P24 President Hasan Cemal among “100 Information Heroes”

Hasan Cemal, P24’s Founding President, is among the “100 heroes”, Reporters Without Borders chose to honor this year for their courageous work or activism in defending “the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The other Turkish journalist who made the list is Radikal reporter İsmail Saymaz.
 
P24 is proud to have its President in this distinguished list and we congratulate both Cemal and Saymaz for this well-deserved recognition.
 
Here is how Reporters Without Borders announced its list, followed by the profiles of Cemal and Saymaz:
 
For the first time ever, Reporters Without Borders is publishing a list of profiles of “100 information heroes” for World Press Freedom Day (3 May).

Through their courageous work or activism, these “100 heroes” help to promote the freedom enshrined in article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the freedom to “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” They put their ideals in the service of the common good. They serve as examples.
“World Press Freedom Day, which Reporters Without Borders helped to create, should be an occasion for paying tribute to the courage of the journalists and bloggers who constantly sacrifice their safety and sometimes their lives to their vocation,” said Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Christophe Deloire.
“These ‘information heroes’ are a source of inspiration to all men and men who aspire to freedom. Without their determination and the determination of all those like them, it would be simply impossible to extend the domain of freedom.
“This obviously non-exhaustive list pays homage not only to the 100 famous and less well known people on it, but also to all the professional and non-professional journalists who constantly help to shed light on the world and cover every aspect of its reality. This initiative aims to show that the fight for freedom of information requires not only active support for the victims of abuses but also the promotion of those who can serve as models.”
The list of “100 information heroes” comprises women and men of almost all ages (25 to 75) and 65 nations. The youngest, Oudom Tat, is Cambodian and the oldest, Muhammed Ziauddin, is Pakistani. Iran, Russia, China, Eritrea, Azerbaijan, Mexico and Vietnam are each represented by at least three heroes.
The lists includes such varied figures as Anabel Hernandez, the author of a bestseller on the collusion between Mexican politicians and organized crime, Ismail Saymaz, a Turkish journalist who has been prosecuted a score of times for his reporting, Hassan Ruvakuki, who was jailed for 15 months in Burundi for interviewing members of a rebel movement, and Gerard Ryle, the head of International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who has contributed to the emergence of global investigative journalism.Some work in democracies. They include Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, US citizens who were responsible for revealing the mass electronic surveillance methods used by the US and British intelligence agencies. Others, such as the Iranian journalist Jila Bani Yaghoob, work under the most authoritarian regimes.
Not all are professional journalists. The Vietnamese citizen-journalist Le Ngoc Thanh, for example, is also a Catholic priest. Many, such as Lirio Abbate, a specialist in the Sicilian mafia, have focused on covering corruption and organized crime. This is the case with Peter John Jaban, a Malaysian radio programme host who spent years in self-exile on London, Serhiy Lechtchenko, an investigative journalist from Ukraine, and Assen Yordanov, a Bulgarian journalist who has been repeatedly threatened.
The profiles also include activists like María Pía Matta, who has worked for nearly ten years for the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC), defending the freedom of community radio stations in Latin America.
Courage is the common denominator. In Uzbekistan, the authorities had no compunction about torturing Muhammad Bekzhanov to extract a confession. In Eritrea, ranked last in the 2014 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index for the seventh year running, Dawit Isaac has languished in the dictator Issayas Afeworki’s jails for the past 13 years. Mazen Darwish, founder of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression and winner of the RWB press freedom prize in 2012, has been held for more than two years by the Assad regime.
 
 
 
HASAN CEMAL

Turkey / Eastern Europe and Central Asia
“If this is journalism, then down with your journalism!” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan did not mince his words when he accused the daily Milliyet of jeopardising the peace process with Kurdish rebels in March last year when it published the minutes of the negotiations. His blast was aimed partly at the noted columnist Hasan Cemal, who defended his newspaper and said he believed each must do his job. He was forced to resign shortly afterwards. Yet, if anyone believes in peace and reconciliation, it is him. But he is also used to breaking taboos. At the height of the fighting between Ankara and the PKK, he was among the handful of journalists who went to interview the rebels in their stronghold in the Kandil mountains. In 2012, he published a book whose title alone would have landed him
in prison a few years earlier: “1915: Armenian Genocide”. It quickly became a best seller and its success was was a sign that Turkish society was changing. The 70-year-old journalist, who now works for the news website T24, is still the regular target of hate campaigns and smears by the far right.

ISMAIL SAYMAZ

Turkey / Eastern Europe and Central Asia
A reporter for the newspaper Radikal, Ismail Saymaz was covering a nationwide wave of demonstrations in the summer of 2013 when he found proof that it was shopkeepers and plainclothes policemen who had beaten a young protester to death in the western city of Eskisehir. As a result, he was threatened by the local prefect, who had said he could have been killed by other protesters. Saymaz is used to such threats. His articles and books have tackled all the most sensitive subjects, including the “deep state,” the Ergenekon conspiracy and political manipulation of the judicial system. He has been sued around 20 times and has been the target of virulent verbal attacks by government officials and the far right. Despite a lively media landscape, independent journalism in Turkey needs a vocation. At least 131 journalists have been fired or forced to resign in 2013 and at least 13 are being held in connection with their reporting. Some have been held for several years.

100 informations heros

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