Journalist Assistance

Mikhail Beketov is lucky to be alive, although I'm sure there are days when he doesn't think so. On November 13, 2008, the environmental reporter who campaigned against a highway that would have destroyed a forest in Khimki, a town outside Moscow, was beaten nearly to death by men with metal bars. The attackers made a special effort to destroy his hands and left him to die in the November cold. He would have if neighbors had not noticed him and called the police 24 hours after the attack.

The streets of Brooklyn seemed too wide to me and the buildings huge. The number 3 train would pass over and over again like a luminous monster. From the window of my apartment, I would watch this train go by. I would also watch people walk without speaking to one another. My days were monotonous and nightmares invaded my nights. I recalled vividly how in Haiti my family and I were threatened with death several times, culminating in an evening when unidentified gunmen targeted my house. In the days after that, they assaulted and attacked other journalists working for the same media outlet as me. Such heinous acts haunted my dreams.

I went into exile.

Somali journalists Hassan Ali Gesey and Abdihakim Jimale are roommates these days, living in a tiny, graffiti-ridden room in Nairobi, Kenya. Neither would have wanted to eke out an existence like this, but dire circumstances brought them together—starting with the night three years ago that Gesey saved Jimale’s life.

The scenes from Port-au-Prince are horrifying, and the needs are staggering. There is no food, no water, no place to bury the dead. And there is also no information. According to CPJ’s Senior Americas Program Coordinator Carlos Lauria, who spoke with Haitian journalist Guylar Delva today, only a handful of Creole-language radio stations are operating. Journalists are unable to work because they have been personally devastated—their homes have collapsed or their loved ones have died.