By Rana Sabbagh

The ICFJ Knight Trailblazer Award that I received in Washington on November 14 in many ways symbolizes my life-long mission to encourage accountability journalism and equip journalists throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with the tools to practice it.

This is a never ending process, but with support from organizations like CNTI, my region can, and must exercise the right to question its leaders based on solid facts and hold them accountable to what they say or do. Without that, we will never secure justice, human rights and democracy.

In the troubled region I come from, it often feels as though the world is looking somewhere else. Let me talk to you about my colleagues in the Middle East, some of whom are living in the ruins of their homes in Gaza or Lebanon, mourning the family members who have been killed, scavenging for food and water for their loved ones who are still alive.

They define what is best in our journalism, the refusal to give up, the refusal to crouch in fear and indulge in self pity, and the unwavering commitment to document the human suffering, the battles, the criminality and the selfless commitment of so many who daily risk their lives to help others. 

They report the story and they are the story. 

Journalism, real journalism, is never easy in my region. Many of my colleagues have been sacked or imprisoned or died. 

In the West, their cases get little, if any, publicity. 

I understand that stability in my region is a legitimate foreign policy goal for the West. Terror has to be fought. But aiming for stability in the region also means accepting injustice, the lack of human rights and a press that’s far from free. 

Look at Tunisia’s slide into a dictatorship after the country became a poster child of the so-called Arab spring. It is a grizzly example of how one leader can use democracy to gain power and then use power to destroy the system that put him there.

The West has been largely silent about the President’s coup against democracy. Why? He promised to work with Europe to stem the flow of migrants in return for millions of euros. Egypt is another example. In March, the EU gave Cairo millions of dollars to curb illegal migration in the Mediterranean.  

The list is long. 

As for my own experience, I was summoned recently to a government office and invited to choose between my loyalty to my job and my loyalty to my country. I told them: “I love my country and my job, and that’s why I was reporting on those who broke its lows and looted its riches.”

The question went away, but inevitably it will return to me and to others.

I’ve been fired from too many positions: chief editor of the Jordan Times, and founder, editorial adviser and columnist for Al-Ghad, what was sold to us by its publisher, and to society as the newspaper that would look for the truth by peeling away the camouflage that had obscured it.

The reason for my sudden firing by the government and the intelligence was simple. 

I refused to toe the official editorial line or give up my commitment to a free press. 

In both instances, I was replaced by the man who is now Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Al-safadi, a former journalist for the Jordan Times, where I began my career in 1985.

My experience and that of hundreds of brave investigative journalists I worked with throughout my 40-year career as an independent journalist and mentor, has shown that journalism in the region can never be a safe profession, and yet it’s all relative.

Tonight, as every night, reporter Mohammed Abu Shahmeh will lie under the nylon roof he has built on the site of his destroyed house in Gaza City, where some 40 members of his family have been killed. He says he has no time to grieve them. We bury nine corpses in one go and immediately leave to find water and food. For us, this has become a normality. This is what he said. His family is starving to death, he tells me, asking me if I could provide him with some cans of fava beans and a bag of rice. I am unable to send him across the heavily-guarded border into Israel a microphone for his mobile, and the bronze statue he recently won for best investigation in Beirut. 

Tonight, as every night, brave Sudanese journalist Fatha Rahman will eat dinner in his tiny new room in the UK after fleeing death threats by warlords who want to silence Israeli journalism.

Iraqi colleague Assad Zelzali and his four-member family will be asleep in their new refuge in the West. In one year, he was beaten up four times by militias, sustaining severe back injury. They called him a traitor because he was working for Al Harra, a satellite TV channel funded by the U.S. government. 

Yemeni colleague, Asil Sariah, who won refugee status in Sweden November 2023, is waiting to reunite with his family after fleeing a civil war raging for nine years.

So I’d like to dedicate my award to Mohammed, Fatah, Assad and Asil who have been investigating corruption and injustice with me — first at the Amman-based Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) which I co-founded in 2006 and ran until early January 2020, and now at  OCCRP.

I would like to dedicate it to the hundreds of brave Arab colleagues I have worked with over 40 years. They risk everything day after day to bring us the news and document the facts. They represent the best of Arab society.

And with this award, I salute their courage and sadly, all too often, their ultimate sacrifice. 

Rana Sabbagh is the Senior MENA Investigations Editor at The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.