JOURNALISTS AGAINST VIOLENCE CAMPAIGN FOR PRESS FREEDOM AND SAFETY Michel Hajji Georgiou has been an opinion writer and political analyst at l’Orient-Le-Jour newspaper for over 10 years. Founding member of the nongovernmental organization (NGO), Journalists Against Violence, Michel Georgiou has been actively fighting for the right to freedom of expression of Lebanese journalists since 2009. “It’s a good thing, committing to defending human rights, specifically those of journalists. You give life a meaning, otherwise it is tasteless and so is your job.” Georgiou has seen his work in the field of press freedom acknowledged with the 2007 Gebran Tueni Award for Freedom of Expression and the 2008 Foundation of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law award. When asked about his hobbyhorse, freedom of expression in Lebanon, Michel Hajji Georgiou says, “There is no free press in Lebanon, there are only free journalists.” With no institution to defend them, Lebanese journalists have no shield. Georgiou discusses the assassinations of Samir Kassir and Gebran Tueni, both in 2005. To him, the assassination of journalists for loud and clear political ideas is just beyond all comprehension. Hence his active fight for journalists’ rights and the creation of the Journalists Against Violence organization, which denounces the physical and moral attacks against journalists in the region. The psychological aspect, intellectual terrorism, is hard to define yet very present in the press circle, can be as damaging as physical abuse. Insults, perjury, slander, and especially threats are not to be taken lightly. “Moral violence is terrible,” says Georgiou. “It terrorizes and often forces journalists to back off, and adopt a system of self-censorship. Worse, in the general tense climate in Lebanon, it quickly degenerates into concrete violence. A physical attack is a hair’s breadth away from the threat.” Cases of violence take place more frequently than we think. This April alone, Journalists Against Violence has documented the case of a television channel correspondent in southern Lebanon whose car was vandalized, and two NTV journalists attacked one in North Lebanon, the other in the South. Created in 2009, this NGO is still very young, unfunded and relatively unknown by the general public, yet it performs vital work in defending journalists in Lebanon. Unable for the moment to create training courses that would focus on the profession itself, what it must be, and the journalistic values such as solidarity among its members, Journalists Against Violence is more of a regulatory organization. In other words, it warns about diverse violations. It alerts the press, hoping they take over in mobilizing public opinion, as in the case of the newspaper Al-Akhbar website hacking a few months ago, (allegedly for publishing cables from WikiLeaks), but also the diplomats and authorities – “When there are [authorities],” says Georgiou chuckling ironically, hoping they take the necessary measures. Few NGOs in our part of the world do regulatory actions. Journalists Against Violence deals specifically with internal affairs for financial reasons but is expanding its projects to various fields, including their last initiative currently in progress. In cooperation with the Foundation of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and SK-Eyes, Journalists Against Violence created a committee and a campaign for the abolition of censorship, a practice that Georgiou judges to be “Stupid” and “Restrictive of our citizen choice” explaining that “There are silly rules in film censorship, for example. We can show 10 to 15 seconds of scenes considered erotic, and then we have to cut the movie. As if we hadn’t had time to see everything there was to see ... They should leave us the right to decide if we want to watch such a movie, or read such a book. It is our right as citizens.” By Youmna Chagoury - See more at: ragmag.co/cat/ragged-highlights/forced-entry#sthash.P7lDm13n.pIdDsaHE.dpuf
Posted on: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 11:09:37 +0000
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