Profile in Courage - Corrine Dufka

So, the other day, I was roving on google, looking for inspiring women I never heard of. There are a lot of women achievers around the world, doing a lot of great things. Some are famous. Most, not so much. I was looking for investigative journalists who had worked in Africa. I found a website; The International Women's Media Foundation [IWMF]. I began looking at the profiles of the women honored over the years with an IWMF Courage award. You have to admire a person willing to endure serous personal risk to achieve something good and decent.

My attention was drawn to the winner of the 1997 IWMF Courage Award. Her name is Corinne Dufka. After getting a masters in Social Welfare at Cal-Berkeley, Corinne Dufka started using a camera to report on very scary political and social conflict. She goes down to central America as an assertive freelance photojournalist, photographing unrest and violence in El Salvador. After that, she gets a gig with Reuters news service, photographing the war in the former Yugoslavia. Next stop is Africa, where she regularly put herself at risk making a photo record of the lawless violence and dysfunction in a succession of nations, including Rwanda, Sudan, Liberia and others on the west coast of Africa. Along the way, she was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and was awarded the 1997 Courage in Journalism Award from the IWMF.

Corrine Dufka

In 1999, Corrine Dufka left Reuters to become a researcher for Human Rights Watch, focusing on Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, and otherWest African Nations.

I just read an article dated 3/25/2011 with Corrine Dufka's byline in Foreign Policy online. Titled, The Case for Intervention in the Ivory Coast, it spotlights a part of the world that rarely gets any attention. The situation Corrine Dufka reports on in the Ivory Coast is very unsettling, but not surprising given the post-colonial history of Africa. Most of the media focus on Africa goes to larger nations like the Congo and Nigeria, but with few exceptions, the entire continent has long been a cauldron of strongman leaders seizing control of nations using violence and corruption. Mass scale oppression in Africa is something that was first introduced by Europeans who claimed large swaths of the African landscape, establishing political boundaries that have little or no cultural reference to the people living there. One particularly audacious 19th century European leader, King Leopold II of Belgium, claimed the Congo, an area larger than all of Europe, not for his people, but for himself. Anyway, no one should be surprised that the post-colonial political dysfunction reflected in Africa would emerge from such a background.

I am probably better informed about Africa than most Americans. But I confess, I was not aware of the situation in the Ivory Coast. Were it not for journalists and advocates like Corrine Dufka, the political dysfunction and ugliness in places like the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and Liberia would remain mostly a mystery.We know what we know about those places because of brave and determined people who go there, risking their lives, to shed light on the often violent reality of life in Africa.

Corrine Dufka continues to serve the interests of justice in Africa as a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch. She remains a mostly unsung hero, by all appearances, a  profoundly good soul, driven by a deep seated need to mnake a difference.

Here are two press releases from Human Rights Watch for which Corrine Dufka is a primary source.

 

Mali - Armed Groups Spread Fear  - 9/25/12

Mali - Security Forces Disappear 20 - Torture Others - 7/25/12