Female journalists awarded for their courage in reporting

In May, an Israeli female journalist was detained in Gaza, after being charged with "violating a military order and staying illegally in an enemy state." She is Amira Haas, a regular columnist for the daily Ha’aretz newspaper in Israel. During the same time, Iryna Khalip, a reporter and editor in the Minsk, Belarus bureau of the Moscow-based Novaya Gazeta newspaper, was subject to police interrogations and surveillance in Belarus, as she had been for years.

These two women represent the many female journalists around the world who work in the face of grave danger for the sake of truth telling. For their courage, they were awarded recently by the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF). Haas won a Lifetime Achievement Award; while Khalip, along with another female journalist from Cameroon and one from Iran, received Courage in Journalism Awards. On October 26, GFMD spoke with Haas and Khalip in Washington, D.C., where they discussed their lives, motivations and the meaning of their awards.

Haas, born in 1956, commenced her journalism profession in 1989 as a copy editor for Ha'aretz. In 1993, she became a full time writer for the paper and moved to Gaza, which then was under full Israeli occupation. She is now based in Ramallah, in the West Bank – the administrative capital of the Palestinian National Authority. Her reports have been critical of both Palestinian and Israeli authorities.

To Haas, receiving an IWMF award was embarrassing. "It makes people talk about you instead of the subject," she said. "There is still so much to learn about Israel, about my society and about Israeli decision makers who invent restrictions."

“Many foreign journalists have failed to recognize the situation,” she said, because it is difficult to “know how to distinguish between where Hamas rule ends and when Israeli rule begins." Local journalists try to capture the story, but they struggle with objectivity, she said, because they are struggling to maintain their own lives – “a life with shrinking horizon,” Haas described.  

Although she has been threatened and detained because of her work, Haas continues to reside in Ramallah. She argues that by living with Palestinians, she can better understand Israeli policy towards Palestine, and what power is doing on the ground. "I am not a journalist who looks for stories in the corridor of power," she adds.

A native Belarusian, Khalip has worked as a journalist for 15 years, during which she witnessed, many times, the danger involved with being a journalist. In 2003, the news agency where she worked, Belaruskaya Delovaya Gazeta, was suspended for an article Khalip wrote that “insulted the honor and dignity of the president.” In 2006, the newspaper was forced to close permanently, and Khalip joined Novaya Gazeta.

That same year, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a colleague at Novaya Gazeta, was murdered. Khalip, too, has received death threats. Her bravery originates from a “personal belief and personal journey,” she said, to tell the public the truth. Official news is all government propaganda, and “students and media faculties are being banned from communicating with independent press.”

To challenge these realities, Khalip and her colleagues covertly disseminate information to the public. “We publish leaflets, underground leaflets. Sometimes to just do massive canvassing, and slip them under the door or put them in mailboxes so that people will know the truth,” she explained.

Under Belarusian government surveillance, she is devoted to informing the public of what is really going on. “I do have a dream, even if it has to be published underground.”

At the panel discussion in Washington D.C., Khalip said she was unsure if she would be welcomed by her government with “red carpet or handcuffs” upon her return.

Since 1990, the annual Courage in Journalism Awards recognizes heroic female journalists. They are supported by International Women’s Media Foundation. Learn more here.