Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Are journalists being targeted in Middle East war zones? To a colleague of the slain Reuters cameraman, it sure seems that way.
Aug 20, 2003 | On Aug. 17, Palestinian cameraman Mazen Dana became the second Reuters journalist to be killed by U.S. soldiers since the start of the Iraq war in March. Dana, who had been filming outside a U.S.-controlled prison in Baghdad following the death of six Iraqis the previous day, was fatally shot through the chest when an American tank crew mistook his camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and opened fire. The American military has called the incident "a terrible mistake" and promised to investigate, but some observers now speculate that the shooting was reckless, at best.
"From the eyewitness accounts, it appears that Dana was fired on without warning," wrote the Committee to Protect Journalists in an open letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "He was filming in an area where no hostilities were taking place, raising questions about whether U.S. troops acted recklessly in targeting him."
For Mazen Dana, it would not have been the first time he was targeted by soldiers while filming a war; as a Palestinian reporter covering the intifada in the West Bank town of Hebron for Reuters, he was deliberately shot at by Israeli troops so often that Reuters eventually sent him to Baghdad for what was considered to be a safer assignment. It was a decision that pleased his wife and four children, who remained in Hebron. "Nobody could believe that now he was going to die doing a job somewhere else," says Canadian journalist Patricia Naylor, who reported and produced a "Frontline/World" documentary in March about Dana and other targeted cameramen in the West Bank.
Coming just five days after the partial release of an investigation into the April 8 shelling by U.S. troops of the journalist-stuffed Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, Dana's death has sparked new questions on whether U.S. soldiers are also targeting journalists. Five journalists have died due to American fire, accounting for one-third of the journalists killed in the war thus far. Whatever the investigations may have yielded, the lessons learned were not sufficient to prevent Dana's death.
In a phone interview Tuesday, Naylor spoke with Salon from her home in Toronto about her perception of Dana's death and the repercussions that might follow.
Let's talk a little bit about how you knew Mazen Dana and how the "Frontline" documentary came about.
I started doing the documentary because there was a group of [Palestinian] cameramen I'd met in Hebron. Mazen Dana was one, and he started telling me stories about being shot by Israeli soldiers on several occasions, mostly with rubber bullets, and being beaten up. And all of the cameramen in this area started showing me wounds, and they said it wasn't an accident at the time and I didn't believe them -- I mean, I work every day and I've never been shot at. So we sat down and they started showing me videotape that they had collected of various incidents where they were beaten up by settlers or shot by rubber bullets by Israeli soldiers. That was before the intifada [in 2000] -- after the start it was no longer rubber bullets, it was live ammunition.
At the beginning of the intifada, Mazen Dana was shot two days in a row -- once in his leg and the next day twice in the foot, with exploding bullets, and he was off work for three months, and I came to believe what they said, that they were targeted. Not intentionally, like, "Let's go shoot a journalist this day," but if the anger among the soldiers rose I think the journalists seemed to get their anger ...
On my last shoot with him, he was by that time only shooting from within buildings because it was too dangerous on the street to film. Which, you know, is amazing for journalists covering the intifada that you'd have to shoot from apartment buildings and whatnot. He was very careful. And he was even shot within the top floor of an apartment building, his camera was shot, and that's when Reuters finally took him off the street because they said, "You know, if we can't protect you within an apartment building, we can't protect you." His children often wanted him to stop doing his work. They were worried for him because they'd seen him shot so many times, so when Reuters took him off filming anymore in the West Bank and sent him to Baghdad, they thought this would be a safer assignment because he spoke Arabic and spoke English. Nobody could believe that now he was going to die doing a job somewhere else.
Do you see a parallel between what happened in Hebron and Baghdad? There's such a terrible irony that he was shot by Israeli soldiers but killed by U.S. soldiers, in a situation that was supposed to be safer for him.
Well, I think it's important the U.S. do a good investigation and honest investigation, and show what a democracy does and that it does protect journalists, and understands journalists are important to tell the story. Because what's happened in the Middle East is that despite many documented shootings of Palestinian journalists, there's never been an honest and full investigation.
Nobody's particularly satisfied with the investigation of this shooting into the Palestine Hotel. There's no indication of whether or not they ever knew there were journalists inside, which everybody did know; I mean, these things aren't secret. These things are widely known, journalists stay together, people are savvy when they're doing war reports.
And Mazen was probably one of the most savvy and experienced war reporters and cameramen in the world.
Right now there are parallels. There is shooting in the West Bank of journalists that is not investigated, and there's not enough public pressure to make it stop, or make it investigated thoroughly and reprimanded to the point that it stops. And right now we have it happening in Iraq, and from the one investigation we don't have a credible, solid investigation that sends out the signal, "Make sure you don't shoot journalists." Journalists aren't hiding; we try to be as obvious as we can. We wear press jackets that say "Press" and dress our cars up with big signs that say "TV," so everyone knows who the journalists are. We always try to talk to the soldiers, and I know Mazen Dana and his sound man had done that the day they were shot, so the soldiers knew who they were. But he was still shot, so it leaves a lot of questions.
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