The Eritrean government will not say where Fesshaye Yohannes is being detained.

So even though he is due to be honoured by The Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) at the 12th Annual International Press Freedom Awards, Fesshaye (Eritreans are known by their first names) is unlikely to be able to attend.

The awards, which recognise "courage in exposing official corruption", will be presented Nov 27 at a ceremony here. The four winners are: Ignacio Gomez, a Colombian investigative journalist; Tipu Sultan, a Bangladeshi reporter; Irina Petrushova, an editor from Kazakhstan, and Fesshaye.

Along with most of Eritrea's independent press corps, Fesshaye, the founding editor of what was Eritrea's largest circulation newspaper, Setit , was imprisoned without charges in September 2001 when the government shut down the independent press in the run-up to a general election. Once the free press was silenced, the government cancelled the election.

No one has heard from Fesshaye, who is also a writer and playwright, since May, when the government transferred him to a secret location for staging a hunger strike.

'Threatening state security'

As a teenager, Fesshaye fought in Eritrea's war of independence from Ethiopia. In 1994, he helped to establish Eritrea's independent media with his weekly newspaper, which covered political issues, and social problems.

Setit , named after the only river in Eritrea to contain water year round, was the most pro-government of Eritrea's independent papers. It was also the paper that "clearly signalled the end of naivete about President Isaias' democratic intentions", says Neil Skene, who between 1999 and 2001 worked with Eritrean journalists in programmes funded by the US State Department.

This signal came, says Skene, when "the paper wrote an editorial gently suggesting it was about time to implement the six-year-old constitution''.

Fesshaye knew that the government was angered by criticism and that the free press was under threat. In May 2001, he asked CJP to help him set up a union to protect independent journalists.

But on Sept 18, while the world's media was focused on the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, the government of this small African country, claimed that Eritrea's independent newspapers were "threatening state security and jeopardising national unity'', says a CPJ press release.

When the government shut down the independent press, some journalists went into exile in Washington and Sudan. "Fesshaye's initial instinct was to go into hiding," says CPJ. "But, refusing to abandon his colleagues, he eventually surrendered to authorities."

Daniel Pearl honoured

All four winners of this year's International Press Freedom Awards have shown similar levels of courage.

In addition to the four winners, a special award will be presented to Marianne Pearl in honour of her late husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was abducted and killed last January while researching a story on al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan.

"The press in the United States does have great power and enjoys legal protection," says CPJ. "But that is not the case in most countries.''

''Scores of journalists are imprisoned every year because of what they have reported. Hundreds more are routinely subjected to physical attack, illegal detention, spurious legal action and threats against themselves or their families."

In 2000 alone, CPJ reports, 24 journalists were killed doing their jobs.

Columbia, says CPJ, is "one of the world's most dangerous countries to practise journalism''. During the last decade, 29 Colombian journalists have been killed.

Death threats

Gomez, one of this year's winners, has survived almost two decades working in that country as an investigative journalist.

During this time he has "exposed alliances between drug lords and politicians, foreign mercenaries operating in Colombia, corrupt soccer teams, and the role of the Colombian military and paramilitary forces in many notorious massacres," says CPJ.

In 2000, Gomez reported that paramilitary leader Carlos Castano was linked to a 1997 massacre in the Columbian village of Mapiripan. A few months after the report was published, the journalist was nearly abducted while getting into a taxi, says CPJ.

"The next day, Gomez's colleague Jineth Bedoya was kidnapped by men who told her they planned to cut Gomez into tiny pieces." This forced him into exile.

After spending a year as a Nieman fellow at Harvard University, he returned to Columbia to be director of investigations for Noticias Uno , a public affairs television show. Since starting work on the show he has received numerous death threats.

In 1989, Gomez reported on 36 individual massacres and had become so distraught that the newspaper he was working for told him to take a break from journalism. "I had to learn to recover my sense of outrage," he recalls. "It's something I can never afford to lose." IPS