A week ago, Peter R. de Vries, a star journalist in the Netherlands, was leaving a studio where he’d just appeared as a guest on a TV program, RTL Boulevard, when a gunman shot him five times, including in the head. De Vries has covered the criminal underworld dating back to the eighties and nineties, when he tracked down a man who helped kidnap Freddy Heineken, the beer tycoon; recently, de Vries had been acting as a confidant and spokesperson for a gang informant in a high-profile case against an alleged high-level crime boss. On Saturday, RTL Boulevard canceled a planned broadcast and evacuated its studio, citing what it characterized as a serious threat from organized crime; police wouldn’t go into specifics, but a Dutch newspaper reported that they had learned of a possible attack by rocket launcher. (This would not have been unprecedented in the Netherlands—in 2018, an anti-tank rocket was fired at the offices of a newspaper publisher.) De Vries is still fighting for his life. On its latest World Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders ranked the Netherlands sixth out of one hundred and eighty countries globally—making it, theoretically at least, one of the safest places in the world to practice journalism.
The day after de Vries was shot in Amsterdam, three men attacked Erk Acarer, a Turkish journalist, at his home in Berlin, where he has lived in exile since 2017. Acarer, who writes for the independent Turkish newspaper BirGün and works for a broadcaster established by other Turkish émigrés, has been critical of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the country’s authoritarian president; last year, Turkish authorities sought to prosecute Acarer and several other journalists on national-security grounds after they reported on the death of an intelligence officer. After the attack, Acarer said on social media that his assailants told him to stop writing, beat him with “fists and knives,” and left him in need of hospital treatment. “I know the attackers,” he said. “I will never surrender to fascism.” Can Dündar, a prominent Turkish journalist who also lives in Germany, called the attack “a direct message to Germany from Erdoğan: ‘I have a long arm. We can attack a dissident journalist even in Berlin.’ ” Reporters Without Borders ranks Germany thirteenth on its index.
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On Sunday, the mother of Alexander Lashkarava, a cameraman at TV Pirveli, in the country of Georgia, found her son dead at home. He was thirty-seven. Less than a week earlier, Lashkarava was among a group of more than fifty journalists that was attacked by rioters who set out to derail a planned LGBT+ march in Tbilisi, the capital. (The march was canceled.) According to a colleague, a mob of around thirty people broke in to a building where Lashkarava was filming march organizers and beat him up. He had surgery on his resulting facial injuries and was discharged from the hospital on Thursday. The cause of his death has not been officially confirmed; officials have suggested that he may have overdosed on drugs, but his colleagues dismiss such claims. (One has alleged that officials took away Lashkarava’s body without his family’s permission.) Since Sunday, hundreds of protesters have been in the streets demanding that Georgia’s government resign, accusing senior officials of stoking hate and failing to protect marchers and journalists from the mob. The prime minister has characterized such claims as part of a “conspiracy” against the state. Yesterday, journalists tried to enter Parliament to talk to pro-government lawmakers, and violence ensued. Reporters Without Borders ranks Georgia sixtieth on its index, higher than countries including Japan, Argentina, and Israel.
Taken together, the events of the past week paint a troubling picture of the state of press freedom in Europe, which has typically been seen as a bastion of media protections. “Europe,” of course, is a big and diverse place, not to mention a contested political and historical concept. Some geographical definitions would place Georgia in Asia. Germany is at the heart of Europe, but attacks on journalists there often seem to involve their work in or about countries that lie beyond the continent’s borders (or straddle them, in Turkey’s case); last year, for instance, it was discovered that a government press staffer with access to information about exiled Egyptian journalists had been spying on behalf of Egypt’s government. The Netherlands, for its part, has a range of geographical, institutional, and socioeconomic conditions that have long made the country fertile ground for drug traffickers—and de Vries may very well have been targeted for his unusual involvement with a court case, and not for his journalism, per se. Still, a general trend seems clear: there are bad people who would hurt journalists everywhere, and, in an increasingly globalized world, reporters aren’t completely safe anywhere—not in their TV studios, not at their homes, and certainly not while they’re out reporting on the street.
In recent years, a string of murders has rocked the European press: Daphne Caruana Galizia, whose car was blown up in Malta, in 2017; Ján Kuciak, who was shot alongside his fiancée in Slovakia, in 2018; Giorgos Karaivaz, who was shot outside his home in Greece, earlier this year. Karaivaz, like de Vries, was a longtime crime reporter; both Kuciak and Caruana Galizia investigated the nexus of organized crime and state corruption; the latter’s murder eventually brought down Malta’s government. These high-profile cases have unfolded against a backdrop of worsening relations between politicians and the press across the continent. Recently, another Reporters Without Borders metric, its gallery of “press freedom predators,” made room for a European leader for the first time, adding Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister who has systematically eroded the country’s independent media. (Presidents Vladimir Putin, of Russia, and Alexander Lukashenko, of Belarus—long-term fixtures of the gallery, both—lead countries that are at least partially in Europe geographically, if not politically. Even in those countries, attacks on the press have recently become more brazen.) Janez Janša, an Orbán ally who serves as prime minister of Slovenia, has explicitly declared war on media “presstitutes.” This month, Slovenia assumed the rotating presidency of the European Union’s council, and, with it, significant agenda-setting power within the bloc. When officials and journalists traveled to Slovenia for the handover, Janša forced them to watch a sixteen-minute video demonizing reporters as biased.
By contrast, top officials in the Netherlands said all the right things after de Vries was shot last week. Mark Rutte, the prime minister, decried a “shocking and incomprehensible” attack, not only on “a courageous journalist” but also “the free press that is so critical to our democracy.” Femke Halsema, the mayor of Amsterdam, hailed de Vries as a “national hero”; even the monarchy put out a supportive statement. Officials would not comment on whether de Vries, who has received threats before, had recently been offered police protection. What is clear is that well-intentioned words about press freedom didn’t prevent his being shot near a busy street in broad daylight. And they won’t have any bearing, now, on whether he lives or dies. Let’s pray that he lives.
Below, more on press freedom around the world:
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