Salim Lone is a Kenyan journalist who was Prime Minister Raila Odinga's Spokesman (2007-2013, 2017-2018), and before that was a Director of Communications under Kofi Annan at the United Nations, where he worked for two decades until retiring in 2003.
He is the only journalist in independent Kenya to have been prosecuted and convicted (along with democracy and environmental activist Wangari Maathai, later the Nobel Peace Prize winner) in court for his work (1981), and had to flee the country in 1982 to avoid arrest.
He won a scholarship to study Literature at Kenyon College in the United States (BA, 1965) as part of a major programme that President Kennedy initiated for university education for newly independent African countries, popularly known as the "US airlift."
His citizenship was subsequently and illegally revoked by President Moi for "disloyalty" to Kenya, but continuing protests by the United Nations staff in NY and Geneva by and human rights organizations saw it restored in 1993.
[6][7] Earlier, as Chief of Publications, Lone worked closely with Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali as Chief Editor and writer to initiate and publish the scholarly UN Blue Books series which documented the role the Organization played in mobilizing global support for pivotal issues of the 20th century, such as opposition to apartheid, the advancement of women, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the genocides in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, whose criminal courts became models for the International Criminal Court.
His boss Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21 other colleagues in Baghdad were killed in a terrorist attack on Canal Hotel in August, but Lone survived with minor injuries.
[11] But Lone's forceful public advocacy for a robust international involvement in finding a negotiated solution to end the mass violence that followed the tainted presidential election - which resulted in President Kibaki having to create the position of Prime Minister for Mr Odinga - led to many death threats, and he had to flee Kenya again.
Lone now lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is writing his book - War and Peace in Kenya - on the extraordinary transformations and disasters that marked the Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga era in the 2003-2013 period (and the subsequent Uhuru Kenyatta presidency).