Bedoya cant leave Colombia because someone gotta stay
REUTERS

BOGOTA, JAN 17: Everyday, Jineth Bedoya receives a blessing from her mother, says a prayer to the Virgin, then gets into the car that drives her, under permanent armed escort, to her job at a Colombian newspaper.

The 27-year-old journalist lives daily with the fear that she will not get home alive after armed men kidnapped her last May in Bogota, raped her and dumped her by the side of the road in the southwest of the country.

``There are days when I leave my apartment with the feeling that I'm never going to return. I live in a state of anxiety. It's very hard for me," Bedoya told Reuters in an interview at the daily newspaper El Espectador, where she earns her living by writing about four decades of a conflict that has killed an average of 10 civilians a day in the last 10 years alone.

Despite her experience, Bedoya is one of the lucky ones. Eight reporters were killed last year in Colombia, 10 kidnapped and later freed and eight fled the country after death threats, human rights groups say.

``It's been another devastating year for the Colombian press, showing it is the victim of civil war and journalists are being attacked from all sides in the armed conflict,'' said Marylene Smets, head of the Americas program of the New York-based Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ).

More than 100 Colombian journalists have been killed since 1980 in attacks blamed on drug traffickers, far-right paramilitary gangs and leftist guerrillas whose conflict has turned this Andean country into the kidnap capital of the world and one of the most violent places on earth.

Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Sans Frontieres(RSF)and the Inter-American Press Society rate Colombia as one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists to work, alongside such destinations as Sierra Leone.

``There seems to be no understanding of the very important role that the press can play in the search for a resolution of the conflict,'' Smets told Reuters, appealing to the parties in Colombia's war to treat the media as neutral. ``The press in Colombia is caught in the cross-fire. Journalists are attacked by all sides...and also by common criminals.''

Colombia has been riven by four decades of conflict that has grown out of a bloody struggle, long since resolved, between its two main political parties.

Much of the country is a no-go area and 2 million mainly poor people have fled intimidation and violence in the last 10 years, becoming refugees in their own country.

Despite the risks, Bedoya said she had turned down offers to leave the country. Since the attack, she has traveled in Bogota with a secret service bodyguard who remains on guard with a gun at the ready and a radio even in the newsroom where she works.

But the guard stays behind when Bedoya, who covers theconflict, prison issues and the drug trade, travels out of town because an armed police presence would be an additional risk in guerrilla- or paramilitary-controlled areas.

"The decision to stay was a tough one," Bedoya said. "Iwanted to go to be far away from danger of being killed, but I wouldn'T have felt right being out of the country." She said she expected it to take months if not years to get over the attack.

"I'M Recovering here with people I love, with my job, withmy family and if I were far away I don'T know how I'D Cope."

Bedoya has strong suspicions about who was behind the attackbut declines comment and says it is up to authorities to catch those responsible. None of the eight murders of journalists in 2000 has yet been cleared up.

Walking with her bodyguard by her side, she defended herdecision to stay: ``In life you have to have causes, otherwise there's no point. You have to have something to work on, to fight for, and for me that's journalism and you can do the best journalism in the world in Colombia.''

But she admits he is not always so upbeat. ``There are days when I wish the man who was pointing a pistol at me had shot. There are days when I wonder why they didn't kill me. There are days when I don't want to be alive because the sadness and the memories get me down.''

Bedoya, who has been inundated with offers to study abroad and has been honored by the Canadian Journalists' Association, shrugged off the heroine tag, saying she just wanted to contribute to peace in Colombia by reporting the truth.

``I don't want to be a heroine. I don't want to attract attention. Mine was a personal decision. We can't all go--someone has to stay,'' she says.

Copyright © 2001 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.