2005 SEAPA Journalism Fellowship
2005 SEAPA Journalism Fellowship
Covering Disaster in Southeast Asia
May 1 - June 10, 2005
The Southeast Asian Press Alliance is inviting journalists from
Southeast Asia to send applications for the 2005 SEAPA Journalism
Fellowship Programme on the theme
`Covering Disaster in Southeast Asia.'
The Fellowship will allow for limited travel to a second Southeast
Asian country where the journalists will spend up to four weeks to
research on a story of their choice. Prior to that, they will
undergo a three-day orientation seminar in Bangkok. After the month-
long research, the fellows will return to Bangkok for a two to three-
day discussion of their stories.
Background
The December 26, 2004 tsunami that killed and displaced hundreds of
thousands of people, swept away entire villages and turned large
swaths of land across south and southeast Asia into wastelands has
been described as `an unprecedented global catastrophe'.
To be sure, this part of the world has had more than its share of
past calamities. Just weeks before the Indian Ocean tsunami,
hundreds of people perished in landslides in the Philippines. Scores
were killed in separate earthquakes in Indonesia. In 1991, a
volcanic eruption killed more than 1,600 people in villages around
Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in one of the country's worst
disasters, the impact of which continued to be felt until a few
years after the eruption. In 1992, more than 2,000 people were
killed by a powerful earthquake in Indonesia. Elsewhere in the
region, floods are a regular occurrence, drowning villagers,
destroying crops and ruining livelihoods.
As Asia struggles to rebuild lives, homes and communities in the
aftermath of the Asian tsunami, as well as other disasters before
that, it is an opportune time for journalists to take a deeper, more
sober look at the impact of this and other crises. This early, there
are fears that politics and corruption will get in the way of
