Faces of Courage Behind a Free Press

One journalist was kidnapped at gunpoint, drugged, brutally beaten and raped by the Colombian paramilitary groups she had exposed in her reports. Two weeks later, bodyguards in tow, Jineth Bedoya Lima, 27, was back on the beat, vowing to keep performing the job “which makes me feel alive.”

Another newspaper reporter, a 22-year veteran who has chronicled the Basque separatist movement in Spain in newspaper stories and two books, narrowly escaped with her two sons when her home was bombed in 1997. Carmen Gurruchaga Basurto was forced to move to another city but refused to be silenced.

The only female editor in chief of a newspaper in Sudan has faced constant harassment and censorship for exposing corruption and has been fined and jailed several times. The extremists who target Amal Abbas declared her a person who merits execution, but she does not relent.

For their bravery and the personal sacrifices they have endured in the name of freedom of the press, Lima, Gurruchaga and Abbas were honored Tuesday by the International Women’s Media Foundation as the winners of the 2001 Courage in Journalism Awards. Their stories, remarked several speakers at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, stand alone as potent snapshots of the power of the press but are particularly compelling to Americans in light of the terrorist attacks against the United States.

“I think that what’s happened and what the undercurrent here tonight is about a better understanding that we have in the United States of the concept of courage and also what it means to be threatened, to feel threatened and to live under threat,” said San Francisco Chronicle executive editor Phil Bronstein. “And the people we honor tonight have risen above the threats and maintained dignity, not just their own but the dignity of their profession.”

An emotional Lima, who fought tears as the audience rose for a standing ovation, spoke of the 14 hours her violent assault lasted last year and described being “overwhelmed by the presence of death.” She had been lured to a prison to interview a paramilitary leader about rumors that she was on his “hit list” when she was drugged and abducted. That evening, a taxi driver found her in a large trash receptacle where she had been left with her hands tied. Still, she was on duty at El Espectador, a Bogota daily, two weeks later because exposing the truth is her life’s mission, she said.

“This generous award from IWMF has proven to be the greatest motivation for me to go on with my life,” she said while accepting the honor. “The award is not only an acknowledgement of the sacrifices made by journalists working in Colombia. This is also an encouragement for us to continue our fight for freedom of expression. It is an incentive to work for a nation in agony, caught in the cross-fire of three armed groups and drug traffickers. But it is also the acknowledgement of hundreds of women who have suffered rape and humiliation, as I have, but who continue to live in that world.”

Although the experiences of the three journalists may feel more like plots from movies to those in the United States, journalists are murdered, tortured and imprisoned as they go about their jobs around the world every year. This year, 14 journalists have been killed in 11 countries, according to a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is investigating the deaths of an additional 15 journalists believed to have died because of their professions.

“We have lived with terror for a month,” said master of ceremonies Narda Zacchino, senior editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. “They have lived with terror all their lives.”

Growing up amid violence and turmoil in the Basque Country, Gurruchaga developed her instincts for news and her sense of justice. As a political reporter for El Mundo, a Madrid daily, Gurruchaga has covered the ETA, a Basque separatist group. Since 1984, the ETA has waged a campaign against her, hoping to intimidate her into ceasing her reports. Over the years, Gurruchaga was forced to move her home and office several times because of repeated threats. Once a Molotov cocktail was tossed into her office.

In December 1997, after Gurruchaga wrote an article identifying the location of an ETA extremist, the group retaliated by bombing her home at 2 a.m. while she was inside reading and her sons were sleeping. “They destroyed our lives,” she said, noting that she had to leave the rest of her family in San Sebastian to move with her sons to Madrid to a secure compound. She travels with bodyguards and uses an alias wherever she goes. “But I will not stop because a society is not free if its media are not.”

Gurruchaga is worthy of admiration because she “fights for freedom but the price she pays is that she’s lost hers,” Bronstein said.

In the same manner, Abbas has sacrificed her personal freedom several times. In the two years since Abbas became editor of the daily newspaper, Al-Rai Al-Akher, she has faced constant harassment and censorship. She was imprisoned for 36 hours in January because she published an article charging a judicial authority with misappropriating funds. A month later, she was sentenced to three months in prison and fined $6,000 because she published an article alleging that local authorities in Khartoum squandered public funds. She spent 17 days in prison before an appellate court released her. In 1999, the government forced the newspaper to suspend publishing seven times for a total of 72 days.

Abbas could not attend the ceremony but expressed her gratitude in a letter to the foundation. To those who wish to silence her, she said in a video: “We only say what’s true, fight corruption, and demand democracy and freedom. The truth and trueness are clearer even than the shining sun of an equatorial midday.”

The foundation, which was launched in 1990 to strengthen the role of women in news media around the world, also presented the awards last week in New York. Both events raised $1 million. The winners received a crystal eagle, representing journalistic freedom and symbolizing their strength and courage.

The foundation’s lifetime achievement award went to Colleen “Koky” Dishon, who capped a 60-year career that revolutionized feature sections and who in 1982 became the first woman on the Chicago Tribune’s masthead.

In 1979, Dishon received the Distinguished Service in Journalism award from Ohio State University because one of 17 sections she created for the Tribune--Tempo--changed how newspaper sections everywhere were produced.

“Now I’m sure you already realized that the only wars I ever had were with editors and publishers,” joked Dishon, 77.

She retired in 1994 but created an experimental newspaper for public television in Chicago this year.

“Now in the wake of terrorism and continued fears, journalism is helping America redefine itself once again,” she said. “It is an awesome and serious day-by-day, hour-by-hour responsibility. ... Many times I’ve wondered if I deserved it. Perhaps, it was being at the right place at the right time with my journalist husband, Robert. Or, perhaps, it was simply God’s grace.”