#dnaEdit: In the line of fire

After 400 days of incarceration, Al-Jazeera journalist, Peter Greste, was finally released from prison earlier this week. In what is by now established to be a sham trial, the Australian journalist was charged with helping the Muslim Brotherhood and disseminating false information following the overthrow of the President Mohammed Morsi by the military in 2013. Disturbingly, Greste’s two other Al-Jazeera colleagues, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, are still behind bars. News reports suggest that Fahmy, who till recently held Egyptian and Canadian citizenship, could be deported to Canada. Significantly, on Tuesday, Fahmy renounced his Egyptian citizenship. Questions still remain about the fate of Baher, who does not hold dual nationality. 

Facing the threat of continued violence and working under severely intimidating conditions, journalists are no longer safe in Egypt. The situation is alarming, to say the least. The present dispensation in Egypt appears determined to wrest back the hard-fought freedoms won during the 2011 spontaneous upsurge — popularly known as the Arab Spring — that dislodged the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. But the spiral of violence and intimidation of journalists is not confined to Egypt alone. Across the world, journalists are under more and more attacks. In an interview to Democracy Now, Delphine Halgand, US director of Reporters Without Borders, said, “:

…2014 and the beginning of 2015 have been marked by an extreme level of violence targeting journalists, from Syria to France.” Halgand said that in the last two years there has been an “explosion” in the number of journalists abducted across the world, especially in Syria, Libya and Ukraine. Nearly 90% of these journalists are local while 10% are Westerners. Maximum numbers of journalists are imprisoned in China, Iran and Eritrea.

Media censorship has entered a new and sinister phase. The most frightening conditions prevail in Syria with all the warring groups wreaking violence on journalists. Clearly, the Islamic State is one of the most dangerous groups threatening journalists, not just in Syria but throughout the region. Local journalists, doing their job, are in the straight line of fire. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 85% of the journalists murdered in Syria are local journalists. More than 70 journalists have been killed in Syria since 2011, according to CPJ figures. Scores of others have been arrested, detained, injured and intimidated. The latest foreign journalist to be killed by the Islamic State is the Japanese national Kenji Goto who went to Syria to chronicle the lives of those destroyed by the war.

The spate of relentless attacks on journalists whose job requires them to go into conflict areas, points to a serious lack of concerted attention on the issue. Campaigns for the release of imprisoned journalists are mostly left to their families and friends. For instance, Greste’s parents Lois and Juris, since his arrest, travelled back and forth between Cairo and Australia, campaigning for his release. The resourceful and the influential manage to run a high visibility campaign. Local journalists often find it hard to drum up such support. But such scattered resistance is clearly inadequate in putting an end to the systematic muzzling of media. 

Sustained political and media intervention is urgently needed to turn things around. Media organisations, across the world, need to come together in resisting the continued intimidation of media persons. They have to be allowed to do their job without facing the threat of abduction, imprisonment and murder. Governments — particularly those that proclaim their commitment to freedom of expression — must exert pressure on the regimes and the groups that are abusing and killing journalists at will.