Free Press reporter wins Amnesty International award for Kenya stories

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This article was published 10/04/2015 (3865 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Free Press reporter Carol Sanders accepted an Amnesty International award at a ceremony in Toronto Friday, a distinction that recognizes outstanding reporting on human rights issues.

Her stories on life in a Kenyan refugee camp were selected for a 2014 Amnesty International Canada’s Media Award, one of five pieces of Canadian journalism to be selected for the 20th annual awards.

Sanders’ series on refugee camps “Nowhere to go: Life in Dadaab“, shed light on the world’s largest refugee camp and its connection to Winnipeg immigrants. It ran in the Free Press in June.

The articles provide insight into the lives of Somalis living in the huge Kenyan refugee camp highlighting their connections to Winnipeg, Amnesty International said in a statement.

“In a clear way, Carol Sanders makes the global local, going to where they are and exploring the connections”, said Madelaine Drohan, a member of the jury. “What is happening to refugees in Dadaab becomes part of the fabric of the lives of others and she brings the issues back home to Canada, drawing people and issues together.”

Sanders won in the local/alternative print category.

Sanders said she was grateful that Amnesty International had acknowledged the stories she had related of people in the town of Dadaab, unwanted by either the Canadian or Kenyan governments and unable to return safely to Somalia.

“I wanted to introduce Free Press readers to folks in Dadaab who have relatives in Winnipeg trying to sponsor them. People like Hassan the schoolteacher and his wife Farah –who had just given birth to their third child – and Abdi, a fearless young electrician learning his trade through trial and error. These weren’t bogus refugee claimants, immigration queue jumpers or terror threats that the Harper government has been warning Canadians abou,” she saidt.

“They were kind, hard working and amazingly resilient people stuck in a country with no permanent home, few rights and one tiny speck of hope – Winnipeg.

“They’re still waiting to come to Canada and the number or refugees in the world has grown to levels not seen since the Second World War. Getting to know some of these people so far away, they’re not so different. They just want to have the right to plan for a future.”

Nathan VanderKlippe won in the national print category for a feature in The Globe and Mail last August. “Inside China’s War on Terror” examined the repression and violence against Muslim minority Uighurs in China’s far western province of Xinjiang.

There were two winners in the video/audio category: Tales from the Organ Trade, an 82-minute documentary written and directed by Ric Esther Bienstock broadcast on the History Channel last July and the Global News TV program 16×9 called Indian Bus Outrage. Produced by Brennan Leffler and Nisha Pahuja, it reveals the horror of rape and murder that has been compounded by injustice in the treatment of the perpetrators.

The online media category winner was “Living at the Border,” a multimedia presentation of the realities of African refugees and migrants’ lives in Italy. Produced by Asha Siad and Roda Siad, the website went live on April 23, 2014.