UNESCO Director-General Matsura confirms he will launch World Press Freedom Day in Manila on May 3

PARIS – Director-General Koichiro Matsura of UNESCO announced yesterday that he will be launching the United Nations agency’s observance of "World Press Freedom Day" in Manila.

This is a signal honor since the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which is based in Paris, represents 189 member-states all over the globe.

Matsura was invited by the Philippines through Education Secretary Raul Roco, and the invitation has been forwarded to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo by Vice Pre-sident and Foreign Affairs Secretary Teofisto Guingona. The President, who just returned from the APEC summit in Shanghai, is expected to immediately formalize the "invitation" which Mr. Matsura has already accepted.

The UNESCO head made his announcement when he met with the Executive Board of the International Press Institute (IPI), our organization of editors, publishers, and journalists representing over 120 countries.

We have been meeting here in Paris since Friday to discuss urgent threats to press freedom, including the arrest by the South Korean government of our own IPI Vice Chairman, Mr. Bang Sang-hoon, president and publisher of Seoul’s biggest and most influential daily, Chosun Ilbo. Also arrested on "tax evasion" charges were 12 other media titans like Kim Byeong-Kwan of Kookmin Ilbo. Mr. Bang, who is now in jail, was former chairman as well of Dong-A Ilbo, another major South Korean newspaper.

* * *

The case of Bang is part of a campaign initiated by the administration of South Korean President Kim dae-Jung to muzzle the media, particularly the Chosun Ilbo which has been fearlessly criticizing the government in recent months. The allegation of the tax authorities is that 13 media organizations had evaded taxes totaling more than US$300 million!

At our final session, the IPI Board strongly condemned this wave of arrests, expressed confidence in Mr. Bang, and declared that the tax probe was an ill-disguised ploy by President Kim and his henchmen to stifle media dissent, particularly with national elections looming.

Sounds like a familiar problem, doesn’t it?

Will the IPI resolution help get Bang out of prison? Not likely – at this juncture. However, President Kim – who plans to go to Oslo (Norway) for the 100th commemoration of the Nobel Prizes – is forewarned. As a laureate who received the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize only a couple of years ago, he has been acting very strangely.

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a "Nobel Recall." Perhaps Secretary-General Kofi Anan and the United Nations, who have just jointly received this year’s Nobel Peace award, could intercede with President Kim for the jailed media owners and executives.

The prosecutors want to get Mr. Bang convicted for a seven-year sentence, would you believe? He’s already behind prison bars – and denied bail – without having been convicted yet. The tax authorities claim that it left free, Bang and the 12 other accused might "destroy evidence" of tax fraud and embezzlement. It’s ridiculous, for starters, that Bang is even being tarred with alleged "offenses" incurred by his predecessor.

* * *

In a tough and candid address, UNESCO Director-General Matsura told the IPI that, in the wake of "the terrible events of September 11 and their aftermath," certain words in the UNESCO constitution of 1946 stands out. Article One, he reminded us, states that the UNESCO’s purpose is "to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture." He pointed out that "the word that leaps from the text is ‘security,’ a less inspiring term than ‘peace’ but one which refers to a fundamental human need and a vital requirement of the relations between states. It is a word which resonates strongly with the present international situation . . ."

Matsura noted that in the UNESCO charter "the free flow of ideas by word and image" are vital for "advancing the mutual knowledge and understanding of peoples through international cooperation."

What the UNESCO head is worried about is that "media freedom and democratic processes risk being caught in the cross-fire between transnational terrorism and the search for security."

He recalled that "UNESCO’s founders (in 1946) recognized that Nazism had transformed the media into an instrument of political control, racist ideology and hate-mingering. It is particularly instructive, therefor, that they have placed their faith in completely untrammeled freedom of expression and the free flow of information."

"As you well know," he declared, "terrorism is no friend of a free press or the free exchange of ideas, opinions and information." The terrorists’ methods can be "brutally direct" taking the form of "violent attacks on reporters and publishers, including assassinations, as well as kidnapping, bombings of media offices, and so forth." And today, he added, "we are witnessing an insiduous form of terrorist threat, the mailing of anthrax spores, which has been targeted upon major television news organizations in New York as well as the US Congress." He asserted that UNESCO condemns all such acts of violence "unreservedly."

* * *

The quandary faced by journalists in the course of their work, however, is that they must deal not merely on issues of terrorism, Matsura underscored, "but also on questions of reporting on warfare . . ."

Matsura explained that "the indirect threat of terrorism" not merely creates "a climate of fear, suspicion and mistrust," but "may provoke a response from governmental authorities which, in the pursuit of greater security, may impose forms of surveillance, control and regulation that severely constrain democratic practices freedom of expression and the operation of free, independent and pluralistic media."

Another troubling aspect, he averred, us "the use of the media by terrorists to spread their messages and the sheer newsworthiness of acts of terrorism."

The main object of his speech, Matsura reiterated, is to deliver the message: "I emphatically reject the view that, to obtain security, we must abandon our freedoms."

His main concern in the current situation, he insisted, is that "much freedom of expression and media freedom may be sacrificed hastily, even voluntarily, on the altar of security. Anxieties induced by terrorist threats may lead to laws and regulations which may undermine the very rights and freedoms that the anti-terrorist campaign is supposed to defend."

The UNESCO, he concluded, "has taken great pains in recent weeks to combat three dangerous myths: that Islam and terrorism are bound together inseparably; that there is a hierarchy of cultures, civilizations and religions; and that we are witnessing an inevitable ‘clash of civilizations’, particularly between the West and Islam."

* * *

He called on us in the IPI to join UNESCO’s efforts to decry such myths and promote "intercultural dialogue and mutual understanding . . ."

I must agree wholeheartedly with Director-General Matsura’s expressions of warning that, in the pursuit of security in the present war on terrorism, freedoms might be stifled. On the other hand, when you’re at "war" and you’ve lost loved ones, or your family is in peril, survival is a primordial emotion and need.

As for Islam existing separately from terrorism, that’s an essential fact, but Mr. Matsura can’t fault the non-Muslim world, bombarded by TV and photographic images of hate-chanting Islamic mobs from Pakistan to Indonesia and the Middle East, of reacting to such Islamic fervor and its rhetoric. The argument that the Islamic extremists are "few" doesn’t jell with the images. So lease forgive us if we withhold concurrence without reservation.

Mr. Matsura was roundly applauded by the IPI Directors and Fellows in the meeting room in L’Lulli, in the Le Grand Inter-Continental, especially when he promised to consider the case of Mr. Bang and the other arrested media executives in the Republic of Korea (ROK).

But, personally, although I admire Mr. Matsura for his eloquent address, his forthright personality and his well-expressed convictions, I’m afraid that – even in this hour of peril – he falls back on the basic United Nations mantra: No one is to blame, really and everyone must be spanked so the UN can be seen as having acted even-handedly.