“Please Don’t Forget Us”

BAYEUX, France — The Prix Bayeux jury was somewhere between Afghanistan and Gaza, deliberating over war coverage as we do each year, when my phone buzzed news as crucial to the world’s fate as those noisier battles on Normandy beaches up the road a lifetime ago.

With tepid understatement, the Nobel Peace Prize committee cited “increasingly adverse conditions” for newsgathering, as it singled out Maria Ressa, the fearless Filipina who runs Rappler, and Dmitry Muratov, the Russian editor who has buried seven reporters since 2000.

A growing penchant to silence journalists has finally made headlines. In separate responses, both laureates made the same point: If trusted, truthful reporters cannot hold autocrats to account, we are all toast. And we are fast running out of time to react.

Those endless rows of graves near here, dug during my lifespan, make clear what havoc a self-obsessed megalomaniac can wreak. That war killed millions. If we get climate collapse, peaceful coexistence and runaway pandemics wrong, the likely toll defies imagination.

Over a photo of his newsroom, Muratov wrote: “The whole Novaya Gazeta and everyone who worked and works there. Alive and dead. This is their prize.” He started the paper in 1993, helped by Mikhail Gorbachev. His bloodhounds still pursue the culprit who ordered the 2006 poisoning of Anna Polikovskaya, whose Chechnya reporting infuriated Vladimir Putin.  

Maria Ressa’s online Rappler has dogged Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines since he took power, fending off 10 arrest orders, brutal harassment and countless death threats. Among independent journalists worldwide, she is Joan of Arc without the political-religious baggage.

They are two among many determined to get the story straight at any cost to keep the rest of us from being blind, deaf — and dumb — as our world spins out of control.

A different United States helped pick up the pieces after World War II, with massive aid. It took the lead in shaping a United Nations, along with global institutions and alliances to avert common crises. Look at it now.  

A sociopath who let Covid-19 run wild for his own selfish purposes now convinces his cultists that Joe Biden is to blame. He just tweeted, “Do you miss me yet?” Republicans who echo his lunacies undercut fair elections while Democrats fight among themselves. He may come back.

The Prix Bayeux Calvados-Normandy for War Correspondents brings 40,000 people to a town of 14,000 for conferences and photo exhibits. Old friends party with new ones until dawn for days, then gather for a seaside oyster feast. But our first stop is a row of columns listing journalists killed since 1944. There are thousands, 65 new names from 2020 alone.

During my 10 years on the jury, entries have changed beyond recognition. Seasoned hands are joined by perceptive, gutsy young people shaped by circumstance as their own societies exploded around them. Others left promising career paths, driven to bear witness.

Damir Sagolj was a Bosnian soldier when that “Welcome to Hell” sign went up on Sniper Alley, the airport road into Sarajevo. He hung out with journalists, then joined them. His mane of black hair and wry smile were all over Bayeux.

Sagolj won the long-form television award along with Danis Tanovic. Their report – “When We Were Them” – sparked controversy among traditionalists who called it an art form, not journalism. But it aired on Al Jazeera, a 15-minute mix of interviews, video footage and narration with the unconventional impact of a barrel bomb.

It was a microcosm of human tides washing up unwelcome in Europe and America. African and Middle Eastern refugees told of foodless, freezing nights in the open; crippling injuries from police beatings. This was in Bosnia, from where people fled en masse not long ago. How, the narrator asked, could these same people be so heartless to others?

Tanovic received an Oscar in 2001 for “No Man’s Land,” which captured the tragic absurdity of Balkan civil wars: a Bosnian and a Serb trapped in the same foxhole find they are more alike than different. 

Sagolj shared Reuters’ 2018 Pulitzer for covering Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar to Bangladesh. In Bayeux, he introduced the main exhibit, pictures by 12 young photographers in Myanmar, who remain anonymous to protect their families and themselves.

They join fleeting protests and work fast, aware that if the ubiquitous police spot them, they risk jail terms, or worse. All had plans for other careers, but they feel a duty to document the brutal crackdown that snuffed out a brief glimmer of democracy.

The courageous team won the top Bayeux prize, for photos, against entries from world-class French shooters. But they are painfully aware that attention is fleeting as so many new crises erupt. At the opening event, Sagolj read a message from the group. “Please do not forget us.”

One of those photographers was there, incognito among 1,500 people who wait hours for a place in the giant tent for the final ceremony. I’d met him and his wife earlier, both cheerfully ebullient. Yes, they said, the risks are huge. But freedoms are worth fighting for.

Five of the 10 photo finalists were from Gaza, electrifying panoramas of crumpled buildings under firestorms from the sky and close-ups of workaday Palestinians caught between extremists in their midst and what many outsiders see as Israeli overkill collective punishment. 

Two haunting frames got to the crux. In one, an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian man glare at each other with indelible hatred. In the other, a scarfed Gazan grandmother and a grizzled Israeli settler scream rebuke, nose to nose.

Photos can be powerful, but it takes words — often a lot of them — to bring deep enmities into perspective, particularly in the unholy land, where Hamas and Hezbollah use random terror assaults to provoke Israeli response. Arguments based on selective history and personal bias miss the point. No solution lasts long unless disparate people find common ground. 

In an image-conscious world, the “print” category is an also-ran in Bayeux, like best screenplay at the Academy Awards. But the winner this year was masterful. (A link is attached below.)

Wolfgang Bauer’s “Among the Taliban” in Zeit Magazin took readers on a harrowing ride across Afghanistan with ragtag fighters. Only a text message from a top commander protected him from execution. Setting out behind a motorcycle guide on a perilous mountain track, Bauer wrote, was like stepping into space. War reporters know the feeling.

With deft brush strokes on a large canvas, Bauer described intimate encounters and then stepped back for telling background, tracing the Taliban from a group of madrassa students led by Mullah Omar in Kandahar who started out defending young girls from warlords.  

Both sides emerge in blunt clarity. Afghans were caught between ruthless zealots stuck in the Middle Ages and a corrupt government whose army often brutalized the people it was meant to protect. When he wrote in the fall of last year, Bauer foresaw the likely finish.

Donald Trump’s capitulation dispirited the army, and the Taliban moved fast. Kabul remained in denial. Bauer ended the piece at a top Afghan diplomat’s villa, with a lavish buffet and red wine. His guests, ministry officials, worried about distant shooting and helicopters crisscrossing over the terrace. He wrote:

“We should go,” says one the guests. “I’m afraid that all the arterial roads will soon be blocked.” But it’s much too early, the host complains. “Please stay,” he says. It’s not yet time to go.”  

As usual, I came back from Bayeux with notebooks full of the backstories behind events that shape the world. One conversation I overheard on a shared car ride led to a long talk with Raphaël Pitti, a former ranking French army doctor who specializes in war trauma. He has made 31 trips to Syria since 2012 as a volunteer medic.

We talked about the Le Monde investigation in 2013 that should have brought Bashar al-Assad before a war-crimes tribunal. Jean-Philippe Remy and Laurent Van Der Stockt smuggled irrefutable evidence back to France that he was using saran gas on civilians. Chemical agents are “weapons of mass destruction,” George W. Bush’s excuse for invading Iraq.

French President François Hollande had jets warming up. Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron were ready to go. But Labor leaders in Parliament demurred; business interests were at risk. Obama referred the decision to Congress. When nothing happened, Assad got the message.

Two years later, Pitti sent damning samples to Paris in a diplomatic pouch. Syrians, he said, were loading saran into grenades and mortar shells in small amounts, just enough to cause horrible damage but then quickly dissipate leaving few traces behind.

This, in his view, was another side of the Nobel. Obama had won a Peace Prize and was reluctant to sully his image by bombing Assad’s command and control network, Pitti said, concluding: “Had he acted then, I am convinced the war would have ended six years ago.”

Recent history is rife with what-ifs that do not come to light when reporters don’t report them – or if they do, a critical mass doesn’t notice in the daily “news media” avalanche. Afghanistan makes the point with distressing clarity.

Lyse Doucet, a past Bayeux laureate, revealed one for-instance in a six-part BBC podcast that deconstructs the war from start to finish. She titled it with a single Afghan word, kashke. It translates to “if only.”

Hamid Karzai confirmed persistent reports that Taliban leaders wrote him in 2002 to offer a truce and a coalition government. He did not reply -- or inform other Afghan leaders. He said that was because Donald Rumsfeld wanted a crushing military victory.

Lyse’s style epitomizes fast-evolving journalism: old-school with an open mind. Her Afghan contacts go back to 1988, from politicians and warlords to villagers in remote provinces. After gathering facts, she finds pleasant ways to say on camera, “Sir, you’re full of crap.”

Bayeux brings together such old pros and young journalists who see news break with deadly impact on their doorsteps. Objectivity matters, but the “Dragnet” TV series approach -- “just-the-facts-ma’am” -- is not enough. Outsiders apply generality to complex societies and miss vital subtleties. Insiders face local pressures and seldom see the wider world context.

Trump fueled a global trend to befuddle the ignorant and apathetic with Hitlerian big lies. Maria Ressa put it well in an AP interview: “You must find your team, people to fight the good fight with, because this time matters. It’s a battle for facts. When you’re in a battle for facts, journalism is activism.”

But activism is not advocacy. Selecting facts to push personal views undercuts public trust across the board. Fox News’ old slogan, fair and balanced, was more than hypocrisy. “Balance” is false equivalence. Christiane Amanpour has it right: truthful but not neutral.

Abdulmonam Eassa, a new Bayeux friend, exemplifies an emerging new breed. He was 19 when war razed his Damascus neighborhood. He worked for a photographer and, like other “fixers” who once stayed in the background, struck out on his own. Now he provides insight that reporters often miss from such vital African backwaters as Darfur and South Sudan.

At the book tent, Adrien Jaulmes signed Raconter La Guerre, his richly detailed history of war correspondents. He is what the French call a grand reporter; in his case, grand understates it. In 2000, he left his job – a lieutenant in the Foreign Legion – to join Le Figaro, covering war and peace. Now, based in America, he covers both.

When Adrien pitched up last year in Tucson, I gave him a map and a few contacts. Within a week, he knew more about the southern border than most party hacks who infest the Arizona Legislature. His approach is simple: For all our new tools and toys, little has changed since parchment and Morse Code. It is the story that matters, not the way it is delivered.

He found on the Mexico border what he sees in the Mediterranean, in Eastern Europe and Asia. Desperate hordes aren’t simply seeking “a better life.” Most are victims of conflict, oppression, climate or poverty, scourges they did not cause and cannot control.

A wealthier world could address root causes. The Ressas and Muratovs show that exposing hard truths makes an impact -- but only if the world takes notice and reacts. Otherwise, there is that old option, noted in various forms for millennia: Shoot the messenger. 

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https://www.europeanpressprize.com/article/among-the-taliban/