Courage Awards: 2003 Courage Award Winners

Anne Garrels, United States
Tatyana Goryachova, Ukraine
Marielos Monzon, Guatemala

Anne Garrels, a foreign correspondent with National Public Radio in the United States, was one of only two American women journalists in Baghdad during the recent war. Her vivid reporting brought the reality of a country under bombardment to her listeners. At one point she was blown back into the elevator of the Palestine Hotel, where she was staying, when a nearby building was bombed from the air. At another, she watched as a cruise missile passed right in front of her window. When U.S. bombs fell on the hotel killing two journalists, she was only a few floors away.

Garrels has been witness to conflict many times. Her extraordinary empathy for those whose lives have been shattered by war makes her reporting shine. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, she has regularly spent time in the former Soviet republics covering issues from social and economic challenges to military and cultural developments. She reported on Tiananmen Square, Bosnia, Israel and the first Gulf War; she endured Russian bombs in Chechnya and reported from the Northern Alliance’s front lines in Afghanistan. All these assignments have entailed physical hardship and great personal risk.

For example, Garrels covered both Chechen wars despite a Russian ban on foreign journalists. While there, she evaded Russian bombs and, at one point, holed up in a railroad car with Russian soldiers on the outskirts of Grozny, the Chechen capital.

Shortly after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Garrels traveled to Central Asia, then up over the Hindu Kush and down into Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley to join the front lines of the Northern Alliance. She wrote her dispatches by candlelight and filed them by satellite phone. After journalists traveling in a convoy were ambushed and killed, Garrels decided she would be safer alone. So, covered with a headscarf, she took a two-day bus ride to Kabul, all the while collecting the stories of the people around her and reporting on the human toll the war was having on the people of Afghanistan.

Anne Garrels joined National Public Radio in 1988. Prior to that, she was the State Department correspondent for NBC News and for a decade before that she worked for ABC News. She served three years as Moscow bureau chief and correspondent for ABC until she was expelled from the country in 1982. She also covered the Eastern Bloc, particularly the rise of Solidarity in Poland. From 1984-85 Garrels was the network’s Central American correspondent.

Anne Garrels was born July 2, 1951. She graduated from Harvard University in 1972.

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Tatyana Goryachova is the editor in chief of Berdyansk Delovoy, the only independent newspaper in Berdyansk, Ukraine, a small town on the Azov Sea. Her husband, Sergey Belousov, is the paper’s publisher. Goryacheva often covers city government, healthcare and local issues, and when she uncovers corruption in these institutions, she writes about it. In Ukraine, a country with one of the worst press freedom records in the world, this is perilous.

Among Goryachova’s stories that have angered city authorities are reports on the illegal firing of a nurse at the city hospital, on a director of the city’s best known kindergarten who was taking bribes and on the death of a young woman in a city hospital because doctors refused to listen to her complaints. Her story about the mayor’s plan to buy the public library so he could build a nightclub in its place so enraged the public that the mayor stopped the sale.

In January 2002, Berdyansk Delovoy gave equal coverage to candidates in local elections, which enraged incumbents. Soon after that Sergey Belousov lost control of his car and crashed on a winding road, suffering a concussion. A later examination of the car revealed that the car’s brakes had been tampered with. Two weeks later, Goryachova was walking home from work when an assailant threw hydrochloric acid on her face. She suffered temporary blindness in her left eye. Police have not solved the case.

While Goryachova was in the U.S. for treatment in October 2002, her mother and daughter received threatening phone calls, warning Goryachova not to give interviews to the Western press. Goryachova decided that by remaining silent she would be giving in to her adversaries and took her story to the Associated Press and the Dallas Morning News.

Berdyansk Delovoy is also under constant financial pressure. Building and tax inspectors visit the publication often looking for offenses and to impose fines. The city pressures businesses to stop them from advertising with the newspaper. In August 2002 the paper’s printing company, which is owned by a friend of the mayor, tripled the newspaper’s printing costs. Through it all, Goryachova has remained steadfast.

Tatyana Goryachova was born June 6, 1966 in Berdyansk, Ukraine. She is a 1988 graduate of Zaporozhye State University and a former high school teacher. She began her journalism career as a producer at Business Today on Television Berdyansk. She has been the editor in chief of Berdyansk Delovoy, a 4,500-circulation weekly newspaper, since 1995. She is the mother of a three-year-old daughter.

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Marielos Monzon, a columnist for the daily Prensa Libre in Guatemala City, Guatemala, is known for her commitment to reporting on human rights violations in her country. Guatemala is a country still coping with the brutal aftermath of a 36-year (1960-1996) civil war in which an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed. By reporting on the bloody aftermath both in her newspaper column and until recently as co-host of a radio program, Punto de Encuentro (Meeting Point), Marielos Monzon has incurred the rath of those who would bury the past.

Monzon began her journalism career at Radio Sonora in 1997, reporting on human rights violations from the civil war. She began receiving threats in 1998 when four gunmen came to her home and smashed the windows of her car. In June 2002, intruders again entered her house. This time they took her dog. At the same time, anonymous callers told her to stop reporting on human rights abuses or risk harm to her children, prompting Monzon to send them out of the country for several months.

In December 2002, threats resumed when Monzon wrote a column about the disappearance of Antonio Pop, an indigenous leader. Callers said that she would suffer the same fate as Pop, whose body was found at the bottom of a well near a military base a week later. In February 2003, Monzon wrote a column about the Guatemalan army’s human rights violations against the civilian population during the 1980’s. On March 2, intruders entered her home, leaving signs of their visit as a warning to her. During the period before and just after the incident, Monzon received 26 threatening phone calls. Despite years of threats to her life and the lives of her children, Monzon continues to pursue the truth about the human rights abuses that have torn her country apart.

Marielos Monzon is a 1994 graduate of Rafael Landivar University in Guatemala City and the mother of two children. In addition to her journalism career, Monzon consults with international non-governmental organizations that work in Guatemala on human rights, democracy and youth issues.

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