Turbulent times create a minefield for reporters

It was a terrifying tale.

Anna Politkovskaya, special correspondent for the Moscow biweekly newspaper Novaya Gazeta, has made more than 40 trips to Chechnya over the past three years to report on Russian military action there. Last year, while investigating charges that Russian soldiers were torturing Chechen civilians, she was arrested by the Russian military, held for three days and threatened with rape and execution. Seven months later, when Moscow said Chechen rebels had shot down a helicopter carrying the staff of a federal commission, she wrote that the Russian military was actually responsible. More threats on her life soon followed.

Politkovskaya’s children have also been threatened, her husband has left her, and she was even forced -- amid new threats, and despite hiring a bodyguard -- to leave Russia. But after two months in Vienna, she returned to Russia last December and continues to write about Chechnya, personal danger notwithstanding.

Politkovskaya was in Los Angeles recently to accept a Courage in Journalism award from the International Women’s Media Foundation, which honors women who have risked their lives -- and, often, their families’ lives -- to bring news of violence, corruption and repression to the world’s attention.

It’s the kind of work -- the kind of risk-taking -- that we will all see again, with more familiar names attached, should President Bush follow through his threats to make war on Iraq. That realization -- and the presence at the podium of the parents of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter killed in Pakistan early this year -- made the Courage in Journalism program last month all the more chilling.

So did the unexpected absence of Politkovskaya herself, who’d been in Los Angeles for two days but had suddenly returned to Russia to face danger anew. At 7 o’clock on the morning of the program, she flew back to Moscow, her presence there having been urgently requested by Chechen rebels who wanted her help in negotiating their demands for peace in Chechnya in exchange for the release of the hundreds of hostages they were holding in a Moscow theater.

Neither Politkovskaya nor anyone else was able to resolve the standoff before Russian troops gassed the rebels and their hostages and stormed the theater, leaving more than 100 dead. But Politkovskaya, who had won the trust of the Chechens during her reporting there, had hoped she could make a difference.

“I have always believed that Russian journalism, first and foremost, is the journalism of action,” she said in a message read to the Courage in Journalism audience.

Politkovskaya always saw her job as questioning, as doubting official government versions -- seeking the truth, no matter the personal risk, and that’s what gave her, she said, “no choice” but to fly to Moscow. That’s also what bound her to other Courage in Journalism honorees this year and in previous years.

The other two winners this year were Sandra Nyaira, who’s faced death threats and lawsuits while investigating the corrupt regime of Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe; and Kathy Gannon, the Associated Press bureau chief in Islamabad and the only Western reporter allowed into Kabul for more than two weeks in the first month after 9/11.

Previous winners of the award have encountered equally menacing obstacles -- in Algeria and Afghanistan, in Spain and the Sudan, in Kosovo and Kenya and Kyrgyzstan. Jineth Bedoya Lima, one of last year’s honorees, covers the conflict between the Colombian government and paramilitary groups for El Espectador, a daily newspaper in Bogota, Colombia. Five months before her appearance at the ceremony in Los Angeles, Lima was kidnapped at gunpoint, drugged, brutally beaten and repeatedly raped. A taxi driver found her that night in a garbage dump, where she had been left with her hands tied.

The consequences of war

As America gears up for possible war in Iraq, it’s worth remembering the risks these journalists have taken -- and the risks their colleagues, men and women alike, will almost inevitably face if President Bush persists with his plan to forcefully disarm Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein.

Ten journalists -- Pearl among them -- were killed during the war in Afghanistan last year, and more than a dozen others were robbed, arrested, kidnapped or shot at. At one time, there were widespread reports that Taliban leaders had offered a bounty of $50,000 to $100,000 to anyone who killed a Western journalist.

It’s not likely to be any safer for journalists in Iraq.

To report accurately in a war zone -- mindful all the while of the age-old journalistic lament that during wartime, “truth is the first casualty” -- many journalists push the envelope on personal safety. Most likely, some will die if we attack Iraq -- as more than 700 journalists have died covering past wars. Despite repeated warnings from their editors that no story is worth dying for, they will take risks in pursuit of stories and pictures

They won’t do so because they’re fools or daredevils. Oh sure, there’s an undeniable sense of adventure, and there are always a few cowboys of the Geraldo Rivera type, men who risk (or want to appear to be risking) life and limb to call attention to their own heroism or win an award or get a Page 1 byline or an on-screen exclusive.

But the vast majority of war correspondents who put themselves in harm’s way do so because -- as Paul Watson, a Times foreign correspondent, told me last year, from Afghanistan -- “If the story of the war is important enough to bring it to the public’s attention, it’s worth the risk to the journalist who brings it to them.”

Watson figures he’s covered more than a dozen wars on four continents. In Bosnia, he says, he was “bombed by Americans, shot at by Albanians and threatened by Serbs on an almost daily basis.” He was also targeted by Serb mortar fire.

But Watson keeps coming back to war, in part because he feels he owes it to those journalists who have been killed in combat, killed while pursuing important stories, stories on horrors and atrocities they thought the world should know about.

That desire to inform, to bear witness to unbearable tragedy, is what has driven the women who have won the Courage in Journalism awards, and it’s what drives war correspondents everywhere.

*

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.