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277 26 HAZARDS OF JOURNALISM sabahuddin kushkaki was banned from journalism in afghanistan and later cast into prison with other prominent Afghans, few of whom survived. Jan Petranek was banned from Czechoslovak journalism, banished to a menial job, and badly injured in an apparent assassination attempt. Armando Doronila was banned from journalism in the Philippines and forced to emigrate . George Syvertsen was killed by a Khmer Rouge rocket in Cambodia, and Welles Hangen was captured by the Khmer Rouge and later beaten to death. Larry Burrows was photographing from a helicopter shot down in Laos. Michel Laurent was the last journalist killed in the Indochina wars. My Cambodian translator, Ang Kheo, was killed by a Khmer Rouge hoe to the back of his neck. A Vietnamese journalist who was also my translator, Hoang Ngoc Nguyen, was sent to a primitive jungle camp for years of Communist re-education. They are some of the people with whom I worked in various parts of the world. For them, journalism was a dangerous profession. So has it been, and remains, for others throughout the world. Many journalists have been persecuted and killed for the audacity of working to tell their neighbors what was going on around them. The work of a war correspondent can obviously involve danger. In Iraq in just one year, 2007, by one count 107 journalists and their assistants were killed, by another count 171—several international groups come up with different counts. But wars are only part of the danger. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) found by mid-2012 that 926 journalists had been killed since 1992. Of them, 34 percent were covering wars, and overall only 13 percent of the deaths were foreign correspondents. By CPJ listing of other deaths in overlapping categories, 41 percent were reporters covering politics, 21 percent reporting on corruption, 15 percent on human rights, and 14 percent on crime. The committee listed 151 deaths in Iraq during these two decades, 72 in 278 The Dalai Lama’s Secret and Other Reporting Adventures the Philippines, 53 in Russia, 43 in Colombia, 42 in Pakistan, 42 in Somalia, and 24 in Afghanistan. Drug trafficking made Mexico probably the most dangerous place for journalists; its governmental human rights commission said in July 2012 that 82 journalists had been killed since 2000 and 16 were missing. Many of the deaths worldwide were victims of malign governments, political bosses, insurgents, drug barons, local gangsters, and others who feared having their activities examined or exposed. Few of the killers were ever identified. Even fewer were ever prosecuted. For a few of those I’ve known who suffered for their work but survived, the eventual outcome—after years of oppression—was good: returning as nationally recognized and honored journalists, respected for honest reporting and well-informed, objective commentary. Both Petranek and Doronila achieved such comebacks. But others who survived the hazards of journalism were never able to regain the distinction that they had earned in their chosen careers. In the 1950s, Kushkaki was selected on the basis of secondary school achievements and family connections in Kabul to be sent by the Afghan government to study journalism in the United States. This was a time when the royal government of Afghanistan was trying to modernize the nation with predominately Western methods but also some Soviet training for its youth. Kushkaki earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Nebraska and then a master’s in journalism at another American university. On return to Kabul, he soon became the head of the official Bakhtar news agency, founding editor of the government’s English-language daily Kabul Times, and a journalism instructor at Kabul University. Juggling several jobs, he also became in 1960 the AP stringer in Kabul. I came to know him on my own reporting trips to Afghanistan and also saw him in Moscow when he visited there in a new capacity, as head of the official Radio Kabul. Kushkaki quit government work in the late 1960s to establish his own newspaper , Caravan. It quickly became recognized as the nation’s best, most honest and independent paper, standing above a number of other papers noted for politicized and often corrupt reporting. His reputation earned him a place in 1972 as minister of information and culture in a reformist government. But when Mohammed Daoud Khan overthrew his brother-in-law and first cousin, King Mohammed Zahir Shah, and the reformist government...

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