Apartheid did not die

October 19, 2007

SOUTH AFRICA: THE NEW APARTHEID .

The series began in South Africa where a huge rise in illegal immigration from Zimbabwe and other African states is behind an increase in racism and xenophobic violence. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy journeys from the Zimbabwean border to one of Johannesburg’s most dangerous quarters to investigate. Reporter Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Director Robin Barnwell begin their film on the Zimbabwean border with a group of Zimbabweans as they begin a long journey to Johannesburg. The South African police stop them but let them go in exchange it is claimed, for a bribe, which the people smugglers claim is routine. The Zimbabweans say they are fleeing a collapsing state, where President Mugabeâ?(TM)s policies have driven the economy into crisis and where earning enough to feed their families is impossible. However, the South Africans blame them for a crime wave and accuse them of causing unemployment. White farmers in the Limpopo border region tell Unreported World that the immigrants are perpetrating brutal farm murders and poaching their game. The team films several farmers taking the law into their own hands by rounding them up, tying them together and handing them over to the police. Itâ?(TM)s not just the farmers who believe these migrants are fuelling a crime wave. The team moves on to Johannesburg and films with police in one of the cityâ?(TM)s most dangerous areas. They accompany officers who routinely use plastic bullets to round up suspected illegal immigrants. Those they catch are sent to the Lindela detention centre. The team interview a group of Congolese men who accuse the guards of severely beating them. Another inmate laments that South Africans have forgotten the support that their â?oeAfrican brothersâ? gave them during the days of Apartheid and accuses black South Africans of being the â?oebiggest racists in the worldâ?. The team then travel to the suburb of Diepsloot where the local South African business community has written an extraordinary letter to Somalian shopkeepers asking them to leave. The shopkeepers - who say theyâ?(TM)re asylum seekers rather than illegal immigrants - fear they will suffer similar violent attacks to those suffered by other immigrant communities. A group of protestors gathers, demanding that South Africa should be for South Africans only. One woman tells Unreported World that black South Africans fought long and hard to gain their freedom that these benefits are now being stolen by illegal immigrants. The team are then allowed to film on board a train returning 400 Zimbabwean illegal immigrants back to the border. Some are so desperate to remain, that they throw themselves from the moving train during the night. Almost all say they will be back in the country within a few days. Given the ever-worsening economic environment in Zimbabwe they say they have no other choice.

Fleeing Zimbabwe

October 4, 2007

abc.net.au

Broadcast: 10/04/2007

Reporter: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

LEAD STORY
SERIES 16
EPISODE 29

Synopsis

This story begins on the Zimbabwe border, as a group of Zimbabweans are attempting to cross through into South Africa with hopes of reaching Johannesburg. In recent months, thousands have made the journey - some being arrested and forced back home only to return a few days later.

The immigrants say they are fleeing a collapsing state, where President Mugabe’s policies have driven the economy into crisis, and where earning enough to feed their families is impossible.

There are some South Africans who are welcoming. Bishop Paul Verryn of the Central Methodist church in Johannesburg provides shelter for hundreds of immigrants, most of them illegal, who cram into the corridors of the church to sleep every night.

But many are angry about the intrusion, and blame the immigrants for an increase in crime and unemployment. They say the illegals are responsible for thefts and violent assaults and should be treated harshly.

While white farmers in the Limpopo border region have been involved in detaining the illegal visitors, it is the black South Africans living in the townships who are most hostile.

“We did fight for this South Africa” says an one indignant township resident
“Now, it’s for us. The freedom is for us, not for illegals.“

This is ironic given that the blacks of South Africa’s townships once turned to the rest of Africa for support in their struggle for freedom.

It’s an attitude not unnoticed by their Zimbabwean neighbours.

“Black South Africans, they are the worlds number 1 racists” says a Zimbabwean detainee.

Broadcast Journalist of the Year: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

July 19, 2007

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is the youngest ever winner of the Broadcast Journalist of the Year award.

Her documentary ‘The New Apartheid’ is a remarkable documentation of how South Africa deals with the increasing number of illegal immigrants crossing the border from Zimbabwe who attempt to escape Mugabe’s regime. Many South Africans blame the increasing crime rates and unemployment on the Zimbabwean immigrants and this documentary reveals the growing violence perpetuated by racism and xenophobia.

Sharmeen speaks to South African border police on the look out for illegal immigrantsThe jury said:

“Shameen Obaid-Chinoy has a style all of her own. Her report from South Africa was a dramatic piece of television but it was also a very even-handed exposition of the problems caused by migration in Southern Africa. She is broadcaster of great presence who hits a story from every angle to communicate directly with her audience.”

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy said:

“The one world media award is particularly dear to me because of what it represents. Its testimony to the fact that international journalism is essential, that stories from across the global have value and that if we persevere the story will make an impact.

I was born and raised in Pakistan, where a woman has to scream out loud to have any chance of being heard! My mother always told me to write, to lobby and to hammer away at an issue until a solution was found. I have carried that advice with me from Afghanistan to East Timor, in search of stories that are often swept under the carpet. I look for the voices of the ordinary men and women on the streets that are drowned out by politics and politicians. To me that is the work of an international journalist, and to be honest, finding and bringing those stories to television screens is what I strive for.”

Dispatches reporter scoops One World broadcast journalism award

June 25, 2007

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy has become the youngest-ever winner of broadcast journalist of the year at the One World Media Awards, celebrating coverage of the developing world.

At 27, Obaid is best known in the UK for work on Channel 4’s Unreported World and Dispatches.

Born and raised in Pakistan, her work has tackled the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in her home country, the women’s movement in Saudi Arabia and the Catholic Church’s pro-life movement in the Philippines.

The awards, presented by Channel 4’s Jon Snow at a ceremony in London on 14 June, are the work of the One World Broadcasting trust, which promotes coverage of the developing world.

Obaid’s broadcasting career began while studying print journalism in the United States, when her documentary pitch about the effects of the Afghan war on child refugees was picked up by New York Times Television.

The film, Terrorist’s Children, went on to win two top journalism awards in the US and led to Obaid working for NYTT for three years. She said of the experience: “I think I quite baffled them [the television station] to be quite honest. They didn’t expect an educated Muslim woman from Pakistan to walk in with a proposal, ideas and an entire budget written out. And honestly, I took a chance.”

Obaid was originally hired as a director, but after one month of filming she discovered that she hadn’t recorded any audio. When the executives in New York asked her to go back and refilm they suggested that she front the piece, launching her career as an on-screen reporter.

She said her sex had helped her gain access to people that a man might not. “It helps tremendously that I’m a woman. If I was a man, I don’t think I could do the kind of journalism that I do; not in the kind of countries I go to and the people I speak to. They open up to me. They don’t perceive me as a threat because I’m a woman. If I were a man and said something to a militant in Kashmir that he would deem offensive he would retaliate.”

Obaid met Channel 4’s Kevin Sutcliffe when seeking for funding for a co-production on an American project, which led to her work on Unreported World. She said British television audiences were more knowledgeable about global affairs because of more coverage.

“In America they try and skirt around the issue whereas in England they are direct about what is happening in parts of the world. If you are doing a film about Pakistan for an American audience, first you have to tell them where the hell Pakistan is, what Pakistan is, its history – by the time you get into the story 10 minutes of the film is gone.”

Other winners in the awards included the Mail on Sunday’s Damien Lewis, recipient of the Popular Features award for his Darfur coverage, and ITV News’s Chris Rogers, who won the Children’s Rights award for his work on Romania’s unwanted children.
Postscript :

Full list of winners:

Broadcast journalist of the year: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Unreported World, Channel 4

Awards for Guardian journalists

June 15, 2007

Two of our reporters were among those who won awards last night for their dispatches from the developing world.
Murray Armstrong

Two Guardian journalists were awarded for their reporting from the developing world at last night’s One World Media awards.

Joanna Moorhead, along with freelance photographer Anna Kari, won the Millennium Development Goals award for their feature comparing maternity care in Africa and Europe. Different planets told the human stories behind an international report last year that showed the best place in the world to give birth is Sweden and the worst is Niger.

Our China correspondent Jonathan Watts picked up the Press award for his Weekend magazine feature, The big steal, a story of violent protest by millions of China’s peasant families against land grabs by local authorities and developers. The rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of the country has created an angry army of the dispossessed.

Broadcast journalist of the year is Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy of Channel 4 for her documentary on the ill-treatment in South Africa of migrants from Zimbabwe.

The special award for community media went to Radio Sagarmatha of Nepal, an independent community broadcasting station that defied the media ban during last year’s unrest.

The awards were presented by Jon Snow, a patron of the One World Broadcasting Trust and regular presenter of its awards. The trust was established in 1987 to promote understanding between developing and developed countries through the effective use of media.

The full shortlist of nominations is on the owtb.org website. All of the winners are not listed there yet but I’m sure they’ll be posted soon.

Documentary filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy - TORONTO STAR

December 31, 2006

LESLIE SCRIVENER
STAFF REPORTER

In a scene from Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s first film, Terror’s Children, a Pakistani boy in a pro-Taliban religious school looks gravely at her and says those who believe in God must not watch TV. Women do not need an education and, he says pointedly, the filmmaker’s face should be covered with a veil.

Obaid-Chinoy’s face is not covered. She’s a Smith College alumna and has two post-graduate degrees from Stanford. And her fearless documentaries are shown around the world.

In her short career, launched when she was still in university, Obaid-Chinoy has made 10 personal, passionate documentaries and won as many prizes. Now 28 and based in Toronto, she is making two more films in 2007, one on the lives of Afghan women five years after the U.S. invasion, and another on the legacy of Zimbabwe strongman Robert Mugabe.

Obaid-Chinoy started work on the Afghan women film, which she’s making for Britain’s Channel 4, this month. “I’m not as interested in Kabul, but in the women in the tiny towns and villages, the voices you never hear,” she says.

Terror’s Children, about Afghan refugees living in her homeland, Pakistan, launched her career in 2002 and immediately won three awards.

Her second, a searing look at the rise of fundamentalism in Pakistan, won four more prizes, including the Livingston Award for young journalists under 35. Obaid-Chinoy was the first non-American to receive it. Other winners in the category of international reporting include David Remnick, now editor of The New Yorker, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times and Christiane Amanpour of CNN.

Bill Abrams, former president of New York Times Television, says when he first encountered Obaid-Chinoy, then a college student, “I thought, this person could be the next Christiane Amanpour - sophisticated, smart, fearless.”

With patrician good looks, Obaid-Chinoy had a privileged upbringing in Karachi, one in which education and accomplishment were prized. Her mother, who married at 17 and stayed home to raise six children, wanted to be a journalist and encouraged her five daughters to write and express themselves.

Sharmeen grew up, as she says in one of her films, wearing jeans and listening to Guns N’Roses. She was the first in her family to go to a co-ed school. By 16, she was doing undercover stories on the sale of passports to illegal immigrants. “That landed me in a lot of trouble,” she recalls. Her name, linked with profanities, was spray-painted around Karachi.

When her textile manufacturer father resisted her pleas to go to university in the U.S., she went on 36-hour hunger strike.

Obaid-Chinoy, who lives in York Mills with her husband, investment banker Fahd Chinoy, and his family, says that when she came here after getting married, “It seemed like the kind of country where there were no stories for me - no human rights violations, no women subjugated. But when you live in a country, then you understand its issues.”

Which led to Highway of Tears, about the disappearance of native women in B.C., released this year. The CBC didn’t respond to her proposal, but Al Jazeera International did and funded the project.

“I’d like to do a film in Canada,” she says, “but it’s too difficult. National Film Board funding takes too long, and there’s too much paperwork; by the time the film is approved the topic is dead and gone.

“My topics are timely. When an event is happening is when I want to be there … I think it is our duty to challenge the status quo. What good is my parents’ wealth and education and upbringing if I’m not contributing to the world?”

Immigrants are victims as ‘apartheid’ returns to South Africa

October 13, 2006

By Sharmeen Obaid Chinnoy in Diepsloot, South Africa

Published: 13 October 2006

As dawn breaks over Zimbabwe, Douglas Foster and five other men crouch behind a fence, waiting for a South African border police patrol to pass. Shivering in the cold September rain they wriggle their way through three sets of fences to enter South Africa illegally. Desperate to escape the spiralling poverty in Zimbabwe, they risk everything to join millions of other African immigrants in one of the continent’s most economically prosperous nations.

No one knows how many illegal immigrants there are in South Africa. A recent census suggested 1.1 million, but the real figure is almost certainly far higher. They come from all over the continent - Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo - but their growing numbers are causing a major backlash, leading to what some describe as a second apart-heid. Xenophobia is on the rise and in the past three months more than 32 Somalis have been killed.

Article Length: 516 words (approx.)

Television: Friday, Oct 13 -The Times

October 13, 2006

by david chater
GALAPAGOS
BBC Two, 9pmThe final part of this achingly beautiful miniseries features some of the strangest-looking creatures so far, including the guineafowl puffer fish and the spotted eagle ray.

But even these do not begin to compare with the otherworldliness of the creatures that float up each night from the depths of the ocean. The series ends on a cautionary note, describing the threat to the fragile ecosystem of the islands that once were protected by their isolation. That isolation is long gone. Now there are more introduced plants than native ones; goats that were brought in as a reliable source of food have ravaged the vegetation and 100,000 tourists visit each year. Sadly, this lovely series can only increase the threat.

UNREPORTED WORLD
Channel 4, 7.35pm

The suits at Channel 4 deserve to be proud of their continued support for this strand. Big Brother may pay their bills, but Unreported World — focusing on matters of life and death that affect hundreds of thousands of people in some of the least publicised parts of the globe — is one of the moral arteries of the channel.

In the first of a new series, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy reports from South Africa, where refugees from all over the continent are flooding

into the country as illegal immigrants and being treated abominably. Either they are accused of stealing jobs and creating a crime wave, or exploited as virtual slave labour. In the country that overcame apartheid, an illegal immigrant says: “I feel I’m being treated like an animal.”

JOHNNY KINGDOM: A YEAR ON EXMOOR
BBC Two, 8pm

Heaven knows, we all have our prejudices. Personally, I’ve never been too keen on wildlife presenters who hurl themselves at crocodiles, shout with excitement at the viewer or present themselves as capital-c Characters. (David Attenborough deliberately wears nondescript clothing in front of the camera because, he says, he doesn’t want to be a distraction.) Johnny Kingdom, on the other hand, is a wildly enthusiastic presenter, covered in tattoos and camouflage clothing, who addresses the viewer like a long-lost friend at a noisy party. Admittedly, he looks after a delightful three-legged deer (aka “the tripod”) and films glorious images of badgers and stags on Exmoor — but it’s very much the “Heeeere’s Johnny!” approach to natural history.

Pak woman filmmaker wins one more award

August 26, 2004

Published: Thursday, 26 August, 2004, 11:55 AM Doha Time

WASHINGTON: Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, the Pakistani-Canadian documentary filmmaker, has won one more award, after having been declared the Broadcast Journalist of the Year by One World Media, a London-based organisation.
Her documentary The New Apartheid has been called a remarkable documentation of how South Africa deals with the increasing number of illegal immigrants crossing the border from Zimbabwe attempting to escape President Robert Mugabe’s regime.
Many South Africans blame the increasing crime rates and unemployment on the Zimbabwean immigrants and the documentary reveals the growing violence perpetuated by racism and xenophobia.
The jury said of the Karachi-born filmmaker’s work: “Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy has a style all of her own. Her report from South Africa was a dramatic piece of television, but it was also a very even-handed exposition of the problems caused by migration in Southern Africa. She is broadcaster of great presence who hits a story from every angle to communicate directly with her audience.”
She began her career with New York Times Television in 2002 for which she produced Terror’s Children - a film about Afghan refugee children.
That documentary won three awards. She also made a film on the resurgence Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan, followed by a documentary on women of Saudi Arabia. Since 2003, she has produced and written for Frontline World, the award winning series on PBS.
Her documentaries On a Razor’s Edge and Cold Comfort explore the complex issues that confront Pakistan since the start of the war against terrorism. —Internews
Gulf Times Newspaper, 2007