Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

The International News Safety Institute (Insi) report shows that embedded journalists – those stationed with and accredited to armed forces – have a far higher survival rate than those brave “unilaterals” who operate independently.

Over the past decade, 248 unilaterals operating without a military or police escort were killed on duty, while those with an escort who were killed numbered only 15. Only six embeds were killed out of a total of 269 killed in war zones between 1996 and 2006.

This revives the debate among journalists on the desirability of embedding.

Last year, this newspaper reported on a South African National Defence Force live-fire exercise at the Army Battle School in Lohatlha in the Northern Cape at which, for the first time, a proposed new SANDF doctrine on embedding was tried out.

The experiment, the final outcome of which may see the creation of an accredited war correspondents’ corps, was useful both to military correspondents and to the armed forces involved, but several issues still need to be cleared up before an acceptable formula is found. The main, controversial restrictions sought by the SANDF are:

l that correspondents get permission from the minister of defence before they report from enemy lines;

l that they report only on what has already happened, not what is planned;

l that if censorship is imposed, all news materials be submitted for clearance prior to publication or broadcast.

The Insi report urged military forces to respect the right of journalists to move freely within the battle space, including the right to un-embed and to operate independently when needed. But such questions are far from easy in fast-changing situations where some embeds choose to wear military uniform, where guerrilla (and regular) forces sometimes deploy their own writers and camera operators, and where reporters’ ancillary staff may for safety reasons have to include armed private security details.

Insi also called on news organisations to provide proper training for their journalists on conflict reporting: “No journalist should go to war without proper training and preparation, including knowledge of first aid and munitions.”

And it urged journalists not to assume that “the safety of the media is a prime concern of soldiers under fire”.

In that light, South African journalists are at great risk in war zones: senior colleagues polled said none were ever paid danger pay; all had to make their own security arrangements, including emergency evacuation plans, with little support from their news organisations; and almost none had received any special training for covering conflicts.

Some were even sent into danger without any proper situation briefings or protective equipment such as helmets and flak jackets – this was the experience of SABC radio crews covering last year’s war in Lebanon, a shameful indictment of their news editors.