Adventures in Correspondentland (35 page)

Few of us have plumbed those depths, nor even come close. Still, I confess on occasions to having listened to the wrenching testimony of a survivor or a victim and then inadvertently responded with the words ‘That's great' at the end of a particularly strong soundbite – a terrible professional tic. My charge sheet would also list what for correspondents is, I am afraid, a routine misdemeanour: of prolonging an interview up until the point where the interviewee succumbs to his or her emotions. As a young reporter, I always thought myself fortunate, charmed even, to have bypassed local newspapers, even though they have always offered the best of journalistic apprenticeships – the ‘University of a Thousand Frozen Doorsteps', a colleague calls them. It meant I never had to force ‘an entry into many a stricken home', to borrow from Evelyn Waugh, when, say, a child was killed in a road accident. As a foreign correspondent, however, I have done more than enough of it in disaster zones.

Often the corollary of the ‘Anyone here been raped and speaks English?' technique is overly sentimental prose drawn from the Heart of the Sleeve school of reportage. Christopher Hitchens offered the most unpitying parody of this overwrought style: ‘As I stand here half-canned and weeping in the burning hell hole called … the body of a child lay like a broken doll in the street.' I dare say most of us have lapsed into this patois of disaster. I
know I have. Perhaps readers will identify shades of it above. The temptation on radio and television is also to deliver this kind of commentary with an overly dramatic voice, as if we were acting the script rather than merely reading it. ‘Ham and cheese', we sometimes call it, or ‘the full Ploughman's' in the most extreme cases.

With reporter involvement – or RI, as it is called for short – much more fashionable now than it was in the past, plaudits often go to those who have successfully inserted themselves into the story in as heroic a manner as possible. Often, their actions genuinely are heroic, and life-saving. But the best correspondents, I would suggest, show self-restraint in how much of this reaches the screen, downplaying their involvement and making sure that the victim remains the focus of the story.

Here, CNN has crossed a threshold, dispatching its on-screen doctor, the neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta, to war zones and disasters, where he regularly performs surgery. It always makes for gripping television. It usually saves lives. Dr Gupta is clearly a fine doctor and a decent human being. But it is not the primary function of news crews, and it takes reportage into an entirely different genre.

Natural disasters can also produce a lot of grandstanding and silliness. A staple of hurricane coverage, especially in America, is to be blown off one's feet, ideally in a live cross back to the studio or, if not, during a piece to camera. Again, theatre rather than journalism.

Likewise, disaster coverage normally follows a standard timeline. The focus in the early days is the devastation, the bereavement and the first arrival of aid, which is usually filmed from atop a heavily laden truck or peering down from the winch
door of a helicopter to show the hands of its recipients, outstretched, clambering and desperate. On day five or six of an earthquake, there is generally a miraculous rescue. By then, an argument will have erupted over the sluggish arrival of government aid. In Islamic countries, the natural follow-up is to show how radical extremist groups, with links to terrorist organisations, are filling the void. Wherever the disaster, always there will be stories about looting, however small the outbreak, falsely implying a mood of savagery that frankly rarely exists (commonly, crime rates drop after major disasters).

In the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, Steve Coll of
The New Yorker
– one of the finest foreign correspondents working today – neatly summed up these subgenres of disaster reportage. He spoke of the Last Miracle, that miraculous rescue; the Interpretation of Meaning, where correspondents would ponder the jolting impact of a major catastrophe on victims' faiths or belief systems; and, finally, the Heading to the Exits stories, in which the ‘laundry-less reporter forecasts a slow recovery complicated by political fall-out and imperfect relief efforts'.

The lack of a decent laundry service hints at the logistical problems correspondents commonly face: the need for food, water, shelter, power and a place to answer the call of nature. Arriving in Iran to cover the Bam earthquake, our first priority, once we had picked up visas from a friendly consular official in Dubai and cleared the noticeably less friendly immigration officials in Tehran, was to find a hardware shop where we could purchase a generator. Without electricity, we might as well not have been there.

Next, we stocked up on food and water, though we always came weighed down with military-issue MREs – meals ready to eat, or ‘meals rarely edible', as they were sometimes known. Then
we put up our tents for a week of extreme camping. Transportation is always problematic, since roads are often completely impassable and the only way to reach some of the more remote areas is by military helicopter. So, even if it meant burning up valuable daylight filming time, it was always worthwhile to spend five or six hours waiting, shot-less, on the ground at a military airfield miles from the disaster zone, because of the pictorial riches that lay in store at the end of the flight.

Admittedly, two-dimensional imagery often fails to convey the magnitude of a disaster, but aerial shots provide our best hope of hinting at the scale. Occasionally, flights over a disaster zone can also throw up the kind of telling detail usually only available at ground level. One of the more memorable examples came during the tsunami, when the Indian coastguard flew a photographer over the seldom-seen Indigenous communities in the southern archipelago of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Hovering overhead, he captured the most astonishing snapshot of an almost totally naked tribesman aiming his bow and arrow into the sky. Rarely did these military facilities, as they are called, disappoint.

My only letdown came on the longest and most logistically intricate military relief mission that I had ever reported on: an attempt by the US military to provide assistance to the victims of Cyclone Nargis in Burma – a tropical storm that killed more than 130,000 people in May 2008. From Singapore, a small group of journalists was taken onboard a US supply ship up through the Strait of Malacca to rendezvous with the USS
Essex
, a massive amphibious assault ship that had taken up position, along with its carrier group, just over the horizon from the Burmese coast.

For days, we were flown from ship to ship, watching the
marines and sailors make preparations for a huge delivery of aid. With dozens of helicopters, hovercrafts and landing craft primed to go, the US military could have delivered tonnes of aid within the hour. However, the Burmese military junta refused American assistance, and the carrier fleet waited off the coast for a further three weeks before finally being defeated by the generals' heartless intransigence.

Finding shelter in disaster zones was occasionally problematic, though usually easier than one might have imagined. Covering the tsunami in Galle, we took up residence in five-star luxury at the Lighthouse Hotel, a dreamy resort designed by Geoffrey Bawa, Sri Lanka's most celebrated architect. Reporting on the destruction in some of the more isolated villages on the east coast of the island, however, we ended up sleeping in a wave-wrecked house swarming with mosquitoes and that still reeked of death.

In Bam, after spending the first few nights in a tent village and sharing a toilet block with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, we risked staying in a hotel on the fringes of the quake zone that had such wide cracks in the walls that you could almost peer into the next room. In southern India, we started off at a decent-enough hotel about a mile inland, and by the end of the week we were actually running it. Fearful of another tsunami, the manager simply did a runner, leaving Vivek, our producer, in temporary charge. Not only did he organise the kitchen and housekeeping staff but he also started taking bookings from the other foreign journalists arriving in town. For an impromptu party on New Year's Eve, he managed to rig up a sound system in the garden at the rear and procured a few crates of south-Indian beer and a stock of Old Monk rum.

Unforgivable as it no doubt sounds, I have rarely been at a
New Year's party where the revellers drank so quickly and so hard, and as the sun appeared over the palm trees along the devastated shoreline there was still a small group of stragglers supping the last drops of Old Monk. All I can say in our rather feeble defence was that after almost a week of being surrounded by such awfulness, we needed to disappear for a few hours into drunkenness. Early the next morning, we returned to the relief camps and orphanages nursing hangovers that seemed a reasonable price for escape.

Like many of my colleagues, I have tried to expiate any feelings of guilt about prying into the misery of others with consoling thoughts about opening up viewers' wallets and increasing the pressure on foreign governments to donate more aid. Often, we sponsored survivors ourselves, and gave them food and rebuilding money. In Sri Lanka, I would even like to think we played a minor role in saving international aid agencies a small fortune by hectoring the finance minister so much on air and off that he finally decided to drop an import levy on the four-wheel-drive vehicles and trucks shipped in to help the relief effort that were waiting still on the quayside.

There were times, too, when survivors appeared to draw a measure of therapeutic comfort from having their stories retold on camera, and they perhaps even experienced something of a catharsis. Still, the pressure and temptation of professional competition meant that our motivations were not always as pure as they should have been, and I often came away from disaster zones with even stronger feelings of existential anguish than usual.

Confronted by a looming book deadline in October 2005, now less than 48 hours away, I was seated at my desk long before
dawn that Saturday morning in the hope of having it ready for the printers by the end of the weekend. When the screen on my laptop appeared to be quivering slightly, my first thought was that it must be time for a screen-break. When it started visibly vibrating and rattling, along with my desk and the pictures hanging on the wall above, it was clear that a gigantic earthquake had hit the region. In the short time it took for the walls of my bedroom in my Delhi apartment to stop shaking, which I suppose must have been 15 seconds or so, over 75,000 people had been killed.

To begin with, we could only guess at where the quake might have hit. Gujarat, where an earthquake had killed 20,000 on Republic Day in 2001, was one possibility. Another, more optimistic, scenario was that the epicentre would be traced to a remote mountain range in the Himalayas, where the death toll would be nowhere near as high.

Within a few minutes, the first wire reports started to appear, as one-line flashes on my computer screen. An earthquake had hit Kashmir. Early estimates of its magnitude varied from 6.8 on the Richter scale to 7.8 – eventually, we would settle on 7.6. According to seismologists, it was a shallow quake, some six to ten miles underground, which meant that it would cause much more damage at the surface. Its epicentre was on the Pakistan side of the Line of Control, and there were early reports, so far unconfirmed, of damage as far away as Islamabad. From the Pakistan capital came eyewitness accounts of an apartment building collapsing in on itself, burying hundreds under the rubble. Thought to be a luxury block of flats, it was almost sure to house foreign diplomats or businessmen. Perhaps someone we knew.

Exact information, as ever in the immediate wake of a major disaster, was hard to come by. Phone lines were down. The mobile
network was out. Landslides blocked the roads that snaked from Islamabad into the mountains, where the devastation was sure to be worst. From the Delhi bureau, one team set off for Srinagar, while we dashed to the airport to catch the only flight of the day to Lahore.

By now, a team from our Islamabad bureau was outside the Margalla Towers, the high-end residential complex, where one tower had been flattened and another partially demolished. It was feared that some 150 people were buried under the collapsed concrete, a high proportion of them women and children. From the airport, we headed there too, for on that first night the Margalla Towers served as ‘ground zero' for everyone's quake coverage, a dramatic floodlit backdrop where rescue workers dug into the rubble in the hope of pulling people alive from the wreckage, stopping occasionally during aftershocks. There were 20 that day.

Later on, we learnt that more than 250 people had perished in the Margalla Towers, yet it hardly merited a mention in the days after. That number simply paled in comparison with the mounting death toll elsewhere. In the cruel way that news assigns a hierarchy to such things, Saturday night's lead story had become almost incidental by early Sunday morning. As roads started opening up into the worst-affected areas and military helicopters launched relief flights, everyone headed for the mountains.