Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Lindsey Hilsum
APRIL 19, 2018 ISSUE
At first, reporters got smugglers to take them into rebel-held areas, but
relentless bombardment by the Syrian regime and its allies, combined
with the vindictive cruelty of ISIS, made covering the war especially
perilous. The Committee to Protect Journalists lists 115 journalists killed
in Syria since 2011, the highest-profile being The Sunday Times of London
correspondent Marie Colvin, who was killed by a government mortar
targeted on the rebel media center where she was staying, in the Baba
Amr district of Homs, in February 2012. The same year, the American
journalist James Foley was kidnapped by ISIS, as was Steven Sotloff in
2013; both were later murdered. Most foreign journalists then confined
themselves to sojourns on the Turkish border to interrogate refugees,
fighters, and smugglers, plus—after the demise of ISIS last year—
occasional short forays into rebel-held territory.
There are more Syrians than foreigners on the CPJ list, but their names
are less well known. This gap between the unknown local and the famous
foreign war correspondent, survivor, and hero of previous battles, both
courting peril to get the story, is a growing tension in modern war
reporting. Rania Abouzeid, a freelance Lebanese-Australian reporter who
has written for The New Yorker and other publications, hints at this at the
beginning of her excellent book, No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in
Wartime Syria. “This book is not another reporter’s war journal,” she
writes. “I went to Syria to see, to investigate, to listen—not to talk over
people who can speak for themselves. They are not voiceless. It is not my
story. It is theirs.” That might chasten flak jacket–clad TV reporters
(declaration of interest: I am one) who regard their own week in the war
zone as of particular note. To rub it in, she adds: “I did my own fixing,
translating, transcribing, logistics, security, research and fact-checking.”
The result is probably the most perceptive journalistic account of the war
so far, highlighting individual stories while never losing sight of the
broader situation and history.
A white Western reporter could not have written this book, but while
Abouzeid’s identity is an integral part of her journalistic method, her
skills as a reporter and writer should not be underestimated. Over seven
years of conflict, she has followed a dozen or so Syrians, assembling their
stories like Lego bricks, each slotting into the next, until the shape of the
structure becomes apparent. Her technique is to hang out with people,
quietly watching and listening, spending so much time with them that
they forget that she is there. Being a woman helps because she is not seen
as a threat. Her presence authenticates the story—she must have been
there, for example, to observe the home life of Mohammed, a fighter with
a rebel group allied with al-Qaeda, and his wife, Sara:
Her husband had returned home after prayers and headed into the
shower. “Hand me the nail clippers!” he yelled from the bathroom.
“Look at my hands!” she said. “When did my nails ever look like this?
I feel like I’m on a front too. I have to do everything here, and all by
hand—the laundry, the dishes. I used to use cucumber face masks,
take afternoon naps, comb my hair, wear makeup. My whole life has
changed.”
One of the few times that Abouzeid highlights her own presence is when
Syrian aid workers on the Turkish border ask her to translate in a
meeting with two British “diplomats.” Mohammed, the al-Qaeda-linked
rebel, is there posing as a refugee. Abouzeid can guess who the diplomats
really are as they try to trade intelligence for food and tents, but they do
not know that she is a journalist. For a moment she has become part of
the story, another person with an assumed identity, in a conflict where
deception and disguise may be the key to survival.
Their initial pieces were published in Vanity Fair. It was, as he puts it, an
“art crime” for which he would probably have been executed had he been
discovered by ISIS. A body hanging from a lamppost, a small child with an
enormous rifle, people running down a rubble-strewn street—such
images rendered beautiful by the pen are disturbing. Crabapple used
vibrant, sometimes lurid color in the original magazine pieces, but the
black-and-white illustrations in the book, carefully blotched and
smudged, invite more thought, not least the cover illustration of a violinist
playing an instrument that, on closer inspection, turns out to be a
Kalashnikov.
grassroots
democracy
electoral rights
respect for the ballot box,
as a basis for representation
and legitimacy
Could these words be more alien to most Syrians? Could these so-
called universal values, the values my friends and I screamed for
between our gas-choked curses at security officers, be far from
universal indeed? Perhaps they are parochial mores, speculated
about in the university campuses of European capitals. Perhaps they
are as insubstantial as ghosts.
The war in Syria has occurred at a time when the first response of many
caught up in a crisis, be it a school shooting in the US or a demonstration
in Damascus, is to get out their phones and start filming. Back in 2011,
Hisham and his friends in northern Syria were among those who alerted
the world to the uprising in Syria by filming protests against the regime
and uploading the videos. Abouzeid writes about a young man in Rastan,
a town halfway between Aleppo and Damascus, who does the same as his
initial act of rebellion. The immediacy of such footage is gripping, but in
Syria it has at times also become foreign journalists’ sole window onto
what is happening.
We are told this is because they are not “objective” or “neutral.” What
does “objective” mean in the Syrian context? Does being “objective”
when covering Syria mean giving voice to a war criminal and his
propaganda, and allowing the regime to justify their bombing of
civilian areas, schools and hospitals?
Most reporters for Western media who cover Syria are clear that the
Assad regime is committing appalling atrocities. However, Syrian “media
activists” tend to show only the part of the story that bolsters their cause.
Footage of bombings and suffering is not faked, as the propagandists for
the regime claim, but activists know that if they want international
sympathy—they have largely given up on international action—it’s better
to show exclusively civilians, especially children. Moreover, rebel
fighters, whether Islamist or more secular, do not like to be filmed except
on their own terms, and they have the guns. Uploaded videos show rebels
of all stripes firing weapons and winning battles, not squabbling among
themselves and losing territory. What we see may be the truth, but it is
not the whole truth, which is why many Western readers and viewers still
turn to visiting war correspondents for what they hope will be a fair
version of events.
As Hollingworth once said, “I like the smell of the breezes. But you can’t
smell the breezes on a computer.”