For how many years, or rather for how many centuries have these words run into your hearings and shaken your spirits? I for myself since childhood have heard these words, coined by politicians and those who are in charge and repeated over and over by Arab intellectuals until they turned into a sort of fossils in this reality submerged/sunk, or rather buried, deep down into history.

These words barely leave their place or change over time; they are not solid but rigid, not stable but stagnant, as if we were a critically ailing nation that could not leave the Intensive Care Unit nor accept being laid down once and for all into a proper coffin!

The strange and surprising thing, however, is that Arab press is really passing through a hard moment and a critical stage, as journalist face their fates either in the form of a car bomb or an explosive legal article or a religious licence, “fatwa”, that prohibits and excommunicate.

It is as though corruption, tyranny and terrorism have made a once-only agreement to detonate the journalist’s freedom,

All the rivals have joined efforts against press freedom,

All those whom you see scrambling, competing, calling one another’s names, quarrelling and disputing at summit meetings never come out with any agreement, except on the bottom line of fighting press freedom. This is the only war Arab rulers have ever agreed upon. The same ones who show hostility towards Israel or come to a peace settlement with her, are the same ones who enforce Islamic laws and ban the use of veil by females. They are the inheritor president and his successor, the king and the crown prince, the sultan and the sultanate, Their Excellencies and Highnesses, the military general and the medical doctor, the colonel and the sergeant. Every single ruler in the Arab World governs exclusively by issuing orders to bomb pens and to hound journalists.

So there is no need for journalists in this wide homeland, dwarfed by her rulers, but to meet and gather in solidarity and to rise above/transcend their differences over loyalty and opposition in each Arab region stricken with despotism, so that they can support the freedom of the press in the face of oppression of dictatorship, corruption and tyranny of extremism.

Let me summarize my case by revealing to you a well-known secret: Since 1992, when I was twenty seven years old, my name was on the assassination target-list of a terrorist organization in Egypt called “The Returned from Afghanistan-2”, and I had to be escorted by a bodyguard designated by Egyptian police in every step during more than six years, but it was the police who later confiscated my novel and then it was the al-Azhar religious institution who banned a book to mine and, finally, it was the ruling party who sentenced me, through his judiciary system, into prison eight times. It seems as if religious extremism and political despotism are two faces for one monster, so much so that independent and free journalists remain squeezed under its hooves or claws.

Dear colleagues,

I was honoured and pleased to receive the award for more than one reason. Firstly, because it is associated with Gebran Tueni, a benchmark for freedom of expression in our Arab media, whose blood was mixed with his ink to such an extent that we could hardly know with which one he really used to write. Secondly, because the award bears the name of WAN, one the most noble and prestigious media organizations that has proven to be a steady fence for us against demolishing tempests, and finally because it gives a kiss of life to writers in Arab countries, where the press is lethally suffocated.

Let me add that the award is given no less than in Beirut, the capital that keeps a portion of our fancies, emotions and freedom and the city that we always wish it to be our balcony to paradise.

Thank you very much indeed, May God’s mercy and peace be upon you

Ibrahim Essa