PARIS: Nearly 1,700 journalists, including 93 Pakistanis, have been killed worldwide in the past 20 years, an average of more than 80 annually, according to an analysis published by Reporters Without Borders.
Paris-based media rights campaigners said the two decades between 2003 and 2022 were “particularly deadly decades for those who serve the right to information.”
“Behind the numbers, there are faces, personalities, skills and determination of people who have sacrificed their lives to gather information, seek the truth and pay for their passion for journalism,” said RSF Secretary General Christophe Delois. paid.”
RSF said Iraq and Syria were the most dangerous countries to work as journalists, “killing a total of 578 journalists over the past 20 years, or more than a third of the worldwide total”.
They are followed by Mexico (125), Philippines (107), Pakistan (93), Afghanistan (81) and Somalia (78).
The “darkest years” were 2012 and 2013, “largely because of the war in Syria”. The report said there were 144 murders in 2012 and 142 the following year.
This peak was followed by a “gradual decline and then historically low figures since 2019”.
Putin’s influence
But deaths rose again in 2022 due to the war in Ukraine. So far this year, 58 journalists have been killed doing their jobs, up from 51 in 2021.
Eight journalists have been killed in Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February. This compares to a total of 12 media deaths over the past 19 years.
After Russia, Ukraine is currently the most dangerous country for media in Europe, where 25 journalists have been killed in the last 20 years.
“Since (President) Vladimir Putin took power, Russia has seen systematic attacks on press freedom — including deadly ones — as RSF has repeatedly reported.
“These include the high-profile murder of Anna Politkovskaya on October 7, 2006,” the rights group said.
Elsewhere in Europe, Turkey was ranked third most dangerous, followed by France “as a result of the 2015 massacre at satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris”.
American tool
Reporters face the greatest risks around the world in areas of armed conflict.
But, RSF stressed, “Countries where there is no official war are not necessarily safe for journalists and some of them are at the top of the list of those where there have been casualties.
“In fact, more journalists have been killed in ‘zones of peace’ than ‘zones of war’ over the past two decades, in most cases because they were investigating organized crime and corruption.”
The United States is responsible for nearly half of the killings of journalists, many in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Honduras.
The US is clearly the most dangerous continent in the world for media today, RSF said.
