John Pilger was made an Honorary Graduand of Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, in March 2008.

The following citation was made by Professor Paul Maylam...

"In Vietnam in 1967 he lay in a muddy war zone, under fire. A year later he was standing a few yards away when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. In April 1975 he was one of the last journalists to leave Vietnam, on the day of the American evacuation. In Cambodia he himself was targeted for assassination by the genocidal Khmer Rouge. He risked his life in East Timor making a film about the East Timorese struggle for independence from Indonesia. John Pilger is a survivor – not only a survivor, but also one of the most important and influential international journalists of the past forty years. And not just a journalist filing  newspaper reports, but also author of several books, prolific film-maker, and ardent campaigner for justice. Through his writing and film-making he has drawn worldwide attention to some of the most brutal atrocities and worst injustices perpetrated in the post-war world.

His entry into newspaper life came in Sydney, the city of his birth, where as a teenager he delivered papers in a fruit crate that ran on ball-bearings. In the early 1960s he went to London and obtained a job on the Daily Mirror. Legend has it that he was appointed because the news editor jumped to the assumption that as John was Australian he would be an invaluable member of the paper’s cricket team – a wrong assumption – a fine swimmer and surfer, yes, but no cricketer – an assumption all the same that helped launch a renowned career.

Sent to Vietnam to cover the war, it was there that he built his reputation. A fierce critic of the war, he highlighted the plight of the Vietnamese, but also saw American soldiers as victims of this wholly unnecessary conflict. Later he produced a book and a film about American Vietnam veterans whose lives were broken by the war – prone to suicide and plagued by alcohol, drugs, unemployment and divorce on their return to the US.

Four years later he was back in south-east Asia. In 1979 he filed two important newspaper reports and produced a documentary, Year Zero, drawing the world’s attention to the horrors of the Cambodian killing fields – revealing that two million people had been killed in the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, and highlighting western complicity as the United Nations turned a blind eye to the atrocities by continuing to recognise Pol Pot. Year Zero won 30 international awards – and, more important, it opened the eyes of many members of the public, with money flooding into Oxfam. In time John would make six documentaries on Cambodia.

Among many international causes taken up by John Pilger, another that stands out is that of East Timor, the small island invaded and occupied by Indonesia in 1975. Again he brought to international attention the horrors experienced by the East Timorese under the brutal rule of the Suharto regime – 200,000 people dying, one-third of the population; women forcibly sterilised. John’s film about East Timor, Death of a Nation, is said to have contributed to East Timor’s eventual attainment of independence in 1999.

It is impossible in a short space to do justice to the extraordinary thematic and geographical scope of John Pilger’s work. He has made films or written about women’s prisons, about thalidomide victims in the UK, about nuclear weapons, about the international arms trade. His work has covered many countries – not only Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia, but also Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Burma, Bangladesh, Australia, the US, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and South Africa. When John first visited South Africa back in the apartheid years he disembarked at Johannesburg, and filling in the section on race on the arrival form he described himself as ‘human’. For such impertinence he was given a stern lecture by officials.

This has been a remarkably productive career – eleven books, and at least one documentary film a year for the last 30 years. His work has won so many awards they cannot all be listed here – just to mention, twice Britain’s Journalist of the Year (the country’s highest award); an international Emmy Award in 1991 for a film on Cambodia; and Britain’s Media Personality of the Year Award in 2003.

John Pilger’s critics have often dismissed him as a left-wing polemicist. This is a false characterisation – such critics readily resort to easy denigration, but rarely engage in a close examination of his work. He has been critical of both right and left-wing governments, opposing past Soviet interventions in Eastern Europe, Afghanistan and Ethiopia. Most of all he is a humanist, driven by a strong sense of justice and injustice. Always ready to expose official spin, hypocrisy, and lying, he is, in his own words, “anti-authoritarian and forever sceptical of anything the agents of power want to tell us”. He practises his journalism “with a respect for humanity, and for telling the stories of humanity”. Many such stories he has told – the stories of those whose voices have been suppressed or marginalised – the stories of ordinary Iraqis suffering the effects of sanctions and war for the past 17 years; the stories of Vietnamese, Cambodians, East Timorese, and Palestinians.

Perhaps more than any other western journalist John Pilger has given a voice to the voiceless. Courageous and outspoken he has risked his life in the world’s most dangerous zones. Impassioned and compassionate he has exposed crimes against humanity, and in so doing has unsettled the consciences of an often uninformed or indifferent public.

Mr Chancellor, I have the honour to ask you to confer on John Pilger the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa."