Villa Aurora Welcomes Persecuted Journalist

A welcoming reception is set for Galima Bukharbaeva Villa Aurora’s 2009 Feuchtwanger Fellow on May 20, 8 p.m., at Villa Aurora on Paseo Miramar. The fellowship is a residency grant of up to 12 months awarded”in cooperation with important human rights organizations and the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at USC”to a writer who was persecuted in his or her homeland. The Fellowship was established to honor those exiles who found refuge in Los Angeles from the pogroms that swept Europe in the 1930s and ’40s. Bukharbaeva was born July 7, 1974, in Tashkent Uzbekistan. She graduated from Tashkent State University’s journalism department in 1997, when she began working for Internews as a television news producer and correspondent for the Zamon news program.’At Internews, Bukharbaeva worked with journalists from the United States and Europe, from whom she became acquainted with the Western and ethical journalistic standards that are fundamentally different from principles of Soviet journalism, whose aim is to propagate government policies.   Bukharbaeva was the correspondent in Uzbekistan for the Agence France Presse news agency between 1998 and 2003. From 2000, she directed the Uzbekistan Project of the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), which aim is to provide independent and professionally written coverage of events in Central Asia by local journalists. Her reportage brought attention to the slaughter of thousands of innocent people in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan on May 13, 2005. Bukharbaeva survived being shot while running from armored personnel carriers, and she continued to cover the massacre.’ As a direct result of her reports, Bukharbaeva fled from the Uzbekistan government, whose General Prosecutor opened a criminal case against her. She continued her education at Columbia University School of Journalism in New York.’ In March 2006, Bukharbaeva organized a conference at Columbia University on the Andijan massacre.’ Bukharbaeva lives with her husband, the Russian journalist Marcus Bensmann, in Germany. The couple will stay at Villa Aurora through December. To RSVP for this event, call 310-573-3603. Shuttle service begins at 7 p.m. from Los Liones Drive street parking, off Sunset Boulevard.