NOBODY WOULD ARGUE that the primary responsibility to protect the people lies with the state. This is the underpinning principle of human rights treaties entered into by members of the United Nations. However, there is a problematic here: If it’s the state authorities who are displacing peoples or communities or committing some other acts of violence, they could not by any stretch of the imagination be expected to offer protection to the same peoples or communities.

Intervention, however, especially the military variant, is a ticklish issue. There are neither rigid rules nor universal standards on which the necessity or non-necessity of intervention may be based except perhaps the time-honored practice of bowing to the “dictates of humanity”.

Yet how extreme should suffering be as to oblige the international community to undertake humanitarian intervention, and, in worst-case scenarios, military intervention? Is there a quantitative standard that serves to gauge specific situations as they arise? To put it bluntly, how many people, particularly civilians, women and children should die first before the world acts? A few hundreds? Thousands? Tens or hundreds of thousands? At least a million? On what scale should starvation, repression and mass murders be in order to warrant intervention?

History tells us that in many cases statistics, although significant, has not had been the number one factor in mobilizing international action for victims of mass hunger and slaughter. It was the evolution of world public opinion, fed by media reports and images of suffering that forced the hand of world leaders and/or the United Nations. Non-government organizations and similar types of pressure groups also contributed through their advocacies, which in the final analysis, really had to rely on the inherent power of the media to influence the course of policy. East Timor exemplifies the positive outcome of waging tenacious advocacy in the realm of international intervention.

Conversely, the inability of information to go beyond national borders – which has become improbable nowadays due to advances in communications technology – has been the biggest stumbling block to positive action. Such was the case of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime. The world knew of the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot only after hundreds of thousands had died – the number of victims eventually reached an estimated two million – because the country’s reclusive and restrictive atmosphere prevented international media from uncovering his crimes. Interestingly, regardless of motives, it was the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia that effectively put an end to the senseless massacres.

Nonetheless, even in cases where media attention had been satisfactory the necessity of intervention would be overshadowed by the demands of realpolitik. Indonesia under Suharto, for instance, witnessed the purge of some one million suspected communists. But the Western powers, undeniably the ones in the best position to put pressure on Jakarta, did not lift a finger on Suharto maybe because his acts fitted snugly into their Cold War agenda.

In recent years, accessing information on events worldwide has relatively become much easier thanks to the Internet and cable TV. So-called real time news or “breaking news” has become standard fare among broadcast and online media outlets. But this practice creates its own problems. For in the obsession to outdo each other in delivering the freshest news, accuracy, depth and context are almost always sacrificed in favor of speed. What often come out are details lacking coherence and worse, half truths that distort the entire picture as well as stories that fail to capture the most important angle of an event, i.e. the extent of human suffering. The “scoop” mentality is getting in the way of good journalism.

The recurring displacement of civilians in conflict areas in Mindanao is a case in point. As noted in some reports, the 600,000 civilians who fled their homes in the Maguindanao and Cotabato provinces in the second half of 2008 owing to renewed fighting between the armed forces and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) was the biggest last year worldwide. It was a humanitarian crisis in the making, if in case it was not yet a crisis. Unfortunately, most news reports unwittingly downplayed its magnitude by focusing instead on the military dimension of the problem – body counts, armaments used, number of encounters, basically the usual fare aired on TV or printed in the papers. Inevitably, news sources are confined to military and local officials. A few stories did tackle the plight of the displaced persons. But media attention given to the victims was the exception not the rule.

But journalists are not solely to blame for the low statistics of human rights stories. In some cases, media ownership is a factor that influences reportage, a reality that, I presume, is happening not just in the Philippines but also in other countries. 

Moreover, civil society groups oftentimes lack savvy in media work. There are also no programmed efforts by these groups to educate journalists on human rights so as to improve the quality of reports. As noted by a priest in Zamboanga City, reporting the stories requires going beyond the surface and practicing the essence of good journalism as a check on government actions. He further asked media to identify and put on target more actors. (Who really pull the strings? What interests are at stake?) 

This brings me to the issue of how aware Philippine journalists are on the issue of human rights and on protection as primarily state obligations. Allow me to cite concrete situations. In earlier workshops with fellow journalists in Mindanao it came out that many lack basic understanding on human rights concepts and that human rights reporting is not a priority among them. Many of them expressed a desire to undergo trainings on the broad spectrum of human rights (civil, political, social, economic and cultural). This appears to be the reason why despite technological advances human rights issues have remained largely underreported, or maybe “misreported”.

The point here is that the failure – or refusal – of media to report extensively and comprehensively on situations that threaten the wellbeing and security of peoples would spell the difference between dying and surviving, between mitigating the horrors of war and prolonging it, between saving hapless individuals and leaving them to the mercy of their oppressors. Their ultimate agenda may not be to influence policymaking, and, by the nature of their profession as “objective” harbingers of information, journalists may not be invited as organic members of this initiative. But by churning out stories told from the viewpoint of the victims themselves and from their own introspection as human beings first and journalists second, members of the Fourth Estate shall have accomplished this unsolicited task. (H. Marcos C. Mordeno/MindaNews)

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