Courage Awards: 2005 Courage Award Winners
Anja Niedringhaus, Germany
Shahla Sherkat, Iran
Sumi Khan, Bangladesh
Anja Niedringhaus, Germany
Anja Niedringhaus began working as a freelance photographer at age 17 while still in high school. In 1989, while a student at the Goerg-August University in Goettingen, Germany, she covered the collapse of the Berlin Wall for the German newspaper Goettinger Tageblatt.
Niedringhaus began full-time work as a photojournalist in 1990 when she joined the European Pressphoto Agency (EPA) in Frankfurt, Germany. One of her first assignments for EPA was covering the conflict in the Balkans, where journalists were regularly targeted by Bosnian Serb forces. On her first day in Sarajevo, Niedringhaus was hit in her flak jacket by a sniper’s bullet. She stayed in the region for ten years, covering Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia and exposing herself to the dangers of civil war.
In 1997, her foot was crushed and broken in three places by a police car while she was covering demonstrations in Belgrade, requiring three reconstructive operations. That same year, Niedringhaus became EPA’s chief photographer.
In Kosovo in 1998, Niedringhaus was blown out of a car by a grenade while caught in cross-fire. In 1999, in Albania, she was with a group of other journalists at the Albania-Kosovo border crossing when they were mistakenly bombed by NATO forces. Niedringhaus says that she and her colleagues tried to hide in bunkers and cars as the NATO forces continued to fire. The bombing went on for 20 minutes, until NATO got word of their mistake. Some of the journalists’ cars were destroyed and a few of the other journalists in the group were injured.
In 2001, Niedringhaus photographed the aftermath of September 11 in New York City for the EPA. Shortly after that, she traveled to Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, where she spent three months covering the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
In November 2002, Niedringhaus moved to the Associated Press as a traveling photographer. Much of her work since then has taken her to the Middle East, where she has reported on events in the Gaza Strip, Israel, Kuwait and Turkey. Once the war in Iraq began, Niedringhaus traveled to that country, which is considered one of the most dangerous places in the world in which a journalist can work. According to the International Press Institute, 23 journalists were killed in Iraq in 2004. In November 2004, Niedringhaus was embedded with the U.S. Marines during the U.S.-led offensive into Fallujah. She also photographed the bombings of the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad and the Italian base in Nasiriyah, as well as events at the Abu Ghraib prison and the 2005 Iraqi elections.
Niedringhaus also covered the G-8 Summit in Geneva, the terrorist bombings in Madrid and the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens for the AP.
She was the only woman on a team of 11 AP photographers awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography.
She was born on October 12, 1965, in Hoexter, Germany.
She is single with no children.
Shahla Sherkat, Iran
Shahla Sherkat is the editorial director of Zanan (Women) in Tehran. Sherkat founded the monthly magazine in 1991, after she was dismissed from her position as editorial director at the government-owned weekly magazine Zan-e Rouz (Today’s Woman). She was pushed off the staff, she says, because she protested the magazine’s coverage of women’s issues, which only appealed to conservative, religious women who fit an image set forth by the Iranian government.
Sherkat founded Zanan because she felt mainstream journalism was ignoring serious coverage of women’s rights in Iran. It was the first independent journal to focus on women’s issues after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Sherkat has worked as a journalist for 26 years. Before becoming editorial director of Zan-e Rouz, she worked in the publishing department for the production company Kanoon-e Parvaresh Fekri from 1980 - 1982. Before that, from 1979 - 1980, she was the assistant editor of Rah-e Zeynab (Zeynab’s Path), a weekly government-owned women’s magazine.
Sherkat publishes Zanan in a very restrictive and difficult climate. Beginning with the election of Mohammad Khatami as president in 1997, some media outlets began to cover corruption and malfeasance. Still, conservatives tightly control Iran’s judiciary and legislatures. They frequently use their power to close pro-reform publications. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Iranian courts have closed more than 100 publications, most of them pro-reform, since 2000.
According to Zanan editor Roza Eftekhari, a 2005 Nieman Fellow, feminism in Iran has carried a negative stigma and, as a result, many publications stay away from covering topics that may be considered “feminist.”
“Zanan remains the one journal in Iran to speak with great courage on issues of feminism and women’s rights,” said Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program for the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.
Zanan consistently covers women’s issues in a way that Iranian society considers taboo, including articles on divorce laws, prostitution, HIV/AIDS, domestic abuse and maternal custody issues. In 1998, an issue of Zanan featured an investigative report on the increasing number of HIV/AIDS victims in Iran and a critique of government inaction on the disease. Another story, published in 2003, covered the controversial topic of prostitution in Iran. And a story published in 2004 touched upon gender discrimination within Iranian universities.
Zanan also faces continuing financial difficulties because Sherkat is the magazine’s sole owner and, as such, is chiefly responsible for finding funding for the magazine. (Most revenue comes from advertisements for women’s cosmetics and other products.)
Zanan’s offices were attacked by fundamentalist gangs during the early and mid-1990s. During this time, Zanan’s office was in the same building as a reformist magazine, Kian. Sherkat says that the gangs were prompted to attack the magazines because they felt the magazines were creating a movement against the government. The gangs broke the publication’s windows, desks and furniture. Sherkat caught the gangs in the office after they had damaged the place and argued with them for six hours before they left. She tried to bring charges against the attackers after the incident, but police refused to intervene. To protect the magazine today, there are no signs or other indicators that identify Zanan’s, headquarters from the outside streets.
Authorities have also cracked down on Sherkat and her writers with threats of imprisonment. As editorial director, Sherkat is liable for the content of the magazine. She is frequently summoned to Iran’s Press Court to defend specific articles, including an article by 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and a controversial series of articles about Islamic law and women that were written by women’s rights lawyer Mehrangiz Kar and Islamic cleric Mohsen Saidzadeh. Charges brought against Sherkat for publishing these pieces were eventually dropped.
In 1987, Sherkat was summoned to court when she published a story about a girl at a Caspian beach who was beaten and arrested by police for not completely covering her hair. She was later exonerated.
In January 2001, Sherkat was fined and sentenced to prison for four months by Tehran’s Revolutionary Court on charges of anti-Islamic activities after she attended a conference held at the Heinrich Boll Institute in Berlin entitled “The Future of Reform in Iran.” During the conference discussions on the future of political change in the country took place. Members of the Iranian judiciary got word of the conference and considered it “harmful to national security” because they viewed it as a plot to overthrow the Iranian Islamic regime. At the conference Sherkat said that Islamic dress code should be encouraged instead of mandatory. She appealed and was not required to serve the prison sentence, but was forced to pay a fine equivalent to two-month’s salary
Sherkat holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Tehran University and a certificate in journalism from Keyhan Institute, also in Tehran. Since 2002, she has been working towards her master’s degree in women’s studies from Allameh Tabatabai University in Tehran. Sherkat was born on March 30, 1956, in Isfahan, Iran.
She is divorced with two daughters.
Sumi Khan, Bangladesh
Sumi Khan began working as a journalist in 1993 when she started freelancing for several national daily newspapers in Bangladesh. In 1999, she became a reporter for the Daily Jugantor in Dhaka. She had been there for less than a year when she published a report about a high-ranking official at an oil company who allegedly raped his maid. The businessman was friends with some of her editors at the Jugantor, and Khan was forced out of her job for writing the story. Other media also covered the story, but Khan believes that she was harassed because she was the only woman who reported it.
A month later, in 2000, Khan joined the staff of Shaptahik 2000 (Weekly 2000), a magazine known for its investigative reports and in June 2005 she joined the staff of the Daily Samakal in Dhaka. She is based in Chittagong, a city known for violent crime, kidnapping and extortion, where journalists are often assaulted and sometimes killed for reporting on sensitive topics. Khan reports on politics, crime, minority persecution, Islamic fundamentalism and corruption and is the only woman crime reporter in the city. In 2004, the Committee to Protect Journalists named Bangladesh the most dangerous country for journalists in Asia.
In 2002, Khan was arrested and held for 12 hours by police in Chittagong while they interrogated her about her knowledge of Muslim fundamentalist groups. Though she was not covering fundamentalist groups at the time, Khan feels that the interrogation was an attempt to stifle her reporting.
In April 2004, she began receiving threatening phone calls because of an article she wrote about local politicians and religious organizations and their ties to attacks on minority groups. According reports from the Committee to Project Journalists, while Khan was on her way to her office to file a story three unknown assailants attempted to abduct her from the rickshaw in which she was riding. They brutally beat and stabbed her, cutting her forehead, mouth and hands with knives as they shouted, “You have gone too far. You are very daring and you should not be!” Khan fought back and was briefly knocked unconscious. Two of her teeth were fractured and one was broken. Her hands were injured so severely that she was unable to move her fingers for a few weeks. She says it is still painful to write or hold objects. After the attack, Khan was bed- ridden for one month before she sought treatment for her injuries in India. When she returned to Chittagong, she began to ease herself back into her reporting. It was three months before she was able to return to full-time work.
Khan continues to work as a crime reporter and continues to receive threats. Most recently, she received a death threat from the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami fundamentalist party after she reported on the group’s ties to criminal and terrorist activities. Jamaat-e-Islami, along with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, is a member of the country’s ruling coalition.
According to Nayeemul Islam Khan, president of the Bangladesh Centre for Development, Journalism and Communication, Khan has challenged the odds by successfully working as a woman journalist in a male-dominated society. He estimates that women are only four percent of journalists in Bangladesh.
Sumi Khan was born on June 29, 1970, in Chittagong, Bangladesh.
She is married with two sons.