Amid Attacks, Jail, Journalists Persevere

Just five months ago, Anna Zarkova was waiting for a bus in Sofia, Bulgaria, at the start of her workday as a police reporter. Suddenly, a man threw sulfuric acid in her face--burning away her left ear and virtually destroying her left eye.

Zarkova had been probing the nation’s criminal mafia, and she paid a terrible price. But if the thugs who attacked Zarkova thought she had been silenced, they were wrong.

“Colleagues,” she said in a radio broadcast from her hospital bed: “For us there is no other way. If they don’t splash acid on your face as a journalist, they will kill you in the street as a citizen.” She vowed to keep reporting.

Beyond America’s borders, journalists are subject to murder, torture and imprisonment simply for doing their job. It’s a risk they face every day, yet most Americans know little of the sacrifices they make in the name of a free press.

Indeed, few are inclined to view reporters as heroes when skepticism about the media is growing and foreign news coverage is shrinking. But advocates are determined to tell the stories of those who put their life on the line.

Today in Los Angeles, Zarkova and two other correspondents will receive the “Courage in Journalism” award from the International Women’s Media Foundation. Like other news organizations that honor journalists, the nonprofit group singles out stories of professional bravery and moral strength. Yet the awards are special because they focus on women.

“They [the recipients] face a double-edged sword every time they go to work, first as journalists in dangerous situations, but also as women, fighting for credibility in their jobs and raising families,” said Sherry Rockey, the group’s executive director.

Besides Zarkova, the honorees are Blanca Rosales, editor of Peru’s second-largest newspaper, and Elizabeth Neuffer, a Boston Globe reporter. The event also will honor Chris Anyanwu, a 1995 winner from Nigeria who was imprisoned at the time but recently has been released, and Time magazine’s Bonnie Angelo, who is receiving a lifetime achievement award.

Worldwide, 26 journalists were killed in 14 countries last year, according to a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least 129 reporters were in prison, and even more were threatened with violence or legal retaliation.

“The murder of a journalist is important news because it is an attack on freedom of expression,” wrote Chairman Gene Roberts in the new report. “If journalists and peacekeepers do not support, cover and constantly struggle for press freedom across national boundaries, then who will?”

The foundation also presented the awards last week in New York.

Zarkova, speaking through a translator as she accepted her award in Manhattan, told of her nation’s struggle for press freedom.

“If we lose the battle against crime, we might lose everything we have achieved,” the reporter for the Trud Daily said.

Zarkova, 38, will get medical treatment in America. “Your support came as a surprise. It came from a distant country and reached me in my hospital room. At the time I could hardly see anything, and the pain was unbearable.”

For Rosales, 40, the ordeal was psychological. Her newspaper, La Republica, has long been a champion of democracy, human rights and a foe of corruption. Despite threats, she and others have continued to expose military assaults on individual freedoms and secret weapon deals.

In April, Rosales was abducted by three armed men as she sat in her car on a street in Lima. For two hours, they screamed insults at her, vowing to track down her family members. They threatened to rape, maim and murder her.

“It was a vast feeling of abandonment,” she said. “A man was threatening me with a gun in the head, while the other was pressing a gun against my stomach. . . . The hammer of a gun lock is a sound that I will never forget.”

Rosales was finally released in a field, but as she walked away, she heard guns click at her back. She has since received threatening phone calls.

Threats are nothing new to Neuffer, the Boston Globe’s European bureau chief. She was nearly raped in Sarajevo; she was taunted by gun-toting rebels in Albania.

“When I think of courage, I think of the women of Rwanda, like a woman I met in Taba commune named Antoinette,” Neuffer told the New York audience. “She was one of the first to defy social convention and talk about her rape by Hutu [tribesmen].”

“Her honesty inspired others to follow, but it cost her friends and family,” the journalist added.

Sometimes the foundation honors reporters who are in prison, and so it was with Anyanwu, founder and publisher of the Sunday Times, the only newsmagazine founded by a woman in Western Africa. When she defied Nigerian Gen. Sani Abacha’s crackdown on press freedoms, she was charged with treason and given a life sentence.

Anyanwu was sent to a remote prison, where she was kept under constant guard and prevented from reading books. The foundation award focused attention on her plight, and when Abacha died in June, the government freed her.

Anyanwu said her decision to defy the regime “is the kind of choice that we Nigerian journalists make every day in a media environment booby-trapped like a minefield.” Captivity was harrowing, she said, but “whenever the going got tough, I said this to myself: ‘Don’t cave in. Don’t be an insult to women. Hang on.’ ”