Striving for Peace: Amira Hass´s Great Effort

Amira Hass, Hebrew born in 1956, daughter of two Holocaust survivors. She was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studied the history of Nazism and the European left relation to the Holocaust.

After working in several different jobs, she began her journalist career in 1989 as a staff editor for Ha´aretz and started to report from the Palestinian territories in 1991. She had been in Gaza and in Ramallah; she is the first and only Israeli journalist who has lived there full-time.

Her report of events and her critical opinion to both official Israeli and Palestinian positions has exposed her to verbal attacks. But she continues to oppose towards to both authorities of government. She thinks that journalists have to monitor the power. This is the reason why she needs to understand, down to the last detail, to the best of her political and historical comprehension. To her, Gaza is the entire saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So she really wanted to try what it was like to be an Israeli under Israeli occupation. And she also thinks that change can come only through social movements and their interaction with the press.

In my opinion she is a brave and reckless journalist who risks her life in conflict territories fighting to give clear reporting about events without benefitting each government. And her articles are critical, objective and show a powerful fight against the power of governments.

I think it is time that Israeli and Palestinian authorities think about the social welfare of their people because civilians do not want war and death anymore because children are the biggest sufferers.

HOMAGE TO BRAVE JOURNALISTS- CHRISTINA ANYANWU

She was born in 1951 in Ahiara (Nigeria). She studied journalism in the United States. She returned to her country to practise her profession and nowadays she’s a great journalist.

In 1995, when she was the publisher and editor in chief of an independent paper“The Sunday Magazine”, she was arrested following the publication of an article about an attempted coup against the Nigerian government. She was condemned to life imprisonment by a special military tribunal in a trial held behind closed doors on July 4, 1995. National and International Human Rights groups pressured and the sentence was reduced to 15 years. The conditions in prison were deplorable. She went partially blind and she didn’t receive medical attention.
Also, in 1995, she was awarded the International Women’s Media Foundation.

In 1997, the Committee to Protect Journalists named Anyanwu winner of the CPJ International Press Fredom Awards.

In 1998, she received the UNESCO’s Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. In june of this year she regained her freedom.

Since she went out of prison, she continues fighting for press freedom. She wrote "Out of Prison - And Back to Face the Montain".

In the general election in 2007, she was on the Platform of the People’s Democratic Party, and was elected to the Senate; as a representative of Owerri Zone, Imo State, Nigeria.

In my opinion I think that every journalist can write and publish the truth of anything; that is the press freedom. Sometimes they risk their life doing this job.The arrest of a journalist has never resolved problems or derreted events. Not only Christina Anyanwu was in prison for this cause, we have to fight against these detentions because they’ve just looked for the truth.

Jesus Blancornelas, Nothing stopped him!

Jesus Blancornelas was a very important journalist in Mexico. He was born in 1936 and he died in 2007.

Blancornelas started his job as a journalist working in a sports newspaper. A few years later, in 1977 he founded a newspaper called ABC of Tijuana. Three years later in 1980, he founded one of his most important creations, the weekly Zeta. These newspapers gave impulse to the investigation on corruption and drug trafficking.

In 1988 Blancornelas was obliged to leave his post in the newspaper ABC, but he did continue doing some research on corruption and drug trafficking.

Jesus Blancornelas also was awarded with a lot of awards, like for example: “International Prize for Freedom of the Press” “Reporters without borders”, “Daniel Pearl”, “María Moors Cabot”, “Freedom of Expression Award from the Inter-American Press”,and I think that the most important, “Prize UNESCO / Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom”.

The unsolved murders in Ciudad Juárez: Lydia Cacho´s call to action.

Lydia Cacho Ribeiro is a Mexican journalist, feminist, and human rights activist. She is a member of the Red Internacional de Periodistas con Visión de Género.

She was born to a mother of Portuguese and French origin who moved from France to Mexico during World War II and then married a mechanical engineer. Cacho herself met a foreigner and then settled in Cancún, Quintana Roo, in 1985. She began working for the cultural section of the newspaper Novedades de Cancún and a decade later wrote articles about the prostitution of Cuban and Argentine girls in the city. In 2003, Cacho wrote articles on the sexual abuse of minors for the newspaper Por Esto including a note on a girl abused by a local hotel owner.
Cacho then wrote the book Los Demonios del Edén (Demons of Eden) in which she accuses Jean Succar Kuri, of being involved in a ring of child pornography and prostitution, based on official statements from his alleged victims and even a video of him (filmed with hidden camera).
By May 2006, Cacho had taken the cause of the unsolved murders in Ciudad Juárez as a call to action against impunity of abuse of women in Mexico. What is an ongoing horror abroad, the chronic discovery of murdered women whose corpses are discovered in repeated patterns of abuse, rape, mutilation and are discarded as offal in pathetic scenes in the desert and urban surroundings of Ciudad Juárez. Young women from factories are said to be helpless in their need for public transportation. This is a common pattern for these women's deaths.
In 2007, She was arrested by Mario Marín, governor of the state of Puebla the United Nations Human Rights Council advised her to leave the country and offered her political asylum, legal assistance, and access to international courts.
While being held, Cacho was granted the Premio Francisco Ojeda al Valor Periodístico
She received the 2007 Amnesty International Ginetta Sagan Award for Women and Children's Rights and, in 2008, the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. She has also been granted the Premio Francisco Ojeda al Valor Periodístico.

Homage to brave journalists - Lasatha Wichrematunge

Lasantha Wichrematunge was born in 1958 in Sri Lanka and was the youngest of six children. He spent some time in Britain and then returned to Sri Lanka where he started his journalistic career in 1980. He studied law, but he chose to practise journalism because it allowed him to do what he considered the most important thing in life: to look beneath the surface of things to get a better society.

Wichrematunge was the editor of Sri Lanka’s The Sunday Leader. He was famous for his style of journalism, critic towards the government. He defended investigative journalism in a country where democracy is in danger.

Lasantha wrote in a posthumous column published last January: “When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me”.

And he was right. On 8 january 2009, Wichrematunge was shot while he was on his way to work. Four motorcycles blocked his car before breaking his window and shooting him. He was taken to Colombo South General Hospital and was operated. Finally, after nearly three hours of surgery, the journalist died from his head wounds.

Wickrematunge’s murder caused an international outcry. For example, The Guardian, in its Editorial of 13 january 2009, described Lasantha as an “idealist of good journalism everywhere”.

Homage to Brave Journalists - Win Tin

Win Tin has a BA in English literature, modern history and political science (12 March 1930).

From 1950 to 1954, he was on the staff of Sarpay Beikman, then Jumbarton (1954-57) and then the daily Kyemon (1957-69). He became well known as a political commentator and regularly criticised the militarisation of the country and the corruption of its rulers. He then became editor of the daily Hanthawathi until it was banned in 1978. He was accused of attending a meeting of intellectuals at which a statement was approved criticising "the Burmese path to socialism" imposed by General Ne Win.

Win Tin was also an art critic, under the pen-name Baw Thit. He specialised in traditional Burmese art and also wrote about European painters, especially Gauguin, who he compared to the Burmese painter U Khin Maung, from Mandalay.

Win Tin was serving a 20-year sentence on charges including "anti-government propaganda." One of the reasons for his detention is his attempt to inform the United Nations of ongoing human rights violations in Burmese prisons. At 76 years of age, he is in a poor state of health, exacerbated by his treatment in prison, which has included torture, inadequate access to medical treatment, being held in a cell designed for military dogs, without bedding, and being deprived of food and water for long periods of time.
Since the start of 2006 he had not been able to receive visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

In 2001, Win Tin was awarded the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize for his efforts to defend and promote and right to freedom of expression. That year, he was also awarded the World Association of Newspapers Golden Pen of Freedom Award.
He was freed on 23 September 2008, after serving 19 years imprisonment.
After his release from prison Win Tin made efforts to reorganise the NLD. He relaunched the weekly meetings of the party's Central Executive Committee which had been irregularly held since 2003. He also resumed a regular roundtable called "Youth and Future" which Aung San Suu Kyi has participated in the past. Win Tin visited family members of political prisoners to offer moral support.

“People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think”: Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian voice

Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist, author and human rights activist well known for her opposition to the Chechen conflict and the Russian President Valdimir Putin.

Politkovskaya worked for Izvestia from 1982 to 1993 and as a reporter, editor of emergencies/accidents section, and assistant chief editor of Obshchaya Gazete led by Yegor Yakovlev. From 1999 to 2006 she wrote columns for the biweekly Novaya Gazeta. Seh published several avard-winning books about Chechnya, life in Russia, and President Putin’s regime.

While attending a conference on the freedom of press organized by Reporters Without Borders in Vienna in December 2005, Politkovskaya said: “People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think”.

She was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building on 7 October 2006 and one year later, she vas awarded by UNESCO with Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize, awarwed posthumously for the first time.