DANGER TO MEDIA MEMBERS HIGHLIGHTED

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) A Turkish reporter covering a funeral is flogged to
death by police. An Algerian journalist is shot three times in the head
while in his car. A Russian news director is fatally beaten, his briefcase
emptied of sensitive documents.

They are among the brutal crimes committed against journalists that will be
remembered Monday World Press Freedom Day at the start of a two-day
U.N.- sponsored conference highlighting dangers to the press worldwide.

The event in Bogota follows a year in which at least 20 journalists were
killed around the world, subtler forms of censorship emerged and many past
killings remained unsolved, conference organizers said.

"Each time a journalist is killed or attacked, society at large suffers a
grievous wound," U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said in a statement. He
appealed for governments to protect the media and to ensure that crimes
against journalists do not go unpunished.

The conference was organized by UNESCO, the U.N.'s educational and cultural
arm, and the local Guillermo Cano Foundation named after the former
publisher of Colombia's El Espectador newspaper, gunned down in 1986 by drug
traffickers.

"We'll need a huge effort to remain united and to protect ourselves mutually
while working to guarantee freedom of expression," the foundation's
president and widow of the slain publisher, Ana Maria Busquets de Cano, told
The Associated Press.

Speakers at the conference will include Jesus Blancornelas, a crusading
Mexican anti-drug journalist shot four times in a 1997 assassination attempt
and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia's Nobel literature laureate who began
his writing career as a newspaper reporter.

Blancornelas, the 63-year-old chief editor and founder of the Tijuana-based
weekly, Zeta, will receive an award for journalists that work under
dictatorships or situations of great danger.

No country was more perilous last year than Colombia a nation riven by drug
trafficking, rampant corruption and a 35-year leftist insurgency.

Four Colombian journalists were assassinated in the line of duty during 1998
more than in any other country and 43 have been killed since 1989, according
to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

The slain Colombians are among an estimated 500 journalists killed worldwide
in the last decade for daring to dig into issues such as official
corruption, drug trafficking, and environmental scandals. Most of the
killers have evaded justice.

Among the unsolved murders to be commemorated at the conference are the 1996
slaying of Turkish journalist Metin Goktepe, the 1993 flogging death of
Algerian reporter Tahar Djaout, and the fatal 1998 beating of Russian news
director Anatoly Levin-Utkin in St. Petersburg.

Panels will also examine the growing use of nonviolent means including
financial and political pressures to stifle the press.