Ali Mazrooe : "Life goes on"

Ali Mazrooei is 63. He is Iranian, a journalist, and has lived in Brussels since 2010.

A graduate of the University of Isfahan, member of the Association of Iranian Journalists (today dissolved), economic journalist for numerous opposition newspapers (all closed) including Salam, heavily involved in his country’s civil society – Ali takes a critical view of Iran.

In 2009, President Ahmadinejad was faced with an uprising of the population (the Green Movement) who contested his re-election following massive electoral fraud. He locked down the media, closed opposition publications one after the other, and threatened to subject journalists to the treatment that is sadly commonplace in countries that don’t allow a free, autonomous press: intimidation, violence, prison. To escape the repression, Ali and 200 other Iranian journalists had to flee their country.

He could have gone to Paris, Rome or Berlin. Ultimately, it was Brussels. “In Iran, thanks to the Association of Iranian Journalists, we had good contacts with the FIJ (International Federation of Journalists) who helped me and the other journalists when we had to leave the country. That’s how I found myself in Brussels.”

With his wife and two of his children, Ali began a new life. “When we arrived in Belgium, I thought we would stay for two or three years before returning to Iran.” Ten years later, Ali is under no illusions. “In light of the current situation, I can’t imagine going back there. I don’t know when we will be able to return.”

It’s been 10 years in which Ali, far from Tehran, has never stopped working. “I was a journalist, and I’m still one. I write for the web and I analyse my country’s situation. I still have contacts there, I read a lot, I keep myself informed.”

In the centre of Ali’s lounge is a lectern on which a laptop sits. The television is on, showing a Persian channel. The phone rings; Ali replies in his language. Having been so active in his own country, he admits to feeling a little isolated. “The hardest thing when you’re far from home is to make friends, a network, relationships, especially at my age. I don’t speak French or Dutch. I still have trouble integrating into Belgian society. I miss my family who are still in Iran.”

Two years ago, his mother died. Ali had tried to bring her to Brussels, but her visa application was refused by the Belgian authorities. Bitter, and with no illusions about the immediate future of his country, Ali tries to keep believing. “I tell myself that life goes on.”

Samuel Malhoure

You won’t see my photo

I’ve worked as a journalist all my life, but unfortunately I’ve not fully exercised my freedom of opinion because of political constraints.

I’ve worked in the state press and the private press in Africa. I’ve been harassed and threatened because I wanted to carry out my professional duty. Because of that, I fled my country to seek asylum in Belgium, which I was easily granted.

I’ve been able to work for a number of Belgian and African publications. My articles often cover democracy and freedom in Africa. Of course, I criticise the dictatorial powers in Africa, and because of this, certain African governments disapprove of me.

I’ve had a number of threats in Europe because of my journalistic activities and my publications. On my blog I’ve effectively published a book about the media and the political powers in my country.

I’m not afraid to pay the price of freedom, wherever I am. But to live this freedom in security, I cannot allow my photo to be published and my identity to be revealed. That is the consequence of the career I have chosen.

Brussels, 14 January 2020.

Arterial pressure

By Antoine Kaburahe

Journalism: the finest career in the world, some say. And I believe them. Despite everything. Even though I’ve spent most of my life fleeing. And I’m still not so old; “only” 54.

In 1992, I entered the profession. Full of illusions, following in the footsteps of my father, also a journalist, who I lost when I was five. In 1993, Burundi was engulfed by a terrible civil war. In 1997, aged 31, threatened, traumatised by so many deaths – family, friends, colleagues – I was forced to flee my country.

Physically injured and emotionally scarred, I settled in Belgium. I had just one wish: to remake myself, to rebuild myself, to forget, to do something else. But journalism was still there, deep inside me, an addiction.

Ten years later, I left my adopted country. I left calmed, confident, with my homeland seeming to have exorcised all its old demons. A peace treaty had been signed at Arusha in Tanzania, thanks largely to Mandela.

I carried with me a project: Iwacu. I was finally going to create a newspaper. Accompany my fatherland on the road to democratic reconstruction by producing a professional news service. I had a dream…

And that dream became a reality. For seven years, at least. Between 2008 and November 2015, Iwacu was a respected press group in Burundi’s media landscape. Forty or more employees, multiple publications, an online radio station and TV channel, a printing press, a publishing house… A real media enterprise. The dream was coming true.

Except the curse still lingered. It began with a convocation by the prosecutor, implicating me in the aborted “attempted coup d’état” of May 2015. That was all it took…

The machine was set in motion and I had to flee for my life. Like hundreds of my peers, I was forced to leave. An international arrest warrant was put out against me, as if for a common criminal.

Exiled again. How long for? I don’t know. My colleagues who remain in Burundi persist in following the dream. But they are paying a heavy price. Today, nobody knows the whereabouts of Jean Bigirimana, an Iwacu journalist who was snatched one day in July 2016. As I write these words, four journalists, Agnès, Christine, Térence and Egide, have just spent more than six months in prison. They are accused of “threatening the interior security of the state”, a vague, catch-all accusation. The prosecution demanded 15 years in prison, ultimately reduced to two and a half years. Iwacu appealed.

And what about me in all of this? I am here. In Belgium, I mean. Suspended between WhatsApp and Twitter. I live online, “connected”. When I should be in my country, with my editorial team. My hair gets a little greyer with each day.

I live in Belgium but my heart is in Burundi. My heart is starting to tire and has recently suffered one or two problems. “Your blood pressure is too high, you must relax, Mr Kaburahe,” my doctor tells me each time, as he writes out a prescription. Blood pressure: 15/9. While I wait for the judge’s verdict against my colleagues, my systolic and diastolic pressures are going crazy.

I know what the best treatment would be. To live my dream. To live once more in my country, to write, to do my job. I am sure my heart would beat better there…

Antoine Kaburahe is the founder Burundian press group Iwacu, exiled in Belgium.
May 3, 2020

"I am no longer me"

By Christa Irakoze

I am a journalist from Burundi. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been passionate about this career. When the president of the country decided to remain in power, even though the Constitution forbade it, my radio station, Bonesha FM, and others reported that this was unconstitutional. So we were marked out as opposition. My station and others were ransacked and destroyed on 14 May 2015. It was unimaginable in a country that was highly ranked in the press freedom charts. From one day to the next, there was no longer any impartial information, everyone felt unsafe. I had to flee to neighbouring Rwanda. In September I returned to Burundi. I rejoined my colleagues who had stayed there and we worked in the print media at the Maison de la presse. Soldiers would regularly come to see where we were working, to threaten us and make it clear that they knew what we were doing. In October 2015, a whole family was killed. A fellow journalist was among them and we perceived it as a warning: “Today it’s him, tomorrow it’s you.” There were threats, surveillance, flyers against us. I felt like I no longer belonged in my own country. I could no longer say: “I am Christa, I work for Radio Bonesha.” They accused us of being the opposition. They attached labels to us that had nothing to do with our jobs. The message was clear: “You have no place here.” In April 2016, a friend was killed after having spent the day with me. A police commissioner led an inquest that began with me, as I was the last person to have been seen with her. I was a journalist, I lived in a district known for protests and I was of an ethnicity considered to be part of the opposition. Everything was against me. I’d given myself plenty of reasons for staying in the country, I’d often told myself that it would be ok, but in the end I still had to leave. When my friend was killed, I told myself I couldn’t stay. I arrived here on 19 March 2017, in a country, a continent I didn’t know. It was like a slap: “I am no longer me, I am just a new refugee.” After all that I had achieved in Burundi, I had to start another life.

Refugee in Rwanda, then Belgium since 2017.

Alongside portrait

By Edouard Diyi Tshitenge

It was in May 2017 that things began to get worse, with verbal threats made by the authorities towards my family (“Your wife and children must die for you to understand…”). I was threatened with arrest and put in grave danger on 28 August 2017. I was able to escape the soldiers thanks to the UN.

I am convinced there are other ways of getting what you want than to sacrifice your fellow human.

Edouard had to flee Kasaï, in the centre of the DRC, in 2017. He found shelter in the capital and then, in 2018, in Belgium. He was recognised as a refugee on 30 September 2019.

"I wouldn’t change a thing"

By Fatimetou Sow

I was arrested for reporting on slavery, and if it were to happen again, I wouldn’t change a thing. I have never felt in the wrong. Slavery, FGM, forced marriage, child marriage are all still rampant in my country. And I will fight until my last breath against this injustice.

TV journalist Fatimetou Sow fled Mauritania. Belgium granted her international protection in January 2019.

Testimony of Mansour Mhawani Ghanem

I had a daily programme on the television. Everyone knew my face, but I didn’t know the faces of those who were threatening me. Going out on the street was dangerous. On the television, I sought to deal with terrorism through talking about peace, through education, through honest information… I am a journalist; words are my weapons. I had three children. They were threatened. If I had been a mechanic, for instance, my family would have had a normal life, but when you’re a journalist, it’s very difficult. I fled to Turkey then via lorry towards Europe. Many other people died en route. I was lucky. If I had stayed, I would be dead. I wanted to leave, but my family is still in the country. I was in pain. It was a sad situation that you can’t imagine if you haven’t lived through it.

Mansour arrived in Belgium in 2016. Having been housed as an asylum-seeker in Spa and Couvin, he was granted refugee status and his family has been able to join him.

From Gaza to Belgium

He had a blog, From Gaza to Gaza, an investigative website that the government shut down. He has made documentary films for the Imperial War Museums in London, for Iranian TV and for Music Against Violence, a Swiss organisation. All his films cover life in Gaza. He investigates the problems of electricity, social and political issues, and the daily life of inhabitants. His work, often filmed in secret, took him during one of his last investigations to a military base, for a training session. Already disapproving of his work, the government accused him of wanting to reveal military secrets. Sarhan has been imprisoned multiple times, and had his finger broken. After one jail sentence of a month, he was released (“because at that time, they were releasing us”) and decided to flee.

Since then, he’s become recognised as a professional journalist in Belgium. He has continued his work, and is developing a film on the right to immigration, called Despair. He is a delegate of the International Centre for Relations and Diplomacy in the UK, representing the institution in Belgium. He wants to be able to work, covering the subjects he wasn’t able to talk about in Gaza.

Returning to Gaza is impossible for him. He explains that one of the most difficult things for a journalist in Gaza is not going against the government or wanting to cover certain things up, it’s risking your reputation. For him, it’s not just a question of imprisonment, of a hindrance in his work or in his career as a journalist – it’s also a question of reputation that ultimately affects his whole family. A journalist who displeases the government is very quickly accused of being a collaborator with foreigners or, worse, Israel. His name could even be published on a list. And “from being a journalist, you become a traitor who is working for the enemy”.

"Problems with the police…"

The geographic Kurdish region is a whole, but a dispersed whole. A population of almost 45 million people spread across four countries: Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria. No border or recognised territory, except in Iraq (the autonomous region of Kurdistan) and Iran (the province of Kurdistan).

Tory Kiliç immediately points out that he is Kurdish, not Turkish.

He is 39. He was born in the region of Mardin in the Kurdish part of Turkey, not far from the Syrian border.

After his aborted studies in Istanbul, he spent years working as a researcher for NGOs, Kurdish associations, lawyers and even families. His mission: to document the disappearance of Kurds in the 1990s in Turkey and the purges against the Kurdish people in the 1980s in Iraq. Tory uses the vocabulary of ethnic cleansing: military police, disappearances, mass graves, bones, bodies… It’s meticulous work. A work of remembrance.

Tory has lived in Belgium for almost three years. Helped by associations and Kurdish activists, he fled Turkey via Dusseldorf and settled in Brussels. Here he has learned French, he has got married. Today he is looking for work. He’d like to do video training. He writes, always about his origins, and cites the media with whom he is working or has worked in the past: Kedistan.net, Media Haber, Sterktv.net.

Though his family are still there, Tory says he cannot return to Turkey; he doesn’t want to return to Turkey. He has already crossed the Turkish border once to get to Iraq, where he was arrested by plain-clothes police. Three days in prison, a broken nose. “Always problems with the Turkish police,” he says in his hesitant French.

“Problems with the police” is an expression that often comes up when he discusses his studies in Istanbul, his documenting of the disappeared in Turkey, his work in Iraq. The other word he often uses when he describes his years of work there: “fear”.

In April 2020, Tory will become a father. He and his wife are expecting a baby boy.

Samuel Malhoure