Slain journalists honored by colleagues, diplomats

Pair killed in Sierra Leone rebel ambush

May 25, 2000
Web posted at: 5:58 p.m. EDT (1758 GMT)

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone -- Diplomats and colleagues remembered on Thursday two journalists who fell victim to the bloody civil war they covered, killed in a suspected rebel ambush in Sierra Leone.

Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork and Associated Press cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora, along with four Sierra Leone soldiers, were shot to death Wednesday on a road near Rogberi Junction. The area, about 87 kilometers (50 miles) from Freetown, has been hotly contested by government soldiers and Revolutionary United Front fighters.

Two other Reuters journalists, South African cameraman Mark Chisholm and Greek photographer Yannis Behrakis, were injured in the attack.

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"These were professionals, seeking to report on a bloody conflict that has already taken too many lives," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a statement. "They were doing what other journalists are doing around the world -- taking risks so that the rest of us can keep informed."

Their final dispatch, Annan said, "is that the killing has not stopped."

Schork honored by Clinton

Both the American Schork and the Spanish Moreno were well known for their reporting from some of the world's most dangerous locales -- Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Iraq.

Schork, said CNN Correspondent Christiane Amanpour, was "the quintessential foreign correspondent."

"He had a deep sense of what was right and what was wrong, and his reporting from all the years of the Bosnian war, through all the crises of the '90s, into Chechnya, and lastly into Sierra Leone, was really an example to all of us who call ourselves journalists," she said.

U.S. President Bill Clinton, who studied at Oxford University at the same time as fellow Rhodes scholar Schork, said he was saddened by the deaths but noted that they were no more tragic than others in nearly a decade of bitter fighting in the West African nation.

"These are just the last in a long line of (the rebels') victims," Clinton said, "many of whom were innocent children who had their limbs chopped off."

Moreno knew the dangers

The 32-year-old Moreno, who began his career as a corporate lawyer, was one of the first journalists to see several mutilated corpses found earlier this week near Rogberi Junction, not far from the spot where he and Schork died. The bodies were believed to be those of slain U.N. peacekeepers.

"Miguel told me once that he felt he was contributing more to the world as a journalist than as a lawyer," said Aida Cerkez-Robinson, an AP reporter who worked with Moreno in Bosnia.

While covering Russia's fight to retake Chechnya from rebels last year, Moreno wrote that the constant Russian bombardments brought a sense of mortality.

"Every day ... I met, filmed or gave cigarettes to people who were dead by the next morning," he wrote in December. "This is the horrific reality of life in Grozny at the dawn of the new millennium."

'Somebody has got to do the job'

Moreno and Schork were the second and third international journalists to die in Sierra Leone -- Associated Press cameraman Myles Tierney was killed by rebels in 1999. But in nine years of covering the civil war, 11 Sierra Leone journalists have lost their lives.

Despite the dangers, however, the journalists who report from the world's hot spots -- and especially those who live there -- were profoundly aware of the importance of the jobs they do.

"Somebody has got to do the job because the world has got to be informed," said veteran Freetown journalist Clarence Ray-Macallaugh. "Like in the case of Sierra Leone, you need to sensitize the international community about what is going on."

Schork and Moreno understood that purpose. Moreno's mother, Maria de Patrocinio Macian Blaya, said that knowledge brought her solace in the midst of "overwhelming sadness and grief."

"Miguel was doing the job he loved and died doing the work he felt ordained for," she said from her home in Barcelona. "He felt his mission was to give voice to those who did not have one."

The 53-year-old Schork, who stepped into journalism at 40 after attending school on a football scholarship, entering public service, racing cars and climbing mountains, was known for detailed reports focusing poignantly on the horrors of war.

"No detail was too small for him to chase and to check," Amanpour said of her former Balkans colleague. "He was dedicated and brave and brilliant, and he had a deep strain of wisdom and conscience."

Correspondent Ben Wedeman, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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