Their News [Archives:2008/1209/Local News]

– Somali Cameraman Wins International Award

Somali news cameraman Abdullahi Farah Duguf has won the 2008 Rory Peck Award for News. The award honours freelance coverage of on-the-day news, where the focus is on the immediacy of the story. The winning footage Two Weeks in Mogadishu was shot in September 2007 and describes the human misery in the war-torn capital.

Abdullah Farah Duguf, known as 'Duguf', has been working as a cameraman in Somalia since 1993. He has also worked extensively with international broadcasters and agencies as a fixer, in particular APTN. Duguf says that the deteriorating situation in Somalia over the past two years has made it almost impossible for him and most other journalists to operate there. He has decided to seek refuge in Djibouti for the foreseeable future.

Duguf's footage shows distressing scenes of violence, destruction and human misery in Mogadishu as the insurgency erupted into almost daily battles on the streets. Duguf captured the terrifying level of violence on the streets where there is nothing to shield local people – or journalists. At one point he became a target himself. In the city hospital he met a man whose wife and three children had just been killed in a mortar attack on their home. And in the makeshift camps outside the city, a woman asked him to film her starving children.

The judges said the film had “drama