Freedom of the Press Committee Changing of the Guard

Report of the FOP Committee for June 2011

by Kevin McDermott

In all likelihood this is my last FOP report to the Board.  After 15 years as co-chair I am stepping down at the end of this summer.

I’m sure Jeremy Main won’t mind if I let you know that he, after ten years on the committee, will also be moving on once September comes.  The soul of the Club’s press freedom work — Larry Martz — remains.  But it would be unfair to expect Larry to carry the current workload of the committee alone — unfair and a missed opportunity.

Between now and the end of summer a small group of us — including Jeremy, Larry, President David Andelman, former Presidents Bill Holstein and Allan Dodds Frank, and several others — will be working on a new blueprint for the Club’s press freedom activities.  We are exploring several ideas, among them my strong suggestion that the chair of the press-freedom committee be drawn from among the Board of Governors.

Throughout the past 15 years — most of them as a board member and all of them as a member of the FOP committee — it has been my ambition to make press-freedom as central to the Club’s identity as its annual awards.  Making that happen requires the active involvement of the board in the work of the FOP committee, and a potent way of encouraging that activism would be by institutionalizing the board’s presence on the committee.

We’ll report back on our recommendations come September.  In the meantime, since our last report:

  • We expressed our horror to Mexican president Felipe Calderon at the slaughter of prominent Veracruz columnist Miguel Ángel López Velasco, murdered last week along with along with his wife, Agustina Solano de López, and their 21-year-old son Misael.  The three were killed by assailants who broke down the door of their home at 5:30 in the morning.  A motive for the murders has not been determined, but Lopez Velasco’s role as editorial director of the newspaper Notivermade him a prominent figure and possible target.
  • In a strongly worded protest to Kyrgyzstan president Roza Otunbayeva we described our outrage that Kyrgyz authorities have filed separate criminal charges against Khalil Khudaiberdiyev and Dzhavlon Mirzakhodzhayev of Osh TV.  The two have been accused of organizing and participating in mass disorder, calling for separatism, inciting inter-ethnic and religious hatred, abusing their office and creating an armed group.  Both men have left the country for their safety and are currently being tried in absentia.
  • The Club was among the first press-freedom organizations to respond to the shocking torture and murder of well-known Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad on May 29th.  Calling it “a dark stain on Pakistan’s democracy,” we told President Asif Al Zadari that the circumstances surrounding Shahzad’s death suggest that individuals within Pakistan’s military services may be implicated.  Shahzad was bureau chief of the Asian Times Online and the Italian news agency, Adnkronos International.  He recently published a story suggesting that Pakistan’s Navy had been incompetent in allowing an attack on its base in Karachi on May 22 by militants affiliated with Al Qaeda.
  • The committee has also been active on behalf of Elmar Huseynov, the Azerbijani editor of Monitor magazine murdered more than six years ago.  Recent Azerbaijani media reports strongly suggest that government agencies are seeking to withhold information regarding the persons involved in the killing.  The Committee will continue to do all it can to keep the case visible.
  • Finally Honduras, a country to which the Committee has given special attention in the past two years.  In late May two more media figures, a TV news program host and the owner of a TV station, were murdered in the space of a week, bringing the number of journalists killed in Honduras since March of 2010 to a total of 11.  At that rate Honduras is competing with Mexico in the slaughter of journalists.