The caption explained that the young woman in the photo on Page A4 Wednesday was carrying a picture of her father as she walked ahead of the hearse in his funeral procession in Istanbul, Turkey.
My eyes kept going back to that image. In the midst of an enormous crowd — 100,000 mourners — Sera Dink looked so lost in thought, so solitary. The word “carried” didn’t really capture what she was doing. She was embracing that portrait of her father, an ethnic-Armenian who had been gunned down just for doing his job.
Hrant Dink was one of the first journalists to die in 2007 simply for telling the truth. Sadly, he won’t be the last. The 2006 tally was a record, a spike up from an already horrific total the year before.
Fifty-five journalists died worldwide in 2006 because of what they do for a living, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based group that keeps this disturbing tally. Of those, 32 deaths occurred in Iraq. Just four involved being caught in crossfire. Most were journalists targeted by insurgents.
These are brave souls who risk everything to reveal what’s really going on in some of the world’s most troubled locales.
Local journalists in Iraq were particularly at risk as they tried to provide the free flow of information a democracy requires. That’s probably why they were targeted by insurgents bent on preventing a Western-style democracy and all of its freedoms from taking root. Since the war began in 2003, the committee reported, 92 journalists have died in Iraq, along with 37 people who worked as support staff.
Why would a journalist volunteer for such an assignment? I put that question to Mark Brunswick, a Star Tribune reporter at the State Capitol who reported from Iraq embedded with the Minnesota National Guard for four weeks in 2005 and volunteered for another six weeks in Iraq in the fall of 2006. Brunswick said although Western journalists are targeted by insurgents as valuable human currency, particularly for kidnappings, he worked in relative security traveling with the military.
But Brunswick and others have observed that the sense of immunity or neutrality that helped safeguard journalists in past conflicts “goes completely out the window in Iraq.” The rule of thumb when reporting on the streets of Baghdad, he said, was that a reporter had 15 minutes in any one place to do an interview before word spread that a Western journalist was around and the risk grew too great.
Why did he want to work in that environment? “It’s the ultimate issue of our generation,” said Brunswick, 50. He knew even in college that parachuting into a conflict to reveal what was happening was something he wanted to do. Brunswick watched the Vietnam War define public policy debate for years after it ended and said he expects the Iraq war also will reverberate through policy debates for many years to come.
“A lot of people were talking about Iraq. But I knew few people who could say what it was like boots on the ground. There’s a certain satisfaction to get a chance to be there. You can’t pass that up. I wanted to tell what it was like to be Iraqi or a soldier. I was able to accomplish a lot of that,” Brunswick said.
The constant risk, he noted, required “putting yourself in a state of denial or you would be paralyzed.”
It’s likely each of those 55 journalists who died knew they were taking a risk. They, too, must have slipped into denial or decided reporting the truth was worth even more than their life.
Iraq wasn’t the only place it was deadly to be a journalist last year. In Russia, one of the best-known reporters in the country, Anna Politkovskaya, 48, was gunned down in her Moscow apartment building.
She had revealed acts of torture by Russian troops in Chechnya. In the course of her tough reporting on the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin, she had been poisoned, threatened until she had to leave the country for a while and thrown into jail.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that once Politkovskaya was “kept in a pit for three days without food or water, while a military officer threatened to shoot her.” But when she got out, she kept reporting.
The official investigation of her death has produced no suspects. On Monday, a delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists went to Moscow to press for further action. They were told investigators were pursuing a lead that Chechnya police might have murdered her. Later the Foreign Ministry denied those specifics, saying only that several “theories” were under investigation.
Most murders of journalists are never solved, often because the investigators work for the very people annoyed by the journalist’s work, glad the bright light of scrutiny will be dimmer.
Why, beyond a basic sense of human decency, should this concern readers of the Star Tribune in Minnesota?
The international wire reports you read in this newspaper are possible only because reporters such as Politkovskaya take enormous risks to let the world know what is going on in their countries. That’s a sacrifice worth thinking about the next time you read a story with a dateline from one of the world’s hot spots.
