In 1979, Sam Neill appeared in an Australian comedy movie about hacks on a Sydney newspaper.

The Journalist was billed as “a saucy, sexy, funny look at a man with a nose for scandal and a weakness for women”.

That would probably not fly these days — but as a rule, movies about Australian journalists are no laughing matter.

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Back in 1982, a young Mel Gibson starred as a foreign correspondent who was dropped into Jakarta during revolutionary chaos in The Year of Living Dangerously. The 1967 events the movie depicted were real enough, but Mel Gibson’s correspondent Guy Hamilton was made up for what was essentially a romantic drama.

There was no romance and a lot more real life 25 years later in Balibo, another movie with Australian journalists in harm’s way during Indonesian upheaval.

Anthony La Paglia had won awards for his performance as Roger East, a journalist killed in what was then East Timor — now Timor-Leste — in December 1975. East was killed while investigating the fate of five other journalists — including New Zealander Guy Cunningham — who was killed during the Indonesian invasion two months earlier.

The Correspondent has a happier ending but is still a tough watch — especially for its subject.

Met in London newsrooms
I first met Peter Greste in newsrooms in London about 30 years ago. He had worked for Reuters, CNN, and the BBC — going on to become a BBC correspondent in Afghanistan.

He later reported from Belgrade, Santiago, and then Nairobi, from where he appeared regularly on RNZ’s Nine to Noon as an African news correspondent. Greste later joined the English-language network of the Doha-based Al Jazeera and became a worldwide story himself while filling in as the correspondent in Cairo.

The Correspondent                 Video: Trailer

Greste and two Egyptian colleagues, Baher Mohamed and Mohamed Fahmy, were arrested in late 2013 on trumped-up charges of aiding and abetting the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation labeled “terrorist” by the new Egyptian regime of the time.

Six months later he was sentenced to seven years in jail for “falsifying news” and smearing the reputation of Egypt itself. Mohamed was sentenced to 10 years.

Media organisations launched an international campaign for their freedom with the slogan “Journalism is not a crime”. Peter’s own family became familiar faces in the media while working hard for his release too.

Peter Greste was deported to Australia in February 2015. The deal stated he would serve the rest of his sentence there, but the Australian government did not enforce that. Instead, Greste became a professor of media and journalism, currently at Macquarie University in Sydney.

Movie consultant
Among other things, he has also been a consultant on The Correspondent — now in cinemas around New Zealand — with Richard Roxborough cast as Greste himself.

Greste told The Sydney Morning Herald he had to watch it “through his fingers” at first.

“I eventually came to realise it’s not me that’s up there on the screen. It’s the product of a whole bunch of creatives. And the result is … more like a painting rather than a photograph,” Greste told Mediawatch.

“Over the years I’ve written about it, I’ve spoken about it countless times. I’ve built a career on it. But I wasn’t really anticipating the emotional impact of seeing the craziness of my arrest, the confusion of that period, the claustrophobia of the cell, the sheer frustration of the crazy trial and the really discombobulating moment of my release.

“But there is another very difficult story about what happened to a colleague of mine in Somalia, which I haven’t spoken about publicly. Seeing that on screen was actually pretty gut-wrenching.”

In 2005, his BBC colleague Kate Peyton was shot alongside him on their first day in on assignment in Somalia. She died soon after.

“That was probably the toughest day of my entire life far over and above anything I went through in Egypt. But I am glad that they put it in [The Correspondent]. It underlines … the way in which journalism is under attack. What happened to us in Egypt wasn’t a random, isolated incident — but part of a much longer pattern we’re seeing continue to this day.”

‘Owed his life’
Greste says he “owes his life” to fellow prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah — an Egyptian activist who is also in the film.

“There’s a bit of artistic licence in the way it was portrayed but . . .  he is easily one of the most intelligent, astute and charismatic humanitarians I’ve ever come across. He was one of the main pro-democracy activists who was behind the Arab Spring revolution in 2011 — a true democrat.

“He also inspired me to write the letters that we smuggled out of prison that described our arrest not as an attack on … what we’d actually come to represent. And that was press freedom.

“That helped frame the campaign that ultimately got me out. So, for both psychological and political reasons, I feel like I owe him my life.

“There was nothing in our reporting that confirmed the allegations against us. So I started to drag up all sorts of demons from the past. I started thinking maybe this is the universe punishing me for sins of the past. I was obviously digging up that particular moment as one of the most extreme and tragic moments. It took a long time for me to get past it.

“He’d been in prison a lot because of his activism, so he understood the psychology of it. He also understood the politics of it in ways that I could never do as a newcomer.”

“Unfortunately, he is still there. He should have been released on September 29th last year. His mother launched a hunger strike in London . . . so I actually joined her on hunger strike earlier this year to try and add pressure.

“If this movie also draws a bit of attention to his case, then I think that’s an important element.”

Another wrinkle
Another wrinkle in the story was the situation of his two Egyptian Al Jazeera colleagues.

Greste was essentially a stranger to them, having only arrived in Egypt shortly before their arrest.

The film shows Greste clashing with Fahmy, who later sued Al Jazeera. Fahmy felt the international pressure to free Greste was making their situation worse by pushing the Egyptian regime into a corner.

“To call it a confrontation is probably a bit of an understatement. We had some really serious arguments and sometimes they got very, very heated. But I want audiences to really understand Fahmy’s worldview in this film.

“He and I had very different understandings of what was going … and how those differences played out.

“I’ve got a hell of a lot of respect for him. He is like a brother to me. That doesn’t mean we always agreed with each other and doesn’t mean we always got on with each other like any siblings, I suppose.”

His colleagues were eventually released on bail shortly after Greste’s deportation in 2015.

Fahmy renounced his Egyptian citizenship and was later deported to Canada, while Mohamed was released on bail and eventually pardoned.

Retrial — all ‘reconvicted’
“After I was released there was a retrial … and we were all reconvicted. They were finally released and pardoned, but the pardon didn’t extend to me.

“I can’t go back because I’m still a convicted ‘terrorist’ and I still have an outstanding prison sentence to serve, which is a little bit weird. Any country that has an extradition treaty with Egypt is a problem. There are a fairly significant number of those across the Middle East and Africa.”

Greste told Mediawatch his conviction was even flagged in transit in Auckland en route from New York to Sydney. He was told he failed a character test.

“I was able to resolve it. I had some friends in Canberra and were able to sort it out, but I was told in no uncertain terms I’m not allowed into New Zealand without getting a visa because of that criminal record.

“If I’m traveling to any country I have to say … I was convicted on terrorism offences. Generally speaking, I can explain it, but it often takes a lot of bureaucratic process to do that.”

Greste’s first account of his time in jail — The First Casualty — was published in 2017. Most of the book was about media freedom around the world, lamenting that the numbers of journalists jailed and killed increased after his release.

Something that Greste also now ponders a lot in his current job as a professor of media and journalism.

Ten years on from that, it is worse again. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says at least 124 journalists and media workers were killed last year, nearly two-thirds of them Palestinians killed by Israel in its war in Gaza.

The book has now been updated and republished as The Correspondent.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Former political prisoner Cristina Bawagan still has the dress she wore the day she was arrested, tortured and sexually abused by soldiers during the late Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s brutal era of martial law.

Bawagan fears the horrors of Marcos’s rule would be diminished if his namesake son wins the presidency in Monday’s election, a victory that would cap a three-decade political fightback for a family driven out in a 1986 “people power” uprising.

Also known as “Bongbong”, Marcos Jr has benefited from what some political analysts describe as a decades-long public relations effort to alter perceptions of his family, accused of living lavishly at the helm of one of Asia’s most notorious kleptocracies.

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As Philippine president, Marcos could control hunt for his family’s wealth

Rivals of the family say the presidential run is an attempt to rewrite history, and change a narrative of corruption and authoritarianism associated with his father’s era.

“This election is not just a fight for elected positions. It is also a fight against disinformation, fake news, and historical revisionism,” Vice-President Leni Robredo, Marcos’s main rival in the presidential race, told supporters in March.

TSEK.PH, a fact-checking initiative for the May 9 vote, reported that it had debunked scores of martial law-related disinformation it said was used to rehabilitate, erase or burnish the discreditable record of Marcos Sr.

No reply to questions
Marcos Jr.’s camp did not reply to written requests for comment on Bawagan’s story.

Marcos Jr., who last week called his late father a “political genius”, has previously denied claims of spreading misinformation and his spokesperson has said Marcos does not engage in negative campaigning.

Bawagan, 67, said martial law victims like her needed to share their stories to counter the portrayal of the elder Marcos’s regime as a peaceful, golden age for the Southeast Asian country.

“It is very important they see primary evidence that it really happened,” said Bawagan while showing the printed dress which had a tear below the neckline where her torturer passed a blade across her chest and fondled her breasts.

The elder Marcos ruled for two decades from 1965, almost half of it under martial law.

During that time, 70,000 people were imprisoned, 34,000 were tortured, and 3240 were killed, according to figures from Amnesty International — figures which Marcos Jr. questioned in a January interview.

Bawagan, an activist, was arrested on 27 May 1981 by soldiers in the province of Nueva Ecija for alleged subversion and brought to a “safehouse” where she was beaten as they tried to extract a confession from her.

“I would receive slaps on my face every time they were not satisfied with my answers and that was all the time,” Bawagan said. “They hit strongly at my thighs and clapped my ears. They tore my duster (dress) and fondled my breasts.”

“The hardest thing was when they put an object in my vagina. That was the worst part of it and all throughout I was screaming. No one seemed to hear,” said Bawagan, a mother of two.

‘No arrests’
In a conversation with Marcos Jr. that appeared on YouTube in 2018, Juan Ponce Enrile, who served as the late dictator’s defence minister, said not one person was arrested for their political and religious views, or for criticising the elder Marcos.

However, more than 11,000 victims of state brutality during Martial Law later received reparations using millions from Marcos’s Swiss bank deposits, part of the billions the family siphoned off from the country’s coffers that were recovered by the Philippine government.

Among them was Felix Dalisay, who was detained for 17 months from August 1973 after he was beaten and tortured by soldiers trying to force him to inform on other activists, causing him to suffer hearing loss.

“They kicked me even before I boarded the military jeep so I fell and hit my face on the ground,” Dalisay said, showing a scar on his right eye as he recounted the day he was arrested.

When they reached the military headquarters, Dalisay said he was brought to an interrogation room, where soldiers repeatedly clapped his ears, kicked and hit him, sometimes with a butt of a rifle, during questioning.

“They started by inserting bullets used in a .45 calibre gun between my fingers and they would squeeze my hand. That really hurt. If they were not satisfied with my answers, they would hit me,” Dalisay pointing to different parts of his body.

The return of a Marcos to the country’s seat of power is unthinkable for Dalisay, who turned 70 this month.

“Our blood is boiling at that thought,” said Dalisay.

“Marcos Sr declared martial law then they will say nobody was arrested, and tortured? We are here speaking while we are still alive.”

Republished with permission from Rappler.