The Tully Center For Free Speech

Barry Bearak, New York Times,
Johannesburg, South Africa
2009 Tully Center Free Speech Award Co-Winner

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Bearak was jailed in Zimbabwe last spring for covering the elections without government permission. He was taken into custody during a raid on a small hotel frequented by foreign journalists in Harare and held in prison for five days before being released on bail. The raid was believed to have been part of a crackdown by the government of long-time President Robert Mugabe, who was doing poorly in the elections.

“I was being charged with the crime of ‘committing journalism,’” Bearak later wrote in his Times account of the ordeal. “One of my captors, Detective Inspector Dani Rangwani, described the offense to me as something despicable, almost hissing the words: ‘You've been gathering, processing and disseminating the news.’”

The charges against Bearak were dismissed after about two weeks, and he returned home to Johannesburg before authorities could re-arrest him.

Frank Chikowore, freelance reporter,
Harare, Zimbabwe
2009 Tully Center Free Speech Award Co-Winner

Chikowore was also arrested in events surrounding the Zimbabwe elections last spring. He was taken into custody while covering a strike organized by the opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change, which was demanding the release of the election results. Initially held incommunicado, he remained in detention for 17 days while police tried and failed to accuse him of various crimes. He was finally charged with public violence connected with a bus burning at the site of the strike and released on bail. He was eventually removed from remand after the state failed to prosecute him.

Chikowore was a reporter for the “Weekly Times” before government authorities closed the paper in 2005. He has since been working as a freelance reporter. He also runs a popular blog that provided critical coverage of the presidential election and its aftermath, but the government has placed tight restrictions on it.

“At the end of the day, I feel I have an obligation to inform Zimbabweans of what’s going on in the world around them,” says Chikowore. He says all journalists in Zimbabwe face a constant battle in the quest for free speech. “We’ve been threatened, yes. But we will not succumb to the pressure.”

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Aboubakr Jamaï, Morocco
2008 Tully Center Free Speech Award Winner

   Aboubakr Jamaï is the former publisher of Morocco's leading weekly newspaper, Le Journal Hebdomadaire. The paper has tackled tough topics such as government corruption, corporate impropriety, and other taboo political subjects in Morocco.
   Jamaï, 39, began his career in finance, co-founding Morocco's first independent investment bank in 1993. After two years advising international emerging market funds with holdings in North Africa, the company, Upline Securities, became the first Moroccan-based bank ever selected to manage a privatization project in Morocco. In 1996, Jamaï joined the Executive Secretariat of the Middle East and North Africa Economic Summit as a financial and economic adviser. This organization was set up by the sponsors of the Middle East peace process to foster economic cooperation in the region.
   Jamaï's foray into journalism came in 1995, when he began writing a column on the relationship between international financial markets and the Moroccan financial market for a weekly economic newspaper. He co-founded Le Journal and Assahifa in 1997 and 1998. In 1999 and 2000, the Moroccan government banned temporarily his newspapers.
   Jamaï won the Committee To Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award in 2003. M. Jamaï has been selected by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader for 2005. He was a Yale World Fellow in 2004 at Yale University and studied as a Nieman Fellow in 2007 at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
   He holds a B.A. from The Higher Institute of Commerce and Management at Casablanca, and a M.B.A. from Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. He is currently completing a mid-career Masters Of Public Administration at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.