People Like Us (6 page)

For a short while, I thought I’d cracked the problem of journalism in the Arab world: News only shows what deviates from the norm, and if the norm is not known, you get a distorted image.

But I continued to feel uneasy. For a while I thought it might be guilt; I’d expected to be able to pick up again the friendships from my student days, but it hadn’t happened. As a student I’d been able to minimize the difference between myself and my poverty-stricken fellow students by renting a room in a working-class suburb. I’d looked down on the Western expats living on Zamalek, the elite island in the Nile,
with youthful scorn. But when I became a correspondent, that’s where I went to live. As a student, adopting the Arab pace of life was wonderful: Taking time for other people, turning up late, making endless calls to see how things were. But now I had editors back home, and the media are organized like a factory. Or rather, an army—it’s not for nothing that we use the term
dead
line.

When we met I noticed how little I, as an educated Westerner, had in common with my old friends. And there was that unbridgeable financial gulf. The rent I paid each month was the equivalent of what some people lived on for three years. Move somewhere else then, you might say; but after a day’s hard work, I yearned for the peace and comfort of Zamalek.

Finding time to make new friends just wasn’t possible either. I covered ten countries, all of which required regular visits. A coup could happen at any time, a leader might die, or something might blow up, and then I’d have to work late or scurry over there—which is not very helpful when you’re trying to build a friendship. In my free time, I simply didn’t feel like hanging out with the people I was reporting on. How many group tirades against an American president or an Israeli prime minister could a man take? It was a
Catch 22
situation: In order to hear what was going on, I needed “local contacts”; yet I’d only get those contacts if I lived in a way that was incompatible with the life of a correspondent.

 

 

B
ut it was more than simple guilt, and it got worse when I discovered something strange. Dutch news teams, me included, fed on the selection of news made by quality media sources like CNN, the BBC, and the
New York Times
. We did that on the assumption that their correspondents understood
the Arab world and commanded a view of it—but many of them turned out not to speak Arabic, or at least not enough to be able to have a conversation in it or to follow the local media. Many of the top dogs at CNN, the BBC, the
Independent
, the
Guardian
, the
New Yorker,
and the
New York Times
were more often than not dependent on assistants and translators.

The correspondents from the quality media lived, like me, in the nicest areas of the city. So let’s turn that around. Imagine that a Moroccan correspondent who speaks neither English nor any European language is sent to London. He goes to live in a posh house in Kensington, where he spends his free time and makes friends—all of whom have to speak Arabic. His children go to an Arabic school, and his wife joins the Arab Women’s Circle. What kind of impression of the U.K. would such a correspondent get? He can’t understand talk shows, election debates, or speeches given by the queen, or the prime minister, or the coach of the national football team. He can’t understand conversations in the street, the news, current affairs columns, soaps, jokes, or comedians. He keeps up with the press through a translation service; what they don’t translate, he doesn’t know. He can’t talk to ordinary British people—only Arab expats, British Arabs, Arab British, British people married to Arabs and, of course, fellow journalists from the Arab world. And that’s in a free country, where people being interviewed don’t have to worry about their interpreter’s other job in the secret services.

Many Western correspondents in the Arab world seem to work and live according to the precepts of this thought experiment of a Moroccan in the U.K. I once traveled alongside a BBC hero. The local assistant took him to the airport, where he sat down to wait for his business-class flight in the
business-class lounge. When he reached his destination, an assistant helped him through customs with his bags, after which his usual chauffeur drove him to the office so he could go through the cuttings from the translation service. It was an efficient way of doing things, and the BBC guy surely got to know more than I did. But how many ordinary people did he speak to and what did he see of everyday life? I spent at least an hour sweating in the passport-checking queue, and then in another queue, and then I had to get my own luggage off the conveyor belt ...

 

 

T
he discovery that my peers and I were viewing “our” areas with blinkers on was painful, but it didn’t explain that feeling of something not being right. I began to suspect that there wasn’t just something wrong with what remained out of the frame in our coverage of the Arab world, but also with what was in the frame. Remember those lists that correspondents had of human rights activists, scholars, and other talking heads? Using their views for the news seemed like straightforward journalism—but was it?

Egypt and other Arab countries are police states where scholars are screened by the secret services before being appointed; it is an open secret that many academics have their connections, not their abilities, to thank for their jobs. Arab embassies in Western countries also keep an eye on the media, so being quoted is a risky business for academics—but it also has its attractions. An Arab academic who turns up frequently in renowned Western newspapers and magazines or on TV gets invited to multicultural arts events, think tanks, and academic institutions in the West. This means a visa, which means future visas will also be much easier to
obtain. It means a free flight, tax-free shopping, and contact with publishers, sponsors, and institutions that give out work, travel, and living-cost bursaries. The daily allowances at Western conferences are often more than a month’s salary for academics from Arab countries.

An academic from the Arab world is different from an academic living in the West, and the same goes for human rights activists. They do earn a good wage, because it is paid for by Western governments (“donors” in the jargon). Local human rights activists are much quoted by correspondents because, let’s face it, it’s nice to have your questions answered for once. But the more of these activists I met, the less enthusiastic I became—with their routine one-liners, the way they immediately handed over their business cards in order to make sure that I’d spell their names and organizations correctly. The interviews they gave frequently included expressions like, “It’s a long way off, but we’re working towards it,” or “Giving up is simply not an option.” I began to suspect that they’d read their interviews later on the Internet and thought,
Hey, those Western journalists always use that bit about “never giving up, ” so I’ll keep saying it
.

That’s the problem with human rights activists in the Arab world. Rich Arabs donate billions every year to Islamic missions and the building of mosques, but human rights activists only exist because of Western subsidies. Their chance of getting the subsidies increases as they become more famous and, of course, Western journalists can help them achieve such fame. The consequence is a dodgy tango between journalists looking for good quotes and human rights activists looking for publicity. I found it telling that, during my studies, not a single student knew any human rights activists, let alone supported them. How, I thought, would I look
on a Dutch organization financed by Iran or Saudi Arabia? Equally telling seems the term that Western diplomats use for local human rights activists: “donor darlings.” Embassies had funds to spend on supporting human rights, but they could only give them to organizations with a Western political agenda, transparent bookkeeping, and other guarantees against fraud. Donor darlings fulfilled these requirements, and had something to offer in exchange. Dutch MPs, for example, would regularly make lightning trips to Egypt or other Arab countries. The embassy would send the MPs off to visit a few donor darlings, who would tell a polished story in fluent English that pushed all the right buttons: Development, gender, empowerment, civil society, and good governance. Back home, the MP would be able to write a glowingly enthusiastic report of his visit:
You see, the Egyptians do want to be just like us!

 

 

I
gradually lost confidence in the talking heads, and the same happened with the local media—another source I’d expected to frequently consult. There were stations like Al-Jazeera that were said to be relatively independent; but their news was usually about international politics, their intended audience being the entire Arab world. For local news, I was reliant on the state newspapers and television, which were censored and controlled by the regime. It resulted in some ridiculous kowtowing—for example, a twenty-four-page supplement on “an angel in the form of a president,” or the recurring headline: “Mubarak’s contribution to peace process is praised all over the world.” Egypt and some other Arab countries also had “independent” newspapers, but they were often full of nonsense: “Foreign nurses inject Libyan babies with
AIDS.” These papers could be shut down at any moment, if only because the government controlled the printing presses, the distribution system, and supplies of paper and ink. It was also rumored that certain independent newspapers were instruments of the secret services, of other Arab leaders, or of prominent oil sheiks. A newspaper can be very useful when you want to harangue and attack rivals and opponents.

One of the top stories during my time in Cairo had to do with domestic terrorist attacks. If a Japanese tourist was stabbed, the Egyptian state television would simply keep quiet about it. Instead you’d get this kind of article in the state newspapers the next day:

Correspondents would be faxed articles like this by the Ministry of Information. At the bottom of my fax about the “incident” with the stabbed Japanese tourist, a civil servant had added in bold letters: “Attention, this is real Egypt.” Not long afterwards, Egypt staged a presidential “referendum,” with a single candidate. The biggest Egyptian paper,
Al-Gumhuriya or The Republic
, offered the following commentary. It was written by the editor-in-chief, a confidant of the man who won the referendum:

Often my editors back home would want quotes—we call them “vox pops”—from the ordinary man in the street. What did he think of the referendum? There I was, sitting down with a certain Nabil, a twenty-something whom I’d once spent a day with in Cairo. “Every revolution, every disaster, economic crisis and war, pornography ... You’ll always discover that
there are Jews behind it. The problem is that Jews only consider themselves to be human. Once, Prophet Mohammed, Peace Be His Name, took a group of Jews captive after a battle. But do you know what’s written in the Jewish holy book? Never take prisoners of war. That’s what Jews are like, it’s in their culture.” He stuck one finger in the air. “But please note, I don’t hate the Jewish. I’ve got a good friend in America who’s a Jew.” He told me about his studies and holidays in America, and how he was teaching his children English. We ordered Cokes, and he explained that the Holocaust could never have happened because “the ovens were too small.” Did I know that Hitler had been subsidized by the Jews? Did I know how much interest they’d asked? “Thirty-eight percent. Because it all comes down to money in the end with the Jews.”

What was I supposed to do with a story like this? Was he mad, or did half of the population think like this?