Courage in Journalism

"The chief cause of death of journalists is planned killing," said Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent for CNN at the west coast banquet for the 2008 Courage in Journalism Awards given by the International Women's Media Foundation at the Beverly Hills Hotel two days ago.

Cancer or heart disease may be the primary cause of death for many people, but journalists around the world are more likely to be murdered, disappeared, or victims of a mysterious accident or illness.

Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter for Novaya Gazeta, received the award in 2002 but in 2006 was killed in the elevator of her apartment building in central Moscow after many death threats. She wrote about the Chechen conflict and did not approve of Putin's handling of it.

Amanpour reported that all the suspects in Politkovskaya's death are members of the Russian Secret Service, but the perpetrators still go unpunished. Instead, the lawyer prosecuting them recently came down with severe mercury poisoning, which she survived.

Lydia Cacho, one of the 2007 winners for her reporting on sex tourism in Cancun, was arrested by police from the state of Puebla and threatened with rape and death. Audio tapes turned up of the governor of the state of Puebla discussing plans for this attack, but last November the Mexico's highest court cleared him of any involvement in Cacho's illegal detention, Amanpour stated.

This year's winners:

FARIDA NEKZAD, 31, managing director of Pajhwok Afghan News, was honored for encouraging women to work as journalists and to fight for their rights in Afghanistan. A warlord told her, "Stop or we will kill you." In the last five years, five women journalists in Afghanistan have been disappeared or brutally killed. During the 2007 funeral of one of these, she received cell phone threats saying, "Daughter of America! We will kill you, just like we killed her."

She explained that the Taliban considers it blasphemous for women to work publicly. Women who work outside the home are targets of violence, discrimination, and prejudice. Warlords and the Afhgan government are the source of threats, along with the Taliban.

Nekzad takes different routes to work each day and sleeps in a different room of her house each night to avoid attack.

"Women are not tolerated even the slightest public role," she said, "but we must continue to inform women of their rights, even if some of us have to lose our lives. We try to decrease the level of violence against women. There have been many attempts to kill me. I have been told to leave my profession and my country."

She asked listeners to bring pressure on her government to investigate the deaths of women journalists. "Please pray for us and for all Afghan women," she concluded.

SEVGUL ULUDAG, 49, is an investigative reporter for Yeniduzen newspaper in Cyprus. Since 2002 she has been investigating thousands of people who disappeared during Greek-Turkish clashes in the 1960s and 1970s. She has brought attention to mass graves and has received death threats for her work, published in books such as Oysters with the Missing Pearls.

Her father refused to join the paramilitary, so the family was branded as traitors and ostracized. Her brother-in-law was killed, and her sister took Turkey to Human Rights Court. For his activism, Uludag's husband was punished by unemployment for eight years.

"Courage is the result of the reaction against repression," she said. "Truth is too important to turn away from. The price journalists are paying around the world is not going without notice."

AYE AYE WIN is one of the few women journalists in Myanmar (Burma), a correspondent for the AP there. She reports on arrests of dissidents, violent demonstrations against the government, and on the detention of Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Her husband, also a reporter, has been detained, and her journalist father was imprisoned for three years. Win fears a knock on her door from police at midnight. She decided not to risk appearing in LA to receive her award, lest doing so put her loved ones at risk.

The 2008 lifetime achievement award went to EDITH LEDERER for twenty-five years of work in war zones and hot spots. In 1966 there were only a handful of women covering hard news for the AP and UPI, and no woman was posted overseas.

She repeatedly asked to cover hard news and then became the first woman to report the Vietnam War in 1972. Her work there led to other assignments explaining causes behind conflicts in Darfur, Iraq, Kosovo, Congo, Sierra Leone, and East Timor.

"The battle for women's equality is far from won," she said, in accepting her award.

As an example, she described traveling with a male reporter when a rebel command leader began to negotiate to buy her. The more her colleague said Lederer was not for sale, the higher price the commander offered, ending at "two camels and half a sheep"--the price of purchasing a 13-year-old virgin.

Celebrities present and introducing the winners included Julie Chen of the CBS Morning Show, actress Renee Zellweger, and Maria Shriver, who was jokingly introduced as a woman who "risks her life on a daily basis being married to a Republican in Sacramento."

She attends the West coast IWMF awards every year, and admitted that these stories of danger and courage often drive her to the bar afterward: "They make you wonder what you're doing with your life."

Yes, attending this event makes me re-evaluate my daily priorities.

As Eugene Robinson, columnist and associate editor of the Washington Post said, "And we're nervous about asking impertinent questions in press conferences?"

You can learn more and support the IWMF by visiting http://www.iwmf.org/ and http://www.rsf.org/, the site of Reporters Without Boundaries.