Chronicles of courage
By Global Journalist Staff Posted Sun, Apr 1 2001
Without much fanfare, women journalists throughout the world have made great strides in recent years. They can be found dodging air attacks, living on bread and water in the Caucasus Mountains, risking radiation exposure in Chernobyl, government retaliation in Africa or death by drug runners in Latin America. You find them running bureaus of great newspapers in Washington, D.C., and even major newspapers themselves. You can find them struggling for managerial positions in the Arab World or in developing countries. One woman, Carol Guzy, has won three Pulitzer Prizes in photography. They fight back from natural disaster and are in the forefront of the American campaign to dominate women’s magazine publishing internationally. On these pages we chronicle the growing presence of women in international journalism — in the field and in home offices, celebrating gains and fighting for more.
Kyrgyzstan Zamira Sydykova
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Kyrgyzstan embraced democracy, including a free press. Unfortunately, the oppressive psychology of the Soviet Union was ingrained in much of government and society. Zamira Sydykova founded Kyrgyzstan’s independent weekly, Res Publika, in 1991 to “change the consciousness of the society.”
From 1994 to 1996, Res Publika published stories accusing the president of the state-run gold mining company of corruption. In 1997, the government brought libel charges against the article’s author and Sydykova. They fought the charges but lost. A district court sentenced Sydykova to 18 months of labor and barred her from practicing journalism. Sydykova served time in a prison colony, where the lack of sanitary facilities and other horrendous conditions compromised her physical and emotional health. Several months later she received a presidential pardon, but she was still banned from working as a journalist.
Now she has been allowed to resume work as editor of Res Publika, despite continuous conflict with the government.
Bogota, Colombia Jineth Bedoya Lima
Jineth Bedoya Lima, a 27-year-old reporter for El Espectador, a daily newspaper in Bogota, Colombia, covers the conflict between the Colombian government and paramilitary groups. Her reports have resulted in harassment and death threats from those she writes about.
On May 25, 2000 Bedoya went to a Bogota-area prison, where she was expecting to interview an imprisoned paramilitary leader about rumors that she was on his “hit list.” While waiting for the interview, Bedoya was kidnapped at gunpoint from the prison waiting room, drugged, then brutally beaten and repeatedly raped by her captors. That evening a taxi driver found her in a garbage dump where she had been left with her hands tied.
Though many Colombian journalists have fled after being repeatedly threatened, Bedoya returned to her job two weeks after being abducted. She has decided to stay in Colombia and continue reporting, though she now does so under the protection of a bodyguard. Bedoya is one of the 2001 winners of the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Courage in Journalism Awards.
Lima, Peru Blanca Rosales Valencia
Blanca Rosales launched her journalism career writing a column for Marka magazine on labor rights issues and in 1996 became editor in chief of La República, one of Peru’s largest daily papers. In 1997, Rosales was abducted and held at gunpoint for several hours.
After reporting that the Peruvian Secret Service was behind her kidnapping she was declared a threat to national security and was the target of a national television campaign to discredit her. She has suffered from panic attacks and works under the protection of two bodyguards.
Rosales was named sub director of La República where she is designing a magazine for women and young people and developing new sections for the paper.
Pristina, Kosovo Aferdita Kelmendi
Aferdita Kelmendi began her career working for Radio Pristina, a station controlled by the Yugoslav government. But when communism fell and civil war erupted she saw a need to educate youth in non-violence.
Kelmendi co-founded the Media Project in 1995, aiming to train young girls in journalism, Internet skills and conflict resolution. In 1998, she became Director of Radio/TV 21, the only independent station in Pristina and part of the Media Project. Since the station was not able to obtain a broadcasting license from the government, in January 1999 Kelmendi decided to transmit news via the Internet.
In March of 1999, her station was destroyed. She also learned that a colleague had been killed and that she was on a hit list. She escaped from Kosovo with her family and initially went to a deportee camp in Macedonia. From there, the family relocated to Skopje. Kelmendi quickly re-established transmission on borrowed equipment and began broadcasting in exile.
When the fighting subsided, Kelmendi returned to Pristina and in July began live radio transmission. Radio/TV 21 is the first Albanian-language station to broadcast from Kosovo.
Afghanistan Sharifa Akhlas
Sharifa Akhlas was born and educated in Afghanistan. She began her journalism career in the early 1990s when she saw the status of women deteriorating because of hostilities in Afghanistan. Akhlas began producing stories on human rights issues, but when the Taliban instituted bans on working women in Afghanistan, she began working secretly, seeking international distribution of her reports.
In order to avoid detection by the Taliban, Akhlas and her family moved frequently. Her clandestine reporting was discovered more than once; most recently in 1998 — she was arrested and beaten. Her husband and father had to promise to keep her from reporting or face arrest themselves.
She now works in exile as a radio and television producer and reporter for the Afghan Media Resource Center (AMRC), based in Peshawar, Pakistan. She continues to move around to avoid detection. In her current work with the AMRC, Akhlas travels to Afghanistan, risking her life to interview women and bring news to the international community.
Kiev, Ukraine Lyubov Kovalevskaya
As reporter and editor of Tribuna Enerhetyky (Energy Tribune), the newspaper of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy plant in Ukraine, Lyubov Kovalevskaya obtained secret documents, which enabled her to break the story about serious problems at the Chernobyl reactor one month before the nuclear accident in 1986 She spent the next three years collecting official documents on the facility and, risking her health, entered the forbidden radioactive zone at least 30 times to interview workers and cooperative officials.
At last report, she was living in Kiev and still working as a freelance writer — her health suffers from the effects of radiation exposure.
Jakarta, Indonesia Bina Bektiati
Bina Bektiati began reporting about politics for the independent newsweekly Tempo in 1991. In 1994 the magazine was banned and its license revoked by the Suharto regime. A government–controlled publication replaced Tempo, but Bektiati refused to join. Instead, she challenged the ban in the courts and helped found the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), Indonesia’s only independent journalist association.
Bektiati was unable to find work in Indonesia and, in 1995, moved to Australia. She returned to Jakarta in 1996 and helped form the Institute for the Study of Free Flow of Information, researching and writing books on current affairs. Bektiati continued writing about politics — often under an assumed byline — and covered the protests leading up to the fall of Suharto and installation of President Habibie in 1998.
The new government has instituted modest reforms and in late 1998, Tempo was re-established. Bektiati has returned to her position with the magazine.
Khartoum, Sudan Amal Abbas
Amal Abbas has faced constant harassment and censorship since she became editor in chief of the Khartoum-based independent daily newspaper Al-Rai Al-Akher two years ago. The only female editor in chief of a newspaper in Sudan, Abbas was sentenced to prison three times — in January for 36 hours, in February for three months and most recently she spent 17 days in a women’s prison — all for writing articles about government corruption. Her sentences are under appeal. She was also fined 15 million Sudanese pounds (approximately US$6,000).
Al-Rai Al-Akher also faces frequent suspensions by the government’s National Press Council. Between May and September of 1999, the paper received seven suspensions, resulting in 72 days of no publishing and is under daily scrutiny from government security police. She is a 2001 Courage in Journalism Award winner.
Vancouver, Canada Kim Bolan
Kim Bolan has been a reporter for The Vancouver Sun since 1984. In the past 15 years, she has covered wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Afghanistan, but Bolan is best known for her coverage of the Sikh community in Vancouver, Canada.
Her reports have led to critical breaks in the 1985 bombing of an Air India jet and a police investigation of a local independent school controlled by several suspects in the bombing. Since December 1997, Bolan has received death threats by mail, telephone and on local Punjabi-language radio shows. In February 1999, police received information that Bolan was on a hit list circulating among Sikh fundamentalists in Vancouver.
Bolan’s work continues, although she is now under police supervision and is escorted on assignment.
United States Marie Colvin
American-born war correspondent Marie Colvin of The Sunday Times in London, has covered some of the worst bloodbaths of the last decade.
Colvin has reported first-hand from Chechnya, Kosovo and East Timor. She provided readers with the rarely reported perspective of Chechen rebels and Kosovo Liberation Army fighters.
While in Chechnya, a fighter jet attacked Colvin’s vehicle as she accompanied rebels from the Republic of Georgia to Grozny, the Chechen capital. Colvin managed to escape into an adjacent field that offered only bare trees for cover, lying there for hours as the jets continued attacking. When she later left Chechnya, Colvin had to make her way through the Caucasus Mountains with a few rebels on foot and without appropriate supplies. After enduring several days of minus zero temperatures, eating mostly a porridge of flour and water, and once falling waist deep into freezing water, she reached safety.
During East Timor’s civil unrest, Colvin was the only newspaper reporter to remain inside the UN compound. Most journalists evacuated after Western diplomats warned they might be murdered by Indonesian-backed militiamen intent on slaughtering the hundreds of fleeing East Timor refugees seeking shelter there.
Colvin continues to work at The Sunday Times. She was recently in the hospital in Sri Lanka after suffering from shrapnel wounds while covering a skirmish between Sri Lankan government troops and rebels.
Manila, Philippines Marites Vitug
Marites Vitug was a reporter for The Manila Chronicle when she wrote of the plunder of the Philippines’ last tropical rain forest by a greedy businessman and a corrupt politician. Her exclusive articles, which appeared in Dow Jones’ Far East Economic Review as well as a number of Filipino publications, brought her death threats and a series of libel suits that threatened imprisonment. She continued to report about the threats to the rain forest.
Vitug has written two books and received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to write a third on the Muslim rebellion in the Philippines. She founded and now sits on the board of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, is the correspondent for Newsweek magazine, and is the Southeast Asia editor of the World Paper.
Madrid, Spain Carmen Gurruchaga Basurto
Carmen Gurruchaga Basurto, a political reporter for El Mundo, a Madrid-based daily newspaper, writes frequently about the Basque separatist group, ETA. Gurruchaga’s stories have threatened the terrorist group since 1984 and ETA has waged a campaign against her, hoping to intimidate her into not reporting on activities.
Originally based in San Sebastian in Basque country, Gurruchaga, who is herself Basque, was forced to move both her home and her office several times because of repeated threats and harassment. Then, in December 1997, when Gurruchaga wrote an article identifying the location of an ETA extremist, the terrorist group retaliated by bombing her home while she was inside with her two young children. Following the attack, Gurruchaga relocated to Madrid. Though she is still on ETA’s hit list, she continues reporting on them for El Mundo and is also a regular commentator for Spanish national television and radio. Gurruchaga is a 2001 Courage in Journalism Award winner.
Algiers, Algeria Horria Saihi
As a television producer, director and reporter, Horria Saihi has fought government censorship and the threat of fundamentalism since the mid-1980s. She has been condemned to death by Muslim fundamentalists and went into hiding in late 1994 after discovering she was on a hit list.
Saihi created a documentary series about television censorship, which was canceled by the government after six months without explanation. She has filmed testimonials with the families of victims of Islamic terrorism, revealing the impact of violence on daily life in Algeria. The assassination of approximately 70 journalists, including colleagues and friends, since 1992 has not changed her determination.
In 1996, she produced documentaries on the clearing of land mines in Algeria and on women who had been raped. After spending months obtaining approval from the government to work on these films, both were censored and have never been aired. Saihi travels incognito throughout Algeria to produce her reports and files her stories with French television stations. The threats on her life continue as she enters her seventh year of hiding.
Sofia, Bulgaria Anna Zarkova
Anna Zarkova is chief of the criminal news department for Trud Daily. She has written stories exposing organized crime, police violence and corruption, and has also received threats because of her work. In May 1998 Zarkova was severely burned when a man threw sulfuric acid on her while she was waiting for a bus. From her hospital bed she said: “Colleagues, for us there is no other way. If they don’t splash acid in your face as a journalist, tomorrow they will kill you in the street as a citizen.”
Zarkova received burns on the left side of her face and body, and she lost her left eye. No arrests have been made, but police suspect a man connected to Bulgaria’s underworld.
Zarkova is determined to keep fighting. “I believe that free speech can only be possible if we keep in mind the romantic phrase of the Three Musketeers: ‘One for all and all for one!’ ”
Burundi Agnes Nindorera
In Burundi, where in the last seven years more than 200,000 Hutus and Tutsis have died in ethnic fighting, no one is trusted. Journalists who report objectively risk being labeled as traitors, an accusation tantamount to a death sentence.
After Agnes Nindorera reported the treatment of Hutus in regroupment camps, a military officer accused her of betraying her nation. Nindorera stopped reporting from September 1999 to December 1999 to take leave and move from her neighborhood and press charges against the officer who threatened her.
She broadcasts for Studio Ijambo, a radio production house funded by Washington DC-based Search for Common Ground, which does features on a range of social issues.
Nindorera has been threatened, beaten, arrested and interrogated numerous times. She says it is because she insists on having access to information. “I was beaten by a soldier with the butt of a Kalishnikov rifle,” she says. “He stopped me from interviewing a former president who was under house arrest. … Once, I was detained for six hours in rural Bujumbura by a governor who tried to hide a massacre of some 10 civilians.”
She continues to cover the political tensions of Burundi.
Nairobi, Kenya Catherine Gicheru
In the year leading up to Kenya's 1992 elections, Catherine Gicheru wrote a series of exclusive reports for the independent daily, The Nation, that exposed involvement of high government officials in the assassination of a local political figure. In retaliation for Gicheru’s articles, the Kenyan government banned the paper from covering the Electoral Commission, which oversaw the 1992 presidential election.
Gicheru also exposed the corruption of a prominent ruling party leader who siphoned off millions of dollars of government–controlled funds into a private housing development. She was harassed and threatened by thugs who tried unsuccessfully to prevent publication of the story.
Gicheru is now bureau chief for The Nation in Mombasa, the second largest city in Kenya.
Istanbul, Turkey Ayse Önal
For more than a decade Ayse Önal has reported on Turkish politics, organized crime and conflicts in the Middle East. She was arrested and detained in Iraq while reporting on the Gulf War, threatened by Islamic fundamentalists and put on the revolutionary left’s death list. In 1994, Önal was shot and wounded by the Turkish mob because of her stories linking the government and organized crime; she subsequently went into hiding for three months.
In 1995, Önal was targeted by a fundamentalist publication because of a report she wrote on peace in the Middle East. The Turkish military blacklisted her and fired her from the national newspaper and television station because of her interviews on the Kurdish conflict. In recent years, Önal has been unable to work or report for the national media. She learned English last year and moved to London and is now writing a socio-political book on the integration of Turkish-origin immigrants in the UK.
Lagos, Nigeria Chris Anyanwu
While editor in chief of the independent weekly, The Sunday Magazine, Chris Anyanwu declined to publicly endorse the military regime of General Sani Abacha. Weeks later, she was arrested and sentenced to life in prison, charged with publishing stories questioning an impending human slaughter under the cover of a coup d’etat. She was also charged with not revealing her sources.
After 1,251 days in confinement, Anyanwu was released in June 1998 following Abacha’s sudden death. She is waiting for the democratic government of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo to grant her a license to run a radio station, which she has waited on for two years.
— Text by Kathleen Currie and Nabila Alibhai