Freedom of the Press Committee Report, January 28, 2009

Since we last met in November, your committee has written some 14 letters protesting abuses of press freedom. We appealed to the rulers of Burundi, Mexico, Jordan, China, Kenya, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan; and we protested the murders of five more journalists -- one each in Mexico, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, and two in Russia.

Since we last met in November, your committee has written some 14 letters protesting abuses of press freedom. We appealed to the rulers of Burundi, Mexico and Jordan to release imprisoned journalists. We asked Bulgaria to put a stop to the growing threat of violence against the media. We criticized China for blocking many of the Web sites it had opened during the Olympic Games. We condemned Kenya and Azerbaijan for passing new and repressive press laws. We wrote to Russia to deplore the beating of a dozen journalists who were trying to cover a peaceful protest in Vladivostok, and to Kazakhstan to express outrage after an editor was snatched from his hospital bed by police and hauled away to be held, incommunicado, at a secret location. And we protested the murders of five more journalists -- one each in Mexico, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, and two in Russia.

Let me report in more detail on two cases.

The human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, was famous in Russia for his work for civil rights and social justice. He had worked closely with the murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya to expose injustice and official misconduct, particularly in Chechnya, and recently he was trying to slow the rising wave of neo-fascist and xenophobic violence in Russia. On January 19, Markelov had just left a news conference at which he vowed to continue to fight the early parole of a former Russian tank commander who had been convicted of murdering a young Chechen woman.

On a central Moscow street in broad daylight, an assassin walked up behind Markelov and shot him in the head with a pistol equipped with a silencer. When Anastasia Baburova, a young journalist walking with Markelov, tried to stop the murderer, she too was shot in the head and killed. Baburova was a journalism student and had been an intern at Novaya Gazeta since October. She is the fourth Novaya Gazeta journalist to be killed since Vladimir Putin took office in 2000; the others included Politkovskaya. She was the second journalist to be murdered in the course of a week. Just a few days before the killings in Moscow , Shafig Amrakhov, the editor of a regional on-line news agency, was ambushed and shot in his apartment building in Murmansk .

By our count, this brings the total number of journalists murdered in Russia to 23 since Putin came to power. In only one case has anyone been convicted; in all of them, the masterminds remain at large. Putin is now prime minister and at least equal partner of the current president, Dmitri Medevev. We wrote to both of them that Russia is now "approaching a state of barbarism," and we urged them yet again to reverse their policy and begin to protect journalists in Russia. We are not optimistic.

Nor are we hopeful about Sri Lanka , where the government seems to be winning its long war with the rebel Tamil Tigers while repressing the independent media and publicly attacking journalists as traitors for breaking the party line. The latest victim was Lasantha Wickrematunge, the courageous editor of the opposition weekly, Sunday Leader, who was shot and killed by two gunmen on a motorcycle on January 8. If you haven't checked out our Web site recently, I recommend reading his last editorial, which his paper published after his death. Aimee has posted it prominently on our home page. In it, Wickrematunge recalls being brutally beaten twice, and having his home sprayed with machine-gun fire. "Despite the government's sanctimonious assurances," he writes, "there was never a serious police inquiry into the perpetrators of these attacks, and the attackers were never apprehended. In all these cases, I have reason to believe the attacks were inspired by the government." And he predicts: "When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me."

The irony in this, writes Wickrematunge, is that he has been a long-time close personal friend of Sri Lanka 's president, Mahinda Rajapaksa. With a few other close friends, he had been going to the president's house regularly to "swap yarns, discuss politics and joke about the good old days." But Wickrematunge never hesitated to criticize Rajapaksa or his government. And in the last editorial, he laments that his friend has gone from a righteous fighter for human rights to a tyrant, drunk with power, who has reduced the country to rubble. "I feel sorry for you," he tells the president. "As for me, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I walked tall and bowed to no man."

He surely did. Lasantha Wickrematunge deserves all the honors a journalist can get, and we should all be humbled by his example.