Russian Deadly for Journalists
The names of more than 200 employees of the media who have been killed in Russia in the last 15 years was read yesterday at a memorial service. According to the Russian Union of Journalists, that list grew by 13 names this year. Most of them died in accidents or in situations not directly related to their professions, but the killings of Anna Politkovskaya and Evgeny Gerasimov, who was investigating industrial takeovers, can be considered directly connected to their journalistic efforts.
According to the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, more than 40 journalists have died while performing their professional duties in Russia (mainly in Chechnya) and another 20 deaths have been categorized as “uninvestigated or suspicious.” Russia occupies third place in the world, after Iraq and Algeria, for the number of journalists killed.
There have also been seven disappearances of journalists since 2001, practically all of which can be connected to crimes motivated by their professional activities. Only two of those cases occurred in the North Caucasus. Between 80 and 90 journalists per year experience attacks.
Two organizations provide statistics on journalists' deaths worldwide. According to the World Organization of Newspapers, there were 28 journalists' deaths in 1998, and 109 in the first three quarters of this year. Committee to Protect Journalists data show that 580 journalists have been killed since 1992, and 55 this year. In either case, the increasing fatality in recent years is clear.
The Committee to Protect Journalists noted that 70 percent of the deaths it registered were murders and 18 percent were random fire. Of those deaths, 20.5 percent could be attributed to the government, almost a quarter to opposition groups 12.6 percent to criminal groups. In 2006, 134 journalists were sentenced to prison, mainly in China, Algeria and Eritrea. Of the 580 deaths since 1992, 78 of them were in Iraq, 60 in Algeria and 42 in Russia. Russia has a notable low incidence of solution of the murder of journalists.
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All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 18, 2006
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