People Like Us: Misrepresenting The Middle East

by Joris Luyendijk

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART I

  Chapter One - Journalism for Beginners

  Chapter Two - No News

  Chapter Three - Donor Darlings and a Hitler Cocktail

  Chapter Four - Hamiha Haramiha

  Chapter Five - All the News That’s Fit to Print

  Chapter Six - September 11 and the Blank Spots in the Dictatorship

  PART II

  Chapter Seven - A New World

  Chapter Eight - The Law of the Scissors

  Chapter Nine - “They Are Killing Innocent Jews”

  Chapter Ten - A Bloody Occupation

  Chapter Eleven - The Middleman’s Dilemma

  Chapter Twelve - Absurd and Bizarre

  PART III

  Chapter Thirteen - New Puppets, Old Strings

  Chapter 14 - “There’s Money in the Flag”

  Afterword

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Joris Luyendijk was born in 1971. He studied Arabic and politics at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Cairo. In 2006, he was awarded the Journalist of the Year prize by De Journalist, selected from the top forty most influential international journalists by the NVJ (the Dutch Association of Journalists).

  For my father

  “And then I said: Well God, what I want to know, God right, all this hunger, misery, illness, catastrophe. Errrr, child abuse, child porn and the Holocaust. Why? And then He said: Well, because of this and that, and this and this and this and this and that. And then I said: Aha! Yes indeed. Yes-yes-yes, oh yes. Of course ... No, now I understand. So it’s not that bad then, right?”

  —Hans Teeuwen, Sweater (Trui)

  “There’s a war between the ones who say there’s a war and the ones who say there isn’t.”

  —Leonard Cohen, There’s a War

  Prologue

  Hello, Everybody!

  “One more?” The Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) coordinator came out of the field hut and looked down at his boots. I nodded, and realized I’d have to come up with something pretty quick—otherwise in the next hut I’d have tears streaming down my pale cheeks, and that was really not what I wanted.

  It was a rainy day in September, and I was walking around the village of Wau in southern Sudan—a place that newspapers had been labeling “famine-afflicted” and “war-torn” for the last twenty years. Somewhere on the other side of the river were the rebels; on our side, MSF had set up a camp for “starving refugees.” For as long as it lasted, a ceasefire was in force.

  “Are you sure you want to see it?” an experienced correspondent in the capital, Khartoum, had asked. “Famine shelters can mess up your hard drive.” Another advised, “Do it on autopilot. All you need to think is, Can I use this for my article?”

  Well, what the MSF coordinator had just shown me in the first two huts was ideal for my article: Pot-bellied children I’d recognized since primary school as the victims of starvation; bones showing through their skin like the poles of a half-blown-down tent; toddlers so emaciated that their mothers had to support their heads to keep their necks from breaking. This was very useful stuff for my article.

  The coordinator and I walked past a poster. “Don’t Fight the Civilian Population,” it said, above a picture of plundering soldiers and helpless-looking civilians. The village where the camp was located was closed down. The Islamic Purity Coffee House, the Office for the Registration of Pledges and Promises, Pope John Paul Middle School, Nazareth Greengrocers—their shutters were down, their doors were boarded up, and their verandas were full of refugees. People of all sorts had been thrown together here: Refugees, villagers, people who believed in Jesus or in Allah, in spirits, or in tree-gods.

  We wove our way around puddles and rubbish to the third hut. There’d be another fifty people sitting staring into a void there, sheltering from the rain, morning their dead, waiting for their next food ration. They seemed to look right through me, as if someone had switched off the light in their eyes. So that’s why despair is called dull. I wrote down “extinguished” in my notebook.

  We’d arrived. In the first two huts, I’d assumed a serious expression and had made a small kind of bow to conceal my awkwardness and hold back the tears, but here I spontaneously raised my hand, forced my face into a smile, and called out, “Hello, everybody!”

  And then it happened. All of a sudden their faces lit up. Girls giggled, an old man shifted in his seat, and children nudged their mothers. “Look, Mummy!” A little toddler of around two wriggled free from his sister, grabbed my knee with both mitts, and tumbled over. Mothers of emaciated infants burst out laughing and used their free hands to wave.

  That was the beginning of my job as a Middle East correspondent, which began in 1998 and lasted for five years. As it came to an end, while my luggage was traveling back to the Netherlands on a cargo ship, I went on a farewell tour, visiting “contacts”—people to whom I was indebted for visas, personal introductions, and other favors. The last person on my list was an Arab ambassador. In his stately residence in The Hague, the political capital of the Netherlands, we drank tea and I showed off my Arabic for the last time. The ambassador said that it was an odd time to give up a correspondent’s post, just as the Americans advanced on Baghdad. I told him that I’d wanted to stop before but had hung on for a few months because of the war. An assistant came in, whispered something in the ambassador’s ear, and switched on CNN. We saw the colossal statue of Saddam Hussein being torn down in Fardoes (Paradise) Square in Baghdad. Jubilant Iraqis screamed into the camera lens and struck the icon with their shoes. “Thank you, Mister Bush!” The presenter solemnly described it as an “historic moment”—the war was over. They could put the nightmare of Saddam Hussein behind them. Baghdad was celebrating its liberation, as Western newspapers announced the next day.

  Then the ambassador clicked to the Arabic broadcaster, Al-Jazeera. They were showing Fardoes Square, too, but their montage offered a different slant. In the same square, we saw American soldiers triumphantly throwing an American flag over the statue of Saddam. Then we were shown feverish discussions and the American soldiers rushing to remove the flag. Al-Jazeera went on to show the jubilant Iraqis from CNN, only they were shot from a longer range: You could see how few there were actually standing in the square, and that most of the people were watching from a safe distance.

  I said goodbye to the ambassador, and over the following months I did what returning correspondents tend to do—I started work on a book about my region. But I got stuck almost immediately. Reading the papers or watching the television, I would see someone arguing that fundamentalism was all about this or that, that there’d be peace in the Middle East “if only Israel would withdraw from the occupied territories” or “if America would stop supporting the dictators.” And then I would think, Well, there are good arguments for that; then again, there are good arguments against it. I couldn’t figure it out, and that’s why my book wasn’t working.

  Then I thought back to my second week as a correspondent. I’d just got back from Sudan and was waiting at the Ministry of Information in Cairo to have my papers stamped. It was taking a while, and I got chatting to a fellow correspondent who was also waiting. He was a real veteran, and within five minutes was telling me in a whisky-soaked voice that his best friend had died in the Iran-Iraq war. “The Commodore Hotel during the Lebanese Civil War, oh those were the days! What? You don’t know the Commodore?” He was that kind of man.
When I told him that I was a writer and I’d just started as a correspondent, he grinned: “If you want to write a book about the Middle East, you’d better do it in your first week. The longer you hang around here, the less you understand.”

  That was unkind, and probably meant that way, but back in the Netherlands I began to understand what he’d been talking about. Before going there, I’d had certain preconceptions about the Middle East, mostly derived from the media. Once I arrived, my preconceptions were slowly replaced by reality itself, which proved to be rather less coherent and understandable than the media had depicted. The first time I came up against this was in that third hut in Wau.

  When I went there, I’d had in the back of my mind those images you see on the news of miserable-looking people. In the first two huts I got to see miserable-looking people; and if I hadn’t blurted out “Hello, everybody!” in the third hut, I’d have probably left with the idea that these people were miserable, too. And they were miserable, of course—they were all but dying of starvation. But that wasn’t the whole story. The area around Wau is just as fertile as the Netherlands, and those miserable people had been farmers who had always provided for themselves until the warring factions had chased them off their land. The people in that famine camp were mainly suffering from a serious case of bad luck.

  As I looked back over my five years as a correspondent, I recalled many similar experiences. Things became even more interesting when I consulted my files and saw how Wau had been depicted in the newspaper. My article had included the surprising reaction of the apparently miserable and “extinguished” people in the third hut, as well as an interview with the doctor in the camp infirmary. He worked with the worst cases and fought daily against the statistic of “eighty deaths a day in Wau.” His biggest problem, he told me, was their shrunken stomachs: “If they eat too much their intestines burst; if they eat too little, they die. Even as they literally starve to death, we have to withhold food. According to medical textbooks, these people are long dead.”

  That last sentence is what editors call “a great quote,” and the news floor had used it as the headline. They’d illustrated the piece with an enormous photo, captioned: “In a refugee camp near Ajiep, not far from Wau in Southern Sudan, a woman gives birth. In the same field hut, a starving family member lies dying.” On the right there was an emaciated man, probably trying to figure out where the curious noise of a clicking camera was coming from; in the middle, a little boy crying; and on the left, two midwives with an anxious, expectant mother.

  It was a powerful image, but the editors could also have chosen a picture of the smiling people in the third hut, and taken a different quotation as the headline, such as this one from one of the other camp doctors: “The resilience of these people is unimaginable. No Westerner could have survived this, but here they wait for peace, walk hundreds of kilometers back to their villages, plant their peanuts, and pick up where they left off.”

  As a correspondent, I could tell different stories about the same situation. The media could only choose one, and it was often the story that confirmed a commonly held notion, like the picture of the miserable people in Wau who were already dead according to the medical textbooks, rather than an image of unimaginably resilient people dealing with a lot of bad luck.

  During those five years I had plenty of experiences like this, which made the events at Fardoes Square such a fitting conclusion. American and European journalists welcomed the fall of Baghdad. They were sent images of overjoyed Iraqis toppling a statue of their dictator, which matched their expectations, and they considered their job done. Al-Jazeera viewed the fall of Baghdad as the beginning of an occupation. They sought symbolic images of their viewpoint, and found one in the image of the triumphant Americans spontaneously throwing their flag over the statue.

  This was how image and reality diverged, and when I realized this I knew which story I wanted to tell. I didn’t want to write a book explaining how the Arab world could become democratic, how tolerant or intolerant Islam is, or who is right or wrong in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. I wanted to write the opposite—a book that shows how difficult it is to say anything meaningful on such a major issue as the Middle East. Or, perhaps, simply a book about all those moments I found myself thinking, Hello, everybody!

  PART I

  Chapter One

  Journalism for Beginners

  Most correspondents learn the trade in their own country, and are sent out into the world afterwards. I did it differently: I studied not journalism but social sciences and Arabic. As part of my course, I spent a year at Cairo University. After that I wrote a book about it, and that’s how the Volkskrant newspaper and Radio 1 News came by my name.

  This meant I was very inexperienced when I arrived at my posting in Cairo. Although they’d let me do a few days’ work experience at the paper’s and the radio’s offices before I’d left for Egypt, I still regarded journalism like the average reader, viewer, or listener did. Journalists know what’s going on in the world, I thought; the news gives an overview of these events, and it is possible to keep that overview objective.

  Very few of these ideas survived intact in the years that followed. “Doing” Israel and Palestine destroyed my belief in the possibility of impartial news. In the years that preceded that particular posting—from my first week in Wau to the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath—I learned that good journalism is a contradiction in terms in the Arab world, and this means that you can’t know what is happening there. You can’t know as a journalist, and you really can’t know as a viewer, reader, or listener.

  It was something I discovered gradually, and certain things only became clear in hindsight, but my doubts had set in early on, during all the stress unleashed by waking up one day and discovering I was a Middle East correspondent.

  That first week in Cairo, there I was amongst my unopened moving boxes when the phone rang. It was somebody from the paper telling me, “You have to go to Sudan!” I’d just found an apartment; now I’d have to leave immediately for a country I’d never visited before! How did that work? Did they have any diseases there I ought to know about? I felt my heart racing, and at that point I didn’t know I’d be visiting a famine camp. Even more embarrassing—I didn’t even know that there was a famine in Sudan.

  The paper had called because some kind of “Islamic Front against Jews and Crusaders” had blown up two U.S. embassies in Africa. In response, Washington had bombarded the front’s training camps in Afghanistan and a factory in Sudan. The Americans claimed that the factory had been manufacturing chemical weapons and was owned by the group leader, one Osama bin Laden—but Washington provided no evidence and, according to the regime in Khartoum, the Al-Shifa (Healing) factory had been producing medicines.

  As we queued at the Sudanese embassy in Cairo, fellow journalists explained what was happening: For years, the Khartoum government had allowed in as few Western journalists as possible, aware that they’d write about nothing but misgovernment, exploitation, and war crimes. Clearly, the regime now supposed that journalists would write stories like “America destroys only pharmaceutical plant in poverty-stricken Sudan.” I had my visa within the hour.

  I booked a flight, rode in the slipstream of the more experienced journalists, and stayed like most Europeans in the Acropolis—an affordable small hotel run by a Greek family who’d lived in the city for generations. Everyone ate together, the bedrooms didn’t have international phone lines, and the central lobby was the only place where you could watch television. All the Americans, without exception, stayed in the five-star Hilton, which also housed the Sudanese regime’s temporary press office.

  I had no idea what I was supposed to do, and simply followed my peers the next morning. They were all very genial, and it soon became clear why, during the flight over the previous evening, they hadn’t been worried about the whys and wherefores: Everything was ready for us. At the bombed factory, the Sudanese had assembled a collection of the remain
s of American rockets and other striking visual evidence of the devastation: Keyboards amongst melted medicine bottles, blackened telephones and overhead projector sheets with next autumn’s objectives. The Ministry of Information directed us to the hospital where we’d find the wounded, and to the demonstrations in the city. These were small, but in close-up they looked larger, and that’s how CNN showed them: “Angry crowds protest against bombing in Khartoum.” Each day there was a press conference where nothing new was announced. After all, what could the regime say? “Poorest country in Africa threatens U.S. with sanctions?” Still, it was a place where you could exchange gossip and tidbits of news, and the export manager of Al-Shifa was walking around tirelessly telling his story to the streams of journalists. “The American president is simply going to have to apologize.”

  That’s how things went, and the bombing turned out to be good for three days” news: The report (“Cruise Missiles on Sudan”); the reactions of the populace (“Clinton is lying about Al-Shifa, too”); and the analysis (“Khartoum exploits U.S. attack”). With this, the bombing was covered, the export manager could go off and look for a new job, and the media caravan rolled on to the next story.

  That story was not the famine in southern Sudan, other journalists said, even though hundreds were dying there every day. But I wanted to see the misery firsthand, and my paper told me to see how far I could get. I asked around and found out that, as part of Khartoum’s charm offensive, the south was temporarily open to journalists. Because the Netherlands gives a relatively large amount of development money to Sudan, the embassy was able to get me a travel permit to the war zone. MSF were keen to get some publicity for their activities, and offered me a seat in their plane. In exchange, I would mention the name of their organization in my article.