Article Added On: May 06, 2008 - 2 months ago
Title: On press freedom day, reporters under attack right here at home
Original URL: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=92e332a8-fcd4-4c6c-88ac-d261fb73b1f2
Author: Kim Bolan
Publication: Vancouver Sun
Publication Date: May 03, 2008 - 2 months ago
Faith Groups: Sikh
Themes: Religion and society, religion and violence

Abstract: Covering the glorification of violence by a tiny minority of Sikhs draws online vitriol and death threats, writes Kim Bolan for the Vancouver Sun.

On World Press Freedom Day, we usually think about journalists in faraway conflicts zones being under attack or those living under totalitarian regimes struggling to practise their crafts.

Increasingly though, journalists in Canada and the subjects we interview are facing death threats and hate-filled vitriol spewed at us online, over unlicensed radio airwaves and in ethnic newspapers.

In the past year, I, my colleague Terry Milewski of the CBC, and several people we have interviewed condemning the glorification of violence by a tiny minority of Sikh separatists in Canada have received threats to our lives.

Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh was called a "blood traitor" who should be killed after he was interviewed in both The Vancouver Sun and in a CBC documentary about violent imagery in the 2007 Vaisakhi parade in Surrey.

Other opponents advocated online and in a Punjabi newspaper that Dosanjh should be beaten again, just as he was in February 1985 after he publically warned about the Sikh extremists who would be linked to the Air India bombing just a few months later.

A young North Delta high school student recently urged, on a Facebook page portraying Milewski as a Nazi with "Sikh" blood dripping from his lips:

"Let's find out were he lives and put hiz (sic) head on a stick."

Hostile comments on some radio stations have also been repeatedly levelled against Liberal MLA Dave Hayer for his tireless commentary against the same small group of extremists that he believes were behind the assassination 10 years ago of his journalist father Tara Singh Hayer.

Some of what's said is just nasty or blatantly false -- as when I was recently called a proponent of genocide, a racist, a bitch -- and a "known associate" of K.P.S. Gill, the former Punjab police chief who crushed the separatist movement in India and has been on a hit list ever since. In fact, I have met Gill only once, when I interviewed him in 2003 for a Sun story.

But other threats have a much more ominous tone and have led to repeated complaints being filed with the RCMP by all the recipients, though no charges have been laid in any of the cases.

Despite the increasing vitriol, I was still startled two months ago to find a photo of myself posted on a Facebook page that had been started a few days earlier to attack me. A bullet hole had been photo-shopped onto my forehead, blood dripping from the wound, my left eye sliced open and more blood flowing from my nose and mouth.

It had been posted March 11 by a young man who identified himself as Raj Singh and said he lived in Toronto. After consulting a couple of colleagues, who said they sure thought the picture was a threat, I contacted the RCMP and a criminal investigation began.

The page was created on Facebook by a Calgary man named Roop Bhandher, the cousin of an admitted gangster named Mindy Bhandher who had just been charged with first-degree murder in a case I was covering. Both Roop and Mindy had graduated from Surrey's Khalsa school founded by Ripudaman Singh Malik, who was charged and acquitted in the Air India bombing -- though none of those connections was mentioned on the page calling me a "racist Canadian journalist," a "hoe" and a "hooker" among other things.

The shocking photo was removed a day later.

But, Dosanjh says, the message it sent, and the other threats, are troubling symptoms of an escalating problem in Canada made worse by the lack of widespread condemnation by the political elite and law enforcement agencies.

"I know the world of those threats is real and it is not like the rest of the world in Canada," Dosanjh said. "I think that people don't understand because it is painful. It is painful to think that in Canada there are people -- journalists and others -- who are not able to exercise their freedom . . . without threats."

Ironically, most of the news reports that have provoked threats have quoted people like Dosanjh and Hayer condemning the glorification of violence in the name of a political struggle, such as publicly depicting the assassins of former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi as martyrs.

The threats have the effect of limiting the number of people willing to be quoted on sensitive but crucial subjects, Dosanjh said, as well as the number of journalists willing to wade into the fray.

"When you face serious threats, when you worry about being able to come back safe at night to your home, why would you speak out? When you know that there isn't the kind of support from our political leadership, from our law enforcement authorities, how can you speak?"

Criminal investigations of online threats are complicated when -- as in the case of Facebook -- servers are located in the U.S. That means the RCMP has to make a cross-border application for investigative aid under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. It can take months.

Take the complaint laid jointly by me and Milewski in November 2006 after postings on a U.S. website called Sikh Sangat by a Winnipeg man who calls himself "Singh with Dunalli."

Dunalli means double-barrelled rifle in Punjabi and his online avatar is of Sukha and Jinda, two admitted assassins who were hanged for killing a retired Indian general.

Upset about our coverage of the Air India case, Singh said that both Milewski and I "need to be shot dead."

"If anyone here crosses the line with Sikhi in Canada, they get their faces bashed in . . . . Kim Bolan already had bullets flying through her house so many times, that's why she has cameras in her house, because she is scared of us, she knows she has signed her death warrant."

"It's Milewski's turn now."

Singh, who also wrote that he had been baptized at one of two Metro Vancouver Khalsa schools, was criticized for his comments by other contributors to the site, but he continued:

"Everyone here in Canada knows not to cross the line with Sikhs. We contribute to the country in every aspect, we give respect and demand it, and that's the way it is. If someone has beef, please be my guest. Bullets come cheap you know."

Dosanjh is alarmed at what he is hearing said about critics of extremism in Canada like himself. But he is more alarmed at the seeming acceptance of violent rhetoric and what it could mean to the future of freedom of expression in this country.

"If we don't pay attention, then the kind of Canada that would continue to evolve wouldn't be the kind of Canada that we had today or we had yesterday. It would be far worse, far more dangerous."