Iran
Fardad Farahzad, journalist, Iran International
Iran International made global headlines last month when its journalist Pouria Zeraati was stabbed outside his London home. The attack was believed to be another example of Iran hiring proxies to assault its critics in the west, according to a Guardian report.
The Persian-language broadcaster, which is based in west London and has an English website, has been facing an escalation in serious threats from Iran since the nationwide protests in 2022 that followed the death of the 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini after her arrest.
A month into coverage of the protests, in October 2022, Hossein Salami, commander-in-chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) warned international media to “watch out, because we’re coming for you”.
In November 2022, two of the broadcaster’s TV presenters, Sima Sabet and Fardad Farahzad, were notified of credible threats to their lives. Due to the heightened risk, the TV station shut down broadcasts from London.
An ITV investigation revealed that the IRGC had plotted to assassinate the two journalists. “When you report on Iran from outside the country, you know there are always threats involved,” says Farahzad. “When the ITV reporter came to Washington [where he now broadcasts from] to show me all the evidence it made it [the threats] very real. A few weeks ago my colleague Pouria was attacked on the streets of London. You realise how vulnerable you are and how important it is what we are doing. Not only for our audience, but also for freedom of the press. If a sovereign state is after you and your colleagues, that shows that the work you’re doing is really meaningful and is having an impact on the ground.
“The worst thing for me is being in the news myself. Journalists never should be the story. As a journalist, we need to report as a third person, however, when there’s a state trying to kill you, how do you report that news?”
Press freedom around the world is threatened by conflicts, war and government crackdowns. The past year has seen 99 journalists killed and countless more attacked, threatened and intimidated for doing their job.
But from the journalists working in Gaza to the female reporters writing on Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power, people continue to put themselves in danger to tell stories and bring issues to light that would otherwise be lost or remain hidden.
We are running a series of pieces this week exploring the threats and challenges faced by media, ahead of World Press Freedom Day on 3 May, created to remind governments of their duty to uphold freedom of expression.
Help support independent journalism by subscribing to the Guardian this week.
Sabet was asked by police to leave her home soon after the attack on her former colleague, the Guardian has learned. She continues to call on the UK government to take decisive action against transnational repression and attacks on press freedom by Iran.
In a message relayed to the Guardian, Zeraati said: “I would hate to see another journalist attacked the way I was. I would really hate that to happen to another journalist anywhere in the world. But it did happen to me and I urge governments in the west to strengthen surveillance of hostile state activities from the Islamic republic. I wasn’t killed in this attack, but I could easily have been. That is a wake-up call.” Deepa Parent
Read Iran International’s content here
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Haiti
Roberson Alphonse, reporter and broadcaster, Le Nouvelliste and Radio Magik9
Roberson Alphonse, one of Haiti’s top investigative journalists, should have been on the ground in Port-au-Prince this year, reporting on the gang insurrection that has plunged the Caribbean city into chaos.
But a 2022 assassination attempt left him fighting for his life and forced him to flee with his family. He has not been back since. “Exile is one of the most atrocious things a human being can experience,” says Alphonse, a 46-year-old editor for Haiti’s oldest newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, and a broadcaster for the station Radio Magik9.
Alphonse suspects the attempt to kill him as he drove to work was linked to his long track record investigating corruption and the misuse of public money, and exposing massacres in the slums around Haiti’s violence-stricken capital. But police investigators have yet to provide him with any clear answers and the gunmen have not been caught. Given that police are now battling a heavily armed criminal rebellion that has also forced the prime minister into exile, they appear unlikely to do so in the near future. “They have, of course, new priorities,” Alphonse says. “I consider my case almost nothing compared to what my country is going through. The main priority now is to bring back peace and help people who are struggling, who have fled their homes and are facing starvation.”
The threats he once received have stopped since he left Haiti but with his would-be killers still at large, Alphonse believes it is too dangerous to return home. For now, he lives in the US, where he is seeking asylum while studying as a Knight-Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan. Alphonse’s focus there is devising ways to help other Haitian journalists continue working and protect themselves while working in an increasingly hostile environment that he compared to a war. He hopes to found an NGO focused on tackling the almost total impunity surrounding the murders of Haitian journalists and the threat to democracy. “So I turned that tragic event into something very positive,” the journalist says of his shooting.
Even from exile, Alphonse continues to cover his country’s plight, conducting interviews and talking to sources over Zoom, WhatsApp and the phone. “I decided to not let anybody silence my voice,” he says. “I keep doing my job … I try to be as useful as I can.” Tom Phillips
Read Alphonse’s reporting at Le Nouvelliste here
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Turkey
Can Dündar, editor, Özgüruz
Can Dündar’s plan is to one day go back to his country “to free Turkey”, he says. “But at the moment it’s impossible. While life in Berlin, which he escaped to in 2016, is “of course better than being in prison in Turkey … at the same time it’s not a paradise, there are many difficulties”.
Dündar was the editor-in-chief of Turkey’s oldest daily, Cumhuriyet, but was arrested in late 2015 after the newspaper published footage that it said showed the Turkish national intelligence organisation transporting weapons to Islamist fighters in Syria. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said at the time that the trucks were carrying aid to Syria and vowed that Dündar would “pay a high price” for publishing the story. Dündar survived an assassination attempt then was sentenced to more than five years’ jail on the same day, but escaped to Berlin in 2016 while awaiting appeal. He was sentenced in his absence to 27 years and six months in prison for espionage and aiding a terrorist organisation.
Among the challenges of life in Berlin he says, is the fact that a lot of the Turkish diaspora in the city are against his presence, meaning he has faced threats. He has personal protection. “I have to be careful about the coffee I drink, where I live,” he says.
“I’m living in a country where lots of people see me as an enemy of the state due to outside propaganda, so I have to be careful and protect myself.”
He now broadcastings via an online radio station and YouTube channel called Özgürüz (meaning We Are Free), run by the non-profit news organisation Correctiv, and “while we are free to say everything, everything we say can really endanger our loved ones, reporters or programmers in Turkey, so you cannot enjoy the freedom here even in a democratic country as long as your country is not free, and it can cause a kind of self-censorship”.
Cumhuriyet as he knew it has effectively disappeared. Former colleagues are in jail or in exile. He misses them and the buzz of the Ankara newsroom.
“We were colleagues fighting together, feeling like soldiers as we challenged the autocratic regime. But we lost our armies and now we are more into a kind of a guerrilla war and are all alone, in a YouTube channel or on Twitter. We are doing the same thing but of course the challenges are greater. Though we’re also lucky that we’re independent and not dependents in a power game. Not to say that it’s easy.”
The Berlin in which he finds himself in 2024 – years after he thought he would have been able to return – has, he says, “become a kind of hub for dissident journalists. Now I’m working with my Russian colleagues, and in the same office we have Afghan and Iranian colleagues. Next year, Gazan colleagues will come. We’re in the same team, as it were, and can learn from each other. We are fighting for the same thing, for a democratic world.”
He admits, for all the obvious disadvantages and difficulties of being a journalist in exile, the experience has also been an invigorating one. “Because I don’t want to be so pessimistic, so I have to see the advantage,” he says.
“Yes it’s certainly a challenge being in exile, but it’s a chance as well. It’s dramatically changed my life. I lost everything I have in my country. I had to start from the beginning again at the age of 60, in a different culture, a different language, but it keeps you warm-hearted and young. It’s a new world, so welcome to the new world.” Kate Connolly
Support Özgürüz’s reporting here
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Hong Kong
M.Y., journalist
Many journalists are all too familiar with an editor asking them to make their articles “more interesting”. But for M.Y., a journalist from Hong Kong, the phrase was a coded instruction to avoid writing anything that could be seen as critical of China. In 2020, that included anything related to the Covid-19 pandemic. “At that time, there was no other news about China, everything was related to Covid,” she remembers.
Then came the national security law, a harsh piece of legislation imposed by Beijing in June 2020 to quell months of unsuccessful pro-democracy protests. The vaguely worded law, which the authorities say was necessary to restore stability to the city, has been widely condemned by international governments and human rights activists.
Several journalists have been targeted with the law, and many more have been detained under other charges such as unlawful assembly. “Every day when I woke up, the first thing I would do is check the news and see if someone else had been arrested,” M.Y. says. “The atmosphere was really bad.”
M.Y. left Hong Kong after the British government extended a lifeboat visa to tens of thousands of former colonial subjects via the British National (Overseas) scheme. She continues to work as a journalist, writing in Chinese for the burgeoning number of Hong Kong diaspora outlets. But she now uses a pseudonym to protect her identity, in case she wants to return to Hong Kong.
“I don’t know if [my work] is helping the people still in Hong Kong, or if I just want to do something … I don’t know, it’s just something we need to record.” She sees her work as a means of reporting on the latest stories affecting Hongkongers, but also as a way of recording the details of the past few years, which she fears will not be preserved in Hong Kong.
“If some day the overseas Hongkongers and the people in Hong Kong can come back together … we can put our stories together, and there’s not a page that would be missing.” Amy Hawkins
Read M.Y.’s reporting here
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Venezuela
Roberto Deniz, Armando.info
When Roberto Deniz received a defamation lawsuit from one of the Venezuelan president’s closest allies in 2017, his lawyer’s advice to him was clear: “Firstly, he said ‘do not publish anything else about that man’. Second, ‘leave the country’.”
Deniz, alongside his colleagues at the Caracas-based investigative outfit Armando.info, had been investigating Alex Saab’s alleged involvement in massive government contracts. Saab, who denies the claims, would later be accused by US prosecutors of siphoning US$350m (£280m) from Venezuelan social programmes as part of a vast money-laundering scheme. He was extradited to the US in 2021 after being detained while transiting through Cape Verde. Before he could face trial he was released in a prisoner swap deal last December.
With Venezuela’s courts stacked with government allies, Deniz and the editors at Armando.info took their lawyer’s advice. In 2018, after getting a tip-off that the government was to issue a warrant preventing them from leaving the country, they scrambled to Colombia, Mexico and the US.
“Unfortunately, no lawyer cannot guarantee you a defence against someone powerful in Venezuela. The best they can do is buy you time,” the journalist says.
The four journalists make up some of the 7 million Venezuelans who have fled the country in the past decade as the country’s economy collapsed under Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian rule.
The government’s intimidation of Deniz has not stopped despite his departure.
Around the same time that Saab was extradited, the Venezuelan police raided Deniz’s parents’ house.
Deniz knows he cannot return but Saab’s plan to muffle their investigation has backfired, he says. In trying to silence the journalists and forcing them to leave Venezuela, he only drew attention to the corruption scandals.
Deniz and his other exiled colleagues have not stopped shining a light on Saab either. Armando.info has published more than 30 stories on the businessman.
Deniz initially had no idea on how to report on Venezuela from Bogotá, about 1,000km from Caracas, but technology helps and Colombia is the preferred home for many other exiles from Venezuela’s business and political sphere, so he has built up a network of local contacts too.
“We are sometimes seen to be reporting out of bravery but I do not see it like that,” he says. “You suffer from fear and anxiety, worrying about your team in Caracas, about your family at home and so on, but in the end I believe it is a matter of our responsibility and our conscience.
“If I had looked the other way and stopped investigating Saab I don’t think I would ever have gotten a good night’s sleep again.”
The 42-year-old is regularly invited to events to talk about his experience of political persecution. He is deeply alarmed that each time there appears to be more invitees who have been forced to flee their home countries by governments trying to silence the press.
“There are always new faces from across the region – journalists fleeing authoritarian governments like Nicaragua and El Salvador, but also as far away as Turkey,” he says. “The reality is that every day there are more of us in exile. And if you look at the map it has nothing to do with left or right. In 2024, democracy is in a bad state where in many countries we cannot do our job with the minimum of protection.” Luke Taylor
Support Armando.info’s journalism here
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Belarus
Aliaksandra Pushkina, director, Zerkalo
Stories by the Belarusian online outlet Zerkalo tend to feature a lot of anonymity. The majority of interview subjects who are still inside Belarus cannot be named for safety reasons, and the outlet also has a policy that none of its stories are bylined. Most of the journalists still have close family in Belarus, and pressure on relatives of opposition figures in exile has been a standard tactic of Alexander Lukashenko’s regime.
“It means our readers have to take a lot on trust,” admits Aliaksandra Pushkina, director of Zerkalo and one of the few employees who speaks in public. Readership statistics suggest the outlet does enjoy that trust: Pushkina says that in March 2024 3.3m unique users accessed its content, and estimates that more than half of those were inside Belarus – impressive figures for a country with a population of 9 million, and evidence that the population craves alternative news stories.
Zerkalo was set up in 2021 by former journalists from tut.by, the largest online outlet in Belarus, which was raided by authorities in May 2021 as part of a crackdown on the last vestiges of independent media by the regime, following massive protests against Lukashenko’s rule in 2020. Tut.by’s editor-in-chief, Marina Zolotova, and director Lyudmila Chekina were arrested, and last year both were sentenced to 12 years in prison. Other journalists were also arrested but were later released and were able to leave the country.
Tut.by had about 300 employees; many of them fled to avoid facing charges, and Zerkalo was registered in Ukraine. The change of name was designed to protect former Tut.by employees who decided to remain in Belarus. “We didn’t want to create risk for the people who didn’t come with us, for them to be held responsible for us,” says Pushkina.
Zerkalo has about 50 employees, a mixture of old-timers from tut.by and new hires. Nine months after the move to Kyiv, Russia invaded, and the team had to move again. Now, some people work from Warsaw, some from Vilnius, and others wherever they were most easily able to travel. “We told people that if they had somewhere where they had a support base or could move easily, they should go there and work remotely,” said Pushkina. Shaun Walker
Support Zerkalo’s journalism here
• This article was amended on 4 May 2024. An error introduced during editing led an earlier version to refer to Aliaksandra Pushkina’s previous role at Zerkalo, as director of communications. Pushkina is currently the news outlet’s director.
