Abstract
Why have the western media taken so little interest in the death of a photojournalist reporting from the front line of a civil war in Africa?
Christopher Allen in South Sudan, taken by himself.
In the summer of 2017, a young journalist travelled to South Sudan to report on a conflict that has received little, if any, coverage in the rest of the world. The civil war between the government of one of Africa’s newest nations and a rebel army known as the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement – In Opposition (SPLM-IO) has been virtually invisible as far as the West is concerned. Yet Christopher Allen, a 26-year-old freelance cameraman, photographer and writer, was inspired by a desire to tell stories ignored by mainstream media.
His mother told me: “Chris wanted to bring to light stories from uncovered or under-covered regions of the world. He was intensely curious about what motivated people to make the choices they did in fighting for their country. His goal was to live with the opposition forces in the field, to try to understand them. His notebooks and photos reveal deep engagement with nameless people in the shadows of violence and conflict.”
She spoke in the past tense because, on August 26 2017, Allen was shot dead. He was embedded with a unit of the SPLM-IO when it attacked government forces in the town of Kaya, near South Sudan’s southern border with Uganda. According to initial reports, he was the victim of crossfire. This version of events was soon discounted because he was found to have been shot five times. But the real circumstances surrounding his killing remain a mystery that continues to haunt his parents, who have been campaigning ever since for an authoritative investigation into his death.
They are not alone in suspecting he was identified by his killers as a journalist and that his murder therefore amounts to a war crime, possibly a double war crime. I will explore the merits of that contention later. His death also raises a series of other important questions. Why did it receive so little media attention? Why did both the British and American authorities turn their backs? What does it say about the state of modern journalism? Was it wise for an inexperienced, lone reporter to take risks that placed him in the line of fire?
Christopher Allen, born in the US, held dual British-American nationality by virtue of his English father. After graduating with a history degree in Philadelphia, he entered an MA programme that saw him attend universities in the Netherlands and France before he arrived at Oxford, where his thesis adviser encouraged him to witness “history in the making”. Allen took him at his word by going to the eastern Ukraine in 2014 to cover the war in Donbass. There, he happened to be one of the first English speakers to reach the crash site of the Malaysia Airlines flight that was shot down by pro-Russian separatists at the cost of 298 lives.
Allen’s sensitive report, accompanied by a video, was published by The Daily Telegraph, giving him his first newspaper byline. It was shared with the paper’s senior foreign correspondent, Roland Oliphant, who told me he contributed very little to the piece and praised Allen’s work. Despite Allen’s lack of formal journalistic training, the piece revealed a talent for description. Later pieces for American outlets showed an increased development of both his writing style and his photography skills. In one of them, he wrote: “I left academia because I believed that out here in a place where humanity is at its most exposed and raw, I might better understand something fundamental about the way the world works and the way history is made – about who people really are.” His mother noted proudly: “A journalist was born.”
During his lengthy stay in Ukraine, Allen was briefly detained by each side in the conflict. “Quite the honour,” he wrote at the time. He then moved on to Turkey, where he managed to get himself embedded with Kurdish guerrillas fighting the Turkish government. He defied a media blackout to file reports, one of which was published by The Independent in March 2016. All displayed an eye for detail while expressing sympathy for people he identified as underdogs. Echoing his Oxford mentor, he said of his determination to witness conflict at first hand: “It is better to be on the front lines of history rather than in a library studying it.”
He refused to wear his bullet-proof vest
Allen’s desire to highlight the struggles of people rebelling against authority took him next to South Sudan. Two years after gaining independence in 2011, it was plunged into a bloody civil war that has been raging ever since. By choosing to report alongside the rebels of the SPLM- IO, he must have been aware of the potential danger. Yet he refused to wear his bullet-proof vest because it made it difficult to keep up with the lightly-clad rebels. It is also blackly ironic that he chose not to wear a press badge in the belief that it might make him a target.
What is evident from the attack on Kaya is that the 250 rebels were heavily defeated by superior government forces. After just 40 minutes, during which Allen was killed, they were forced to retreat. What is not evident is why soldiers shot a man with only a camera in his hand. There were conflicting accounts. The caught-in-the-crossfire story was soon supplanted by suggestions that his camera was mistaken for a weapon. Then there were claims that Allen was thought to be a “white mercenary”. An inkling of what might be the truth emerged months later in interviews with some of the South Sudan soldiers by an Associated Press journalist, Sam Mednick.
A sergeant told her: “We saw him taking photos… To us, he was one of the rebels. Even now, we still think he’s a rebel.” Another soldier quoted by Mednick said Allen was shot while hiding in the bushes with a camera. Later, when the troops went to check on their victim, they were “shocked and felt bad that they killed a white man”. This version of events is contradicted by what the troops did to Allen’s bullet-riddled body. His cameras, backpack and jacket were removed. His pockets were emptied. Then his body was flown by helicopter to South Sudan’s capital, Juba. Next came humiliation when pictures of Allen, stripped naked, were posted on social media. They were taken down only after the intervention of American diplomats.
Simona Foltyn, another freelancer embedded with the SPLM-IO but several kilometres back from the group that attacked Kaya, heard the news of Allen’s death relayed by phone from the front line. She had previously helped Allen by providing him with contacts but wrote that her failure to tell him how to navigate rebel-held South Sudan was “a mistake that has been a great source of guilt”. It fired her to try to find out how he died: “Not searching for answers…would be to fall short of my journalistic duties.” Despite her best efforts, she was unable to determine the manner of his death. But she did discover that the last sequence of photos found on his camera showed images of rebel fighters facing the lens as they moved forward, suggesting his back was turned to the enemy.
According to Mednick, the autopsy report stated that Allen was shot five times – once in the left side of his head and twice in the neck, with two other bullets found in his right thigh and lower left leg. Experts were unable to determine whether his death was accidental, but one, a neuropathologist, said: “The shots were intentionally fired in his direction.” They were not the result of a ricochet, but were “a series of shots all in a line”. A forensic pathologist who read the report said that although it was not conclusive, “due to the bullet patterns…we cannot exclude the extrajudicial execution argument”.
South Sudan’s government refused calls to hold an investigation. Allen’s body was allowed to be repatriated to the United States and was flown initially to London’s Heathrow. Given that he held British nationality, an inquest should have been held. It was a missed opportunity that the London law firm acting for Allen’s family, Doughty Street Chambers, regards as a serious error. I believe the oversight is a consequence of the British media’s failure to accord the killing appropriate coverage.
Once the body was flown to the US, Allen’s parents, Joyce Krajian and John Allen, called for an investigation by the FBI in the belief that there was enough evidence to suggest their son’s killing was a war crime. As I write, the FBI has not responded to their request. Similarly, nothing has come of attempts to persuade the United Nations to get involved. Now, the campaign for an independent inquiry into Allen’s death has been taken up by the international press freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders (RWB) on the grounds that it is emblematic in terms of the risks faced by war reporters, especially freelances, and to let it pass deepens the already grave problem of impunity attached to the murder of journalists covering conflicts.
RWB’s UK board director Rebecca Vincent says: “The failure of the US and UK governments, and the UN, to act is nothing short of shameful. Christopher Allen’s family should not have needed to fight the system on their own. In campaigning for justice for Christopher, we are also campaigning for the protection of journalists everywhere, and to ensure that our own governments do not allow this to happen when journalists are targeted abroad.” She is disgusted by the way in which “it has somehow become acceptable for journalists to be killed with impunity in conflict zones while the international community stands idly by”.
Big media withdraws as reporting gets more dangerous
The RWB initiative is supported by Doughty Street Chambers. One of its barristers, Caoilfhionn Gallagher, argues that there is probable cause to suspect Allen suffered from a double war crime. The first, being killed for being a journalist, was compounded by the second: the outrage on his personal dignity by subjecting his body to humiliating and degrading treatment. She says: “A journalist, whether embedded with an armed group or not, falls within the definition of a civilian and is entitled to protection. Journalists who bear witness to armed conflict are both exercising their own fundamental rights to freedom of expression and performing a public service.”
Unsurprisingly, I agree with Vincent and Gallagher. But journalists, and the organisations they work for, need to ask questions of themselves. The failure of media outlets to highlight Allen’s death meant an absence of pressure on governments and the relevant authorities to investigate. It appears that we are in danger of accepting that journalists can be killed with impunity when covering conflicts.
Secondly, note the trend. Just as modern war reporting has become ever more dangerous, so “big media” has gradually withdrawn from the field. More and more conflicts across the world are covered by freelances who lack the kind of resources and back-up enjoyed by staff journalists. While freelance copy, photographs and video are gratefully received by newspapers and broadcasting organisations in the West, they bear none of the responsibility for what happens to those who produce the material. Nor, when things go tragically wrong, do they make the kind of necessary hullabaloo.
We cannot ignore the fact that Allen appeared to be on a singular mission in which he took risks that most experienced correspondents would have avoided. I am not thinking of the failure to wear a bullet-proof jacket or a press badge because, given the nature of his death, I doubt that either would have made a scrap of difference. Just being there, accompanying a force of ill-trained, under-armed rebels fighting a larger, well-equipped army, was his fatal mistake. It is hard not to see him as naïve, if brave and well-meaning.
This tragic reality should not detract from the rightful call for a proper inquiry into his death. In a joint email to me, his parents said: “We must find justice for Christopher’s tragically short but well-lived life, thereby ensuring a safer world for journalists who report from conflict zones in the future.” That, of course, is the point. This is not just about the loss of one young man but about the young men and women who are putting their lives on the line so that light is shed on darkness.
His mother told me: “Christopher dedicated himself to covering what he felt were invisible wars.” We owe it to him, and to all the journalists who dare to do such work, to ensure that his death is not invisible.
Chris with SPLM-IO fighters days before the Kaya battle in which he died.
