Memorial to journalists honors Taras Protsyuk, Gareth Jones (05/09/04)

Memorial to journalists honors Taras Protsyuk, Gareth Jones

by Yaro Bihun
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

ROSSLYN, Va. - Rising in the midst of the modern office buildings of Rosslyn, Va., just across the Potomac River from Washington, is a monument to journalists who died while covering the news. Their names - 1,528 of them - are imbedded in the glass panels that spiral up its stainless steel supporting structure.

The journalists hail from most every country in the world, and they died in just about every country, more in some than in others. Many died covering foreign wars, revolutions and protests; some found themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time; while others were just plain murdered.

Last year, the panels of the Freedom Forum Journalists Memorial listed 1,475 names of fallen journalists. On May 3, in what has become an annual ceremony on World Press Freedom Day, that number was raised by 53, the total killed in 2003, the deadliest year for journalists since World War II.

Among the additions was the 35-year-old Ukrainian television cameraman for Reuters, Taras Protsyuk, one of 20 journalists to die in the war in Iraq last year. He joined two other Ukrainian journalists already on the memorial: Heorhiy Gongadze, the 31-year-old muckraking editor of Ukrainska Pravda, whose decapitated, acid-burned body was discovered in a shallow grave near Kyiv in 2000, and Ihor Oleksandrov, 44, the director of an independent television company who was clubbed to death in Sloviansk in 2001.

In addition to those killed in 2003, two other journalists were belatedly recognized and honored during the ceremony. One of them was a Welsh freelance journalist well-known to Ukrainians: Gareth Vaughan Jones, whose reporting in the London Evening Standard and other papers alerted the West to the tragedy of the 1933 Famine in Ukraine. He was killed two years later by Chinese bandits while reporting in the Far East, at the age of 30. The other, Sidney J. Cohen, a 24-year-old reporter with the Charleston, S.C., Evening Post, was shot to death in the United States while covering an election in 1915. Their names will be added to the monument at a later date.

The annual ceremony was organized by the Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation "dedicated to free press, free speech and free spirit for all people," which built the monument in 1991 next to the Newseum, which it also funds.

It began at 7 a.m. at the monument, with 10 American and foreign correspondents reading the names of the 1,475 colleagues known to have been killed between 1812 and 2002. Following this two-hour session, rain forced the organizers to move the ceremonies indoors, where the names of the newest group of journalists were read aloud and honored. NBC-TV Anchor and Managing Editor Tom Brokaw, whose NBC colleague, David Bloom, died in Iraq, was the main speaker, and Tom Kelly, the father of The Atlantic Monthly correspondent Michael Kelly, who also died in Iraq, spoke on behalf of the relatives of the fallen journalists.

Many relatives of those honored were present at the memorial ceremonies, among them Taras Protsyuk's widow, Lidia Lytvynchuk, and their 8-year-old son, Denys, as well as the niece of Gareth Jones, Dr. Margaret Siriol Colley, who flew in from Wales.

Ms. Lytvynchuk and her son now live in Warsaw, where her husband was based in Reuters' Polish office since 1999. He was born and grew up in Ivano-Frankivsk; she - in the town of Derevok, in the Volyn oblast. He joined Reuters in 1993 and worked for that British news organization as a cameraman in Kyiv and Warsaw, and distinguished himself in covering the wars in Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Protsyuk's day of reckoning came on April 8, 2003, when he and José Couso, a Spanish TV journalist, were killed by an American tank shell fired at the Palestine Hotel, where most of the foreign media were staying in Baghdad. Protsyuk, who was filming from his 15th-floor balcony, was killed instantly; Couso died later in the hospital. Three Reuters journalists were wounded in the shooting.

Initially, the U.S. Army said that the tank was responding to enemy gunfire coming from the hotel, a claim that journalists staying at the hotel denied. Following a lengthy inquiry, U.S. Central Command announced in August that the tank's firing was a legitimate defense because there was "positive intelligence" that U.S. forces were being observed by an enemy "hunter/killer team" at the hotel.

Taras Protsyuk was 35 when he died.

On the anniversary of his killing, Protsyuk's journalist friends in Kyiv staged a protest in front of the U.S. Embassy there, calling for an official apology and compensation for his family.

Asked whether she had ever received an apology or expression of regret from the United States, Lidia Litvinchuk said that while she heard about various U.S. statements, none of them, as far as she knew, fit that description.

As for how she and her young son are managing, she expressed her appreciation for the way Reuters had cared for them.

Michael Sawkiw Jr. president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, and a several other representatives of the Ukrainian American community came to pay their respect to the fallen journalists and their families.

The Journalists Memorial is located directly across the Potomac River via the Francis Scott Key Bridge from the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington. The memorial anchors the upper end of Freedom Park, which runs along the old Newseum building (recently closed, to be re-opened in a new building near the Capitol in Washington in 2006). The other end of the park is anchored by segments of the Berlin Wall.

In between, there are a number of other recent symbols of man's quest for freedom, such as a toppled, headless statue of Lenin from Russia; a replica of the statue of liberty built by Chinese students during their protests in Beijing; a small, improvised boat used to flee Cuba; and a barred door to the jail cell that once held Martin Luther King.

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