by Zahra Hankir
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Despite attending a French high school, I had rejected the French education system. I wanted to free myself from French colonialism, the remnants of which lingered, even after the liberation of my country on paper. (Morocco had been under the rule of the French Protectorate from 1912 to 1956.) I was still a high school student in Marrakesh when the September 11 terror attacks rattled New York in 2001. Bereft of so many innocent civilians, America was grieving for its dead while also preparing to avenge them by striking the Muslim world. It was in this charged environment that I started to apply to universities abroad. I was, at the time, oblivious to world events, despite my interest in journalism. In fact, I wasn’t particularly concerned about what was happening in the Middle East. This might have been because I was still young, or simply because I didn’t feel much solidarity with the Muslim world—if anything, I felt like “the other” in my own country.
In December of that year, I went to a party where I ran into Leila, who was home in Marrakesh for the winter break. At the time, she was studying sociology and film at Hofstra University in New York. I hadn’t seen her in a while, and back then, we weren’t very close. She’d always intimidated me—I thought she was far too cool to be my friend.
I stood in a corner at the party, alone; I used to be quite shy, especially in crowded social settings. (In retrospect, it’s surprising that I pursued a career that involves having to speak to people I don’t know on a daily basis.) Leila spotted and approached me and we started a conversation. I was curious to hear more about her experiences in New York, so I bombarded her with questions. She was in love with her new life. I confided in her my concerns about how I was going to pay for college in the city. School in France was free, so the United States was a tough sell to my parents. Convinced that I’d “blossom” in New York, Leila said I shouldn’t be deterred. She suggested that I attend Hunter, an inexpensive city college in Manhattan, and worry only about finding funding to pay for grad school. Thirteen months later, I was a student at Hunter; seven years later, I went to grad school at Columbia.
Leila and I grew closer in New York. She introduced me to her community of friends, helping me make New York my home. We spent some of the happiest years of our friendship in the city. In 2008, Leila moved back to Morocco because she felt it would kick-start her photography career. Coincidentally, I moved back a year later. We embarked on different paths—she was a photographer and I was a news reporter. But we focused on the same issues, and eventually worked together on the plight of sub-Saharan migrants in Morocco. We attended street protests in 2011, galvanized by the energy of the people. One of my dearest memories with Leila was when we stood side by side on a truck as she photographed young Moroccans with their fists up in the air, screaming for freedom.
Soon after I moved to France in 2012, Leila started dividing her time between Beirut and Paris. In 2014, she started working on a project about first-generation immigrants who had lost their jobs after dedicating years of their professional lives to the Renault factory in a Parisian suburb. Leila wanted to document how these immigrants had left their countries and devoted themselves to France without receiving much recognition in return. She interviewed the immigrants tirelessly for months, riding her bike to their suburb to meet them, bonding with them in ways that left them distraught by her absence when she was gone. That was Leila’s last major artistic project before she passed away.
Moving to France opened up old wounds—the wounds of colonial history, but also the wounds of resentment against Muslims, which was still rising. This particular move was different from when I’d left to go to the United States in 2002: I was finally paying attention to how Muslims were being treated in the wake of tragedies perpetrated by extremists. Instead of feeling bitter about or hiding from it, I decided to seek out those who were positively reacting to discrimination. While Leila focused on the North Africans who had given everything to France after leaving their homes behind them, I focused on their children. The different generations were fighting with the same sense of pride and desire to reclaim their religious and national identities.
Leila and I always felt out of place. We shared a fascination with other outcasts—individuals who reminded us of how privileged we were and who inspired us to give them a voice. We were overwhelmed and humbled by their struggles. When Leila died, I repeatedly asked myself what she would have done had it been I who’d perished instead. The answer is easy: she would have continued pouring her energy into her work.
I still find myself dwelling on the irony of Leila being killed by terrorists after having spent years of her short life working to dispel racism and challenge stereotypes. I wonder what she would have made of today’s political realities, as the demonization of the “other” accelerates at a disturbing pace. The United States has elected a president whose discriminatory policies have already had a concrete impact on refugees and immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries and beyond. His rhetoric has further inflamed the Islamophobia that already saturates Europe, emboldening ultra-right-wing movements everywhere. Meanwhile, the dream of a prosperous, free Middle East is no more. The Arab Spring has in many ways disappointed us.
But these failures and disappointments have, at the same time, reinvigorated Arabs, Muslims, and other minorities. In 2015, I wrote a profile for the New York Times on two young French Muslims who work for a media platform called Le Bondy Blog. The news site piqued my interest as all of its contributors hailed from Parisian projects, or banlieues, and reported on minority communities they knew inside and out. The platform gave the members of these little-known and misunderstood communities an authentic voice, allowing them to contest the stories that reporters who had “parachuted” in had already told. I continue to learn from these activists, particularly their rejection of victimization and their desire to make a difference and to gain equal rights and respect.
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On the same evening that Leila was gunned down in front of a café as she stepped out of a car to buy a salad in Ouagadougou, another story made the headlines in France. Newscasts that night showed a shattered Amal emerging from the Bobigny courthouse in the suburbs of Paris. Damien Saboundjian, the police officer who’d killed her brother, had just been acquitted of all charges. “They took away his right to live,” she told journalists who were present at the verdict. The setback didn’t stop Amal from continuing her fight. She filed for an appeal. A year later, Saboundjian was found guilty of murder without the intention to kill.
In the months leading up to the appeal trial, I chronicled Amal’s struggle for justice and we grew closer. Amal’s personal life had been plagued by tragedy and hardship. She’d never received a college education (though she’s now pursuing a law degree). She’d fought to marry a Portuguese man she’d met when she was just thirteen. She’d lost her brother. And yet she managed, in the span of a few years, to become the face of the fight against police brutality. She alone can gather crowds of thousands in the French capital to protest against institutional racism—a concept that remains absent from the mainstream conversation in France.
I tried hard while working with Amal to not let my strong admiration for her cloud my judgment as a reporter. Instead, I found strength in her hope and determination. I channel that strength into France’s Children, a documentary feature I’m currently working on about Muslim empowerment and activism in the country. As part of my work, I’m closely following the lives of Arab and Muslim millennial immigrants who are mobilizing, inspired by the fascinating example set by the American Black Power movement. Amal is the film’s main protagonist. I spent weeks with her and other inspiring activists, building their trust as I filmed them.
Working on France’s Children, difficult as it has been, has finally brought me some peace. I know I’m doing something meaningful. And I know Leila would be proud.
Words, Not Weapons
Shamael Elno
or
I faced my first moral dilemma as a journalist in September 2013, when I was working for a Sudanese national broadcaster called Al Shorooq whose editorial views reflected those of the ruling party.
Up until that point in my career at Al Shorooq, my reporting had been free from political influence. Today, Sudan is one of the least free countries in the world when it comes to freedom of the press, but this wasn’t always the case. My formative years in journalism, from 2007 to 2011, came after the end of a brutal twenty-two-year-long civil war; those postwar years witnessed a remarkable surge in political activity and, by extension, journalistic activity. The situation was constantly changing, and there was much to report on.
But when South Sudan seceded in 2011, the political situation deteriorated, taking civil liberties, including relative journalistic freedoms, along with it. There was talk of enforcing Sharia law on Sudan’s entire population, since South Sudan was largely Christian, and its secession meant that the population of Sudan was now majority Muslim. What’s more, much of Sudan’s oil revenue had come from the south, and the loss of that source of income triggered multiple economic shocks across the country. Economic growth slowed and inflation surged.
Amid those economic strains, the Sudanese government decided to cut fuel subsidies. In September 2013, people took to the streets to protest the decision. It was a disaster. There was chaos everywhere, and fuel prices were intolerable. I was in Nairobi at the time attending a workshop; news of street protests had started spreading beyond borders. Demonstrations unfolded in Khartoum as well as in other cities. What an unbelievable mess it was! The streets were boiling, covered with the blood of young protesters.
Upon returning from Nairobi, I quickly learned that our managers at Al Shorooq wanted us to turn a blind eye to the reality of what was unraveling on the ground. The station was funded by Sudan’s ruling party—National Congress Party, or NCP. Although initially NCP had wanted Al Shorooq to operate independently, after the secession in 2011, it gradually tightened its grip on the network, ousting the previous administration and starting the process of its “Sudanization.” The state’s increased control meant that when the street protests erupted in 2013, Al Shorooq had no choice but to give in to the pressure to further NCP’s agenda—an infuriating sequence of events, but in hindsight, not an unusual one. News organizations in Sudan are often coerced into toeing the ruling party’s lines.
Our youth were being shot dead by the ruling militia, and the police were calling them “vandals and criminals.” As an editor and producer at the channel, I was instructed to repeat those expressions and inject them into my news reports, with no regard to ethics. What an unbearable moral crisis! It was as if our independent editorial policies had evaporated.
It wasn’t just the channel that I worked for that took this editorial line. The freedom of every other station in the country was at stake. One media outlet published the headline TABBAT YAD AL MOUKHARIBEEN (damned are the thugs). The very use of those words underscored how harsh the press was on those who opposed the status quo: the phrase is used in the Qur’an to condemn sinners. Many journalists went on strike, but publishers continued to produce and distribute newspapers under the control of the government and security forces. No words can describe the moral and mental anguish other journalists and I suffered back then.
I was adamant that I didn’t want to be forced to write false or warped truths, and sought the advice of some of my colleagues. Although they initially agreed to a mass resignation to exert pressure on the administration, they subsequently backed down. After some thought, I opted to quit, but at first the administration rejected my resignation. I wasn’t able to leave the station for good until twelve months after the protests first broke out.
I learned from this experience that there was only one way for me to be a journalist. What value does journalism really have if it doesn’t accurately serve the people and reflect the street as it is? My resolve was strengthened, and my experience underscored that the word can shake despots in a way that weapons can’t.
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It was this resolution to not shy away from taking risks in my reporting that led me to take an unfathomable one about six months later, in March 2015, when I traveled to Darfur to interview a man depicted by the media as a murderer and rapist.
Darfur, a region in western Sudan, has long been home to clashes between Arabs and the indigenous Africans. The conflict came to a head in 2003, when two non-Arab groups began fighting the Sudanese government, which they had charged with mistreating and oppressing the non-Arab population of Darfur.
Complicating matters was the involvement of the Janjaweed, a militia made up of Arab tribes. When the war in Darfur broke out, the Sudanese government provided the Janjaweed with weapons with which to fight the Africans. (While the government has denied that this ever occurred, Human Rights Watch and other aid organizations maintain there is “irrefutable evidence” of state support for the Janjaweed at the time. The government, it has been said, distrusted its own armed forces because many of its soldiers hailed from Darfur. As a result, it turned to the Janjaweed for its counterinsurgency.)
The Janjaweed had an infamous reputation in local and Western media: they were known for being responsible for atrocities against the Africans, including looting, burning, forced displacement, and rape. The war in Darfur was categorized by some as a genocide; the United Nations estimates that it has left up to three hundred thousand civilians dead.
The man I was going to interview was the spiritual leader and chief of the Janjaweed, Musa Hilal—an Arab fighting Africans in systematic operations bearing alarming similarities to ethnic cleansing. An interview with him would have been a tremendous opportunity for any reporter, and so I reached out to my contacts, hoping to gain access. From there, things moved quickly. Some local fixers I knew managed to arrange a meeting for me with an official of the Janjaweed.
One of those fixers was a prominent African fighter. As he knew the area well, I asked him how we’d be navigating the territory that was under the control of the leader of the Janjaweed, his enemy, and if we’d be safe. He said he had open lines of communication with Hilal himself and that he could set up an interview without difficulty. I was astonished—the two were supposed to be enemies! Hilal was meant to be fighting the Africans. It was unbelievable; the sides were at opposite ends of the conflict, and yet there seemed to be a veneer of mutual trust.
My fixer gave me the number of Hilal’s personal assistant, a young man. I called him, and after we briefly exchanged greetings, he put me through to the sheikh, as they like to refer to him. How surreal! There came a quiet, barely audible voice. Hilal told me I was welcome to come meet him and said he trusted and respected the individual who had arranged the meeting—otherwise, he wouldn’t have agreed to it. “We asked about you and looked into what you have written,” he said. “You’re really good!”
When I arrived for the first time in the war-ridden province of Darfur, the fighting between the various African movements and the government had eased, but tribal clashes were rife, on top of tensions within the ranks of the state’s Arab allies. The area I visited didn’t fall under state jurisdiction; the tribes and their militias had full autonomy, and I was at their mercy. Moving from place to place as a journalist, especially on missions like these, constitutes a grave risk. You must coordinate with a person who has the authority to guarantee your personal safety and to facilitate your movements. After I arrived at Geneina Airport, to the west of Darfur, a four-by-four that was to drive me to our agreed-upon meeting place was waiting for me. The vehicle was full of men with their faces covered carrying Kalashnikovs. This was the first time I’d traveled in a military vehicle. Mixed feelings washed over me: fear and anxiety, but also excitement and adrenaline.
It was a long journey from the airport. When we finally arrived, I was escorted to a tent in which Hilal was waiting. I’d
only ever imagined him to be the violent, bloodthirsty man I had seen in the news. In real life, he seemed remarkably calm, his complexion youthful and supple—like that of a movie star, not that of a desert bush fighter. He wore tinted glasses and kept a piece of candy in his mouth during our entire meeting. His mustache was perfectly trimmed.
The talk went smoothly. We discussed what the militia’s relationship with the state was—after Darfur, the government and the Janjaweed had clashed—and whether he was interested in breaking into politics. For the first time ever, Hilal explicitly said he had political ambitions. His exact words were “I’d like to rule Sudan one day.”
That piece sparked extensive controversy when it was published, for I was the first journalist to write about Hilal as a political figure rather than the leader of a militia. The attention it garnered gave me more confidence and courage to face danger while reporting from the ground. It dawned upon me afterward what I’d accomplished: a distinguished feat of journalism, the result of a life-altering risk.
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The consequences of writing that piece proved weighty, particularly considering the government’s contentious relationship with Hilal. A few months later, when I was on my way back from a trip to Uganda with two colleagues, we were detained at the Khartoum airport. It was about two a.m., and an officer asked us to step aside during a routine security check. It was clear that we were going to be questioned about some security matter.
