In the article and embedded videos, I interview Myroslava Gongadze, the wife of the murdered journalist Georgiy whose homicide caused an international scandal in 2000, and Ukrainian affairs expert Dr. Taras Kuzio. View the article as it originally appeared at the Pulitzer Center.

Ukrainian Journalists Face Uncertain Future

By Christina Maria Paschyn

In 2004 thousands of protesters swarmed the capital of Ukraine demanding that the country’s fraudulent presidential election be overturned. Dubbed the Orange Revolution, the movement swept pro-Western politician Viktor Yushchenko to power, whose victory brought hope to millions of democratic activists including journalist Myroslava Gongadze.

Her husband Georgiy Gongadze, an investigative reporter on government corruption, had been kidnapped in September 2000; two months later his decapitated body was found lying in a forest outside Kiev. Leaked secret recordings linked then-President Leonid Kuchma and other top officials to the homicide, who are heard discussing ways to silence the muckraking journalist. But the tapes’ authenticity was questioned, and none of the individuals on the recordings were ever brought to court.

As part of his campaign platform, Yushchenko promised to launch a legitimate investigation and finally solve the case for Gongadze and her family. Moreover, he swore to fully democratize the former Soviet nation and restore civil liberties for Ukrainian journalists who routinely suffered government harassment and censorship.

Six years later the Orange Revolution is regarded a failure. Political infighting within Yushchenko’s coalition prevented the beleaguered president from achieving many of the goals he championed, like stamping out government corruption and integrating Ukraine into the European Union. Gongadze says her family has only received partial justice: by 2009, three policemen and a general in the Interior Ministry’s foreign surveillance unit were arrested for carrying out the murder, but the identities of the officials who ordered it remain unclear.

“It was important for Yushchenko to demonstrate some progress in the investigation since he came to power with Georgiy’s name on his [campaign] flags,” said Gongadze, who is now a television anchor for Voice of America’s Ukrainian Service. “He was able to pursue it up to some point, so I can be thankful and I do think that Yushchenko did something. But I don’t think he did everything he had the power to do.”

Despite all the broken promises, Gongadze acknowledges that Yushchenko did improve democratic freedoms in the country: For the first time journalists reported feeling free to cover whatever they wanted without fear of government intimidation. Independent media organizations flourished, and in 2009 Freedom House ranked Ukraine 108 in its index of press freedom in 196 countries – the best score for any former Soviet state outside the Baltics.

“The Yushchenko government was not trying to oppress the media and there were almost no cases of harassment, intimidation or killing [of journalists],” Gongadze explained. “And he allowed democratic elections – that’s a real plus as well…so there was professional development in the Ukrainian media field.”

But now Ukrainian journalists are at risk of losing their hard-won rights.

Journalists Targeted Ahead of Local Elections

In February 2010 Viktor Yanukovych, the alleged fraudster in the Orange Revolution, regained power ironically in a fair and free election that his predecessor had worked to ensure. Less than a year into his presidency, several media watchdogs have blasted Yanukovych for what they say is a steady curtailment of press freedom. In August Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released a report detailing the rise in attempts to censor journalists, prevent certain coverage and doctor reports:

“Many TV news reporters say they have been censored. Either their reports have been suppressed outright, or they have been changed substantially, always in such a way as to favor people of influence. They cite new formats or editorial directives that interfere in their reporting.”

According to RSF, in April a special piece on the Kharkiv Accords, which extend the presence of the Russian Black Sea Feet in Crimea, was banned from broadcast on the basis that “the job of the staff is not to analyze the accords but to highlight their positive aspect.” In June STB journalist Serhi Andrushko reported that his package on Yanukovych’s first 100 days in office was edited by the station’s director-general to make it more flattering of the president.

Independent journalists who report critically on ruling officials have been targeted by police and security agents and even physically assaulted. When local blogger Oleh Shynkarenko criticized Yanukovych in July, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) interrogated him for allegedly threatening the president’s life and insulting him. In September Artyom Furmanyuk, a journalist in the Eastern city of Donetsk, said he was severely beaten by police in an incident outside his home just hours after Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty ran his article on local government corruption.

Some experts see signs of a return to the brutal targeting of journalists that marked the pre-Yushchenko era: Vasyl Klymentyev, the editor of an investigative newspaper in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, mysteriously disappeared in August. The case is being treated as a homicide, but colleagues of the missing editor fear it will be a repeat of the Gongadze investigation. In October Kharkiv police searched the apartment of Klymentyev’s deputy editor, who claims his computers were confiscated in an attempt to punish him for publicizing the case.

The world has taken notice of the deteriorating situation in Ukraine. Last week European Union Commissioner Stefan Fuele criticized the new president for the apparent clampdown on independent media and opposition leaders in the lead up to local council elections on October 31, raising concerns of potential fraud. The RSF downgraded the country by 42 points in its annual global press freedom report; Ukraine now ranks 131 out of 178 nations, worse than Egypt and Iraq.

Yanukovych has dismissed censorship incidents as byproducts of the conflicting and competing interests of media owners. Ukrainian foreign and domestic policy expert Taras Kuzio, Ph.D., sees some truth in that claim.

“The oligarchs (business magnates) who control the big TV stations, they want to ingratiate themselves with the authorities,” explained Kuzio, a senior fellow of Ukrainian studies at the University of Toronto. “Therefore they apply pressure on middle management [who then] turn on journalists to not cover certain events…to belittle the opposition – to sort of portray them divided and small in numbers – and to beef up the public perception of the authorities.”

Kuzio says Ukrainians, who will go to the polls this Sunday, have felt the mainstream media’s self-censorship most in the lack of equal coverage to opposition parties: “It’s really more a question of general climate. The opposition always complain that they are no longer invited to TV chat shows to give comments like they were under the Yushchenko era. So when people are watching political chat shows and news programs they tend to get a one-sided view of what is going on.”

But the SBU is directly contributing to biased political coverage through its interrogation and intimidation of journalists critical of the government, he added. Moreover, the president’s promotion of Valeriy Khoroshkovsky, the owner of the pro-government Inter TV, threatens the fate of independent television stations across Ukraine.

Yanukovych appointed Khoroshkovsky head of the SBU in March. Despite this apparent conflict of interest, Khoroshkovsky used his position to influence the National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting’s decision to strip rivals TVi and 5 Kanal of their broadcasting frequencies last month, according to media watchdogs. The stations supported the Orange Revolution and are considered to be one of the few remaining independent news sources in the country.

Under Russia’s Thumb

“Today, as observers note, the Yanukovych government is heading down the path of creating in Ukraine a system of so-called ‘controlled democracy,’ similar to that of [Prime Minister] Putin and [President] Medvedev in Russia,” explained Gongadze in a presentation for the National Endowment for Democracy on October 22. “The attempt to increase control over media outlets in order to gain more personal power is not new in the post-Soviet countries. We witnessed the unfolding of this scenario in Russia when [then] President Putin came to power.”

If Yanukovych is indeed following the Putin model, then the result could be a dramatic reversal of the western-style reforms and liberties implemented during the Yushchenko era. Russia, where censorship often takes a violent form, is regularly ranked as one of the worst countries in the world to be a journalist.

But Kuzio asserts that Russia’s influence extends beyond the authoritarian attempts to censor criticism of the government and reports favorable to the opposition: The Yanukovych regime is targeting journalists and academics that promote a Ukrainian nationalist identity and write negatively about Russia on contentious historical issues. He cites the SBU’s recent interrogation of a historian writing on the Holodomor, the 1932-1933 Ukrainian famine that the Yushchenko administration declared a Stalin-masterminded genocide.

“The national identity question is very much tied to reforms and support for integration into Europe, and that is one of the main reasons why there is an attack at the moment against, what I would call, a ‘Ukrainianphile’ national identity,” Kuzio explained. “Today we have a far more assertive Russia and a Russia that is demanding influence over Kiev and its neighboring states, particularly in the case of education, national identity policy and over the security forces.”

This policy is reflected in Yanukovych’s selection of Khoroshkovsky as SBU chairman and Dmytro Tabachnyk as education minister – appointments that Kuzio says were heavily influenced by Russia. Tabachnyk has since ordered that school textbooks follow Russia in referencing World War II as the “Great Patriotic War.” Likewise RSF reports that broadcasts about the education minister, Holodomor and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (World War II nationalist group) have been censored.

Fighting Back

The slow decline of civil liberties in Ukraine is a depressing development for Gongadze, who says she now has little hope that her husband’s homicide will ever be solved. Before the tenth anniversary of Georgiy’s disappearance on September 16, the Prosecutor’s Office announced that Kuchma’s Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko had ordered the killing. It’s a ruling Gongadze says she cannot accept.

“I do believe that Kravchenko was involved…what I don’t believe is that he was the only one who ordered the killing,” she said. “Georgiy was not his personal enemy and he didn’t have any reason to order Georgiy’s murder. If he did that means that someone else ordered him to do that.” Kravchenko died in 2005 from two supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head, but media reports doubted this official conclusion; they speculated that he might have been assassinated to prevent him from testifying in court. Kravchenko left an alleged suicide note denying any guilt.

“This investigation was a complete cover up of the power holders and it still is a cover-up,” Gongadze stated. “We already had partial justice [under the Yushchenko administration] now we just need political will from the Yanukovych government to really push forward. I don’t see this political will right now; I see the will by the Yanukovych government to manipulate the situation.” She believes the regime is protecting those truly responsible for ordering the murder, including the current chairman of the parliament Volodymyr Lytvyn whose voice is also on the leaked recordings.

But Gongadze remains committed to pursuing her fight for justice, and she believes that all is not lost for Ukrainian journalists: “The most important thing is to keep the balance that we have right now between the government and the media and civil society. So far civil society and the media have been able to fight back, they were able to stand up for their rights.” She praises the creation in May of Stop Censorship, a movement made up of more than 500 national and regional journalists to counteract government suppression. In addition recent surveys and focus groups conducted by InterMedia show that Ukrainians today are aware of the rise of biased news coverage and are becoming increasingly willing to turn to the internet and international media to access objective information.

“[But] they need more support from Western democracies to really hold that position because definitely the government has more power to go against the media,” Gongadze added. She laments that Western leaders are still too quick to praise Yanukovych for the supposed “stability” his presidency has brought to Ukraine, which has been marked by a swift consolidation of power and a lack of political infighting unlike in the Yushchenko era.

Kuzio is confident that Ukraine’s civil society will not allow the country to regress: “There is a lot of discontent and anger on the streets and I don’t think the authorities really understand what’s taken place in the last five years,” he remarked. “A generation of young Ukrainians received their political maturity in the Orange Revolution…You had five years of freedom for journalists, historians and academics, and I don’t think it’s that easy to put that genie back in the bottle.”

Whether the president’s party will feel the brunt of that sentiment in a fair and free election on Sunday remains to be seen.

On October 20, friends and colleagues of Persephone Miel gathered to remember the former senior advisor of Internews, who dedicated her life to advancing the work of journalists across the globe. Persephone passed away on June 28 after a long battle with cancer.

Before she died, Persephone said she wanted to be remembered by a fellowship that would help media professionals outside the United States report on their home countries and bring their work to a broader international audience. The Persephone Miel Fellowship will be overseen by the Pulitzer Center in partnership with Internews.

“Persephone is quite particular, she had a very clear vision of what she wanted,” said Center Executive Director Jon Sawyer, who spoke at the memorial service. “She’s trying to make an opportunity for voices to be heard beyond a region, beyond a country in a larger world, and give us the opportunity to bring those voices to the widest possible audience.”

“We [the Center] will work to do everything we can to mentor them, to bring them multimedia tools and to expose the work as broadly as we can,” he added.

Internews has raised already more than $30,000 for the fellowship; they hope to raise as much as $500,000, which would be enough to endow the program and ensure the funding of at least one fellow annually.

Circassian journalist Fatima Tlisova also spoke at the event and said she considers herself to be the ‘first’ Persephone Miel fellow. Persephone introduced Tlisova to the Center, and her resulting reporting project on journalist murders and brutal censorship in the Caucasus became the inspiration for the fellowship.

“It wouldn’t have happened without her,” Fatima explained. Tlisova’s work was featured in the September issue of Harvard’s Nieman Reports; her additional articles and videos interviews with targeted journalists are available on the Center’s website.

View remarks from Jon Sawyer, Fatima Tlisova, and Jeanne Bourgault, COO of Internews, in the video above.

To donate to the fellowship, visit: http://www.internews.org/persephone/

It’s an important issue – two out of three schools in the developing world lack decent toilets, according to UNICEF. The World Health Organization estimates that 272 million school days are lost each year due to diarrhea and some 400 million school-aged children worldwide have worms.

Read on: Stressing Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Children in Developing Countries

Girl in Africa Carrying Jerry Cans Full of Water

Not anymore. Yahoo reports:

In a book to be published this year, Lomborg calls global warming “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and calls for the world’s governments to invest tens of billions of dollars annually to fight climate change.

Lomborg’s former foes in the environmental movement are so far unimpressed by news of his conversion. Calling him a “shrewd self-promoter,” Grist.org’s Jonathan Hiskes marveled at Lomborg’s ability to “play the media” in simply “adopting a position already held by millions of sensible people.” And Friends of the Earth climate campaigner Mike Childs told the U.K. Guardian, “It appears that the self-styled skeptical environmentalist is beginning to become less skeptical as he enters middle age.”

I helped interview Lomborg for TIME.com in 2007. It was my first video shooting/editing gig at the news organization, but unfortunately the video producers never added this lowly intern’s name to the credits. Still, if you’re interested in hearing Lomborg’s previous views, watch it:

Image courtesy of Caucasian Knot from Fatima Tlisova's presentation "Brutal Censorship."

In June of this year I interviewed Fatima Tlisova, an independent journalist from the North Caucasus who has reported on human rights abuses and political/military brutality and corruption in the region. She was giving a presentation for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) on eight journalists who had been marginalized by Russian authorities through unjustified criminal prosecution, forced exile and even assassination. Included among the journalists she profiled was the late Natalia Estemirova, a prominent Chechen reporter and activist who dared to write about Chechen President (and Russian lackey) Ramzan Kadyrov’s personal torture prisons and barbaric intimidation tactics. For instance, Natalia was one of the very few journalists who documented the beheading of a local rebel, whose head was placed on a stake in the center of his village at Kadyrov’s order. For her determination to achieve  social justice for her people, Natalia was assassinated. Activists and other independent journalists assert that her murder was conducted by Kremlin security officials.

Fatima Tlisova is a Pulitzer Center grantee, and this past week I spent my working hours carefully fact checking her articles. I was truly happy to do so for because of my Ukrainian ethnic background and my own people’s vicious oppression under Soviet rule, I wholeheartedly support Fatima’s mission to expose the world to the atrocities occurring in her homeland at the hands of Putin and his minions.

I encourage you all to visit her project page and read her articles on the Pulitzer Center website. We have just published her blog post on the life and death of Natalia Estemirova. It is the first in a series of reports from her project published in advance of her upcoming feature story in the fall issue of the Nieman Reports.

Read/watch my print and video interview with Fatima. It is also available on my website, www.christinapaschyn.com, under the print section.

Last year, I reported on the 100th anniversary of a major women’s suffrage parade in Edinburgh. As we celebrate the wonderful achievements of America’s early feminists today, we should also honor the spirit of 20th century Scottish feminists. Moreover, we all need to realize that the battle for gender equality in Scotland is far from over.

View my story below. It appeared on the Scottish American Society website on Oct 12, 2009.

The 100th anniversary of the women's suffrage parade in Edinburgh

EDINBURGH – Flora Drummond was a sight to behold on the morning of October 9th, 1909.

Carrying a whip and dressed in a purple and white military uniform, the Scottish suffragette – aptly nicknamed the “General” – led hundreds of women in a march through the city of Edinburgh to demand the right to vote. Thousands of spectators looked on in wonder at the sea of flags, bagpipes and floats; many more stared in astonishment at the sight of Drummond riding her horse astride rather than sidesaddle.

But never the kind to conform to antiquated notions of modesty, Drummond and her sisters of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a militant suffragette organization, would continue to shock the patriarchal establishment by burning and destroying government property and staging hunger strikes in prison. In this way suffragettes differentiated themselves from women suffragists, who used more peaceful methods to fight for the vote.

Nevertheless, suffragists were invited to participate in the march as well. Both camps’ efforts would pay off in 1928 when British women finally were granted the right to vote on the same terms as men.

Scottish feminists recreate the march

Now on the 100th anniversary of the procession, Scottish feminists are paying tribute to these women by holding workshops, theatre performances and forums across the country.

Most recently on October 10th, about 3,000 men and women reenacted the event by marching in Edinburgh with banners and signs reading “Votes for Women” and “Equal Pay.”

Channeling the spirit of Drummond, most of the demonstrators wore purple, green and white scarves, sashes and ribbons – the colors of the WSPU; many also donned Victorian and Edwardian costumes.

But while all had come to celebrate the suffragettes’ achievements, the march also stressed the need for women to keep exercising their political strength.

“An article came out in 2007 just before the [Scottish] parliamentary elections that suggested that women were not turning out to vote and not engaging in the political process,” said procession coordinator Fiona Skillen of Gude Cause, the organization that planned the event and which takes its name from a suffragette slogan. “We wanted to really do something to encourage women to engage in the political process again, celebrate women’s history and mark the centennial of the event.

Gude Cause invited numerous women’s organizations to march; their banners and flags highlighted the contemporary issues affecting Scotland: “The problem of inequality in the workplace, conflict resolution, violence against women, human trafficking….These are issues that I think some people are oblivious to or they think that because of past legislation the problems have been solved, but that is far from the case,” said Skillen.

Marching along Princes Street in Edinburgh

Indeed, women in Scotland still face a number of economic, social and political hurdles. They suffer a 17-18 percent pay gap from men – a statistic lamented by dozens of young school girls who partook in Saturday’s procession singing “We work all day, we get less pay” to the tune of Snow White’s High Ho.

More shockingly, the rape conviction rate sits at just 3.9 percent – one of the lowest in the world; and one out of two boys and one out of three girls believe there are some situations when it is ok to hit or force sex on a woman, according to the feminist organization Engender.

Lily Greenan of Scottish Women’s Aid, an anti-domestic violence lobbying group, sported a purple sash with the phrase “This is What a Feminist Looks Like.” She hoped the march would inspire change and advocacy: “I think that some of this is a celebration. It’s a way to say ‘hey, we’ve done a hundred years of work and its gone really well,’ but it’s also a way of saying we still do have a really long way to go and women are not fully co-participants in society – certainly not in this society.”

Culmination of the rally on Calton Hill

It’s a sympathy shared by Scottish Parliament member (MSP) Fiona Hyslop. She addressed the procession’s concluding rally on Calton Hill, which overlooks the site of a former prison that once held the suffragette Ethel Moorhead.

Hyslop bemoaned the low percentage of female MSPs, which she said has dropped in the last ten years from about 40 to 33 percent today. But while stressing the need for more political participation by women, she acknowledged that the suffragettes would have been proud of modern-day feminists’ accomplishments.

“Ethel was jailed in Calton Jail on the ground now where the Scottish government has its seat and where I now have an office,” said Hyslop to the cheering and singing crowd. “I think Ethel and her sisters would be quite pleased that a hundred years on we have women MPs in a Scottish parliament and we have women ministers in that place that used to be Calton Jail.”

Commemorations of Scotland’s suffragette history will continue through the rest of the year; an exhibition showcasing their struggle is on display in the Museum of Edinburgh until January 9 2010.

The next generation of Scottish feminists

View more of my stories at my personal website, www.ChristinaPaschyn.com.

This blog post also appeared on my Edinburgh travel blog for NileGuide.com.

]]> http://christinapaschyn.wordpress.com/2010/08/26/celebrating-women%e2%80%99s-suffrage-in-america-honoring-the-scottish-women%e2%80%99s-movement/feed/ 0 Christina Paschyn womenssuffragetwo.jpg.w300h225 womenssuffrageone.jpg.w300h268 womenssuffragethree.jpg.w300h212 womenssuffragefour.jpg.w300h219 womenssuffragefive.jpg.w300h246 http://christinapaschyn.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/understanding-net-neutrality-and-the-google-verizon-pact/ http://christinapaschyn.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/understanding-net-neutrality-and-the-google-verizon-pact/#comments Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:41:32 +0000 christinapaschyn http://christinapaschyn.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/understanding-net-neutrality-and-the-google-verizon-pact/ ]]> Sam Gustin has written a great and easy to understand article on the Google-Verizon net neutrality plan, and what the former has to gain from it. Take a look:

The Google-Verizon Deal: An ‘Evil’ or Pragmatic Pact?

And check out my video piece on what net neutrality means for journalists and start-ups, also available on my website under the print tab.

This policy change could have negative consequences for journalists and independent news organization. I spoke with David Sohn of the Center for Democracy and Technology on this issue. Check out my article and video interview with him: What Net Neutrality Means for Journalists featured on the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting website.

You can also view this story under the Print tab on my website.

Drum roll please…

Introducing ChristinaPaschyn.com:

My resume website

I encourage everyone to visit my fabulous website often – that way, you’ll never miss my latest story or career development.

Some navigation tips:

• Click on the Contact tab to send me a message. Obviously, the Blog tab takes you back to this site.

• My name – the header – links to the homepage of the site, which features my resume reel.

• The Broadcast tab opens a video player where you can watch all of my broadcast work. Scroll down the playlist to pick a video.

NOTE: Always pause the video player before leaving the homepage (resume reel) or broadcast page. Otherwise, the videos may continue to play and my beautiful voice may distract you from perusing the rest of the site!

• The Print tab takes you to all my print articles. Hover the mouse cursor over the title, date, description or publication name for the full information.  Use the arrows to select a story and then press GO to open the article in a new tab.

• Click the Resume tab to download a pdf version of my resume.

• Click About to learn more about this wonderful journalist!

Have fun perusing my work! Send the link to your friends and colleagues, and feel free to message me with questions or comments.

I reported on this issue back in 2008 in a video for TIME.com.

Be sure to check out my website – www.christinapaschyn.com – to see all of my journalistic work.