People Like Us (11 page)

I had no reason to mistrust the former ambassador, but the old woman didn’t make my article. I felt there was too much of a risk that Mazjdi would find out about it, either through a Dutch Iraqi or through the embassy. The woman has since died.

One of my beer-drinking partners in Cairo was Gie, a Flemish man who managed a sweet factory for a multinational. “I wanted to import eight tons of a special oil,” he once told me. “I couldn’t find out anywhere what the requirements for such a container of oil would be. The ministries of environment, transport, economic affairs, and health all told different stories, and no one returned my calls. However, my
factory couldn’t continue manufacturing without this oil, so I imported it. The container hadn’t even got to the harbor when it was seized—the oil had to be destroyed or redistributed, and it was going to cost me sixty thousand dollars. I called my lawyer, who called a contact, who called another contact. I ended up paying a ‘consultant’ six hundred dollars for ‘legal advice,’ and my oil was allowed through customs. I’ve got a special little chap who will go to prison for me if we get caught. Any Western companies who say they don’t operate through bribery in Egypt are liars. If they didn’t, they’d have gone bankrupt long ago.”

Gie’s problems illustrated beautifully how corruption and mismanagement wreck a country’s economy. Yet the story didn’t find its way into the economic supplement because I didn’t want to put Gie’s career at risk, and the Egyptian embassy in The Hague reads everything—which is why, in reality, Gie has a different name and isn’t Flemish.

 

 

T
he vulnerability of the sources was a third filter that kept the realities of daily life under a dictatorship out of the news. And there was a fourth one. Sometimes I’d hear something, I’d have it fact-checked, and I’d have sources with first and last names ... but then it wouldn’t be news. One example was the traffic mortality rate in the Middle East. Because of the poor state of the roads in the region, the clapped-out cars, the corrupt police, and the useless hospitals, an Arab is fifty times more likely to have a fatal car accident than a European. It’s a bloodbath in the Arab world—day in, day out. In this instance, the usual impediments to getting a good story don’t exist: There are figures available, you can get great quotes from UN press guys, and the names and last names of
the victims and their relatives are not that important for the human angle. So I waited for an exceptionally big accident on the Cairo to Alexandria motorway, and grafted my story onto it.

So then I had the one article ... but that’s as far as it went. How was it possible that the biggest bloodbath in the Arab world was only good for one piece?

The answer was, once again, because Arab lands are not democracies. Compare them with the Netherlands. While I was in the Middle East, an increasing number of my countrymen were concluding that mass immigration cost more than it delivered. A certain person offered that opinion, it received media coverage, and when his message got hold he was invited to speak more often. This inspired supporters to write in, hold demonstrations, and organize events; in this way, resistance to further immigration made it onto the political agenda. It took time because, even in a democracy, the elite can keep certain issues off the agenda. But sooner or later the issues come to the surface, and that’s precisely the difference between ours and a closed system such as a dictatorship. The mainstream Arab media will never report that, “Today, thousands of Egyptians hit the streets to protest against the president’s appointment of his half-illiterate brother as government advisor.” No, and neither would they report: “Today, the secretary of traffic safety in Egypt has given a petition containing 3 million signatures to the president and asked him to act against the children of generals and politicians responsible for 200kph hit-and-run accidents.”

If something deviates from the everyday, and verifiable information is available, it can become news. But, to remain news, an issue has to have legs; it must stay in motion. “We’re following this story closely,” they say on CNN; but without
development there’s nothing to follow. That’s why the hunger in Wau in Sudan was not a story for the editors: “Oh, no, not another conflict with no end in sight.”

I
once asked a TV colleague back at the studios what he thought the news was. He gave an embarrassed grin: “If it bleeds, it leads. We like to open with attacks, kidnaps, murders, and large, bloody accidents, because they grab the public’s attention. You also have to divide the number of deaths by the number of kilometers from the studios back home. Dead whites are bigger news than dead blacks or Asians, and dead Christians are bigger news than dead people of other faiths—except that, as American colleagues pun: Jews are news. So an attack in Jerusalem could make the headlines, but a small bomb in Algiers or Delhi won’t make the broadcast.”

The jokes were charmingly cynical and became something of a running gag. But they also seemed to have a function, specifically to reiterate that nobody knows exactly why something becomes news. You can list the requirements for something to be news, but why it actually makes the news programs ... The only certainty for journalists in the West is that if something really important happens, sooner or later ordinary people will make themselves heard.

That’s the West, but in dictatorships people are oppressed. Protesting and getting things on the agenda are impossible, and so much remains out of shot—not only everyday life, but also things that have a huge effect on people’s lives. In Egypt, 75 million people live in a residential area the size of the Netherlands, and each year the population increases by 1.5
million. In order to keep up with this population explosion, the authorities need to create five hundred thousand new jobs a year, build one hundred thousand new houses, ten thousand new schools, one thousand new centers of higher education, one hundred new hospitals, and a handful of new universities ... This is how much pressure population growth creates—not only in Egypt, but also in Yemen, Syria, and other Arab countries. That’s 6 million more people every year, and when there’s no water or work for them they may very well decide to come to Europe. But until they do that in their masses, the population explosion is not news:

Neither traffic deaths nor population growth were news, but at least there were statistics about them. By contrast, nobody knows how many Egyptian girls have their vulvas mutilated annually—“female circumcision,” they call it. Nor do we know how many people in the Arab world have been locked away without a fair trial (or a trial of any kind). Nor how many billions of skimmed dollars various generals have managed to secrete in foreign accounts. And there’s no chance of finding out how many Arabs are killed or handicapped each year by such criminal mismanagement. Nobody knows, and nobody dares to protest about it.

An Egyptian doctor friend told me about the chaos and corruption in the hospitals. Doctors were committing fatal
errors because their qualifications hadn’t been acquired through exams, but bribes; patients had to bribe doctors to receive treatment; corrupt buyers bought too-expensive medicines or the wrong ones in exchange for fat commission fees.
That’s what I’m going to write about,
I thought enthusiastically. But there were no figures about damage, waste, and bribery, and that doctor could, at the limit, only be quoted anonymously in the paper. In the West, the victims of such a system would set up a Patients Association; but, like the wife of that doctor said, “The only time I’ve voted freely in my life was on Idols. And I swear to you, if I set up a fan club for my idol, I’d have the secret service on my back.”

 

 

T
his was journalism in a dictatorship, but how could it be any different? You can’t fill a radio news program or a newspaper with personal impressions and anecdotes that you don’t even know to be true, or at all representative. That’s why those colleagues who spoke really good Arabic and had more experience and contacts than I did stuck to the news stream from the news agencies. And that’s why even the most brutal dictators didn’t deport those news agencies. They didn’t need to, because the agencies had already put on their own gags.

It was as simple as that, and that’s why so much remained out of sight and why you had to start from scratch when people suddenly did want to know more about the Arabs. Like after September 11, 2001.

It’s hard to imagine now but, before my appointment in 1998,
de Volkskrant
had had serious discussions over whether having a correspondent in the Arab world was still necessary. Couldn’t it be covered from Israel? At the end of the 1990s few were concerned about Islam, and the peace process between Israel and Palestine seemed to be limping towards a resolution. Once there was peace at last, the Arabs would climb aboard the democratic bandwagon, along with the rest of humanity. “The end of history,” it was called at the time, and a columnist grumbled that everyone was starting to look like everyone else: “The world is going to be one giant McDonald’s.”

It’s all part of the game, but in that climate my observations to my bosses about our distorted representation of Arabs had little effect. To them, the Arab world was on the same rung as Latin America on the ladder: One page-long background article once in a while was enough.

I was stuck with it. Because you can hardly squeeze anything out of it, a dictatorship is like a map with uncharted areas. During quiet periods, correspondents can talk around these blank spots by limiting their reporting to events for which there is verifiable information: Summits, diplomatic breakthroughs, bombings. But when something big happens, the public wants to know things that the correspondent can’t find out. What do you do then? There’s competition in the news industry, too—not only between domestic and foreign news, but also between correspondents who want to get their own area on the front page, or who covet someone else’s job or travel budget. When you’re asked what’s going on in your area, it’s not a good idea if you reply, “It’s hard to know.” You run the risk of the editor-in-chief looking at you during the next round of cutbacks. Why should we invest in you if you never know anything?

 

 

T
his dilemma was brought into sharp relief when the Syrian dictator Hafez Al-Assad died. Suddenly, Syria hit the headlines, and the gates of Damascus sprung wide open. The world news caravan was on the move, and I’d hardly left the arrivals hall when I was set to work. “Our correspondent has arrived in Damascus. What is the atmosphere there?” As if I knew, so I hid behind a wall of trivial facts, like all the other journalists did: The procession will go this way, the burial will be there on that day, President
A will be attending but Leader B will not, there will be x number of days of national morning ... It would work a few times, but it was boring, and you could serve it up from the studio just as easily. When a leader who has ruled for this long dies, editors want to know more—as in, “What’s going to happen now in Syria?”

And that was one of the blank spots. Assad would be succeeded by his son; that much was certain, but after that? It seemed to me that the regime wouldn’t be rushing to share power with an opposition it had been repressing with an iron fist for decades. Damascus had been brought to a standstill by security measures, loudspeakers blared out the whole day, “Dear Assad, we support you with blood and soul,” and the pinboards in the corridors of the Ministry of Information were decorated with sheets of paper reading: “General assembly tomorrow at 7:00 AM at the main entrance. Obligatory attendance for the funeral of Our Leader for Eternity.” This wasn’t exactly the sound of a new wind blowing, and the few Syrians I spoke to were mainly afraid of chaos. They’d rather see another strong man come into power than go through any risky experiments, they said.

What was going to happen in Syria? A successor is almost always weaker, because fewer people are indebted to him. He would be supported by the powers who’d supported his predecessor, but they’d only do that as long as their own pockets were being filled—and for that their own positions had to remain unthreatened. The possibility of a new wind was therefore limited, and why would a dictator want to hand over some of his power? Say he introduced democracy, and it went wrong and you had a coup. Who’d be first against the wall, along with his family? Not to mention the risk that would arise of being tried as a former dictator.

I think the correspondents should have said, “We don’t know what the new leader or the people want. We can’t know because it’s a dictatorship.” Then we could have explained what a dictatorship was, with the conclusion that one chief crook would probably be followed by another in Syria.