[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/12/18/christianerwanda.jpg caption="Christiane Amanpour standing in a graveyard in Rwanda for her documentary 'Scream Bloody Murder'"]
By Vladimir Duthiers; Production Assistant, AMANPOUR.
On November 25, the Committee to Protect Journalist honored five journalists with its 2009 International Press Freedom Awards in a ceremony highlighting the plight of journalists in danger zones such as Somalia, China, Sri Lanka, Azerbaijan and most recently, the Philippines, where thirty journalists were killed in the province of Maguindanao. Christiane, who sits on the CPJ board, hosted the event at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.
Among the awardees of the CPJ’s 2009 International Press Freedom Awards was Eynulla Fatullayev, founder and editor-in-chief of Realny Azerbaijan, J.S. Tissainayagam, editor of the news web site OutreachSL and a columnist for the English-language Sri Lankan Sunday Times, Mustafa Haji Abdinur, Somalia correspondent for Agence France-Presse and editor-in-chief of the independent radio station Radio Simba, and Naziha Réjiba, editor of the Tunisia based independent online news journal Kalima. The CPJ also presented the Burton Benjamin Memorial Award to the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist, Anthony Lewis. The award is given in recognition of a lifetime of distinguished achievement in the cause of press freedom
For me, the sight of Miss Réjiba at the podium was especially moving and served as a personal source of inspiration around the issue of the Internet’s emerging role in press freedom and those that seek to suppress it. While attempting to report on recent elections in her home country of Tunisia, Réjiba said she faced “a relentless and vicious campaign” waged by her government. She added, reporters’ movements “have been restricted; others have been beaten, abducted, subjected to politicized trials, imprisoned, or placed under constant surveillance.”
While I was listening to her speech, I was reminded of a story that I had often heard repeated by my relatives.
Family legend has it that my paternal grandmother was raised by my great-grandfather to have a tough, “take-no-prisoners” attitude when it came to living by rules imposed by the powers that be. In pre-World War II France, the powers that be were men. French men, just so you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about. Highly educated and fiercely independent, my grandmother spent several years in Paris as a journalist, writing about the right of all French women to participate in the values of the republic - Liberté, égalité, fraternité - embodied no less, by France’s national emblem, Marianne. My grandmother’s articles challenged the government to give women the right to vote, which ultimately, did not happen in France until after the war in 1945.
My grandmother Jeanne, never lived to see the fruits of her efforts. She died delivering my father in June of 1944. Her sister-in-law was already an old woman by the time I came into the world in 1969, but like the old griots of West Africa, she would regale me with stories of Jeanne’s exploits, including the reason, she believed, for her sudden, unexpected death. The gendarmerie was angered by her call to action in local underground newspapers not deemed to have journalistic merit by the government. She was not writing in Le Temps – the pre-cursor to Le Monde, The New York Times of France. No, my grandmother wrote for small, sometimes self-published, fly-by-night newspapers funded usually in secret, by like-minded citizens of all genders She was essentially, a proto-blogger and her defiance in the face of efforts to muzzle her and her like-minded compatriots resulted in her being jailed several times and occasionally, beaten while in prison.
So the story goes.
I say “story” because I’ve never been able to verify these tales. As a child, I took them as gospel. My grandmother’s exploits fueled my desire to read books on every subject no matter how disparate, as I dreamed of also becoming a crusading journalist, fighting to expose truths obscured by shadows of injustice while enlightening a society when their institutions failed to educate them. It didn’t hurt that my other boyhood idol, Superman, moonlighted as a journalist by day. There was never any doubt in my mind that what my grandmother did was journalism – even if the French government decided that what she was doing was inciting rebellion.
Yet what was Thomas Paine advocating when he wrote about the absurdity of an island ruling a continent? In his revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, he said, “In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears.” This almost certainly did not go over well in Windsor Castle. In 1850, Frederick Douglass, called for insurrection against laws that that did not measure up to America’s creed that held that all men are created equal. In his newspaper, the North Star, Douglass wrote, “Slaveholders of the South, with equal assiduity have been active in originating schemes, with a view to stay the progress of these opinions and principles, and in fortifying the system of slavery against attack, by trampling upon the right of petition, by suppressing free discussion, by fettering the American press, by gagging the American pulpit, and by enlarging their borders - the judgment-day of slavery is dawning.”
The American journalist, and social reformer William Lloyd Garrison’s call to action was as incendiary as they come. In his first piece for the weekly Liberator, which he founded in 1831, he said, "I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation… I am in earnest - I will not equivocate - I will not excuse - I will not retreat a single inch - AND I WILL BE HEARD."
Fast forward to the present and in many countries around the world, those trying to be heard are instead, being silenced. In a blog post former CNN Jakarta Bureau Chief Maria Ressa and current VP for News and Current Affairs at the Philippines based ABS-CBN, describes a citizen journalist, known only as “patroller”, who risked his life on three separate occasions to show the world what was happening in an area where professional journalists would not go until more than twelve hours after the massacre of their colleagues.
“Patroller”, along with the honorees of the CPJ and yes, my legendary grandmother, Jeanne Caillet, form the first line of defense in the face of tyranny and injustice. My grandmother died surrounded by loved ones, not in a ditch by the side of a road. But Maguindanao is only the most recent example and unfortunately, will not be the last. Witness the suppression of the citizen press in Iran recently. But, like William Lloyd Garrison, they will be heard.
I lived in Europe for over ten years, six of them in Paris. Many times, I found myself standing in front of the National Archives, intent on tracking down grandmother Jeanne, finding the name of her newspaper, an arrest record, anything that would make the myth real. I never did walk in.
While I believe in the truth, I love fairy tales.
For a discussion about the future of journalism, join Christiane and powerhouse media couple Sir Harold Evans and Tina Brown. It’s their first joint interview ever. See it on AMANPOUR. Friday December 18, 2009 at 20:00 GMT.
To see profiles of the journalists honored at the Committee to Protect Journalist, please click on their names below: