As Assassins Target Somali Journalists, Fear Is a Daily Event

When he goes to work these days, he zigzags across the city like a hunted man, varying his routes to avoid any kind of predictable pattern. Other times, like Tahlil, he just sleeps at his office for days.

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"I'm afraid for my life, but if I'm a journalist I must struggle," Salim said. "I must do my job impartially."

Being a journalist in Somalia has never been easy.

During the reign of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in the 1980s, there was one radio station, one television station and one newspaper, offering mostly government propaganda and weekly economics lectures by Siad Barre, who referred to himself as "The Lion of Africa."

After his fall in 1991, the news media fragmented into hundreds of tiny outlets, each associated with a particular clan or sub-clan. There were at least 100 newspapers and at least 20 radio stations as cabals of warlords took over, routinely harassing reporters who challenged them.

In that atmosphere, Shabelle and Horn Afriq established themselves in the late 1990s as Somalia's first relatively independent and well-respected media outlets.

Shabelle broadcasts throughout Mogadishu and much of southern Somalia, while Horn Afriq reaches most of the country and, via satellite, large swaths of the Somalia diaspora in cities from Nairobi to London to Minneapolis.

While some radio stations were shut down during the six-month rule of the Union of Islamic Courts last year, the atmosphere for journalists has become even more repressive since the U.S.-backed government of President Abdullahi Yusuf came to power.

Yusuf and his Ethiopian backers have targeted not only insurgents but also religious leaders, democracy activists and anyone else thought to support the opposition. Shabelle and Horn Afriq have been shut down by the Somali government numerous times; their offices have been raided and wrecked by troops.

These days, it is potentially a life-or-death decision whether to report such basic information as the number of civilians killed in a gunfight. Talk-show hosts realize they may be putting their lives at risk to air a program on good governance.

When they are called to a government news conference, reporters often confer, trying to decide whether it might be a government trap to arrest them. One reporter, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recalled debating with himself for hours whether to report that the son of a high-ranking insurgent commander had been killed.

"A bunch of journalists were afraid to report the incident," he said, "but it was the truth that this man's son was killed."