Courage Awards: 2001 Courage Award Winners

Jineth Bedoya Lima, Colombia
Carmen Gurruchaga Basurto, Spain
Amal Abbas, Sudan

Jineth Bedoya Lima, a 27-year-old reporter for El Espectador, a daily newspaper in Bogota, Colombia, covers the conflict between the Colombian government and paramilitary groups. Her reports have regularly earned her harassment and death threats from those she writes about.

On May 25, 2000, Bedoya went to a Bogota-area prison, where she was expecting to interview a paramilitary leader about rumors that she was on his "hit list." While waiting for the interview, Bedoya was kidnapped at gunpoint, drugged, then brutally beaten and repeatedly raped by her captors. That evening a taxi driver found her in a garbage dump, where she had been left with her hands tied.

Though many Colombian journalists have fled for their lives after being repeatedly threatened, Bedoya returned to her job just two weeks after being abducted. She has decided to stay in Colombia and continue reporting, though she now does so under the protection of a bodyguard.

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Carmen Gurruchaga Basurto, a political reporter for El Mundo, a Madrid-based daily newspaper, writes frequently about the Basque separatist group, ETA. Gurruchaga's stories have so threatened the terrorist group that since 1984 it has waged a campaign against her, hoping to intimidate her into stopping reporting on their activities.

Originally based in San Sebastian in Basque country, Gurruchaga, who is herself Basque, was forced to move both her home and her office several times, because of repeated threats and harassment. Then, in December 1997, when Gurruchaga wrote an article identifying the location of an ETA extremist, the terrorist group retaliated by bombing her home while she was inside with her two young children. Following the attack, Gurruchaga relocated to Madrid.

Though she is still on ETA's hit list, she continues reporting on them for El Mundo and is also a regular commentator for Spanish national television and radio.

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In the two years since she became editor-in-chief of the Khartoum-based independent daily newspaper Al-Rai Al-Akher, Amal Abbas has faced constant harassment and censorship. The only female editor-in-chief of a newspaper in Sudan, Abbas was sent to prison in January 2001 and held for 36 hours because she published an article charging a judicial authority with misappropriating funds.

In February 2001 she was sentenced to three months in prison and given a fine of 15 million Sudanese pounds (approximately $6,000) because she published an article alleging that local authorities in Khartoum had squandered public funds. This time she spent 17 days in Omdurman Women's Prison. She was released pending a decision on her appeal.

Al-Rai Al-Akher also faces frequent suspensions by the government's National Press Council. Between May and September of 1999 alone, the paper received seven suspensions, with the result that it was not published on 72 days. Al-Rai Al-Akher, like all other newspapers in Sudan, is under daily scrutiny from government security police.

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