Click on the links below to view the acceptance speeches:

• Iryna Khalip
• Agnes Taile
• Amira Hass
  

 

Iryna Khalip
Acceptance Speech
International Women’s Media Foundation
2009 Courage in Journalism Award

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Friends,
Thank you for this award and for the possibility to address such an esteemed audience.

I still cannot understand how Belarus has become a dictatorship. There was no putsch, no junta, no sudden coup d’etat. There was just Belarus, a young country just finding itself.

We had hopes of happiness, success, creativity, and honor for our own country. For me, having grown up in the Soviet Union, the feeling of freedom was a blissful discovery. I had an enormous desire to work in this new, free country.

I do not know when, exactly, we started to gradually loose our freedom.

Was it when my paper was shut down?
Or was it when my colleagues started to get arrested for reporting the news?
Or, was it perhaps when the police searched my house after I had published a piece on corruption?
Was it when my friends – opponent to Lukashenka -- started to disappear one by one?

Dictatorships don’t like journalists. They either destroy them or buy them out. In 2003, the Criminal Code of Belarus was amended to prevent reporters from writing anything negative about the President. Hundreds of my colleagues were left without jobs because Lukashenka’s regime destroyed the independent press.

Every dictatorship is scared of open debates because it understands it is doomed to loose. And it uses very primitive means to avoid such debates. For them it is sufficient to close down the papers and to intimidate the journalists.  Many of my colleagues started to work in propaganda, having lost the fight for freedom of speech. Many emigrated, not wanting to waste their lives fighting the dictatorship which, as they think, may prove to be eternal.

I cannot blame them.

I didn’t make my choice because of that. Truly, I didn’t have a choice. I live in a country where the freedom to choose died long ago together with civil rights and freedoms. I simply want to tell the truth about the abductions and killings of politicians, about beatings of journalists.

I simply cannot forget about my friends in jail, about those whose husbands were killed, about my colleagues, fewer and fewer of whom still remain in Belarus.

I want my two-year-old son, who doesn’t yet understand what’s going on, to have no fear for me, like all my relatives do.
I want to tell the truth of what’s going on in Belarus.

Especially now, when something equally dangerous has entered the world scene --  I mean “realpolitik” – the willingness of the international community – guided by pragmatic reasons, such as oil and gas transit routes --  to tolerate and “overlook” the totalitarian regime of Lukashenka for an obscure idea of illusionary stability in a region. This destroys the efforts of independent reporters, like myself, who are fighting for freedom of speech and free media.

If this dangerous trend continues our voices may be silenced.

However, I want to assure you that I shall continue to write the truth and talk openly about the situation in Belarus.

If all media venues are shutdown to me, I shall shout the news to you.

Please listen.

Agnes Taile
Acceptance Speech
International Women’s Media Foundation
2009 Courage in Journalism Award

It will soon be November 6, and once again I will remember those painful events when my work brought me closer to death than ever before.  But today is a great day for women of Cameroon and I am deeply honored to represent them here by accepting this award in the name of their suffering, their frustrations and their despair.

As I stand before you, I think that one of them is going through intense pain in one corner of this country so dear to me: Cameroon. And I could not fail to mention here the courage and the determination of these women who deserve our respect and our support.

I think of all those young girls forced to give up their quest for knowledge to suffer discrimination, prostitution and early and forced marriages.
I think of those who still feel the sharp blade of the cutter's knife, leaving behind physical and psychological trauma and, even worse, the risk of HIV/AIDS.

I think of all those women who will never see their children again, them having fallen victim to hostage takers who cut their throats or burnt them alive for an unpaid ransom.  I will never forget the tears of these helpless mothers whose innocent sons fell under the bullets of the fighting in Chad or in the hunger riots of February 2008 in Cameroon.
 
I cannot forget all these women, the children, the adults and the elderly who live below the poverty line and suffer unfairly under the ever-present corruption deeply rooted in the justice system, the police, the healthcare system and the entire Cameroonian civil service. And how can we forget the embezzlement of public funds despite the arrest of the alleged plunderers of the State’s resources.
 
I could not list here all the injustices I have personally experienced since I was born, which have compelled my decision to become society’s watchdog.
 
I know that no true journalist can remain silent in the face of these injustices, despite intimidation or gagging of the press, whether by arrests, false imprisonment and hasty trials or physical and psychological assault. I have experienced all these and my presence here today is proof of it.
 
This is why now, for almost 8 years, I have chosen the most beautiful job in the world: I am a journalist. Such work provides the feeling of having done something positive for humanity, affording a smile and a voice to the oppressed by carrying on the relentless pursuit of truth and an end to inequality.
 
I am not ready to forget the innumerable miles I have walked in my quest for information, those nights and days of hunger, working for no pay, with the constant threat of unemployment (which today for me is a reality) in the name of the freedom of expression I never cease to demand within the media. 
 
I am not ready to let corruption win in my difficult fight against the government’s failures, our employers’ weaknesses and my family who still struggles to understand my choice.
 
I may have lost my job, but my conviction is stronger today than ever before. And this honor you have bestowed upon me will only harden my resolve.
 
I dedicate this IWMF award to all the women of Cameroon, and in particular to women journalists, journalist unions and organizations supporting our efforts.
 
My heartfelt thanks go out to you for this award you have granted me.  And in closing, I will share with you an old saying: that which does not kill you will only make you stronger.

Thank you.

Amira Hass
Acceptance Speech
International Women’s Media Foundation
2009 Lifetime Achievement Award

Allow me to start with a correction.   How impolite, you’d rightly think, but anyway, we Israelis are being forgiven for much worse than impoliteness.

What is so  generously termed today by the International Women’s Media Foundation as my   lifetime achievement  needs to be corrected.  Because it is Failure.  Nothing more than a  failure.   A lifetime failure. 

Come to think of it, the lifetime part is just as questionable: after all, it is about a  third of my life, not more, that I have been engaged  in Journalism.

Also, if the ‘lifetime’ part gives you the impression that I am soon going to retire  - then this impression has to be corrected as well. I am not  planning to end soon what I am doing.  

What am I doing?   I am generally defined as a reporter on Palestinian issues.  But, in fact,  my reports are about the Israeli society and policies, about Domination and its intoxications.  My sources are not secret documents and leaked out minutes which were taken at meetings of  people with Power and in  Power.  My sources are the open ways by which the subjugated are being dispossessed of their equal rights as human beings. 

There is still so much more to learn about Israel, about my society, and about Israeli decision makers who invent restrictions such as:  Gazan students are not to study in a Palestinian university in the West Bank, some 70 km’s away from their home.    Another  ban:    Children (above the age of  18) are not to visit their parents in Gaza, if the parents are well and healthy.  If they were dying,  Israeli order-abiding officials would have  allowed the visit.  If the children are younger than 18 - the visit would have  been allowed.  But, on the other hand,   second degree relatives are not allowed to visit dying or healthy siblings in Gaza. 

It is an intriguing philosophical question, not only journalistic.   Think of it: what, for the Israeli System, is so disturbing, about reasonably healthy fathers or mothers?  What is so disturbing about a kid choosing and getting a better education?  And these are but two in a long, long list of Israeli prohibitions.   

Or when I write about the progressively decimated and fragmented Palestinian territory of the West Bank.  It’s not just about people losing their family property and livelihood; it’s not only about the shrinking opportunities of people in disconnected, crowded enclaves.  It is in fact a story about the skills of Israeli architects.  It is a way to learn about how Israeli on the-ground  planning contradicts official  proclamations, a phenomenon  which   characterizes the acts of all Israeli governments, in the past as in the present.  In short, there is so much to keep me busy for another  lifetime, or at least for the rest of my lifetime.    
   
But, as I said, the real correction is elsewhere.   It’s not about achievement that we should be talking here, but  about a failure. 

It is the failure to make the Israeli and international public use and accept correct terms and words  - which reflect the reality.  Not the Orwelian Newspeak that has flourished since 1993 and has been cleverly dictated and disseminated by those with invested interests.

The Peace Process terminology, which took reign, blurs the perception of real processes that are going on:  a special blend of military occupation,  colonialism,  apartheid, Palestinian limited self-rule in enclaves and a democracy for Jews.  

It is  not my role as a journalist to make my fellow Israelis and Jews agree that these processes are immoral and dangerously unwise.  It is my role, though, to exercise the Right for freedom of the Press, in order to supply information and to make people know.  But, as I have painfully discovered, the right to know does not mean a duty to know. 

Thousands of my articles and zillion of words have evaporated. They could not compete with the official language  that has been happily  adopted by  the mass media, and is used in order to dis-portray the reality.   Official language that encourages people not to know. 

Indeed, a remarkable failure for a journalist.
                                          

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