Journalists discuss visa barrier at UNESCO panel p. 15

By: Editorial Staff

BEFORE THE FALL of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, it sometimes could take years for Western media organizations to set up bureaus in Moscow and other communist capitals.
Today, journalists from Russia and other former Soviet states are encountering the same problems in the West, one Russian news executive contends.
"The problem of movement of journalists is a chronic one," Vitalij Ignatenko, director-general of the Russian news service ITAR-TASS, said at a two-day discussion sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization at its headquarters in Paris.
The visa barrier is just one of many obstacles to press freedoms analyzed at the Round Table on the Free Flow of Information and Movement of Journalists in the Post Cold War Era.
At the meeting, Ignatenko, fellow Russian journalists and representatives of eight Western news organizations exchanged ideas and pondered solutions, UNESCO reported.
Russian newspeople complained about the government's monopoly on newsprint, distribution and other basic goods and services.
Speakers said that journalists there are threatened, assaulted and killed and faced with expensive lawsuits and lack proper training to cover their fast-changing society.
"Everyone is suffering in torment alone and we are unfamiliar with how to get out of this crisis," said Lev Gushin, editor in chief of Ogonyok Weekly.
Russian journalists applying for visas in the West wait an average of three to five months and sometimes as long as 18 months and they often are required to provide irrelevant dental records, notarized certificates and other bureaucratic papers, Ignatenko told the gathering.
"Even the central agency ITAR-TASS, with world prestige, fourth in rank in the world [among news agencies], has great difficulty getting visas from Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Finland, Belgium and Australia," he said.
Johann Fritz, director of the International Press Institute, said the visa problem for former Soviet journalists began with the recent influx of Central and Eastern Europeans seeking economic refuge in Western Europe.
As a result, many European countries have tightened their immigration laws, and many of these nations have difficulty recognizing valid journalists' credentials from false ones, he reported.
To counter this problem, IPI and other media organizations, with the support of UNESCO, plan to ask the Member States of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe to "lift barriers to the speedy granting of entrance visas to journalists," UNESCO said. They also will ask the CSCE office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Warsaw to monitor this situation.
The International Federation of Journalists, International Federation of Newspaper Publishers (known by its French acronym, FIEJ), World Press Freedom Committee, Russian-American Press and Information Center, Reporters Sans Fronti?rs, European Journalist Training Association and European Journalism Centre agreed to make the request to the CSCE, according to UNESCO.
"We asked the CSCE to monitor this situation because they have the political authority to tell its member states how to treat visas for journalists," Fritz said of the recommendation.
Participants of the discussion agreed that Russian state authorities should consider introducing financial aid such as tax relief and reductions in postal and telecommunications rates to assist independent media.
Participating journalists and organizations also called on UNESCO to organize and coordinate activities to support the development of the independent press in Russia.