LuisTeodoro.com

To mark World Press Freedom Day, which falls on May 3 each year, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released on April 30 a list of the 10 worst places in the world to be a journalist. In the Philippines it was commemorated with the shooting death of a broadcaster and the ambush of another.

At the top of the CPJ list is Iraq, where 15 journalists have been killed since the United States attacked that country on March 20. One other country where the US achieved regime change, Afghanistan, also made it, as did the usual suspects: Cuba, Vietnam, Chechnya, the West Bank and Gaza, Eritrea, Togo, Colombia and Belarus.

A press freedom-monitoring group, CPJ is based in New York, and also releases in March each year its evaluation of the state of press freedom worldwide.

Absent from the CPJ list is the Philippines, which CPJ has had occasion in the past to describe as “one of the most dangerous places [in the world] to be a journalist,” if not the most dangerous.

As if to validate that distinction, the release of the CPJ list on April 30, embargoed (not for publication) until May 2, coincided with the April 28 murder of a broadcaster in Legazpi City, Albay, and the April 29 ambush of another broadcaster, this time in Davao City, Davao del Sur.

Radio broadcaster John Belen Villanueva was shot dead by two men on motorcycles in the early morning of April 28 in Legazpi. His colleagues believe he had been targeted by the police because of his alleged sympathies with the New People’s Army.

In Davao City, Jun Pala, former head of the vigilante group Alsa Masa, who has reinvented himself since 2001 as a broadcaster, was ambushed midmorning of April 29 by three men in police swat uniforms.

Depending on who’s doing the counting, Villanueva was either the 40th or the 37th Filipino journalist killed since 1986. Had the ambush on Pala succeeded, Pala would have been the 41st or the 38th.

CPJ itself had 39 on its list as of 2002. The Philippines’ Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility had 36, the difference being the latter’s insistence on listing only those journalists whose death is directly work-related, which does matter in some instances, but appears immaterial in terms of the impact of such assassinations on the press community. For whatever reason he or she is killed, the killing of a journalist by itself has a chilling effect on the entire community and, therefore, on press freedom.

But whether 39 or 36, the number of journalists killed in the Philippines was enough for the CPJ’s man in Asia, Bangkok-based and former Manila correspondent Linn Neumann, to conclude in 2002 that the Philippines was still one of the most dangerous places in the world in which to practice journalism.

Of special concern to CPJ and other international press freedom groups (the local press was—has been—mostly indifferent) is the fact that not one of the post-1986 murders has been solved.

The impunity with which journalists can be killed can only encourage further assassinations. And encourage them it has. Neumann was in the Philippines in August 2002 to look into the 38th and 39th cases of journalists killed in the CPJ count.

In a pattern that has seen an average of three murders per year since 1986, last year two journalists were killed, a broadcaster and newspaper editor (Edgar Damalerio) on May 13 in Pagadian City, Zamboanga del Sur, and a broadcaster (Sonny Alcantara) on August 22 in San Pablo, Laguna. A college paper reporter was also killed that year, but is usually, and perhaps unjustly, not included in most counts because she was not a professional journalist at the time of her death. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines does include her in its statements on the state of press freedom in the Philippines, however.

The murder of Villanueva and the ambush on Pala occurred not only on the virtual eve of May 3rd, but ironically also came close to the launch on May 7 of a “countdown for justice” by the Freedom Fund for Filipino Journalists.

Counting several media advocacy organizations including the Philippine Press Institute and the Kapisanan ng Mga Brodkaster sa Pilipinas as members, the Fund was established January this year to push for the resolution not only of the most recent murders of journalists but also of the over three dozen other cases since 1986. The “countdown” by TV networks and newspapers will provide a daily record of the number of days since Edgar Damalerio of Pagadian City’s suspected killer has remained at large.

Representatives of member-organizations of the Fund met last January with Interior and Local Government Secretary Jose Lina and National Police officials to press for the immediate apprehension of the suspect in the Damalerio case. A policeman, the suspect was subsequently confined to a police camp in Zamboanga del Sur, but disappeared when a local judge finally issued a warrant for his arrest. He has been sighted in Pagadian as well as other cities in the province and even in Cebu in the Visayas, but has so far not been taken into custody.

CPJ, RSF and the Canada-based International Free Expression Exchange have noted the same immunity from prosecution of the suspected killers of journalists in other countries. But the Philippine cases are unique in that there have been so many of them, whereas, with the exception of conflict areas such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Colombia, and the West Bank and Gaza, the killing of journalists by government security forces and/or their cohorts has been relatively rare.

Cuba, second on the list of CPJ’s “10 worst places,” for example, qualified for the arrest and conviction of 28 journalists; Vietnam for censorship; Eritrea for imprisoning journalists; Togo for the same offense, as well as banning foreign correspondents; and Belarus for imposing harsh penalties on independent newspaper people. No killings occurred in five of CPJ’s 10 worst places last year.

The only places the number of deaths in the Philippines can compete with are Iraq (where the 15 journalists were killed within the three weeks of the US invasion); Chechnya (where 18 journalists have been killed since the Chechen campaign for independence from Russia began in 1992); the West Bank and Gaza, where the Israeli army, which habitually shoots at journalists, killed three last year; and Colombia, where a fierce civil war has led to the killing of 30 journalists in the last 10 years.

Not even Afghanistan qualifies as a Philippine competitor. Since 2001, when the US attacked that country to overthrow the Taliban government, journalists have been harassed and threatened, but none have been reported killed.

The murder of journalists in the Philippines has naturally led press freedom groups to reconsider the validity of the claim—made often and usually very loudly by Filipinos—that the Philippine press is the freest in Asia.

It’s not even the freest in Southeast Asia. Early this year RSF’s Press Freedom Index ranked the Philippines 89th among 136 countries in terms of press freedom compliance, putting it behind its Southeast Asian neighbors Indonesia, Cambodia and Thailand. There’s reason enough—40 of them—for this poor ranking, the murder of journalists being the ultimate, and most final expression of repression.

Journalists could console themselves by keeping in mind that more than 30 community activists were killed in Mindoro in just one year (2002). But that won’t make democracy any more vibrant in this country than its wheezing economy. On the contrary, that dissent and criticism whether by journalists or by social and political activists do not seem to be thriving in the countryside nowadays suggests that Philippine claims to democratic rule can be very, very seriously challenged.

(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, May 3, 2003)

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