1.
AMY GOODMAN: Egyptian President Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi granted pardons to 100 people Wednesday, including two jailed
journalists from Al Jazeera—Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed. The two were
initially arrested along with Australian journalist Peter Greste as part of a crackdown
on Al Jazeera following the ouster of the democratically elected President
Mohamed Morsi in 2013. To the shock of press freedom advocates, the three were
initially sentenced to between seven and 10 years in prison. After over a year
in jail, Peter Greste was released in February, deported home to Australia.
Shortly afterwards, Fahmy and Baher Mohamed were also freed on bail. But then,
in August, those two were sentenced—resentenced to three years in jail. Last
week, Baher Mohamed described what it felt like to be finally pardoned.
2.
BAHER MOHAMED: Finally, yes, after 411
days, it’s like a big rock was on your chest, and suddenly you moved it. So it
was such a feeling—it’s hard to describe that moment. I was like jumping and
jumping, like—and even I heard the word “release,” and that’s it, because the
sound inside the cell, because the cell, as you know, it’s like with glass,
surrounded with glass, so you can just hear almost the sound. So, it was
amazing. I just can’t express. I kept jumping and jumping. I’m like, “Finally.”
I’m happy that I will return back, I will not stay in
prison. I’m happy that I’m going back to my family, seeing my family and my
kids. I just spoke to my wife and kids now. They were very happy that I’m
returning home. This is something very beautiful and I really appreciate. And I’m
willing to continue this for freedom of press.
3.
AMY GOODMAN: In a statement, Amnesty
International said, quote, “While these pardons come as a great relief, it is
ludicrous that some of these people were even behind bars in the first place.” “While
these pardons come [as a great relief],” they said, “it is ludicrous that some
of these [people] were even behind bars in the first place.”
While Fahmy and Mohamed have been pardoned, no pardon has
been issued yet for Peter Greste. He has come to New York to lobby for a
presidential pardon while Egyptian President General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is
here attending the United Nations General Assembly. El-Sisi has also been
invited by President Obama to attend the Leaders’ Summit on Countering ISIL and
Violent Extremism taking place on Tuesday at the United Nations. Egypt claims
it recently killed as many as 500 people in the Sinai Peninsula during an
anti-militant offensive called Operation Martyr’s Right. Peter Greste joins us
here in our studio, longtime foreign correspondent who has worked at the BBC,
CNN and Reuters before joining Al Jazeera. In 2011, he won a Peabody Award for
a documentary on Somalia.
Peter Greste, it’s a pleasure to have you here in our
studio in New York.
4.
PETER GRESTE: Thanks very much, Amy. It’s
fantastic to be here.
5.
AMY GOODMAN: You served over 400 days in
prison in Egypt.
6.
PETER GRESTE: Four hundred exactly, in
fact.
7.
AMY GOODMAN: And you got out of prison,
you were deported to Australia. Explain what happened last week with your two
Al Jazeera colleagues.
8.
PETER GRESTE: What happened was that—one
of the things that surprised us, in fact, was that when the retrial began—I was
deported in a gap between our formal convictions and the start of the retrial
process. Once the retrial began, we thought that I would—I was off the case.
But I was in fact included in the retrial. I was on trial in absentia. The
court officially didn’t recognize my deportation under presidential order. And
so, we were all convicted a few weeks ago. Finally, we’ve—
9.
AMY GOODMAN: And sentenced to another
three years.
10.
PETER GRESTE: Exactly, sentenced to
another three years, convicted on terrorism charges. And then, last week, and
much to everyone’s surprise—we really weren’t expecting it—the president
formally pardoned, as you mentioned earlier, 100, about 100 prisoners, 100
detainees, including Fahmy and Baher. We were hoping that I and six other
people who were also convicted in absentia in the first trial would also
receive pardons. That hasn’t happened yet. And so, as you just mentioned, that’s
why I’m here at the moment, to try and clear the names of all of those who were
convicted in absentia.
11.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what
happened this weekend in the U.N.?
12.
PETER GRESTE: Well, this weekend, we saw
President Sisi speak. We saw quite a number of—we know there were a lot
of—there was a number of meetings. We’ve seen quite a lot of attention focused
on President Sisi—I take it this is what you’re talking about. And we’ve also
been doing—having a number of conversations. I’ve been speaking to the
Australian foreign minister, Julie Bishop, who has also spoken to her
counterpart, her Egyptian counterpart. And everyone seems to be supporting us.
13.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, just to understand, on
Friday, when the pope addressed the General Assembly, didn’t your foreign
minister, Julie Bishop, meet with the foreign minister in the presence of
President el-Sisi?
14.
PETER GRESTE: That’s right, it was in—it
was in the presence of President Sisi. And so that’s why we—
15.
AMY GOODMAN: And what did they say?
16.
PETER GRESTE: Well, Julie Bishop, as she
relayed the conversation, she said that Foreign Minister Shoukry said that the
Egyptians were keen to try and find a solution to this, that they were looking
favorably at the possibility of pardoning the journalists, but that they had
several legal obstacles to overcome, and that, if necessary, they would—
17.
AMY GOODMAN: What made you different from
your two colleagues?
18.
PETER GRESTE: The fact that we were convicted
in absentia. As I understand it, the law doesn’t allow the president to pardon
people who are in absentia, that we have to be present, physically present, in
Egypt to apply for a pardon.
19.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you planning to go back?
20.
PETER GRESTE: No. No, we’re not. And, you
know, I mean, in a way—
21.
AMY GOODMAN: And you’re talking about
another group of journalists who never served time in prison but were convicted
in absentia.
22.
PETER GRESTE: That’s right. In all, there
were the three of us plus six others, who were all convicted—sorry, who were
all charged in absentia in the first trial. They were unable to—well, they
weren’t a part of the retrial, because, again, they’re not allowed to appeal if
they’re not physically present. And so, they remain—those convictions remain
for them.
And so, what we’re trying to do is get everybody off these
charges. You know, this is—the fact is that we’re very grateful to President
Sisi for pardoning Fahmy and Baher. It was an injustice that should never have
happened, and I think President Sisi, in issuing those pardons, has made an
implicit acknowledgment of that. But the fact is that that’s an extremely
welcome first step. That was the thing that really has been bothering all of
us. The one thing that we needed to happen was to have everybody out of prison.
But I’m afraid that it’s not—it’s not everything. We need to finish this off,
and that’s clear everyone else’s whose names are on this list.
23.
AMY GOODMAN: What does it mean to say
that you have not been pardoned? How does that affect you?
24.
PETER GRESTE: Well, look, it
affects—there are three big areas in this. The first is, is the usual problems
that come with anybody who—confront anybody who’s been—who has a criminal
record. This is a very serious criminal record. It’s a record on terrorism
charges. As anybody knows, if you’ve got a criminal record, it makes travel
very difficult. It was quite difficult for me to get into the United States.
25.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?
26.
PETER GRESTE: Well,
anyone who travels to the U.S. on an Australian passport generally gets in on a
visa waiver program, but to do that, you have to answer an online
questionnaire. And one of the questions is: Have you ever been arrested? And if
you check that box, you have to explain the circumstances of the arrest. And,
of course, I have to say that I was arrested and convicted on charges of aiding
a terrorist organization, financing a terrorist organization, broadcasting
false news to undermine national security, but please google me because it
was—even President Obama spoke out in support of our case. So, you know, it
raises all sorts of red flags for the bureaucrats that are processing these
visas. We had to go and get special clearance from the State Department, from
John Kerry’s office himself, to get that visa through. Now, it was never going
to be a major problem, but it caused us a lot of bureaucratic headaches.
Other things, like getting bank loans and the like, are all
problematic. Travel is a real headache. I want to—I’m trying to go to a
number of countries. I work—I was working in Kenya before I was arrested. Kenya
was my home. I was covering East Africa as East Africa correspondent for Al
Jazeera. And again, the whole of the African Union has an extradition treaty.
Now, the problem is that if we—if an arrest warrant is issued, then I’m liable
to be arrested anywhere in the African Union and sent back to Egypt. Again, we
don’t know that that warrant has been issued, but it—as far as I’m aware, it
hasn’t, but that can be issued at anytime. And it’s kind of like a sword of
Damocles hanging over my head.
But quite apart
from those issues, the fact is that this case has become emblematic of the much
wider issues over press freedom. And so, what we’ve been saying to the
diplomats and to Egypt is that we need to see this finished off, because our
cases had a very damaging effect, I think, on freedom of the press. Now, the
Egyptians keep saying to us that this was never about the press, this was—about
freedom of the press, they weren’t targeting the press specifically, they weren’t
trying to send any message, this was simply about the facts of law. Whatever
their motivations were, the fact is that it sent a very chilling message to any
journalist that’s been operating in Egypt. And so, to have—if the press is
going to operate freely, as is enshrined in the Egyptian constitution, then we
need to get these charges cleared.
27.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Peter
Greste. He is free. He’s in our studio. He’s here in New York. He’s lobbying
the Egyptian president, el-Sisi, for a pardon. When we come back, we want to
talk about his time in prison and also those who remain behind bars, talk about
overall press freedom. Peter Greste is an Al Jazeera journalist, imprisoned in
Egypt for 400 days, covering the Egyptian revolution that took place. He was
arrested during a crackdown on Al Jazeera during the ouster of President
Mohamed Morsi in 2013. We’ll be back with him in a minute. [break] This
is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m
Amy Goodman. Our guest is Peter Greste. He’s one of the three Al Jazeera
reporters who were arrested December 29th, 2013. You heard about them
extensively over the 400 days that Peter Greste was in jail, and a bit more
than that for Baher Mohamed and Mohamed Fahmy, who have just been pardoned and
released from jail by the president of Egypt. I was wondering, Peter, if you’d
go back to that day, to December 29, 2013. You’d been in Egypt for what? Like
two weeks?
28.
PETER GRESTE: Yeah, just two weeks. I was
only in the bureau covering. This was—you know, I’m not an Egypt expert. I hadn’t
worked in the country before, and I was in Kenya covering East Africa. That’s
my patch. And so, they needed someone to work over that Christmas-New Year
period, and so I agreed to go up and just fill in the bureau. And so, honestly,
one of the things that continually frustrated me, in a way, is that we were
arrested for what turns out to be some pretty mundane reporting. We weren’t
doing anything particularly radical at the time. I was simply trying to make
sure that we had the basic stories covered. It was all very routine journalism.
There was no particular investigation. And we weren’t—certainly weren’t pushing
the boundaries. So I was absolutely staggered, to be honest, when the secret
service agents—or, the special service agents burst into our room and started
picking up all of my equipment and dragged me off down to the police station.
29.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, you were covering—at
that time, Mubarak was out, President Morsi was in?
30.
PETER GRESTE: No, at that point,
President Morsi had been ousted.
31.
AMY GOODMAN: Had been ousted.
32.
PETER GRESTE: Had already been ousted in
June of 2013. There was the interim administration, which had been installed
earlier that year, and that government was trying to—its main job was to
organize new elections, fresh elections, which happened earlier in 2014. At the
time, the Brotherhood was under enormous pressure. Shortly before we were
arrested, the government banned the Brotherhood and declared them to
be—declared them to be a terrorist organization, but hadn’t formally or legally
gazetted them as a terrorist organization. So, as far as we were concerned, the
Brotherhood still amounted to the official opposition. It had formed the
government. It was the first legitimately elected administration that Egypt had
ever had. It had been forced out of power, and the new government had taken to
declaring it as a terrorist organization. Well, we were simply doing the job of
any responsible journalist, particularly when it came to covering some fairly
significant political changes that were taking place. The government was
introducing new legislation. It introduced—it changed the constitution quite
radically. And so we went and asked the Brotherhood what they thought of it.
Now, of course, we weren’t acting as propagandists; we were simply doing, as I
said, the responsible—the job of responsible journalists and producing balanced
reports.
33.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, explain what the
government charged you with.
34.
PETER GRESTE: We were charged basically
with being propagandists for the Brotherhood. We were accused of—
35.
AMY GOODMAN: Because to interview them
was to be their propagandists, according to the Egyptian government.
36.
PETER GRESTE: Basically, yes, yes. I
mean, the charges were far more severe. We were charged with broadcasting false
news. We were charged with broadcasting news to undermine national security. We
were charged with trying to give the false impression of Egypt in a state of
chaos, as a country at war. We didn’t—we did none of those things. You know,
and one of the things we have continually said to the prosecutor was, “Look, if
you believe that we broadcast false news, that we acted as propagandists, then,
please, show us. I mean, by definition, the work that we produce is a matter of
public record. So, where is the false news? Where is the propaganda?” One of
the rather disturbing elements of the verdict, which—the written judgment,
which was released only a few weeks ago, was the idea that—from the judges, who
said that there was no need for specific technical evidence in our case, that
the overall narrative was enough to convict us, which I think cuts to the very
core of the problem here, that Egypt seems to believe that simply by working
for an organization that’s financed by Qatar, we must, by definition, be
members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and there’s no need for them to come up with
any specific evidence of it.
37.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to one of
your last reports, Peter Greste, before you were arrested, covering clashes
between supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian security forces.
38.
PETER GRESTE: As you can see, that the
protests, the clashes are still ongoing. We understand that the Muslim
Brotherhood students or the pro-Muslim Brotherhood students entered the
university in some of the exam halls. They tried to tear up some of the exam
papers and enforce a boycott of the exams in protest at the government. We
understand that the authorities, the police moved in and fired tear gas. And it
was the heat from the tear gas canisters which apparently set fire to some of
the exam papers. Either way, what we have there is an ongoing clash that really
represents the broader divisions that we’re seeing, that we saw yesterday,
where supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and supporters of the anti-coup
alliance took to the streets in open defiance of the government’s ban on
protests, and in particular challenging the government to arrest them and
enforce this five-year prison sentence, which the government has been
threatening to impose on anybody who is convicted of taking part in these
demonstrations.
39.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Peter Greste in
Cairo talking about what was happening at that time in the clashes between the
supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian security forces. Must
bring you back. So, December 29th, they break into where you were staying.
40.
PETER GRESTE: Mm-hmm.
41.
AMY GOODMAN: And they took everything.
42.
PETER GRESTE: That’s right.
43.
AMY GOODMAN: And you go to prison.
44.
PETER GRESTE: Yes.
45.
AMY GOODMAN: What happens? Describe the
time in prison for us, because often, for everyone obviously outside, that is a
black box, once you disappear.
46.
PETER GRESTE: Yeah, yeah. Look, Egyptian
prisons are never the best of places. You know, prison anywhere is pretty tough
experience. And Egyptian prisons are never the easiest. We went through two—I
was in two police cells before we actually entered the prison system. And I
think the police cells were probably some of the toughest experiences of my
life. One of them was—one cell was a box about eight-foot square, and it had a
toilet in one corner and a sink in the other and a door and a tiny little
exhaust fan up in the corner. There were 16 guys in that box. It was
unbelievably crowded. It was impossibly, impossibly crowded. And there were a
couple of guys who had been in there for about six months, with almost no time
out of that at all. It was quite—it was quite shocking. We were moved—I didn’t
spend a great deal of time in there, only a couple of days, but it was enough
to understand the kind of environment that an awful lot of people are in.
From there, we were
moved into the prison system, into a number of prisons. I was kept in solitary
confinement for the first couple of—first 10 days or so, before I was allowed
to have any kind of connections with any other prisoners. Again, a small
concrete box, basic water and food and a bed, but quite, quite tough conditions
at that point. It was very, very cold. It was midwinter, of course, and even
though Egypt gets hot in the summer, it’s also very, very cold in winter. The
problem, I think—or I know that we also had probably—not probably,
definitely—much better prison conditions than almost anybody else, largely, I
think, because we had a lot of attention focused on us from a lot of human
rights groups, from diplomats, from consular missions and so on.
47.
AMY GOODMAN: When did you rejoin Baher
and Mohamed?
48.
PETER GRESTE: It took about a month. I
was with—I was in a prison called Luman. I was alongside some of the main
activists of the January 25th revolution, the youth activists, the secular
activists, people like Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Ahmed Maher, Ahmed Douma, leaders of
the April 6 Movement and several other groups. And then, just before our
retrial—our trial, rather, our first trial began, I was moved to another prison
called Mulhaq, which had most of the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood in
it. And that’s where we were all put in one cell together.
49.
AMY GOODMAN: Gave you a chance to really
interview them.
50.
PETER GRESTE: Well, yes, yeah, talk to
them. We actually started what was called Mulhaq Radio, where, after lockdown,
everyone would pull the beds up to the end of the doors, and there was a small
hatch, and you’d sort of bellow out the doors and have these conversations up
and down the corridors, and really sort of started to, I guess—you know, we’re
journalists. We do what journalists normally do, and that’s kind of interrogate
and try and understand what was going on, what were the deeper issues involved,
what was the Brotherhood leadership thinking, because, again, we—you know, we
wanted to know. We wanted to understand.
51.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read an excerpt
that you wrote from prison. It was published
by Al Jazeera in 2014. Writing from the Tora Prison, Peter Greste, you say
your colleagues, Fahmy and Baher, quote, “have been accused of being Muslim
Brotherhood members, so they are being held in the far more draconian ‘Scorpion
prison’ built for convicted terrorists. Fahmy has been denied the hospital
treatment he badly needs for a shoulder injury he sustained shortly before our
arrest. Both men spend 24 hours a day in their mosquito-infested cells,
sleeping on the floor with no books or writing materials to break the
soul-destroying tedium. Remember we have not been formally charged, much less
convicted of any crime. But this is not just about three Al Jazeera
journalists. Our arrest and continued detention sends a clear and unequivocal
message to all journalists covering Egypt, both foreign and local.” How did you
get that letter out?
52.
PETER GRESTE: I can’t tell you at this
point. You know, the systems—there are ways of communicating in Egypt. There
are still some people who helped, who supported us, who were interested in
making sure that our case was heard. And so, I can’t go into too much detail,
but I wrote that letter because I was concerned, because, as I said, at that
particular point we hadn’t been charged. It was quite clear that this was
heading in a very dangerous direction. This was really only a couple of weeks
after we’d been arrested. And for the first few weeks, I really struggled trying
to understand what was taking place, what had happened, why we were in this
position. I felt that—initially thought it had been a mistake, that, you know,
it would all be a matter—it would all be cleared up fairly quickly. We hadn’t
done anything wrong. I knew we hadn’t done anything wrong. And so, once the
authorities understood, then we’d be fine. But as the questioning progressed,
it became clear to me that this really wasn’t just about what we had done
ourselves, it was what we had come to represent, and that was the entire
journalism community. And that’s why I wrote that letter, because I felt that
the case would either be argued about the detail of what we had said, whether
it was right for us to interview one figure and not the other, whether our language
had been biased or not biased, when in fact what this really was about, as far
as I was concerned, was the bigger issues of the press, of press freedom.
53.
AMY GOODMAN: And describe what it was
like to be brought to court, to stand in a cage.
54.
PETER GRESTE: Yeah, that was tough. You
know, the whole—that court is designed for terrorism cases, and so when you’re
brought into that room and you’re placed in a cage with a buffer between you
and everybody else in court, it’s quite intimidating. You know that this is how
you’re being treated, that you’re being seen as a very—as not just a dangerous
prisoner, but as a direct threat to the security of everybody else in that
room. Yes, it is a—it was extremely difficult to see. And even watching these
pictures now makes me feel—takes me back quite dramatically to those times.
55.
AMY GOODMAN: Who was it who yelled, who
shouted out, of the three of you?
56.
PETER GRESTE: It was Fahmy and Baher.
Both of them have far bigger voices. I’m routinely described by my colleagues as
soft-spoken. My voice just doesn’t have the same kind of volume. And every time
I tried to shout out, I never quite managed to get—to make it across the room.
Everybody else was struggling to hear. So, they would—
57.
AMY GOODMAN: And their point in doing that,
what they were shouting?
58.
PETER GRESTE: Well, we needed—we needed
to communicate. We had no other way of directly communicating. The rooms were
full of journalists.
59.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re hearing people in the
background, for our audience. This is the court. And for those who are
watching, who are listening on the radio, we’re showing images of Baher and
Mohamed and Peter in a cage.
60.
PETER GRESTE: Yeah, in the cage in the
court, and that was very—that felt—that was very confronting. Fahmy was
basically shouting out messages to—obviously, to our families, but also the
bigger messages that we felt needed to be—we needed to remind people of. We
knew that there was a lot of press attention. We could see the journalists all
arrayed before us. And we needed to make it very clear to them that we were
innocent, that we felt that we were being charged—we were being used as an
example rather than because of anything that we had actually done.
61.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about that
period of time? You spent in a cell with Baher Mohamed and Mohamed Fahmy how
many days?
62.
PETER GRESTE: I don’t remember exactly
how many days we spent in that cell. It would have been—well, the trial ran
over six months, so it was that six-month period that we were in that—in that
cell.
63.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you keep your
sanity, day to day, in prison?
64.
PETER GRESTE: For me, it’s—I didn’t think
of it at this point—in quite so clear terms at the time, but ultimately it
boiled down to dealing with mind, body and spirit, that you had to keep your
physical fitness up. And so, every opportunity we had, you would—we went
exercising. They’d let us out for an hour a day, and we would run for that full
hour. We also had an exercise regime that the Australian Embassy brought in
called 5BX, which is designed for a very confined space. In fact, I think it
was designed by the Canadian Air Force for their airmen, if they were ever
downed in World War II and captured. And it was very useful to us. We were able
to keep relatively fit.
But the problem also in prison is that you’re faced with this amorphous
blob of time, this shapeless lump of time, and if you don’t do something with
that time, if you don’t impose a structure on it, it will send you crazy. And so, we
would spend—I would spend a lot of time in meditation. We had nothing in there—no books, no writing material, no
reading material. They even took our watches for the first period. And that
made it—that made it psychologically extremely difficult. And so, if
you—what happens is that your mind tends to start in on—turn in on itself. In that kind of environment, your mind is your own worst
enemy. And so, for me, meditation was a way of controlling that sort of monkey
mind, controlling the mind that—controlling your mind, stopping it from running
out of control, from running amok.
And the other part of it was also dealing with keeping mentally fit. So
we would play mind games, memory games. We’d do—try and consciously spend time
being creative. Sometimes we had food delivered with foil, wrapped up, and we’d save
the foil, and we made foil murals on the walls, you know, sort of stuck it up
with soap—anything, basically, to keep ourselves mentally active, as well.
65.
AMY GOODMAN: You and Baher came up with a
universal media freedom charter?
66.
PETER GRESTE: That’s right. We, Baher and
I, were trying to think about what—first of all, what we could—why we were in
this situation and about the bigger issues around press freedom, not just in
Egypt, but globally, because I don’t think the issue is just—is confined. Even
in Australia, we have some fairly draconian laws that we’re fighting at the
moment to try and make sure that we keep press free to do the fundamental job
that we play in a democracy. And so, we’re seeing—we’re seeing the press
freedom eroded quite dramatically around the world. We felt that there needed
to be some kind of clear statement of the principles of journalism and the
roles and responsibilities that both journalists and governments need to have.
Something—we recognized that something that has force of law is probably too
difficult to get through, but something along the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights is the kind of thing that we’d be looking for that has—that sets a
gold standard of the way the relationship should work, of the roles and
responsibilities of both government and the media, that has, if not force of
law, certainly a lot of moral authority. This is still very much a work in
progress. This might not be the best solution that we’re—or the only solution,
but we need to do something to protect journalists in these kinds of
situations.
67.
AMY GOODMAN: In Egypt, there are still
more than 20 journalists who are behind bars, the most high-profile of them,
Abdullah Al-Fakharany, who has received a life sentence, also Mahmoud Abu Zeid,
who’s also known as Shawkan, who’s been held for over two years without trial.
68.
PETER GRESTE: Look, the Committee for the
Protection of Journalists has done those surveys. The Egyptian government
insists that it is operating within the law, insists that those journalists are
there because they broke—that there were specific breaches of the law.
69.
AMY GOODMAN: Like with you.
70.
PETER GRESTE: As they did with us,
exactly. The fact that we have been pardoned rather than acquitted, I think, is
still concerning for us. I would rather have our names cleared by the judicial
process.
71.
AMY GOODMAN: Although you haven’t been
pardoned.
72.
PETER GRESTE: But I haven’t—no, I haven’t
been pardoned, and so we need to go through that process.
73.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the role of Al
Jazeera? Mohamed Fahmy sued Al Jazeera for breach of contract, for saying that
they didn’t—they weren’t concerned enough with security. Your thoughts about
whether Al Jazeera stood up for you enough?
74.
PETER GRESTE: Look, my feeling—there’s no
doubt that Al Jazeera made some mistakes in the way that they handled our case,
in the way that they handled things up in the lead-up to our arrest.
75.
AMY GOODMAN: Because a group from Al
Jazeera English was arrested before you all came in.
76.
PETER GRESTE: Yes, yeah, that’s right.
And there had been a lot of pressure on Al Jazeera and the journalists and the
teams in Egypt. You know, Al Jazeera has never had the best relationship with
the Egyptian authorities, and we understood that. And certainly there are some
difficult questions to answer, and we’ve been through some fairly difficult
forensic debates with our bosses. And, you know, it’s very—it’s still very much
a work in progress.
But my view has
always been that Al Jazeera, as an institution, was not on trial. If Egypt had
problems with Al Jazeera as a network or with Qatar as a government, then it
needed to deal with those organizations and those institutions at the
appropriate level, not come after some guys on the ground. We were the ones who
were specifically charged with aiding a terrorist organization, not the
network. It was the three of us. We were specifically the ones that were
charged with broadcasting false news. And so, we’ve always said, “Where was the
evidence against us?” There was none. We weren’t involved with any of that. We
were working as good professional journalists. We know our job. We know the
limits of what we should and shouldn’t be doing. And there was nothing—you
know, we did nothing criminal. We did not collude with terrorists. We certainly
weren’t doing anything unethical.
77.
AMY GOODMAN: And I wanted to ask what it
meant to you, journalists around the world putting tape over their mouths in
solidarity with you.
78.
PETER GRESTE: Oh, Amy, this was
extraordinary. You know, I was—we were absolutely overwhelmed by the scale of
the response, both by our professional colleagues and by the public, by
diplomats and politicians. You know, as you would know, journalists are about
as difficult to organize as a herd of cats. Instinctively, we fight each other.
We’re a skeptical, cynical, cantankerous bunch, and extremely competitive. And
so, to see our direct rivals, like the BBC, like Christiane Amanpour from CNN,
all taping their mouths up, holding “Free AJ staff” signs was unbelievably
gratifying to us, because it made it very clear that the journalists around the
world understood the significance of what we were going through and why this
fight was so important, because it wasn’t just about the three of us, it was
about the institution of press freedom.
79.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, of course, there
were your families, speaking out all along the way. Last year, Egyptian
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said he would not intervene on the sentencing of
the three Al Jazeera journalists to between seven and 10 years in prison, even
as international outcry spread. I wanted to play a clip of your father, of
Juris Greste, responding to that decision.
80.
JURIS GRESTE: This is a very
dark time, not only for our family, but for journalism generally. We are
devastated, shocked and dismayed at this finding. We are not usually a family
of superlatives, but I have to say this morning my vocabulary fails to convey
just how shattered we are. Journalism is not a crime, or you should all be
behind bars. It’s as simple as that. This man, our son Peter, is an
award-winning journalist. He is not a criminal. He’s not a criminal.
81.
AMY GOODMAN: That is your
father, Juris Greste. Where was he speaking?
82.
PETER GRESTE: He was speaking in Brisbane, at the ABC
studios in Brisbane. Yeah, watching that was quite difficult. You know,
my father, my parents went through hell through that year. They were
extraordinary advocates for us. They found a voice that I don’t think even they
knew that they had. They fought and campaigned and lobbied. You know, my father
is a retired architect. My mother is a social worker—again, a retired social
worker. And all of a sudden they became international lawyers and diplomats and
campaigners, completely outside their comfort zone. And so, you know, it was an
incredibly tough time for all the family. But to be honest with you, I don’t
think I’d be here now if it weren’t for them.
83.
AMY GOODMAN: Because?
84.
PETER GRESTE: Because they were the
voice. They gave—they took my story and made it human. They made people
understand what was really going on with us at a very human level. They made
people appreciate what was going on. They allowed people to empathize and
identify not just with us, but with the family, the extended family. And I
think they helped really convey the fact that we weren’t terrorists, that we
weren’t criminals, that we were professional journalists who were working with
all the integrity and professionalism that we could muster.
85.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and
then come back to the end of this discussion. Our guest for the hour is Peter
Greste, an Al Jazeera journalist who was imprisoned in Egypt for 400 days
during the crackdown on Al Jazeera following the ouster of President Mohamed
Morsi. He was arrested December 29th, 2013, with his two Al Jazeera colleagues,
Baher Mohamed and
Mohamed Fahmy. Back with him in a moment. [break] Our guest for the hour
is Peter Greste, Al Jazeera journalist, known around the world because he was
one of three Al Jazeera journalists imprisoned in Egypt. He was in prison for
400 days. He is here in New York seeking a pardon from the Egyptian president,
el-Sisi, who is at the U.N. General Assembly. Whether he gets that, we’ll see.
His two other colleagues, while held longer than he was, Baher Mohamed and Mohamed
Fahmy, by a number of weeks, they were pardoned last week along with 100
others in Egypt.
I wanted to ask you
about coverage of prisons and also of refugees. And you’ve reported all over
the world. You won a major award covering Somalia, for example. You are the son
of an asylum seeker in Australia?
86.
PETER GRESTE: Yeah, of a refugee. My
father is Latvian. His family fled Latvia when the Russians annexed the Baltic
states, back during World War II—excuse me—and they came out to Australia as
refugees in the wake of World War II. So, you know, in a way, of course,
everybody, apart from the Aborigines in Australia, are migrants of some sort,
whether they’re refugees or migrants seeking a better life. Everybody has come
to Australia, I think, in much the same case—same way that they’ve come here,
at some point, to this country.
87.
AMY GOODMAN: And you criticized the
former prime minister of Australia, Tony Abbott.
88.
PETER GRESTE: Yes. Well, I’ve—it was
interesting. This was at the National Press Club, where somebody gave a speech—
89.
AMY GOODMAN: In Australia.
90.
PETER GRESTE: In Australia, yes, the
National Press Club in Canberra. And, in fact, we had Julie Bishop, our foreign
minister, sitting in the audience, and someone asked me about coverage of the
refugee detention center in Nauru, an island to the north of Australia where
asylum seekers are being held. And I made the point that—
91.
AMY GOODMAN: So they keep them on islands
in the South Pacific.
92.
PETER GRESTE: That’s right, they keep
them on islands away from the press. The press have been refused, have been
denied access to those areas. And I felt very, very strongly about this, that
this is not—we’re not been denied access on national security grounds. It’s
impossible, I think, to justify denying access to journalists to those
detention centers, because in a democracy the government acts in our name, the
government works for us, as voters, as taxpayers. And so, unless there is a
very clear, very specific reason for denying us access on national security
grounds—and I simply can’t see why there would be in the case of asylum seekers—then
we need to know what’s being done in our name. The only reason we can think of
is that those detention centers might actually be embarrassing to the
Australian government. Well, frankly, that’s not good enough. In a democracy,
we need to understand what’s being done.
93.
AMY GOODMAN: They either put them in
detention centers or turn them away, the boats.
94.
PETER GRESTE: That’s right, exactly. And
anybody who tries to get into Australia by boat is automatically placed in
those detention centers and either sent back to their country of origin or
resettled in third countries. They will not be allowed into Australia. It’s a
very controversial policy. The government—the government of Tony Abbott has
insisted that it’s the only practical approach to stopping the boats. They say
that this is for the safety of those—of the asylum seekers themselves, because
they argue that in fact by stopping the movement of refugees, they’re
effectively shutting down the people smugglers, which are—who are responsible
for so many deaths at sea. Whether or not that’s actually saving lives is a
debatable question. Whether this is the best way of doing that is something
that is a debate that I think is still ongoing. And one of the key elements to
that debate is whether it’s appropriate to keep those asylum seekers on those
islands in those detention centers, in conditions that, frankly, we know are
quite severe, but we really haven’t been able to examine properly because the
press simply isn’t allowed access.
95.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, you laid a wreath
along with Shirley Shackleton, the widow of Greg Shackleton.
96.
PETER GRESTE: Yes.
97.
AMY GOODMAN: A story I think our viewers
and listeners know well, about East Timor. He was killed in the lead-up to
the—Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor by Indonesian forces.
98.
PETER GRESTE: Yeah, yeah.
99.
AMY GOODMAN: You laid a wreath at the
graves of war—or monument to war correspondents who have died.
100.
PETER GRESTE: That’s right. This was
something—and I’m getting goosebumps actually remembering all—remembering this.
This is—and something I’m very proud of. The Australian government has, after a
long, long time—the Australian War Memorial has agreed to a wreath—sorry, to a
memorial to not just correspondents who have been killed in action, to war
correspondents who have been killed in action, but to all those who serve in
conflict zones as reporters. And I think it’s an extremely timely reminder of
why—of the role that foreign correspondents, that war correspondents play in
keeping people informed of what’s going on. We have to have a place that’s—we
have a place that’s accepted, the government accepts that we have a legitimate
role to play. And it’s right and proper, I think, that that role is
memorialized.
101.
AMY GOODMAN: We have two seconds. I want
to thank you so much, Peter Greste, Al Jazeera journalist.
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