by Mark Colvin
There’s the story of my return to Australia in 1997, and the gradual deterioration of my kidneys to the point in 2010 when I had to accept that my only alternative was to go on dialysis; and the story of how Mary-Ellen Field, whom I first came to know as a journalist interviewing her about how Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World hacked her voicemails (when she was model Elle Macpherson’s business adviser), decided to give me a kidney, and how well that kidney has worked ever since.
But this has essentially been a book about what now looks like the postwar interregnum: the period in which the locked-in struggle of two nuclear superpowers kept us in a mutually assured state of fear, while at the same time giving us the illusion that this was the way it would always be. A mirror of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four dystopia: ‘Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.’ Apart from occasional diplomatic skirmishes and quite a few proxy wars, the world we lived in was the world drawn up by Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the Yalta Conference in 1945. Now, thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union, we could suddenly see that binary opposition as more impermanent than perhaps we ever dared expect.
But I began this book with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and I think with hindsight we can see that, too, as a hinge-point, presaging a new era even before the new one was over. An era in which other forces would arise to challenge the old strategic assumptions. A new ‘asymmetric’ world in which forces other than capitalism and Marxism would enter the field, and warfare itself would become increasingly asymmetrical.
It was from afar that I had to watch the collapse of the Soviet Union’s Eastern European Empire: I was in Sydney at Four Corners, and the Berlin Wall fell at the end of the year, when all the program’s slots were already filled. Besides, since we were still working entirely on film (beautiful but unwieldy), it would have been extremely difficult to get the story to air fast enough. We had to leave it to the nightly news and current affairs programs.
It was frustrating, but in the back of my mind the thought was already forming: what happens next? What does a post-bipolar international landscape look like? I was to find out soon enough, in early 1990, when we began planning a trip to Ethiopia.
* * *
One of the first consequences of Moscow’s weaker hand was a dwindling of the massive aid it had given to many of its allies in Africa. High among them was the Marxist government of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam in Addis Ababa. In Ethiopia’s north, Eritreans had long been fighting for independence, and their neighbours in Tigray, in recent years, had been doing the same. But as my Four Corners colleague Chris Masters had reported in a searing piece a few years before, Mengistu was ruthless—so ruthless that he was prepared to use famine as a weapon of war. That was the time of Live Aid, and the notion was widespread that, somehow, large injections of Western money would provide answers, when the root of the starvation was as old as humanity itself—at least as old as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Death, Famine, War and Conquest.
The Forgotten Famine, the film we made about the unheralded return of that humanitarian disaster in Tigray, involved by far the hardest trip I ever made. We travelled with Community Aid Abroad, which has since merged with Oxfam, in a train of ancient, badly maintained trucks, on terrible roads which often turned to quagmire and bogged the entire convoy. There was no strictly legal way into Tigray: you had to go via Khartoum, and get the Sudanese authorities to give you a month’s visa while turning a blind eye to the fact that you were going to slip across the border into neighbouring Ethiopia. Once inside, all travel was at night: a couple of weeks beforehand, Mengistu’s air force had bombed an aid convoy, and Britain’s ITV News had filmed the carnage. We parked under trees or in sheds in villages during the daytime—reading or sleeping in the shade, or under whatever cover we could find—and never set off till the hour before sunset. On many days, we saw Soviet-built MiG fighter-bombers flying overhead, but we were lucky. Even so, on many nights, the roads were so bad and the trucks so dilapidated that we could only cover 60 kilometres before dawn.
My wife Michele was expecting a baby in late April. When we set out, Community Aid Abroad seemed sure the trip would take no more than a month. I should be back in mid-March. Plenty of time to be there at the birth. As it was, it took ten gruelling days just to get to Aksum, still well outside the worst famine zone. There we all, one by one, contracted dysentery. I was hit last, only to discover that the ABC had provided us with only enough Flagyl and antibiotics to cover three people, when there were four of us. Fortunately, we found a pharmacy of sorts, where I learned from experience a hard truth about life in the developing world: antibiotics are diluted by black marketeers, so that to be sure of any effect you are wise to take at least triple the stated dose.
After a few days of near-delirium, combined with disgusting sanitary facilities, we were able to continue. Aksum was just far enough from Addis Ababa to have escaped the worst of the bombing. Its ancient cathedral, claimed to contain the Biblical Ark of the Covenant, was still practising a form of Christian service that dated back 1600 years. The town was dotted with dusty cafés containing beautifully decorated chrome Gaggia espresso machines, left over from Mussolini’s occupation of what was then called Abyssinia. They, like the bakelite telephones and art-deco lamps, were all useless because there was no electricity and all phone lines were cut.
Now it was onward through Adwa and Adigrat, and into some of the most remote and difficult territory I’ve ever seen. It was all stones and rocks and dust on steep harsh slopes, completely impassable to trucks. We filmed thousands of people making day-long marches to get grain handouts, up and down mountain ranges and across deserts. They’d been encouraged to stay in their towns and villages, to avoid the mass starvation in refugee camps and along the roads of the 1984–85 Live Aid exodus. They’d obeyed in the belief that the world would help. But the aid was too little, too late. They walked with staffs, in robes and sandals or barefoot. It was a picture from a Biblical famine, not a twentieth-century one—a panorama almost unchanged for centuries. The bishop of Adigrat, Kidane Mariam, told me, ‘Now nobody is helping and no food is coming. They have to stay at home and die there.’
In one village, Dera, we filmed a family trying to survive. Their grain crops had failed months before because of drought. The head of the family, Germay Seneslet, told me of how he’d had to sell his cow and calf, then finally, a few months later, his ox. Finally, desperate, he’d had to hire his twelve-year-old son out to a local merchant as a shepherd. The boy’s wage: a mere 5 kilograms of barley for a full month’s work. When we went back to see the Seneslet family the next day, Germay’s wife, who we’d filmed talking and heating tiny handfuls of grain for her children, was lying exhausted. She was clearly dying. We stopped filming and withdrew, to leave her at least some dignity in the death that followed soon after.
We pushed on south. In a clinic in Mekele we saw babies dying of TB. The elderly Irish nurse looking after them told me how there’d been medicine to treat them, but now it had run out. It is appalling at any time to watch children dying: when you want to be with your pregnant wife thousands of kilometres away, and know that whatever happens your baby will be well cared for, it seems even harder.
But this turned out to be a historic moment in what eventually became the fall of Mengistu and his Derg government in Addis Ababa. The further south we went, the more we could see the signs that the Ethiopian Army, deprived of Moscow’s strong backing, was in retreat. Wrecked tanks, armoured cars and jeeps littered the roadsides. From a hilltop, we could see in the distance an Ethiopian air base put out of commission by Tigrayan shelling. We could hear artillery to the south, and were advised this was as far as we could go. We were close to the front line, and it was clear that the line was moving steadily towards the capital, Addis Ababa.
In now-empty trucks, getting out was faster than getting in, but still not fast enough. After six weeks completely out of touch with my
family, I needed to get to Khartoum as quickly as possible, and then on a plane back to Sydney. I was reckoning without the fundamentalist Muslim government of Omar al-Bashir.
We arrived back in Khartoum on 29 March. We’d overstayed our visas, a formality in normal circumstances, requiring only a stamp to allow us to depart. But Ramadan had just begun, and all government offices were closed. The prospect loomed of weeks of waiting. As it was, the stamping happened within days, but it was already too late. On 3 April, my sister-in-law Marilyn rang to tell me that there’d been an emergency—placenta previa—which entailed Michele being rushed to hospital and my son William being born prematurely. I remember lying on my bed beating the pillow and crying tears of frustration and rage. It wasn’t till nearly three days later that I first looked into the piercing blue gaze of the son whose birth I’d managed to miss.
The fall of Ethiopia was one of the first harbingers of what both US President George Bush Snr and Mikhail Gorbachev had been calling the New World Order. The nature of that ‘Order’ began to crystallise four months later, when the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Four Corners’ Executive Producer Marian Wilkinson sent me to Baghdad to watch as Saddam prepared his nation for war. In a hotel reputedly purpose-built with two-way mirrors and microphones for the bugging of every room, accompanied everywhere else we went by minders, we had just one advantage over other television crews. Four Corners was still made on film, rather than videotape—in the days before digital, not only were the pictures better, but you could do much more in editing and post-production. For once, we found, this was not a hindrance but an advantage. Iraq no longer had processing facilities for TV film, and therefore, unlike video, no means to censor what we filmed. A long meeting at the Information Ministry ended with officials reluctantly giving us the go-ahead, but intensifying the minder oversight.
They could not, however, do much about it when they took us to a ‘model village’ in Kurdistan, to show how well the people were treated, and we discreetly filmed a menacing truck with a heavy machine-gunner on the back patrolling up and down to keep the populace quiet. Nor did they know that we had filmed from our hotel rooms the large numbers of anti-aircraft gun emplacements on the roofs of every building nearby. The only images to be seen in public places in Baghdad were huge, flattering paintings of Saddam himself, but you weren’t supposed to film them. We did.
There was a great deal more: the massive parade of reserve troops that turned out to be a showcase of the very young, the very old and the infirm, but was supposed to persuade the world that Iraq was ready to take on all-comers. The propaganda play we were allowed to film, full of ludicrous anti-Western caricatures. The multimillion-dollar memorial to the dead of the Iran–Iraq war, which had been turned into a hagiographic museum of the life of Saddam Hussein.
Yet there were many all over the Middle East who believed in Saddam. We opened our film with a mass rally in Jordan of Shi’ites, offering heartfelt support to Iraq despite its long, primitive and utterly deadly war with Shi’ite Iran. In a sign of the global changes of the last year, I reported, the Soviet Union, Egypt and Syria had joined the Gulf states threatened by Iraq’s military might in an ‘unprecedented coalition’. But when I interviewed Jordan’s Crown Prince Hassan, he told me of ‘the sense of disillusion and despair’ in a region with 300 million people, ‘70 per cent of whom are under the age of fifteen, many of whom are unemployed, embittered, see no hope in terms of Western promises and political solutions … if the Gulf had been producing bananas we wouldn’t have seen this rapid response’. And in Saudi Arabia, I interviewed obdurate sheikhs who said that the oil kingdoms didn’t need democracy because—a circular argument in the absence of elections—they already had the wholehearted support of the people.
The resulting Four Corners film, broadcast on 12 November 1990, seemed prophetic in many ways, not only about the first Gulf War which started two months later, but about the second in 2003. I narrated the following:
From here in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein will try to control the rage of Islam to his own ends. But the chances are that he will fail. Saddam’s military, if it comes to war, will almost certainly be outgunned and outclassed. But the West hardly seems to have thought about the dangers of total victory. If Saddam Hussein were removed, Iraq would become a massive power vacuum. The opposition has been systematically eliminated. This is all there is. The consequences outside Iraq may be just as dire. Israel will find itself more threatened than ever before. Saudi Arabia and the Sheikhdoms will find for all their riches that rule of the many by the few is harder to justify in victory or defeat. Saddam Hussein opened the bottle and the genies of war have escaped. We will all have to face the consequences.
* * *
In early January 1991, I flew to London to pull together a fast-turnaround follow-up piece on the war that was clearly just about to begin. The 747 was almost empty. Tough-guy movie stars Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone had cancelled trans-Atlantic trips to Europe because of the perceived threats to aviation: certainly very few Australians wanted to overfly the Middle East on their way to London, and Britain’s tourism, along with Qantas’ business, was hurting.
I stayed with my father, who saw the complexities of what was about to happen with equal clarity. He was particularly concerned, based on long connections with contemporaries in the CIA, at the way American intelligence had systematically shed Middle East expertise, even down to the number of people who spoke Arabic or Persian. He had little faith in American military and strategic thinking.
We talked a lot that night, and inevitably the conversation turned to the last forty-five years—the Cold War which he had fought secretly from the inside, which I had observed as a child and been trying to make sense of ever since. Just as I’d been worried about the Iraqi power vacuum, I could see trouble coming in the former Soviet Union. He, too, could see that the blight of Soviet totalitarianism wouldn’t necessarily be replaced by a new utopia. But of one thing he was very sure: anything was better than Stalinism and its heirs.
I remembered another conversation, years earlier, when he’d asked me why I kept on being a reporter, rather than a commentator. It obviously puzzled him, as someone who’d spent his whole career having opinions and making predictions. I’d said something about never being sure enough about anything to write editorials telling people what to think. In the years between, I’d moved subtly from that position to another: now I was prepared to prognosticate, up to a point, but only after I’d had the chance to examine all the facts, preferably on the ground. But what remained consistent was my addiction to reporting first, concluding later. In fact, my real interest was, had always been, in the opinions and perspectives of others: in walking around a subject, as one walks around a building or a sculpture in a museum, trying to see it from every possible angle.
He was a grandfather now. I was a father. It seemed we were somehow on a new level, more equal than before. We could argue without falling out, we could understand each other’s point of view. It was easy and comfortable, sitting on the sofa, working our way through a bottle of red while a gangster film played in the background. We were not so very different, except in this one respect: he had always been firmly on one side, a purist for the Cold War.
What I really remember about that night is the moment I asked my father what he thought about the mirror-world of moral grey areas, dilemmas, paradoxes and complexities explored in the novels of John le Carré. ‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Was it always absolutely clear-cut? Did you ever find any ambivalence or ambiguity about what you were doing?’
‘Never. Not once. Not for a single minute,’ he replied.
I had—in a way that was arguably equally purist—devoted myself to not taking sides, to trying at all times to see the other person’s point of view. Each was a tenable position, each was understandable in the context of the lives we had led and the trades we had followed. We each understood that, but there it was, the fault line across which we viewe
d each other.
Postscript
THE LAST STORY I actually reported from the field was in New York, on the first anniversary of 9/11. Michael Carey, Virginia Trioli and I had done a three-and-a-half-hour live broadcast on the city’s commemorations, but afterwards I was on a promise to supply a piece to The World Today. I went for a walk with a tape recorder, but I think it was the spirit of Alistair Cooke, my favourite broadcast journalist, that impelled me to write a purely spoken piece. This is part of it, about the ‘message wall’ set up right across Union Square:
Here were stories, all right. So many that by the time you’d read from one end of the wall to another, new sheets were papering over the place where you’d started. So this is a record of the Union Square wall during just one hour of September the 11th, 2002. An hour later, the stories would have been different.
There were memories of the lost: ‘You are in our hearts forever. We all miss you, Aunish. I know you’re here with me. You never left. Your sister, Nidhi Arya.’
And this: ‘It was my third day of teaching. The principal told us we could not tell the children yet. We needed to just teach. I looked at my lesson plan for the day, shaking. I began to read. The class was silent. They listened. I stopped. James Baldwin wrote years before, for me? for this moment?, that without love we cannot survive. I asked the students to write and write all they could on this one sentence. Then they were taken away and told. Without love we cannot survive.’
