Allan Little is Special Correspondent with the BBC. He covered the Gulf conflict of 1991, the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, was for two years BBC South Africa correspondent, then Moscow correspondent and Africa correspondent. Little’s experiences reporting the Gulf conflict of 1991 gave him an enduring distrust of embedding. But now, he argues, independent, free-roaming, eye-witness reporting, which journalists used to pursue with such vigour and commitment, faces enormous threats.
In April 2003, I got in my car at the Hotel Palestine, Baghdad, overlooking the broad green curve of the Tigris River and drove to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of the Iraqi capital. There was a cemetery on the edge of the prison complex. Two young men, Shia Muslims from the south of the country, had come to try to retrieve the body of their brother who had been executed some years earlier. They believed, but did not know, he was buried here.
A cemetery keeper consulted a bulging file, and found their brother’s name and its corresponding grave number, and led them to the place where their brother had been interred. I followed them. As we went, the keeper explained that under Saddam Hussein’s regime, the condemned fell into two categories: soldiers were executed by firing squad; common criminals were hanged. The second category included political opponents such as the brother we were about to disinter.
I stood on the edge of the grave and watched them dig. A couple of feet into the dry, pliable soil, their brother’s remains began to emerge. As they recognised the clothes in which he’d been buried their stillness fell away. They fell on the body and wept and embraced it and howled their grief to the sky. We filmed. They let us film. That was how it was then. There was freedom of movement, pretty much unfettered access to the seismic forces that were changing the topography of this most volatile region.
Political vacuum after Saddam’s fall
Within days of Saddam Hussein's statue in Fardus Square, Baghdad, coming down on 9 April 2003, two things were evident. The first was that the coalition forces that had invaded Iraq were not ready. They did not know what was about to unfold and they had made no effective plan. So there was a vacuum.
The second was that very quickly, organised religion moved to fill that vacuum. The Imams were the only trusted public authorities. It was the clerics who put a stop to the looting that had swept the city after the Ba'ath regime had fallen. It was the clerics who organised rotas of men to stand guard at the hospitals to protect the medical staff from lawlessness. It was the clerics who sent the young to busy road junctions to act as traffic cops to keep the city’s roads flowing when all the lights were out.
One day, an American arms dump exploded in a residential suburb. Nearby houses that had withstood weeks of allied bombardment were obliterated. Families were wiped out. But what was striking was how quickly public anger was channelled. Within an hour there was a "spontaneous" demonstration of Iraqis – hundreds, perhaps thousands, strong – already with printed placards and leaflets blaming the Americans for deliberately endangering the lives of Iraqis. I went along. I marched with them, interviewed them for television. One man told me, in fluent English, that "the United States of America is the enemy of Islam, it is written so in the Holy Koran".
I said in my report for that night’s news on BBC1:
"The explosion has ignited an anti-American fury. Within hours that fury was organised. It has not taken long for this to turn into a demonstration of rage against the Americans (...) Today, nothing the Americans can say will be heard amid the din – the organised and carefully marshalled chorus – of anti- American sentiment (my own italics). But still we filmed. Still they let us film. This happy state of freedom was not to last long."
There had been signs of what was to come. Before the invasion I had decided against embedding myself with a Coalition unit. I had covered the first Gulf War in 1991 from the Iraqi side. I had watched Baghdad night after night as it was slowly taken apart by the precision bombing of a high-tech and largely unseen allied air force.
War as a rudimentary video-game
It was only after the war, when I went back to Jordan, that I saw, for the first time, how most of the world had witnessed it. In those pre-internet, pre-24 hour news days, I had not seen, from my Baghdad viewpoint, the missile nose-cone cameras that had made the war look like a rudimentary video-game. I had seen what those missiles had done when they came into contact with human flesh. My perspective was more visceral – literally. The experience gave me an enduring distrust of embedding alone.
On 13 February 1991, an allied air raid struck a large, fortified structure in a western suburb of Baghdad called al-Amariyah. We were taken there shortly after dawn. This is the report I filed for BBC radio news:
"It’s reported from Baghdad that hundreds of Iraqi civilians may have been killed when a large air raid shelter was hit during an allied air attack. Two missiles or bombs penetrated its reinforced concrete roof exploding inside. Our correspondent in Baghdad, Allan Little, was among a small group of journalists taken to the shelter in a residential area of the city hours after the attack. His report has not been subject to Iraqi restrictions.
"When we arrived, black smoke was still pouring from the shelter. There was chaos. The operation to recover bodies had barely begun. The charred and mutilated remains of those inside were being carried out in blankets and piled into the back of a truck. Some were hardly recognisable as human. Local people said the shelter had a capacity of 2,000. Between 700 and 1,100 had used it every night since bombing began they said, almost all women and children from the middle class suburb of Amariyah.
"Crowds of near-hysterical men pushed and jostled their way through to try to find news of their wives and families. Popular army men had been drafted in to assist. Some wept uncontrollably. One young officer pointed to a neighbouring house: seven people from one family had died, he said; the women of the neighbourhood had been wiped out.
"We were taken to a nearby hospital. Between 30 and 40 bodies, blackened and twisted, were laid out on blankets. Most were women, but many were children three-, four-, five-years-old. Some curled on their sides as though they’d died instantly in their sleep. No one knows how many have been killed. Civil defence officials here say up to 1,000; others, perhaps 400.
I saw no evidence of nearby military installations.
"This attack will send a shockwave through Baghdad, many of whose citizens take nightly shelter in buildings like this, believing themselves safe. Among many Iraqi people, it will further strengthen Saddam Hussein’s claim that the allies aim not to liberate Kuwait, but to destroy the Iraqi state and nation."
How the BBC became dubbed the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation
Within hours, the news had caused a political sensation in the allied countries. In Britain, my BBC TV colleague Jeremy Bowen and I were being denounced as dupes of the enemy. The BBC was the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation, according to one British tabloid newspaper.
The allies said the building was not a civilian air raid shelter but a military command bunker. Yet we were there, standing among the bodies. A few feet away, a pick-up truck was being piled high with the remains of the dead. As it sped off, the body on the top of the pile fell to the ground a few feet from where I stood. I walked into a grassy clearing a vomited, again and again. Jeremy and I scoured the building for evidence of military or communications facility and could find none. The allies also challenged Iraqi claims about the number of dead. So I went to the morgue and I counted – one, two, three... until I got to a little more than three hundred.
The power of eye-witness journalism
Eye witness journalism is in one sense the purest and best of what we do. It has the power to settle part of the argument, to close down propaganda, to challenge myth-making. It is the first draft in the writing of history and, in itself, a primary source for future historians.
So in 2003 I went to Kuwait to try to cover this second war as an independent, non-embedded reporter. As the invasion began, braver souls than me headed north, unembedded, under their own steam. I stood in the lobby of an international hotel, just after dark, on the first or second day of the invasion. A US Army major was talking urgently into a mobile phone to a journalist who had got lost in southern Iraq.
"These voices you can hear," the major was saying, "are they English or Arabic? Arabic. I see. Then lie flat on the ground. Do not move. Switch off your mobile phone because if it rings it will give away your position. Stay there all night. When you hear American forces arrive, wave something white and put up your hands. Now, is there any message you would like me to pass on to your next of kin while you still can?”
That same day we heard news that an ITN crew had gone north with the invasion forces, unembedded, and was now missing. The correspondent was a friend of mine, Terry Lloyd, whom I had come to know in Bosnia a decade earlier. He was a generous and thoughtful colleague and a welcome friend in any bad place. I’d run into him earlier, we had greeted each other with enthusiasm and punched each other's local mobile numbers into our phones. We promised to stay in touch and swap notes. He was killed the next day as he tried to make his way to Basra, killed in pursuit of being first into a liberated city.
And so the portents were there for us to read. By 2004 they were unmistakable. The kidnap, in Pakistan, of the American reporter Daniel Pearl in January 2002 was an early indication of how utterly changed the world was for independent reporting. Pearl was beheaded in front of a video camera and the pictures were posted on the internet. A new phenomenon was born – that of the "exhibition killing". It created a market in Western lives, a way for Islamist and other anti-Western or insurgent groups to advertise their own radicalism and attract a global community of support.
In Iraq, the murders of the British contractor Kenneth Bigley, in October 2004, and the British-Irish aid worker Margaret Hassan, in November 2004, and many others turned this phenomenon into an ever-present danger. Also in 2004, two French journalists, Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, were kidnapped while driving from Baghdad to the southern Iraqi city of Najaf, along a road that had not, until then, been considered dangerous territory. They were held for more than four months, before being released after a massive intervention by the French security services.
Kidnappers – organised and disciplined
On their return to France, a few days before Christmas, they gave a remarkable insight into the organised and disciplined nature of the kidnappers’ thinking. Their captors had told him their case would be heard by a high ranking tribunal. There were, they were told, four categories of people who, when captured, deserved execution. These were: foreign combatants; anyone working for the occupying, or coalition, forces; anyone carrying the passport of one of the occupying, or coalition, countries (British, American, Australian, Danish etc); and spies. Malbrunot and Chesnot had satisfied their captors that they did not fit into any of the first three categories. The question of whether or not they were spies was, for months, undecided.
This, broadly, is the state of affairs that prevails. It has required international news organisations to invest in providing security for their reporters. It has placed a screen of security between us and those whose stories we need to hear. What is life like in those great swathes of Afghanistan that are controlled by the Taliban? We can only know a small part of the picture. We can listen to the stories of those who flee to government-controlled territory. But we can no longer get in our cars in Kabul and drive unmolested into the countryside to see for ourselves.
The intrepid, courageous New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell tried to do this in September 2009, after a Nato airstrike on two hijacked fuel tankers had caused dozens of civilian deaths near the northern Afghan city of Kunduz. He found his eye witnesses, he was listening to their story, he was piecing together what had actually happened from those who had actually seen it. He was acquiring that vital commodity – evidence, the kind of evidence that writes the first draft of history and which is such an essential tool in combating propaganda and myth-making.
And he was kidnapped. Worse than that. He was held for four days and then rescued in an audacious raid by British forces. Four people were killed in the operation – Farrell’s popular and highly respected Afghan colleague Sultan Munadi, one British soldier and two Iraqi women who had the misfortune to get in the way. It is – surely – too high a price to pay. The world is now very hard, indeed, for the kind of independent, free-roaming, eye-witness journalism we used to pursue which such vigour and commitment.
Extracts from the book will be published by Journalism.co.uk over the course of this week and there will be a launch event at the Frontline Club on 15 September: Who is Winning the Media War in Afghanistan?
Afghanistan, War and the Media: Deadlines and Frontlines (ISBN 9781845494445) is published by Abramis on 13 September.
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