SPEECH OF DAVID DADGE
IPI Director
When the Wall Came Tumbling Down, Some Barriers Remained
Delivered at the Opening of the IPI World Congress and 58th General Assembly
7 June 2009
SPEECH OF DAVID DADGE
IPI Director
When the Wall Came Tumbling Down, Some Barriers Remained
Delivered at the Opening of the IPI World Congress and 58th General Assembly
7 June 2009
Mr. Speaker, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I would like to welcome you to the opening ceremony of the 58th World Congress and General Assembly of the International Press Institute.
I am especially pleased to be able to address you from Finlandia Hall. Completed in 1971, the building provides a truly excellent setting for the IPI World Congress and I very much want to thank the organisers, the Helsingen Sanomat Foundation and the Finnish Host Committee for their hard work in organising this World Congress.
This year, the International Press Institute has reinforced its tradition of mixing local themes with the international by creating, in my belief, one of the strongest programmes in recent memory.
Our panel sessions range from Nordic Democracy to a discussion on the resurgence of a newly confident Russian—of which I will have more to say later! And they encompass many of the challenges that the world faces today: from climate change, Asian capitalism and to something much more personal, the financial crisis and the media.
We should also not forget our core activity, the very reason for IPI’s existence, press freedom. Over the next few days, we will explore journalism’s ethical duties regarding interviews with terrorists and hold a panel session on a new film, Balibo, examining the murders of five journalists in East Timor, as well as the execution of the journalist sent to investigate their deaths.
In 1976, IPI passed a resolution on these murders and the panel session, which includes some of the victims’ relatives, is a sad reminder to us all, not only of the costs of journalism, but also that so much of press freedom advocacy is about not forgetting; if you will: it is a continuing remembrance of the desire for justice.
We are also here, with Russia so close in terms of history and geography, during an important anniversary year. 2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of the year in which the Berlin Wall came down and the start of the disintegration of the communist system. A year that marks a turning point in our shared history and one that continues to resonate today, nearly twenty years on!
On November 9th Berlin will celebrate the fall of the Wall with a “Festival of Freedom,” and in the United States, the German Embassy is celebrating “Freedom Without Walls”. But, while we should all celebrate this moment in history, I would urge caution. It is my opinion that when the walls came down and communism in the former Soviet Union was overthrown, some barriers remained standing! That even without walls, a new Russia born out of the collapse of the old Soviet system, retains obstacles that continue to inhibit true freedom.
According to figures from the International Press Institute, 32 journalists have been killed in Russia since 2000. The majority of those murderers have never been caught, never been punished.
Can there ever be true freedoms in a country, if the murderers of journalists escape with impunity? Are the people of Russia best served by journalists too scared to add their names to a story or forced to travel with body guards?
The removal of the so-called Russian Oligarchs and the concentration of media in the hands of government-friendly companies has narrowed the democratic space where media can practice their profession. In modern Russia, there are few media organisations, particularly in broadcasting, that can claim to be free from the influence of government and who are not in service of the state.
Twenty years on from the fall of the Berlin wall, the Russian media—a media that for so long had nursed a desire for independence in the shadow of that wall during communist times and which was so vocal in Russia in the early years after 1989—has been reduced to a brave whisper.
Now, I mention Russia today not only due to the anniversary, and its proximity to Helsinki, but also because we are here in Finlandia Hall to celebrate a Russian media organisation, which throughout its own life has remained true, and brave and independent. A media organisation that has existed its entire life, “Not to serve the state, but to serve society” and, in doing so, has paid heavily.
Ladies and gentleman, the financial crisis and the problems for the media all over the world have concentrated our minds on problems that are close to all of us. But as I have mentioned, the act of supporting press freedom is also an act of remembering. As such it lays claim on all of us to remember that even in the midst of this crisis, the murder and imprisonment of journalists goes on.
Because of its global press freedom role, the International Press Institute is at the forefront of this remembering, and this year, we could think of no better way of uniting all of us together by acclaiming an organisation that, through its own work, represents the very best of the media tradition to inform, to explain and to debate.
This is why, this year, the International Press Institute, in conjunction with Freedom Forum, is awarding its Free Media Pioneer Award to the Russian Novaya Gazeta newspaper and its editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov.
Novaya Gazeta is a tri-weekly newspaper formed in 1993 when former members of the Soviet-era Komsomolskaya Pravda decided to create a modern, independent media organisation. These staff members hold 51 per cent of the newspaper’s ownership, while the remainder is owned by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Russian mediaowner, Alexander Lebedev.
From the outset, the newspaper has typified what its editor-in-chief has described as a wish to “carry out an independent investigation of life.” But in doing so, the newspaper has paid dearly. Since 2000, four journalists, and a human rights lawyer connected to the newspaper, have been cruelly murdered.
These appalling figures include journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was murdered in October 2006, and who was posthumously made an IPI World Press Freedom Hero in December 2006 by the IPI Executive Board; as well as reporter Anastasia Baburova, shot down, along with human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, at the start of this year.
The newspaper has also suffered reprisals for its internationally recognised reporting in other ways. Reporting that has covered such challenging themes as human rights in Chechnya. In 2007, a regional edition was suspended, and it has faced a series of libel cases that were barely disguised attempts at trying to cripple the newspaper financially.
Therefore, for its courageous desire to serve the public, and for being the standard bearer for an independent and critical media in Russia, I would like to award the 2009 IPI Free Media Pioneer Award to Novaya Gazeta and its editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov.