MEDIA-PHILIPPINES: ‘Getting Killed Goes With the Journalist’s Job’

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Aug 8 2006 (IPS) - For a country that boasts of having the freest media in South-east Asia, the Philippines bears a stain that is not easy to whitewash. It has an expanding graveyard for journalists killed in the line of duty.

Senior Filipina journalists in Manila, that IPS interviewed, are dismissive of the order given by Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for the police to solve the extra-judicial killings of 10 journalists and left-wing activists. Arroyo’s announcement on Aug. 1 gave the authorities 10 weeks to arrest the murderers.

”(This deadline) is nothing more than for purposes of good sound bytes,” says Marichu Villanueva, news editor of ‘The Philippine Star’, a daily. ”I think the general mood pervading among us journalists is basically the same as it has been – that being killed is part of the hazards of the job.”

Josefina Lichauco, a columnist on the same paper, is dismissive for other reasons. ”Ms. Arroyo does not seem to be outraged at all. I don’t hear her giving an ultimatum to the police and military,” she says. ”I have never witnessed anything as horrible as this in my long life.”

This year has already seen five journalists gunned down in the archipelago, with the most recent victim, Prudencio Melendrez, a photographer for a Manila tabloid, being killed on the eve of Arroyo’s order.

”Melendrez was reportedly on his way to his coverage assignment, wearing a raincoat, a jacket and a black belt bag, when four armed men shot him in a narrow alley near his house at Gozon compound in Malabon City (northern Manila). The victim succumbed to gunshot wounds in the chest, abdomen, and nape,” states the Centre for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR), an independent, Manila-based media rights monitor.

”Melendrez’s assassins, who wore black jackets with hoods, immediately fled after the incident aboard a passenger jeep bound for the nearby municipality of Navotas, according to a witness. Other sketchy reports said the suspects were riding two motorcycles,” it adds.

Barely two weeks before that, the CMFR issued an alert about the murder of Armando ”Rachman” Pace, a 51-year-old broadcast journalist, who was shot soon after he had left the radio station where he had just hosted a daily one-hour programme. ”(Two) men (on a motorcycle) pulled besides the victim’s own motorcycle (and) one of them shot Pace several times using a .45 calibre pistol,” the media group revealed. The incident occurred in Digos City, on the southern island of Mindanao, where Filipino troops are locked in a decades-long conflict with Muslim separatist rebels and with armed sections of the country’s Communist Party.

The scepticism from the local and international media rights watchdogs to Arroyo’s order is with reason. The years since she became president in January 2001 has seen a spike in the number of journalists murdered, higher than during any other presidency since the Philippines overthrew the nearly two-decades-long dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

The Jul. 31 killing of photographer Melendrez brings to 30 the number of journalists who have been murdered during the Arroyo presidency, according to CMFR’s calculations. During the previous 14 years after democracy was restored, 31 journalists were killed. Most of the victims were from local radio stations in provincial towns and rural villages and faced the wrath of powerful mayors, governors and crime lords.

According to the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF – Reporters without Borders), the Philippines has been the second most deadly place for journalists after war-torn Iraq during two recent years, 2003 and 2005. Last year, seven journalists were shot in mafia-style killings.

This month, in a letter to Arroyo following her call for a crackdown on the murder of Filipino journalists, the head of RSF drew attention to the environment that had made the Philippines such a hostile place for a free media. ”The culture of violence is not the sole explanation. It is the culture of impunity, for which senior government officials share the blame, that has allowed the hit-men and those who hire them to murder so many journalists throughout the country,” wrote Robert Menard, RSF’s secretary-general.

Such a reality is mirrored in another chilling fact about political violence in the country since January 2001. There have been 724 extra-judicial killings, including the murders of activists, human rights champions and Leftists, in addition to journalists, since Arroyo became the president, according to figures made public by the country’s independent Commission on Human Rights.

Yet, even Arroyo’s critics in the media admit that the murdered journalists are not victims of a national conspiracy, as was the case during the Marcos dictatorship. ”There is a breakdown of law and order in the country,” Roby Alampay, executive director of the South-east Asia Press Alliance, a regional media rights watchdog, told IPS. ”There is no conspiracy by the government to kill journalists. But the government is trying to wash its hands of this problem.”

Manila will not be able to get away lightly with such policies. ”The government has a responsibility to stop the killings, to send a tough message to the governors, mayors and crime lords,” says Alampay. ”It has to get serious, because two years ago the government created a special police task force to go after the killers of journalists but there has been little result.”