The CJA thanks the Commonwealth Foundation for its financial support

Issue No 8 May 2005

Page 3 Joint founder of CJA Patrick Keatley dies at 84

Page 3-4 A Gambian tragedy and a ray of hope

Page 5 Seventy journalists killed in 2004

Page 6 How I was beaten by The Godfather’s thugs

Page 7 Execution of a TV film-maker

Page 8 Hong Kong media under government pressure

Page 9 A Royal mess for Zimbabwe’s free press

Pages 11-12 News in brief

CJA workshop in Guyana urges unbiased political reporting

The first CJA workshop held since the secretariat moved to Trinidad took place in February in Guyana, which has seen in recent years an explosion of media, particularly television. The workshop, opened by Dale Enoch, Caribbean member of the CJA executive, and CJA veteran George John, was funded by the Commonwealth Media Development Fund. It looked at issues facing political journalists, including the need to give every community the chance to express its concerns.

Many Guyanese journalists are perceived as having strong ties to one or other of the two main political parties. Critics consequently argue that political reporting in Guyana is imbalanced and fails to contribute to a healthy democracy. Journalists for their part have protested against the government’s closure of a TV station which criticised its response to flooding. (The CJA group on their third day visited flood-hit areas.)

The workshop brought together 20-plus local journalists and observers, and 17 other Caribbean journalists, most of whom had never been to Guyana before and admitted to a negative impression of the country. It took in the opening of the new Caricom (Caribbean Community) headquarters in Georgetown. Robert Persuad, the President’s information officer, arranged for the journalists to attend the opening, which gave them a chance to pursue issues that the workshop raised.

Chris Cobb, president of the CJA’s Canadian branch, who covers politics in Ottawa, told the workshop’s first session that political journalists everywhere are tempted to enter powerful political circles but their first responsibility is to their readers and listeners. He conceded that important political stories can be boring. Journalists need to make them engaging.

Kirk Meighoo, a Trinidad-based analyst, said political journalists needed to ask tough questions and not simply accept what politicians and news releases tell them. Meighoo contended that journalists read and research too little, and so report on issues they know little about. In response, participants complained of poor pay, overwork and lack of training and time for reading. There was another lively debate in the afternoon about owners, state and private, and their control of the media. It raised the point that defamation is still a criminal offence in many Caribbean states.

In the evening, workshop groups discussed the Caribbean Court of Justice and the Caricom single market. They found that journalists lacked awareness of these initiatives and that readers and editors lacked interest in them. The groups also suggested ideas for stories, including regional preparedness for disasters, the movement of workers from country to country and the selection of judges for the Caribbean Court of Justice.

On the second day the CJA contingent attended the opening of the Caricom headquarters, interviewed visiting politicians and spent an hour with Guyana’s president, Bharrat Jagdeo. He vigorously defended his government’s relationship with the media and contended that the TV station which the government closed had been inciting the public at a time of national crisis. Its licence was to be reinstated.

Both Guyana’s major newspapers covered the workshop discussions, and the CJA’s executive director, Josanne Leonard, appeared on TV. Reporting by the workshop participants provided Caribbean people with information about a significant moment in the Caribbean’s history. Participants said that monthly or bi-monthly seminars would be useful in educating them in governance, democracy, trade and development.

Patrick Keatley, joint founder of the CJA, dies at 84

Patrick Keatley, joint founder of the Commonwealth Journalists Association, has died aged 84. He caught the Commonwealth bug in his home city of Vancouver (Canada) and was one of the journalists who covered the story of African independence. He was a personal friend of such African leaders as Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Joshua Nkomo and Nelson Mandela and got a warm embrace from President Sam Nujoma at the CJA’s Namibia conference. For them, his Canadian-ness as well as his sympathy made him trustworthy.

He started in journalism with the Vancouver Sun and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. His first major story when he joined The Guardian in Britain in 1952, however, was very different. It concerned the despatch of British and Irish horses to European slaughterhouses. Posing as an American meat trader, he travelled with the horses and reported their suffering.

This expose won him a job in The Guardian’s then small London office and the chance to pursue his interest in the Commonwealth. He was The Guardian’s Commonwealth and later diplomatic correspondent until 1985. He also broadcast frequently on the BBC and its World Service, to the frustration of Guardian night editors awaiting his copy. “Where is Keatley?” was their catchphrase. John Tusa, former head of the World Service, says that there, too, producers were frequently waiting for Keatley. But everyone got their copy in the end. Tusa adds that Patrick educated BBC producers about the developing world.

After helping found the CJA in 1978, he became chairman of its London management committee and also of its UK branch. He arranged many events for branch members.

A Gambian tragedy and a ray of hope

By Demba Jawo

The murder of veteran editor and government critic Deyda Hydara has put the plight of Gambian journalists on the agenda of the world media. Deyda, managing editor of The Point newspaper, died in a hail of bullets on December 16 in Kanifing, outside Banjul, while taking two women staff home from work.

The women, Ida Jagne and Nyansarang Jobe, saw a Mercedes taxi approach the car from behind at high speed. Deyda slowed down to let it pass. As it drew level, one of the occupants opened fire. Hit by three bullets, he died on the spot. It was dark and it all happened too fast for the women to see who was in the taxi.

There is still no idea who killed Deyda or why, and the police investigation has made no progress. Barely two months before he died, the Gambian parliament passed two draconian media laws which he had severely criticised. There is no evidence linking the government or anyone else to his death. But the government’s attitude to the independent media has not instilled confidence in its innocence.

Deyda’s death is the latest of several attacks on the independent media, for which no one has been arrested. Radio 1FM was firebombed in 2001, The Independent’s printing press was torched in April 2004, and the house of the BBC’s Banjul correspondent, Ebrima Sillah, was burned down in August.

In September, an opposition member of the national assembly accused two of President Jammeh’s bodyguards of being among the group who torched The Independent’s printing press. However, the police never questioned them.

After Deyda’s killing, morale among Gambian journalists became quite low. Some gave up journalism and others left the country. However, journalists have used Deyda’s killing to highlight their plight. International media rights groups such as Reporters Sans Frontieres and the Committee to Protect Journalists are focusing on The Gambia. [RSF alleges that Deyda Hydara was being watched by Gambian intelligence until a few minutes before he died.]

All this has made the Gambian authorities aware that their treatment of the media is being monitored. Madi Ceesay, newly elected president of the Gambia Press Union, has commented: “Whoever killed Deyda has not only made a martyr of him. But he, or they, have also brought the plight of Gambian journalists to the fore.”

71 journalists murdered, worldwide

Alagi Yorro Jallow, managing editor of The Independent (Gambia) whose printing press was torched by armed men last year, and Tipu Sultan, a Bangladeshi journalist who was beaten almost to death by a politician’s henchmen four years ago, were among speakers at a London conference on World Press Freedom Day, May 3. Timothy Balding, director-general of the organisers, the World Association of Newspapers, said that governments transmitted a sinister message by their failure to track down the murderers of journalists. This message was that those who used violence to rid themselves of media criticism could get away with it. Seventy-one journalists, worldwide, were murdered last year.

‘I will not be silenced,’ says editor

Alagi Yorro Jallow says that the Gambian government’s persecution of independent media is increasing in severity and that the brutal murder of Deyda Hydara, editor of The Point, shows the lengths to which the government is prepared to go to silence critics. Not one police investigation has resulted in the prosecution of those responsible for crimes against privately-owned media.

“Deyda Hydara and I were like brothers. You can imagine how I felt when I learned he had been assassinated. No one could have predicted that he would be gunned down because he was a journalist. I was told I would have been killed, too, if I had been in The Gambia. Now murder is in their game plan, the murder of anyone who opposes their agenda.

“People are more guarded in what they say and write. Families of journalists and printing staff are pressing them to look for other jobs

If Deyda Hydara can be murdered, no one can sleep peacefully in bed. I was under pressure from my wife to quit journalism but I am not going to be silenced. We will leave no stone unturned in pursuing the murderers of Deyda Hydara.”

At the time of his murder, Hydara was a leading critic of the Newspaper Amendment Act which raises to about £9,000 the bond which newspapers must lodge in exchange for registration. Excessive bonds are incompatible with freedom of expression, says Jallow. The government has also made libel a criminal offence carrying a penalty of imprisonment without the option of a fine.

‘I was floating on my own blood’

Tipu Sultan, correspondent for United News of Bangladesh in the town of Feni, wrote about Zoynal Hazary, a local politician known as The Godfather. In 2001, Hazary’s private militia beat him almost to death. Tipu says:

“They took me to a community centre. They used hockey sticks, iron bars, baseball bats. They broke my hands and legs in pieces. I was floating on my own blood. I couldn’t scream. All I did was wait. I don’t know what I was waiting for. Maybe they got tired or thought they were beating a dead body. A rickshaw puller found me senseless on the street.”

Hazary’s men pursued him to hospital and he was transferred to Dhaka where the Daily Prothom Alo and the Daily Star raised a fund for his treatment. He was then for four months in a hospital in Bangkok. Back in Feni, Hazary searched for Tipu’s family, who went into hiding.

Tipu, who has made a remarkable recovery, now works for the Daily Prothom Alo in Dhaka. He cannot return home to Feni, though Hazary is now in exile in India. Even in Dhaka, he feels he must move carefully.

Tipu says that the police refused to register his complaint against Hazary and his men, until after the 2001 election was called and a caretaker government took over. Tipu and an eye-witness were threatened with death if he did not withdraw the case.

He says that n-depth reports cause criminals to attempt to stop journalists from writing. They are threatened by smugglers, owners of ‘black’ money and leaders loyal to the ruling party. If they write about corruption, police accuse them of publishing false news. It is impossible to write about corruption in courts. Yet elites with money can influence trials. Seven journalists at the Daily Prothom Alo and Daily Bhorer Kagoj were given one-month sentences after alleging that a judge was using a fake Bachelor of Laws certificate.

“In opposition, political parties call for the freedom of the press. They forget when they get into power. We journalists in Bangladesh are trying to uphold people’s right to information.”

The execution of a TV journalist

James Miller, a talented British TV film director, was shot dead by an Israeli soldier in May 2003 while making a film about the plight of children growing up in the Gaza Strip. A t the London press freedom conference, his colleague Saira Shah spoke about the day he died

I believe, says Saira Shah, that James Miller was the most talented young director of his time. We were making a film, about the impact of Islamic extremism on children. But when we met the children of Rafah we jettisoned everything and started on a film about what it is like to be an ordinary kid growing up in a battle zone.

As you go south through the Gaza Strip, you come to many Israeli checkpoints. It can take days to get through. Rafah, at the southern end, is an ugly, bombed-out town, right on the Egyptian border. It is ringed with towers, with sentries on top. Children are caught between Palestinian militants with their cult of martyrdom and the Israeli army, which shoots first and asks questions afterwards. Many children have been hurt. You hear gunfire all the time.

Militants smuggle weapons across the border. So the Israelis were trying to clear a zone between the border and Rafah. We heard that their bulldozers were going to the house of Najla, a 16-year-old girl whose life we had been following. These are enormous, armour-plated bulldozers, and are accompanied by armoured personnel carriers. We filmed children throwing stones at them.

We were four – James, the producer, the translator and me – and we were determined to be very visible and recognised as non-combatant. As darkness was falling, we went on to the well-lit verandah of Najla’s house. The bulldozers were clearing ground 100 metres away. Then the bulldozers left and two APCs remained. The Bedouin soldiers in the APCs sounded in high spirits. They were playing Lebanese pop songs. We found they had nicknamed Najla’s house the journalists’ house.

We decided to return to our apartment round the corner. Najla’s family had a white flag. With Abud, the translator, carrying it, we set out towards an APC, which had night vision equipment. After a few paces, we stopped and shouted Hello. A few more paces, and we shouted Hello again. A single shot came from the APC, 60 to 80 metres in front of us. A single shot means Freeze and so we froze. I was shouting: “We are British journalists.”

There was a second shot. It hit James in the neck, between his helmet and his body armour. It was an execution shot. Firing went on, in a measured way. I am certain the firing came from the APC. I was trying to work out how to evacuate James. After what seemed a long time, I managed to attract the attention of the soldiers who got James on to the APC. He was already dead. An autopsy found a fragment of an Israeli bullet in his neck. He was not shot in the back, as the Israeli Army at first claimed.

An army inquiry came to nothing. A military police inquiry interviewed me twice and one soldier six times. Eventually a 78-page report in Hebrew was handed to James Miller’s family. This said there was insufficient evidence against the lieutenant believed to have fired the fatal shot. Disciplinary action was put in the hands of the lieutenant’s commanding officer, who decided to take no action. The Miller family managed to get the inquiry report translated just in time to bring a civil case in the Israeli High Court. It had to be brought within two years.

Hong Kong media under pressure

Gillian Yau, a Hong Kong broadcaster, is in Britain as a Reuter Fellow. She writes about the media back home.

“There is so much pressure – the slanted media, the savage Hong Kong government and the tyrannical central government,” said radio talkshow host Albert Cheng when he was forced out of his job last summer. His comment reflects the pressure of politics on Hong Kong’s media.

Since Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, its politics have been divided into two parts: pro-China and pro-democratic. Media have to pay attention to this, commonly giving both camps the same coverage.

In 2003, half a million people – urged on by the most popular paper, the Apple Daily - demonstrated against the proposed National Security Law which journalists opposed because it threatened freedom of expression. The law was scrapped but many believe that the Chinese government will not be happy until a similar law is enacted. However, the furore caused more people to ask for democracy. Politically apathetic citizens in Hong Kong have never been so energised.

China responded by starting a debate about patriotism, accusing pro-democrats of having unpatriotic interests and seeking independence. The media came under pressure to be politically correct. Pressure to conform became worse when three outspoken radio talk-show hosts walked away from their jobs following the debate on patriotism. We called this period “white terror”. We can still broadcast what we want but we have to be cautious. One of the talk-show hosts quit because of a late-night call from a mainland Chinese official saying: “How’s your wife? How’s your daughter?”

Since 1997, China and Hong Kong have had different social and political systems. We are all afraid that this one-country, two-systems situation will end. Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy, its tradition of upholding rights, its respect for freedom of expression all face a difficult and questionable future. The community has a deep set of unease. This was not resolved with the resignation in March of the unpopular chief executive C.H.Tung.

Tung told the press that he quit because of a health problem. Media in Hong Kong could not get anyone in authority to confirm his resignation. This lack of official information is unhealthy for reporting but seems to be getting common on issues relating to the mainland government.

A Royal mess for Zimbabwe’s free press

When Prince Charles shook hands with Robert Mugabe at the Pope’s funeral it was another blow to Zimbabwe’s free press, writes Tom de Castella. (This article first appeared in the FT Magazine, London)

Another rigged election victory for Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party is a catastrophe for objective journalism. And just when the independent press had the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission on the ropes over the discrepancy between turnout and party results, Prince Charles changed the news agenda with an absent-minded squeeze of tyrannical flesh. [The handshake took place in the sharing of the peace at the funeral service.]

Over the past 18 months over 70 journalists have been arrested and four newspapers forced to close. Welshman Ncube, secretary-general of the oppositon Movement for Democratic Change, says Mugabe has been clever with the media. He has tolerated a degree of dissent. The weeklies – the Independent and the Standard – are not seen as influencing the mass of people. “But an independent media in the sense of mass circulation daily newspapers? Forget it. It’s not possible as long as this dictatorship’s in place.”

Mugabe’s media manipulation reached its apogee when conducted by former information minister Professor Jonathan Moyo. “Prof” is hated by journalists for his ruthless remoulding of the media and mocked for his comical tirades on state television. In January he was fired. But the structures and laws he put in place live on, above all, the Access to Information and Protectionh of Privacy Act. It was the AIPPA that finished off the Daily News, a newspaper that had become a morning fixture for young, urban Zimbabweans.

In most countries, the idea that one newspaper could determine a nation’s fate would be seen as melodramatic and unwelcome. But In Zimbabwe this idea was plausible and hopeful. The Daily News launched in March 1999 and was soon selling over 100,000 copies a day, more than any other paper and two or three times as many as the state’s flagship, The Herald. Five years later it was shut down by the government. Most of the 167 journalists have left the country or turned freelance. Only a skeleton online service survives.

The Daily News arrived the same year that the Movement for Democratic Change was set up and the fortunes of the two have been closely linked. Without a daily paper willing to give it space, the MDC will always struggle to get its message across. Between elections it struggles to remain visible and fight off Zanu-PF’s misinformation machine. In a country where thousands are starving, television schedules are interspersed with scenes of happy peasants hoeing fields in time to traditional music with lyrics written by government ministers.

In this war on truth, the journalists of the independent press must man the trenches. Vincent Kahiya, editor of the weekly Independent, was arrested twice last year, the first time for a story about Mugabe’s use of an airliner for his holiday in Malaysia. He and colleagues were jailed for two nights in a cell with 30 other people, a blocked toilet, no blankets and no room to sleep. In January, after numerous court visits, they were taken off remand as the state had failed to bring a case. Kahiya says that arrest, imprisonment and legal harassment, rather than prosecution, are the government’s tools.

In March a court ordered the government’s media commission to license the Daily News to start publishing again. The miracle is that Zimbabwe’s independent journalists are not giving up.

News in brief

Dharmeratnam Sivaram, editor of the Sri Lankan news website TamilNet and columnist for the Daily Mirror, was shot dead in April after being kidnapped in Colombo by four men.

Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, faces a newspaper circulation war. The Hindustan Times is launching a Mumbai edition, and TV broadcaster Zee is involved in a scheme to publish a new paper. To defend its position, the Times of India is giving free health insurance to newsvendors.

Relations between government and media in Kenya deteriorated this month, after the president’s wife Lucy Kibaki staged an all-night sit-in at the offices of The Nation. She was enraged by newspaper reports of her attempts to stop the noisiness of a farewell party for the World Bank’s representative. On May 6 in the town of Kisii, the director of a tea plant hit The Nation’s correspondent with a chair.

On World Press Freedom Day, May 3, club-wielding police attacked and arrested journalists meeting in front of Pakistan’s parliament building in Islamabad. Journalists covering the national assembly walked out in protest. In Lahore, police charged journalists as they gathered to demonstrate for better working conditions. In Karachi, journalists incensed by this staged a sit-in outside the Governor’s House

Thomas Nguanyi, a prizewinning journalist for the BBC World Service and a founding member of the Cameroon Association of Commonwealth Journalists, has gone into hiding in Britain after release from hospital. He collapsed while detained at Harwich after losing his claim for asylum. He was accused of spying in Cameroon last year after being arrested with South African journalist Farouk Chotia on a peninsula disputed with Nigeria. Two journalists working for L’Oeil du Sahel, Cameroon, were given five-month prison sentences in April for defamation in an article accusing gendarmes of robbery. Neither attended the hearing. The editor-in-chief of Le Jeune Observateur has been set free after a month in prison for libel

Alister Hughes, one of the Caribbean’s best known journalists, died at the end of February at the age of 86. He received an award during the CJA conference in Trinidad last year. He did not become a journalist until he was 50, when he began reporting Grenada for the BBC, the Caribbean News Agency and the Associated Press. Three years later he and his wife Cynthia started the Grenada Newsletter. He made his reputation reporting live on radio as the notorious Mongoose gang of Chief Minister Gairy beat up, gassed and fired on demonstrators. After Maurice Bishop, who overthrew Gairy, was murdered, Hughes was put in prison. However, the American invasion freed him. Understandably, he called it a rescue mission.

Hiro Shroff, who reported Pakistan for India’s news agency after independence, is pursuing his Down Memory Lane project by recording the impressions of people who have witnessed Indian life since those days. He is on e-mail at hiroshroff@hotmail.com