by Natalie Kempner

The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was awarded June 16 in London to U.S. journalist, Dahr Jamail and Palestinian journalist, Mohammed Omer. Jamail reports from Iraq and Omer from his native Gaza. The two freelance writers will share the L5000 prize money.

U.S. journalist Martha Gellhorn lived from 1908 until 1999. She reported from the front line of virtually every major conflict from the Spanish Civil War to the invasion of Panama in 1989. At the outbreak of the Bosnia war in the 1990’s, she decided she was too old to go: “You need to be nimble.”

Gellhorn was in Spain in 1937 when the carpet bombing of the Basque town of Guernica marked the moment when indiscriminate bombing of civilians became a tactic of war. She followed the troops to Normandy in 1944, and was among the first to enter the Dachau concentration camp and report its horrors. When she identified the atrocities in Vietnam as a “new kind of war” against civilians, her articles were suppressed in the U.S.; she was banned from South Vietnam by the U.S. military. In the 1970’s, she wrote from El Salvador, “We hold shameful passports!”

In 1999, The Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism was established to honor her kind of reporting: “the view from the ground.” It is awarded annually to journalists writing in English. All six of the current judges knew Gellhorn well and try to judge from her point of view. “We would expect the winner to tell an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts, that exposes establishment conduct and its propaganda, or “official drivel” as Martha called it.“

With those criteria, it is not surprising that U.S. journalists have not been winners. Dahr Jamail is the first. For the first time, the award was expanded to include writers of credible websites and Jamail, excluded from the world of corporate US media, became eligible. His expose of the siege of the Iraqi city of Falluja was hailed by the judges as “a beacon of modern war reporting.” Not a follower of websites, I first knew of Jamail’s Fallujah reporting in November 2005 when the American Friends Service Committee organized a New Dahr Jamail Honored for England speaking tour for Jamail and I volunteered to provide transportation and overnight hospitality. At Bowdoin College’s filled Kresge auditorium, he told the untold story of the November 2004 siege of Fallujah, illustrating it with the powerful underground documentary of the indiscriminate bombing of Fallujah and its civilians, “Caught in the Crossfire.”

Next morning at breakfast Dahr talked about growing up in Texas, the youngest of three, in an ultra- conservative family. After college, he left Texas for mountain climbing, ending up in Alaska as a guide and volunteer rescue ranger. In the spring of 2003, he spent long evenings listening to radio reports of the invasion of Iraq and got so “pissed” by the contradictions that he knew he had to take off to meet and talk to the Iraqi people who were so absent from the news being reported. By November, having saved $2000, he designed his own press card and, with a laptop, a camera and some internet contacts he set out to see for himself. At that time he had not heard of a blog, but his long reports to friends were essentially that, and, as word got around, he found himself producing Dahr Jamail’s Weblog. Toward the end of his first tour, he realized he might actually return to Iraq and work as a journalist.

If it were not for the Internet, The Nation, and independent sources such as “Democracy Now!” Jamail’s voice would not be heard in this country, as Gellhorn’s so often was not heard in her time.

In the Afterward of his book, Beyond the Green Zone, published in the fall of 2007, Jamail laments this inability to share more widely: “If the people of the United states had the real story about what their government has done in Iraq, the occupation would already have ended. As a journalist, I continue to hold out hope that if people have knowledge of what is happening they will act accordingly.”

Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill calls Dahr Jamail “ the conscience of American war reporting, the quintessential unembedded reporter.” As Jamail carries Gellhorn’s legacy of truth-seeking into the 21st century, we can hope he comes to be heard and honored, even in his own country.