JINHA

ISTANBUL – JINHA reporter and editor Zehra Doğan has been awarded the MetinGöktepe Journalism Award for best written journalism.

This year marked the 18^th year of the MetinGöktepe Journalism Awards. The awards are named for Metin Göktepe, the journalist tortured and murdered in police custody in Turkey in 1996.

Zehra Doğan's series on Êzîdî women's stories of escape from Daesh captivity won the award for written journalism this year. The series, available in English under the title "Êzîdî women's journey of pain and resistance," was released by JINHA in early March, 2015. The series appeared in three languages and was republished in English on ZNET.

The photography award went to Mehmet Emin Ali for the photograph "The Boot of Power," which depicted the suit-wearing advisor to now-President Erdoğan kicking a miner in the town of Soma during protests in the wake of the 2014 Soma mine disaster. 301 miners lost their lives due to mining company and government neglect in the disaster.

The jury awarded the local journalism award to GençağaKarafazlı for a piece on the resistance of the people of the Fındıklı area, near the Black Sea city of Rize, against attempts to build hydroelectric power plants that would disrupt the valleys and creeks of the region.

The jury awarded a special prize to Agos newspaper (founded by assassinated Armenian journalist Hrant Dink), marking the newspaper's special work to give voice to the Armenian people. 2015 marks the 100^th anniversary of the Armenian genocide in Turkey.

İMC TV reporters Saadet Yıldız and RefikTekinwon the award for video journalism for their video report depicting Turkish soldiers meeting with ISIS members to secure the passage of ISIS fighters across the border to Turkey in October 2014.

Two special prizes this year were awarded to institutions in the name of journalists murdered in the past year.

On February 18 2015, a local shopkeeper knifed to death NuhKöklü, a journalist who was one of the organizers of the strike at Sabah and ATV. The shopkeeper said he was enraged by Nuh and his friends' snowball fight. The jury gave the NuhKöklü prize to the Journalists' Union of Turkey for their special work to organize journalists in the workplace.

Kadri Bağdu, the distributor of Kurdish newspaper Azadiya Welat, was murdered in the streets of Adana in a hit-and-run on October 14, 2014, during the height of the repression of Kobanê solidarity protests in Turkey. The jury gave the KadriBağdu award to Cumhuriyet newspaper for its immediate solidarity with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

An April 10 award ceremony is planned for the winners.

(fk/cm)