The Bloody Contest of Pen and Sword : Journalism: The death toll is leaping upward among those reporting on the battles for democracy and human rights.

Sixty-three journalists were killed on the job in 22 countries last year, the highest toll since records have been kept. And now with the execution in Iraq of Farzad Bazoft of the London Observer, 1990 already has the makings of surpasssing it. In the last three months, journalists have been killed in El Salvador, Brazil, Romania and Turkey.

Bazoft met his gruesome death on the orders of President Saddam Hussein, on an unproven charge of spying. Only a week before, an extraordinarily brave Turkish journalist, Cetin Emec, chief editor and columnist of the Istanbul daily, Hurriyet, was shot to death by marksmen as he left home for work. In what turned out to be his last column, Emec wrote of his fears of the resurgence of terrorism in Turkey and the role of Syria in promoting it. He also argued that Damascus was behind the bombing of the Pan Am jumbo jet over Scotland in December, 1988.

In 1982, only nine journalists were killed. In 1983, it was 14. (Among them was The Times’ Dial Torgerson, who was ambushed while driving on the Honduras-Nicaragua border.) In 1984, the toll was 21; in 1985, 31; in 1986, 19; in 1987, 32; in 1988, 46; last year, 63. The number arrested or detained has also shot up, from a low of 72 in 1984 to 225 in 1989. These are the carefully compiled figures of Freedom House in New York. They clearly suggest something is awry, but what?

Journalism has always been a dangerous profession. During the Vietnam War, more journalists were killed (proportional to their numbers) than American soldiers. A few years ago, West German insurers gave the longevity of the average journalist as somewhere in the late 40s.

But something rather different, without precedent, is afoot today. It is occuring in too many countries for there to be one catch-all explanation. What is happening, I believe, is a worldwide sea change in how journalists perceive their craft. Over the last decade they have become more and more disrespectful of those who abuse their power, whether they be governments or guerrilla movements. Increasingly, they insist on the hard questions, particularly ones that challenge an authority’s conduct if it appears to have no democratic base and abuses the rights of those with less influence.

This maturation of the journalistic mind is part of the harvest reaped after 30 years of civil- and human-rights agitation in the Western world. That influence has moved like a wave through Western-educated and Western-oriented younger people all over the world. Not least, it has affected journalists who occupy that highly sensitive and fine-tuned midway point between politics and literature and have always wanted to believe that the pen is mightier than the sword. The post-1950s movement toward liberty and democracy has encouraged them to confront with growing confidence those who use power, wealth or guns for ignoble ends. But a price is paid for touching the nerve ends of those who have no compunction about being ruthless. The morbidity figures seem to suggest that journalists have pushed the frontiers of free reporting so far that they have made themselves frighteningly vulnerable.

The determination to fight with the pen is certainly what drives the Colombian journalism fraternity, which has made a greater sacrifice than any other national group: 19 journalists were murdered by the Colombian drug mafia last year, 86 in the last decade. Along with a number of judges and political leaders, the journalists have taken the brunt of the drug lords’ effort to intimidate Colombian society into cowed submission. Make no mistake about it, the Colombian journalists are imbued first and foremost with a sense of mission, not to save the bodies and souls of drug consumers in the United States, although of course they would be glad to see that happen, but to save their own precious institutions of democracy and justice.

Democracy, too, is what drove Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, general director of the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa, to fight the totalitarianism of the Sandinistas. Now, victorious at the polls, she is president-elect.

And democracy is what drove a large number of journalists, Chinese and foreign, to cover the demonstrations and protests of Tian An Men Square last June with an intimacy and daring that was breathtaking. By year’s end, at least 56 Chinese journalists, including some of the most prominent, had been arrested. But there remains a strong underground of journalists active in China, working by new-day fax and old-day samizdat to keep the cause of democracy burning.

Across much of the world, the battle for democracy and human rights has reached a crescendo, and journalists are on the cutting edge, capturing and shaping the mood. As the wave spreads, in China again, and in Africa and the Middle East, journalists will be there, too, and there will be more casualties.