The day was infused with memories of The Boston Globe reporter and Courage in Journalism Award winner who is the forum’s namesake.
Peter Canellos, Elizabeth Neuffer’s partner of 13 years, called it a “roadmap” of her life.
Anthony Lewis, a retired New York Times foreign affairs columnist, said the forum reminded him of Neuffer and “how endearing, bright and funny she was among all her other talents.”
Many of the day’s speakers were colleagues who had known Neuffer from reporting stints in Bosnia and Africa. Indira Lakshmanan, now The Boston Globe correspondent in Central and South America, recalled how Neuffer had mentored her in Bosnia by driving with her over front lines for three days in a snowstorm to make sure that she was properly introduced to her new assignment. Neuffer told the inexperienced Lakshmanan that she “didn’t want to see a young woman fail.”
Tom Ashbrook, host of On Point for WBUR-FM in Boston, was The Boston Globe foreign editor during Neuffer’s coverage of the 1991 Gulf War. “I advised her, in the beginning of the Gulf War, to stay close to the hotel in Riyadh,” he said. “Before I knew it, she was calling me, from honestly, I don’t know where, and she had outrun all the supply lines.”
The day’s speakers shared Elizabeth Neuffer’s belief that journalism has the power to draw attention to human rights violations around the world.
Pamela Constable, deputy foreign editor at The Washington Post, knew Elizabeth Neuffer from reporting in Afghanistan. She addressed the situation for women in Southeast Asia, particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The good news, she said, is that women have claimed their right to participate in politics since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
The bad news, she added, is that tribal culture – “The most traditional, conservative, rural kind of culture you can imagine … very male dominated, in which women simply have no rights” still dominates. One case cited by Constable was that of a woman who was stoned to death “with the support of the community and her parents” for the crime of having committed adultery with a neighbor.
Constable said that the press has played an important role in bringing this and other cases to light. “State authorities never get involved because it’s untouchable territory,” she said. “It’s personal. It’s local. It’s tribal. It’s religious. Nobody touches it until some reporter comes along – usually a local radio reporter – and the word starts getting out.”
Corinne Dufka, who spent 10 years in Latin America, Bosnia and Africa, first as a photojournalist for Reuters and later as a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said that her time covering conflict created a “frustration, wanting to be able to understand what was at the root of the conflicts that I was covering. Again and again and again, I felt as though in Africa I was reading the first chapter of the same book with the characters and the venues changing.”
“What we [journalists and human rights activists] often do is end up covering war crimes, the ultimate expression of a break down of a community and a society, a failed state,” she said. “It’s terribly important to look at the issues that give rise to conflicts in Africa.” These include political exploitation, particularly of ethnicity, and corruption. Reporters, she said, should pay attention to these root issues and write more about them.
“One could venture to say that all of Latin America, in a way, has been forgotten since 9/11,” said Indira Lakshmanan, The Boston Globe correspondent for Central and Latin America. On a forgotten continent, the most forgotten issue is the fate of indigenous people throughout Latin America, she said. “They are being persecuted in political and economic ways to the point of virtual extinction, and because their numbers are small, they are forgotten.”
“I think it is the responsibility of journalists, not only in the Western media, but in their own countries to remember to highlight the issues [indigenous peoples] face,” she said. Lakshmanan has concentrated her own coverage on indigenous people in Colombia, where a leftist insurgency and civil war have been going on for four decades and where some 60,000 people have been killed since 1985. A disproportionate number of the dead are indigenous people, and they are also among those most often displaced from their land, primarily because those lands tend to be in strategic corridors that are coveted for drug trafficking, arms smuggling, rebel encampments and military encampments. Last year alone, 156 Indians were assassinated in the conflict, Lakshmanan said.
The national press in Colombia has begun to pay attention to the plight of indigenous people, she noted, which has led the people to speak up more often.
“I think that is significant because it shows the role the press can play in terms of giving oppressed people the strength to think that they can stand up,” she said.
Anthony Lewis lamented the loss of Elizabeth Neuffer’s eye for focusing on human beings in conflict. “How we needed her in Iraq, when the vain glory of ‘mission accomplished’ unraveled,” he said. “We don’t even tally Iraqi civilian casualties. Our press has hardly told the story of the dangers and humiliations that mark Iraqi lives.”
Lewis predicted that had she lived, Neuffer “would have by now been in Darfur more than once. She would not let Western governments – ours and others – step away from their promises to end that genocide. She would have made us face unflinchingly the shared humanity of the Darfur women raped by Sudanese militiamen and driven from their homes.”
“She would also have turned her talents to documenting the fact that Americans – soldiers, lawyers, CIA agents, high-ranking officials – have been engaged in a world-wide enterprise of torture.”
Women and girls caught in conflict were often the subject of Elizabeth Neuffer’s reporting. Their lives also received particular attention at the Elizabeth Neuffer Forum.
“Women bear a special burden in the realm of human rights, or more particularly in the lack of human rights,” said Tom Ashbrook, Neuffer’s former editor who moderated a panel devoted to women’s human rights. He cited the following statistics:
--One in three women globally will be beaten, coerced into sex or abused in her lifetime.
--More than 60 million women are missing in the world today, as a result of selection abortions or female infanticide.
-- The World Health Organization has reported that up to 70 percent of female murder victims worldwide are killed by their male partners.
-- Small arms and lights weapons are the tools of almost every conflict today. The U.N. secretary general says that women and children account for nearly 80 percent of the casualties from those weapons worldwide.
Angela King, former special advisor to the U.N. Secretary General on gender issues and advancement of women, said the women are getting short shrift because programs to support women are not properly funded. The face of poverty is still a woman’s face, she said.
Pamela Shifman, UNICEF’s project officer on sexual abuse and exploitation in humanitarian crises, said that women and girls around the globe “face the constant threat of gender-based violence in all its forms, including rape, prostitution, trafficking and forced pregnancy.”
Rape is only the beginning of problems for many women and girls, she said. “In Kinshasa right now, it costs 30 cents to buy a girl on the street, to buy sex from a young girl. They are there as a result of war.”
She credited the media for removing the secrecy surrounding rape during conflict and bringing attention to the fact that humanitarian personnel and peacekeepers were trading humanitarian supplies for sex, further exploiting women and girls in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
She challenged the media to go further, by reporting on government policies that impact women’s lives. For example, in Darfur women were required to report rapes to the police before a hospital would treat them. This meant that rape victims were terrified to come forward “because they don’t trust the police,” she said. Though the regulation is now changed, she said “that story being told might have moved things along more quickly, might have changed the policy more quickly.”
Several months before she died, Elizabeth Neuffer was part of another panel at the John F. Kennedy Library. At the time, she asked: “Can the media do a better job? Can Americans care more? The answer, of course, is yes.”
Through the Elizabeth Neuffer Forum on Human Rights and Journalism, she is still asking the important and tough questions.