JournalismPakistan.com
October 25, 2012

NEW YORK: The International Women's Media Foundation has honored 70-year-old Pakistani journalist Zubeida Mustafa with its annual lifetime achievement award at a lunch in New York Wednesday.

Honored as the first woman in Pakistani mainstream media, Zubeida worked to enact hiring policies favorable to women during her 30 years at Dawn.

She covered issues that received little attention in her country and were sometimes considered taboo, including breast cancer, contraception and rape. She paid tribute in her speech to the Pakistani women who followed in her journalistic footsteps, saying that without them, she would not have "earned the title of pioneer."

A columnist imprisoned under Ethiopia's controversial anti-terrorism laws, an Azerbaijani investigative radio reporter who had surveillance cameras planted in her apartment and a Palestinian blogger who has been beaten and tortured for reporting on abuses and protests in Gaza received Courage in Journalism awards from the women's media group.

Khadija Ismayilova of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Azerbaijan, Asmaa al-Ghoul, a freelance journalist in the Gaza Strip, and Reeyot Alemu, who was a columnist for the independent Ethiopian newspaper Feteh until her arrest in June 2011, won the courage awards.- AP (Photo courtesy: Athar Khan)