Murderous year for media worldwide

As armed conflicts escalate in Africa amid a worsening humanitarian crisis, extreme poverty and violation of human rights, Africa's power-obsessed dictators and blood-thirsty warlords flex their muscles and vow to crush anyone who dares oppose and criticise their ruling methods.

And as usual, the media paid a heavy price for striving to tell it as it is and denounce the abuse of power, enlisting of child soldiers and massive atrocities taking place here and there.

A total of eight journalists were slain last year in Somalia, where the war pitting President Abdullah Yusuf's transitional government, backed by Ethiopian troops, against the Islamic Courts militia, takes an ugly turn.

“It has never been at this level,” Ahmed Abdisalam Adan, a Somali journalist living in Nairobi, Kenya, was quoted by the Canada-based newspaper Globe and Mail as saying.

“It is no longer Somalis fighting, but clans fighting. It is a regional conflict, an international conflict,” Adan added.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, editor Serge Maheshe of UN-sponsored Radio Okapi was killed in June 13 by two gunmen in Bukavu in the war-torn east of the country, bringing to four the number of journalists to have perished in mysterious circumstances in the past three years.

Zimbabwean freelance cameraman Edward Chikomba's badly beaten body was discovered in a bush some 50 km west of Harare at the end of March last year.

Chikomba, who was working for the state-controlled ZBC, ‘flirted' with the opposition MDC and his colleagues said that he was killed by Robert Mugabe's secret police for smuggling news footage out of Zimbabwe showing beaten up MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

All over the world, the number of media personnel killed has considerably increased in the past 10 years, prompting organisations such as the International News Safety Institute (INSI), the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) to appeal to the President of UN Security Council to help persuade states to respect ‘in letter and in spirit' a key Security Council resolution on the safety of journalists.

“We appeal to you, Sir, to urge your colleagues on the Security Council to respect the letter and the spirit of Resolution 1738 so that we can begin to bring down the shocking level of casualties suffered by the news media on behalf of free societies everywhere,” the letter, published on the INSI website, said.

According to an INSI two-year inquiry, 1000 media fatalities have occurred between 1996 and 2006, and the organisation said that in fewer than two out of 10 cases of murder was anyone brought to justice.