Washington D.C. – VOA, December 03, 2024
American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva was in a Russian prison earlier this year when she learned from an interrogator that she had been recognized with an award from the National Press Club in Washington.
Kurmasheva found the situation ironic at the time, she told VOA this week. The interrogator said the award was evidence that she worked for a foreign government. For Kurmasheva, the award was a signal that people were fighting for her release.
“That’s the moment when I realized that the free world was fighting for me,” said Kurmasheva, who works at VOA’s sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague.
After her release as part of a historic prisoner swap in August, Kurmasheva learned just how hard media associations had fought to secure her freedom. The National Press Club, she said, was “one of my strongest defenders.”
Based in Washington as a professional organization for journalists, the club has long had a record of standing up for members of the media community under threat.
With risks for media rising globally, the club has formalized its work to create a Press Freedom Center, which will operate independently from the club, said the group’s director Bill McCarren.
“How do we support those kinds of journalists, both from the standpoint of campaigning for them when they’re under threat, and then helping them when they have arrived [to safety]?” McCarren said. Those two areas will be the center’s goals, McCarren said.
The center is using the first-hand knowledge of journalists who have experienced imprisonment to help guide its work.
Kurmasheva will be among those serving on the advisory board of the new Press Freedom Center, and The Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian will chair the board.
Like Kurmasheva, Rezaian said the support from the press club was invaluable when he was unjustly jailed in Iran from 2014 to 2016.
He sees the center as a way to help journalists who were recently released from prison, as well as newly exiled journalists.
Once journalists are out of harm’s way, “there are so many gaps in the aftercare that it’s very difficult for these people to get up and running,” Rezaian said, pointing to immigration and bureaucratic challenges that often go unnoticed. “There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this.”
