When Nigerian reporter Isioma Daniel heard that a fatwa, or Islamic ruling, had been issued against her, she “felt calm … then realised that there was no going back”.
“Was I scared? I didn’t sleep too well that night,” she wrote in a February 2003 article published by The Guardian about her case.
A writer for ThisDay, Daniel had angered fundamentalist Muslims with her coverage of the Miss World contest in 2002. After being summoned to report to state security, Daniel and her father decided she had to leave the country.
“I remember feeling uneasy after completing the piece,” she said. “It was breezy and sarcastic. My recent time in Britain, studying journalism at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, had made me irreverent — there are no sacred cows in the United Kingdom.”
Daniel crossed the border to Benin and the next day learned that a fatwa had been issued, saying: “Like Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed. It is abiding on all Muslims wherever they are to consider killing the writer as a religious duty.”
With help from the Committee to Protect Journalists and Amnesty International, she won asylum in Norway.
“Now I am trying to understand my new home. I wonder if I will be able to write again,” she said.
On Wednesday, Daniel was named as one of the 2005 winners of the United States-based Hellman/Hammett grants, which range from $1Â 000 to $10Â 000 and are handed out yearly to writers around the world who have been targets of political persecution.
The programme was founded in 1989 when US playwright Lillian Hellman willed that her estate be used to assist writers in financial need as a result of expressing their views.
Hellman was prompted by her experiences during the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, when she and her long-time companion, the writer Dashiell Hammett, were questioned by US congressional committees about their political beliefs and affiliations.
“It’s an opportunity for the writer to make an issue of human rights and free expression,” said Marcia Allina of Human Rights Watch (HRW), which administers the grants. “We haven’t been very successful in getting the US press to pay attention, but it has made a big difference in their home countries.”
Of the 27 winners this year, five have asked to remain anonymous out of fear for their personal safety. Some are hard to track down because they are in hiding, Allina said.
But most have agreed to publicise their cases.
Hollman Morris was the founder and editor of the peace and human rights section of the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, where he wrote about the atrocities committed by all sides in the civil war.
Death threats drove him into exile in the 1990s, but he returned to Colombia in 2003 to direct the television journal Contravia, and resume his investigative reporting of human rights abuses, including the murder of fellow journalist Jaime Garzón.
Morris unearthed evidence that had been ignored in the criminal investigation of the case, and was later cited by the judge in rendering the final verdict. He was also the first TV journalist to provide in-depth coverage of a recent massacre in the community of San Jose de Apartado.
Last December, after filing a complaint against military officers who had detained him while he was researching a story, Morris was told that a military intelligence officer had suggested he was a member of the rebel group Farc — which is tantamount to a death sentence in Colombia. The apparent involvement of military intelligence makes Morris’s situation even more dangerous, HRW notes.
Other grantees have been less fortunate. Pierre Elisem, a Haitian radio journalist, was shot in the neck and stomach by assailants after airing a listener call-in show that pro-government forces thought was biased in favour of the opposition.
He awoke as a quadriplegic in Cap Haitien hospital, where staff members were forced to hide him in the maternity ward when Elisem’s attackers learned he was still alive and returned — presumably to finish him off. The journalist now lives in Miami, and has regained the ability to walk with a cane.
Two Iranian bloggers also made the list — Omid Memarian and Sina Mottalebi.
Mottalebi was arrested in 2003 during the first wave of the government crackdown on bloggers. He later fled to The Netherlands, where he wrote a detailed exposé of the judiciary’s detention and interrogation techniques in his country. The Iranian authorities tried to silence him by arresting his father in Tehran.
After most pro-reform newspapers were closed in 2004, Omid Memarian continued writing on his blog. During an October 2004 crackdown aimed at silencing internet journalists, he was arrested, held in solitary confinement and tortured. Upon his release in December 2004, he campaigned actively against arbitrary arrests and mistreatment of detainees by the authorities.
Maha Hassan, a Syrian-Kurdish author of novels, short stories and essays, has been banned from publishing in the country since 2000 because the authorities consider her writing too liberal, too feminist, and “morally condemnable”.
Hassan fled the country when mounting rumours convinced her that she would soon be arrested and jailed. In August last year, she went to Paris, the first time she had ever left her family or been out of Syria.
“Syria has had no free media since the Ba’ath party came to power in March 1963,” she told Reporters sans Frontières in December last year. “All newspapers are the party’s mouthpieces and are linked to it some way … Journalists working for the official papers are rarely jailed, since their work is read beforehand by the censorship office and they censor themselves anyway.”
Yet, she added, “Syria has a proud history of newspaper diversity. During the 1918-1920 Arab government, 54 daily papers were appearing.”
Other winners include Kum Margaret of Cameroon, Tewodros Kassa of Ethiopia, Ismail Mbonigaba of Rwanda and Yuri Bagrov of Russia.
Five writers from Iran were chosen: Assurbanipal Babilla, Ali-Reza Jabari, Omid Memarian, Sina Mottalebi and Taqi Rahmani. Also from the Middle East are Ali Lmrabet of Morocco and Abdallah Zouari of Tunisia.
In Asia, the selections committee honoured Saleem Samad of Bangladesh; Bao Zunxin, Guo Qinghai and Yu Shicun from China; and Ameera Javeria of Pakistan.
In the 15 previous years of the Hellman/Hammett grant programme, more than 500 writers received grants totalling more than $2,5-million. — IPS