GUGULETHU TO GAZA

3. GUGULETHU TO GAZA Conflict Reporting Masterclass 2009 Presentation by Michael Schmidt (frayintermedia) Photographs by James Oatway (Sunday Times) “The reporter is always on the borders of someone else’s country, his papers never quite in order. However much he knows, he can never know enough. The dispatch written with utter confidence turns out to be incomplete or wrongheaded. The dispatch written on instinct alone turns out to be God’s truth.” – Ward Just, New York Times, 1999

4. In the line of duty • Fifteen South African journalists have been killed in the line of duty since 1990. But journalists do not have to be tough “war correspondents” to encounter threats to life and limb. Of the 15 dead, only one, WTN bureau chief Vincent Francis, killed in an ambush in Burundi in 1995, died in what we would recognise as a war zone. Earlier this month, Mozambican journalist Bernardo Carlos of Noticias was publicly threatened with mutilation by a regional governor because of his municipal reporting. Civil conflict in daily life can erupt during a strike, a service-delivery protest, a political rally, or even celebratory events such as a soccer match or a music concert. These commonplace events on the news diary can suddenly turn very grave – as demonstrated by the kidnapping, stripping and public humiliation in February of four women journalists covering the International Day against Female Circumcision in Sierra Leone. • Last year, according to the International News Safety Institute (INSI) www.newssafety.org/ , 109 journalists and media workers died covering the news in 36 countries. War-zones like Iraq, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Ossetia, Somalia and Gaza, obviously accounted for much of the toll, but most of the more than 1,300 journalists killed since INSI began tracking the death-toll twelve years ago – including investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso of the Mozambican newspaper Metical whose killer is still on the run after escaping from jail – were murdered in their own countries in peacetime covering regular beats such as crime.

5. The threat scenario • Journalists in southern Africa face danger in many guises. Journalists and their commissioning, news and picture editors need to understand, assess and manage the very real threats they face daily, whether covering open warfare in an exotic land, or a deceptively milder civil dispute much closer to home. • From service-delivery protests in Gugulethu to aerial bombardments in Gaza, journalists need to anticipate, assess and counteract threats to their lives, their editorial independence and their ability to get the story. • Field reporters and their line managers need to devise practical solutions to issues including: preparations like finding reliable fixers, drivers and translators; exit strategies; what equipment is necessary; conflict-related first aid; international safety conventions; the isolation of field work; the logistical challenges to be surmounted; the fraught question of interviewing child victims and child perpetrators; the ethics and compromises of operating in combat zones; the specific threats to female correspondents and support staff; and the question of “embedding” with, or even merely traveling alongside, armed forces and police.

6. Frontline • I am going to quote several times from the remarkable book Frontline by David Loyn, the inspiring tale of the impact on conflict reporting that a handful of dedicated freelancers made with Frontline Television News. Conceived in action in the Afghan campaign against the Russians in 1979, Frontline really made its name during the First Gulf War in 1991 when cameraman Vaughan Smith disguised himself as a British Army captain and covered the bombardment of Iraqi positions. • Frontline distinguished itself by its leading-edge exclusive conflict reporting from the world’s hot-spots, especially Afghanistan, Chechnya, Russia, Kurdistan and Iraq. They were a special breed of men – and a few women – many from military backgrounds, who took calculated risks, lived rough, made life-long contacts (one even married his fixer), and were ever-mindful of the ethical lines that bedevil battlefields as much as do mines. • Times have changed, their brand of daring journalism squeezed out by the news beast that one veteran interviewed by Loyn likened to a slow but omnivorous brontosaurus. But their legacy lives on in the Frontline Club in London, and in the standard they set by the way they conducted themselves in the field.

7. Why do it at all? • Writing of the man most often credited with being the first war correspondent in the modern sense, William Howard Russell who covered the Crimean War of 1853-1856, Loyn says Russell “made things better for the ordinary British soldier by reporting on [appalling] conditions”. “His promotion of Florence Nightingale established modern nursing along the way,” a more intelligent and lasting legacy than Lord Tennyson’s jingoistic celebration of the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade. • Moving on to Martha Gellhorn, who wrote with clarity and empathy on everything from lynchings in the American deep South and grinding poverty in the Depression’s dust-bowls to the D-Day landings of World War II and America’s counter-insurgency wars in Central America – an exemplar of covering conflict in all its diverse forms – Loyn writes that since her “tales of civilians caught up in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s the effects of war on its victims have driven the news agenda. The personal stories at the heart of conflict make the news. After the months of pictures of the preparation of the hardware to be dropped on Iraq in 2003, and then the extraordinary battle footage during the war itself, it was the plight of the people of Iraq that made the enduring images of that conflict.”

8. “We lived lightly on their hospitality” • That, for me, is the defining quote of the entire book, the journalist’s version of the green dictum “take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints.” Although Loyn does not say so, it appears to be core to the ethic that Frontline established in the field. Not only did their crews pack light, but they lived lightly by being undemanding and paying close attention to the cultures they worked within, recognising that they lived on the hospitality of those they encountered – including the Taliban – and making sure they did not abuse their positions as guests. Cultural knowledge and respect is key to survival in the field, whether covering a gangland scrap in Westbury or a showdown between extremists in Mogadishu, so we will be interrogating that issue a bit later today. • Southern African journalists have a well-deserved reputation for bravery. I often recall the incident during the First Zaire / DRC War when Namibian photographer Karl Prinsloo told how when things got hot in Goma, all the foreign correspondents fled the fighting; the only ones going in the opposite direction were himself and the South Africans. But covering conflict is not the macho pursuit of danger. It is the judicious assessment of the risk that is acceptable to the correspondent based on the importance of the story.

10. The African environment • Our region has a war-torn history: the Anglo-Boer War, the Bambaata Rebellion, the Herero Genocide, the 1914 Boer Rebellion, the 1922 Rand Revolt, the First and Second World Wars, the Angolan Civil War, the Mozambican Civil War, the “Border Wars”, the 1976-1977 Uprising etc, right down to the 1998 SA/Botswana invasion of Lesotho. And yet journalists operating in the region have no safety training and to my knowledge, no South African journalist operating in a war-zone has ever been paid danger pay. I recall that cameraman Nicky de Blois on several occasions had to sell his equipment in Kinshasa just to get out of jail and I myself almost got stranded there once, cashless, because my newsdesk had failed to properly estimate the costs of operating in the DRC. • That is why we initiated this Conflict Reporting Workshop last year. At last year’s workshop, Joburg-based BBC producer Jacky Martens told how field journalists working in conflict zones had “conned” the BBC into providing safety training: first they got the BBC to reluctantly insure them while in the field; then the insurance companies forced the BBC to reduce their risk of underwriting the journalists by providing safety training. But it took the death of a high-profile journalist to get even that far.

11. Safety for journalists or an alibi for media managers? • David Loyn puts it so: “… safety spending is well intentioned but sometimes no more than a comfort blanket. The death of the BBC correspondent John Schofield in Croatia in 1995 was the spur for a huge expansion of spending on safety. The provision of ‘hostile environment’ courses is now big business, and at their best they do of course give people tools to cope in difficult situations. But at their worst they are merely an insurance policy for management and can give journalists the illusion that war can be reported at no risk, with no personal cost.” • In 1993, Johan de Waal of Beeld was shot in both legs in Katlehong, Herbert Mabuza of Sunday Times was shot in the arm during a taxi protest inJohannesburg, and Calvin Thusago of the SABC bled to death after being attacked by about 30 youths in Katlehong. The SAUJ rushed to print a safety booklet for journalists, but it took the shootings of journalists Abdul Shariff and Ken Oosterbroek on the eve of the 1994 election to break the three-month deadlock between SAUJ / MWASA and Independent Newspapers management on providing safety equipment. Thanks to their deaths I managed in one day to have a factory work overtime in Pretoria to make 40 new bullet-resistant vests, and hired a fleet of 17 cars complete with tyre-weld kits, first-aid kits, and water canisters. Fortunately, the election was peaceful and the equipment not needed. But the lesson was clear: it took a dead journalist to move management.

12. “We have every right to spill our own blood…” • Loyn’s other lesson is more grim but just as clear: journalists should be entering conflict zones well-trained, yes, but fully aware that the risk of injury or death goes with the territory – and this applies as much to working in Gugulethu as it does to Gaza. After Frontline’s Roddy Scott was shot dead by Russian soldiers while advancing on Grozny from Ingushetia in 2002 with a company of Chechen rebels, he was posthumously pilloried in The Times as “naïve,” “crazy” and “suicidal” – a gross distortion of Scott’s sober risk-assessment before he undertook what he knew would be a dangerous assignment. Frontline’s Vaughan Smith raged against The Times: “We have every right to spill our own blood if we want to…” I agree with him. • But too often it is not management that is to blame but those who should know better, like the cavalier news editor who dispatched a clueless young woman to cover the Summer War in Lebanon with us in 2006. With no idea where she was or why, with no safety equipment or training, she was terrified out of her mind and filed only one story. She is now promoting washing detergent on TV. I blame not her, but her news editor for their stupid failure to appreciate and assess the risks that put her in harm’s way. Now we’ll never know whether she’d have become a great journalist.

13. The price we pay • Conflict is messy and this has a very real impact on the psyche of those who tend to shy away from calling themselves war correspondents. Loyn describes Frontline cameraman Richard Parry who cut his teeth in the wars in Bosnia, Chechnya and Armenia, so: “Although he had loved the life in the front line, and learnt things from it, it had given him panic attacks. He developed an awareness of reality that made life tougher and made him insecure. He stopped in order to stop the slide down the path towards becoming a war junkie. But it never left him. He had found out things about humanity that could not now be neatly filed away, the way that normal life is processed. Like all who travel into conflict, he was changed forever, left with the knowledge that there are some things that do not make sense.” • I’m no war correspondent. My beard turned noticeably whiter from the sheer stress of working in south Lebanon. Yet we all pay a price for covering conflict. We recall the loss of Kevin Carter to suicide, haunted by the dying children he had photographed. Anthony Loyd of The Times of London writes in his harrowing book My War Gone By, I Miss it So how he descended into heroin addiction because his inability to help the dying in Grozny made him feel like a “pornographer” and a voyeur.

14. “… there for the underdog” • “Every journalist who goes to war, even the biggest ‘bang bang’ addict, says that, one way or another, they are there for the underdog,” Loyn writes. Martha Gellhorn would have approved. And yet the ethics of covering conflict are, as Carter and Loyd discovered to their cost, often tormenting. What lies in wait for those who cling to the illusion of “objective journalism” is a feeling of helplessness in the face of atrocity, akin to what the Dutch UN peacekeepers felt as the Srebrenica Massacre was methodically carried out in front of their eyes, or what journalist Scott Peterson felt watching the gruesome unfolding of the Rwandan Genocide, acutely aware of his own vulnerability: 46 Rwandese journalists were butchered. • Martin Bell while working in Bosnia-Herzegovina argued for a more ethically engaged journalism, a “journalism of attachment”, but Vaughan Smith argued for more diverse coverage. I think we need both. After all, once the story is over, we leave behind the victims, our interviewees, our brave fixers, translators and drivers, those who united or collided with us for brief periods of intense pain, fear and exhilaration, for better or worse. Our legacy resides in what message of integrity we leave behind in their shattered societies, in the empathetic way we told their stories to the world.