Basma Mostafa, an Egyptian Investigative journalist in Exile, takes us through her journey from field journalism to investigative journalism. She talks about how the revolution inspired her to be a journalist, her journey from field to investigative journalism and how she is learning new ways to cover Egypt from exile, being mindful of her mental health.
I love and enjoy collecting the information, and the verification process is really amazing because it's like a puzzle. At first, you have nothing, maybe you have one piece of this puzzle. And you start to have the second piece and third piece and collect more and more and more and more until you have the whole image clear. And really this process is very amazing to me and exciting. Because when I collect all the pieces I feel power; I feel the importance of our job and our role.
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About the speaker
Basma Mostafa is an accomplished Egyptian investigative journalist exiled in Berlin. She has worked with Mnemonic which digitally documents human rights violations and international crimes in Sudan and has over a decade of experience uncovering human rights abuses in Egypt.
Mostafa has a strong track record in reporting on gender issues, sexual violence, discrimination against minorities, and police brutality.
A fellow with both Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the institute für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA).
She contributes regularly to international newspapers and received both international and local awards for her work.
Mostafa has been arrested and jailed on three occasions because of her work.
Transcript
In 2011, I had no idea about journalism or human rights crime, but my father got arrested after the revolution; random arrest. I used to visit him and there a lot of families had the same situation -like no one knew about them. So I start to just write on my Facebook account about what I see. After that, I had a meeting with Khaled El-Balshy. He asked me to take a laptop and write. After a while, I found the draft publisher on Al-Badeel website with my name and I started my work. Journalists at that time helped me with my father's case, and they inspired me; I decided to be one of them. I chose to cover human rights violations in Egypt. I felt we should be telling the other story that the state wants to deny.
My name is Basma Mostafa. I'm an investigative journalist from Egypt and now based in Berlin. I focus on human rights violations in Egypt. And I got arrested three times in Egypt because of my journalistic work, and because of this I fled the country since two years.
The first thing I had a passion to cover was military courts against civilians. After that I started to learn some tools; and I was in the field covering the demos and writing about random arrests and how the state attacks activists and human rights defenders. Yeah, I think until 2013. The coup happened, and the first thing Sisi did was to control the media outlets and I started to work as a freelance investigative journalist.
If you are a journalist in the field, your life, your reporting, everything, is about going in the street to cover what happens in the street, so no time to think about a big story or a big investigation or, specific information you want to figure out; because you're focused on what's going on now on the street. I did a shift between field journalism and investigative journalism because somehow in Egypt there is no field anymore, for any journalist.
Like in Afroto case, this is a guy who got tortured and killed in a police station in Egypt. I went to the field to report about the case, but there I found that this incident must be more, more big. So I investigated the whole information but I was in the field. And after that, I published an investigation, a big investigation, but the format was different. It's just a big investigation, but all the information I collected was from the street, from the hospital, from witnesses. I think field journalism and investigative journalism must be connected.
I love and enjoy collecting the information, and the verification process is really amazing because it's like a puzzle. At first, you have nothing, maybe you have one piece of this puzzle. And you start to have the second piece and third piece and collect more and more and more and more until you have the whole image clear. And really this process is very amazing to me and exciting. Because when I collect all the pieces I feel power; I feel the importance of our job and our role.
In March 2016, I was working in Dotmsr. Dotmsr is an Egyptian website but the Egyptian intelligence controlled it and at the time I didn't know, really I didn't know this information. I was in New York, when I started my work with them and when I was there I read the news about Giulio Regeni's murder.
Hyder Abbasi Al Jazeera. Giulio Regeni went missing in Cairo on the 25th of January, the fifth anniversary of the uprising in Egypt. His body was found nine days later in a ditch, beaten, burned, and electrocuted. Egyptian investigators say Regeni was killed by a criminal gang. His mother rejects this account.
When I read the title of the news, I have this feeling that they are lying. So I said in my mind, yeah, maybe when I arrive in Egypt, I have to visit these people. And I remembered what happened to my father. I have this feeling towards the families - as a victim - because their son is killed and after that the whole media writes shit about them and publishes their names, their photos. I went back and I told my editor-in-chief, I have an investigation about the five people who were killed last week, and security forces charged them with Giulio Regeni's murder. We did the investigation and everything is clear, the information is correct and the verification is done. And after that the editor-in-chief said something like, ‘we have to wait for the management approval, so we will not publish this investigation now’. And I started to feel that something is weird, something is not correct. My colleague, who reviewed the investigation after me already, and he saw that everything is done, everything is clear. He decides to publish the investigation without waiting for their approval. After that, they published a decision like 'Basma Mostafa shouldn't write about politics or human rights in Egypt, or military or police officers ...' And they put me in the lifestyle department. And I stayed for one month in that place, and after that, I decided to leave because I got arrested on March 24, 2016. They released me after they got some calls, and I started to understand that something, something big happened outside. And after they released me, I found that the Italian prosecution published a statement about me. And when I arrived at my office my colleagues told me that there was a kind of cooperation between security and the management to hand me over.
I think Giulio Regeni's case, and the Egyptians, the five Egyptians dead. Not the first, but the biggest investigative journalism I did, and it put me on the list of the Egyptian security. And of course, also for me after this investigation, I started to figure out my tools and my power as a journalist and what can I do, and what is the topic I will cover in the next investigation. This investigation made something like a mapping for me, for my journalistic work, for Basma.
There is no one way to pick my stories. First, I have to follow the news every day, every morning. For me, the official news is more interesting to take the information from them, and after that, you do your research, so you will find when and where they are lying. And in this topic and in this information maybe there is something to investigate. Another way is to be among people and you have open ears to listen to everything , to just listen to the people, what they are saying, what they are experiencing. And of course when I was in Egypt, until I got arrested and fled, I still had this connection with the field. When something was happening in the field, and I knew it may be ... It was very risky, but I always told myself 'yeah but you have to do it. You have the duty. You must be there and try to protect yourself the most. But also we should bring this story from the street because it happened in the street.' So, yeah.
And I started telling myself every day 'Basma is the most important, if Basma is not well, she can do nothing.' In Berlin, I decided to go to Charité Hospital. I registered myself in a mental health program for journalists like me and have the same experience with prison in their country and now living in exile. And I think I keep making progress in my mental health.
Now I am working with Mnemonic organization in the Sudanese archive. We make open source investigations about the coup in Sudan. And we make open source documentation about human rights crimes in Sudan. And, I found open source to be really amazing and very interesting, and I use it now to cover a lot of crime from Sudan; just online. I collect a video or a photo to show a violation, and I started to know about how to verify this video from Google maps. I can define where this crime happened and on which street. So these tools, I think, enable me to work again about Egypt, from distance or from the exile.
There is no safety guarantee 100%, but as a journalist, you have to follow some rules as a safety measure - not just for the journalist but also for our resources. Usually I use Signal, encrypted mail, I close my location from everything, my phone, my laptop. I did risk assessment, always, but yeah, you know, in a military country like Egypt, not all of the tools can work. I think in Egypt they pay a lot of money to be in advance in this topic: how to spy on journalists and human rights defenders.
I think all journalists know about the risk in journalism work and they have to accept it. If we don't accept the risk in our job, we will not be working again. The one thing keeping me working is that I just accept the risk in my work. And we shouldn't as a journalist pay something for our work, but somehow you find yourself, you pay something.
I am tired a lot because of journalism and sometimes I take breaks or keep distance for some months. But I always come back and yeah, I think after I left Egypt I felt that I hated journalism the most, because it just exposed me to pain. But after I started to calm down and thought about everything, I just remembered that when I decided to work as a journalist, I accepted the risk.
I think I keep working as a journalist for the justice and for the other story and for the unheard voices. It's a really amazing job and it can change our present and our future if we just keep telling the truth.
Credits
The Exposing the Invisible podcast series is produced by Tactical Tech.
Interview, Production and Sound Design by Mariam Aboughazi.
Tactical Tech's Exposing the Invisible team includes Laura Ranca, Lieke Ploeger, Wael Eskandar, Marek Tuszynski and Christy Lange.
Theme Music by Wael Eskandar.
Additional music:
Smoldering by Kai Engel, Free Music Archive, licensed under a Attribution License (CC BY). Forgive and Forget by Siddhartha Corsus, Free Music Archive, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC). Interception by Kai Engel, Free Music Archive, licensed under a Attribution License (CC BY). Cold War Echo by Kai Engel, Free Music Archive, licensed under a Attribution License (CC BY).
News Clip:
Al Jazeera English, Mar 30, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXIQbX8BWb8.
Illustration by Ann Kiernan
With support from
