BY MICHAEL LITTLEJOHNS
UNITED NATIONS - A full page of heartfelt letters to the editor that
The Wall Street Journal ran the other day in tribute to its slain
reporter Danny Pearl -- whose last words "I am a Jew" revived
memories of the Holocaust -- just may be a sign that the old
antipathy among the public at large toward journalists is yielding,
post-Sept. 11, to a recognition that these are guys who, while
working like anybody else, often risk a very nasty fate doing it.
At any rate, it seems that the message got through to the UN this
week, when its annual memorial ceremonies for its own staff and
associates abducted, killed or still missing in line of duty
included a forum on the hazards that journalist and bureaucrat alike
face when they go out into the field. (What with all those newspaper
tales about a "bloated bureaucracy," waste and corruption, and so
on, reporters were not always the UN's favorite people; tolerated,
but not embraced. Finding common cause, therefore, was a
breakthrough of sorts.)
One UN staffer who disappeared and was never seen again -- an
extremist group said he was executed for "spying" -- was both a
journalist by training and an international civil servant by
persuasion: Alec Collett, who was trying to help Palestinian
refugees as an UNRWA aide when kidnapped in Beirut. The British-born
Collett worked in the UN bureau of The Associated Press, and
elsewhere for that news service, before opting for UN contract
assignments in Africa and the Middle East, where his reportorial
skills were invaluable.
Shashi Tharoor, the head of the UN department of public information,
moderated the forum and among the invited participants was Raghida
Dergham, a distinguished Lebanese-American journalist, who has
herself been a terrorism target. A letter addressed to her at the
UN, where she is a reporter and a widely-read analyst for al Hayyat,
contained plastique. Providentially, her suspicion about the
contents was timely and the missive was disabled by the UN bomb
squad.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, some of whose officials
attended the UN forum Monday, has since issued its annual report on
the horrible things that may happen to reporters going about their
normal day-to-day business, but in dangerous places low on law and
order. No fewer than 37 of them were killed last year as a direct
result of their work, a substantial increase over the 24 who lost
their lives in parallel circumstances in 2000, says CPJ.
Eight journalist fatalities resulted from Afghanistan war coverage.
(The Wall Street Journal's Pearl was murdered in Pakistan this past
January in an atrocity related to the war. Unhappily, many other
crimes against reporters seem inevitable before his death appears
among the CPJ's statistics for 2002.)
Most of the victims last year, the committee says, were murdered in
retaliation for their reports on sensitive matters, like official
crime and corruption -- in Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Thailand and
Yugoslavia, to name only a few places.
