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LSE Literary Festival - War Stories: How to bring the battle to the book?
01:23:19
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- [00:00]
Charlie Beckett
Good morning, everybody.
- [00:01]
Moderator
Thanks very much for coming in On a beautiful day like this, into the darkness of the lse, perhaps we can shed some light on some things. My name is Charlie Beckett. I'm the director of something called polis, which is the media journalism think tank here at the London School of Economics. We're based in the Media and Communications department. And one of the things that we teach about is around journalism and conflict issues. And whenever we do that, whenever I, which I did recently, I gave a lecture about war reporting. One of the things I point out to the students who are very international, is that they are in a country that is, in a sense, at war. Britain is at war. And indeed, many of the students themselves are from countries that are either engaged in conflict or are somehow affected by it. So it's very much an issue that's very present in people's lives. And what we teach or we look at is the way that war itself has become very diverse, asymmetric, internal civilization, transnational. And of course, the way that we report on war has become much more diverse because of new media technologies. Even things like the changing nature of air travel has changed the way that we can report on our world and the conflict that is within it. So this is obviously an incredibly topical issue and a complex issue. And so I'm delighted that we've got a very diverse panel with us who, in a sense, represent the very different strands that there are in conflict journalism. I should say at the beginning that apologies from Sam Kiley, who was due to be here, but can't. Sam has broken his leg, which I think is a reasonably good excuse not to turn up, I should say. It wasn't in a conflict zone, it was in London. But we're delighted that Andrew Miller has agreed to step in the format today is that. I'm going to shut up in a second and our three authors are going to read in turn from their latest books, and then we're going to have a discussion. It's very much open to you to comment, ask questions, etc. So make a mental note while you're listening, and you'll have plenty of chance at the end of this to have a conversation about war, I guess, and about how we report on war and what difference it can make to write books about war, I guess. Very quick introduction to the three of us. Firstly, Andrew Muller kindly stepped in to replace Sam Kiely. Andrew, who is. You'll work out when he speaks. Originally Australian, but very much a Londoner for the last 20 years. He's an all round, kind of international reporter, somebody who covers culture as well as conflict. Indeed. His latest book, I Wouldn't Start From Here, is something of a kind of travelogue where conflict constantly keeps coming across his path. Your path comes across conflict. Then we're going to hear from Roslyn Jones, who's worked for all sorts of newspapers, Guardian, Mirror. When I spoke to Ros last week, she was busy projecting images onto, was it the House of Commons? Bank of England. Sorry, bank of England, as part of the Robin Hood tax campaign. So somebody who's, if you like, active as well as journalistic. Her latest book was made up, which is, you may think it's not surprising for a journalist, but in this case it's legitimate. It's because it's a novel. Something Is Going To Fall Like Rain is a novel about the conflict in South Sudan. And then finally we're going to hear from Stephen Gray, who is an investigative journalist, who, in a sense, I think it's fair to say, Stephen, you sort of come later to war reporting, but certainly came to it. He spent time last year in Afghanistan. His latest book, Operation Snake Bite, is about the war in Afghanistan. And obviously, you know, that's very much in our minds today as they launch the Operation Mosh Tarak against the Taliban this morning, if you can launch a campaign this morning. So we're going to have those readings, then we have a conversation and obviously you're part of that. And I'd like to start, I think, with Andrew Muller. Andrew, do you want to come up here?
- [05:14]
Andrew Muller
Thank you.
- [05:15]
Charlie Beckett
Wow.
- [05:17]
Andrew Muller
Yeah. My name's Andrew Muller and this came out, I don't know, late 2008 in the UK it's called I Wouldn't Start From Here. And it's. I still don't really know what it's about. The idea was that it was going to be the first published history of the 21st century, but it was the 21st century very much as I'd experienced it. It's all about me, as these things always are. The reading I want to do today is from. From the recollection of visiting Baghdad in 2003, very shortly after it had been taken by the Americans. And things were still somewhat confused, which is why a lot of this dispatch is probably somewhat confusing. Sorry, I should have brought my water with me. In Baghdad, we found lodgings in a genial flea pit around the corner from the better appointed Al Hamrah Hotel, which was teeming with hacks and NGO types wilting under the weight of laminated ID badges. We were still within staggering distance of the Alhambra's bar, and it was only $30 a night for a four room suite. The staff's commitment to their guest safety also impressed us. At night, the family who owned the hotel slept in the lobby with rifles and grenade launchers under their camp beds. We hired a driver, translator from among the men looking for business outside the Al Hamra Amar sold himself on his excellent English and air conditioned yellow Chevrolet. I asked him to take us to Rasheed street, the heart of downtown Baghdad, for breakfast in a fruit juice bar. I'd fallen in love with these places back in 2000. Gaudy cafes with tiled mirrored interiors, piles of fresh fruit stacked in the windows, rows of blenders, surfaces painted, and staff dressed in colors matching the merchandise. Bananas, oranges, kiwi fruit, pineapples and pomegranates. Rashid street wasn't the vibrant shopping district I remembered. Most shops and most juice bars were closed. The rubbish hadn't been collected for a couple of months. There were no cars on the street, which had once been so congested that I suspected that places in the traffic jam were passed from father to son. The few people present were talkative, which wasn't surprising. They had a lot to talk about and generally optimistic, which was surprising. The views of the shopkeepers who fed us tea and cakes could be summarized the hell with Saddam Hussein. Thank you, America, for removing him. Please fix everything you broke and bugger off. Complaints about the present state of affairs were also unvarying. Absence of security, electricity, hot water and telephones. The removal of all the everyday miracles of modern urban life. One man showed me a receipt for the $25,000 in taxes his company had paid the previous October. Where is it? He demanded. What has happened to my money? I told him that bafflement regarding the end use of one's taxes was not unique to Iraq. Some of mine, I explained, had recently been spent on bombing his city for reasons which remained unclear to me. Also on Rashid street were a couple of previously unimaginable displays of independent political thought. The New Iraq Progressive Movement Party was selling a newspaper, and the workers Communist Party of Iraq, had set up a labor exchange on the footpath. If this looked like good news, it was balanced by less heartening omens. Stahl selling postcards of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Hezbollah Secretary General Syed Hassan Nasrallah. And in the juice bar we decided on the chaps behind the counter. Having noted, our cameras directed us around the corner. In an avenue off Rasheed street, an incongruously clean blue and white blanket lay on the dirty footpath. A grey hand protruded from underneath it. A thief, someone said, shot earlier that morning. Though nobody in the curious crowd who gathered around us was clear whether he died in the heat of hot pursuit or the cold blood of summary execution. It would be ludicrous to suggest that arbitrary death had not been a feature of life in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein. But this pathetic tragedy seemed to encapsulate everything that was wrong with post war Iraq. All the usual rules of life had been suspended. There were no laws to deter the thief from contemplating his crime. There were no police to call when he was observed in the act. There was no judicial process to try him. There wasn't even anyone willing to collect the corpse. Not far away on Jamhariya street, we met our first American soldiers, men from 27th infantry guarding a bank. We told them what we'd found. I think someone's dealing with that kind of stuff, said one. Not sure who, though, but basically the rule is that if we don't kill them ourselves, we can't pick them up. All over Baghdad, the American soldiers looked as perplexed as people he'd toggled up for a fancy dress party and gone to the wrong address. Like every American position In Baghdad, the 27th Infantry's position outside the Al Sahaya bank was a mixture of sentry post, talking shop, freak show, and sitting duck. Although the crowd of Iraqis around the knee high barbed wire that delineated the perimeter seemed affable, it was impossible when seeing the street as the soldiers did, to forget that any overlooking window could secrete a sniper. Any passing motorcyclist could toss a grenade. Any truck could explode. Some Iraqi children joked with the soldiers, one capering rapscallion maintaining a spirited if incredibly annoying chorus of usa, usa. George Bush. Very good. An impeccably mannered gray haired gent in a suit asked in perfect English when he'd be able to withdraw his money. Sir, sighed the sergeant, I wish I could help you. Most people just stood and stared. The reality of American soldiers in downtown Baghdad, still only slightly less bizarre than the invasion by the idea of invasion by six headed green men from Saturn. Out of earshot of the soldiers, some hostile muttering was discernible. Fucking assholes. Spluttered one man with commendable grasp of the colloquial. They destroyed my country. If I had a gun, I'd shoot them. Nice, I said, to meet the only unarmed man in Baghdad. I swear, I swear, he said unnecessarily Fucking assholes. Would he rather have Saddam back? Fucking asshole. No pleasing some people at the compound, which included the Sheraton and Palestine hotels, where most of the press had covered the war, had stayed. The entrances were sealed with barbed wire and guarded by Abrams tanks. The security was impenetrable unless you looked like you were in no way Iraqi, in which case you were waved in with smiles from the soldiers. The tanks belonged to Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 69th Armored Regiment. Each tank had a nickname, beginning with the company identification C painted on the barrel. One crew had made a real effort with a striped, appropriately colored courtesy of the red, white and blue. This was a homage to the post Sept. 11 Toby Keith ballad whose fist pumping middle eight, which promised to insert a boot into the posterior of anyone possessing the temerity to mess with the US Of A split seemed to have mutated from sentimental populist anthem into American foreign policy. Another tank crew, obviously Beavis and Butthead fans, had plumped for Cornholio outside the Palestine. Robert and I got talking to the crew of the Abrams named Camel Toe, they said, not sounding entirely convinced themselves. The name had seemed funnier at the time. Lt. Temple, Camel TO's commander, guessed that C Company killed at least 130 Fedayeen on the way up from Kuwait, while an excited correspondent from Fox News rooted around inside the tank, probably trying to start it so he could invade Syria. I observed that Lt. Temple sounded like he'd rather enjoyed his ride to Baghdad. He didn't disagree. It was pretty awesome, said Lt. Temple. We're a tank crew, so this was the super bowl for us. Kind of sad, though. This is probably the first and last tank battle of the 21st century. We're not going to fight wars like this anymore. At the wire fencing the hotels off from Ferda Square, the barrel of another Abrams squinted across to the plinth from which the famous statue of Saddam had been hauled down. Before a crowd of several hundred hysterical foreign journalists and several bemused Iraqis, I spoke to a couple of the locals peering over the barricade. One young man, who introduced himself as Sadeel and told me his father was a sports reporter, was upset. The whole world, he said, is laughing at my people. I doubted that, I said, whether people were for or against the war, they were generally sympathetic to the folks on the receiving end. No, he insisted, you laugh. The discussion began to involve several, then a dozen, then dozens of Iraqis, then American soldiers as well. Though animated, it was jovial, reminiscent of rival cricket fans ragging each other during a Drinks break. Adding to the cacophony, a demonstration arrived in the square bearing the Kurdish flag and some regrettably mistranslated banners deploring Saddam Hussein's comical bombing. A group of five musicians clad in black sat up in the middle of the roundabout and struck up a mournful tune on two violins, a cello, a clarinet and a mandolin. The American soldier closest to the Abrams addressed the chattering crowd. People. He yelled at parade ground volume. Could you all please can it for a few minutes so we can enjoy the music? They did and we did, and the Kurds seemed genuinely touched by the subsequent applause. An inspired piece of improvised diplomacy, a quality in short supply elsewhere in Baghdad.
- [14:22]
Roslyn Jones
This book's not quite as funny as Stephen's book it grew out of. I covered the civil war in southern Sudan in the late 90s and I must have written about 50 reports from there during that time. And really this novel kind of grew out of the gaps in between those reports, the stuff that it gets harder and harder to report. In this extract. One of the main characters, he's a very sort of naive trainee doctor called Maria, is basically trapped behind the front lines of the civil war. They've gone in on an assessment mission to try and see what the needs are. There's a huge famine going on as well as a war. At this point they've gone in on assessment mission, but the airstrip has been destroyed by bombing overnight. So they found themselves trapped in this village, which was quite a common threat to aid workers in South Sudan at that time. So at this point they'd been trapped there for a month. She's argued with her hosts kind of overnight and woken up early in the morning still thinking about the argument that she'd had. Sean and I had spoken for a while afterwards, but when I awoke in the darkness it was Chief Deng and Michael I thought of, desperately upset that I'd argued with them, but also still feeling they were wrong. Rather than relive the conversation again, I decided to get up, sliding my feet into my battered blue flip flops and pausing to flick the wood spiders from my damp towel. Walking out into the unlit camp, showering under a sky lightning towards grey velvet with a few stubborn stars still glittering above me, I began to feel a little better, luxuriating in the 92nd torrent of cool well water before pulling on cleanest shorts and a recently washed T shirt. The headache I'd been carrying the past couple of days seemed to shift slightly and I felt light headed as the warm air dried, my wet hair pausing at the embers of the fire, I thought about filling the heavy kettle and making tea, but found myself pulled by a strong desire to take a walk through the approaching dawn and watch the village awake from beyond its perimeter. I had precious little time to explore now that the work at the hospital and the feeding centres had become so unforgiving, and I longed to walk out to the fringes of the bush and beyond, away from the dung fires and the scent of boiling butter and wet, mealy meal, to an empty landscape where children did not cry and queues of women did not watch my progress with hopeful, desperate eyes. Too impatient to return to the tucor for my boots, I left in darkness in my flip flops, my feet joyfully liberated from the heavy, sweltering leather they'd been encased in for weeks. In my shorts pocket, by some small miracle, was a slender Lucky Strike cigarette, and I had the idea of smoking it somewhere I could watch the dawn's red sun tip over the straw huts, flooding them with fiery light after so many weeks of violent, oppressive heat. The air felt deliciously cool on my clean skin after my shower, and I found my spirits lifting as I walked. The watercolour sky was slowly lightening, a pale eggshell grey tinged with pink brushstrokes where it met the earth, and I longed to be there at the empty horizon, a single black silhouette like the dark mango wood carvings I'd seen at the roadside near Locky, a lone shape rising from the curvature of the reddish earth. Passing through the camp entrance, I picked up speed, smiling at the slumbering form of our guard, Moses, the sleeping sentinel, his shadow nodding against the butt of his rifle. I walked with the morning heat haze rising around my half bare feet, slipping through the compounds of sleeping tucals where white smoke crept on its belly along the earth from the embers of the previous night's fires. I walked with the dawn in front of me and my damp feet gathering dirt with every step, listening for even the faintest trace of birdsong in this place where so much that had been living was dead. As I walked, I felt the tension that knotted my shoulders and gnawed at my stomach slowly lifting as if I were unfolding like a piece of paper. There is always hope at dawn, I thought, even in Africa. As the first yellow rays of sun were within moments of lighting the sky, I realized I was at the turn off for the path to the SPLA barracks where the soldiers of the rebel army trained and slept. I walked unconsciously, thinking only to clear the village but now I saw that by turning left I would arrive at Commander Wall's lair. Overcome with curiosity about a place so vociferously declared out of bounds, I decided to continue a little way along the path towards the barracks and stop once they were in view. The path took me gently uphill, through scattered trees and sharp scrub, and then into a field which appeared like a vision and into which I eagerly stepped, luxuriating the feel of actual grass licking up against the sides of my exposed, already filthy feet. The sun was fully up over the horizon now, and after weeks living in a hot, empty, grassless dust bowl in the desert, the setting was as completely perfect as a hot summer's day on the South Downs. When I closed my eyes, I could smell rain, dampened grass and rabbit droppings and light cigarette smoke and the musty wool of my mother's old orange picnic blanket. The lackadaisical drone of a mosquito became the sound of a distant a road, and my mind filled in the birdsong, a stiff Bank Holiday breeze and thick cut ham sandwiches. No wonder, I thought, the Commander didn't want anyone coming here while the rest of a deck village was picked over by hunger, every exposed shoot sucked dry, every fallen seed eaten. Here was a living field that existed outside of drought or famine. The thin grass was yellowed and ravaged by lack of rain, but in a deck this might have been Eden. I walked further into the field and lighting the cigarette I had reserved long ago for a great moment and which had appeared in my pocket this morning like a sign, I exhaled a plume of white smoke which tasted bitter after days without smoking, made me cough a little. I stood looking down at my bare toes, the dirt and bruises and bites cast into absent shadow by the angle of the low sun, and was contemplating removing my flip flops altogether when something unnaturally white caught my eye. I bent to the long object and as my hand touched it, I realized it was a fragment of bone. The sunlight caught another white object in the long grass and I made out the shape of a long femur, a thigh bone too long to be a goat's and too thin to belong to a cow. As I looked round, I saw similar objects, almost delicately scattered, whitened like driftwood by the harsh glare of the sun. My brain knew what they were before my heart would accept them, or perhaps it was the other way around that my mind was unwilling to breach the staccato's beats, distance between knowledge and intuition. They were human bones, that much was certain. Femurs and fibulas with a periosteum long worn away to compact bone. A humerus, a great jawbone from some man that must have once stood 7ft tall. By the upturned root of a decapitated tree stood a pile of skulls, and the training doctor in me recognized what the human being rejected that they reached child size of varying ages, naught to five years old. I was standing there, the forgotten cigarette burning quickly between my fingers, thinking of my mother, buried deep and intact under the earth, wondering why these bones still lay here, whether nobody knew who the people were, or whether they had some plague or curse that meant no one would touch them, or whether it was simply tradition for people here to rejoin the earth exactly where they fell when my eyes answered their own question. There were mechanical parts to this tableau too. Bullet casings, shrapnel, the broken wooden handle of a gun. Next to my feet was a dull, rusted object I recognised belatedly from a brightly coloured canvas chart Sean had shown me on the aircraft on the way into Sudan, which now hung in the storeroom. It was a landmine, a small smooth disc of moulded metal or plastic with a circular pattern at its centre, like a fallen miniature hubcap or an ice hockey puck made with deadly intent. The butt from my cigarette, where I must have unthinkingly dropped it, lay carelessly next to it, a half inch from detonation. Minutes or hours could have passed. Time went into free fall, bearing no relation to the prescribed divisions of the clock. I felt light headed, sick, floaty. As I contemplated the landmine three feet away, I realized why. The field was untouched by those hungry enough to have explored every inch of territory for hundreds, even thousands of miles. In the long grass I saw now there were dozens more mines of differing kinds, fist shaped mines stuck into the grass like stunted cobs of grey corn, crudely made mines with sprung coils hanging out like entrails where they had already ripped open and done their deadly work. My mind was in overdrive, seeking all available information, and my body was flooded with a freezing liquid that might have been my own blood. With effort I forced my brain to swim against the tide of my confusion, rewinding it to the plain conversation I'd had with Sean. And two words came back to me. Stand still, I swore at myself then I was in a field off the beaten track where nobody need pass for days. Nobody would even know I was missing. Sean had given up demanding I check in with him all the time, would simply assume I was at the feeding centres. At the feeding centres. Billy would think I was at the hospital with Michael and vice versa. It might take hours or days for them to find me, and I was standing on a small patch of ground on which I did not dare even to redistribute my own shaking weight. Oh, God, I heard my voice say, and wondered at its tone. My baby blue beach holiday flip flops mocked me from below the line of my hips, my bare dusty toes emphasizing the childish vulnerability of my predicament. If I'd been wearing a sombrero, I would have felt no more foolish, although a hat might have offered some protection against the slowly increasing violence of the rising sun.
- [24:57]
Moderator
I told you it was going to be diamonds. And now Stephen Graham.
- [25:04]
Charlie Beckett
Thank you. This is a book I wrote, just out in paperback actually, and it's about an operation that took place in Afghanistan two years ago. I'll just read you the beginning of it, which explains how I got involved. And I guess I just ask you in your mind's eye to think of what's happening this morning, because actually, the scene I describe here is exactly what is happening right now, or would have happened about eight hours ago, several thousand miles away in Afghanistan. In the blur of. In the blur of combat, there is so much you see so clearly and there is so much that lies hidden, so you have little chance of understanding what is happening around you. Then you move on and the events consume you. There is no time for real reflection. Even in the busiest, most frantically crazy moment of your life, there is sometimes an intensity of thought or a brief vision of some far off place that suddenly distracts you, often with no relevance at all to the moment. Then afterwards, the mantra of the army is crack on, put feelings to one side for now. Only later, much later, does the fog lift and the pieces fall into place. Everything starts to make sense in your head. You can reconstruct a picture of what really happened partly from your own memories and partly from the tales of others who were there. Now you have a picture that stays with you. But even so, it's only one reality. A nagging doubt may plague you by day or in your dreams. Was it really like that? On the 6th of November of December 2007, I was in the desert in Afghanistan, lying under the stars. Of all the places in the world I would have been in no other nowhere could have seemed more serene. That night was cold, moonless and dark, and I doubted I would sleep. I wasn't sure I wanted to. Under my back was hard earth. The wind cut through my down sleeping bag and the thin bivy bag I Drew the strings at the top of my bag tight so I could only stare skyward through a narrow slit. Every so often I wondered if I should dig out another layer of clothes to wear. But I couldn't face the cold of the night to get up and find them. So I just lay there, shivering gently, just looking into the timeless heavens. I could forget for a moment why I was there. I could imagine how many countless others, whether shepherds or soldiers, were at this moment doing as I was and staring at some Milky Way, the same Milky Way. But all these dreamlike thoughts were only an escape. If I peered closely, I could see the stars didn't only twinkle. Some were also moving the slow track of airplanes or satellites. And if I listened, I could hear the rumble of truck engines and Afghan music and laughter inside their heated cabs. There were snores too, and the crackle and whispers of the radio operators on duty. These were the noises of a leaguer, a term for a temporary camp of a besieging army. We'd arrived in a 12 mile long convoy tracked everywhere by the Taliban. I was alone that night, only in my thoughts. Tomorrow's dawn light would sketch out on the desert plain an encampment of men preparing for war. I was among thousands of men that night who were one prong in the biggest maneuver by the British army in Afghanistan since the days of a long gone empire. Its purpose was to support an attack on the town called Musakaba, a town now famous as a Taliban stronghold, rebel stronghold. That night, like generations of men before me, I wondered how, if it really came to it, I would react to extreme danger. As a reporter for 20 years, I'd been on the edge before, staring at the sky and surrounded by the snores of men who would wake up and be prepared to kill. But always the tension had faded away. I'd been arrested at gunpoint, seen bombs and mortars explode, seen the burning homes of the victims of ethnic cleansing and the charred remains of the victims of massacres. I'd met bad men all over the world, had friends who'd been kidnapped and held hostage and been very afraid before. Sometimes, though, I felt like a mere observer in some surreal scene which had no impact on me or posed no threat to me. How would I react if I came under direct fire myself? Like the soldiers, I did have some serious mission. I wanted to understand this war, to report on what we were doing in this foreign land and see if we could win or we were doing any good. But if I'm being honest, it wasn't the only thing I felt a thrill that I'd be an eyewitness to something important and something real. I might also find out something about myself. I found my war in Afghanistan the next day in a place called Der Zoi Sofla, which means the Lower Noon Village. Quite high Noob. We were walking across an open field. Beyond us was the mud walls of the compounds that marked the outer edges of the village. The point section of the lead platoon was already close. Through all the hours of the waiting. That morning, in the heat of midday sun, the tension of the night before disappeared as we strolled along, my mood was almost light hearted. I was attached that day to British soldiers of B Company, 2nd Battalion, the Yorkshire Regiment. I was following the company commander, Major Jake Little, and his group of radio operators. On our flanks were the trucks of heavy machine guns. On their roofs they belonged to an a team of U.S. special Forces. The interpreter, a small man dressed in green fatigues, turned to me. We'll be a big target here. You look like an interpreter. They know the officers are always nearby. That's where they fire. I look down the track, left and right at the shallow depression at the side of the truck. The track. I reflect upon which way I would jump if the battle suddenly started. Not much to choose. If it kicks off, I'll be in the ditch, I joked to Jake. I'll be joining you there, he replied. We walked forward in waves. One column moved while the others kneeled, ready to provide supporting gunfire. I realized how unfit I was and how useless my clothing was. With a belt bag digging into my stomach and the weight of the armor plates inside my padded flak jacket, I found it hard to kneel comfortably. Then the firing began. A volley of bullets screaming in our direction. A cracking sound as they came near. We dived right into the shallow ditch again. My clothes didn't seem to fit. My jeans were slipping and I needed a belt. Firing was now intense. I concentrated on keeping my head down. I didn't know who was firing, where it came from. Jake and his group got up to run and I followed in a stumble. We ran across the track towards the shelter of one American truck, a Humvee. It was then the gunfire became closest. I remember a zing, zing. And then, in a memory that only exists in slow motion, I saw the bullets strike the earth around my feet, kicking up little bursts of dust. But we made it to the vehicle and I crouched behind the wheels, catching my breath. If the enemy could shoot straight, you'd have been dead, someone told me later. I remember just a feeling of confusion or flapping, as the soldiers would later tell me, not quite sure what I should be doing, which way I should be running. And I wish that I had spent the last few weeks in a gym and could run like the wind. The motto of Jake's B company was fortune favours the fittest. My fortunes were fading fast and I remember thinking of my wife and daughter and wondering how fair I was to bring them to be bringing myself to this crazy, precarious scene. Jake had told me to follow him. At one point he got up from behind the vehicle. I stood up too, thinking we were about to move. But then he opened fire with his rifle. Stupid me. I got back down. It was sometime in the middle of this I forgot. Forget when? When I turned my head and looked behind me. I realized now that bound up in my own dramas, I'd missed something big. A white Toyota saloon car was now overturned upside down and sideways in the track, and I could make out a gush of blood down the driver's door. Even closer along the road was a small open back lorry. I'd seen it before, with women and children crowded in the back whom I'd taken to be refugees. There was a crowd of people standing in front of the cab and two bundles of cloth on the road in front. Bodies, I presumed. Some British soldiers were approaching and being shouted at in English. Go away. Go away. Captain Dan, the US Special Forces commander, now joined up, looking impassive. Who fired at them? I asked him. I'm not sure. I'm trying to work it all out, he said. For now no one seemed to know. I finally remembered the video camera inside my pocket and began to film. I think I'll stop it there.
- [34:22]
Moderator
Personally, I could quite like to get.
- [34:24]
Charlie Beckett
You three to go back up again.
- [34:25]
Moderator
Because I was quite enjoying that I might be read too, and that was extraordinary testimonies, if you like, about war. In a minute we'll invite people to comment or ask questions. But I wanted to kick off by asking you a kind of big question, which is that it's clear that you.
- [34:48]
Charlie Beckett
Three bring three different perspectives, albeit I.
- [34:52]
Moderator
Still think of it very much as journalism. What difference does it make that you're able to write at book length? What do you feel that you're saying that isn't normally said in the hurly burly of news. What do you think?
- [35:10]
Charlie Beckett
If you like gets unspokenness, start with.
- [35:12]
Moderator
Roz, because obviously you've taken the most extreme, if you like divergence from traditional news by writing a novel rather Than fact.
- [35:24]
Roslyn Jones
Yeah, I suppose. I think for me, I came back from Sudan and wrote the book that I wrote quite a few years later. And I think it was because so many things kept coming back to me about that experience that I felt. Felt I'd never really expressed properly. And partly. I mean, partly it came from meeting this boy sort of years before when we'd been stuck in fairly similar circumstances and hadn't been able to move because there'd been bombing in the area, and stuck in this camp with nothing to do. I'd been talking to one of the little lads who sort of worked in the camp about his life story through the translator went just. Just chatting with him over a few hours. When we were stuck there, you just thought, if he was a British or American kid, Steven Spielberg would have made a film about his life story. I mean, it was extraordinary. He'd like, you know, walked for something, I don't know, eight months across the desert, you know, to Ethiopia and back. He'd buried both his parents on the way. He'd raised two little sisters. He'd been carrying this sort of baby across the desert. Desert. He'd had all these adventures. You know, he'd been like a child soldier for a brief period. There'd been, you know, all this incredible stuff and he was just thinking, who's telling. No one's telling his story. And he. He kept saying to me, oh, could you, you know, will you tell people about Sudan? Will you tell people about Sudan? And you have a sense that you keep filing these reports, but actually people aren't really reading them. There's some degree. And, you know, and I do it myself, you pick up the paper and there's harrowing reports from Haiti or wherever. And quite often you turn the page, you're not in a. You're not in that day where you can. Where you can read about Haiti. But then you just think, how do you. How can you bring those voices out?
- [37:12]
Moderator
How much of it was, in a sense, for you? Because obviously you reported some. No conflict zone is somehow pleasant place to be. But you've reported from some very extreme places, like Rwanda and so on, where people's emotions and the suffering we went through was about as extreme as it could have been. Is it partly that you're able to cope better? Perhaps if you're novelising something like this, you know that you're getting something out of your system.
- [37:42]
Roslyn Jones
Yes, I mean, I think there's a degree of therapy with those situations. I mean, Rwanda, I was there post conflict, but East Timor, that I reported from, you know, very, you know, was a very sort of scarring experience. And I think, in some ways, although I'd find it very hard to write about East Timor now, writing about Sudan in some ways helps you to express some of the things that you've seen and just to try and bring in that perspective of the people on the ground. Because I think. Think what journalism often does very well is to show what the, you know, George Bush would call the kind of shock and awe, the sort of, you know, the big bombs and explosions and actually, sometimes you want to hear what that's like for the people who are kind of shivering on the. On the ground without electricity, who are worried about, you know, where they're going to get the next meal. Never mind the bombs exploding in the sky.
- [38:36]
Moderator
Andrew, you'll see me thinking therapy.
- [38:42]
Andrew Muller
We've only just met.
- [38:46]
Moderator
I mean, extraordinary, the comedy that you managed to bring out. What is, you know, when we think of that moment in Iraq when it was this moment of high drama and obviously high destruction, and you managed to bring a dark comedy out of that. That's obviously not a news method, is it?
- [39:06]
Andrew Muller
No.
- [39:07]
Moderator
You don't get many laughs out of.
- [39:08]
Charlie Beckett
John Simpson, do you?
- [39:10]
Andrew Muller
You do, inadvertently, occasionally. No, I'm not. As I actually state quite boldly in the introduction to that book, I've never thought of myself as a proper reporter as such. I'm not a news journalist and never really wanted to be. I'm a feature writer to the extent that I'm any one thing at all that gives you a certain license, if you have an editor who will give you the leeway. And I've been fortunate in a few cases to sort of idle around and set your own agenda and figure out for yourself what's actually interesting here, rather than be beholden to any news agenda. The book. And you're asking about what's the value from our perspective in doing a book. It's kind of. It's kind of a revenge against editors, I guess, because this is where you get a chance to put everything in that you would have liked to have got in but couldn't get into the original thing you were doing because of strictures of space or whatever else was going on. The fact that. I'm glad you spotted the fact that that was intended to be a piece of humorous writing, because the idea with that book was it's by and large supposed to be funny, even though it's about a lot of stuff that isn't funny. And that's partly just my general response. To most things. It's possibly extremely juvenile and I should probably grow out of it, but I do have a tendency to be drawn to what is absurd or amusing about any given situation. As both Ros and Stephen will attest, an awful lot of what goes on in conflict zones during. Can be incredibly funny. I mean, the comedy can just write itself. Whenever you have sort of such enormous stakes being played out, either geostrategically or even personally, the sort of. The kind of comedy that only comes in that intersection between hubris and nemesis is just all around you. And also, I think it's a perfectly legitimate way to respond to a situation like that, because when I first started traveling in places like that, which I guess was bosnia in the mid-90s, I was surprised by how much laughing people did and how many jokes they told. And I'm grasping a bit for a universal theory of everything here, which is always a risk before lunch and sober. But laughter is a defense mechanism. It's what people do to kind of. Of, I think, block out realities, whether they're immediate ones or existential ones. And sometimes the humour is very bleak, but sometimes it is genuinely hilarious. I have laughed a great deal in some of the places I've reported from, and the people I've been reporting on have also been laughing a great deal. So writing a funny book, or what is supposed to be a funny book, at least about some unfunny situations, seemed to me perfectly reasonable for that reason. And it's actually one of the reasons I ever wanted to be a news reporter, because there is an obligation, and I think quite a reasonable one, to take things incredibly seriously. But I do think that leads in itself to unintentional comedy. And I mentioned. I think I alluded in that chapter to that idiotic spectacle of the statue being pulled down in Third Assault Square, which I'd seen on television. And of course, this was. It was broadcast at the time. It was a hysterical outside broadcast on the BBC by Ragi Omar, as if this was sort of because, you know, they want the symbol of Iraq's liberation, so they sort of talk about this sort of dancing crowd of Iraqis. But when you actually saw the wide shots a few days later, pull back. What it literally was was several hundred sort of journalists all trying to get the shot, while, like, half a dozen of their translators just stand around drinking coffee and going. It's. Moments like that are what I look out for. And I'm fortunate enough that I'm usually allowed to do that.
- [43:06]
Moderator
And of course, in the England Stephen.
- [43:09]
Charlie Beckett
I can see, especially think about your.
- [43:11]
Moderator
Previous book about Extraordinary Rendition, where you're trying to piece together what was an extraordinary, complicated and detailed investigation. And Snakeflight obviously does something quite different. It tells more of a narrative, as we heard there, with that extract, a narrative with obviously you at the heart of it, which is obviously not a traditional journalistic trope, but in a sense tells us much more about what is going on or what. We don't know what's going on.
- [43:42]
Charlie Beckett
Yeah, it's sort of. I mean, that's sort of. I start as an eyewitness and then go back and investigate the whole story. So there's an element of investigation, but told as a single story, I suppose. I mean, I find that. I just feel, as I've sort of reported over the years, that my sort of instant responses are not nearly as interesting or good as actually reflecting on things. So I think actually the books kind of see me better. That's one thing. I mean, I find what you saw at the start of the book, there is an incident which is incredibly shocking for me because as Charlie says, I'm not really that. I'm not really a war reporter, but I can get involved in it more and more. And so seeing that destruction, what happens after that is a soldier gets killed pretty close to me, a British soldier I just seen. That scene I described there actually involved involves the death of what I later find out. I reported the time. Two, I think three dead. It turns out there are eight dead. There's also a bomb dropped at the end when you. On the video I shot, you hear everyone going yee haw. You know, and it turns out they may have killed some women and children who were actually in the compound. You know, there's a whole series of kind of shocking events, you know, plus this. I mean, I don't really get into this there, but I mean, this utterly surreal and very common situation sometimes of this, you know, we're like Martians in this totally. There's a huge clash of culture which just automatically brings up this humour and people just trying to make sense of it as well. And you know, the black humour people develop in the worst of situations for me is very engaging. So I sort of set up to go and find out all the layers of action and characters involved that shape these very intense events on the ground. I think as a reporter, I mean, to get to your heart, your question about the difference between reporting and the sort of long form book writing is that it's very difficult nowadays to separate out the fact that information and Propaganda are at the heart of the actual battle, and that therefore, even if you do your best not to become sucked into it, you are being regarded as a potential vehicle for propaganda by both sides because of the psychological element of the battle, because of the way that the wars have to be sustained back home, but also because the way that in an operation like this one, it's not really about defeating an army, it's about winning over the population. So everything about what you do and how it's reported is actually, you are basically a player in the battle, and therefore there's a lot of pressure on you. And also it's quite hard. You only get given a limited vision of something. To get at the truth, I think you need to step back from it. So I think in all the frontline reports you see at the moment, there'll be some gripping stuff that will tell you one part of the story. But actually unfolding what went on behind the scenes actually gives you what is the only chance you have of getting at the truth. It's too immediate, it becomes too loaded in a way, because it actually influences the current events. And as a journalist, I'd rather not be there as a sort of actor in the stage, but rather someone who records what happens and describes it.
- [47:00]
Moderator
You mentioned your little video camera, and I'm constantly banging on about the joys of new technology and how it makes it all wonderful and easy to report. But is it possible that actually war reporting has become harder than ever? When you think of Gaza, that journalists have kept out of Sri Lanka, when you think of the fact that, as you said, journalists are either manipulated or now become targets. When we watch the news or read newspapers, do you think we're getting anything like a real picture?
- [47:36]
Charlie Beckett
I think there's a seduction in the immediacy of some of the. Actually, I think we get better access and better information than ever before. But I think the problem is we can be seduced by the illusion of access that there is, provided by live reports, high quality photos, all that sort of thing, and apparently candid reflections by people right and wrong in the middle of action and forget the fact how limited people's ability to tell the truth is. And it's a very ongoing situation where, you know, really speaking, you know, if you're in the middle of a battle, you just can't say everything that's going on. And so the problem really lies of our own impression of it rather than the fact that the reporting is. And probably our own sort of grandiose kind of egomania about building up what we're doing everyone newspaper promoting what they're doing rather than being honest about the fact of how limited what it is. I mean the fact that, you know, for example reports filed from by British reporters in Elmond province are filed under Ministry of Defence restrictions. So they have to file and be included through a Ministry of Defence press centre, you know, who will limit if they spot anything that they regard British operational security from being published and where. So embedded reporting is the heart of the reporting now I would argue actually in most intense conflicts that has always been the case. You have to sort of turn up with one armed group or another because otherwise it's just too dangerous. I mean when we were honest and think back in situations where we generally speaking have gone up to the front with one of the. Be they the insurgents or the sort of regular army kind of approaching very rarely moved around without gunmen of one sort or another. And I'm thinking back to Kosovo which I was also involved in as well and you know, from Vietnam. But I was just, I was reading a book about the charge of the Light Brigade. It's called the Reason why. Sort of extract from the Tennyson poem. Victor Woodham Smith. Cecil Woodham Smith. That's it, yeah. Brilliant book. And I just. What really struck me then was how as affected by the media the army was in those days as a premature decision to attack the Crimea. This ill prepared convoy went off and landed in the wrong place and when they weren't even ready, they left behind half their cavalry and that sort of thing. And that was generated by pressure from London to sort of. With false reports being filed saying that everything was going well in these sort of jingoistic demonstrations through the streets of London. People say it's a modern phenomenon. I've been to various army conferences, 24 hour news. It means everything we're doing is affected by the political pressure back home. It's not modern at all. The difference is then that, I mean I think the quality of reporting is such that the political influence now is much better, more informed than it was because back then you had equal amount of crazy decisions sparked by a political. Political pressure but much more false information that was actually feeding that in those days.
- [50:46]
Moderator
Tennyson.
- [50:50]
Roslyn Jones
Should we throw it open?
- [50:51]
Moderator
Would any of you like to ask any questions or raise any comments? Should we start here? Please take the microphone.
- [51:01]
Audience Member 1
This room's so small it feels weird with the microphone. Anyway, I just to want, wanted to ask you, all three of you kind of presented very different experiences of war though there's A lot of overlap, but it's also very clearly. And maybe this is from the fact that, like Charlie said, we've been talking about your books, but it seems very clear to me that what you presented today is very different than what I would read in a news report about any of these conflicts. And I was just wondering. You've all had these very unique experiences, and they've all been, I'd say, relatively personal from what you said today. And I was wondering how, if at all, you think it's possible for maybe war reporting to become more personal or if you think that's necessary or maybe that's the wrong way to go. A lot of questions.
- [51:46]
Roslyn Jones
Sorry.
- [51:47]
Charlie Beckett
It's a really interesting point, isn't it? Well, I think become too personal in some ways. I mean, in the sense that we just build up the sort of egos of the. We're more and more. Reporting is much more about the reporter as individual. You know, my experience of this photo, picture of the photo and television is very, very driven by the personality of the reporter. But actually, there's stuff you can't get across in that toll through that medium that actually you want to like just. You want to see. If you want to understand what's happening in Afghanistan, you need to not slip into the personality of the fresh young journalists. You need to slip into the personality of the Afghan villager or sometimes the military commanders of both sides. I'm very struck by some of these films, the Golf and if you saw The Film Channel 4 dispatches last week about Taliban, I was undercover with the Taliban. I thought that was a brilliant film. And one of the things I thought was brilliant because there was no reporter, actually, it was a cameraman who did all that. The personalities that came across were the people he filmed. And you actually got to understand your enemy, which is. Or the other side, which is, I think, pretty important. Whereas when you get some sort of, you know, white journalist going off to meet the Taliban and make a film about that, you know, all it's about is, you know, my dangerous journey, you know, and, you know, and, oh, I was nearly executed. Oh, they're putting me on trial here, you know, and. And the guy's talking to him as a foreign person. You don't really get under the skin. So personally, I think actually the eyewitness is really important. You can understand because someone like you is describing it. And therefore you can, by understanding the report, if you like, you get to weigh up what they're saying certain degree. So eyewitness is vital. But in some Ways I think kind of pushed in a way a bit too much in that direction.
- [53:50]
Andrew Muller
I would answer yes and no. You're perfectly right in the sort of reporter's ego, especially on television coverage of these things starts to become a bit overwhelming because I mean the thing, you know, it's show business, same as everything else. And they do sort of promote personalities in that respect. I mean, I feel obliged to speak up a bit on behalf of the sort of the first person approach, having just done an entire book of. And quite a big book, the first word of which is in fact, hi. That's not. I hasten to stress because I'm a rampaging egomaniac. I mean, at least not exclusively. The. The reason that I've always felt more comfortable writing from that perspective is that I get a bit. I'm always mindful of the quote's usually attributed to Claude Coburn, his law of newspaper readership, which is that people believe everything in the newspaper except the one story they personally know something about. They know that story is absolute rubbish. And the reason I felt more comfortable writing from a first person perspective and the book is very much an account of my experiences interacting in various locations and people in the 21st century is that that way at least I can be sure that everything in that book happened. It's true as I understand it. And as I remember I was there, I saw this, I spoke to these people, this is what they said when I asked them this question. I tend to get a bit wary of. And I realize it's a necessity of news reporting because you have to say this is what's actually happening. But I think with that comes a tendency to sort of assume the benefits of omniscience, which I really feel uncomfortable doing. I think I am trying. This is. This is possibly a bit of a stretch, but I think in actually taking a first person. Here I am, this is what I'm doing and here's what I understand approach. There's actually weirdly kind of a humility to that. I'm not pretending to have any greater insights other than this is what happened, this is what I've got. And yeah, that enabled me to feel comfortable putting the book out there. I mean it's basically, it is, you know, it is me blundering around several locations just saying, somebody please tell me what's going on here. But that's. You get some good answers when you ask that question. When you just sort of ask the really basic ones. It's surprising what people come up with. But I mean, I think There's a value to. Obviously, I realise I can't go on the news at 6 o' clock and do that, but I think there is a value to doing that.
- [56:33]
Roslyn Jones
Yeah. I think during the Bosnian war in particular, there was a sort of development in journalism that people talk a lot about in terms of how genus kind of became more partisan. Yeah. Attachments, gender attachment. And how basically during that conflict. Because. And I think it depends where you are as journalists. Like, if you. If you are embedded with an army, that's one thing. If you're. I mean, the way that I've tried to report wars often has been war with NGOs and aid agencies, which also gives you a kind of biased perspective, but at least it's a slightly different one from the ones that the armies are trying to kind of give you. So if you're with the UN or Oxfam or somebody like that, you have access more to the humanitarian side, the kind of product of the conflict, the people who've been dislodged, the refugees, the people who are kind of cut off without water. And I think that's what happened in Bosnia, that journalists were able to kind of go off and see people in camps and feel actually, you can't. I think for journalists to say that they're neutral, I think is a. I don't know, it's a really difficult issue. I mean, I've gone to most wars that I've ever gone to, neutral, and within a few weeks, it's very, very hard not to be at least on the side of the people who are experiencing the bombardment. Regardless of what you think is happening politically and not to be on. You know, for me, the more that I was reporting from South Sudan at the time I was reporting from there, there were two issues going on. One was the famine. The British government kept saying, Claire Shaw at that time was saying, there's no famine in South Sudan. And we were just going through endless, you know, hundreds of thousands of people everywhere. You know, people literally just being buried, you know, left, right and center. And still this official line kept saying, you know, this isn't happening and the government's not bombing people. And under those circumstances, you do become. You do become attached, but you're.
- [58:40]
Charlie Beckett
Isn't that. Is there any difference between neutrality on the facts and neutrality on the cause, as it were? You attach yourself to the fact that you're exposing a lot there. It's not quite the same as saying, I back this particular side.
- [58:52]
Roslyn Jones
Yes, I think the Sit Down People's Liberation army are brilliant. I think the government, you know, sit down.
- [58:57]
Moderator
That's what Martin Bell meant. He meant. Martin's an interesting example, because, you know, people, British people here will know instantly who I mean when I say Martin Bell. It's that man in a white suit.
- [59:07]
Charlie Beckett
Who then went on to become an.
- [59:09]
Moderator
MP and is a great personality and yet was also a very rigorously, he said, objective BBC correspondent who, as you say, witnessed what's happening in Bosnia.
- [59:21]
Charlie Beckett
As such.
- [59:22]
Moderator
He put that there was such a discordance between what he was seeing and what Malcolm Lifkin and Bill Kinsman were saying that he had to say things that were still, he said, factual, but he felt compelled to say them because on behalf of.
- [59:43]
Roslyn Jones
I mean, the other thing I would say is your question made me think about years ago when I went to the OMA bomb in Northern Ireland. I first sort of started kind of covering conflict in Northern Ireland. And I can remember on the day of the OMA bomb, I'd kind of arrived very suddenly from London. I didn't have a laptop and my phone would never used to work, which was kind of a joke amongst Republicans who used to say it was, because it was on orange, could never get any signal. And I was trying to get these reports back to the office. And it was one of those occasions where I think. I mean, I'd been to a lot of things in Northern Ireland before that had been horrific. You know, bombs going off. There's something quite unique about that occasion because somebody had actually planted a bomb outside a school uniform shop on the Saturday before term started, which just seems quite incomprehensible even to people in Northern Ireland at that time. And because I didn't have a phone, I'd compiled my report and the only way to file was to go to a payphone. Now the payphones have massive queues because people obviously trying to phone to say they were alive, to say, has anyone seen so and so I don't know where my child is. So you felt this huge conflict between taking up a phone space to kind of send you a report when all these people were so distraught and they needed the phone. So I kind of let a few people go. In the end, I took the phone myself and then was in the really bizarre circumstance of effectively reporting on all these people's grief while they all stood there listening, which was just, to me, kind of, I don't know, sort of cut to this thing about. In a way, you're already rendering their experience not necessarily into journalistic cliche, but into some, you know, into the Kind of formula of reporting which we all. You know, there's a certain way to file a report. So it's kind of like all their grief and all their experience is kind of going into these neat paragraphs and you're saying point, paragraph, paragraph over the phone to this copy taker in London. And everyone's kind of staring at you and you're just thinking, what right have I got to render these people's experience in front of their eyes? But it was. Yeah, it's kind of moments like that where you just. Yeah.
- [62:05]
Moderator
Any more questions? Please, Jonah, just grab the mic.
- [62:10]
Roslyn Jones
It's a question for Stephen Gray, not about what you say, but you must have been thinking about it since. What do you think's going on in Afghanistan? I mean, is it to make our safer? I mean, how much of what we're told do you agree with and how much are you skeptical about? But maybe that's a whole other new book.
- [62:43]
Charlie Beckett
Yeah, but I mean, I do deal with that. I try and deal with the whole reason we're there and how we got caught into.
- [62:51]
Roslyn Jones
I caught it. I haven't read it yet.
- [62:53]
Charlie Beckett
Well, that's very kind of you. I think that the reasons we're there are often very different from as they're stated publicly. And that leads is dangerous because it means that actually we shape a strategy that isn't necessarily very honest to our actual real purpose. That leads to mistakes. I mean, I think we're largely there because we're there. We're there because we're there sort of thing. And we're trying to get ourselves out. We've had a series of interventions. I think it goes back to Kosovo, really. The philosophy of humanitarian intervention, which I think Tony Blair found 9, 11, very comforting in only one sense. I don't need to be in the sense that it confirmed his view that there needed to be this preemptive intervention at all times to prevent and. Which reshaped the idea of our role in the world and the role of the army and all those sort of things as to sort of the sort of makers of peace in advance. And I think it's all gone terribly wrong, you know, all over. And we're now left in this sort of muddle where we're in these places. And it's almost. We have to sort of, as it happened in Iraq, put more in to get. Be able to sort of pull out. And it doesn't always work. I think the people, the tactics, you know, it's not clear to me. It wasn't clear to me In Iraq that the way to bring democracy was through tanks. And it's not clear to me that in Afghanistan that, that very often we make things better at all by using military force. I do think that applying the right way, it's very difficult to see how you don't. You can't at this point in time, you can't oppose the people who are trying to sort of reimpose Taliban government. I was there on the Taliban and it was, I was, you know, I thought it was. Was heading towards a kind of Pol Pot situation. And I really did think that it was a very dangerous regime. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda, just the way that this kind of countryside, this clash between countryside and city, so kind of the revenge of the countryside, it was needed in a way of Taliban because of it, the warlordism was there. And I'm reluctant to see the country slip back into that clash of warlords, which is. And the problem is, I think we haven't got beyond a fight between warlords which is embodied in the present Afghan government, you know, and if we sort of lift the lid on it, we'll go back to how it was. So I certainly don't. I'm not sure we're doing the right thing, but nor do I think that just sort of kind of removing ourselves I think now would be an application of responsibility. So very skeptical about the purposes and the strategy, but by no means an advocate of something. Troops out.
- [65:47]
Moderator
Let's take another question, please. Hi, I just want to ask how, when you're writing a story and presenting.
- [65:59]
Roslyn Jones
Finding reports, how powerful is the need.
- [66:02]
Moderator
To sort of create a narrative about what's happening? You mentioned the sort of. The statue for. And boards take pictures of that. And part of the reason for that is just that it looks good and.
- [66:12]
Charlie Beckett
Sort of suits the story sort of.
- [66:14]
Andrew Muller
Story wants to tell.
- [66:15]
Moderator
How powerful, how important is that? Is it sort of like some sort of self censorship that happens when you sort or you just really choose to sort of piece of things together sort.
- [66:24]
Charlie Beckett
Of fit in or.
- [66:27]
Andrew Muller
I'll take that one, I guess, because you were looking straight at me, accusing, faintly accusing fashion. Yes and no. Again, that's my favorite answer to everything. What happens is there's kind, especially in this. It's not intended to be a criticism of news reporters because they are as people and as journalists generally far better organized and braver than I am, which is one of the reasons I'm not one. But a herd mentality does overtake it. And to come back to the top statue toppling again. But it is kind of a good example of that because CNN's got it, that means the BBC have to cover it, that means Al Jazeera have to cover it, that means everybody then has to. And because then everybody's covering it, everyone then has to act like it's important. Whereas obviously it actually wasn't in the grand scheme of things, but it was a neat visual symbol. But you weren't going to get a single network producer who was just going to say, you know what they, this is bullshit and it's on every other channel. Let's go and do something else. One of the reasons that I like being a feature writer in a situation like that is that I have the liberty to do that. And I've been in various places where I've been working, where there's been large gatherings of journalists. I'm in a fortunate position of if I'm at a press conference or some stage media event to be able to look around the room and think, this is being reported. There are 30 or 40 other people here with notepads and tape records. I don't have to do this. I can go off and find something else, which is a luxury I have. Being a feature, obviously it starts to feed on itself, it acquires momentum. You have to do this because everybody else is doing it. But I think Stephen's probably, and Ros, in fact, are probably both better qualified to answer that question. So I shouldn't have said anything.
- [68:15]
Roslyn Jones
Well, I mean, I'm a feature writer as well, and I think similarly that I always really enjoyed that freedom and particularly that's why I used to be allowed to go off with NGOs or go off to say, oh, something interesting is happening over here, can I go? And there would be news reporters left behind to sort of do the key bits of news of the day. I mean, when I turned up at Kosovo, I was very sort of naive, really, about war. And I'd been covering the build up to the crisis. There was a massive refugee crisis where people were pulling out of Kosovo into Albania and Macedonia. So I'd kind of start off from that side. And when we were finally sort of allowed into Kosovo, there'd been this one shot that the early reporters were all reporting from. It was kind of CNN and BBC and people. And it was this really sort of bombed, burned out location that in my mind I was thinking, this must kind of be the front lines of this war that finally we're going to get to. You know, we've been waiting for about eight weeks at this point. And in different points along the border to try and get through. And then basically we kind of arrived. We got to Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. Everyone was put into this kind of hotel, you know, hotel didn't really have any water, electricity or anything, but, you know, it was a hotel. And when I looked out of the back window of my room, there were all the CNN reporters and BBC all lined up in their flap jackets, kind of nowhere near to the front line, but the car park at the back had had a bit of shelling at some point, so it made a nice kind of scenic location for everyone to stand. And I was thinking, oh, God, I thought I was coming to a war, but, you know, just come to kind of Blackpool or something.
- [70:03]
Charlie Beckett
Intervention TV.
- [70:06]
Moderator
I worked in TV news for 20 years, but I do remember one wonderful moment when we had an embedded reporter in the Iraqi desert and we did a live with him. And I won't say his name, he was framed by, you know, the camouflage netting they have around their trucks and stuff, and he had this drape behind him and that's all he could see. You couldn't see any desert, any tank. All you could see was the camouflage netting. He could easily have been in a cupboard next door. And for all he knew about what was going on, he might as well have been. We told him what was the narrative for that day, and he basically took.
- [70:44]
Charlie Beckett
Us back, adding in various bits of.
- [70:47]
Moderator
Sand, various orifices, and that was his contribution. Let's just take some more questions. There's a couple people here waiting.
- [70:59]
Audience Member 2
I would like to ask a question which is sort of broader. I would like to think about the ethical dimension of the work that is done. The first thing that always makes me wonder, because of the use of language and the way, of course, that language affects many people and the cause of wars or whatever, is how much preparation do the journalists or news reporters do on the countries they are going to go to report on how much knowledge of the history of the issues of the language and culture. That's the first question. And then the ethical dimension of what you do yourselves, as you yourselves have alluded that you have certain degree of egocentrism in whatever you do. And it is always we can only filter the world through our own perception, through the universe of knowledge that we possess. So how much does this affect or impact? Have you ever thought how much of these impacts upon the lives of those people that are left behind? Not the books that you're publishing and earning money, but on the lives of those people left down There I'm sorry to ask a bit a question.
- [72:06]
Moderator
Nasty things we never like to think about which is one can master reality actually bloody know or even bothers trying to find out. And guilt, you know. Yeah, obviously we know three reporters who have made more of an effort than most, frankly.
- [72:23]
Charlie Beckett
Yeah, I started off on the Express years ago and there used to be a sackable offense not to carry your passport with you at all times. It shows you how much, how quickly you get thrown into conflicts. I think that generally speaking there's always a balance there because actually first impressions are actually quite useful. Actually seeing it as an outsider not being drawn into all the built in arguments is a good way of describing a scene. But still the skills we bring, I mean the people. There's a big tendency now because essentially because of jet travel which means that the world is reported through what they call firemen rather than a string of foreign correspondents all over the world. You have previously called them big feet who actually generally have big feet like John Simpson and others, but who just celebs, celeb genders who get parachuted into these tomflu. They'll take push aside the local stringers, local journalists and to sort of report them to become the voice and report on the conflict. And they obviously get a great knowledge from being able to sort of survey international affairs but they don't necessarily have all the local knowledge they could. Whereas you know, go a few years back and you generally have much greater depth surroundings of foreign correspondences like Spirit Express used to have 130 foreign correspondents. I think the same number of staff.
- [73:56]
Roslyn Jones
Photographers abroad haven't even got that number of staff total.
- [74:00]
Charlie Beckett
Total paper I work for Sunday Times has I think about five full time foreign correspondence and that whole network of freelancers who do sort of do sometimes what staff would have done in other freelance. But the balance is over deploying people out and stuff rather than getting it out. And I think we lose quite a lot in that. But there are things we gain from the ability to the great network of translated freelance copy. The wire services, Reuters and Associated Press, afp, they're that much better now and they do give you access to a huge knowledge base and local reporters everywhere of the country being translated. So there is a sort of way we actually are better informed. I think now as far as guilt and you know, as far as what effect we have, we have an enormous effect but I think that the main thing is to get it right, you know. And I mean I just slightly pick up on, you know because it Sort of touches on the point. I think there's a great danger in emotionalism. You need to tell the story, you need to get inside the characters, but you need to really get inside. And that's the problem is we can get it sucked up and you can report the massacre victim and make that your cause without knowing the two sides to it. And actually just because someone has been a victim, the victims aren't always right sort of thing, or there's a backstory. It's we get so easily sucked into it. Just as I could have got sucked in, I did it for a wise person degree. You know, the drama of a soldier getting killed and all the things that went into that. You know, you become attached to these people, you know. But there is a wider story. But funny enough, I sort of feel you can almost tell the truth through one individual if you really know that individual. Because once you know their doubts and they're all their own sort of of internal counter observations, then it becomes a true story. But it's just their sort of instant response as you're broadcasting what is only one part of their personality, then they've chosen at that point to put across. Then you will miss out the true depths of the story.
- [76:17]
Moderator
Andrew, in a way, Stephen makes a.
- [76:21]
Charlie Beckett
Good point there, that there is a.
- [76:22]
Moderator
Virtue of being an outsider, being an inside your books. By being sex travel journalists, you are foregrounding that idea that you're not actually an in house expert.
- [76:34]
Andrew Muller
Yeah, no, and I think there is. I mean, you asked about sort of preparation and research. This may sound like I'm trying to legitimize laziness to an extent and possibly I am. But it is possible to do too much if you arrive somewhere thinking you already know everything. That's I think a serious weakness, what I like to do, and it's kind of an instinctive thing. I like to know enough about a place that I can go there and have a conversation with people without them thinking I'm a complete idiot because that doesn't really help. But I also like to not know enough that I can still be surprised that I can still think, wow, that's interesting. I didn't know that because the stuff that actually makes you perfect prick your ears are. That's the stuff that's useful to your story. And yeah, there is a value in being an outsider. I don't pretend to be an expert about any situation I've ever covered or any place I've ever written about what I like to think I am. If I'm serving any Wider role beyond amusing myself and paying the mortgage is I'm in an extraordinary fortunate position and I get to go to a lot of places that I think people are curious about. I, I get to meet a lot of people that people are curious about. And the risk of, you know, I'm flirting boldly with pomposity here, but what I get to be at that point is the representative of those people. What I'm trying to do, I guess, is give an idea of this is what happens when a more reasonably intelligent human being from a middle class, first world background goes to one of these places, hangs out for a bit and talks to people. This is actually what it's like. That's what I try in terms of sort of worrying about the people I write about and then leave behind. Honestly, it doesn't keep me awake nights. The only considerations I have are have I told their story as honestly as I can, at least as I understood it. And if there's somebody who, in the sort of circumstances where this is an issue, is this somebody who's helped me and who figures in my story and have I written their role in it in such a way that isn't going to get them into any trouble? And that's just. And mercifully, as far as I know, that hasn't happened yet.
- [78:47]
Charlie Beckett
Ros, if I can just get you.
- [78:48]
Moderator
On the guilt bit because it's obviously clear from your work that you.
- [78:53]
Roslyn Jones
Very guilty, very guilty.
- [78:56]
Charlie Beckett
You know, the conscience is, and it's not a reason to meet. But why you've written this book.
- [79:01]
Roslyn Jones
Yeah, I think, I mean, you have to an extent, I think, and maybe particularly because I've often reported the story of the people on the ground who are being affected. I think you also get an enormous amount of survivor's guilt because you're with people who don't come out of those situations and you do, and that becomes hard to live with, I think. I mean, in the case of this book, some money from it goes to Oxfam, to their South Sudan program. That's not to say I'm a great person, but it's because of the nature of my book, which is writing about particular people who are still in such a terrible situation. Now, I felt like you said I couldn't really go around the country promoting my book, something for myself without, well, meanwhile their suffering continues. And certainly, I mean, I've been working on a big campaign since January for Sudan. That's still very much part of work that I do. Just trying. I mean, Sudan's in a terrible Terrible situation at the moment where there's been a peace scenario for the last five years that's held. People have been, you know, crops are growing in the fields, all this amazing stuff's happening, and it's on the brink of collapse. And basically, you know, having been there in the late 90s, I can visualize only too well what will happen if that fails. I mean, I think I'm someone, you know, maybe I'm not a good sleeper in general, but a lot of things have kept me awake at night about, you know, the experiences that I've had. And even that in itself sometimes really frustrates you because you kind of think, you know, the people who've lived through the. These things, you know, I'm sure they're not, you know, I'm sure they're not depressed or kind of having difficult times. They're just getting on with their lives. In terms of the question you're asking about research, I think. I mean, I used to be very much in that sort of firefighting mode for a couple of different papers. And very often, I mean, basically you'd go and get your jabs in what they tell you to go. You check, you get your jabs, you go into a bookshop or whatever, one of the ones on Fleet street, buy as many books as possible, read them on the night flight on the way there, and hope for the best. Really, that was the main research. And I mean, obviously I know so much more about South Sudan now than I did at the time when I was reporting there. You try to sort of learn quickly, but I can remember a few occasions like when I was in Rwanda. I've been there about two weeks, and I was looking up in the sky and saw the Southern Cross. And I was thinking, am I in the southern hemisphere? So you don't even really have any idea sort of where you are on a map, or you don't. I don't know. It's very confusing. And part of that weird immediacy, I think, was one of the things that I used to find hardest about that kind of life was that one day you were kind of in the middle of your normal life. 24 hours later, you might be in Mozambique at some floods that happened. You'd be there for three weeks, and then you'd come back and the paper would send you to this book launch where everyone would be drinking champagne in Soho or something. You just think, no, this is the globe, the planet is quite a mental place of extraordinary contrast. And trying to keep all that in your brain was sometimes quite troubling, I think.
- [82:24]
Moderator
I think the idea of the world is a mental place with many contrasts is a very good place to stop this session. I'm really, really grateful to the three journalists here, three writers here today. I think it's been a wonderful set. If you want to continue the conversation, their books are on sale outside. I think they'll be signing them and they'll be prepared to chat to you. They're all online as well, so you can contact and find out more about their work online. Indeed, you can find out more through.
- [83:05]
Charlie Beckett
The Polis website as well, and through.
- [83:07]
Moderator
My blog, which will link to these people and discuss these issues. So let's keep the conversation going. But thank you very much for coming.
- [83:13]
Charlie Beckett
And thank you especially.