Risks Keen for War Journalists

Melinda Liu has covered wars in the Persian Gulf and in Southeast Asia. She’s reported on revolution in Burma, anarchy in Somalia and genocide in Bosnia. She’s had bullets flying all around her in Tiananmen Square, and she was shot in the leg in the Philippines.

But in her 21 years with Newsweek, Liu has never seen anything quite like Afghanistan, where eight Western journalists have been killed, more than a dozen others have been robbed, arrested, kidnapped or shot at and reports are widespread that Taliban leaders have offered a bounty of $50,000 to $100,000 to anyone who kills one of them.

“You can get killed in a bombardment or by a land mine . . . and if you’ve covered war before, you know that risk,” Liu, 50, said by satellite phone. “Everything’s very murky here, though, and that makes it particularly dangerous.

“The front is always shifting, so a road that’s safe one hour can be very unsafe the next, and a warlord who’s very friendly to you one day is hostile the next,” Liu said. “And on top of the politics and the unpredictability and instability, you’ve got all this banditry.”

Many Western journalists think they and their colleagues have been especially targeted, both by the Taliban and by Al Qaeda.

As Taliban resistance continues to crumble with the fall of Kandahar, journalists are likely to become even more vulnerable--and not only because of the rumored bounty put on their heads by Mullah Mohammed Omar. Freed of rigid Taliban control, freelance bandits and thugs may contribute to a growing lawlessness as rival warlords struggle for local control.

Moreover, “when armies fall apart, they start looking for three things, and they can get them all from journalists,” says Mort Rosenblum, a longtime special correspondent for Associated Press, who’s been covering armed conflict since the mid-1960s.

“They want resources--dollars or things they can sell, like the satellite phones, cameras and laptop computers that journalists carry. They want transportation like the . . . vehicles the journalists drive. And they want revenge against the people they think are responsible for their downfall.”

“In many Third World countries, there isn’t much difference between the government and the press,” says Tim Wiener of the New York Times, speaking by satellite phone from Jalalabad. “They think the press is an arm of the government, and the press can tell the government to stop the bombing. When that doesn’t happen . . . . “ His voice trails off.

So why are hundreds of journalists risking their lives in Afghanistan--or in any war zone, for that matter?

The reasons vary, ranging from the love of adventure and the pursuit of the Big Story to an affection for the people of Afghanistan and a determination to make a difference in the world.

For many, as Pamela Constable of the Washington Post says, the motivation is multilayered: competitive zeal, fear of boredom at desk jobs back home, “the addictive thrill of danger” that sharpens the senses and emotions, and “the heady conviction that we could reach the precipice without toppling in the abyss.”

Most journalists insist they’re not looking for danger, even though they recognize its inevitability in a combat zone. War is the ultimate story because it makes any situation both more poignant and more painful.

As Constable says, “The idea of following Marines into hell is not my idea of what I ought to be doing or am good at doing. I’m much more interested in the human drama and struggle.”

Many Western journalists share Constable’s fascination with and fondness for Afghanistan.

“There’s a passion about this part of the world, a hyper-life, that’s more intense than anything I’ve ever felt anywhere else,” says Alissa Rubin of The Los Angeles Times. “Places like this may seem really alien, but there are moments when you realize that some very different places are connected to us in the United States. . . . That’s why I became a reporter, to try to explain those links, to try to show what makes . . . terrorists hiding in Afghanistan explainable.”

Last week, in the Pakistani border town of Chaman, Rubin was interviewing a former Taliban in an Afghan refugee neighborhood when a crowd started to gather.

Crowds often gather around Western reporters, especially women reporters, and blond women reporters like Rubin are especially conspicuous in that part of the world. In Afghanistan, conspicuous is not good, and when Rubin sensed a growing “tenseness” in the crowd, she and her photographer and their driver and translator retreated to their car.

“In that moment,” Rubin says, “the crowd became a mob and someone pulled the driver out and took the car keys out and the car was being pounded, rocking back and forth.

“I kept yelling, ‘Go, go, go,’ ” Rubin says, and she and her colleagues finally escaped, driving off with one door hanging open. Only later did her translator tell her that while she’d been doing her interview, he’d heard a man in the rear of the crowd say of her and her photographer, “We can kill them, because we are doing jihad.”

But Rubin blamed herself in part for what had happened. “It’s Ramadan, and the people in the crowd had been fasting. They were getting edgy after not having eaten since 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t a good idea to interview them then,” she said.

Some journalists now travel with armed escorts. Others have armed guards protecting their living quarters--especially since a Swedish cameraman was shot to death last month by robbers who broke into the Taloqan house he was staying in.

Some journalists wear helmets, flak jackets and bulletproof vests, and several news organizations--CNN and the New York Times among them--have ordered armored vehicles to carry their reporters in the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan.

But none of these measures is any guarantee of safety.

“In Somalia, people showed up in flak jackets and the bad guys just shot them in the head and stole their flak jackets,” says the AP’s Rosenblum.

Even armed escorts can be risky, says Nic Robertson of CNN. “You have to remember that alliances change quickly here, and your escorts will save their own skin before they save yours.”

Ultimately, reporters say, good judgment and good luck are their best protection in combat.

How about guns?

Geraldo Rivera of Fox News says he’s carrying one. Rivera says he realizes his gun is useless against armed soldiers--as he found out Thursday morning when he was taping a report from a hilltop in Tora Bora, where U.S. forces are focusing their hunt for Osama bin Laden. A sniper fired two shots at Rivera, and he dove to the ground while the bullets whizzed by, “close enough to hear . . . within inches.”

But Rivera says he is convinced that with all the bandits and brigands roaming the Afghan countryside, a gun “has the same value here . . . as it does against crooks back home.”

Still, Rivera aside, journalists insist they don’t--and shouldn’t--carry guns. To do so, they say, compromises their noncombatant status and makes them and other journalists legitimate targets for enemy soldiers, who are likely to be both more heavily armed and quicker, better shots.

“Carrying a gun is the very best way to get yourself killed,” says Chris Tomlinson, who spent seven years as an Army medic before joining the staff of Associated Press in 1997. Speaking from Jalalabad, Tomlinson said, “You carry a gun . . . and in the eye of the enemy, you’re suddenly a fighting force.”

Tomlinson, 36, is one of the more unusual members of the Western press corps in Afghanistan--not just ex-Army but a Buddhist who says he came to Afghanistan as a reporter to “tell the story of the war, in the hope that people will learn how terrible war is and how much people suffer and maybe, in time, they won’t tolerate war any more.”

Tomlinson acknowledges that “this may be naive,” but colleagues say he’s anything but naive in the combat zone.

On Nov. 19, Tomlinson’s first full day in Afghanistan, four reporters were killed on the Jalalabad-to-Kabul road. Earlier that morning, he had passed that same murderous checkpoint going the opposite way.

When he saw the men with guns standing on the side of the road, he decided immediately that it wasn’t a legitimate Taliban checkpoint.

There was no barrier of any kind,” he says. “The men were standing on the side of the road, twiddling their Kalishnikovs. They looked like neighborhood thugs to me. “I told my driver to keep going, don’t stop.”

But relatively few of today’s reporters have seen military combat duty. That’s why a few news organizations--including CNN, Associated Press and the New York Times--have sent some of their reporters to special military training courses, one of them run by Paul Rees, managing director of London-based Centurion Risk Services.

Rees says his staff of 20 ex-Royal Marine commandos gives an intensive, five-day course in which “we teach them about mines and booby traps, weapons and ballistics, emergency first aid, how to defuse a potentially violent situation, what you do if you’re caught in cross-fire or kidnapped or stopped at a blockade,” Rees says.

Most reporters have to rely on their journalistic experience in these situations, though, and editors and television news executives say that experience is generally the first thing they look for in trying to decide whom to send to Afghanistan.

“You want to send people over there who aren’t looking at this kind of conflict situation for the first time,” says Gerald Boyd, managing editor of the New York Times.

Several editors say they frequently remind their reporters in Afghanistan that no story is worth dying for.

More than 700 journalists have died covering wars--66 of them in World War II, 65 more in Vietnam--according to the Freedom Forum in Arlington, Va.

“If a war is worth fighting, then it’s certainly worth dying for,” says Paul Watson of The Los Angeles Times. “That doesn’t mean you run around taking foolish risks. But if the story of the war is important enough to bring it to the public’s attention, it’s worth the risk to the journalist who brings it to them.”

Watson, 42, figures he’s covered more than a dozen wars on four continents. But he keeps coming back, in part because he feels he owes it to those journalists who have been killed in combat, killed pursuing stories on horrors and atrocities the world should know about.

This sense of shared risk and mutual obligation tends to create among war correspondents a special bond and a much greater sense of cooperation and collegiality than one might find among reporters in, say, the White House press room. War correspondents compete with each other, but they also share with each other and help each other--and commiserate and celebrate with each other.

Thanksgiving this year came two days after the four journalists were killed on the Jalalabad-Kabul road. More than 40 journalists based in Jalalabad banded together in a rundown hotel that fourth Thursday in November to celebrate this uniquely American holiday--and to toast and honor their dead colleagues.

At the local market, they bought eight turkeys--called “elephant birds” in Pashto--and cooked them in big aluminum pots in outdoor, earthen ovens with burning embers on top. They had pomegranate seeds instead of cranberry sauce. A Washington Post reporter made the stuffing. A New York Times reporter made mashed potatoes. A Los Angeles Times reporter provided the only bottle of wine.

“Everyone got just a drop,” says The Times’ Rone Tempest, “and there was no dessert. But it was one of the best Thanksgivings I’ve ever had.”