‘One more?’ The Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) coordinator came out of the field barrack and looked down at his boots. I nodded, and realised I’d have to come up with something pretty quick, otherwise in the next hut I’d have tears streaming down my lily-white cheeks, and that was really not what I wanted.
It was a rainy day in September, and I was walking around the village of Wau in Southern Sudan, a place newspapers had been labelling ‘famine afflicted’ and ‘war-torn’ for the last twenty years. Somewhere on the other side of the river were the rebels; on our side MSF had set up a camp for ‘starving refugees’. A ceasefire was in force - for as long as it lasted.
‘Are you sure you want to see it?’ an experienced correspondent in Khartoum, the capital, had asked. ‘Famine shelters can mess up your hard drive.’ Another advised me; ‘Do it on auto-pilot. The only question you need to ask yourself: Is this good copy for my article?’ Well, what the MSF coordinator had just shown me in the first two huts was ideal for my piece: children with the sort of pot-bellies I’d known since primary school were caused by starvation; bones sticking out through the skin like the poles of a half blown-down tent; toddlers so emaciated that their mothers had to support their heads to keep their necks from breaking. All great stuff I could use for my article.
The coordinator and I walked past a poster. ‘Don’t Fight the Civilian Population’ it said, above a picture of plundering soldiers and helpless-looking civilians. The village in which the camp was located had closed down.
The Islamic Purity Coffee House, the Office for the Registration of Pledges and Promises, Pope John Paul Middle School, Nazareth Greengrocers - their shutters were all down, their doors boarded up and their verandas crowded with refugees. People of all sorts had been thrown together here: refugees, villagers, people who believed in Jesus or in Allah, in spirits or in tree-gods.
We picked our way around puddles and heaps of rubbish towards the third hut. Inside there’d be another fifty people sitting staring into the void, sheltering from the rain, mourning their dead, waiting for their next food ration. They seemed to look right through me, as if someone had switched off the light in their eyes. So that’s why despair is called dull. I wrote down ‘extinguished’ in my notebook.
We’d arrived. In the first two huts, I’d assumed a serious expression and had made a small kind of bow to conceal my awkwardness and hold back the tears, but here I spontaneously raised my hand, forced my face into a smile and called out, ‘Hello, everybody!’ And then it happened. All of a sudden their faces lit up.
Girls giggled, an old man shifted in his seat, and children nudged their mothers. ‘Look, Mummy!’ A little toddler of around two wriggled free from his sister, grabbed my knee with both mitts, and tumbled over. Mothers of emaciated infants burst out laughing and used their free hands to wave.
That was my debut as a Middle East correspondent - the job began in 1998 and lasted for five exciting years. While my luggage was travelling back to the Netherlands on a cargo ship, I went on a farewell tour, visiting ‘contacts’ - people to whom I was indebted for visas, personal introductions, and other favours. Back in Holland, the last person on my list was an Arab ambassador. In his stately residence in the Hague, the political capital of the Netherlands, we drank tea and I showed off my Arabic for the last time. The ambassador said that it was an odd time to give up a correspondent’s post, just as the Americans were advancing on Baghdad. I told him that I’d wanted to stop before, but had hung on for a few months because of the war. An assistant came in, whispered something in the ambassador’s ear, and switched on CNN. We saw the colossal statue of Saddam Hussein being torn down in Fardoes (Paradise) Square in Baghdad. Jubilant Iraqis roared into the camera and struck the icon with their shoes. ‘Thank you, Mister Bush!’ The presenter solemnly described it as an ‘historic moment’ - the war was over.
They could put the nightmare of Saddam Hussein behind them. Baghdad was celebrating its liberation, just as the headlines of the western newspapers announced the next day.
Then the ambassador clicked over to the Arabic broadcaster, Al-Jazeera. They were showing Fardoes Square too, but their montage offered a different slant. In the same square, we saw American soldiers triumphantly throwing an American flag over the statue of Saddam. Then we were shown feverish discussions and the American soldiers rushing to remove the flag. Al-Jazeera went on to show the jubilant Iraqis from CNN, only now they were shot from a long range so you could see how few people there were actually standing in the square, and how most of them were watching from a safe distance.
I said goodbye to the ambassador, and over the following months I did what returning correspondents tend to do - I tried to write a book about my region. But I got stuck almost immediately. Reading the papers or watching the television, I would see someone arguing that fundamentalism was all about this or that, that there’d be peace in the Middle East ‘if only Israel would withdraw from the occupied territories’ or ‘if America would stop supporting the dictators’. And then I would think, Well, there are good arguments for that, but then again there are good arguments against it. I couldn’t figure it out, and that’s why my book wasn’t working.
Then I thought back to my second week as a correspondent.
I’d just returned from Sudan and was waiting at the Ministry of Information in Cairo to have my papers stamped. It was taking a while, and I got chatting to a fellow correspondent who was also waiting. He was a real veteran, and within five minutes was telling me in a whisky-soaked voice that his best friend had died in the Iran-Iraq war. ‘The Commodore Hotel during the Lebanese Civil War, oh those were the days! What? You don’t know the Commodore?’ He was that kind of a man.
When I told him that I was a writer and I’d just started as a correspondent, he grinned: ‘If you want to write a book about the Middle East, you’d better do it in your first week. The longer you hang around here, the less you understand.’ That was quite unkind - and it was probably meant that way - but back in the Netherlands I began to understand what he had been talking about. Before going there, I’d harboured certain preconceptions about the Middle East, most of them picked up from the media.
Once I arrived, my preconceptions were slowly replaced by reality itself, which proved to be rather less coherent and understandable than the media had depicted it.
The first time I came up against this was in that third hut in Wau.
When I went there, I’d had in the back of my mind those images you see on the news of miserable-looking people.
In the first two huts I had seen miserable-looking people, and if I hadn’t blurted out ‘Hello, everybody!’ in the third hut, I’d have probably left with the idea that these people were miserable too. And they were miserable, of course - they were all but dying of starvation. But that wasn’t the whole story. The area around Wau is just as fertile as the Netherlands, and those miserable people had been farmers who had always provided for themselves, until the warring factions had chased them off their land. The people in that famine camp were mainly suffering from a serious case of bad luck.
As I looked back over my five years as a correspondent, I recalled many similar experiences. Things became even more interesting when I consulted my files and saw how Wau had been portrayed in the paper. My article had included the surprising reaction of the apparently miserable and ‘extinguished’ people in the third hut, as well as an interview with the doctor in the camp infirmary.
He worked with the worst cases and fought daily against the statistic of ‘eighty deaths a day in Wau’. His biggest problem, he told me, was their shrunken stomachs: ‘If they eat too much their intestines burst; if they eat too little, they die. Even as they literally starve to death, we have to withhold food. According to medical textbooks, these people are long dead.’ That last sentence is what the editors call ‘a great quote’, and the news desk had used it as the headline. They’d il lustrated the piece with an enormous photo, captioned: ‘In a refugee camp near Ajiep, not far from Wau in Southern Sudan, a woman gives birth. In the same field hut, a starving family member lies dying.’ On the right there was an emaciated man, probably trying to figure out where the curious noise of a clicking camera was coming from; in the middle, a little boy crying; and on the left, two midwives with an anxious, expectant mother.
It was a powerful image. But the editors could also have chosen to use a picture of the smiling people in the third hut, with a different slug for the headline, such as this from one of the other camp doctors: ‘The resilience of these people is unimaginable. No Westerner could have survived this, but here they wait for peace, walk hundreds of kilometres back to their villages, plant their peanuts, and pick up where they left off.’ As a correspondent, I realised that I could tell different stories about the same situation. The news desk could only choose one, and it was often the story that confirmed a commonly held notion, like the picture of the miserable people in Wau who were already dead according to the medical textbooks, rather than an image of unimaginably resilient people dealing with a lot of bad luck.
During those following five years I had plenty of experiences like this, which made the events at Fardoes Square such a fitting conclusion. American and European journalists welcomed the fall of Baghdad. They were sent images of overjoyed Iraqis toppling a statue of their dictator - images which matched their expectations - and they considered the job done. Al-Jazeera, on the other hand, viewed the fall of Baghdad as the beginning of an occupation. They sought symbolic images to support their take on events and found one in the vision of the triumphant Americans spontaneously throwing their flag over the statue.
This was how image and reality diverged, and when I realised this I knew which story I wanted to tell. I didn’t want to write a book explaining how the Arab world could become democratic, how tolerant or intolerant Islam is, or who is right and who is wrong in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. I wanted to write the opposite - a book that shows how difficult it is to say anything meaningful on such a major issue as the Middle East. Or, perhaps, simply a book about all those moments I found myself thinking, ‘Hello, everybody!’
