Free for lunch? With a warlord?

I have faced many more real-life dilemmas, almost as many as the stories I have covered, for the NBC rule book does not deal with having lunch with a Somali warlord, who has just stolen the food you are eating from the aid organizations; or with how far to press for answers from Son Sen, who helped kill up to two million of his countrymen, while at his mercy in a Khmer Rouge jungle hideout in Cambodia. Nor does the rule book tell you how to react when a Palestinian militant tells you how happy he is that a suicide bomber blew up a bus in Tel Aviv, killing 21 people, while you know your son just took a bus to that city center.

How about this for a dilemma? In Somalia, Tom Brokaw had asked me for a story on what it’s like to die of starvation. I could ask a doctor. Or I could show Fida Ibrahim die on camera. She was a once-pretty, 20-year-old Somali woman I just met who is starving and sick in a clinic, and the nurse said she had no hope of surviving. What is the best way to tell the story?

Or this: Five-year-old Yehona Iliu has lost her family in the crush of Kosovar refugees fleeing the ethnic slaughter of the Serbs. We have followed her for months as the Red Cross and the British Army try to trace her mother, and like everyone, we have fallen for this sweet child that never cried. Finally, Yehona’s mother is found in an Albanian camp and we are invited to the reunion, to witness the story’s happy ending. But on the same day, NATO invades Kosovo and we are assigned to follow the German tanks. Which is more important?

Here’s another one. On the West Bank, an Israeli soldier hits a Palestinian driver on the head with a night-stick with a sickening thud. We trace both men to their homes and explain how the two men’s lives crossed at this violent moment. And then we wonder, should we ask them whether they’d like to meet each other, this time in a peaceful context? Is that legitimate, or is it interfering with the story, interfering with fate, playing God?

No clear answers
There is no clear way to act: the conflict is always between getting the best pictures and information for a television report, and staying a reasonably decent human being. For so often one has to compromise one’s humane instincts and become callous and thick-skinned, in pursuit of the story. The most obvious example, common in wars, is the need to get a sound bite from somebody who has just lost a family member; to film a mother grieving a dead child is heart-breaking, yet how else can you convey what has happened?

In my career I didn’t always get it right. When I was working as a cameraman for Visnews (now Reuters) before I joined NBC News, my soundman was killed in a minefield, the correspondent was seriously wounded, and I had to decide whether to walk through the mines to rescue him.

As an Egyptian jet dropped bombs on the Israeli army vehicle I was in, and strafed us with his machine guns, I had to decide, should I hide, film him, or just scream in terror? What to do when it became clear that mujahedeen guiding me over the Hindu Kush mountain range to report on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were more interested in robbing me than fighting the Soviets?

Courtesy Washington Journalism R Ready for a gas war – Fletcher on the cover of Washington Journalism Review.

I felt my way as best I could. Along the way I have met thousands of people who allowed me into their lives at their lowest moments, and I have tried to act with respect and care, and tell their story as clearly and accurately as possible.

Some have become friends; I have found that almost everybody, when you talk long enough to him or her, has goodness inside them. While a few are just irredeemable villains, beyond comprehension. In conflicts, most people believe their enemy to be the latter; and I have tried to be a bridge.

As for that wedding invitation, I didn’t accept. But I did see the murder, because the killers made their own video, and showed it proudly.

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