People Like Us (2 page)

This was how image and reality diverged, and when I realized this I knew which story I wanted to tell. I didn’t want to write a book explaining how the Arab world could become democratic, how tolerant or intolerant Islam is, or who is right or wrong in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. I wanted to write the opposite—a book that shows how difficult it is to say anything meaningful on such a major issue as the Middle East. Or, perhaps, simply a book about all those moments I found myself thinking,
Hello, everybody!

Most correspondents learn the trade in their own country, and are sent out into the world afterwards. I did it differently: I studied not journalism but social sciences and Arabic. As part of my course, I spent a year at Cairo University. After that I wrote a book about it, and that’s how the
Volkskrant
newspaper and Radio 1 News came by my name.

This meant I was very inexperienced when I arrived at my posting in Cairo. Although they’d let me do a few days’ work experience at the paper’s and the radio’s offices before I’d left for Egypt, I still regarded journalism like the average reader, viewer, or listener did. Journalists know what’s going on in the world, I thought; the news gives an overview of these events, and it is possible to keep that overview objective.

Very few of these ideas survived intact in the years that followed. “Doing” Israel and Palestine destroyed my belief in the possibility of impartial news. In the years that preceded that particular posting—from my first week in Wau to the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath—I learned that good journalism is a contradiction in terms in the Arab world, and this means that you
can’t
know what is happening there. You can’t know as a journalist, and you really can’t know as a viewer, reader, or listener.

It was something I discovered gradually, and certain things only became clear in hindsight, but my doubts had set in early on, during all the stress unleashed by waking up one day and discovering I was a Middle East correspondent.

That first week in Cairo, there I was amongst my unopened moving boxes when the phone rang. It was somebody from the paper telling me, “You have to go to Sudan!” I’d just found an apartment; now I’d have to leave immediately for a country I’d never visited before! How did that work? Did they have any diseases there I ought to know about? I felt my heart racing, and at that point I didn’t know I’d be visiting a famine camp. Even more embarrassing—I didn’t even know that there was a famine in Sudan.

The paper had called because some kind of “Islamic Front against Jews and Crusaders” had blown up two U.S. embassies in Africa. In response, Washington had bombarded the front’s training camps in Afghanistan and a factory in Sudan. The Americans claimed that the factory had been manufacturing chemical weapons and was owned by the group leader, one Osama bin Laden—but Washington provided no evidence and, according to the regime in Khartoum, the Al-Shifa (Healing) factory had been producing medicines.

As we queued at the Sudanese embassy in Cairo, fellow
journalists explained what was happening: For years, the Khartoum government had allowed in as few Western journalists as possible, aware that they’d write about nothing but misgovernment, exploitation, and war crimes. Clearly, the regime now supposed that journalists would write stories like “America destroys only pharmaceutical plant in poverty-stricken Sudan.” I had my visa within the hour.

I booked a flight, rode in the slipstream of the more experienced journalists, and stayed like most Europeans in the Acropolis—an affordable small hotel run by a Greek family who’d lived in the city for generations. Everyone ate together, the bedrooms didn’t have international phone lines, and the central lobby was the only place where you could watch television. All the Americans, without exception, stayed in the five-star Hilton, which also housed the Sudanese regime’s temporary press office.

I had no idea what I was supposed to do, and simply followed my peers the next morning. They were all very genial, and it soon became clear why, during the flight over the previous evening, they hadn’t been worried about the whys and wherefores: Everything was ready for us. At the bombed factory, the Sudanese had assembled a collection of the remains of American rockets and other striking visual evidence of the devastation: Keyboards amongst melted medicine bottles, blackened telephones and overhead projector sheets with next autumn’s objectives. The Ministry of Information directed us to the hospital where we’d find the wounded, and to the demonstrations in the city. These were small, but in close-up they looked larger, and that’s how CNN showed them: “Angry crowds protest against bombing in Khartoum.” Each day there was a press conference where nothing new was announced. After all, what could the regime say? “Poorest
country in Africa threatens U.S. with sanctions?” Still, it was a place where you could exchange gossip and tidbits of news, and the export manager of Al-Shifa was walking around tirelessly telling his story to the streams of journalists. “The American president is simply going to have to apologize.”

That’s how things went, and the bombing turned out to be good for three days” news: The report (“Cruise Missiles on Sudan”); the reactions of the populace (“Clinton is lying about Al-Shifa, too”); and the analysis (“Khartoum exploits U.S. attack”). With this, the bombing was covered, the export manager could go off and look for a new job, and the media caravan rolled on to the next story.

That story was not the famine in southern Sudan, other journalists said, even though hundreds were dying there every day. But I wanted to see the misery firsthand, and my paper told me to see how far I could get. I asked around and found out that, as part of Khartoum’s charm offensive, the south was temporarily open to journalists. Because the Netherlands gives a relatively large amount of development money to Sudan, the embassy was able to get me a travel permit to the war zone. MSF were keen to get some publicity for their activities, and offered me a seat in their plane. In exchange, I would mention the name of their organization in my article.

That’s how it went.

 

 

T
he editorial staff back home called my Sudan trip a tremendous start to my career. But, as I made my way back to Cairo, I was overburdened with confusing, new impressions. I’d always considered refugees to be, well, victims. But the biggest problems that MSF was facing were thuggery and theft. Camp residents stole from the relief workers
and from each other, fought vendettas, and sabotaged the food handouts unless they received preferential treatment ... Beforehand, I’d never have imagined this happening; but when the camp coordinator told me about it, I thought, what did you expect? It was the same with the Sudanese officials and bureaucrats. I’d assumed that they wanted to put an end to the misery; but, in Africa’s poorest country, things didn’t work that way. Local officials knew that Western aid organizations had to deliver the goods they’d promised and that individual aid workers” careers would be on the line if food didn’t reach the right people at the right time. So the officials blackmailed the aid workers—a thousand-dollar clearance fee would be demanded for the distribution of a food consignment to the south; no payment, and the food would be left to rot in the harbor.

In Cairo I slept for twenty-four hours, unpacked a few boxes, and then it was Monday morning. I sat down at my desk, lined up my “Middle East Correspondent” business cards, checked that my fax, phone, computer, and Internet were connected, and spotted a fatal flaw. What if a Western tourist was kidnapped in Yemen, a spiritual leader was blown up in Lebanon, Baghdad’s regime staged angry demonstrations, or a fundamentalist group was rounded up in the south of my very own Egypt? ... How would I know about it? You might tell me to switch on the news. But I was the news now.

It turned out to work like this: All the newspaper, radio, and television offices subscribe to news agencies such as Reuters, Agence France Presse (AFP), Associated Press (AP), and their more lightweight competitors. These news agencies send reporters to important events and also have tipsters on the payroll, even in the furthest corners of the world. When one of these reporters or tipsters from say, Reuters,
comes across something newsworthy, he calls his line manager. The line manager consults his bosses; and if they give the green light, reporters and photographers go off on the chase. Their photos and information are sent to the local capital or to London, where they are turned into a newsflash that is forwarded as quickly as possible to thousands of editors all over the world. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—press conferences, funerals, world records, shootings, election results, medical wonders, earthquakes, amazing rescue operations, unexpected snowfall, border incidents ...

The news agencies are the eyes and ears of the world and, in the industry, their flood of information is called the “news stream” or simply “the agencies” or “the wires.” It would go like this: “Hilversum studios here. The wires say that some fundamentalists have been picked up in your area. Do you know anything else about it?” In the beginning I sometimes wanted to exclaim, “How do you expect me to know anything else about it when the local media sits on news for days on end?” It was, of course, a standard question, but the implication verged on humiliating: If, in Hilversum, they had faster and better access to what was happening in my area than I did, where did that leave me?

 

 

P
resenting was the primary task of every correspondent, as I discovered a month and a half later when the Middle East really dominated world news for a while. Saddam Hussein was still in power in Iraq and had expelled the UN weapons inspectors from his country. The U.S. was insisting that he let them back in, and was threatening him with bombardment.

An ultimatum was set, and journalists hurried to neighboring
Jordan, where the only still-functioning Iraqi embassy was situated. I was reunited with the journalists I’d gotten to know in Sudan, but there were too many new faces for it to be an intimate reunion. The fact was, because America bombing Iraq was more newsworthy than America bombing Sudan, reporters had flown in from all over the world. The week before they’d reported on riots in Asia, and after this they’d move on to Africa. It made for some interesting scenes in the five-star hotels in Amman. You had the diplomats and Western businessmen who’d been working in Iraq and had all raced from Baghdad to Amman in their four-wheel drives, and you had the journalists who’d raced to Amman to tear off in four-wheel drives to Baghdad. Apparently there were also Iraqi secret agents in the five-star hotels, trying to keep a record of who the expats were talking to.

It was as cosy as could be with all those war correspondents, and practical problems dominated our conversations. We huddled up with contacts, spoke stealthily into our phones, tried to wheedle other people’s gambits out of them after much beer, or begged the BBC for help—there was a rumor going round that they had a functionary at the Iraqi Ministry of Information on their payroll and could get visas. This was what everything revolved around, and for me, too—getting a visa. What a humiliating nightmare. You filled in a form and you went twice a day to the Iraqi embassy to listen to Consul Sadun, sitting under a large poster of Saddam Hussein, the Anointed, the Glorious, read out the names of the lucky few. We jostled Sadun like children clustering around a dubious-looking man with candy and, on the final evening before the ultimatum was levied, I saw grown men in tears by the embassy gates when they discovered they’d be reduced to peering through the fence. Perhaps it was some consolation
to them that, shortly afterwards, all the stress gave Sadun a heart attack. Some news organizations sent fruit baskets.

Back in our hotel, everyone was drinking. “Arafat! Yes, Arafat. That time when Clinton came to Gaza—Oh, with that bloke with the tip-top homemade whisky—I even interviewed him—Who, Arafat?!—Yes, but I’m not telling you how I swung that one.” Lost for words, I drank along with them, if only because the alcohol helped me forget that I didn’t have a visa stamp in my passport either, and I’d have to “do” the war from my hotel room in Amman.

The bombings began, and a wave of suppressed relief swept over the correspondents, particularly the freelancers. Saddam could have given in at the last minute, and then there wouldn’t have been any bombings. No bombings would have meant no work, after money had already been spent on coming to Amman.

The news agencies’ reports over the first bomb strikes came in, and Dutch Radio 1 News began a continuous broadcast. But what was there to report? It wasn’t yet possible to determine whether all of the targets had been hit. The fact that the U.S. Air Force said it was all going according to plan, and that the victims of the bombing were angry, was par for the course; I could only report that a couple of times. But what else? I couldn’t even leave the hotel. Not only was it the middle of the night, but the sound quality afforded by the Jordanian telephone company was too poor to do a cross-talk with the radio mobile.