Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  Further inland, at one of Nagapattinam’s many makeshift orphanages, two young sisters, Shivaranjini and Divya, told us that their mother had been killed and their father, another fisherman, had lost his livelihood. He no longer had the means to raise them and had had to give them up. ‘We came here hoping to get an education,’ said ten-year-old Shivaranjini, an angel-faced young thing with neatly tied pigtails. ‘Then we can look after him.’

  Every so often, parents came to the door of the orphanage in the hope of finding their lost children. They might have heard there was a girl who looked like their daughter, or a boy who met the description of their son. Not once, however, did we witness a successful reunion.

  If anything, in this trans-national disaster, Sri Lanka had been hit harder. Normally so enchanting, the road to Galle was lined with wreckage and misery. The destruction started just south of Colombo, first with some scattered debris and then with a few half-demolished seafront houses. Thereafter, it got steadily worse. In some places, all that remained of once-sturdy houses was their concrete foundations, laid out on the ground like life-sized architectural plans. Small fishing boats had been hurled hundreds of metres inland. The normally unspoilt beaches were scattered with rubble, splintered timber and uprooted palm trees.

  Just over halfway to Galle was the small town of Peraliya, where hundreds of panicked locals had tried to escape the walls of water by clambering aboard a train that traced the line of the coast – a service known as the ‘Queen of the Sea’. Yet the force of the five-metre waves lifted the train from the tracks and overturned its packed carriages. Within seconds, they filled with water, drowning hundreds of passengers, while hundreds more were wrenched out to sea in the undertow.

  Some 800 bodies were recovered from the wreckage of the train’s rust-coloured carriages. The remains of another 700 or 800 victims were never found. So buckled and contorted was the railway track that it looked like a corkscrew ride at a fairground. Well over 1500 people were killed aboard the ‘Queen of the Sea’, instantly making it the world’s worst ever railway disaster – an astounding fact relegated to footnote status because of the scale of the catastrophe elsewhere. What made this disaster all the more remarkable was that Peraliya was a west-coast town, when it was the east coast of Sri Lanka that should have borne the brunt of the tsunami. Such was the refractive effect of the advancing waves that the tsunami wrapped itself around the lower half of the island and devastated a coastline that one would have thought sheltered.

  The fortress town of Galle on Sri Lanka’s most south-westerly corner had produced some of the most disturbing television footage from the Boxing Day Tsunami, which is why we headed there first. We saw how the waves had upturned buses and swept them through the centre of town like broken twigs. Entire families had tried to climb through their windows and clamber onto their roofs, as they were buffeted in the swirling currents. Below the ramparts of the old city, the Test cricket ground was covered in muddy water and scattered with the carcasses of buses, cars and tuk-tuks. Most troubling of all was the number of dead bodies laid out at the sides of the roads. Nik, my cameraman, was among the first foreign journalists to arrive, and he saw piles of dead children. Death has an awful, sulphuric stench, and the air that night was full of it.

  Remote and difficult to get to at the best of times, the northeast of the island had taken much longer to reach. Here, in the fiefdom of the Tamil Tigers, entire towns had been obliterated, almost wiped from the map. The Tiger stronghold of Mullaitivu, which had always shown the scars of civil war, had been virtually flattened. The tsunami had done in seconds what the Sri Lankan Army had failed to achieve in nearly 20 years.

  On the waterfront, the shattered shell of a church, its concrete altar now exposed to the skies, and the private residence of the head of the Sea Tigers, which had undergone a speedy repair job, were pretty much all that remained. The landscape was empty of humans, since everyone had relocated to tented camps further inland.

  Among them were the surviving children from an orphanage, Tender Sprouts, that cared for the sons and daughters of victims of the civil war. Of the 175 children housed in its seafront dormitories, only 30 had survived. For weeks afterwards, some of these poor young souls were so traumatised that they could not even utter a single word. Others had learnt a new one: ‘tsunami’ – a term that I myself had never used and that I’d found myself repeating over and over as I flew into Sri Lanka so as to lock it in my mind to get the pronunciation right.

  It was far too soon to reach for consolation, and to ponder what good might spring from an undiscriminating disaster that had shown no regard for ethnicity, wealth, military rank or religion. In those early days, however, came the pregnant hope that the tsunami might break the impasse in the peace process between the government and the Tamil Tigers. It was not uncommon, after all, for natural disasters to produce a kind of peace dividend.

  I had seen this for myself during the Bam earthquake in Iran, which by unfortunate coincidence had struck on Boxing Day the previous year and killed more than 26,000 people. Amidst the wreckage of the medieval town, we witnessed the improbable sight of an American emergency medical team from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, being protected by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard – not that the doctors, nurses and spinal-injury specialists needed any security. In a land where ‘Death to America’ was still the fuming cry, Iranians queued up to have their photographs taken with Americans whose bulky ski jackets were embroidered with the Stars and Stripes. It had been the first official US delegation of any kind to travel to Iran in over a decade, and its presence was all the more remarkable given that Tehran had been declared a founding member of the axis of evil by George W. Bush.

  Hoping to achieve an almost immediate breakthrough in Sri Lanka, a negotiating team from Norway – the original brokers of the ceasefire agreement – flew to Colombo to revive talks. Encouragement also came from a speech at the national mourning service from the country’s president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, whose husband had been killed by the Tamil Tigers and who herself had come close to being assassinated when a suicide bomber attacked her in 1999 at an election rally on the steps of Colombo Town Hall.

  ‘Nature has treated us equally,’ said Kumaratunga, who had been left partially blinded by the assassination attempt. ‘Can’t we treat each other likewise?’

  But the Tigers were unimpressed. Blatant propaganda, they scoffed, intended primarily for international consumption. Shortly afterwards, Kofi Annan, the then UN secretary-general, was barred by the government from visiting Tamil-held areas during a tour of the tsunami zone.

  Alas, disputes over the distribution of aid threatened to drive the two sides even further apart. Calculating that Tamils had borne two-thirds of the casualties and the damage, the Tigers argued they should receive a corresponding proportion of international aid. Fearing the Tigers would use the money to rebuild its navy, which had been badly hit in the tsunami, the government maintained that aid should not be distributed by a ‘terrorist organisation’.

  Eventually, six months after the disaster, the Tigers and the government arrived at an agreement, but it broke down within weeks. The hardline Buddhist party, the JVP, whose thugs had surrounded us in Trincomalee that time, petitioned the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Tigers were terrorists and thus should not receive aid.

  Across the Bay of Bengal in Indonesia – the first country to feel the force of the Boxing Day Tsunami – talks in Aceh province between separatist rebels and Jakarta led to a landmark agreement ending almost 29 years of conflict. It was a triumph of disaster diplomacy. By contrast, the childish quarrel over aid in Sri Lanka led to a fast deterioration. Those Norwegian officials who returned hoping to revive their peace plan instead found themselves documenting a steep escalation in violence. Six months afterwards, there were five killings a day.

  The chance of a more permanent peace had gone, and both sides prepared once again for all-out war. By year’s end, when we visited ts
unami-hit communities in Tamil-held areas, mothers told us they lay awake at night listening out for the wallop of crashing waves and the crack of gunfire as rebels once more took on the army.

  Covering the tsunami entangled us in the usual ethical thicket of eavesdropping on the misfortune of others. Awful as it sounds, the most terrible days for the victims of natural disasters or conflicts often provided the most professionally rewarding moments for reporters retelling their stories. Rarely was the competition between rival news organisations more intense than in the aftermath of natural disasters.

  Often, this was equally true of correspondents working on the same side. Prized was the boast of being the first reporter on the scene, or the first to broadcast live, in high-definition quality, from the rubble. The aim was to own the story, to become the face and voice of it.

  Grotesque as this sounds, for some there was an element of sport. This was partly because disasters came with the allure of awards, the pursuit of which could breed a certain callousness and insensitivity. A BBC film crew in the Congo had set the gold standard in the 1960s, after the evacuation of a planeload of Europeans. ‘Anyone here been raped and speaks English?’ a reporter bellowed – a pitiless line of enquiry that the legendary foreign correspondent Edward Behr appropriated as the title for his memoirs.

  Nowadays, the vast majority of correspondents are far more emotionally intelligent, and they approach disaster coverage with great humanity and sensitivity. From the Asian tsunami to Haiti, the best coverage is usually the most tender-hearted. But our trade abounds with tales of journalistic tactlessness. One particularly sorry example, which sounds too bad to be true, involved a reporter in Bosnia who was told he could film young children who had sustained terrible injuries from shelling. When shown a child who had the top of his finger ripped off, he was completely unmoved. ‘Is that it?’ he reportedly asked, with a look bordering on disgust.

  War and disaster zones could make decent-minded reporters completely take leave of their senses. Perhaps the most extreme recent example came from an Australian reporter in Iraq who had seen a group of young children playing on some unexploded missiles. She instructed her translator to ask them to do it again for the camera, and then repeated the charade for a second time so the cameraman could shoot it from a different angle. What made this lapse even more inexplicable was that the very story she had set out to cover was on the dangers to children of the hundred or so decaying surface-to-air missiles littering Baghdad. I ran into her a few years later, and she seemed charming and thoroughly right-thinking, but in the pressure of that moment her judgement had gone terribly awry.

  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 us
ually 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.