Calls for release of jailed journalists go global

By MALKHADIR MUHUMED

Nairobi-based journalists could not be any happier. Their February campaign for the release of fellow Al Jazeera journalists languishing in Egyptian cells has caught fire, globally.

In the last 12 weeks, more than 60,000 people around the world have been actively involved in the campaign; over 110,000 tweets have been sent out in the same period, reaching 100,000,000 social media users.

Colleagues around the world have also held silent protests.

Hotel raid

CNN’s well-known foreign correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, held up the #FreeAJStaff sign live on air, the same hashtag popularised by Nairobi-based journalists.

Calls for the journalists’ release have also poured in from the White House, London, Sydney and from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and others.

“All these campaigns speak volumes about just how respected the jailed Al Jazeera journalists are,” said Robyn Kriel, the East Africa Bureau Chief of eNews Channel Africa, who spent hundreds of hours organising the February 2 campaign amid breaking stories in the continent, especially in the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Somalia and the Oscar Pistorious trial in South Africa.

“What this campaign taught us is that,” Kriel said, “if we all work together, then our hashtags can really cause waves or even revolutions.”

The significance of the protests was not also lost on the leaders of Al Jazeera English. The channel’s managing director, Al Anstey, was in Nairobi this month with two simple but powerful messages: To pay tribute to the campaigners and urge them to keep the pressure on Egypt.

“The campaign that followed the detention of our journalists has gone global. It has been felt by all corners of the globe,”  he said after meeting some of them at a Nairobi hotel.

The three – Nairobi-based Peter Greste, Cairo Bureau Chief Mohamed Adel Fahmy and Producer Baher Mohamed – were arrested last December in a raid on a hotel in Cairo, and later charged with allegedly spreading false information and siding with the banned Muslim Brotherhood. Al Jazeera denied the charges and demanded their release.

These Nairobi-based journalists now have their own organisation, Foreign Correspondents Association of East Africa, a group of about 200 journalists.

Carrying banners reading, “Being a Journalist Is Not a Crime” and “We Are All Peter Greste”, the journalists and their sympathisers have also held their Global Day of Action with the hashtag #FREEAJSTAFF outside the Egyptian embassy in Nairobi.

In his remarks on World Press Freedom Day, the UN Secretary General said journalists, who face kidnapping, detention, beatings and murder, are singled out for speaking or writing uncomfortable truths.

“Such treatment is completely unacceptable in a world ever more reliant on global news outlets and the journalists who serve them,” he said, calling on governments “to actively defend this fundamental right”.

In a letter from Tora prison, Greste thanked those who are campaigning for their release saying such efforts have “become emblematic of the freedom of the press worldwide”.

Convey concerns

“We are deeply moved and strengthened by the outpouring of support, but we also understand that this isn’t just about the three of us,” he wrote.

A spokeswoman for US Department of State, Jen Psaki, said last month that her country is “watching closely the trial and continues to convey our deep concerns directly to the Government of Egypt”.

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has also expressed concern over the detention of the journalists in Egypt, while the US White House condemned journalists’ detention and called for their release.

It is however unclear whether such a huge outpouring of reaction from around the world will force Egypt to release them.