THE FACT OF THE MATTER
BY PAUL HOPKINS
Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have killed 189 Palestinian journalists since the start of the war in Gaza and 242 have died in total. No, they’re not ‘combatants’. And, yes, targeting them is a violation of international law.
Last year at least 68 media workers were killed in the line of duty in other countries in conflict; four in Ukraine and Colombia, three each in Iraq, Lebanon, Myanmar and Sudan and one each in Syria, Chad, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo – and elsewhere.
Reliable information is vital in conflict situations to help affected populations and to enlighten the world. They’re shooting the messenger, to the degree that some agencies believe the IDF are “deliberately” killing journalists – particularly camera personnel – to deny them letting the world know about the genocide taking place.
A doctor at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza, which was hit by Israeli strikes, when at least 20 people, including five journalists, were killed, recently told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland he believed news personnel were being deliberately targeted by Israel. “This is not something sporadic, or isolated. It is something planned,” Dr Al Faro said.
A journalist working on the frontline faces immense risks including injury, kidnapping and death as we have seen too often in the past two years. There is also the ongoing threats from both State and non-State agencies who seek to suppress independent reporting. Frontline journalists take high-ends risks and rely solely on their team to keep them out of harm’s way.
They often face mental health issues, as candidly told by our own Fergal Keane in his memoir Madness. As BBC man on the ground in Bosnia and several warn-torn countries in Africa in a career spanning more than 40 years, the Kerry-born newsman writes with great honesty of his turning to excess drink to forget the horrors of war, and of living with PTSD.
Jenny Douglas was from Christchurch in New Zealand. Like her two male siblings, she was a journalist since leaving college. She was there on the frontline in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive in 1968. I met her in 1977 in Rhodesia/Zimababe when we were both covering the guerrilla war waged by Robert Mugabe against the white minority led by Ian Smith. For a while we shared an apartment and became confidantes.
She moved to Umtali on the Mozambique border when she met the ‘love of her life’, Eugene Swanepoel, owner of a sawmill business. She and Swane died instantly when their jeep was incinerated by a missile near Melsetter on August 22, 1978.
She was six months pregnant with Swane’s child.
The television journalist Simon Cumbers, who was shot and killed in Saudi Arabia back in 2004 at the age of 36, had a love of reporting that took him from a close family in rural Ireland to most of the world’s trouble spots.
Writing in the Guardian back then about his death, our own Orla Guerin – now Senior Global Correspondent for the BBC – said: “It was Hemingway who noted that the definition of courage was grace under pressure; Simon was courage personified.”
Simon Cumbers – born and reared in Navan, Co. Meath – was a cameraman for BBC News. He was shot and killed by a gunman in a terrorist attack in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. His colleague Frank Gardner survived the terrorist attack but was left paralysed.
At the age of 20, he started as a rookie and advanced to chief reporter for Capitol Radio (now FM 104). In 1990, Cumbers moved to the UK to work with a variety of British broadcasters, including ITN’s Channel 4 News, Sky News, and eventually the BBC.
At the time of his murder he was married to Louise Bevan who, as a journalist, worked with him at the BBC.
Some of those involved in the attack on the two men – said to have links to Al-Qaeda – were dead by June of 2009 and just one suspect, named as Adil Said Al-Dubayti Al-Mutayri, remained in custody.
The Cumbers family were adamant they did not want the suspected killer of their son to be executed, and appealed to the Saudi authorities, “Simon was a pacifist, someone who would not have wanted the death penalty and would have opposed it. We do not want this man to be executed if he is found guilty,” Robert Cumbers told Meath Chronicle the same year, five years after his son’s killing.
Simon Cumbers’ killer was executed on January 2, 2016.
