Zannuba Ariffah Chafsoh, or more popularly known as Yenny Wahid (born 29 October 1974) is an Indonesian Islamic activist, journalist, and politician. She is currently the director of The Wahid Institute, an Islamic research center founded by her father, Abdurrahman Wahid.
As a journalist, she covered news stories from East Timor and Aceh. For her stories in post-referendum East Timor, she and her team won a Walkley Award for journalism.[2][3]
Advocacy career
When her father was elected as the country's fourth President, she had to leave her career in journalism in order to assist her father in his new post, with special responsibility for communication. Upon Wahid's impeachment, she went to pursue a master's degree at Harvard Kennedy School as a Mason Fellow.[4] In 2004, upon her return from Boston, she was appointed as the director of the newly founded Wahid Institute, as political communication advisor to the President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono from 2005 to 2007, a position that she still retains now. She was involved in the National Awakening Party (PKB) as secretary-general.[citation needed]
Recognition
Greg Barton in The Australian credits her with having played a crucial role in persuading her father of "the extent of military-backed militia violence in East Timor [...] and the culpability of the Indonesian military leadership".[5]
According to the Wahid Institute, the World Economic Forum named her a Young Global Leader in 2009, a role in which she remained active as of 2013.[6][7]
She is married to Dhohir Farisi.[8]
^Graham, Duncan (19 June 2017). "Indonesia's woman to watch". Inside Indonesia. Retrieved 27 June 2017. Wahid reported for Fairfax Press when the Indonesian Army trashed East Timor after locals broke free of Indonesian rule in the UN-supervised 1999 referendum. The team Wahid was part of won a Walkley Award, Australia's highest prize in journalism.