May 11, 2007
Shooters at risk
Frank Smyth
Although war reporting demands physical proximity to a story, the risks that photographers and journalists face worldwide don't always involve bombs and grenades. Uncovering certain stories may be more dangerous, as illustrated by the many local journalists who are killed in direct retaliation for their work.
Cape Town, South Africa. Feb. 11, 1990. Magnum photographer Patrick Zachmann was wounded by a rubber bullet when taking this picture during a police altercation with a crowd awaiting the liberation of Nelson Mandela. Patrick Zachmann/Magnum Photos
It's an unconventional memorial. A heavy slab of gray rock sits outside the elevators in the foyer of Reuters' Washington bureau. Propped up against a polished wooden stand, the face of the granite is hand etched with white letters to read:
In memory of Roberto Navas Alvarez
Reuter [sic] Photographer
Born 12 December 1960
Died March 18 1989
Shot while covering Presidential elections in El Salvador.
The small Central American nation was packed with foreign journalists. At least a dozen of them lived in San Salvador at the time, while a few dozen more had just parachuted in to cover national elections to be held the following day. Many foreign news organizations, especially the wires, hired locals to help report and take pictures.
Navas was a newly hired photo-stringer for Reuters, and he was giving his more established Reuters colleague, Luis Galdámez, a ride home on his motorcycle after a long day’s work. Things were tense, as leftist guerrillas were boycotting the elections being organized by the Salvadoran government and backed by the United States. Many Salvadoran Army officers complained that the foreign press in particular gave the Marxist rebels too much ink.
It was already dark when Salvadoran soldiers stopped the motorcycle with the two photographers at a military checkpoint. The journalists showed their military issued press cards, along with other identification, and were told to pass. They drove toward a second checkpoint within site of the first.
"When we reached the second checkpoint," Galdámez later told United Press International from a hospital bed while awaiting an operation on his badly injured arm, "no one signaled for us to stop, so we kept moving. After we passed the checkpoint, they opened fire on us, shooting us from behind." On that day, Galdámez lost his young colleague
Navas was not the only journalist to die that weekend. Early the next morning, a crew of the local Channel 12 television news approached another military checkpoint with their car bearing a white flag and marked as "TV" with masking tape. Once again soldiers allowed them to pass only to fire on them from behind, killing crew member Mauricio Pineda.
Later the same morning, a cameraman for Dutch Television system, Cornel LaGrouw, was wounded covering a firefight between the Salvadoran army and Marxist guerrillas. Three colleagues tried to rush him to the hospital when a government helicopter began pursuing them, strafing the road in front of the two vehicles marked as press and carrying four white flags between them, and forcing them to take cover for 20 minutes.
"It's probable they were playing a game with us," producer Peter Elenbaas said later at a press conference. "If they had wanted to hit the car, they probably could have." The 20 minute wait took its toll as LaGrouw became the third journalist to die.
In an angry confrontation later inside the military high command, one local journalist asked the small nation's military commanders if they had not somehow given soldiers a green light to shoot the press.
"Salvador was one of the first places where someone was targeted," recently noted veteran Reuters correspondent Angus MacSwan, who went on to cover Bosnia and other conflicts.
Three journalists shot dead in three separate incidents in no more than fourteen hours. Two out of three of the fatalities were local journalists unknown literally to anyone outside of their own nations. This is hardly an isolated trend. Nearly everywhere around the globe most journalists killed on the job are hardly the kind of celebrities we might see on our own TVs. Instead, they are by and large local journalists reporting for local media whose work is rarely read, heard or seen outside of their own communities.
THAT DAY in El Salvador was close to two decades ago. By all accounts, the risks faced by journalists of all kinds including photographers have only increased. The Balkans was the next place were some reporters, and especially local journalists, found themselves being targeted as they were documenting the war and the plight of civilians under siege.
Photographers, much like camera operators, run particular risks. While writers can reconstruct scenes based on interviews with eyewitnesses and others, visual journalists must maintain a line of sight to the action. Moreover, the images captured by still or moving pictures can provide the kind of documentary proof that could later be used to tarnish the reputation of actors, or may be used as evidence against alleged perpetrators in a national or international court.
Technological advances have further raised the risks. Now instead of shipping film by air to an agency in London, Paris or New York and waiting a day or more for it to be developed and make it into print, images can be uploaded, cropped, captioned and posted online within hours if not minutes. The shortening of the production process means that actors are increasingly more mindful of who may be capturing their image on film, as the camera lens itself and the journalist behind it may play an immediate role in the story.
In recent years, whether in the streets of the West Bank, among the jungles of Colombia, or around the broken levies of New Orleans, governmental and non-governmental actors alike seem to understand the political punch of images, encouraging photographers to take some pictures while blocking them from taking others.
Still, how risky is it for news photographers compared to other journalists? That depends. Certainly the statistics from Vietnam, Bosnia and elsewhere show that when it comes to covering combat photojournalists along with camera operators are near the top of the list. But in other circumstances that is not case.
When looking at absolute numbers, only 7.4 percent of journalists killed worldwide from 1992 to 2006 were photographers, according to a recent study by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Camera operators comprised slightly more of the fatalities at 9.4 percent. But other types of journalists were killed in even larger numbers. Editors responsible for news decisions consisted of 15.9 percent. Broadcast journalists who tell stories on the air comprised 20.7 percent. And newspaper and magazine writers are at the top of the overall journalist killed list at 32 percent.
One must take into account that no more than 17.6 percent of all journalists killed over the past 15 years died on the battlefield or while covering an armed conflict. 72 percent of journalists killed worldwide were murdered outright in direct reprisal for their reporting. 26.3 percent had previously been threatened.
Who are they? Some of them are intrepid investigative reporters like Anna Politskovskaya who was murdered in 2006 in Moscow, possibly in retaliation for exposing human rights violations by Russian-backed forces in Chechnya. Russia is third, after Iraq and Algeria, when it comes to total murders. Most of the reporters were beat reporters covering local politics, business or even sports who uncovered evidence of corruption.
Photographers are among those who have been targeted for death. The corpse of Hayatullah Khan was found six months after he disappeared in northwestern Pakistan. The day before his abduction, Khan had photographed the apparent remains of a U.S.-made missile that witnesses said struck a home and al-Qaeda safe house, killing an al-Qaeda leader. Khan's pictures were widely distributed by the European Pressphoto Agency on the same day they were taken and they contradicted the Pakistani government's claim that the al-Qaeda leader had died in a blast from his own explosives stored inside the safe house.
TAKING PICTURES of news is more dangerous now than it was before. No place better illustrates this than Iraq. At the time of writing, 98 journalists, of whom 25 were photojournalists or camera operators, have died since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 in Iraq, and most of them were Iraqis. In this war, journalists are being targeted with more vengeance than ever before. But one thing has stayed the same. In all such tragedies over the past nearly twenty years, those responsible have been prosecuted in only a handful of cases.
Published on the Magnum Blog on May 11, 2007
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