Session 6: 2004 MOHAMED AMIN AWARD

Featured Speakers: Salim Amin, CEO, Camerapix, Kenya; Tony Donovan, Managing Director, Reuters TV, UK; Rodney Pinder, Director, INSI, UK

Tony Donovan: Good morning everybody and welcome back. I'm delighted to introduce the 2004 Mohamed Amin Award. The Mohamed Amin Award was introduced in 1997 which was one year after his death in a hi-jacked airliner near the Comoros. A lot of us in this industry wanted to make sure that there was an annual reminder of the qualities that Mo brought to our industry, qualities that made him possibly the most famous cameraman in the world. He is remembered and rightly so for the many stories that brought Africa to the rest of the world but above all he is remembered for his coverage of the Ethiopian famine. This year is the 20^th anniversary of that coverage and of course with much publicity the Live Aid DVD has been re-released and the Live Aid song re-recorded, so we thought it might be appropriate to remind ourselves again of Mo's images which really were the catalyst to that entire effort.

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Mo Amin's message lives on not just in that footage or in the affections of those of us who knew him but most importantly through the Mohamed Amin Foundation in Africa, so let me introduce now Mohamed's son, Salim Amin, who's going to talk to you about the Foundation and also present the 2004 Mohamed Amin Award.

Salim Amin: Thanks Tony, first of all thanks to News Xchange and Reuters for once again presenting this award. It means an enormous amount to me and my family that you continue to remember him. Seven years ago at a similar conference when I set up the Mohamed Amin Foundation, a training school for African journalists hopefully not just to talk about images like those but to talk about the positive and rewarding aspects of Africa that many of us don't go into. Three years ago we had a graduate that this year won the CNN African journalist of the Year Award. There are some sponsors that I want to thank who continue to support the school year in year out, Reuters, CNN, the BBC and Bloomberg for their scholarships. It makes a lot of difference to us and I know this is not a fundraising gathering but anyone else who can help, we need more and I dare say that some of these graduates will one day be as useful to you all as the person who the Foundation is named after. Tony Blair said that 2005 will be the year for Africa but if the hungry could eat words then there wouldn't be famine on a lot of this continent, so we need your help to make that a reality and make 2005 the year for Africa, make sure that the stories are told and not just the bad stories but a lot of the good stories as well. The Mohamed Amin Award was introduced to recognise those who have made a contribution to TV news through their enterprise, courage, initiative, determination and drive but were normally not recognised or particularly high profile. Throughout the history of the award there have been many deserving winners who have met these criteria but none more so than this year. Throughout the last 18 months while the glare of the world's spotlight has been firmly on Iraq many of the images that we have come to rely upon to tell that story have been recorded not by western journalists not by staff from the agencies or by freelancers and not by cameramen able to leave after a period of time. We have all relied on local Iraqi freelance cameramen to tell the story of their country. They have come from a very mixed bag of backgrounds, some with experience of journalism most without; barbers, electricians and academics alongside men who had previously worked for Iraqi TV all driven to tell the stories of the towns in which they lived, Fallujah, Najaf, Ramadi, Karbala, towns that have been critical in the continuing chaos in Iraq, towns that we from the west cannot cover. This band of freelancers work under constant threat, as Sandy MacIntyre of APTN has pointed out they are both mistrusted by their own communities and under threat from US forces - in the latest terrible example, Dhia Najim, killed by a US bullet while filming in Ramadi. The courage to operate under constant danger, the determination to tell the story, the initiative to get their tapes out, the drive to continue regardless; this year the Mohamed Amin Award goes to a very worthy winner, actually a group of winners, the freelance cameramen of Iraq. Here's a short video to illustrate their work.

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Each year the winner of the award receives a bursary provided by Reuters. There is an obvious problem this year with doing that with this year's widespread group of winners. After thinking about this we have decided to donate the funds to the organisation best placed to help them as a group: INSI the International News Safety Institute, already actively involved in helping to secure the safety of all journalists working in Iraq, so I will ask Rodney Pinder to come and accept the cheque on behalf of the winners of the 2004 Mohamed Amin Award: the freelance cameramen of Iraq.

Rodney Pinder: Thanks very much Salim, this is terrific. I can recall my own friendship with Mo, your Dad and the great times we had in Africa. He would be very proud of what Salim is doing now, and of the Mohamed Amin Foundation and of Camerapix. So I'm sure he'll be shooting this from a comfortable position somewhere. I'd like to take just a minute of your time if I may to remind those of you who don't know what the International News Safety Institute is and how we came to be in this position today. INSI was set up by the news industry a year or so ago out of concern at the rising numbers of journalists being killed around the world. The situation was spiralling out of control and still is but this was an effort by the news industry to stop talking and complaining about it and to do something practical to tackle the situation. INSI, I should say is focussed on news safety utterly and completely, nothing else but safety. In the past year we've taken some practical steps to address this situation. We've begun discussions with key military organisations, the Israeli Defence Force, the British military, the American military and we're beginning discussions with NATO to talk about the safety of journalists in the battle space. We proceed on the basis of our right to be there, that the rules of engagement take account of our right to be there and that there must be open and transparent enquiry when journalists fall in action. We've got a long way to go and it's going to be a tough haul but we've made a beginning. We've also begun a series of safety debates, which take place in London and Brussels and bring together conflict reporters and cameramen to discuss their experiences and exchange ideas about how we can do this job better and survive. We have a website which gives advice and guidance. We give safety training for those in need who cannot afford their own. We've already done the first safety training for Iraqi journalists in Iraq, we've recently completed a course in Russia and a few months ago we did one for Colombian journalists who are among the most threatened on the globe. We have now begun a global inquiry into the causes of deaths of journalists which will include international jurists, news organisations and journalist support groups. It will be chaired by a person you all know, Richard Sambrook, the head of news at BBC World. We have also just completed the very first survey of specific safety requirements of women covering conflict and this has come out with some interesting details which we will be following up, there are copies available at this conference.

At this point I would like to move on to what is perhaps a sensitive area. Our very first moderator at our very first debate at this conference mentioned the cleansing rite of self-examination and self-criticism, I think in that light I would just like to say a few other words which might be a little embarrassing or painful for some but I make no excuse for that and I take my cue from an excellent paper on news safety and conflict done by Vaughn Smith, a prominent freelance cameraman who now runs the Frontline Club for experienced reporters in London. His article is an amazing piece of work with much thought for us all and it will be published on our website on Monday. He says in the introduction, 'risk in journalism is here to stay and no safety policy can be expected to make everybody safe' but this needs to be reflected in our operations and thinking. Reform is needed but poorly executed safety measures and inadequately considered controls will always risk limiting journalism more than at controlling safety. Lives can be saved through the improvement of logistics and field skills and foreign news gathering, nobody in television news-gathering has lost their life through bad writing but many have been killed through poor preparation, logistical failure and inadequate field craft. And this comes home to my own firmly held view that far too often these days the only professionals on a battlefield who are utterly unprepared for what they would encounter there are the journalists and we must do something about this. We are good at pointing fingers elsewhere and we should point fingers where the laying of blame is constructive and something can be achieved. But we really have got to stop our whingeing and address or problems ourselves, no one else can be so relied upon as ourselves. There is much to do yet relatively few news organisations subscribe to this. The ones that do can be literally counted on the fingers of two hands - the ones who are really dedicated to safer news coverage. Frankly it's a disgrace that more news organisations around the world where there are thousands of journalists at risk in their daily reporting do not receive better protection, better equipment, better training, better education, better insurance, better consideration and better care from their employers. These include freelancers and my colleague Tina Carr at the Rory Peck Trust knows more about this than most on whom we depend on so much and yet we far too often give back so little to insure that they can do their jobs in some degree of greater safety. Of 1200 journalists and media support workers killed around the world in the past 10 years, 90% of them are casualties in their own countries killed by criminals, by shadowy gun squads, by governments and their own security forces and in an appalling 94% of these cases no one has ever been brought to justice. So I would appeal to you to help INSI, it is your organisation, it is your safety net and every cent you pay in membership fees is ploughed back into new safety work for you and other less fortunate journalists from around the world who need help and need guidance and assistance. So we need your support, Salim's Camerapix, one of the smallest but more perfectly formed of news organisations recognises the importance of this and was one of INSI's first and most appreciated members. It is a small organisation but it is large in heart and generosity of spirit to endangered colleagues around Africa and elsewhere and this award exemplifies that effort. In Iraq Iraqi journalists are most at threat, we now count more than 60 news media personnel killed in this conflict in only 19 months and of that, 33 of them have been Iraqis. So this award is for all those unsung heroes and INSI will ensure that every penny goes towards safety equipment, safety advice and safety training as far as we can stretch the money. And in an effort to stretch this money a little bit more...I thank Reuters for its generosity in getting this award and getting the fund going; I spent some time at this conference in the past 24 hours and already we have received pledges form AKE and Pilgrim, BBC, NBC, CNN, ITV and the Rory Peck Trust amounting to an additional £7,500 which we can add to this fund to do something really meaningful for our friends and colleagues in Iraq and we appeal to you to help us reach a target of £15,000 to do really good work for these people.

Over to you John.

John Owen: I just want to say on Rodney's behalf and speaking as a member of the INSI board we would like to appeal to you to be one of the magic partners and Rodney is going to be near the exits as you leave today and it is a really selfless opportunity to put your own organisation on the record in helping the Iraqi journalists through INSI and provide more training so we really are appealing to you if we had more time we would start an auction off right now and we would stay in this room until we had a sizeable number of contributors, so we are going to appeal to your generosity and ask you to do that.

Now we are very privileged to move to the next part of our programme and Ulla Terkelsen from TV2 in Denmark has a very special guest and the conversation will take place now.