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Mission Journal | A Look Back
AP/Oscar Navarrete
caution, however. “We still don’t really know what’s going to
happen,” he said and asked that we not use his name. The
publisher at another paper, Prensa Libre, was more blunt.
“This is war,” he said, noting that his editor had recently
been kidnapped by guerrillas and was still missing.
The haggling within our delegation followed us home as
we sought to hammer out a statement that all could live
with. Don’t ask me how, but Weinstein ended up drafting the
Nicaragua and El Salvador sections. (He left the delegation
before it got to Guatemala.) The statement on Nicaragua
contained political commentary that seemed to me extraneous
to the press situation there, and I said so at the press
conference we held. Some 75 journalists attended the event,
and our statement was written up in The New York Times
and other publications.
Did it have any effect I don’t think so. Conditions for
the press worsened in all three countries. The investigation
into the deaths of the Dutch journalists stalled. (Soon after
we issued our statement, I got a call from I.F. Stone angrily
upbraiding us for not digging deeper into the case.) La
Prensa continued to publish throughout the Contra war but
was largely defanged. In Guatemala, Rios Montt proved
even more brutal than his predecessor, and the editor of
Diario El Gráfico with whom we’d talked, and who had
asked that his name not be used, was murdered several
years later. Throughout, the Reagan administration confined
its concerns over press freedom to Nicaragua.
For CPJ, however, the mission was invaluable, for it
imparted some important lessons. One was to keep delegations
small. The larger the group, the more unwieldy it
becomes. We also learned to avoid selecting participants
according to some ideological standard. The key is to pick
accomplished journalists with an uncompromising commitment
to the cause of press freedom. Finally, in designing
missions, we found that it helps to keep the scope limited.
Visiting three war-fractured countries in 10 days was
wildly unrealistic.
Fortified by these lessons, CPJ today conducts more
than a dozen missions a year, pulling them off with great
aplomb. For me, however, the memories of that first mission
linger, and while I’ve been on several trips since, I’ve
gone mostly solo. As for Allen Weinstein, today he’s the
director of the National Archives. ■
Sandinista soldiers cross a stream during a confrontation with Contras in Las Pinuelas, Nicaragua. Throughout the 1980s, the United
States expressed concern over press freedom in strife-ridden Nicaragua but not in other Central American countries.
A Matter
of Commitment
Missions to Ethiopia and Eritrea tested CPJ and showed the importance of
Washington’s leadership.
By Josh Friedman
Ethiopia and Eritrea are on the frontier of the struggle
for press freedom. Isolated in high mountains, the
two countries test the limits of CPJ’s ability to aid
endangered journalists. In four missions since 1996 (three
to Ethiopia and one to Eritrea), we have had mixed success—owing
more to the changing attitudes of officials in
Washington than to leaders in the strategically crucial Horn
of Africa.
What are we dealing with Journalists in these two
countries face obstacles those of us in free countries can
only imagine. In Ethiopia, joking about the prime minister
sent a cartoonist to jail for years. In Eritrea, an editorial urging
good government led to the mass roundup and continued
disappearance of virtually every independent journalist
in the country.
Ethiopia has a long history of jailing journalists, and
since 2001 Eritrea has had more than a dozen journalists
imprisoned in secret locations without charge. As of 2005,
Ethiopia and Eritrea lagged only China and Cuba as the
world’s top jailers of journalists.
So when CPJ asked me to participate in missions to
these two remote countries I jumped at the chance. I had
gotten to know them as a newspaper reporter in the mid-
1980s when they were one country under a murderous
Soviet-backed dictatorship called the Derg, headed by
Mengistu Haile Mariam. A free press did not exist. Now, in
1996, on the first of two CPJ missions I accompanied, I
would have a chance to see how the press had developed
after the Derg fell in 1991.
Josh Friedman is director of international programs at the
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. A former
reporter for Newsday, he won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize
for international reporting for his coverage of the famine in
Ethiopia.
In a word, it was heartrending. In both countries, eager,
optimistic, and mostly inexperienced young people—and
die-hards from the previous regime—had become instant
journalists. In Ethiopia, nearly 100 publications, mostly oneor
two-person affairs, poured forth a mixture of real news,
rumor, accidentally fake news, deliberately fake news, and
ad hominem attacks on the country’s new leaders.
The hard-bitten guerrilla leaders who had taken over
Ethiopia—and then Eritrea when it seceded—recoiled in
horror at the exuberant free press. After all, these were doctrinaire
Marxists who had spent decades fighting from cave
hideouts where they had enforced discipline through selfcriticism
sessions and strict adherence to ideology. Determined
to maximize pressure on the press despite having
signed human rights accords to please Western donors, the
new leaders of Ethiopia and Eritrea found more subtle ways
to intimidate the media.
In Ethiopia, for example, editors routinely have multiple
criminal charges pending under a repressive 1992 press
law, ensuring that they can easily be sent to jail. Authorities
also use under-the-radar techniques such as putting pressure
on printers.
So what could a CPJ mission do to confront this On the
ground we could gather facts to inform the world what was
happening, buck up endangered journalists, comfort the
families of the jailed or missing, rally the small network of
diplomats committed to a free press—and plead with and
cajole the countries’ new leaders to be patient with an
embryonic press.
This last was the hardest. For millennia, because of
their isolation on high mountain plateaus, Ethiopia and
Eritrea had developed a culture of distrusting outsiders,
whom they called ferengi. Foreign invaders had come and
gone—often meting out cruelty. One of my best sources in
Ethiopia, scion of a long-deposed aristocratic family, was
76 Fall | Winter 2006
Dangerous Assignments
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