Friday 16 December 2011

PAYING THE PRICE FOR A FREE PRESS

Gadzhimurat Kamalov, the founder of a newspaper that has reported on corruption and police abuses in Russia's southern republic of Dagestan, was shot dead outside the offices of his newspaper Chernovik ("rough draft"), in Dagestan's capital Makhachkala, on Thursday. Kamalov founded the newspaper in 2003 and had edited it for several years and remained its publisher until his death.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has noted that Chernovik staff have been persecuted and harassed by the authorities. The CPJ called Kamalov's murder "a massive loss for independent journalism in the North Caucasus, Russia's most dangerous place for reporters". Violence (nominally political and wholly criminal) remains rife in Dagestan, where police have been battling Islamist insurgents since the 1990s.

The CPJ notes that Russia has one of the worst records in the world for attacks on journalists, with 18 unsolved press murders since the year 2000. Whether or not there is a list of journalists who happen to criticise the policies of the Russian Government (and some of the local corrupt elite's activities) is a mute point but there do seem to be an awful lot of coincidences.

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