Friends in high places
By Kevin Uhrich 06/11/2009
Americans were shocked to learn this week that TV reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee each received sentences of 12 years of hard labor in a North Korean prison camp after being convicted by that country’s highest court.
Having already spent nearly three months in captivity for committing what North Korean officials describe as a “grave crime” against the state — depending on which story you’ve heard, they were either trying to sneak into the country through its border with China or captured by overzealous North Korean soldiers who chased the pair into ostensibly safe Chinese territory — Ling, the 32-year-old younger sister of National Geographic reporter Lisa Ling, and Lee, a 26-year-old with a husband and 4-year-old daughter, will now be taken to an undisclosed prison to start serving their time.
Considering North Korea’s nuclear power ambitions, and the West’s absolute horror at the prospect of the North Koreans possessing the technology to make Japan an atomic bomb test site for a third time in 64 years, Ling and Lee could actually be considered lucky because, one, they were not shot on sight, and two, the pair will likely become valuable players in a geopolitical chess game aimed at tipping the scales of global nuclear power in Pyongyang’s favor. Chances are they will eventually regain their freedom with the full, unabashed assistance of the US government.
Seems Ling and Lee have friends in some very high places — friends who have spent careers ducking the media in this country but are now ready to go to bat for these two reporters. One who may be called in is former UN ambassador and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who back in the early 1990s helped get Americans out of trouble in North Korea.
No less than Al Gore, whose Current TV network Ling and Lee were working for, is expected to personally intercede at some point. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already called on North Korea to dismiss the charges and deport the two reporters. The president, who along with Clinton has expressed deep concern over North Korea’s claim of once again successfully testing nuclear weapons, is also personally worried about the fate of Ling and Lee.
If only other journalists — like the 41 killed last year in direct connection to their work, the 65 killed in 2007 and the 138 killed while covering the war in Iraq over the past six years — were lucky enough to have such powerful friends.
What many Americans don’t realize is that in many countries journalists stand a better than good chance of being killed or maimed for merely doing their jobs. In fact, compared to other countries — like Iraq, Somalia, India, or Pakistan — North Korea doesn’t even rank as a potentially life-threatening place to work.
In Somalia, for instance, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported this week that an unidentified gunmen opened fire on two staff members of Radio Shabelle, leaving one dead, another injured. That was the fifth journalist killed this year in that war-torn country.
Newly democratized Russia isn’t much better. Authorities there still have not won convictions in even high-profile killings, such as the 2004 murder of Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov and the 2006 slaying of investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya.
What CPJ found was that the vast majority of victims were local reporters covering sensitive topics such as crime, corruption and national security in their home countries. And nowhere in this hemisphere, it seems, is more dangerous than Mexico, where reporters are moving targets for drug lords with more money and firepower than the government. CPJ calls Mexico “the most dangerous beat in the Americas.” Six reporter murders have gone unsolved in the last decade, and at least seven Mexican journalists have gone missing since 2005, all presumed dead.
Two years ago, CPJ came up with the Impunity Index, a way of tracking countries where journalists are killed regularly and governments fail to solve the crimes. The index calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of a country’s population. CPJ examined every nation in the world for the years 1999 through 2008. Only nations with five or more unsolved cases were included, a threshold reached by 14 countries this year, North Korea not among them.
Iraq, where not one murder of a journalist has been solved, Sierra Leone and Somalia topped the index, but most were peacetime democracies with functioning law enforcement, nations such as Russia, the Philippines and India, according to CPJ.
Liza Gross of the International Women’s Media Foundation, according to Associated Press, said that “press freedom must not be used as a pawn in chess games between nations,” as seems to be the case with the conviction of Ling and Lee.
Then again, both Ling and Lee will likely live to write another day, especially in their unwanted but historic roles as pawns in the nuclear game being played by their captors and the US. That’s a lot more than can be said for many of their colleagues.
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