Saturday, February 8, 2014

Al-Jazeera reporter - journalism is not terrorism and I'm not a terrorist

The Guardian

Sue
Sue Turton, above, is a presenter and senior correspondent with Al-Jazeera English. She has been indicted in her absence by the Egyptian authorities on a charge of aiding terrorists. She and a colleague, Dominic Kane, were among 20 people accused of spreading false news, bringing Egypt into disrepute, and conspiring with terrorists.
"At least, unlike five other imprisoned Al-Jazeera staff, she is outside Egypt. She is therefore able to write about the situation inside the country, and about the arrests of three Al-Jazeera English colleagues. Here is her story...
We are careful at Al-Jazeera not to label anyone a terrorist. After all, one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. But the Egyptian prosecutor general sees things very differently. To him, journalism can be terrorism.

The charges levelled against me and my colleagues are an affront to every journalist who has reported accurately and independently from Egypt in recent times.

We weren't there to promote one side or the other. We had no agenda. We just told it as we saw it. How did the daily grind of stories on a 24-hour news channel become such a threat to an all-powerful military-backed government?
I've been physically attacked, verbally abused, shot at, bombed and arrested in my 25 years as a TV reporter. They're occupational hazards. But being accused of assisting terrorists is not.
I've covered the Egypt beat many times for Al-Jazeera but I flew into Cairo last September last year on a story about Syria. I had gone to cover a meeting of the Arab League foreign ministers to discuss possible US military action against the Assad regime.
It was just two months after Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhoodleader, was ousted by the military and we already had a team in an Egyptian jail.
As the foreign ministers were settling down in the general assembly chamber we got a call from our bureau chief. The police were raiding our offices and had arrested the accountant.

Cairo is a rumour mill - who knows what to believe?

We were told the police were on the way to the Arab League to arrest all Al-Jazeera staff. But we left unhindered. Cairo is a rumour mill, so who knows what to believe?
But we were unsure of just how safe our presence was, and we could have shut up shop and left. Maybe we should have. But that's not what Al-Jazeera is about. And it's not why I joined the channel as its Afghanistan correspondent after 12 years working alongside Jon Snow at Channel 4 News.
I covered the Libyan revolution and the Syrian conflict, plus stints in Egypt, Jerusalem, Ramallah and Moscow. Conflict is where you see people in the raw, and life is a constant juggling act of pushing the boundaries just far enough to do the job without getting locked up or hurt.
When you cover a conflict there is always one side that wants to arrest or kill you. When you work in countries that don't respect the human rights of their own people you will be doing interviews that those in power don't want aired.
I knew I was reporting without government accreditation. Being granted such a pass had become increasingly difficult for us. Is not having accreditation a reason not to report a story? It's certainly not a reason to lock a reporter up for a day, never mind 40 days.
After the raiding of our Cairo bureau we thought things would calm down. Surely Egypt didn't want more damaging headlines about western journalists being imprisoned or worse.
The advice was to move to a large international hotel and stay in full view. So we all checked into the Marriott in Zamalek, a major international hotel full of foreign businessmen and other journalists.
This is when I worked with Baher Mohamed, our producer [in jail since 29 December]. He is Egyptian so he has no foreign embassy lobbying for his release. Just a lot of guards and police who don't much like Al-Jazeera questioning their methods.
Baher is a proud Egyptian and an even prouder father. I lost count of how many times he went on to the streets to tell us what was going on as it was too dangerous for westerners to venture out. His enthusiasm is infectious.

Peter Greste, now in jail, is one of our stalwart correspondents

Our bosses acted quickly to find us reinforcements and a few days later Mohamed Fahmy walked into the Marriott [also in jail since 29 December]. More handsome than George Clooney, and with a kind, gentle manner, Mohamed steadied the ship.
He has worked for CNN and the BBC and has a large following of over 18,000 on Twitter for his considered, well-informed comments. He persuaded most of the Egyptian staff to keep working for us and tried to settle frayed nerves.
There were rumours that the police were looking for us, but we weren't in hiding. I reported on stories about pollution, football violence, bombings in Sinai and the Morsi trial – the same kind of fodder Al-Jazeera covers in bureaus across the world.
I was one of a number of correspondents to rotate through the Cairo bureau. Peter Greste [in jail since 29 December] is one of our stalwart correspondents, based in East Africa. He had only been in Egypt for three weeks when he was arrested.
He had been reporting on the same stories with the same producers and cameramen, doing the same sorts of interviews, trying to make sense of the aftermath of the revolution and last summer's change in leadership with a seasoned eye.
I remember him doing a live cross with me as I anchored from the studio on Christmas Day and thinking how measured his answers were.
If the new men in charge want to be seen as governing a civilised society with checks and balances and a respect for human rights then they must embrace a free press, not incarcerate those who dare to differ."

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