Valiant for Truth

We are gathered under a compelling banner: Valiant for Truth. This phrase captures the essence of those we remember and celebrate – the reporters, producers, cameramen, crew members who, with courage and conviction, went into the breach fearlessly and didn’t make it out… or remain unaccounted for.

But they live on – in our memories – and in the stories and images they carried into our homes. They did not lose their lives in vain: they made crucial contributions to our understanding of war, of injustice, and of the human stories that lie behind each and every news story that we read, we listen to and we watch daily.

We remember too those who made the wrong enemies, those who spoke inconvenient truths. We live in a world in which still, too often, powers see the traditional press as the enemy that gets in the way of their alternative facts.

There is something very personal about being with you tonight. Growing up in times of civil war is what made me determined to become a journalist. As a teenager I had a foolishly romantic vision of what a foreign correspondent was, one that was rectified when it was my turn to cover conflict. I have lost friends, and watched the oppression of others, from Algeria to Syria, from Russia to Hong Kong. Now, and often with conviction as well as responsibility, I send journalists to tell the stories.
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Since 2010, we’ve come together here at St Brides to light candles for fallen comrades; to remember those missing or imprisoned; and to express support for those reporting from conflict zones.

This year is different. I can’t recall a time when we’ve seen this level of violence or loss of life among our community. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that this has been the deadliest period for journalists since it began gathering data in 1992. Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza suffered the most: 137 journalists and media workers were confirmed killed in the Middle East conflict, as of early November 2024: 129 were Palestinian, two Israeli, and six Lebanese.

In addition, 47 journalists were reported injured. 2 journalists were reported missing. 71 journalists were reported arrested.

And of course these are not just numbers. They are human beings who are with us one moment – doing their jobs and living their lives – and gone the next. One journalist killed was 28-year-old Palestinian Wafaa Abu Dabaan, who was a young mother. She was five months pregnant with her second child when she and her husband were killed by an Israeli airstrike in a refugee camp in Gaza.

I am struck by the abrupt and violent nature of many of this year’s deaths. The sudden absence. Perhaps some of you were following the social media output of a journalist in Gaza – getting a daily feed of images of war and hearing the stories of those living in affected communities. And then suddenly and all at once – the posts stop and the lines go silent.

It is not just individual voices that have been silenced. We recently wrote in the FT that the destruction of media offices and infrastructure is shattering the basis of a functioning press once the conflict ends. That is an equally sinister dimension of this and other wars.
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Despite the concentration of horror in the Middle East at the moment, censorship and media suppression are not confined to the region. In Russia, the regime has passed new anti-press laws to criminalise what it considers “fake news” about the war in Ukraine and it has revoked media licences over critical coverage. Russian journalists have been forced to flee, some facing arrest warrants in absentia, while those who remain face heavy scrutiny.

Ukrainian journalists are also suffering. Last month, Victoria Roshchyna, held captive for more than a year, died while in Russian detention. Victoria, just 27-years-old, was one of 20 Ukrainian journalists detained by Russia since the start of the invasion. The others face an uncertain future. And they get limited attention.

We all watched the harrowing experience of Evan Gershkovich play out before he was released in August after a year and a half in Russian captivity. His story served as a stark reminder of the abuse of journalists as part of political game playing… another familiar feature of oppressive regimes and straight from the Cold War playbook.

It was heartening to see the international efforts and solidarity to free Evan. We all participated and supported the campaign to bring him home. And what joy to see him and Alsu Kurmasheva of Radio Free Europe walk free.

We should also lend our names and raise our voices in support of other journalists oppressed, killed, imprisoned, perhaps from lesser known outlets and with fewer diplomatic resources at their disposal. We must not stand by while our colleagues are picked off quietly… and made to disappear.
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And so while being drawn in by the sheer scale of death among journalists in the Middle East and in Russia and Ukraine, we must also monitor attacks on press freedom globally – from Venezuela to Nigeria to India to Hong Kong. Imagine that just this year, 2024, we have seen pro-democracy journalists in Hong Kong jailed for sedition. From our comfortable seats in London, it is hard to fully appreciate the existential risks that others take in this industry. We must continue to shine a light where theirs have been temporarily extinguished.

I wanted here to say a little about Sander Thoenes, a Dutch freelance reporter for the Financial Times, who lost his life in East Timor 25 years ago. Some of you may have read a recent article we published reprising his story and its lack of just conclusion.

For Sander, reporting in Indonesia was a dream. He eagerly lobbied the foreign editor and learned the language on his own initiative. Two years after he arrived in Jakarta, he was shot dead by Indonesian soldiers in a suburb of Dili, the capital city of East Timor. He was just 30-years-old.

No one has ever been brought to justice for his death and each year it seems ever less likely that anyone will. Sander’s story, like so many others, reminds us that the fight for accountability continues. As his memorial stone notes, he was murdered in search of the truth.
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Yet in the face of adversity – even among our own ranks – journalists press on. We refuse to be silenced, even when authoritarian regimes try hard to do so. And we can find hope in the individual stories of bravery, as well as the courage and pride of the families and colleagues left behind.

And there is hope too in initiatives created to support reporters who face oppression or exile. These can range from the very practical to the regulatory. In Myanmar, for example, many journalists face exile under the military’s severe restrictions. And so Reporters Without Borders has launched a support project in Thailand to assist exiled reporters and those still operating in Myanmar.

Closer to home, the European Parliament’s adoption of its first press freedom law marks a milestone in safeguarding media independence and the public’s right to information within the EU. I look forward to initiatives in the US at a time when the press will be increasingly vulnerable. The next president is an admirer of autocrats, envious of their absolute power. He and his administration will need to be reminded of the value of the free press.

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To those journalists who continue to speak out in the face of danger, we salute you. To those who have given their lives for this profession, we remember you. And to all of us, let us reaffirm our commitment to protecting journalists, defending the truth, and ensuring that those who seek to silence the press will never succeed.

God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.

Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;

though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble with its tumult.

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.

God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved;
God will help her right early.

The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice, the earth melts.

The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge.

Come, behold the works of the LORD,
how he has wrought desolations in the earth.

He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear,
he burns the chariots with fire!

“Be still, and know that I am God.
I am exalted among the nations,
I am exalted in the earth!”

The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge.

These are the words of Shrouq Al Aila, a journalist and producer from Gaza, winner of this year’s CPJ International Press Freedom Award. Shrouq’s husband Roshdi Saraj, journalist and founder of Palestinian production company Ain Media, which Shrouq now runs, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on October 22 2023 while standing in front of their house next to his wife and two-year old daughter, Dania.

Something that the camera or the video can’t show is the smell of the rubble. Since Roshdi was martyred, I’ve been associating the smell of the rubble, the gunpowder, the concrete, and the dust, with death. Every time I pass by a newly destroyed house, I go back to the first hit, and to the biggest loss. This is something we can never reflect in our reporting. The audience will never know how it smells or what the bodies smell like. Many people are still under the rubble and the civil defense isn’t able to retrieve all the bodies because they don’t have the infrastructure for it, like trucks, or the fuel for these trucks to work. Their priority is the people who are still alive or the areas they can actually reach.

Sometimes I feel like this is all for nothing. I take a picture of something and I look at the real scene in front of me and I feel like 70% of the immensity, the magnitude, and harshness of the scene aren’t reflected in the photo or in the video. So sometimes I say, “No one will ever feel what’s going on but us.” And I wish that no one would have to endure what we have been through — this endless nightmare. What suffocates me as a journalist and makes me relive the sorrow is this smell, especially because I’m a survivor of an airstrike and I was picked up from the rubble myself. You become gray — everything is gray, your face, your body, your clothes, the environment around you. Everything. And the thing that bothers me the most is that my daughter Dania was also gray when she was pulled from the rubble.

My message to the journalism community is: We as journalists talked about everything. We filmed everything. It is now time for foreign correspondents to come and cover the war. We don’t have any more words. There’s nothing left to say or film. You can watch everything on your screen and still, nobody acted. It’s like we’re down a well screaming and we only hear the echo. We need foreigners to come and report, maybe they have something to say, maybe someone will believe them, but we are tired and exhausted, and we have done everything in our power to tell the story.

More than 130 journalists were killed in this war. It’s such a shame that journalists were targeted. Where is the freedom of journalism? Where are the press protection groups? Where is international law? As journalists, we are tired, and disappointed.

This extract is taken from a piece Kim wrote in August 2023 which reflected on his time in Afghanistan two years earlier as one of the few British journalists in Kabul when it fell to the Taliban.

Among the terrible scenes of human misery that unfolded as people desperately tried to escape Kabul, there was one particularly sad and haunting day.

In an airless heat under a fiery sun – with hundreds of people packed into a narrow road outside the Hamid Karzai international airport – we heard a piercing cry.

A frightened woman stumbled out of the crowd, desperately searching for a familiar face.

She tried to speak, but no words came. Then she fell into the dust, a hand raised in supplication.

She died in front of us – the first of five women to perish in the following hours on a road filled with potholes and rubble.

It wasn’t long before a young Hazara girl, around eight years old, came up to me and said she was trying to find her mother.

“I feel very scared, I have no one,” she whispered, raising her arms. One hand was missing. The result, we found out later, of an earlier bomb blast.

We could not find who she was looking for. The girl stuck close as we asked British troops, trying to bring some kind of order to the tumult, and they too tried to help. But without success.

Nearby, the bodies of several dead women, covered with strips of tattered white cloth, had been placed against a wall. As we searched, the girl wandered across to them.

A soldier from the parachute regiment and I both tried to go over and get her away, but by the time we reached her she had lifted the shroud and found her mother. She collapsed crying.

Some of us who were reporting on those last days of the Western withdrawal from Afghanistan had covered the conflict for a long time.
I had been to the country around two-dozen times across two decades. We had seen our share of horror and injury from bombs and bullets.
But the deaths at the airport, so distressing and so unnecessary, were particularly poignant.

The suffering that took place over those chaotic few days was a damning indictment of the Western withdrawal, an inglorious exit forced by Joe Biden’s decision to pull out all troops and limit the window for evacuation.

The cost was borne by the Afghan people who had been assured safety by successive American presidents and British prime ministers.

The little Hazara girl is now with her family in a safe place. But one of her relations, a government official, was subsequently imprisoned and killed by a local Taliban commander.

One among many victims of the new rulers who assured us in a press conference days after taking over that there would be no retribution on adversaries.

They also promised that day that they would respect women’s rights – and their access to education and work. In the ensuing two years all that has proved to be false.

The toll of the disappeared, the tortured and the executed continues to rise.

Women are shut away at home, the life they knew stripped away layer by layer.

And thousands who were left particularly vulnerable due to their links with Western governments, including the UK, remain trapped in the country, hunted by the Taliban.