At GlobalPost, we’re proud of the coverage we provided this year particularly in Afghanistan. Our team has done stellar work there and we are thankful to them for it. We’ve had some notable successes in other areas of our reporting, which I have tried to highlight albeit sporadically here in this blog. But we also recognize that we at GlobalPost have much work to do in 2011. We are poised for a year of change and growth, a pivotal year where we will launch a redesign of the site and where we will take on more ambitious , in-depth reporting. I would like to keep you involved in the conversation of how we’re evolving as a news organizations. I’ve tried to do that through the blog, but haven’t always succeeded as the demands of the daily news operation have been relentless in our two years since launch. (One of my New Year’s resolutions is to try to do better tending to this blog! )  In the spirit of  starting fresh and living up to resolutions,  I thought I’d copy you in on a New Year memo I just sent to our correspondents in the field and a link to our new 2011 Field Guide for Correspondents. It’s hot off the presses and dated 1/1/11, which as one of my sons just joked will be a one-derful year! We ask that you not reprint the Field Guide without our permission,  but we invite you to take a look as it contains our news organization’s core values and it also includes our correction policy as well as nine essays written by seven of our correspondents in the field and from our editor-at-large Sebastian Junger as well as the BBC Washington Bureau Chief Simon Wilson. Here it is:

To all correspondents in the field,

BOSTON – Wishing you all the best in 2011. Thinking particularly of those of you in Afghanistan, Iraq and other places in the field where you might be far from family and friends. No matter where you are, I trust you are all resourceful enough foreign correspondents to find a glass of cheer. So, here’s to you.
Happy New Year!

Here’s the 2011 edition of GlobalPost’s Field Guide for Correspondents. This year you will see I have updated some chapters and included nine essays from correspondents in the field which we’ve collected over the last two years. I’ve also made an addendum which includes a tip sheet on social networking and our policy for corrections, which was first sent out to you at the beginning of last year. You can quickly retrieve the full 33-page Field Guide for Correspondents at this link. (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8465435/globalpost/field%20guide/2011_fieldGuide3.pdf) (Lower resolution pdf files of the Field Guide are also included as an attachment, but it takes some time to open.)

We hope you will download and save the Field Guide and maybe even be old school enough to print it out. We want you to know it and refer to it when needed. We will have some bound copies here for those of you who might be passing through Boston.

The expectations, standards and policies that are written in the Field Guide shape the core of our relationship with those of you in the field. They have put us in very good stead in the last two years as we’ve worked together to build a news organization which has earned a solid reputation for accuracy and integrity.  That has come through the skill and vigilance of our editing team here in Boston and the solid, balanced reporting you correspondents do every day in the field. Thanks to everyone for all the hard work.

The New Year is shaping up as a very exciting one for GlobalPost with a lot of good changes in the air. We are looking forward to the pending launch of our redesign which looks great. We are also looking forward to the transition in our editorial team as Editor Thomas Mucha takes the reins of daily news operations and I turn my focus to Special Reports and a new initiative for in-depth reporting through non-profit funding. It’s a pivotal year for GlobalPost and Tom and I are both looking forward to working together with you to step up our coverage on all fronts.

We are pleased to share the news with you that we have secured two significant grants for 2011, one for reporting on global health and the other for reporting on human rights. I will soon provide more details about those and other grants and how you can be part of these reporting projects. As previously stated, it is my hope that you will be sending along ground-breaking project ideas and that we might have a chance to work together on these Special Reports. I am looking forward to getting back in the field myself in the coming year. Hope to see you out there.

All best in 2011!

Cheers,
Charlie

Charles M. Sennott
Executive Editor and co-founder

They are the words of the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, and they seem as if they were penned for Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who persevered through tragedy and always did so with a great sense of humor and a love for laughter.

There are many things to say in remembering Senator Kennedy. There’s the passion for helping the downtrodden, the commitment to human rights, the determination to carry the torch for the ideals and the dreams of his brothers, John and Robert. And there are the burdens of tragedy, the lost opportunities for greatness, the failure to achieve health care reform in his lifetime, the scandals that caused so much harm to himself and those who were scandalized.

But in the search for the enduring traits that Kennedy leaves behind, humor should not be overlooked. He liked to laugh and his laughter and playfulness cut across all boundaries geographic and otherwise.

That should be remembered as the somber tributes continue and the country prepares for a world-class Irish wake.

I had a chance to see Ted Kennedy in one of his last public appearances in Boston prior to his diagnosis for brain cancer.

It was at the Kennedy Library in Boston in early May, 2008 at the annual gathering for the Profiles in Courage award which honors leaders in public service in America. And there was Ted, looking great in a tuxedo, and on stage with his beloved niece, Caroline.

I will hold that memory of the way he worked the room and convinced everyone there that he knew them and somehow managed to conveyed a knowing sense of compassion with a wink and a handshake. I’d covered Kennedy on different issues, including his stand on Northern Ireland, the war in Iraq, but also the family’s darker side, including the rape trial of his nephew William Kennedy Smith, an allegation that came out of a night of hard partying in the family’s Palm Beach, Florida estate on Easter weekend.

I’d seen him and studied him and taken notes on what he said in many settings, but it never ceased to amaze me how he worked a room.

Maybe they were just the gifts of a lifelong politician, but something far deeper was there as well. It was a genuine passion for the little guy, a fighting spirit that was always framed by genuine laughter and joy.

On the stage that night, Ted Kennedy sang a Broadway show tune and danced a soft shoe and the whole time he looked like he was having the time of his life. All the remembrance and the tragedy and the weight that surrounds the Kennedy Library was there, but he danced on like the old Irish ballad, the Lord of the Dance, and it felt in that moment like he would always be there. It was just a few weeks later that his diagnosis of brain cancer was announced.

I would see him again, but not laughing. Instead he was focused and serious and impassioned and that was the night of his endorsement of Barack Obama for president in the heat of the Democratic campaign.

Last August, he went on to deliver what was his last great speech during the Democratic Convention. Kennedy’s address echoed perhaps his most famous speech at the convention in 1980 when he delivered, no, roared a single phrase that is now echoing across every broadcast honoring him from America to Africa and Asia and Latin America and Europe and the Middle East.

“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

Those words will echo for a very long time, and so will his laughter.

You can check out the interview here.

A big, old yellow Labrador who lived to eat, Maggie begged on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide when I was based as a journalist in Jerusalem with my wife and family. In fact, she was well known for sauntering down the ancient, cobbled streets and picking up scraps from the Palestinian shwarma shops and then making her way across the street to the Israeli falafel vendors. In a culture where dogs are feared and often loathed, Maggie had made good friends on both sides of the conflict.

Later when I was assigned to London, Maggie dined on left over Shepherd’s Pie from one of the great old pubs of Hampstead which was right next to my office.

She quaffed buttery croissants in France when she lived briefly with a retired French military officer on the coast of Brittany. He was an in-law who offered to take her for 90 days so she could get her European Union citizenship and avoid the officiousness of the British laws for quarantining pets.

She traveled in and out of many ports of call and across international borders with her own small blue, pet passport in which was recorded her many journeys and the attendant inoculations and paper work required for her passage.

I gave Maggie to my wife as a present for our first wedding anniversary 14 years ago. And she lived with us all over the world since then. She was at our side as we had four boys born in Boston, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and London. They loved her and never knew life without her tail thumping the floor in the early morning and her steady breathing putting us all to sleep at night. My wife showered her with affection and treated her as if she was our only girl, which of course she was.

The constant plane travel and the plastic air crates grew more and more difficult for Maggie as she got older. After so many years of parachuting in and out of stories all over the Middle East, I knew how she felt. We’d both begun to lose our traveling legs a bit.

In the last few years, she was happy to have retired with us to a small New England town West of Boston where she had a pond to swim in and lots of grass to roll around in.

But sometimes she’d sit on the porch and look out on the road and I’d wonder if she, like me, didn’t long to get back to traveling.
In the end, Maggie had one last lesson for us.

We thought for sure she was gone when we took her to the vet last week. She was struggling all summer with her breathing due to laryngeal paralysis, a degenerative condition that restricts the air passage and is quite common in Labs. Her condition worsened dramatically while we were on a lakeside vacation in Maine.

A local vet said there wasn’t much we could do to prevent her from dying, but as a last resort he gave her steroids that reduced some of the swelling of her larynx and she rallied for a few more good days. Our boys joked that the steroids would mean that her life would have an asterisk just like the Red Sox players David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez who had been exposed for using steroids. But the drugs worked just as they did for Big Papi.

Suddenly, Maggie was swimming and doing what our boys called “the happy dance,” which was rolling on her back in the grass with her paws in the air and a wide smile.

She taught us at the very end to just live every day as if it’s your last.

We fed her lamb and hugged her and told her we loved her. We cherished every minute with her and quietly wondered why we didn’t treat every day with her like that, and every day with each other like that. For sure, that was what she was telling us in her own quiet way. And sometimes it takes an old dog to remind you of the simplest truths.
We said “goodbye.” Then after a few days, her breathing got very heavy again. She was lethargic and clearly unable to get air. Her tongue was turning blue. She was rushed to the emergency room at an animal hospital and the vet quietly told us what we already knew, that Maggie was not going to live. But like everyone who has been through the extraordinary ordeal of euthanizing a pet, we denied the obvious until we couldn’t any longer.

When the vet finally put her down on Sunday morning, Maggie heaved her last breath and set out on the final journey.

On Thursday morning, Taliban terrorists packed a timber truck full of explosives and detonated it at a checkpoint between two schools in the Logar Province, they killed 25 people, including 13 elementary school students.

I was just in Afghanistan reporting on the girls’ school that is right where this bombing went off. On Wednesday I met with Sally and Don Goodrich. They are an amazing couple from Vermont who lost their son, Peter, in the September 11 attacks. They raised the money to build the girls’ school in his honor through the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation. Two years ago, I went on a trip with Sally to document the opening of the school. It was a joyous occasion. And we stayed in touch and have become friends.

We sat together Wednesday night and talked about the school and disturbing news that the village in which it lies is now apparently under control of the Taliban. The son and brother of Haji Malik, the village elder who has helped Don and Sally win community approval for the school, have been detained by US military for allegedly supporting the Taliban. A cache of weapons and explosives was found on their property, the military claims, and they have evidence photos to prove it. Sally and Don talked of wanting to close the school because they feared for the students’ safety.

Only hours later the truck bomb went off. Already Don and Sally have moved into action, raising more money to send to the families to help pay for burial of their children.

The girls school in the Mohammed Agha district of Logar is a microcosm of all that has gone wrong in Afghanistan. It is a sad illustration of the best of intentions and the worst of intentions.

Who, in God’s name, could kill children walking to school?

Iason, a freelance journalist who had been writing for GlobalPost in Iran, was detained without charge for nearly three weeks by the Iranian government. He was picked up at the airport amid a crackdown on Western media covering the contested elections and the dramatic street demonstrations that followed.

Yesterday was a waiting-to-exhale afternoon as the first sketchy reports came in from Iran that he was going to be released. And then we got the word from the Committee to Protect Journalists, who have done outstanding work on his behalf, that the good news was confirmed. The Greek government and representatives of the Greek Orthodox Church were pivotal in making direct pleas for his release to the Iranian government. A Greek and British citizen, Iason lives in Istanbul and is on his way to be with his family and loved ones. We hope to speak with him soon. We will give you an update when we do. Check out my last post to read more about Iason and his profound talent as a reporter and photographer.

The CPJ reports that there are still more than 35 journalists, bloggers and commentators who remain under detention in Iran for their coverage of the events that unfolded there last month. We will continue to work with CPJ and other news organizations toward their release. And I am certain Iason will want to play a role in that effort. Welcome home, Iason.

Being there on the ground for the story is what matters. And Iason Athanasiadis, a freelance writer and contributor to GlobalPost who was detained while working in Iran last month, always seeks ground truth. He lives it as a writer and photographer.

Iason has always done extraordinary work around the world for publications including the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor and others. But his greatest work and his greatest passion has been in Iran. His photo essay, “Children of the Revolution,” was one of the most enlightening pieces of journalism I have seen come out of Iran in many years. It chronicles the lives of Iranians with dignity and respect. It is void of cliches. It celebrates the complexity of its culture and it honors the yearnings of its people, particularly its youth, in their search for freedom.

And so I am thinking of Iason today, on America’s “Independence Day,” when big cities and little towns gather for cookouts and parades and forget that July 4th is really about some pretty heavy ideas like “revolution” and “freedom.”

Iason was in Iran reporting on these ideas — “revolution” and “freedom” — for GlobalPost when he was detained by Iranian officials at Tehran International Airport on June 17. Amid a crackdown on press freedoms in the wake of the contested presidential elections and the massive demonstrations that followed, Iason was preparing to leave the country as requested by the government of all Western journalists.

Iason's "Reflections on Leaving Iran"

Iason is a Greek citizen and was traveling with valid journalist credentials and a visa. In the three weeks since his detention, GlobalPost has been working diligently for his release with the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, which provided a grant for him to report from there, and The Washington Times, for which he was also contributing stories, as well as a wide circle of family, friends and colleagues. In an abundance of caution, we kept Iason’s detention quiet at first. (In the post below celebrating the escape of New York Times correspondent David Rohde from his Taliban captors in Afghanistan, you can see a veiled reference to Iason.) At the request of his family, we at first released only a sparse statement on his detention and a plea for his release. We are not trying to make a global drama out of it, just quietly working to encourage the Iranian government to do the right and legal thing. Greek government and Greek Orthodox Church officials have directly intervened with the Iranian government on Iason’s behalf and are also calling for his release. No formal charges against Iason have been presented to date.

Iason is more than a respected colleague. He is a friend. I met him in his native Greece just before the 2004 summer Olympics. I had taken my oldest son, Will, who was then 8, along for the reporting trip and Iason was very warm to him and took some photographs of Will walking through the Parthenon. I met Iason again when he came to Harvard University for the Nieman Fellowship in the Class of 2008 and he remembered my son’s name. That’s a small thing, for sure, but it says a lot about the kind of person he is, one who listens and cares about people. For many months after his Nieman year, he and I looked forward to finding a way for him to contribute to GlobalPost from Iran and finally in June we had the chance to do that. His work for us was fair and balanced and enlightening and, as always, based on “ground truth.”

So on this day with so much talk about freedom, we are left holding our breath that Iason will soon have his.

“He’s old school,” as his brother in Boston described him.

Photography by: Tomas Munita/New York Times

And that is an understatement. David is one of the most talented and humble reporters I have ever met. He is quiet and unassuming and nothing short of heroic. He has taken extraordinary risks as a reporter from his Pulitzer-Prize-winning dispatches from the war in Bosnia, where he was also detained, to his reporting in Afghanistan, where he also won a Pulitzer Prize for excellent work. He was picked up on November 10 by captors while inerviewing a Taliban commander and he was held for the last seven months, just two months after he had been married. He escaped last week and the story of his release was broken on Sunday in the New York Times and a detailed account of the escape appears in today’s editions. David is fearless, but never reckless. He is not a cowboy, just one hell of a great reporter. He’s old school indeed.

I’ve known David from the field for the better part of a decade and I have been worried sick about him for every day of the last seven months. Those of us who knew about his capture were sworn to silence at the request of his family.

One of his signatures as a reporter was a faded, old Boston Red Sox cap and, when we crossed paths, he and I often shared news from Fenway and our shared hometown. I was traveling in Pakistan and Afghanistan for most of this month and thinking of David at every turn. The story of his capture in Logar Province, just outside of Kabul, was very much on my mind when I took the decision not to go there in pursuit of a story. I know he would have approved of the caution. And when I was meeting with former officials in the now deposed Taliban government, I took each step carefully and tried to think the way David would think about the reporting. He holds important lessons for all of us who do this kind of work in the field, lessons about the need to be careful, of course, but also the need to have courage. There are some other colleagues who I work with and admire who are still being held and whose details have to remain secret for now. All I can say is we are being constantly vigilant about their situation and working quietly toward their release. They share David’s courage and sense of importance for geting the story in the field.

The kind of reporting David has done his whole life is the best of foreign reporting. And when you are dropping a row of quarters for a newspaper as great as the New York Times remember the quality and the courage of some of the people behind those bylines.

I was at Fenway yesterday watching the Red Sox win a great game with a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth. I was there with my boys in field boxes near the Pesky pole in a swirling mist of rain and thinking of David’s father and about fate. I was hoping David was watching the game with his family. What a great father’s day present for David’s Dad to have his son safely returned. Welcome home, David.

Photography by: Seamus Murphy

For a moment, you feel what it must have been like to live here in the early 1960s.

That’s when Dupree first arrived in Kabul and where she would meet the two great loves of her life. The first was her husband, Louis Dupree, the dashing American paratrooper turned world-famous archaeologist. The second love was one they both shared: the cultural and historic riches of the rugged, magical landscape of Afghanistan and its people.

As an archaeologist and ethnologist, Afghanistan has been the focus of their life’s work.

She and Louis, who passed away in 1989, lived through it all and suffered with the Afghans through the wars and celebrated the life that has gone on in between. She survived the dark days of the civil war here in the early 1990s and the even darker days of the Taliban. Through it all, she studied and worked to protect and preserve the country’s culture and heritage. Today, there is no Westerner who knows the Afghan people like Nancy.

Some 45 years after her arrival here, I meet with Dupree on a sunny day in the late afternoon shadows of the once-grand home where she lives part of the year in downtown Kabul.

The rest of the year she lives just across the border in Peshawar, Pakistan still writing and researching at the age of 83. She divides her time between the two cities tending to an archive that is housed at Kabul University. The archive, an idea inspired by Louis, is dedicated to creating a resource center for all the different aid workers and Afghan experts who could no longer travel freely in war-torn Afghanistan.

She looks heart sick when she talks about the Taliban’s destruction of the two giant Buddha’s of Bamayan. She also wants to set the record straight that she was negotiating with the Taliban leadership to protect the Buddha’s, and believes the decision to dynamite them was made by a militant fringe closely connected to Al Qaeda. She insists that many in the Taliban government were opposed to the destruction, but the militants had run away with the Taliban movement.

She holds the secrets to so much of the politics that has gone on in Afghanistan, but at every turn the conversation comes back to the Afghan people and her love for and fascination with them and their history.

“I’m a people person,” says Nancy, who apologizes that she doesn’t have much time to talk as she is heading out to a party at the embassy to meet the newly appointed American Ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, who also served as the commanding general in Afghanistan.

Right away, she wants to get into it.

Nancy still has a lot of fire in her voice and she has some stern criticism of the U.S. military and diplomatic approach in Afghanistan.

“They make strategies for people who they don’t talk to,” she says, sitting on a couch in the parlor where we are talking and leaning forward with intensity.

“They sit behind the fortress with razor wire walls of the Embassy. And the rest make their strategy from behind desks thousands of miles away … They don’t seem to realize that the strategy has to be about the people,” she says.

She checks her watch and says, “Sorry, I have to go put on my face now and get ready for all the diplomats. Too many of them, if you ask me.”

Moments later she heads out through the steel gate, looking elegant in a long, traditional embroidered gown. She slides into the back seat and she and her driver head out down the crowded, chaotic and sometimes-perilous streets of the city she loves.

The Honorable Barack Hussein Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street, NW

Washington, DC 20520

Paris, February 17, 2009

Dear Mr. President:

Dear Madam Secretary of State

Reporters Without Borders, an international press freedom organization, would like to draw your attention to the situation of journalists in a number of countries now ranked as diplomatic priorities for the U.S. government. Mr. President, you appointed yourself to be the spokesperson in the fight for the right to inform and to be informed while visiting the Sudan in 2006, when you stated: “Press freedom is like tending a garden, it’s never done.” These words are somewhat reminiscent of those spoken by President Thomas Jefferson: “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that limited without danger of losing it.”

We consider it essential that the country of the First Amendment actively participate in promoting human rights within the international community, and especially in those regions of the planet in which these rights are being repeatedly violated. The executive order signed on January 22, 2009, which was aimed at putting an end to the humanitarian and legal scandal represented by the Guantanamo detention camp sent, in our opinion, an important signal. Moreover, we are expecting the new Congress to finally approve a “shield law” guaranteeing journalists federal protection for the privilege of source confidentiality, thus sparing the latter from prison terms like those handed down under the previous administration-a period characterized by a decline in public freedoms. What is at stake is not only the preservation of a basic principle of investigative journalism, but also of the quality of information that the American public has a right to expect.

The fact that the United States of America is speaking on behalf of human rights obviously implies that you must keep a particularly close watch in regions where you have established a military presence. The war that began in Iraq in 2003 has been the bloodiest of all time for local and foreign journalists, and the U.S. Army bears the heavy burden of responsibility for some of these tragedies. The necessary withdrawal of the troops that you plan to successfully carry out by 2011 must be accompanied by guarantees essential to peace. In Afghanistan, too, the U.S. Army has too often hindered journalists’ work, and Bagram Prison remains closed to the media. As a Reporters Without Borders’ delegation realized during an on-site mission there in January 2009, American support of early efforts to further a democratic process have in no way prevented violations of the freedom to inform and to be informed by Afghan courts. Case in point: Perwiz Kambakhsh’s 20-year prison sentence, upheld on appeal, for having downloaded “blasphemous” material on the condition of women in the country.

Your decision to promote dialogue with certain powers cannot fail to take into account this necessity, either. In China, the Olympic Games did very little to further the progress of freedom of expression. We hope, Madam Secretary of State, that your next visit to the country, February 20 to 22, will induce Chinese authorities to release prisoners of conscience. The “comprehensive dialogue” that you wish to initiate must keep its promises by venturing beyond economic and trade considerations. In the world’s biggest prison for freelance journalists and cyberdissidents, it is nearly impossible to pick up broadcasts from such stations as Radio Free Asia or Voice of America, and websites of American daily newspapers like The New York Times are still blocked. Your “extended hand” to Iran, whose Internet connection capacities rely upon U.S. companies, calls for a relaxation of the filtering now being imposed on foreign media websites and an end to the legal harassment of human rights and gender equity activists such as lawyer Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Founder of the Circle for the Defenders of Human Rights.

History has shown it, and you have understood it: placing a ban on countries subject to the most repressive regimes has often exacerbated their isolation without changing the attitude of their leaders. That is why we are particularly focusing on the State Department’s desire to mediate in favor of a genuine sharing of power between the political forces present in Zimbabwe. The participation of Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC in the government is an essential precondition for reinstating freedoms, for an in-depth reform of press laws and for foreign journalists to gain access to a country in chaos. Although Western chanceries have spoken out against Robert Mugabe and his regime, their silence in the face of the tyranny prevailing in Eritrea is all the more incomprehensible.

Moreover, being aware of your personal attachment to East Africa, Mr. President, you cannot tolerate the fact that the Asmara government, some members of which also possess American citizenship, is targeting Eritrean exiles – of whom there are many in the United States – for extortion and threatening them with reprisals against their friends and relatives remaining in the homeland, who are already being terrorized. For many years, Reporters Without Borders has been urging that the assets of certain identified leaders be frozen, that they be prohibited from entering the U.S., and that the Eritrean Ambassador to the United States be summoned without delay. The same sort of pressure needs to be placed on the Gambian government, which continues to ignore appeals from the international community, and the injunctions issued by the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) concerning the disappearance, in July 2007, of “Chief” Ebrima Manneh, a reporter for the Daily Observer. Pursuing this logic, it would be in the best interest of U.S. intelligence services to make public the information they have on the circumstances surrounding the murder, in 2004, of Deyda Hydara, editor-in-chief of Gambia’s private daily newspaper, The Point. Our organization, which had conducted two in-depth investigations on this matter, has certain details that placing the security services surrounding President Yahya Jammeh under strong suspicion.

Worldwide, there are too many of these closed-off States adept at double talk and ready to exchange a strategic position in return for impunity. How can any serious diplomatic relations-ones which truly promote peace and security-be established with regimes that are exercising draconian control over information? Syria cannot claim that it should be considered a reliable negotiating partner in the Middle East if, at the same time, it continues to violate the principles that this ambition demands. It must provide proof by releasing cyberdissidents Homam Hassan Haddad, Habib Saleh, Tariq Biasi, Kareem Arabji, Firas Saad, Muhened Abdulrahman and journalist Michel Kilo, who are being held arbitrarily. This requirement also applies to Myanmar, where dozens of recently arrested journalists and political opponents are serving their sentences under disgraceful conditions. The United States has everything to gain by strengthening the UN mandate in this country, without which contacts with the ruling junta may be permanently broken off. A dangerous isolationism, conducive to the worst kinds of human rights violations, is also at work in the strategic region of the Central Asian Republics, where Russia has regained its influence, to the detriment of that of Western countries.

The consistency and credibility of U.S. foreign policy will depend upon the ability of your administration to demonstrate the same vigilance in relations with your partners and allies. As a member of the UN Security Council and a key actor in what has become a multipolar world, Russia merits special attention. Disarmament constitutes a necessary yet inadequate step to ensure that the Kremlin can inspire confidence in the international community. The rejection of transparency by Moscow’s leaders can be seen in the troubling repression against civil society and the opposition. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006, undoubtedly paid with her life for having informed the world of the horrors committed by Russian troops in Chechnya. No democracy can withstand the scrutiny of the international community and its media when it yields to the temptation to act for the worst. The Israeli offensive in Gaza, which led you to appoint a new U.S. envoy in the person of George Mitchell, reminded us of this.

Like other countries whose populations have grown mainly as a result of immigration, the United States must prepare itself to accommodate journalists fleeing oppression and terror, and grant them asylum. Afghans, Iranians, Eritreans-they are also coming in from neighboring countries, like Mexican Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, unjustly detained for seven months by the immigration services in El Paso, Texas, merely for having sought to save his own life and that of his young son. This case is the consequence of the deadly drug cartel war, intensified by the violence of the authorities, which is grieving Mexico. As you promised, Mr. President, during a meeting with President Felipe Calderón prior to your inauguration, the American and Mexican governments need to join forces if they are to secure the border between the two countries, without which no Rule of Law can exist there.

Elsewhere in Latin America, the havoc wrought by the drug traffic and paramilitarism are draining all sense from the constitutional principles previously taken for granted. In this respect, like certain members of the U.S. Congress, we would ask that Plan Colombia’s funding – so costly for the American taxpayer – be reviewed in proportion to the actual efforts being made by Bogota authorities on behalf of human rights. President Alvaro Uribe has too often connived and made irresponsible statements that have placed in jeopardy journalists of whom he did not approve, or forced them into exile. Finally, your willingness to relax the clauses of the embargo imposed since 1962 on Cuba -the only country of the continent with no free press, and in which there are 23 journalists listed among its 200 political prisoners – may persuade Havana authorities to comply more closely with the international community’s expectations. The embargo, challenged in its principle by virtually all members of the UN’s General Assembly, has done nothing but strengthen the Castrist regime, to the detriment of the Cuban people. It must be raised one day. The island’s future depends upon it.

Mr. President, Madam Secretary of State, we look forward to your response, and thank you for your consideration. I am at your disposal, as is Lucie Morillon, our Washington D.C. bureau director, should you have any questions or desire further clarification regarding the situation of journalists and press freedom around the world.

Yours very respectfully,

Jean-François Julliard

Reporters Without Borders
Secretary-General