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Testifying
from the front
Shiraz
Sidhva, UNESCO Courier journalist. |
Rwanda 1994: Magnum photographer James Nachtwey carries an orphaned baby to shelter...
... while
cameras zoom in on a suspected Hutu death squad member.
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Seeing
is not always believing
In 1995, when
the historic town of Charar-e-Sharif in the Kashmir valley was burnt to a cinder,
army officials escorted busloads of visiting foreign and Indian journalists to see
the devastation. To prove it was the work of mercenaries from Pakistan, reporters
were guided to a courtyard to photograph five corpses they claimed were “foreign”
mercenaries killed in a gun-battle with the army.
Journalists who returned to the site after the “guided tour” discovered that the
bodies were not “foreign” at all. Five men from a nearby village had been arrested
that morning and killed to serve the government’s propaganda machine. Almost every
Indian newspaper carried the photograph of the “dreaded Afghan mercenaries.” Only
one foreign news magazine published photographs of the anguished villagers grieving
their dead that day.
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“You
can have a subtle mix of information control, drip-feed propaganda stories, cosy
briefings and more blatant attempts at intimidation.”
www.cpj.org
www.iwpr.net
www.rsf.fr
Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty, Prion Books, London, rev.ed. 2000. |
Modern
wars are fought with huge propaganda machines or through the rule of terror. How
can a journalist in the midst of conflict decipher the truth?
The first casualty when
war comes, is truth,” observed U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson in the midst of World War
I. Nearly a century and many conflicts later, technological advances have brought
wars into living rooms across the world. But truth still remains the first casualty,
buried under layers of propaganda, vested interests and fear.
Reporting from the battlefront has never been technically easier, with satellite
phones and live news relayed in real-time. But this has only accentuated the dilemmas
that journalists encounter when covering conflicts: authoritarian regimes and even
democracies go to even greater lengths to conceal the truth.
The last century has seen large-scale battles between countries give way to deadly
internecine conflicts, often between governments and their own people. From Africa
to East Timor, from Kashmir and Sri Lanka to the killing fields of Chechnya, Bosnia,
Colombia and Sierra Leone, old ethnic hatred is rekindled, and wars are fought not
on battlefronts but in the midst of civilian populations. According to Robert Manoff,
director of New York University’s Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, mass
violence is so “universalized” that there are currently over 200 communal groups
fighting political and military wars in 93 countries.
The media’s role remains essentially to act as a messenger. Yet journalists also
have the power to change the course of conflicts by influencing public opinion. “The
outcomes of these small, post-modern wars may depend as much on how they are perceived
as on how they are fought,” writes Tom Gjelten of U.S. National Public Radio. Gjelten,
who has covered major conflicts worldwide, believes journalists must recognize that
their task is not to please diplomats or facilitate peace processes, but to describe
a conflict as truthfully as possible.
Local
journalists are prime targets
Do
the exigencies of war justify a different set of ethics from those of peacetime?
The principles are essentially the same, but for one major difference: journalists
are more vulnerable in war. In Sierra Leone, East Timor and Chechnya, the bulletproof
jackets that Western journalists donned provided little protection from the wrath
of a killer squad or a vindictive soldier’s bullet. For local journalists, the terrors
are even starker. Yves Sorokobi, who coordinates the Africa programme for the Committee
to Protect Journalists, recounts that ten reporters were executed by rebels in Sierra
Leone over 21 days in 1999 (see box).
Reporting is also hampered by government restrictions on access to trouble spots.
Since 1995, hardly any journalists in Sri Lanka have had access to the area where
the government is fighting a deadly battle with the separatist guerrilla group, the
Liberation of Tamil Tigers’ Eelam. “We don’t get anywhere close to the conflict,”
says Nirupama Subramanian, special correspondent of The Hindu in Colombo. Instead,
both sides transmit their version of the news via contradictory press releases. “It
is a fax war we are covering,” Subramanian says. “There’s no way of knowing the truth.”
The proliferation of real-time news has made political control even tighter. Journalists
often find they have little training for the choices they are forced to make in tense
situations. When two countries are at war, whose “truth” should the correspondent
convey–that of the country to which the journalist belongs or that of the enemy,
whose version might be more compelling? For the writer and war correspondent John
Pilger, it is exactly this “virulence of an unrecognized censorship, often concealed
behind false principles of objectivity” that serves to “minimize and deny the culpability
of Western power in acts of great violence and terrorism, such as the Gulf and Kosovo.”
Powerless
observers of unfolding dramas?
War
reporting has nevertheless come a long way since the two world wars, when most journalism
was an uncritical arm of the war effort. Twenty years later, governments learnt from
Vietnam that unrestricted access to war zones, particularly with the advent of television,
was potential political suicide. In his classic book The First Casualty, Phillip
Knightley concludes that the freedom journalists had to operate in Vietnam “to go
anywhere, see anything, and write what they liked is not going to be given again.”
“In a democracy, you cannot get away with the crude authoritarianism of closing down
newspapers or taking over broadcasters,” writes Steven Barnett, senior lecturer in
communications at the University of Westminster, reviewing Knightley’s book. “You
can, however, have a subtle mixture of information control, drip-feed propaganda
stories about the enemy, cosy briefings for ‘friendly’ journalists and more blatant
attempts at intimidation for the less obliging.”
The British devised an excellent strategy to manage the media during the Falklands
war in 1982–they denied access, except to “friendly” journalists willing to report
defence briefings.
The Gulf War was the first in history where the public expected regular reporting
from an “enemy” capital under siege. Fought mostly from the air, with attacks deep
within enemy territory, it was impossible for international journalists to verify
military information or report on Iraqi casualties. It was only later that the deceptions
were exposed, whether it was Iraqis flinging premature Kuwaiti babies out of incubators
(which turned out to be the work of an American public relations agency commissioned
by the Kuwaiti government), or the filmed preparations for an allied landing on the
Kuwaiti coast, which was never part of the military plan.
During the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, the press was actively used to drum up
public support. The pitfalls of instant news became all too obvious during the conflict.
With 2,700 media personnel in the region when NATO entered Kosovo (compared with
500 in Vietnam at the war’s peak), the war could have produced unprecedented free
and fair reporting. But instead, the story behind the sound bytes was missing. “The
public drowned in wave after wave of images that added up to nothing,” writes Knightley.
Above all the clamour, however, several war correspondents have worked at great risk.
John Burns of the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, spent more than a year
in besieged Sarajevo, sharing many nights of terror with the local people to tell
the world what was really going on. For such journalists, objectivity may have little
to do with neutrality, especially when the choice is between hapless victims and
perpetrators of genocidal crimes.
For many reporters, the greatest dilemma comes down to how involved they should get.
Often, journalists are overwhelmed by fear and helplessness, but are still called
upon to provide the only link between a war-afflicted people and the outside world.
“I couldn’t stop the smallest part of it,” recalled Lindsey Hilsum of the British
news service ITN about reporting the massacres of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. “I could
only watch and survive.” Yet Hilsum decided to testify before the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda. “It was not my responsibility, and testifying could even have
compromised my role as a journalist,” she explained. “But I also have responsibilities
as a human being.”
Courses at journalism school and professional guidelines drawn up by media organizations
like the Freedom Forum are widening the debate on professionalism in war reporting,
though most agree that the basic qualities needed are integrity and a good dose of
common sense. Anthony Borden, executive director of the Institute of War and Peace
Reporting in London, stresses the importance of engaging and valuing the work of
local journalists, especially at a time when commercial pressures threaten the continued
coverage of conflicts in regions not perceived to have strategic importance.
Given all the dangers, why do journalists choose to cover certain conflicts? It is
unlikely they do it for fame or fortune, or as some people believe, for the thrill
of it. Most reporters believe their writing will make a difference. The legendary
correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who covered wars for nearly half a century, explained
it best: “… in all my reporting life, I have thrown small pebbles into a very large
pond, and I have no way of knowing if any pebble caused the slightest ripple. I don’t
need to worry about that.” |
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Jia
Kangbai*: Reporting from death row
Since it began
in 1991, Sierra Leone’s conflict between rebels and the government has claimed close
to 30,000 lives while mutilating 120,000. Outside the warring factions, no group
has been more targeted than journalists. Reporting involves a constant face-to-face
meeting with death, kidnappings, torture and even long detention without trial.
Every Sierra Leonean journalist has a horror tale to tell of his or her experience
in the field. I received my war baptism in 1995 while heading for the southern town
of Bo to investigate alleged collaboration between government forces and Revolutionary
United Front rebels. Barely an hour into the journey the convoy of more than 100
vehicles ran into an ambush. That was the closest call to death I have ever had.
More than 75 vehicles lay in ruins and 36 people were killed. Those of us who survived
were forced to tote the rebels’ loot back to their base.
Many have not gotten off so lightly. Mustapha Sesay, who used to work for the Standard
Times, had his left eye permanently damaged by a machete while trying to flee the
rebel invasion of the capital, Freetown, in 1999. The invading troops killed Sesay’s
deputy editor, Paul Mansaray, and his entire family in front of their home. Rebels
went on to set the paper’s offices ablaze and destroy five other newspaper offices.
Both parties to the conflict, meanwhile, conducted house-to-house searches for blacklisted
journalists, raising the question of whether it is necessary to prostrate one’s life
at the abattoir table for an objective report in a war like ours.
Objective reporting was constantly on the mind of Corinne Dufka, a researcher with
Human Rights Watch, during a visit to Freetown last year. “Don’t the authorities
know that you journalists are required to have every side of the story including
that of the rebels?” Ms. Dufka asked while discussing the fate of a local journalist,
Abdoul Kouyateh, who was detained for six months for having links with the rebels.
There is no official rebel-run newspaper in the country, and a balanced or critical
article written about either of the two stakeholders (government and rebels) in the
peace process is invariably interpreted as partisan reporting. Write an opinion piece
or editorial lampooning the government for not honouring its side of the 1999 Lome
peace deal and people will brand you a rebel. Give me a local newspaper, and I will
tell you which government minister or official financed its publication.
In times of “peace,” what you write and say in your report will be the bullet that
kills you when the war intensifies. Most local journalists, especially those in the
print media, have unfortunately contributed to this deplorable state of affairs.
In October last year, the pro-government Kamajor militia abducted and tortured me
for three days. The whole episode was the machination of the country’s defence chief
and militia head, Sam Hinga Norman, who four days before my abduction had tried to
bribe us into dropping a story of a clash between his militia and the army. A colleague
of mine, who doubled as a militia informer, had leaked the story to his patrons.
We are now fearing a possible attack from the Kamajors, whose head we recently lambasted
for alleged corruption. I have yet to see a local court which could pass a guilty
verdict on the militia or security apparatus.
The few journalists who dare to file stories from this death row should be encouraged
and highly appreciated. But they need to understand that no matter how important
a story is, it is useless to risk their lives for it: war reporting is for the living,
not for the dead.
* Editor
of The Standard Times, Freetown
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