On July 17, 2013, the UN Security Council met to discuss the “protection of journalists in armed conflict” and, for the first time in its history, invited journalists themselves to provide testimony. Among those who spoke was Mustafa Haji Abdinur, a reporter from Somalia. “They call me a dead man walking,” he told the council’s members. “Day after day, I tell stories to the world of the people of Somalia, the troubles they face and their hopes for the future. But today I sit here having carried with me the stories of my comrades and colleagues, my fellow journalists who paid the ultimate price for reporting from those same streets.”1
Somalia is one of the most deadly countries for the media in the entire world, with fifty-one journalists killed since 1992, including a dozen in 2012. Haji’s cell phone is filled with the numbers of murdered colleagues. He refuses to delete them. “In such a terrible situation, it is fair to ask: ‘Why become a journalist?’” he continued. “There is no doubt that without a free press there can be no freedom for a country. I tell the council that we have a higher objective for good and that by doing our jobs we feel that we are saving lives.”
Country after country—including representatives from Pakistan and Colombia, both places where journalists have faced systematic violence—pledged to defend press freedom and to combat impunity. “It is clear that all attacks on journalists are unacceptable,” said the Russian ambassador, Vitaly Churkin. Member states also expressed their support for the “UN Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity,” a global strategy to reduce violence against the press.2 The plan is being tested in several key countries, including Iraq, Nepal, South Sudan, and Pakistan, where a March 2013 conference brought together press groups, international donors, human rights organizations, and UN officials.
The UN Security Council session was a milestone. It demonstrated that the world had taken notice of the threat posed by the unchecked killings of journalists and had recognized the link between the ongoing violence and the failure to achieve justice. The murder of journalists represents a threat to global peace and security because it suppresses the flow of information from countries undergoing conflict. As Haji told the council, “When a journalist is killed, the news dies too. A whole society can be forgotten simply because there is no one left to tell its stories.”
The UN action was also a victory for journalists and press freedom advocates around the world, who for years had pushed for greater international attention to stem the tide of violence. Murder, after all, is the ultimate form of censorship. Killing journalists not only suppresses coverage; it produces fear and self-censorship, which ripple through the press corps. Statistics compiled by press freedom organizations including CPJ suggest that the number of journalists murdered has skyrocketed in recent years.3 Murders in conflict zones carried out by terror groups are one reason, and those causes and consequences were discussed in chapter 3. But many killings are tied to criminal organizations, military forces, and political factions that operate with government support or protection. Journalists targeted are primarily local reporters covering crime, corruption, and human rights. Government officials are directly implicated in nearly a quarter of all journalists killed worldwide since 1992. In around 90 percent of all cases, the murders are carried out with impunity, meaning no one is ever convicted of a crime.4
Based on data of journalists killed since 1992, CPJ publishes an annual “Impunity Index,” which ranks the countries around the world where journalists are systematically murdered and the killers routinely go free. Topping the list are conflict-ravaged countries like Iraq and Somalia. But most of the other countries on the list are nominal democracies that are not at war. The Philippines, for example, has the third-highest rate of impunity for journalist killings in the world. Mexico is seventh on the list; Russia is ninth.5 Fighting against impunity in countries like Syria, Somalia, and Iraq is necessary, but prospects for justice are low. In other countries it is possible to make progress by exposing the crimes, rallying the public, and then pressuring the authorities to take specific, concrete steps to achieve justice. The goal is to create a dynamic in which failure to solve the crime results in a direct political cost for the government in power, at least in terms of its international reputation.
In 1995 the Inter-American Press Association, a publishers’ group that fights for press freedom in the Americas, began a regional anti-impunity campaign. IAPA’s effort, launched with support from the Miami-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, sought to investigate journalist murders, track progress, mobilize public support through a hemisphere-wide media campaign, pressure public officials, and push for legal action.6 While these efforts helped achieve a notable number of convictions, journalist killings remain an acute problem in a number of Latin American countries including Mexico, Brazil, and Honduras. Other groups, including CPJ, Reporters Without Borders, the International Press Institute, and the International Federation of Journalists, have all made impunity a key focus of their advocacy over the last decade. In 2011, international, regional, and domestic press freedom organizations joined forces in a global anti-impunity campaign coordinated by the International Freedom of Expression Exchange, or IFEX, a global network of freedom of expression organizations headquartered in Toronto, Canada.7
It is notable that governments and international institutions like the United Nations have now publically recognized the scope of the problem. There have also been declines in the level of violence against the press in a number countries, including Colombia, where overall security has increased as the civil war has ebbed. But globally levels of violence against journalists remain exceedingly high and convictions remain exceedingly rare.
This chapter looks at two very different countries where journalists have been targeted with murder and violence: Russia and the Philippines. In each, some combination of international and domestic pressure has forced the government to take action. In each, there has been some measure of progress, and in Russia the rate of violence has slowed. Yet fear and self-censorship have become deeply embedded in the press corps in both countries. In this environment, the flow of information to the world depends almost entirely on the willingness of journalists to risk their lives to report the news. “All of my colleagues who have been killed had one thing in common: they were committed to telling the story of their country to the rest of the world,” Mustafa Haji told the UN Security Council, pledging to continue his own work despite the risk. “They may call me a dead man walking, but I report the news.”
No Justice in Russia
Three days after the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building, Russian president Vladimir Putin finally stepped forward to condemn her murder. Tellingly, he did so not in Russia but in Germany, where Putin was meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel. Putin described Politkovskaya’s killing as an “unacceptable crime that cannot be allowed to go unpunished.” But he also felt compelled to note that Politkovskaya’s “influence on political life in the country was extremely insignificant in scale. She was known in journalist and human rights circles, but her influence on political life in Russia was minimal.” Putin’s description was undoubtedly accurate, but his effort to minimize the importance of Russia’s most courageous investigative journalist so soon after her murder was deeply hurtful. What Putin didn’t say was that Politkovskaya’s influence was limited in Russia because she had been banned from appearing on the country’s private television networks, all beholden to the Kremlin.
Politkovskaya was forty-eight at the time of her death. She had spent seven years of the previous decade as an investigative reporter with the fiercely independent Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta. She was murdered on October 7, 2006, while returning from grocery shopping. Her killer shot her three times in the chest and shoulder before delivering the coup de grace as she lay on the ground. He casually tossed his silencer-equipped gun to the ground before fleeing the scene. For days following the killing, flowers piled up outside Politkovskaya’s building, and there were small rallies to demand justice. But there was no mass outcry.
Outside of Russia, however, the response was very different. Politkovskaya had been repeatedly honored internationally for her courageous human rights reporting. I had a chance to meet her when she visited New York to receive an award and was inspired by her physical courage and intellectual fearlessness, which at times bordered on the reckless. Her books on the war on Chechnya—which featured detailed descriptions of depravities committed by the Russian forces, chronicles of civilian suffering, and unstinting denunciations of the Russian leadership, including Putin himself—had been widely translated.8
After her killing, there were demonstrations in cities throughout Europe, condemnations from governments around the world, and a flurry of letters and protests from press freedom and human rights groups. As international pressure on Russia mounted, the Russian government shifted its approach, at times adopting a defiant posture, at other times seeking to show progress in bringing the killers to justice. Through repeated engagement with Russian officials over many years I saw the positive influence of international advocacy—and also its clear limitations.
The Politkovskaya killing was not an isolated incident. In fact, Politkovskaya was the thirteenth journalist to be murdered since Putin became president in 2000. Among the other prominent victims was the American journalist Paul Klebnikov, an investigative reporter who founded Forbes Russia. He was killed while leaving his Moscow office on July 9, 2004, by a gunman who fired nine times from a moving car. Klebnikov had covered a variety of topics, from crony capitalism to political scandals, and had made many powerful enemies in the process. Like Politkovskaya he had closely investigated the web of corruption and kickbacks tying the Kremlin to the massive state-funded program in Chechnya that had transformed the capital Grozny from a rubble-strewn ruin into a gleaming showcase of the reconstruction effort.9 Politkovskaya, for one, was not fooled. Her reporting often focused on exposing Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, whom she accused of crimes ranging from skimming reconstruction funds to personally overseeing torture sessions. Ramzan, who had succeeded his father Akhmad, a former separatist rebel who was assassinated in 2004 after he abandoned their cause and switched to the Russian side, was not pleased. He was reported to have condemned Politkovskaya to death during a meeting with his advisors.10
Three months after Politkovskaya’s murder, in January 2007, I traveled to Moscow along with CPJ’s chairman Paul Steiger, board member Norman Pearlstine, and Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova. We had come to deliver hundreds of petitions addressed to Putin and collected at CPJ’s International Press Freedom Awards dinner the previous November. Ognianova pushed relentlessly for a high-level meeting, and Russian authorities seemed unsure of how to respond. While they didn’t want to confer legitimacy on our concerns, they couldn’t simply ignore us given our visibility and the level of international concern. We were eventually able to secure a meeting with Ella Pamfilova, the chairwoman of the Russian Human Rights Council, a quasi-independent body created by Putin to advise him on human rights issues. Over tea and cookies, Pamfilova expressed sympathy for our cause. When we handed her the four hundred petitions, she offered to deliver them personally to President Putin.
We also met with a second-tier foreign ministry official named Boris Malakhov, who had served as a Soviet diplomat in the United States. The meeting got off to an unpromising start, with Malakhov mounting a potted defense of Russia’s human rights record. But he then dropped a bombshell. The Prosecutor General’s office had informed him that morning that it was investigating the possible involvement of Chechen police in the Politkovskaya killing. The Chechen police, who report directly to Kadyrov, may have killed Politkovskaya, Malakhov told us, because she was about to publish an investigation alleging their involvement in torture. Malakhov had clearly wanted to demonstrate to our visiting delegation that Russian investigators were making progress. But he had not been authorized to provide to us a detailed update on the investigation, and when we announced the results of our meeting at a press conference held on January 23 we set off a firestorm.11
Malakhov, under pressure from the Prosecutor General, denied that he made the statement.12 But there was no possibility of misunderstanding. The meeting had been conducted in English and attended by two renowned editors, Steiger and Pearlstine, who confirmed Malakhov’s comments. The revelation of possible official involvement in the Politkovskaya killing implicated Kadyrov, who issued a vaguely menacing statement calling our announcement a “carefully planned provocation.”13 Kadyrov was widely perceived as untouchable thanks to his role in restoring some semblance of stability in Chechnya. He was also widely suspected of involvement in corruption and kickback schemes involving reconstruction funds that implicated senior Kremlin officials, schemes uncovered by Politkovskaya herself. Kadyrov’s statement appeared as a warning to the Russian media that had covered our press conference not to pursue the story further.
The Malakhov meeting had clearly been a disaster from the perspective of the Russian government. It generated media headlines around the world quoting a Russian official as suggesting possible state involvement in the Politkovskaya killing. It exposed rifts in the Russian leadership, highlighting the division between the Foreign Ministry and the Prosecutor General’s office. It also alienated Kadyrov, a critical if highly problematic Kremlin ally.
By the middle of 2007 the Russian government was taking a new tack. Instead of minimizing the Politkovskaya murder and dismissing international criticism, the Putin government had decided to engage. “For our country . . . the issue of journalist persecution is one of the most pressing,” Putin said during his annual press conference on February 1, 2007. “And we realize our degree of responsibility in this.”14 In an apparent breakthrough in August of that year, Russian prosecutors announced the arrest of ten suspects in the Politkovskaya murder (an eleventh suspect was arrested soon after). That same month, five members of a criminal gang in the republic of Tatarstan were convicted of carrying out the 2000 murder of the Novaya Gazeta reporter Igor Domnikov. These were the first convictions in a journalist’s killing since Vladimir Putin had come to office.15
But the effort to demonstrate a commitment to justice in the Politkovskaya murder was subverted by the incompetence of prosecutors and the clear deficiencies in Russia’s criminal justice system. By the time the trial got under way in November 2008, only four of the original eleven suspects were still in custody. In the dock were two brothers, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, accused of serving as lookouts, and a former policeman accused of organizing the killing. The trial was marred from the outset by a hamfisted effort to bar the media. The prosecution’s case was based almost entirely on circumstantial evidence, which the defense lawyer demolished. The jury took less than two hours to render its verdict, and on February 19, 2009, the defendants were acquitted. Politkovskaya’s family and colleagues blamed the prosecutor’s office for failing to present sufficient evidence but more broadly for focusing on minor figures in the conspiracy at the expense of the masterminds. Citing procedural violations, the Supreme Court overturned the acquittals a few months later and ordered a new trial.
Meanwhile, in an alarming setback in the larger battle against impunity, two more journalists were murdered in 2009, both from Novaya Gazeta. In January, gunmen brazenly executed the prominent human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and the twenty-five-year-old reporter Anastasia Baburova on a Moscow street corner. In July, four men forced the renowned human rights advocate and contributor to Novaya Gazeta and other publications Natalya Estemirova into a car in Grozny, Chechnya, executed her, and dumped her body. Estemirova was a close friend of Politkovskaya and had been personally threatened by Kadyrov at a meeting a month before her killing, according to a statement by Memorial, the Russian human rights group for which she worked.16 Dmitry Medvedev, who by then had replaced Putin as president while Russia’s maximum leader endured a hiatus in the prime minister’s office, condemned both murders and even took the unprecedented step of meeting with Novaya Gazeta’s editor, Dmitry Muratov.
In September 2009 CPJ released a seventy-two-page report on the failure of Russian authorities to achieve justice in the killing of (by then) seventeen journalists since Putin first assumed the presidency 2000. Anatomy of Injustice: The Unsolved Killings of Journalists in Russia featured contributions from a variety of Russian and international experts and identified incompetence, secrecy, conflicts of interest, corruption, and political interference as the primary impediments to successful prosecutions. The CPJ delegation that traveled to Moscow to release the report was led by the board member Kati Marton and included Ognianova and a senior adviser, Jean-Paul Marthoz. During their visit, they had the opportunity to meet with a team of eleven investigators looking into the various journalist murders. The meeting was contentious at times, but the mere fact that the Russian government was willing to give CPJ direct access to the investigators was encouraging. Two weeks earlier the Russian Supreme Court returned the Politkovskaya case to the prosecutor’s office for further investigation and ordered that separate cases against the triggermen and organizers be merged. Marton and Ognianova were able to secure a commitment from the Investigative Committee to meet again in a year’s time to provide a progress report.
In September 2010 Marton, Steiger, Ognianova, Marthoz, and I returned to Moscow for the update.17 This time, the officials were extremely well prepared. The day we arrived the Russian government announced the reorganization of the office of the Investigative Committee that carries out criminal probes and gathers evidence for prosecutors. Since the founding of the new Russian state, the Investigative Committee had reported to the Prosecutor General, who in turn reported to the presidency. Under the reorganization, the Investigative Committee would operate independently, and its head, Aleksandr Bastrykin, would report directly to President Medvedev. Bastrykin told us the reorganization was an effort to professionalize the Investigative Committee, turning it into the Russian version of the FBI. “I want to be Russia’s J. Edgar Hoover,” Bastrykin told us. Given Hoover’s reputation for running roughshod over civil liberties, his pronouncement was not necessarily reassuring. But the meeting was extremely positive. The breakthrough came when we handed Bastrykin a list of (now) nineteen journalists murdered in the line of duty since 2000, when Putin first became president. Instead of quibbling with our findings, as Russian officials had sometimes done previously, Bastrykin asked a team of about a dozen investigators arrayed around the large conference table to provide detailed briefings on the status of each of the cases.
The lead investigator on the Politkovskaya murder Petros Garibyan told us that the killers were motivated by a desire to ingratiate themselves with President Kadyrov. This was different from what Malakhov had told us two years earlier, and the new legal theory did not implicate the Chechen police or Kadyrov directly. Nevertheless, his statement seemed to be a signal to Kadyrov that he should not get too comfortable. Bastrykin added that the suspected triggerman in the Politkovskaya murder, Rustam Makhmudov, had been identified and was in hiding in Belgium. He also acknowledged that prosecutors had “rushed” the earlier case against two accomplices to court, a mistake he was determined not to repeat.
At our behest, the Investigative Committee agreed to reopen five murder investigations, including the 2003 death of Novaya Gazeta’s deputy editor Yuri Shchekochikhin, whose colleagues believe he was poisoned. Shchekochikhin was a legendary (if unconventional) figure in the Russian journalism world. He used his status as a member of the state Duma to report on classified government activities, including a scandal involving a chain of furniture stores that he alleged were being used by the FSB—the successor to the KGB—to launder money through the Bank of New York. A friend to both radical activists and FSB colonels, he died after succumbing to a never-diagnosed “allergy” that killed him within days as his organs failed one by one and his skin flaked off his body. Some compared his symptoms to those exhibited by Alexander Litvinenko, the exiled FSB agent and Putin critic who died in a London hospital after being poisoned with polonium. Suspicions of possible state involvement in the crime were heightened by the fact that Shchekochikhin’s clinical test results were classified as a “medical secret.”
Investigators also told us they were optimistic about obtaining convictions in the murder of the Novaya Gazeta freelancer Anastasiya Baburova and the human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov. The two were shot down on a busy Moscow street corner on January 19, 2009, after Markelov held a press conference to denounce the early release of a Russian army colonel, Yuri Budanov, who had been convicted of kidnapping and killing an eighteen-year-old Chechen girl. Baburova, a twenty-five-year-old reporter specializing in the coverage of neo-Nazi groups, was walking with Markelov after the press conference when they were approached by a masked gunman who shot Markelov in the head with a silencer-equipped pistol and then gunned down Baburova when she tried to intercede. A few months after our meeting, a jury in Moscow convicted the radical nationalists Nikita Tikhonov and his common-law wife Yevgeniya Khasis in the killings. Tikhonov was sentenced to life in prison and Khasis to eighteen years.
On May 31, 2011, Rustam Makhmudov was arrested in Chechnya. He had returned from Belgium to escape the Belgian police, who had intensified their search. He went on trial in July 2013 with his brothers Dzhabrail and Ibragim, who were alleged to have served as lookouts and accomplices. Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, their uncle, also went on trial for having organized the hit on behalf of an unidentified mastermind. A former police officer is accused of being the organizer. All were originally acquitted in the 2009 verdict overturned by Russia’s Supreme Court.18 They were sentenced to long prison terms in June 2014. Anna Politkovskaya’s children, Ilya and Vera, boycotted the legal process, which they described as illegitimate. They accused investigators of failing to pursue the masterminds and were particularly disappointed by the December 2012 plea arrangement with the former police official Lt. Col Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, who is serving eleven years in prison for his role in coordinating the hit team. Under the terms of his agreement Pavlyuchenkov was required to help identify the mastermind of the crime. But Politkovskaya family representatives and editors at Novaya Gazeta said that he failed to cooperate. Large portions of his trial were held in secret and closed to the press.19
Who is the mastermind? In his remarks immediately following the murder, Putin suggested that the murder was organized “outside the country,” implicitly pointing the finger at Boris Berezovsky, the exiled oligarch and sworn Putin enemy who committed suicide in his London home in March 2013. Berezovsky’s name, however, has never surfaced in any of my meetings with Russian investigators. The name I kept hearing was Kadyrov. Kadyrov certainly has a motive. Politkovskaya’s reporting had not only exposed his role in torture and other gross human rights violations but also chronicled the widespread corruption associated with the reconstruction effort. Kadyrov has also been linked to many other political killings in Chechnya, including the Estemirova killing.
More than a decade after Putin first came to power and seven years after the brutal murder that shocked the conscience of the world, what have been the benefits and limitations of the strategy of engagement around impunity? While justice is at best partial, low-level perpetrators have been convicted in three journalists’ murders, including in the Politkovskaya case. Violence against journalists in Russia continues, but at significantly lower levels than seen earlier in the decade. More recent media killings have taken place in the conflict-ravaged North Caucasus, not on Moscow street corners. In Russia investigators are extremely capable, undoubtedly a Soviet-era legacy. After years of working there, I have come to the conclusion that the investigations are generally able to “solve” the crimes and that the leadership knows who carried out the killings. However, they have blocked or limited prosecutions because those identified as the likely perpetrators operate with some level of official protection. During an extended visit to Moscow in the summer of 2011, Ognianova met with a senior official in the office of the Investigative Committee to push for more aggressive action in the Estemirova and Politkovskaya cases. Frustrated and exasperated by the relentless pressure, the investigator finally laid it on the table. “Russia would rather have five human rights activists killed than arrest Kadyrov,” he said, his voice rising. “If you want to start another war in the North Caucasus, go ahead and arrest Kadyrov.” In Russia justice is nothing more than a crude political calculation.
Putin, back in the presidency since 2012 after completing a six-year switch with Dmitry Medvedev, has recognized the damage to the country’s international reputation caused by the murders of journalists that have received so much attention. In recent years, Russia has become less violent and more repressive. The “democratator” strategy described in chapter 2 today takes precedence over the policy of official tolerance for the criminal mafias that left too many bodies on the street. Some have noted that Politkovskaya was murdered on Putin’s birthday, suggesting that her killers may have wanted to give Putin a present. Today, murder is a gift he does not want.
Murder in Mindanao
In Russia, which under Putin has experienced a decade of political stability and economic growth, the media is tightly controlled. In the Philippines, which has stagnated economically, the political culture is freewheeling, volatile, competitive, and deeply corrupt. The media is largely open and vibrant. What Russia and the Philippines share is a history of violence against journalists that has landed them both squarely on CPJ’s Impunity Index.
In the Philippines, the press is both a check on power and an enabler of corruption. In the provinces, many journalists are under the sway of local political bosses who pay them to provide positive stories about them and negative coverage of their political rivals. This form of journalism had become so pervasive that it even has a name: AC/DC, for Attack Collect/Defend Collect. The victims of these paid smear campaigns have not always taken the criticism in stride. With guns rampant in the provinces, disputes are often settled with violence. Murders are almost never solved.
The Philippines also has a strong tradition of crusading reporting and a small but vital cadre of investigative journalists. The pervasive culture of impunity makes these journalists equally vulnerable to violent attack. Among the best-known journalists to be killed was Marlene Garcia-Esperat, a whistleblower and columnist from the volatile island of Mindanao. Her 2005 murder convulsed the nation.
Because of her unyielding temperament and her flashy attire, Garcia-Esperat was nicknamed the Erin Brockovich of the Philippines. The daughter of a prominent politician in Tacurong, she was encouraged from a young age to fight injustice and corruption. After obtaining a degree in chemistry—a rarity for a woman in the Philippines—she took a position at the Ministry of Agriculture in Cotabato in Mindanao, testing livestock for chemical exposure. The work should have been routine, but something was deeply amiss. In 1989, less than a year before Garcia-Esperat started in her position at the Agriculture Ministry, another employee in the same department had been murdered in what was purported to be a botched robbery. There were rumors linking the killing to the department’s top regional finance official, a man named Osmeña Montañer. Another Agriculture Department worker who also alleged corruption against Montañer had been shot and left in a coma. She eventually recovered.20
It didn’t take Garcia-Esperat long in her new position for her to confirm that funds were going missing. Despite generous allocations from the federal government, her lab was woefully equipped. By 1996, after years of digging, she had uncovered evidence of a massive corruption scheme, and the following year she filed formal complaints with federal authorities. The day before auditors were to arrive from Manila to carry out an investigation, the Agriculture Department building housing the evidence was burned to the ground in a suspicious fire. Furious, Garcia-Esperat went to the press for the first time, giving an interview to a local newspaper, the Midland Review, and a radio station, DXKR. After being warned that her life was in danger, Garcia-Esperat fled to Manila with the documents she had salvaged from the fire and entered a witness protection program. Montañer and his driver were charged with arson, but the charges were later dropped.
Garcia-Esperat spent two years living in a rundown Manila safe house separated from her family, but the case against Montañer went nowhere. Disillusioned and furious, she returned to Mindanao and decided to pursue justice through a different means—the media. She bought time on DXKR for a radio program, and as her notoriety grew she was eventually given a weekly column in the Midland Review, entitled “Madam Witness.” She also made arrangements to bring the story of corruption in the Agriculture Department to the national media in collaboration with a journalism nonprofit, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, or PCIJ.
As Garcia-Esperat become more prominent the death threats grew. She was warned repeatedly about plots against her life. She dismissed them, telling an interviewer, “I grew up on bullets.” But she was scared. In February 2005 she wrote a letter to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo informing her that “military intelligence operatives are allegedly out to liquidate the undersigned and silence her forever.” The following month, an assassin who had been casing her home for weeks finally saw an opportunity. After Marcia-Esperat sent her bodyguard home for the Easter holiday, the gunmen slipped into her home. He greeted her with a friendly “Hello, ma’am,” then shot her in the face as she sat at the table enjoying a holiday meal with her family. Her young children witnessed the horrific crime.
Unlike the Politkovskaya murder in Russia, Garcia-Esperat’s killing sparked widespread outrage and indignation in the Philippines. The Philippines not only has a strong independent media but also a community of press freedom advocates including unions and human rights groups who spearheaded protests and pushed for action. International groups amplified the pressure by sending open letters to high officials in the Philippine government. Based on a careful analysis of available data, CPJ declared the Philippines the “most murderous country for journalists” in the world, more deadly than Iraq at the time.21 While President Macapagal-Arroyo disputed that characterization, she was forced by the public pressure to take action. In May 2005, she gave a press conference flanked by Garcia-Esperat’s two young sons and announced that the Justice Department was being given a “green light” to go after the masterminds of the murder. She also announced the creation of a special task force to investigate journalists’ killings. Over the next year, investigators made significant progress in apprehending the organizers of the Garcia-Esperat murder, who quickly turned state’s witness. The former military intelligence officer Rowie Barua affirmed that he had been hired by Montañer and his assistant Estrella Sabay to carry out the killing.
The Garcia-Esperat case appeared for a time as a fleeting opportunity to overcome the culture of impunity in the Philippines. With Nena Santos, Garcia-Esperat’s lawyer and personal friend, spearheading the quest for justice, and with support from leading Philippine press groups and the international community, the legal process moved forward in fits and starts. Charges were dismissed, then reinstated. Officialdom was nominally cooperative. It was a relatively simple matter to get an appointment with the special police task force set up by President Arroyo to investigate the journalists’ murders, and investigators were more than happy to meet with international visitors and give presentations outlining progress. There were also some exceptionally committed public servants like Leo Dacera, a Justice Department official who without the full support of his bosses made investigating journalists’ murders a personal crusade. Nominally the head of the witness protection program, Dacera was also leading the Garcia-Esperat prosecution and, with the assistance of Nena Santos, was pushing back against efforts by Montañer and Sabay to delay the proceedings. A February 2008 conference on “Impunity and Press Freedom” attracted nearly two hundred participants, including representatives of the Philippine government. The conference’s keynote speaker, Supreme Court Chief Justice Reynato Puno, declared, “Bullets fired in the direction of journalists pierce not only human flesh, but also our republican ideals.” His remarks made headlines.22
Despite these efforts, the case against Montañer and Sabay eventually stalled. In December 2009 an appellate court quashed the outstanding arrest warrants against the officials, who reportedly returned to work at the Agriculture Department in February 2010.23
There were other reasons beyond the dysfunctional Philippine criminal justice system why the case did not move forward. Nena Santos told me during a visit to Manila that she had documents linking the corruption in the Agricultural Department in Mindanao directly to the president’s husband, Jose Miguel Arroyo. The corruption was not just about money. According to widespread media reports, the funds were part of a widespread vote-buying scheme in Mindanao that had helped President Arroyo win reelection in 2004.
The public pressure had put the issue of impunity firmly on the national agenda, and while President Arroyo made a show of responding, her range of action was limited by her own corrupt dependence on powerful military and regional political bosses to deliver votes and maintain the system of federal government largesse that kept her in power. The regional bosses responsible for many of the killings continued to thwart justice, gumming up the legal system with endless appeals. In meetings with Philippine officials, press freedom groups insisted that that unless the impunity issue was addressed as a priority the violence would continue and might possibly grow. But we could not have imagined what came next.
On the morning of November 23, 2009, at around 9 a.m., a convoy of six cars pulled out from the home of Esmael “Toto” Mangudadatu, the vice mayor of the town of Buluan in Mindanao. Mangudadatu had decided to run for governor of Maguindanao province, and in order to launch his candidacy he needed to file papers in the provincial capital of Shariff Aguak. The problem was that Shariff Aguak was controlled by a rival family, the Ampatuans, who had long dominated political power in the region. Mangudadatu was a formidable figure in his own right and had previously been an ally of the Ampatuans. But the family patriarch Andal Ampatuan Sr. made clear that he would not tolerate a political challenge. Mangudadatu knew he was a marked man but assumed that according to Muslim tradition his female relatives would not be harmed. He dispatched his wife and sisters to file the candidacy on his behalf. To increase their security he invited local journalists to accompany them. More than thirty journalists took him up on the offer and joined the convoy.
That same morning another convoy of six or seven vehicles left the compound of Andal Ampatuan Jr. in Shariff Aguak and headed southeast. Andal Jr., the volatile and violent son of the Ampatuan patriarch, had organized a force that included one hundred men, among them elements from the local police, as well as a Hummer mounted with a.50-caliber machine gun. In a scrubby field at the end of a dirt road, Ampatuan’s men had dug three massive trenches using backhoes emblazoned with the family name.
The Ampatuan clan has dominated politics in Maguindanao since the Marcos era but had consolidated their control under President Arroyo. The arrangement was fairly simple. In exchange for delivering votes on election day—the casual nature of the fraud was suggested by the fact Arroyo sometimes received more than 100 percent of the vote in towns under Ampatuan control—the family was given a free hand to run the province as its personal domain. The Ampatuans were also permitted to operate a massive private militia, ostensibly “a force multiplier” in the military’s battle against separatist Muslim rebels but in reality a means to intimidate rivals and ensure unchecked political control.
Journalists in the region had long sought to navigate the volatile political environment and had learned to put aside competitive rivalries for the sake of security. They were not a particularly aggressive bunch; to the contrary, they often made alliances and cut political deals with the Ampatuans. While Mangudadatu had been correct that the presence of the media could serve as a hedge against the worst abuses, and while journalists themselves had calculated correctly that working cooperatively in a large group would increase their overall security, they had both badly miscalculated the level of brutality that Andal Ampatuan Jr. was prepared to employ.
As the convoy carrying journalists and the Mangudadatu relatives drove into the ambush, they were cut off in front and in back. The handful of cell phone calls and text messages that were sent in the initial moments paint a terrifying picture. Mangudadatu’s wife Genalyn managed to get a call out to her husband in which she described people being beaten with rifle butts. A text message sent by one of the journalists read simply, “pray for us, our situation is critical.”
All six cars were immediately commandeered; cell phones and identity documents were apparently confiscated. The cars were driven for approximately half an hour to the field where the killing would take place. The women were executed first; some were reportedly raped and sexually mutilated. They were then tossed into the previously dug graves. The backhoes were used to crush the vehicles, which were also buried. The killers had nearly completed the job by late afternoon when the military arrived on the scene, tipped off by a journalist who, after receiving a cell phone message from a colleague, had alerted the local military commander. The day before, the top military commander had denied a request from a journalist to provide security for the convoy, assuring him that the road was safe.
What became known as the Maguindanao Massacre was the single most deadly day for the media in history.24 Thirty-two journalists and media workers were executed. According to a report prepared by the International Crisis Group, “Some of the killers taken into custody expressed more remorse about the killing of journalists” because they thought they would be targeting the Mangudadutus.25 The journalists’ murders also turned what might have been perceived as a local power struggle into an international incident, partly because it mobilized the domestic and international groups that had already been active in the Garcia-Esperat case.
Within weeks of the killing, Philippine groups, including the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) and Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CFMR), had organized street protests in Manila, rallied the national media, and traveled to Mindanao to carry out an investigation and support the families of the victims. Two weeks later, an international delegation traveled to General Santos City in Mindanao, where the participants held an emotional meeting with the families, visited the graves of the slain journalists to pay their respects, and were briefed by local officials about the status of the investigation. Under intense international pressure the authorities moved quickly to arrest Andal Ampatuan Jr., his father, and dozens of other alleged accomplices, but cracks quickly emerged in the investigation, cracks that would become fissures in the coming weeks and months.
While the trial was moved to Manila to protect against witness tampering, many key witnesses in the case were under extreme pressure. The home of an eyewitness who testified in the bail proceeding that he had seen Andal Ampatuan Jr. murder the first victim with an automatic rifle came under mortar attack, and his lawyer was shot in the neck (he survived). Another witness in the case, a member of the local militia who had acknowledged his participation and agreed to turn state’s witness, was murdered as he was about to enroll in the witness protection program. Men who said they represented the Ampatuans visited the families of those killed and offered enormous sums to the widows if they would agree to sign blank papers.
In July 2010, President Benigno Aquino III succeeded Arroyo as president. The new president had an impressive political pedigree. His mother, Corazon Aquino, entered political life after her husband, Benigno Aquino Jr., was assassinated in 1983. She was sworn in as president three years later after the People Power Revolution, which she helped lead, brought down the Marcos dictatorship. The younger Aquino, known as Noynoy, had campaigned on a platform of reversing the country’s record of impunity and had pledged that justice in the Maguindanao Massacre would be a priority of the new administration. His newly appointed justice minister, Leila de Lima, called it a “litmus test.”
But when CPJ met with members of the Aquino administration at the Malacañan Palace in August 2010, the challenges to a successful prosecution were immense. Only nineteen of 196 suspects in the crime, including Andal Ampatuan Jr.; sixteen police officers; and two private militia members were on trial; forty-seven suspects in custody had not yet been arraigned. Another 130 suspects, including police officials and members of the Ampatuans’ three-thousand-man-strong militia, were still at large. Lawyers for the Ampatuans had filed a flurry of motions that had successfully delayed the legal proceedings. Prosecutors, meanwhile, were forced to rely on the direct testimony of eyewitnesses because much of the forensic evidence had been compromised. In the most egregious example, the bodies of the victims had been extracted from the graves using a backhoe rather than shovels.
The underfunded and inept Philippine justice system was clearly overwhelmed by the complexity of the Maguindanao massacre prosecutions. There were hundreds of suspects, some in custody, some on the loose. The trial was moved to Manila for security reasons, but the change in venue created a tremendous logistical strain and complicated the testimony of eyewitnesses who were already vulnerable to bribery and threats. Overcoming these challenges would require the full focus and attention of the federal government, which was overwhelmed by the nation’s other pressing challenges. The cause of justice also suffered a serious blow when Leo Dacera died of a heart attack on November 4, 2010. He was fifty-four. Dacera had recently been named lead prosecutor in the Maguindanao massacre case.26
The contrast between the Philippines and Russia demonstrates the challenge of fighting impunity at a global level. In Russia, there had been little domestic outcry to the killings of Anna Politkovskaya and other journalists, but the Putin government had pushed forward a handful of prosecutions in order to blunt international criticism. The level of violence against journalists had declined even as the country became more repressive. In the Philippines, meanwhile, the dynamic was exactly reversed. The massive public outpouring in response to the Marcia-Esperat murder and later the Maguindanao massacre put the issue of impunity high on the national agenda. But the government has been unable to deliver justice, both because of the overwhelming deficiencies in the criminal justice system and because of a lack of political will. Violence against journalists in the Philippines continues unabated while the stakes have grown. They were summed up by the journalist Aquiles Zonio, who had been part of the Maguindanao convoy but had turned back prior to the fatal checkpoint because he had forgotten his cell phone. “I believe that Justice will eventually be served to the victims,” he said as he visited the massacre site, today a nondescript clearing overgrown with weeds. “Because if not, this country has no future.”27
On December 18, 2013, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution declaring November 2 “The International Day to End Impunity” of crimes against journalists.28 The designation of the special international day to commemorate the anti-impunity struggle was the culmination of years of advocacy by global press groups, who had initially proposed November 23 to mark the Maguindanao massacre. That date was blocked by the Philippines, which did not want to draw attention to its failure to achieve justice. The November 2 date was a compromise commemorating the death of two French journalists, Ghislaine Dupont and Claude Verlon, who were kidnapped and murdered in 2013 while reporting in Mali.
The resolution called on member states “to do their utmost to prevent violence against journalists and media workers, to ensure accountability through the conduct of impartial, speedy and effective investigations into all alleged violence against journalists and media workers falling within their jurisdiction, and to bring the perpetrators of such crimes to justice and to ensure that victims have access to appropriate remedies.”
As the Garcia-Esperat and Politkovskaya cases illustrate, such outcomes are exceedingly rare at a global level. Indeed, the problem of impunity seems intractable until you dig down into the data. CPJ’s 2013 Impunity Index—which includes all countries in the world where there are at least five unsolved journalist murders over the preceding ten years—lists only twelve countries. While every media killing is a threat to the flow of information, those countries included on the index are the places around the world where the problem is sustained and systematic. Iraq and Somalia, which top the list, are both experiencing active conflicts, and the rule of law is so weak in both countries that the prospect for justice in the current environment is essentially nil. This does not mean that the fight for impunity should be abandoned in either country, or in Syria, which because of the recent spate of killings will be included on the 2014 index. But it must be contemplated as part of a longer-term effort to achieve transitional justice when the circumstances permit.
That leaves ten countries around the world that should be the focus of international attention and action. They are the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Afghanistan, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria, and India. As the case studies in Russia and the Philippines make clear, each country must be approached differently. In Russia, the authoritarian structures have made it possible to translate limited political will into action, and violence has declined. In the Philippines, where both the level of mobilization and government engagement is higher, the weakness of the criminal justice system and lack of government control and influence in key areas of the country make concrete progress more difficult.
The UN Plan of Action on the Issue of Impunity and Safety of Journalists seeks to address the issue in a systematic way. It was developed with considerable input from civil-society and press-freedom groups and emphasizes strategies both for achieving justice and mitigating future risk. The plan states:
Without freedom of expression, and particularly freedom of the press, an informed, active and engaged citizenry is impossible. In a climate where journalists are safe, citizens find it easier to access quality information and many objectives become possible as a result: democratic governance and poverty reduction; conservation of the environment; gender equality and the empowerment of women; justice and a culture of human rights, to name a few. Hence, while the problem of impunity is not restricted to the failure to investigate the murders of journalists and media workers, the curtailment of their expression deprives society as a whole of their journalistic contribution and results in a wider impact on press freedom where a climate of intimidation and violence leads to self-censorship. In such a climate societies suffer because they lack the information needed to fully realize their potential.29
But like all UN plans, there are lots of proclamations and statements of good intentions and less clarity about how the ambitious strategy will be put into action. The plan identifies four countries—Iraq, South Sudan, Nepal, and Pakistan—which are the focus of initial action. Pakistan has been the country of most urgent attention and the increased visibility has resulted in the government formally accepting the UN action plan in October 2013 at a joint conference with media freedom groups.30 But as in the Philippines, the weakness of the criminal justice system will need to be overcome. That challenge will be even more difficult because (as discussed in the introduction to this book) there is compelling evidence that the country’s powerful spy service, the ISI, has been involved in a number of journalist murders.
Fighting impunity means not only applying political pressure. It means supporting governments that seek to build investigative capacity and develop legal infrastructure. In this regard, the case of Mexico is instructive. When I first joined CPJ in 1997, I undertook a reporting trip across Mexico to investigate a series of murders of journalists that had taken place over the previous several years. Because murder is a state crime, the investigations were being undertaken by state prosecutors who not only lacked resources but were often corrupt or threatened by the same people who had carried out the killings. When I met with federal authorities to push for more aggressive action, I was told that the federal government had no authority to intervene in the cases even though the killings represented a fundamental threat to the right to freedom of expression, guaranteed by the 1917 Mexican Constitution.
In July 2000, Vicente Fox Quezada from the conservative National Action Party was elected president of Mexico, ending the six-decade-long reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. With violence against journalists continuing to escalate under his administration, the urgency of federal action became more acute. Under pressure from domestic and international groups, Fox agreed to appoint a special prosecutor for crimes against journalists to coordinate the state-level investigations. He also promised to support legislation making attacks on journalists a federal crime. While Fox followed through and named the special prosecutor in February 2006, without a legal framework for action the effectiveness of the new office was limited.
Throughout the Fox administration and government of Felipe Calderón that followed, the issue languished. Proposed legislation moved forward, then collapsed amid debate in Mexico’s acrimonious Congress. It was not until April 2013—as Calderón’s six-year term was nearing its end—that the legislation was finally passed.31 It will be up to Mexico’s current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, to ensure that the new federal authority is used to deliver justice.
In Sri Lanka, where the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa has consolidated power following the defeat of the Tamil Tigers insurgency in a brutal 2009 military offensive, the immediate goal is necessarily more modest. The government there has shown zero interest in investigating the nine unsolved murders of journalists that have taken place over the last decade but has focused considerable energy on burnishing its international reputation following the defeat of the Tamil Tigers. When Sri Lanka hosted a meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government in November 2013, press freedom and human rights groups from around the world used the opportunity to highlight the country’s terrible human rights and press freedom record. British prime minister David Cameron used the Commonwealth meeting to speak out about ongoing human rights issues and even visited besieged Tamil journalists in Jaffna, in the country’s north.
In Colombia, where violence has declined dramatically and a comprehensive settlement to end the decades-long insurgency seems within reach, the goal is to ensure that those responsible for the wave of media killings are held accountable. While fear and self-censorship remain, Colombia’s situation has undoubtedly improved. The attorney general’s office won the first-ever conviction of the masterminds of a journalist’s killing when three ex-officials, including the former mayor of the town of Barrancabermeja, were sentenced to twenty-eight years’ imprisonment for the 2003 murder of a radio commentator.32
Ultimately, the battle against impunity is a long-term struggle. In lawless and violent societies where powerful groups fight to control information, journalists will continue to be killed. But it is possible to reduce the rate of violence or at least ensure that countries that fail to take aggressive steps to investigate the crimes and bring the killers to justice face a significant political cost. It is also important to recognize that in most cases the motive for killing a journalist is to use violence as a form of censorship. The best way to undermine this logic is by keeping the story itself alive after a journalist is killed. This means supporting journalists and media organizations that continue to cover sensitive issues. Or, in the poignant words of the Mexican investigative reporter Marcela Turati, who founded an organization, Periodistas de Pie, to defend the human rights of journalists covering the drug war, “Don’t abandon us.”33
Impunity must be addressed in the context of a universal right to freedom of expression. But governments also need to recognize that stemming the tide of violence against the press is essential to the creation of a society based on the rule of the law, one in which information and knowledge circulate freely, in which political differences are resolved through public debate, and in which accountability is assured through the public exposure of corruption, abuse, and malfeasance. Murdering journalists is the most brutal and primitive means of controlling information, information that benefits people within a particular society as well as those who seek to access it across borders. Fighting and winning the battle against impunity in the Philippines, Russia, Mexico and Pakistan ultimately requires the recognition of countries all around the world that they have a collective stake in justice.