Count to three for freedom
Editors whose bravery gives the press a good name
Peter Preston
Sunday April 29, 2001
The Observer
Some awards juries are different. The one I sit on - the one I wouldn't miss - has a special power and a special pull. Sometimes it can get people - innocent people - out of prison. I hope that begins to happen on Thursday for U Tin Win. But he is what he has been since 1989, a prisoner of Burma's unrelenting military dictators. Count three (for 3 May) and pray.
U Tin Win used to edit the Hanthawati Times and campaign for democracy, of which press freedom is an umbilical part. He knowingly courted personal disaster; it duly arrived. He was sentenced to 12 years in jail, then had another eight added, with almost casual brutality, when he was found with a pen and paper in his cell. He languishes now, health broken, behind locked doors at Rangoon general hospital. The generals say they will let him out if he recants and falls silent. He suffers, but he stays.
My jury, 14 journalists from around the globe, meets once a year at Unesco headquarters in Paris to choose the Guillermo Cano prizewinner for World Press Freedom Day. It is, simultaneously, a dispiriting and inspiring task. Cano (a brave Colombian editor) was gunned down by drug cartel assassins and his family give the prize in his memory. Sometimes - for Christina Anyanwu in Nigeria or Gao Yu in China - winning helps and their prison doors open. Sometimes even the clout of Unesco brings no instant relief. Nizar Nayyouf, going blind in a Syrian military jail, won it last year. Assad the Elder is dead and Assad the supposedly Younger and More Liberal has taken over, but Nayyouf is still wretchedly behind bars and renewing a hunger strike which will surely kill him. Again - a recurring theme - he can go free if he shuts up. He will do no such thing.
What's dispiriting about this jury? The impossibility of choosing between murdered editors in the Congo and murdered reporters in Cyprus, between gallant Serbs who fought the good fight against Milosevic and survived and Burma's legions of the lost. Any individual choice - of the living over the dead, the victors over the vanquished - seems to diminish the whole. Yet inspiration also holds sway.
Here we sit in grubby old Britain, wriggling over the News of the World, and we lose all perspective. We forget what journalism, at heart, is about. It is not about Sophie's slip showing or Posh's new boob job; not about share-tipping or celebrity-mongering: the journalism of Nayyouf and U Tin Win is about raising voices and turning over stones. A brave and necessary trade.
I haven't met U Tin Win, but I feel that I know him because I know U Thaung, a Burmese brother in blood and ink. Almost 45 years ago, he started Kyemon, which became Burma's best-selling paper overnight. The generals came; the editor went to prison; his paper 'nationalised' into acquiescence.Now he lives in exile in America, writing constantly - 26 books - about the beloved country he cries for. And the striking thing about U Thaung, face to face, is how modest and quiet and calm he is. He endures. Burma's democratic government (in exile, too) doesn't count him an unquestioning friend because he sticks to no party line. He is a prisoner of his own conscience.
That is also the simple truth about so many editors and writers the world over who stand beside U Tin Win and U Thaung as a constantly endangered species - Pius Njawe from the Ivory Coast, Fred M'membe from Zambia, Savea Sano Malifa of Samoa, Daoud Kuttab from Palestine. There is no end, month after month, to the roll of those who must be included.
The freedom day on 3 May arrives, as always, bulwarked by reports and statistics. Has Africa (despite Zimbabwe) edged forward in the decade since Unesco's Windhoek declaration of the rights of independent journalism there? Is Russia slipping back into repression? The Observer has a fine new web campaign (observer.co.uk/freepress) to chart such ebbs and flows. They are the first sure signs of democracy taking hold or fading away. But, alongside these countings, there is always a human dimension which the smug, developed world too easily forgets.
What you see, in the bravery and the strugglings, is a basic definition of what journalism exists to offer - the instinctive, individual impulsion to bring the news and views. When we have to look abroad for that - beyond America, beyond Britain - we also reproach ourselves.
Kofi Annan and Mary Robinson have joined the head of Unesco, Koichiro Matsuura, in a statement to carry us on from Windhoek. They talk of the progress made and of that fundamental human right enshrined in the UN charter: 'the right to receive and impart information free from censorship.' But they also, glancing around, know how 'even the most heinous regimes can gain popular support if they manage to muzzle the media or to manipulate it to arouse fear and hatred among their citizens'.
Free, independent and pluralist media, they say, 'have an indispensable role to play in rooting out racism and xenophobia'. Now, who does that apply to, pray? To U Thaung and those Burmese print warriors who found asylum after distress? Or are we talking of a darkness much closer to home?
Peter Preston is a former editor of the Guardian and former chairman of the International Press Institute