DOHA: The Doha-based Al Jazeera journalist Ahmed Al Mansouri who faces an arrest warrant in his home country Egypt, has appealed to all media houses — from televisions to radios and newspapers — to boycott dictatorial regimes that conspire attacks against journalists.
He was speaking yesterday at a regional symposium titled “safety and security of journalists-the reality of violations and the efforts for protection” to mark the International Day to End Impunity. The event at St. Regis Hotel was organized by Al Jazeera network.
Al Mansouri called for blacking out any government that attacked journalists and regretted that some media networks continued their co-operation with the Egyptian government despite its continuing campaign against journalists.
Al Mansouri was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison on charges of torturing and sexually assaulting a lawyer during the 2011 uprising against former president Hosni Mubarak, the charges Al Jazeera has called absurd and politicized. Last month, Interpol rejected Egypt’s international arrest warrant against Al Mansouri saying that the request did not meet their rules.
During the symposium, two other Al Jazeera journalists, Abdullah Al Shami, a correspondent, and Mohamad Zaki, a cameraman, gave their testimonials of the suffering of journalists they had witnessed during the Arab spring including the killing of some of their colleagues.
Moaidi Lami, head of the Iraqi Journalists Syndicate, said that Arab countries still jailing journalists should take some lessons from Iraq, where despite all the violence there has been no journalist arrested for doing their work in the last two years. However, most of the speakers turned down the Iraqi model, saying that even though there were no arrests of journalists in the country, many were still being killed while doing their work, which is even worse.
Most of the discussions centred on the challenges of practising journalism in Arab countries like Egypt, Syria and Iraq, leaving out the GCC countries.
The Peninsula
