“If you have a dream, there is nothing that can stop you from doing it,” noted formerly censored journalist Aaron Berhane during a stirring speech last week.

As a journalist in Eritrea, a former province of Ethiopia which had just won a 30-year struggle for independence, Berhane co-founded his own newspaper, Setit, the first paper to enjoy independence and freedom from government censorship. He addressed a room full of eager journalism students at U of T’s Scarborough campus last Wednesday.

He began with a circulation of 5,000 copies in 1997 and steadily worked up to a circulation of 40,000. Since the government had previously owned all Eritrea’s media outlets, Berhane’s articles criticizing the regime had never made it to publication. Setit, named after an Eritrean river, exposed many of the social problems in the province as well as numerous weaknesses of the government-controlled media.

Intimidation tactics were soon adopted by the government in order to censor what was covered in the independent newspapers. Berhane found his life threatened as well as the lives of his family. In 2001 his paper was shut down and many journalists, as well as sources, were arrested on Sep. 18 of that year. Berhane drastically changed his appearance, acquired fake identification, and passed through 14 checkpoints in order to escape to Sudan. His precautions were not enough to save him and two companions from gunfire at the border of Sudan; Berhane lost his friends and narrowly escaped death before reaching freedom.

Berhane stressed the importance of journalistic ethics to the students, emphasizing the responsibility journalists have to report on issues of substance and significance.

After living in both Regina and Toronto for almost a year and a half, Berhane has well-formed opinions of the Canadian media. Public media, he feels, is informative and educational; private media, however, has a decidedly less informative role to play and focuses on entertainment. As a journalist, he prefers to see newspapers concentrate more on pressing social issues in the media, instead of reporting on the Leafs, for example.

Berhane is a Journalism Fellow at Massey College, and is writing a book in his native language, Tigrigna, about his experience has a journalist, editor, and co-founder of the first independent newspaper in Eritrea.