Pakistan’s Abbas: Journalists hostage to ‘power of gun’
CPJ award winner Mazhar Abbas penned a strong Sunday op-ed piece, “Death is the only news–Challenges of working in conflict zones,” for The News. It’s about conditions for journalists working in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Baluchistan. As Abbas says, “The killing of one journalist is a message for another.” He goes on…
India’s challenge: Intolerance vs. intellectual freedom
Because of criticism from Hindu fundamentalists, the showing of a documentary by filmmaker Sanjay Kak at the Symbiosis College of Arts and Commerce in Pune has been indefinitely postponed. The conservative student organization Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parisha protested Kak’s film, “Jashn-e-Azadi” (How we celebrate freedom), which is critical of the Indian army’s role in Kashmir.…
Hrant Dink’s Voice
A murder that spawned a movement, the five-year anniversary of Hrant Dink’s high profile assassination drew huge crowds in Turkey to protest the judiciary’s decision to dismiss charges of conspiracy to silence one of the nation’s most outspoken critics. In this New Yorker article CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney describes the current backslide of press freedom in Turkey and the spectre…
Cabezas’ convicted killers are free, 15 years after murder
It was a cold winter morning more than 15 years ago. As part of my daily routine as a foreign correspondent, I opened my laptop to read the Argentine papers. I was shocked by a headline: my colleague José Luis Cabezas, a photographer for the newsweekly magazine Noticias, had been murdered. His bullet-ridden body was…
In Mexico mission, PEN speaks for a silenced press
The leading American author Russell Banks set the tone on Sunday as he stood among international writers and their local colleagues in Mexico City: “A nation’s journalists and writers, like its poets and story-tellers, are the eyes, ears, and mouths of the people. When journalists cannot freely speak of what they see and hear of…
Black January? A foreign plot, says Sri Lankan government
On Monday, I wrote about two demonstrations scheduled for Sri Lanka this week. Both were meant to commemorate the ugly string of anti-press attacks in recent Januaries, which has included journalists killed and abducted, television stations bombed, websites attacked, and media offices torched. But Wednesday’s Black January effort, publicized by the Free Media Movement (FMM)…
Mazhar Abbas: Shahzad was no Pearl
Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl in Karachi on January 23, 2002. On February 21 of that year, a video of his beheading was released. In the wake of the judicial inquiry into the murder of journalist Saleem Shahzad, veteran Pakistani journalist Mazhar Abbas has taken…
A deeper reading: Umar Cheema on the Shahzad report
With the shooting of Mukarram Khan Aatif on Tuesday, the once high-profile case of Saleem Shahzad has almost been overtaken by events. The day before Aatif’s death, Umar Cheema had sent me a link to his analysis of the judicial inquiry into the killing of Saleem Shahzad.