Our September Author: Kati Marton

This month we are reading the Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America by Kati Marton. After finishing this memoir about her parents' struggles as journalists in Cold War era Hungary and noting Marton's own career as a journalist it is unsurprising to learn that she serves on the Board of Directors for the Committee to Protect Journalists and that she recently won an award from the United Nations Association for her human rights advocacy work. Her acceptance speech makes a good, brief self-introduction and is worth checking out. She draws parallels between the Hungarian Uprising and the Arab Spring, explains her motivations for her work with CPJ, and presents how she aims to connect past and present in her books. The Millions has an interview with the author where she summarizes,

This is a book about terror and surveillance and how the terror state functioned… which is by fear, which is by implicating the whole population, making everybody in a sense complicit in the way that it turned even our closest friends and relatives into informers. I think that is the theme. And how these two people, my mother and father, survived. More than survived. They survived with their heads held high.

Also, this short interview from Hungarian Watch shows Marton's attentiveness to on-going human rights issues in Hungary.  Amnesty covers current concerns here.

Below is a video interview from ForaTv. You may also want to check out a couple of interviews available as free iTunes downloads from the New York Public Library and Chautauqua Podcasts. I especially enjoyed the Chautauqua interview because it skipped past the information you already know if you've read the book kicking off, for example, with a question about the reception of the book in Hungary.



And just for fun, there is this exchange between Kati Marton and another Rights Readers author, Samantha Power (A Problem from Hell) discussing a different Marton book, The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World.


Finally, from a few months back, Marton contributed an editorial to the New York Times upon the capture of Ratko Mladic, the butcher of Srebrenica, reflecting on the bittersweet nature of this event, "a very good day for humanity" coming after the death of her husband, Richard Holbrooke, who had negotiated the end of the Balkan conflict.

Award to Imprisoned Eritrean Journalist

Eritrean journalist Seyoum Tsehaye has been chosen as “Journalist of the Year 2007” by Reporters Without Borders - Fondation de France. The panel of judges sought to highlight not only the case of this brave journalist held in Eritrea’s appalling jails since September 2001 but also the catastrophic state of press freedom in this small Horn of Africa country. At least four journalists have died in prison in Eritrea over the last few years. The blame lies chiefly at the door of Issaias Afeworki, the highly authoritarian and obdurate president of the country since its independence in 1993.

Read the full press release from Reporters Without Borders here.
There's a photo of Seyoum at the AI Group 19 website.

AI Group 22 in Pasadena works in behalf of Estifanos Seyoum, another Eritrea prisoner of conscience held incommunicado since the 2001 crackdown. We hope that the publicity generated by this award might help to persuade the Eritrean authorities to improve their country's human rights situation or at least result in the release of information about these journalists and former government officials detained without trial or charges since 2001.

Our September Author: Sonia Nazario

This month we are reading Los Angeles Times reporter Sonia Nazario's account of Central American children immigrating to the US to find their mothers, Enrique's Journey. The book has its own website, worth visiting if for no other reason than it includes some bonus photos to give you a fuller picture of the journey. NPR's Fresh Air has a lengthy interview with Nazario and KPBS in San Diego has a multimedia package that includes commentary from Don Bartiletti, the photographer whose striking pictures gave the original newspaper story such immediate impact. Finally, for a little inside scoop, there's a talk on the journalistic ethics of writing this type of piece given to the L.A. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

The Reporter's Game

The Los Angeles Times brings us an article on activist gaming and among some familiar examples, (Darfur is Dying), we learn that in the virtual world, we too can become Anna Politkovskaya, or more precisely Amira Hass,

In Global Conflicts: Palestine, you control a freelance journalist who roams the streets of Jerusalem armed with nothing but a pencil and a steno pad. Your editor asks you to cover Israeli Defense Forces security raids, border checkpoints, and even martyrdom; you're asked to interview families of the victims and of the bomber alike. As you speak to Arabs and Israelis around town, you carefully pluck their best quotes, the object being to write a balanced, thorough newspaper article at the day's end.

Democracy on Deadline

Last year Independent Lens aired the film Democracy on Deadline: The Global Struggle for an Independent Press which followed several brave and determined journalists as they tried to shine some light on dark places. You can still check out the journalist profiles on the website, including Anna Politkovskaya (Putin's Russia) and Israeli reporter Amira Hass (Rights Readers selection Drinking by the Sea at Gaza) as well as Nigerian Chris Anyanwu, a former prisoner of conscience. The site also has a handy list of links to organization supporting freedom of the press.

And while we are on the subject of courage in journalism, Amnesty International USA announced the award of the Ginetta Sagan Human Rights Award to Mexican reporter Lydia Cacho Ribeiro yesterday.

For March: Putin's Russia

For our March 18 meeting, we have selected the late journalist Anna Politkovskaya's, Putin's Russia. Be sure to participate in the Holiday Card Action offering condolences to her family and friends. (Note: This book will be available in paper on December 26.)

Hailed as “a lone voice crying out in a moral wilderness” (New Statesman), Anna Politkovskaya made her name with her fearless reporting on the war in Chechnya. Now she turns her steely gaze on the multiple threats to Russian stability, among them President Putin himself.

Putin’s Russia depicts a far-reaching state of decay. Politkovskaya describes an army in which soldiers die from malnutrition, parents must pay bribes to recover their dead sons’ bodies, and conscripts are even hired out as slaves. She exposes rampant corruption in business, government, and the judiciary, where everything from store permits to bus routes to court appointments is for sale. And she offers a scathing condemnation of the ongoing war in Chechnya, where kidnappings, extrajudicial killings, rape, and torture are begetting terrorism rather than fighting it.

Sounding an urgent alarm, Putin’s Russia is both a gripping portrayal of a country in crisis and the testament of a great and intrepid reporter.