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Journalist victims, of Mideast violence, honoured in UAE

ABU DHABI - The United Arab Emirates has honoured a number of Arab and Western journalists who have been the victims of violence in the Middle East.

Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Shaikh Mohammad bin Zayed Al Nahayan awarded medals at a ceremony late Monday to BBC correspondent Frank Gardner and May Shidiac of the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC), both badly wounded in attacks, and representatives of slain journalists.

An audience at Shaikh Mohammad’s Ramadan ‘majlis’—a place of daily gatherings during the Muslim fasting month—earlier heard Gardner’s account of the June 2004 attack in Riyadh that left him wheelchair-bound.

A fluent Arabic speaker and Al Qaeda expert, the British journalist was shot by suspected Islamist extremists and his Irish cameraman, Simon Cumbers, was killed at the height of attacks against Westerners in Saudi Arabia.

Gardner blamed the Saudi education system for producing Islamist extremism and said Saudi officials did not recognise the extent to which extremism was rooted in their country before Al Qaeda suspects unleashed a wave of violence in May 2003.

But he acknowledged that the oil-rich kingdom has since gone a long way in reforming curricula and fighting terrorism.

Shidiac, who hosts a political talk show and was badly wounded in September 2005 by a bomb placed in her car in north Beirut, said she had been the victim of ‘state terrorism’ practiced by some Arab regimes.

It was an apparent reference to Syria, which has been blamed for a string of killings and attempted killings of political opponents of its hold on Lebanon. Damascus denies the charges.

Two prominent Lebanese journalists with the daily An-Nahar whose killings were blamed on Syria—MP Gibran Tueni, killed in a December 2005 car bombing, and Samir Kassir, killed by a car bomb in June that year—were also honoured.

Others were journalists with the satellite news channel Al Arabiya hit in Iraq—including Atwar Bahjat, killed in February 2006, Ali Al Khatib, killed along with a photographer in March 2004, and Jawad Kazem, who was victim of a June 2005 attack that left him bound to a wheelchair.

According to figures posted on the website of international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, 75 journalists have been killed so far this year, 43 of them in Iraq, compared to 85 last year.