Article: Job hazard

Tuesday September 29, 2009

By HILARY CHIEW

Documenting green crimes has grown increasingly dangerous for journalists.

IN a report that focuses on threats faced by environmental journalists worldwide, media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders – better known by its French acronym RSF or Reporters Sans Frontieres – warned that these journalists are on the frontlines of a new war.

"There is a lot at stake in the environment. The gathering of information alone is threatening for many companies, organised crime groups, governments and the various kinds of intermediaries that profit from misuse of the environment.

"Environmental concerns complicate their plans. As a result, investigative journalists and environmental activists are seen as an unwanted menace and even as enemies to be physically eliminated," said the report, The Dangers For Journalists Who Expose Environmental Issues.

The seven-page report documented 21 cases in 17 countries, the majority of which are developing countries where depletion of natural resources have proven to be politically sensitive issues.

Show of support: People staging a rally in central Moscow last November in support of journalist Mikhail Beketov who was then in hospital after he was found unconscious in a pool of blood in front of his house in Khimki, just outside Moscow . Beketov is well-known for his critical articles against local authorities in Khimki.

Death threats, abductions, physical assaults and libel suits were levelled at 14 journalists, one blogger and one filmmaker in the last decade.

It included the hideous maiming of Russian journalist Mikhail Beketov, a vocal critic of local authorities who fought to save the Khimki forest affected by the construction of a motorway between Moscow and St Petersburg. He survived a savage beating outside his house in 2008 after having a leg and several fingers amputated.

Another Russian journalist, Grigory Pasko, battled espionage charges after he supplied footage of the Russian naval fleet dumping radioactive waste in the Sea of Japan to Japanese TV station NHK in 1997.

After spending 20 months in prison, he was tried and sentenced to four years in prison in 2001. He served two-thirds of his sentence and was released on parole. He has filed his case at the European Court of Human Rights to challenge the Russian court verdict that branded him a traitor.

Logging in the tropical rainforest appears to be a taboo subject for journalists. In the Philippines, Joey Estriber, a radio host in Aurora province (north-east of Manila) has been missing since March 2006 following his kidnap by four men. He had criticised logging by companies with allies inside the government and had campaigned to have the logging permits withdrawn.

Journalists who exposed illegal logging in Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Guinea-Bissau received threatening phone calls. Radio Free Asia reporter Lem Piseth of Cambodia fled to Thailand after getting this threatening phonecall: "You are insolent, do you want to die? ... There will not be enough land to bury you."

Lucio Flavio Pinto, the founder and editor of Jornal Pessoal, a Brazilian bi-monthly in the northern state of Para in the Amazon basin, faced 33 lawsuits for publishing a series of reports on deforestation.

His Brazilian colleagues were also constant targets of intimidation. Vilma Berna, the editor of an environmental daily who had exposed clandestine overfishing in Rio de Janeiro Bay, hired bodyguards after a half-burnt body was dumped outside his house as a warning in May 2006. He, however, is without protection now as he could no longer afford the security fees.

Another Brazilian, Fabricio Ribeiro Pimenta, fled his hometown of Espirito Santo after being assaulted in July for denouncing an illegal marble factory of causing toxic dust pollution in a residential district.

Uzbek journalist Solidzhon Abdurakhmanov, who had written extensively about the Aral Sea ecological disaster, was arrested on a drug trafficking charge in June 2008 and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment despite irregularities and enormous gaps in the prosecution case. His arrest is said to be deliberately planned to punish him for his reporting.

Egyptian blogger Tamer Mabrouk was fined 6,000 (RM30,000) in May for libel after he blogged about a chemical company dumping untreated water into Lake Manzalah and the Suez Canal, near Port Said.

The report also highlighted the difficulties in gathering information when investigative journalists are shunned by the local population that are beholden to the polluters for employment.

In southern China, for example, foreign journalists were chased out of villages where most of the world's discarded computers are stripped apart in an environmentally disastrous manner.

The report also noted the curse of "envelope journalism" where reporters are bribed into silence and whistle-blowers are jailed under punitive security laws.

■ Read the full report at www.rsf.org/IMG/rapport_en_mdf.pdf

This article was taken from: The Star Online: Lifestyle: Focus 29 September 2009