LONDON: In Daniel Pearl, the conflict in Afghanistan claimed its ninth victim in the journalistic corps, following the deaths of reporters from Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden. Four were hauled from their car and executed in cold blood, three died in a Taliban mortar attack on a troop transport and the eighth was shot during an armed robbery.

Pearl’s execution, though no less senseless than those of his colleagues, was the first to have a stated “political” motivation. In kidnapping him and threatening to kill him, the Islamic extremist group which has claimed responsibility made a string of demands related to US government policies.

As the Wall Street Journal repeatedly stated as it tried to save the life of its reporter, these demands were pointless because neither Pearl nor the Dow Jones company had the power to change the policies of the Bush administration. If there is any moral at all to be drawn from this tragedy, it is in this apparent misunderstanding that we might find it.

Legitimate fears have been expressed in the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks that the fight against terrorism might lead dictators and authoritarian regimes to further limit freedoms of all kinds - particularly freedom of the press - that stand in the way of full control over their countries. These regimes have not disappointed us. Singapore, to name but one, has praised the “healthy guided censorship” which it maliciously claims to see in new US information policies.

The redressers of a free press have found all the inspiration and justification that they need both in the US and in Britain, where the governments have called on the media to refrain from broadcasting or printing the self-justifying messages of Osama bin Laden.

These calls for “restraint” or, less generously put, self-censorship, from the governments of some of the world’s greatest democracies have not only provided a pretext for regimes with little or no love for free expression to reinforce their policies of control over information, they have also seriously muddied the waters in the more general question of the role of free information and free expression.

Just a few days after Sept 11 and before any decisions had been made at the White House about the course to pursue, a group of US citizens asked the World Association of News-papers to join its call for the bombing of Afghanistan - with information. “Carpet the country with magazines and newspapers showing the horror of terrorism,” they urged. “Blitz them with laptop computers and DVD players filled with a perspective that is denied them by their government”. Send so much information, said this sympathetic group, “that the Taliban can’t collect and hide it all”.

One clear message about information to come out of the war on terrorism is that the international community should put all its political weight and money behind efforts to bring down the barriers and the obstacles to the free flow of information and ideas. If Pearl’s killers confused the positions of the US administration and the Wall Street Journal’s ability to do anything about them, it is not surprising. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.