Abstract
In the historic town of Bayeux in Normandy, a memorial park honouring every journalist killed since 1944 has more than 2,100 names engraved on tall pillars of stone. Every year the list grows longer – a reminder of the price journalists have paid and continue to pay for doing their job. This year will be no exception.
The journalists hail from across the world – young, old, men and women – and although the majority were murdered in their own countries to silence their reporting, many were killed in war zones.
Being killed or wounded while covering conflict should be a self-evident risk of the trade. One particularly scary day in Vietnam a distinguished war correspondent mischievously told me: “If you can't take a joke, you shouldn't sign on.”
So it is foolish for a journalist to enter a war zone assuming they are going to emerge unscathed. But inevitably some do, swept up by the excitement and adventure of it all and believing in their own immortality even as others around them are dying.
The grim truth is that there is always someone out there who wants to kill you. Luck can run out even for the most battle experienced. But the atrocious kidnappings and beheadings of foreign journalists and aid workers in Syria by Islamic State have introduced new dangers to the trade, which have to be taken into account when assessing an assignment. It has certainly taken some of the fun out of war reporting. Responsible news organisations are no longer prepared to cover the conflict from the rebel side.
Not since 1970 in Cambodia, when 25 journalists out of a press corps of about 60 were ambushed, kidnapped, shot and bludgeoned to death in the rice fields by the murderous Khmer Rouge because they were identified with the invading Americans or as spies, has there been such a dangerous country to report from.
There is no uniform or simple explanation as to why journalists risk their lives covering wars. The reasons are generally noble, although to suggest that they are there solely to bear witness, as we hear every time a journalist is killed, is overdone. Each and every one of them, as well as wanting to tell the story in the best way they know, probably has a more complex inner compulsion to do what they do which perhaps only they know or can explain.
Many journalist friends when asked what they saw and felt covering war will talk candidly about it being both the most agonising and exhilarating time of their lives. If they are honest they will admit that seldom has life felt so precious because it was so precarious. The experience has never left them.
But Syria is no “adventure playground”, to repeat the phrase my generation used to say about Vietnam. It may well have started that way in the heady first days of the Arab spring. Not for long, however, as journalists crossing into Syria from Turkey began to go missing.
Like so many wars, Syria had sucked in a number of young and intrepid freelancers keen to cover the conflict. They all had particular reasons for wanting to be there and report first-hand on the conflict. Inevitably, some of them had relatively little experience and knowledge, and as freelancers they were often out on a limb with little or no backing from the big news organisations they were contributing to. It did not reduce the value of their work. As they disappeared it gradually dawned on their colleagues and offices back home that something dark and sinister was afoot.
One of those to realise this was the journalist James Harkin. He spent three years investigating the kidnapping and disappearance of 24 foreign journalists and aid workers in Syria. His book, he says, is a labour of love evolving from the time he himself spent in Syria and knowing some of the journalists involved; it is the most meticulously researched account of this tragedy to date.
Harkin explores how, as Syria descended into chaos, the rise to power of Islamic State and its campaign to kidnap and sell foreign hostages were inseparable. He believes the danger to foreign journalists could have been better understood, if not foreseen. He reasons that Islamic State saw the foreign journalists reporting from Syria as a security risk, partly because many of the masked jihadis fighting there were from the same countries as the journalists.
Harkin has woven his book around the kidnapping and murder of the American freelancer James Foley, whom he admired enormously Foley's murder was revealed to the world on August 19, 2014, when Islamic State uploaded a video titled a “Message to America” showing his beheading. Harkin explains why, while the group was trying to sell its other hostages, Foley never had a chance.
The intelligence of where he was being held was fatally flawed; for a while it was assumed he was a prisoner of the Assad regime and when the US finally mounted a rescue operation it was acting on stale intelligence. Foley had already been moved.
It is a terrifying story All the hostages were abused and tortured. Foley was particularly badly treated, perhaps, his fellow prisoners surmise, because he was one of those “who never gave up, who never totally surrendered” to his torturers.
Most importantly, the US government would not countenance paying a ransom to his kidnappers and put barriers in his family's way as they used every means at their disposal to save him, whereas European governments, NGOs and families had paid millions of euros to free their hostages.
Foley's parents blame a disastrous lack of communication and coordination for their son's death. Diane and John Foley paid an emotional tribute to their son at the Bayeux memorial, saying they hoped he did not die in vain.
They can draw some comfort from the universal admiration in which their murdered son is held. But it will not take away their pain.
