the Assad regime’s murder of Marie Colvin

Sun 3 Feb 2019 06.00 GMTLast modified on Sun 3 Feb 2019 12.00 GMT

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Marie Colvin walked towards the sound of gunfire. Throughout her career as a war correspondent reporting from the killing zones of Iraq, Chechnya, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka, where she lost an eye when fired upon by government forces, Colvin exhibited exceptional professional ability, coupled with awesome personal bravery. When she died in an artillery attack in Homs, Syria, in 2012, the world of free, independent reporting lost one of its foremost practitioners.

It is now certain Colvin’s death was no accident. The Sunday Times reporter was not just another random casualty of a war that has claimed more than 400,000 lives. Following an exhaustive inquiry, a judge in the US ruled that Colvin was deliberately targeted by the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad as part of its settled policy of violence against independent journalists, whom it considers “enemies of the state”. This campaign of violence continues to this day.

“Officials at the highest level of the Syrian government carefully planned and executed the artillery assault on the Baba Amr media centre [in Homs] for the specific purpose of killing the journalists inside,” judge Amy Jackson said. Colvin and a French photojournalist, Rémi Ochlik, who also died, were “specifically targeted” in order to silence their reporting of the growing opposition to Assad’s dictatorship and atrocities committed by regime forces.

The court’s award of $302m (£230m) in punitive damages against Assad, his brother, Maher al-Assad, and their associates opens the way for the seizure of some or all of an estimated $1bn in Assad family assets salted away around the world, some of which have already been identified and frozen. The premeditated murder of Colvin should now also form a part of the ongoing UN-led criminal investigations of Assad. The UN must designate the deliberate killing of a reporter as a war crime.

‘Once photography gets a grip, you're captive’: Don McCullin and Giles Duley in conversation

 

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The need to safeguard and defend independent journalists who seek to keep the world informed about the crimes and misdeeds of those in power has never been greater. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the number of reporters killed in direct retaliation for their work nearly doubled in 2018, to at least 34. The most high-profile case concerned the brutal murder last autumn of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the autocratic Saudi regime.

Such horrors are not confined to far-off places. Investigative reporters in European countries including Malta, Bulgaria and Slovakia have also been silenced by one nefarious means or another. The CPJ says that 53 journalists were killed while doing their jobs last year, including four murdered in an attack on the Capital Gazette in Maryland. At the same time, at least 250 journalists are in prison. Turkey, Egypt and China are the leading jailers. One notorious case concerns two Reuters reporters, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, imprisoned in Myanmar after their exemplary work on the killing of Rohingya Muslims embarrassed the regime.

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Nobody would deny reporting in war zones is hazardous and those who do so know the risks they run. Afghanistan is the most dangerous place on Earth for journalists; 13 died there last year, some in terrorist attacks. Journalists also voluntarily play a vital but sometimes personally costly role in documenting the aftermath and legacies of war, as was the case with photographer Giles Duley, cruelly injured by a landmine in Afghanistan in 2011, whose inspiring story we relate in today’s New Review.

But it’s clear a worrying trend is developing. Across the world, irresponsible and authoritarian leaders increasingly reject the crucial role that a free press must play in safeguarding open, democratic governance, fighting wrongdoing and uncovering truth. Instead, they treat journalists as adversaries. From there, it is but a short step to the deliberate murder of brave reporters such as Marie Colvin.

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