Le pays des paradoxes

Je mets en lien le blog d’une journaliste iranienne, Azadeh Akbari, qui après avoir travaillé quatre ans au sein des quotidiens réformateurs, est aujourd’hui correspondante pour Associated Press ainsi que pour le journal japonais Mainich.

  http://iranianjournalist.blogfa.com/ 

C’est une femme célibataire, indépendante et journaliste. Elle travaille sur des sujet sociaux, politiques et religieux mais traite également de la prostitution, la drogue ou encore l’homosexualité. C’est en lisant un livre d’Oriana Falacci, (une journaliste italienne qui ne ménagea pas ses mots envers la religion musulmane, en particulier vers la fin de sa carrière) qu’elle trouva sa vocation. Son premier texte se suffit à lui seul pour exprimer l’incroyable contradiction inhérente à la république islamique d’Iran :

“When I was born, Iran-Iraq war has reached the highest point. People were escaping from the cities and everywhere was unsafe. In the day I was born, Freedom Mountains in west of Iran obtained after long time of occupation by Iraqi forces, so my father gave me the name: "Azadeh" that means free woman. All my childhood spent in war and fear. Once there was a horrible raid in our neighborhood, I remember the fire flames, people crying and children shouting for their parents. Tomorrow morning some of my friends were in the heaven that was what my mother told me.

Since then, I tried to understand why people allow themselves to kill each other. Can't they do the ceasefire from the first moment, without any killing, without this much suffering and pain?

When I got 13, there was an old bookshop near the bus station I used to go for taking a bus to school. One day I saw a book titled "life, war and nothing else" written by Oriana Falachi, an Italian journalist. In that book she wanted to answer her little sister's question that what is life and she started to find the answer in Vietnam War, A very hard place to understand the truth that how villainous can be humankind. When I finished the book I was fascinated by the way she looked for the truth: journalism.

Since then I started my first step to become a journalist, 2 years later when I was only 15, I won the national press prize for the very young journalists and that was how I became a journalist.

By the time I started my professional job as a journalist, I was 19. On that time I was suffering from inequalities in the society like gender discrimination. I was young and full of energy but the society wanted to reduce my speed in any way. I felt that the whole society is ignoring the rights of children, women, old or disabled people.  So I started to write about these things and little by little I was one of those few ones that they were writing about social problems in Iran . I won my second national press prize when I was 20. I tried to write about prostitution, addicts, homosexuals, child abuse, domestic violence, etc. I wanted to show the government that despite all their propaganda through governmental TV channels, lots of problems do exist in the society and we should think about them. I decided to get closer to people in trouble, so I worked for one year in very poor areas of the Capital, Tehran . I used to publish a magazine for street children that all the articles in that, were written by street children themselves. When I was working for them, I felt how they can express themselves and get free form all that pain they have to tolerate. I understood that my words in newspapers can help people who do not have any medium or they are not educated enough to show how problem full is their lives. I wrote a report on abortion operations in Iran . Abortion is illegal in Iran . I found out that every year there is more than 90,000 illegal abortions being done and lots of these poor mothers die because of very dirty underground operation rooms. My report helped to take people's attention to what they want to ignore despite its existence. I had lots of phone calls and emails from girls who had abortion and that was a sense of an impression that a journalist can have. I hope that one day if I can be more strong and educated to be more influential. 

During presidential elections, 2005, associated press invited me to work with them. This opened another window to my professional life. I understood how different and higher the international standards for journalism are. I met lots of great journalists and I had wonderful experiences to work for them. I traveled so much and day by day I felt that there should be something more about journalism. I read some AP books about journalism but that was not enough. These books are very useful when you are in a developed country. But in Iran with a very complicated bureaucratic organizations and a government that does not feel any responsibility to answer the journalists, what should I do? This is the question I always have that in a country with undemocratic government, how should we adapt the international standards to local work?  I would love to hear other people's experiences about how could they work professionally in their countries despite censorship and discrimination.

The other problem is that In Iran an average person reads less than 5 minutes a year. There are only 6 TV channels that all of them are led by the government. Reformist newspapers are under censorship. If we write a word against the government they close down the newspaper. Self-censorship is very common between journalists. In this case more educated journalists who have met the same under developed countries experiences can help to increase the status of professional journalism in Iran .

I experienced 3 close downs during my work. Our newspaper were closed down because we published some news about the subjects the government did not want people to be aware of. After being jobless again and again I always felt happiness and pain together. Pain of being this much under pressure because of your thoughts and happiness because of being influential that much to be closed down!

I sometimes hope for a day of liberation, to a day that we can write about important things and people can read it, too. For a day that my name, becomes true!

Pour continuer sur cette vision alternative de l’Iran, allez voir l’excellent reportage de Kevin Site, journaliste américain indépendant, spécialisé dans les zones à risques :

   Iran Video Report 

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/ver/218/popup/index.php?cl=2...