WOMEN AT WAR:Assaults on several female journalists covering the Arab Spring in Egypt and Libya last year reopened the debate on women working in war zones. Here, some of the dedicated band of female war reporters share their experiences
MARY FITZGERALD
The Irish Times
When Reporters Sans Frontières last year advised media outlets against sending women journalists to Egypt because of the risk of assault, reaction was swift – and outraged.
My friend Hannah, an Egyptian-American reporter who spent years – and a pregnancy – as Baghdad bureau chief for her agency and is now based in Cairo, tweeted: “Well intentioned, but we have a job to do . . . Nobody ever tells female doctors and nurses to go home and let the boys handle it.”
In an open letter to RSF, Lindsey Hilsum, Channel 4’s international editor, asked: “If more female journalists are assaulted, are you going to say it’s our fault for being there?”
I emailed RSF pointing out that, as a member of the organisation and a journalist who has lived in and reported widely from the Middle East, I was extremely disappointed that it was sending out such a damaging message. At the time I was preparing for an assignment in Congo, a country with the world’s highest rates of sexual violence. Going by RSF’s logic, should I have abandoned my plans? The reply I got, shortly before RSF withdrew its statement, was apologetic. “Gender is not the issue here,” it acknowledged.
Indeed. Just like many of my male colleagues, I have come under sniper and artillery fire as well as aerial bombardment; I have been tear-gassed at protests; and interrogated by security services and militias in the Middle East, Africa, and south Asia.
I have been groped in crowds in Syria and Pakistan and know male reporters who have experienced the same. The risks of our work have little to do with gender.
Women have long reported from conflict zones – think Martha Gellhorn during the Spanish civil war, Clare Hollingworth’s dispatches during the second World War, or the generation of journalists that made their names during the Bosnian war. Yet the tiresome debate over “reporting while female” refuses to go away.
People often assume that reporting from the places I have – including Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Somalia – is more difficult for a woman. The opposite is true. As a Western woman and journalist, you are almost like a third sex in conservative societies where gender roles can be rigidly defined. This allows you to switch from being an “honorary man” – as Lindsey Hilsum puts it – to having access to women who would never talk to a male stranger.
In Afghanistan, Irish Timesphotographer Brenda Fitzsimons and I could don burqas to travel inconspicuously for an interview with Taliban commanders, but we could also visit a shelter for abused women that no male reporter would have been allowed to enter. Female journalists get a dual perspective which allows us to report all facets of the story.
The only time my gender has ever been an issue was when a radical Turkish lawyer who had represented the al-Qaeda suspects accused of the 2003 Istanbul bombing insisted I sit behind a thick screen in his office as he would not talk face-to-face with a woman he was not related to. I agreed because I knew the interview was important. The story should always matter more than whoever – male or female – is reporting it.
'You see the worst and best of people'
SANDRA JORDAN
Channel 4
Should women go to war? Where I work – Gaza, Kashmir, Colombia, Sri Lanka – half the population is female. Being a woman reporter is a huge advantage where, for cultural reasons, only a woman can talk respectably to another woman.
A truly good reporter will have empathy. They will impart a visceral sense of what it is like for the people caught in the conflict. You, the reporter, will care for those people. If you do your job right, maybe your work will make the outside world care too. When it comes to that, I think female reporters often have the edge.
Of course there are dangers. But most journalists don’t set out to cover wars. It usually starts with a chance assignment.
It is an addictive life because in the middle of conflict you live in the moment. Life is vivid. You see the worst and best of people. Your blood is up.
You change. There is no unknowing the terrible things you now know. You see cruelty and suffering, wrongs inflicted on strangers that you get to know, real people who you often really like.
There is fear before a job. Before going to Gaza I would sometimes, literally, go weak at the knees. But I would beg my bosses to send me there. I have had a handful of near-death experiences, but very few given the places I’ve worked. Working with local fixers helps avoid risk. But you are in a war zone and have to accept the risk. The moment when you think you are about to die is strangely mundane. You look in shock at the people beside you and think something banal like “shit”.
When you return to your safe, comfortable world you feel a sense of responsibility to the people who are still under fire. It is very hard to turn your back on that. And stopping feels like a betrayal.
Critics of women war correspondents describe selfish, gung-ho, machines who abandon their children for the thrills of war. These critics mustn’t know any female war reporters or think very hard about the issue. I have a baby and haven’t worked in a dangerous place since – but I feel the pull. You absolutely don’t want to leave that child or risk dying. But it’s that betrayal issue – you have bonds with the people who are still being massacred. It is a terrible conflict within yourself.
'The best reporters follow the story'
ORLA GUERIN
BBC TV
Packing for war zones is a fine art – after more than two decades as a foreign correspondent, I haven't mastered it. But I know that in among the torches, and the teabags, the extension cables and the spare batteries, another element comes along uninvited – risk.
On some trips it shadows your every step, lies in wait at every roadblock. You hear it, taste it, and feel it – like a cool mist on your skin. Even as you watch for it – and you do, constantly – you try to deny its existence. But you know it's waiting for any wrong move.
Risk is voracious, unrelenting, and in my experience, usually gender-blind.
In April 2011 I made my second visit to the Libyan city of Misrata. It was still besieged by Colonel Gadafy's forces. Snipers were menacing the streets. The only way in was by sea. Before we set out on the 20-hour voyage we weighed the risks carefully, and liaised with bosses in London.
We were a three-woman team – producer Jacky Martens, cameraperson/editor Maxine Mawhinney and myself. We were joined by a male security advisor and a male translator – a Libyan called Ramadan. His safety was our greatest concern.
What if Gadafy's forces captured us? As Westerners, we might be badly treated. As a Libyan, Ramadan might be killed. After hours of discussion and soul-searching, we included him in the team. But arguably this brave young man was running a greater risk than any of the women on the team.
Many factors can make you vulnerable in a warzone. Gender is one of them. But there are others – nationality, inexperience, lack of training, body armour or travelling companions.
I've had moments when being a woman has been an advantage. When the Russians were bombing Chechnya in 1991, we were in neighbouring Ingushetia, reporting on civilians fleeing across the border.
Security checks were common. At every roadblock, burly policemen would demand the passports and ID cards of our male driver, and local bodyguard. Typically they would ignore the three women in the back seat – even the one carrying the large camera.
The last time I can recall facing discrimination in my work was in Moscow in 1990, in the dying days of the Soviet Union. I went to the foreign ministry to meet the official in charge of Irish journalists – a bloated bureaucrat who proferred a glass of vodka. It was, after all, 10.30am. He wasn't too happy when I declined. We spoke for about an hour, through an interpreter. At the end he asked when the correspondent would be coming to see him. "She just has," I said. "Of course, of course," he said, "but tell him to come and see me when he arrives." I haven't encountered that kind of chauvinism since then. Perhaps I have been lucky. To me it is a relic of a bygone era. And the debate about whether women journalists belong in warzones feels equally archaic.
There is a hackneyed view that male reporters count the bullets, and female reporters count the casualties. In my opinion the best reporters follow the story, wherever it leads – to the hospital, the refugee camp, or the frontline.
I thought we'd got past that
LARA MARLOWE
The Irish Times
In the 1991 Gulf War, the first major conflict I covered, perhaps two-thirds of the reporters were men. Over the past two decades, the gender balance shifted. By the time I covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq, at least half – probably more – of the journalists were women.
Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 and Caroline Sinz – who was assaulted in Cairo last November – did stellar reporting. It was Sinz and her cameraman who caught the Pentagon lying about the US tank shell that killed two journalists in the Palestine Hotel on April 8th, 2003.
The few times that I feared for my life – in Algeria in the mid-1990s, at a Serb militia checkpoint in Kosovo in 1999, under Israeli bombardment in Lebanon, under US bombardment in Iraq – the threat had nothing to do with my gender. Bullets, bombs and artillery shells do not distinguish between men and women. When I lived in Lebanon in the late 1980s, kidnappers abducted male journalists only. But women journalists have since been held hostage in Iraq and imprisoned in Iran.
Weighing the risk of entering a crowd, travelling down a highway under bombardment or visiting a neighbourhood where Westerners have been kidnapped or murdered is an integral part of reporting from war zones. It's a judgment call that requires calm and common sense.
Any woman who has worked in the Middle East or covered a war – and alas, the two often go together – has been asked if it wasn't more difficult and dangerous because she's a woman. The question made me weary; I thought we'd got past that. The underlying assumption is that Muslim men are barbaric and that women remain the fair sex. Terrible as the attacks on Lara Logan and other women in Cairo were, I've seen and heard more lewd sexual behaviour and language in Europe and America than in the Middle East.
There was a Saudi National Guard officer who stormed out of a room in Dhahran in 1990, saying in the English he'd learned from his US trainers: "In our country, we think men and women should be kept separate." There was an Afghan fighter who sat on a boulder picking his toenails as he refused to allow me to enter a military encampment in 2001. These two small incidents of overt sexism during three decades when I worked periodically in the Muslim world were far outweighed by the opportunity to talk to women and children, in the intimacy of homes that my male colleagues could not enter.
There will always be another war
MARGARET WARD
RTÉ
Women reporters in war zones is one of those features that come around every time there is a major conflict, and for a long time I've avoided getting involved in the debate, but when an organisation like Reporters Sans Frontières starts suggesting that editors shouldn't send women to Egypt, things have gone too far. Put simply, women, and men, should report wherever they and their editors see fit.
Whether women who are mothers should be in a conflict zone is a question for those mothers and their husbands or partners and children. The question of whether men with children should be in a war zone is a question for those men and their wives or partners and children. Full stop, end of story.
Conflict zones are inherently dangerous, but no one is suggesting journalists should stop covering wars and revolutions. No editor sends journalists into conflict zones against their will. And contrary to some opinion, most of the journalists I've met in these places are not war junkies or people with a death wish. They want to report the story, they weigh up the risks and try to do it as safely as possible.
But it isn't safe, and sometimes people will die, get injured and/or get kidnapped. As one colleague put it to me, we all have our personal danger threshold. I know that I am more cautious now than I was 10 years ago, when I ended up in a Northern Alliance bunker 100 yards from the Taliban frontline without thinking too deeply about what could go wrong. And that's because I know more now about what can go wrong.
I have never found that being a woman is a hindrance, and on several occasions it has been a help. It has made it easier on occasion to cross borders and to inveigle commanders into giving me access and interviews I might not otherwise have got. In northern Afghanistan in 2001 I found being a woman was a positive. As a reporter you were generally treated as an honorary man. Doing a piece to camera might attract some leering stares but not outright hostility. The difference was that I could talk to women in their homes in a way that men could never do. I don't subscribe to the notion that women are necessarily better at covering human interest stories or that we are by definition more compassionate.
I do think women reporters are less inclined to focus on the fighting and the weaponry and more on the causes and costs of conflict. But the best stories, and the best reporters, male and female, combine the personal and the political. We are there to give the best report we can about what is going on. It will be flawed, it will be partial, but it should certainly reflect the experience and perspective of both genders.
I don't think that there's any danger that women will stop reporting wars. And unfortunately there will always be another war.
We were seen initially as some strange exotic creatures... a protected species
MAGGIE O'KANE
The Guardian
For a brief period in the mid-1990s there was a rash of what we called "Chicks In The Zone" articles. Sunday magazine editors (usually men of a certain age) wanted to know what the new female war reporters had in their make-up bags, where we washed our knickers and what our favourite perfume was.
The most beautiful, Marie Colvin of the
Sunday Times, had the biggest picture bylines. Marie in a string of pearls gazing out across the Baghdad skyline when she stayed behind in the Al Rashid hotel to report on the first Iraq war. Then, towards the end of that decade, the novelty was wearing off.
Marie lost an eye in Sri Lanka reporting on the Tamil Tigers; a CNN camerawoman lost half her face in Bosnia. Women reporters were everywhere. They were just good – sometimes not-so-good – reporters, taking risks. Like the men they worked alongside that had even left babies and children behind to do it. We all, driven by our egos, madness and sometimes dreams of doing an important job, got on with it.
But Lara Logan's attack in Tahrir Square a year ago brought the boring questions flooding back. "Shouldn't we keep Lara and the girls at home?" suggested Reporters Sans Frontières, in a great leap for womankind.
Sadly, the questions were not: What is it about Egyptian society that allowed a male mob to rip the clothes of a woman for nearly half an hour in public? Why, since then, has one Egyptian human rights group documented more than 100 sexual assaults on women demonstrators by soldiers, some including forced virginity tests?
Or, to get right to the core of it, why does Egypt have one of the highest rates of genital mutilation of girls in the world? As for the dangers for female war reporters, we were seen initially as some strange exotic creatures and were often a protected species. More protected than the women we were choosing to report on.
While trying to investigate the rumoured Serb rape camps set up around Foca during the Bosnian war, I came across the Foca town hall, where the women and girls were waiting to be transported to various furniture stores and schools to be raped at night by soldiers. I didn't end up inside the town hall but instead, as a strange foreign woman, I was referred up the line to the commander. He gave me strong, sweet coffee and then dispatched me with his driver safely out of town. It might be a different end now with the success of the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague and journalists as potential witnesses for the prosecution.
It is dangerous, and becoming more dangerous. I decided to give it up one day in November 2002 when three journalists I knew – two men and a woman – were taken out of a convoy of cars heading to Kabul and executed on the side of the road. The woman was 27 and on one of her first reporting assignments. I had given her advice in her newsroom in Milan when she was a domestic reporter with dreams of going abroad.
Men and women will continue to choose to go and cover wars. A year after Tahrir Square and 120 years since Sara Wilson covered the Boer War for the Daily Mail, isn't it time we all just got over it and celebrated the honour of being given such privileged access into the lives of others when they are at their most vulnerable and most impressive?
