There’s a corner on every bookshelf that your eyes run over every day. It is a comfort zone, which you go back to read when possible. For some, this corner has books by their favourite authors, for others the history of their favourite place or time. For me, it’s the books written by (mostly) western journalists on their times in conflict zones. These books carry accounts from Rwanda to Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Afghanistan to Syria and Lebanon, of the dangers these journalists faced in getting their stories out from these conflict zones, often with nothing but their wits to protect them. Some of the pleasure of reading the stories is vicarious and some of it comes from the fact that journalists tend to be laypersons; hence their experiences are easier to engage with.
Times have changed, of course. Some media organisations now send on assignment star correspondents who are protected by “hostile environment” teams and security guards. Most no longer cover dangerous situations. It was notable that none were in East Aleppo in the past month. Instead, local freelancers, already affiliated to humanitarian agencies or rebel groups or the government, feed in videos, which become the basis for much of the reporting.
Killing the messenger
Above all, the danger of being an international journalist goes far beyond becoming “collateral damage” in a conflict, or being injured in crossfire. Journalists are increasingly the targets, whether it is because of one side’s desire to silence them, or another’s to kidnap them as a way of grabbing headlines. Of the 48 journalists who died worldwide in 2016, more than half died covering conflict. According to the figures collated annually by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), two-thirds of the 152 journalists killed on “dangerous assignments” since 1992 were targeted directly for their reportage.
Despite the odds, these foreign correspondents go to countries completely out of their ken, battle terrain and traditions they would probably never encounter back home, and stay to tell stories that could well take their lives. Then they go home, rinse hair, and repeat the battle.
That sums up the life of Marie Colvin, The Sunday Times reporter killed at the age of 56 while covering the Baba Amr siege in the Syrian city of Homs in February 2012. Recognised for the distinct eyepatch that she wore after she lost an eye during a grenade attack in Sri Lanka in 2001, Colvin was known equally for her cracking laugh and dark humour.
Describing the incident, she wrote: “Blood was pouring from my eye and mouth onto the dirt. I felt a profound sadness that I was going to die… Then I thought it was taking an awful long time to die if I was really shot in the head (it was actually shrapnel), so I started yelling again. ‘English! Anyone speak English!’”
Just a year before she died, I met Colvin in Tripoli. I had flown in to cover the evacuation of thousands of Indians from Libya in March 2011 just as NATO jets were preparing to go in. Colvin had been there to interview the Libyan leader, Muammar Qadhafi, whom she had first interviewed in 1986, and seemed to have struck quite a rapport with. “He’s a mad dog, indeed he is,” she said, as we stood in the courtyard of the Rixos hotel he owned. “But they’d be crazy to get rid of him without putting someone else in his place.” This addition was quite prophetic and dramatic about the chaos that was to follow.
Colvin never wrote her memoirs, but her writing is collected in one book, On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin . Paul Conroy, her photographer who survived the artillery fire that killed Colvin in Syria, and also accompanied her in Libya, has a riveting account in Under the Wire: Marie Colvin’s Final Assignment. What sets most of these accounts apart from other books on conflicts is that there is relatively little activism. When asked at London’s Frontline Club why they had both insisted on taking a perilous route with rebels to a city under siege and that was bound to be overtaken by Bashar al-Assad regime forces, Conroy says: “I could sit on a laptop right now and download a bunch of videos, and tell you any story I wanted to with them: pro-regime, anti-regime… anything. That’s why I needed to go in and see for myself and show what I see.”
It is this almost crazy urge to “see and show” that drives most conflict journalists and their reportage. Some of it is the thrill of beating competition. Some of it is about an alternative to the mundane life of “ensuring milk doesn’t run out at home,” says Christina Lamb, author of Farewell Kabul . Much of it is about returning home to tell the tale of their voyages and discoveries, much like the warriors of yore would.
However, not all their tales are heroic or hailed. International correspondents are often mocked for “parachuting” into situations, putting their networks of fixers and drivers into jeopardy when they leave. Many are seen as partisan, reporting narratives convenient to their (western) governments back home, weighed by what is often derisively called the “white man’s burden”.
Ignoring stories
Others find that the risks they take are often ignored by their own organisations, which are preoccupied with domestic stories. After getting a major interview with the then Iranian President, Mohammad Khatami, in which he apologised on tape for taking Americans hostage, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and Parisa Khosravi recount how their scoop barely made air. Instead, according to The News Sorority by Sheila Weller, they found to their horror that a young girl called Monica Lewinsky was the only one on air that day in January 1998. Some journalists talk of the sheer frustration of getting the story out only to find that no one cares about the immense suffering in the conflict. “After Bosnia, I swore that I would never feel that terrible stirring of guilt so profound — that feeling we did nothing,” writes Newsweek foreign correspondent in West Asia, Janine di Giovanni, in The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria . But she did.
Interspersed with horror and guilt are some very human stories of how they deal with fear and self-recrimination. “I was far less afraid when I was young, because there is nothing as stupid as being young. But if you are afraid, do a different kind of journalism, because not everyone has to do this crazy stuff,” said Channel 4’s Lindsey Hilsum, author of Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution at a recent lecture, where she spoke of her next book, a biography of Marie Colvin. “We aren’t like Edith Piaf, you know, who sang ‘ Je Ne Regret Rien ’ (I never regret). We regret everything,” she said about the risks she regrets taking during the Rwandan massacre. As my eye goes back to that shelf I like, I see there’s some space left for more such stories. Unfortunately, there are too many conflicts that still need covering.
suhasini.h@thehindu.co.in
