By Evelyn Leopold
NEW YORK, Nov 23 (Reuters) - A Kosovo journalist who saw the premature report of his death on television, a jailed Cuban writer, a Colombian journalist under death threats and two prominent Pakistani editors have been awarded the annual international press freedom awards.
The five will be honoured at a Tuesday night gala dinner by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), whose executive director, Anne Cooper, said they were chosen because the ``threats these journalists stand up to are ultimately threats to all of us.''
They are: Baton Haxhiu, editor-in-chief of the Pristina daily, Koha Ditore; Jesus Joel Diaz Hernandez, in jail in Cuba for starting an independent news agency on the Internet; Maria Cristina Cabellero, a reporter who fled death threats in Colombia; and Jugnu Mohsin and Najam Sethi, a husband and
wife team who publish The Friday Times in Pakistan.
Haxhiu, editor-in-chief of the Pristina newspaper, has criticised every player in the Kosovo quagmire, earning him the wrath of Serbian authorities and Albanian leaders alike.
On the eve of the NATO air strikes in March, Serbian forces torched his paper's offices, killing a guard. But NATO forces believed Haxhiu had been killed and he watched televised reports of his death as he was hiding in a basement. He then fled to Macedonia where he resumed publishing the paper
to Kosovo refugees.
Now back in Kosovo, Haxhiu, an ethnic Albanian, is still a target, receiving death threats after a press agency linked to the Kosovo Liberation Army denounced him as a traitor. ``To be independent in Kosovo is so dangerous,'' he said.
BEATEN, GAGGED AS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY OFFENDER
Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin, the well-connected husband and wife team who write, edit and publish The Friday Times in Lahore, fought to assert press freedoms, challenging ex-prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his predecessor, Benazir Bhutto, to answer corruption charges.
Last May, Sethi was dragged from his bedroom during the night by government agents who beat him, gagged him and held him for nearly a month, his wife reported. During Sethi's imprisonment, Mohsin put out the newspaper while organising friends to learn Sethi's whereabouts and get him freed.
Life is easier under the generals who seized power from Sharif last month but Sethi is not sure how long this will last. ``It's too early to say if these guys will be as good as their word. We are keeping our fingers crossed,'' he said.
WRITING FROM JAIL IN CUBA
Jesus Joel Diaz Hernandez, only 25 years old, was arrested last January and spent eight months in solitary confinement as part of his four-year jail sentence for founding an independent news agency in cyberspace, the CPJ reported.
Using the Internet to circumvent censorship, he dictated stories over the phone to colleagues abroad for posting on Web sites. Some were broadcast back to Cuba.
In prison, Diaz Hernandez has continued to write, although guards have confiscated his stories and threatened him with up to 20 more years of jail, the CPJ said.
A journalist from Bogota, Colombia, Maria Cristina Caballero says she walks down the streets of Cambridge, Mass. looking over her shoulder. She fled to Cambridge after finding a death threat on her answering machine last spring, not many months after four journalists had been murdered in
Colombia.
Caballero says she had made enemies all around, having interviewed all sides in the conflict tearing her country apart: drug kingpins, leftwing guerrillas, rightwing paramilitary forces. She is now on leave from her job on the weekly Semana to write a book about Colombia's civil war.
03:13 11-23-99
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited. |