Journalists’ concerns for their safety (Part 1)

Davao City—The issue of ensuring the safety of journalists in conflict-affected areas is the main theme of a workshop on capacity building for those who are covering the provinces and related or adjacent areas in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM). It started yesterday and will end on Thursday, Feb. 21, here at the cool environment amid the majestic pine trees within the Eden Nature Park and Resort in Toril.

Funded through a grant from the British Embassy in Manila and implemented by the Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication (AIJC), the workshop is run by a small team under the able leadership of Ann Lourdes Lopez, AIJC’s senior director. It is mainly a basic training for “safety and fact-checking” to help protect journalists as they go about their work gathering information for their respective beats and to ensure the safety of their respective news outlets.

Seventeen years ago, I was also here in this same venue, for a conference I helped organize among selected journalists from the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. It was a collaborative project between the Universiti Sains Malaysia based in Penang, Malaysia, and the Canadian International Development Agency.

What made the workshop quite different was the participation of information officers of some public and private institutions in selected areas in Mindanao, including some academics.

It was a pleasant surprise to be reconnected with a friend of long-standing, a journalist who has covered Mindanao, especially the Bangsamoro areas, for more than three decades of her life, and now still works as one of this paper’s veteran reporters—Julie Alipala. Julie attended the 2007 conference I helped organize then, also in this venue. The main theme of the 2007 conference lectures and workshops was on how journalists promote peace and development through their reporting in the three countries represented in the conference.

Julie and I recalled that many of the issues journalists discussed quite passionately in that conference from way back resonate with similar issues now, especially on how journalists are constantly bothered by perennial acts of impunity from government officials, and people who have access to tools that perpetuate violence. Such tools include both physical ones like guns and various forms of firearms and more insidious ones like political power and greed.

The merchants of violence both in the past and the present may have changed faces, but their successors are quite the same, and even more virulent and deadly because there are now more platforms to use to scare the wits out of journalists, especially those who are just starting their news reporting careers. These platforms include social media that glorify incendiary comments and feedback against some reports, including articles of opinion columnists of the country’s broadsheets. All these can cause inordinate feelings of insecurity bordering on paranoia and for some, a slowly developing trauma that can trigger sudden emotional outbursts from them. I heard about these personally during a similar workshop last week, also here in Davao but conducted by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, with collaborative support from the British Embassy in Manila and The Asia Foundation.

It is no joke to be a journalist at a time of intensely contested political dynamics in countries like the Philippines. Our situation in the Bangsamoro and its related areas may not be creating an immense humanitarian catastrophe like what has been happening in Gaza for the last four months. Still, the recurring violence in areas like Pikit, in Cotabato, in the municipality of Mamasapano, and just recently in Munai, Lanao del Norte, are issues of serious concern.

From 2022 until early this year, more than 60 people have been killed in different locations in the small municipality of Pikit, Cotabato. All cases have remained unsolved. In one case, a mother and her mature son were killed inside their eatery in a central area in Pikit población, with so many people watching. Police authorities in the municipality just immediately made pronouncements that these were incidences involving a history of personal grudges that evolved into vengeance killings typical of rido in the Bangsamoro.

Last Sunday, Feb. 18 at 2 p.m., a firefight between the elements of the Scout Platoon of the 44th Infantry Battalion and the members of the Dawlah Islamia took place in Munai, Lanao del Norte. As of Monday, Feb. 19, the firefight was still ongoing, with six soldiers killed and four others wounded, while two from Dawlah were also killed in that firefight.

(More next week)

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