of alleged violence against journalists by a police officer, Tanjung said that the AJI had already pursued ethnical channels by reporting the case to the police’s professionalism and security division (Propam) but the report was not followed up.

Tanjung also criticised the role of the mass media and journalists who themselves have been victims of violence.

Out of the 26 cases of violence against journalists only two reporters or victims were prepared to be assisted by AJI in making reports with police. Yet Tanjung said that journalists need to push for cases of violence against them to be resolved legally so that they are not repeated.

• Translated by James Balowski of the Indoleft News service. The original title of the article was AJI Jakarta: 26 Kasus Kekerasan terhadap Wartawan Tak Diproses

Pacific Media Watch Newsdesk

International human rights lawyers Amal Clooney and Caoilfhionn Gallagher QC will lead a legal team representing Maria Ressa, the award-winning Philippines journalist, editor and publisher who has been repeatedly arrested this year on charges that critics say are designed to silence her, reports CNN.

“It is clear that the government is manipulating the law to muzzle and intimidate one of its most credible media critics,” said the Committee to Protect Journalists after her arrest in March.

“Maria Ressa is a courageous journalist who is being persecuted for reporting the news and standing up to human rights abuses. We will pursue all available legal remedies to vindicate her rights and defend press freedom and the rule of law in the Philippines,” Clooney said in a press statement released by London-based law firm Doughty Street Chambers announcing the relationship.

READ MORE: Maria Ressa – targeted by Duterte

Ressa is the cofounder and editor of online news site Rappler, which has gained prominence for its unflinching coverage of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte and his brutal war on drugs.

She has been indicted multiple times on libel and tax evasion charges that critics have described as designed to silence independent media in the southeast Asian country. She worked for CNN as an investigative journalist before starting Rappler.

In an op-ed published this year by Columbia Journalism Review, Ressa accused Duterte of leading a systematic campaign against news organisations in the Philippines, and against herself personally.

“Legal hassles can take up 90 percent of my time; a day after our May midterm elections, I was arraigned for cyber libel in the morning and appeared for a case of securities fraud in the afternoon,” she wrote.

Cyber libel charges
After being arrested on cyber libel charges in February, she told CNN it was an example of how the law was being “weaponised” against critics of the country’s president.

Speaking to CNN’s Kristie Lu Stout, Ressa said the law was “draining … democracy dry”.

Ressa had been charged with a lawsuit relating to a story written in 2012, which alleged that businessman Wilfredo Keng had links to illegal drugs and human trafficking.

However, the article was published by Rappler two years before the new cyber libel laws came into effect in the Philippines.

In March, she was detained at Manila airport and later charged with violating the anti-dummy law, legislation related to securities fraud.

Clooney has previously represented Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were jailed in Myanmar under the country’s Official Secrets Act for reporting on a massacre of Rohingya civilians. The Pulitzer Prize-winning pair were released in May.

The statistics globally are chilling. And the Asia-Pacific region bears the brunt of the killing of journalists with impunity disproportionately.

Revelations in research published in the latest edition of Pacific Journalism Review on the trauma experienced by television journalists in the Philippines covering President Rodrigo Duterte’s so-called ‘war on drugs’ are deeply disturbing.

More than 12,000 people have reportedly been killed – according to Amnesty International, although estimates are unverified – in the presidential-inspired purge.

READ MORE: Killing the messenger

According to UNESCO, about 1,010 journalists globally have been “killed for reporting the news and bringing information to the public” in the 12 years until 2017 – or on average, one death every four days.

Many argue that the Philippines, with one of the worst death tolls of journalists in the past decade, is a prime example of the crisis.

Journalists covering the “graveyard shift” were the first recorders of violence and brutality under Duterte’s anti-illegal drugs campaign.

The first phase in 2016, called Oplan Tokhang, was executed ruthlessly and relentlessly.

Chilling study
This chilling post-traumatic stress study in the latest PJR by ABS-CBN news executive Mariquit Almario-Gonzalez examines how graveyard-shift TV journalists experienced covering Oplan Tokhang.

The Tagalog phase in English means “to knock and plead” and was supposed to be bloodless – a far cry from the reality.

Almario-Gonzalez’s colleague, award-winning photographer Fernando G Sepe Jr, has also contributed an associated photoessay drawn from his groundbreaking ‘Healing The Wounds From the Drug War’ gallery.

He reflects on the impact of Duterte’s onslaught on the poor in his country.

Compared to the Philippines and other Asian countries – such as Cambodia, Indonesia and Myanmar – media freedom issues in the Pacific micro states and neighbouring Australia and New Zealand may appear relatively benign – and certainly not life threatening.

Nevertheless, the Pacific faces growing media freedom challenges.

The phosphate Micronesian state of Nauru banned the Australian public broadcaster ABC and “arrested” Television New Zealand Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver while she covered the Pacific Islands Forum leaders summit in September 2018.

Media freedom crises
In this context, Auckland University of Technology’s Pacific Media Centre marked its tenth anniversary in November 2017 with a wide-ranging public seminar discussing critical media freedom crises.

The “Journalism Under Duress in Asia-Pacific” seminar examined media freedom and human rights in the Philippines and in Indonesia’s Papua region – known as West Papua.

Keynote speakers included Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) executive director Malou Mangahas and RNZ Pacific senior journalist Johnny Blades.

Papers from this seminar and 14 other contributing researchers from seven countries on topics ranging from the threats to the internet, post-conflict identity, Pacific media freedom and journalist safety are featured in this edition of PJR.

Unthemed paper topics include representations of Muslims in New Zealand, ASEAN development journalism, US militarism in Micronesia and the reporting of illegal rhino poaching for the Vietnamese market.

The issue has been edited by Professor David Robie, director of the PMC, Khairiah A. Rahman of AUT, and Dr Philip Cass of Unitec. The designer was Del Abcede.

• The November edition of Pacific Journalism Review
• Journalism under duress in Asia-Pacific

The president of the Pacific Islands News Association says he is appalled and disappointed by an attack on Papua New Guinea journalist Dorothy Mark, who travelled to Manam Island on Saturday to cover the latest volcanic disaster.

Efforts are underway to evacuate about 5000 people from the island.

The president, Kora Nou, who is also the managing director of PNG’s National Broadcasting Corporation, said Mark suffered facial injuries when the boat she and other journalists had used to travel to the island was taken away.

Nou said they had to walk for an hour to the next village to hitch a ride back in the early hours of Sunday morning.

He said Mark risked her life to travel to Manam to ensure the world appreciated the latest calamity to befall Manam Islanders

“It is such early reporting and awareness by our journalists that can trigger quicker evacuation of our citizens, as well as much-needed relief assistance.

“The reported unprovoked assault on Ms Mark, who received facial injuries, should therefore be condemned in the strongest terms and those responsible be arrested and charged,” he said.

Nou also stated his concern over online abuse targeted at Samoan journalist Lani Wendt Young, the editor of the Samoa Planet online.

“Online abuse is serious and we hope that service providers can put in place controls that would prevent this from happening,” Nou said.

This article is republished under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand.

• Other Manam volcano stories

For journalists who cover Afghanistan, the bombing that killed nine local reporters last week in Kabul was a sober reminder of the dangers the media continue to face in the country’s seemingly endless conflict.

The victims were not well-known foreign correspondents, but a group of courageous Afghan photographers, reporters and cameramen who had gone to report on another bomb blast that had exploded about 40 minutes earlier.

They included a photographer from the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP), as well as contributors to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and several local media companies.

READ MORE: Free media week killings underscore crimes of impunity against journalists

Elsewhere on the same day, a 10th journalist was shot dead – a reporter for the BBC’s Pashto service, Ahmad Shah.

According to Reporters Without Borders, it was the deadliest single day for journalists in the country since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

The principal way we receive news from conflict zones like Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq is via eyewitnesses on social media and the global news agencies – AFP, Associated Press and Reuters. Agency reporters are often the first “media responders” to deadly incidents like suicide bombings and terror attacks. They also negotiate with local reporters on the ground to secure the best pictures, which then get relayed to the thousands of media companies around the world who subscribe to their services.

To feed this beast of global 24/7 news coverage, there is still an expectation that agency journalists will dare to tread where others will not.

Journalists as targets
Increasingly, this has become even more dangerous, as extremist groups like the Islamic State have shifted tactics to specifically target journalists.

The Afghan Journalists Safety Committee warned of “an unprecedented increase in threats and violence against journalists” in a 2017 report:

Increased threats from DAESH to media and journalists have created a new wave of concerns about the security of journalists and media. What is seriously worrying is the group’s direct attacks against media, which in 2017 is responsible for the vast majority of journalists’ deaths.

Reporters Without Borders says 34 journalists and media workers have died in attacks by the Islamic State and Taliban in Afghanistan since the start of 2016. The situation has become so dire that the group has called on the United Nations to appoint a special representative dedicated to protecting the lives of journalists. The proposal has been backed by French President Emmanuel Macron and the German Parliament.

Without adequate security provisions, journalists have also been abandoning countries that have become too dangerous, Reporters Without Borders notes in its 2017 annual report on reporters killed in the line of duty.

AFP continues to operate with a team of two or three foreign journalists in Kabul, backed up by seven full-time Afghan journalists and various stringers working across the country. Reuters employs just one foreign correspondent and one local journalist in Kabul, and AP has two local reporters and two local photographers.

Former BBC journalist Bilal Sarwary, who now works as a freelancer, tells me there are very few Western journalists left in Afghanistan because “Iraq and then Syria have commanded their attention” in recent years. He said The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post still have reporters based in the country, but now rely almost entirely on freelance photographers.

Responding to the new reality
Under global news director Michèle Léridon, AFP has been highly innovative at adapting to news gathering challenges, but also strict in its policy of not being made stooges by terrorists. According to Phil Chetwynd, AFP’s global editor-in-chief, the company is constantly evaluating its security procedures.

We have always been cautious about rushing to the scene of attacks. We have moved our office several times in Kabul to find a better location as the threat level has changed. We have sent security experts to review our procedures and to recommend physical reinforcements and measures to our buildings.

We have also sent reporters on hostile environment courses and sent trainers to Kabul to train all staff including non-journalists. The message to all our reporters remains that security comes first.

Chetwynd notes the suicide bomber who killed the nine Afghan journalists in Kabul last week – a group that included AFP photographer Shah Marai – had apparently been posing as a fellow reporter, a new tactic by terror groups.

“We are already changing and reacting to this appalling new reality,” he says.

It’s clear that all media organisations need to constantly rethink their strategies when it comes to reporting in conflict zones.

Media scholars, too, are tackling the issue. At the upcoming International Communications Association conference in Prague later this month, I will be joining other academics on a panel titled “Voices in journalism: Local news staff producing international news” to discuss the latest research examining the working conditions of stringers, fixers and local journalists.

Researched challenges
One of the panellists, Saumava Mitra, has researched the work of photojournalists in Afghanistan and co-authored an essay last week on the challenges they face:

We have seen that local journalists usually have much poorer access to hostile-environment training, work-hazard insurance or even medical benefits from their employers. They face different threats and risks than those who parachute into the conflict and have nowhere to go if the situation escalates.

They are also much more prone to reprisals. The first step to help prevent their deaths is to acknowledge that the news we consume is often produced by journalists working under precarious conditions in hostile places.

Marai, for one, always knew the dangers of working in Kabul, as his blog on the AFP website so devastatingly shows. In it, he recounts how life changed for the worse when the Taliban returned to stage attacks in Kabul in the mid-2000s:

“I don’t dare to take my children for a walk. I have five and they spend their time cooped up inside the house. Every morning as I go to the office and every evening when I return home, all I think of are cars that can be booby-trapped, or of suicide bombers coming out of a crowd. I can’t take the risk. So we don’t go out.

“I have never felt life to have so little prospects and I don’t see a way out. It’s a time of anxiety.”

Dr Colleen Murrell is undergraduate coordinator for journalism at Monash University, Melbourne, and the author of Foreign Correspondents and International Newsgathering: The role of fixers.This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished on Asia Pacific Report under a Creative Commons licence.

• Journalists in war zones tread a fine line between safety and freedom of speech

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) joins its affiliate Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) in condemning the reported arrest of Iranian-Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani by Papua New Guinea police earlier today.

The IFJ and MEAA have deplored the arrest as a targeted attack on press freedom by Papua New Guinea’s police.

A police operation was launched on Manus Island with PNG police and immigration officers entering the former Australian detention centre.

The centre was closed three weeks ago, but refugees have refused to leave, due to concerns over their safety.

Large numbers of officers, including the paramilitary police mobile squad unit entered the grounds and told the refugees they had an hour to leave. They tried to confiscate mobile phones and reportedly damaged personal belongings.

Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian-Kurdish journalist, was arrested during the raid, with reports that officers were specifically looking for him.

Silencing a critic
He was led away in handcuffs by two police officers.

Boochani has been in the detention centre on Manus Island since August 2013.

Boochani has been a main source of factual information about the conditions inside Manus Island detention centre, with his reports been published in Australia and internationally.

Earlier this year he was shortlisted in the journalism category for the 2017 Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards and just three weeks ago he was awarded the Amnesty International Australia Media Award for his journalism from Manus Island.

Earlier this year, MEAA and the IFJ launched a campaign with IFEX calling on the Australian government to resettle Boochani in Australia.

MEAA chief executive Paul Murphy said: “If, as the case appears to be, he has been targeted and arrested because of his profile and his role as a journalist in an attempt to silence him, this is an egregious attack on press freedom that cannot be let stand.

“We call on the Australian and PNG governments to release him from custody, assure his safety, and not to hinder him from continuing to perform his role as a journalist.”

The IFJ said: “The arrest of Behrouz Boochani, if it is because of his work as journalist, is a blatant attack of press freedom and an attempt to silence a critical voice. We join MEAA in calling for the Australian and PNG governments to release him for custody immediately, and guarantee his safety.

“Journalists should never be stopped from doing their work.”

• More Manus Island reports

BOOKS: By David Robie

The Ghanaian investigative journalist summed up the mood among some 1500 media people with the beaded face veil rather well—a facial security screen symbolising both the safety of the reporter and his sources. But this was no empty gesture. It is characteristic of the man who has captured judges on tape allegedly taking bribes.

As the result of his celebrated documentary, Ghana in the Eyes of God: Epic of Injustice, more than 30 judges and 170 judicial officers were implicated in Ghana’s biggest corruption scandal.

On the same day that investigator Anas Aremeyaw Anas took the stage in his trademark mask at the World Press Freedom Day conference in Jakarta on 3 May 2017, a new book was being launched with the spotlight on wide-ranging research into the safety of journalists after many years of reporters being killed with impunity.

The Assault on Journalism: Building Knowledge to Protect Freedom of Expression is a diverse collection of empirical and theoretical papers presented at a parallel research conference at WPFD2016 in Helsinki, Finland.

The book is divided into four main parts: 1. The Status of Safety of Journalists; 2. The Way Forward (this would have been better placed as the last section before the appendices); and 3. Research, concluding with three chapters on foreign correspondents and local journalists, Pakistani freedoms (or rather lack of them) and Nigerian digital safety.

It also republishes the UNESCO 2016 report Time to Break the Cycle of Violence Against Journalists and the UN safety action plan as the fourth part. However, there is a need for a “rounding off” chapter, which could actually have been Jackie Harrison’s “Setting a New Research Agenda”.

Keynote Helsinki address
Professor Simon Cottle’s introduction, “Journalist Killings and the Responsibility to Report”, was the keynote academic address in Helsinki. He cites figures compiled by the International News Safety Institute (INSI) indicating that around the world 111 media workers were killed in 2016 and 115 the following year. He also cites a Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) figure showing 2012 journalists being killed since 1992.

“Many of these deaths go largely unnoticed and unreported in the world’s media,” Cottle notes (p. 21). He also points to the deaths of American journalist Marie Colvin (wrongly named as Mary in the book)—described by many of her peers as ‘the greatest war correspondent of her generation’—and French photographer Rémi Ochlok in a bombardment of the Baba Amro district in the Syrian city of Homs on 22 February 2012 (Conroy, 2013).

Homs was earlier this year recaptured by the Assad regime. While admitting that high-profile deaths such these “remind us of the terrible price that can be paid by Western correspondents and photojournalists” when reporting conflict, they are not an accurate representation of journalist killings around the globe.

Data collected by world media freedom monitoring agencies show that most journalist killings and incidents of intimidation actually target local and “indigenous” journalists. The reason is simple, according to Cottle:

“Following the end of the Cold War, the world’s political tectonic plates moved and fragmented, creating a situation of multiple power plays and shifting political actors that no longer align in a predictable, bipolar world of allegiances.” (p. 22)

Cottle argues for a greater mandate for the safeguarding of journalists in their responsibilities to report from dangerous places. “In violent times, [the protection] cannot therefore be simply seen as a matter to do with ‘journalists’ or, even more broadly, as simply about ‘journalism’.”

Genesis of journalism safety
Guy Berger, director of UNESCO’s Freedom of Expression division in Paris, explores the genesis of journalism safety issues and why they have become critical to the global free media agenda. Acknowledging that the end of the Cold War enabled a fresh focus on safety issues, he says “it was the harsh reality that drove safety to the top of the agenda” (p. 36).

Outlining the objectives of the UN plan of action, especially against extrajudicial killings, Berger argues the need for strategic partnerships with a gender-sensitive approach. Berger, former head of journalism at Rhodes University in South Africa, also acknowledges the “growing positive response from academia” since 2014 with research programmes and initiatives on the topic of safety and impunity.

This academic response was reflected again at WPFD2017 in Jakarta, although the two days of research papers are more likely to be the basis of commentary and analytical pieces in social media and popular online outlets rather another book at this stage.

Two of the more interesting chapters are “Gendering War and Peace Journalism” by Berit von der Lippe and Rune Ottosen and “Collaboration is the Future” by Thomas Hanitzsch. While acknowledging that the storytelling domination of war and glory through the “masculinised memory” of males in powerful positions and male reporters has been challenged by a growing “women’s presence” among political leaders and war-reporting media, the hegemonic discourse largely remains intact.

“War reporting has been overrepresented by elite sources like politicians, high ranking military officers and state officials. These elite sources are collectively dominated by men and it will require more than more women journalists to change this male hegemony.” (p. 63)

Von der Lippe and Ottosen offer a useful encapsulation of Galtung’s model of “war journalism” and “peace journalism”: “War journalism is violence-oriented, propaganda-oriented, elite-oriented and victory-oriented; peace journalism is people oriented … focuses on the victims (often civilian casualties) and thus gives voice to the voiceless”.

It is also truth-oriented. However, the authors are critical of notions of liberal feminism being assumed to offer better or more peace journalism.

‘Coordinated cooperation’ model
As they note, women in general do not share some “gender-specific style of … journalistic philosophy”. Hanitzsch shares his “coordinated cooperation model” on international
collaborative research experience, particularly with the 10-year-old Worlds of Journalism Study involving 27,500 journalists in 67 countries. He makes a plea for wider adoption of this approach to collaborative research in the “network era”.

Overall, this is a very timely and valuable volume for journalism educators and researchers—and also for journalists and journalism safety advocates themselves. Nordicom, UNESCO and IAMCR deserve commendation for bringing this research collection to fruition.

The Assault on Journalism: Building Knowledge to Protect Freedom of Expression, edited by Ulla Carlsson and Reeta Pöyhtäri. Gothenburg, Sweden: Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research (Nordicom). 2017. 363 pages. ISBN 9789187957505

This review was published originally in Pacific Journalism Review.

References
Anas Aremeyaw Anas (2015). Ghana in the Eyes of God; Epic of Injustice [Documentary]. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S4rgAbYaZc

Conroy, P. (2013). Under the wire: Marie Colvin’s final assignment. New York: Weinstein Books.