Courage Awards: 1996 Courage Award Winners
Ayse Önal, Turkey
Saida Ramadan, Sudan
Lucy Sichone, Zambia
For more than a decade Ayse Önal has reported on Turkish politics, organized crime and conflicts in the Middle East. She was arrested and detained in Iraq while reporting on the Gulf War, threatened by Islamic fundamentalists and put on the revolutionary left's death list. In 1994 Önal was shot and wounded by the Turkish mob because of her stories linking the government and organized crime; she subsequently went into hiding for three months.
In 1995, Önal was targeted by a fundamentalist publication because of a report she wrote on peace in the Middle East. The following year, she was warned by the government censorship agency about her television interviews on the Kurdish conflict. In recent years, Önal has been unable to find full-time employment because of the opposition to her work.
Önal has two children, has authored two books and has won 14 Turkish National Press Awards.
Saida Ramadan
Sudan (in exile in Egypt)
Saida Ramadan, a Sudanese journalist, began writing in exile from Egypt after the Muslim fundamentalist-backed regime of Lt. General Omar Hassan al-Bashir took power in Sudan in 1989 and began a systematic campaign against the media. At the time, Ramadan was a correspondent for the Sudanese paper Al-Alam in Cairo. The paper was shut down, her passport revoked and she was not allowed back in her homeland.
Ramadan began work as a staff editor at the Egyptian daily Al-Alam Al-Youm where she continued to express views against the Sudanese regime. She was blacklisted by the National Islamic Front, threatened and physically assaulted. Upon receiving her Courage in Journalism Award Ramadan said, "I'm only one of many Sudanese journalists who are oppressed because of their political opinions. This award is for the Egyptian media for giving me a place in which I can voice my opinion."
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Lucy Sichone
Lusaka, Zambia
Deceased
A widow and mother of four, Lucy Sichone wrote for The Post, Zambia's leading daily newspaper. In February 1996, Sichone went into hiding, along with her 3-month-old baby, to avoid imprisonment for writing articles critical of the Zambian parliament. She was charged with contempt of Parliament, which would have dealt her a sentence of indefinite detention. The government issued a reward for information on her whereabouts, but Sichone remained in hiding, continuing to write articles demanding a return to press freedom for Zambia and her right to a fair trial.
She wrote, "The freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights make it a sacred duty for me to defend them to the death." When the charges against her were dropped, Sichone returned to public life and continued to write her columns as well as coordinate civic education and human rights programs.
Sichone earned a law degree from the University of Zambia and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. She continued advocating on behalf of the disadvantaged until her death in August 1998, at age 44.
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