Courage Award Winners

Anna Zarkova is chief of the Criminal News Department for Trud Daily. She has been awarded national prizes for her stories exposing organized crime, p...

Blanca Rosales launched her journalism career writing a column for Marka magazine on labor rights issues and, in 1996, became editor-in-chief of La Republica, one of Peru's largest daily papers. As the relationship between the press and the government of Alberto Fujimori continues to erode, journalists are regularly threatened. In 1997, Rosales was one of those targeted when she was abducted and held at gunpoint for several hours.

Throughout her 20-year career, Maribel Gutierrez has been deeply involved in covering the experiences of rural and Indian communities in Mexico and especially in the state of Guerrero, one of the poorest in Mexico. In 1993, she co-founded El Sur, an independent newspaper covering local news, human and political rights, militarization, corruption and social problems, in a state where almost all press is under government control.

Bina Bektiati began reporting about politics for the independent newsweekly Tempo in 1991. In 1994 the magazine was banned and its license revoked by the Suharto regime. A government-controlled publication replaced Tempo, but Bektiati refused to join. Instead, she challenged the ban in the courts and helped found the Alliance of Independent Journalists, Indonesia's only independent journalists association.

Before becoming a photojournalist, Corinne Dufka spent ten years as a social worker. Her interest in photojournalism began while working in El Salvador for a humanitarian organization providing mental health services to the victims of civil war. She found that photography allowed her to document the human rights abuses experienced by civilians and she began freelancing.

A widow and mother of four, Lucy Sichone wrote for The Post, Zambia's leading daily newspaper. In February 1996, Sichone went into hiding, along with her 3-month-old baby, to avoid imprisonment for writing articles critical of the Zambian parliament. She was charged with contempt of Parliament, which would have dealt her a sentence of indefinite detention. The government issued a reward for information on her whereabouts, but Sichone remained in hiding, continuing to write articles demanding a return to press freedom for Zambia and her right to a fair trial.

Saida Ramadan, a Sudanese journalist, began writing in exile from Egypt after the Muslim fundamentalist-backed regime of Lt. General Omar Hassan al-Bashir took power in Sudan in 1989 and began a systematic campaign against the media. At the time, Ramadan was a correspondent for the Sudanese paper Al-Alam in Cairo. The paper was shut down, her passport revoked and she was not allowed back in her homeland.

For more than a decade Ayse Önal has reported on Turkish politics, organized crime and conflicts in the Middle East. She was arrested and detained in Iraq while reporting on the Gulf War, threatened by Islamic fundamentalists and put on the revolutionary left's death list. In 1994 Önal was shot and wounded by the Turkish mob because of her stories linking the government and organized crime; she subsequently went into hiding for three months.

Algerian journalists, embattled from both sides in the ongoing civil war, continue their daily struggle to work as well as to stay alive. As a television producer, director and reporter, Horria Saihi has fought government censorship and the threat of fundamentalism since the mid-1980s. She has been condemned to death by Muslim fundamentalists, and went into hiding in late 1994 after discovering that she was on a hit list.

One of the most respected journalists in China, Gao Yu was in prison when her award was announced. An economic and political reporter, she was sentenced in 1993 to six years in prison for "leaking state secrets," through - ironically - a pro-Chinese newspaper in Hong Kong. The charges brought against Gao led some observers to believe that the underlying goal was to send a message about acceptable boundaries of press freedom and limit media criticism of China's government.

While editor-in-chief of the independent weekly, The Sunday Magazine, Chris Anyanwu declined to publicly endorse the military regime of General Sani Abacha. Weeks later, she was arrested and sentenced to life in prison, charged with publishing stories about an alleged coup plot against Abacha and refusing to reveal the sources.

For 20 years Razia Bhatti was a leader in Pakistani journalism. After leaving a major magazine in 1988 because of limitations imposed on her writing, she founded and served as editor-in-chief of Newsline magazine.

As a photographer and founder of "Agence Haitienne d'Images," Marie-Yolande Saint-Fleur captured the repression of Haiti's citizens and the violence of its military rulers.

As an international correspondent for CNN, Christiane Amanpour has consistently delivered insightful and extensive reporting from some of the most dangerous hot spots in recent memory. For two years she covered civil strife in Bosnia, then the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda, and the overthrow of the Haitian government.

When the siege of Sarajevo continued into a second year of bloody civil war, Radio and Television Bosnia-Herzegovina's broadcasts to the outside world also continued because of dedicated journalists like Mirsada Sakic-Hatibovic and Arijana Saracevic. The two women put their lives in constant jeopardy, providing battlefront reports and up-to-the-minute accounts of hostilities that impacted the city's multi-ethnic population.