Saturday, October 27, 2007 Mogadishu, Tribune correspondent Paul Salopek encounters reporters who are afraid to even go outside with good reason.
- Paul Salopek is the Tribune's Africa correspondent.
MOGADISHU, Somalia Bashir Nur Gedi, the acting director of Shabelle Media radio, was too frightened to visit me recently in this embattled African capital.
Gedi was sitting in his office only about 20 blocks from my safe house. But it may as well have been a thousand miles away, given the dangers journalists face today in Mogadishu. Indeed, when it comes to media workers' safety—or the lack of it —this desert city is starting to resemble another arid metropolis: Baghdad.
"I'll send over some other staff to talk to you," Gedi promised via cell phone. "I don't like to go out."
Like scores of other Somali journalists, Gedi, a jovial businessman who had switched to reporting, was receiving anonymous death threats. He was too scared to even go home, he explained. His house was being watched. So he was sleeping at a different location each night—including at his radio station, on a floor mat.
Ten months ago, Ethiopia invaded Somalia and toppled a radical Islamist regime. The U.S. lent a covert hand. This was supposed to be a blow for freedom and democracy in the Horn of Africa. Yet since then, for many working in the Somali media, exercising the right to freedom of speech has gotten more, not less, hazardous. Some would say it's gotten suicidal.
Eight Somali journalists have been murdered this year, according to media watchdogs. The usual technique: a faceless assassin armed with a pistol and a getaway car. Extremists associated with Somalia's growing Islamic insurgency are doubtless to blame for some of these killings. But rights groups implicate the fragile transitional federal government as well. Human Rights Watch counts more than 40 reporters detained by federal authorities this year. Touchy officials here don't like to be portrayed as weak.
Last month, it was Radio Shabelle's turn. Government troops shot up the radio station, one of Somalia's few independent news outlets, and briefly detained 16 of its employees. The two staffers that Gedi managed to send me were terrified.
They showed up in what they called "civilian clothes." This was ragged attire that helped them blend in with Mogadishu's illiterate poor. They had walked from the radio station. Riding in a car would have drawn too much attention, they said. For the same reason, they declined my invitation to pay their taxi fare back.
Both men presented me with their journalist IDs. They set the laminated cards on the table in front of them, as if to say: Here we are, part of the brotherhood. I don't know why, but this plaintive gesture, the wildly misguided hope in it, made me feel ashamed. How many times has this happened before? It was like hearing the distant appeals from a refugee ship fleeing Nazi Germany. Or the pleading at the gates of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.
Their names were Abdulrahman Yusuf, the head of programming, and Hassan Sheik Abdullah, a producer. They were trapped in Mogadishu without passports. They recounted the threats, their sleepless nights, and the paralyzing fear that comes with being stalked. Near the end of our conversation, Abdullah said he regretted ever becoming a journalist. They didn't want money. They each drank a Coke, and left.
A few days later I received an e-mail.
Gedi was dead. They finally got him. Two unknown gunmen shot him on the street, 14 times, outside a Mogadishu cafe.
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, October 27, 2007