¼
Trying to control my heart torn in two and a stomach
like a rock. I had to finish a piece to send in 20
minutes, and the effort was awful. Together with him,
there was Samir, the loyal and hopeful Arab-Spanish
interpreter, whose services we both shared, and who,
once again showed his integrity even with a bag
asphyxiating him and a weapon with the trigger
cocked pointed at his head.
They were accused of spying, and
their immediate execution was being demanded. Fran
made a live broadcast of his kidnapping on an open
satellite phone link and it went out on national
radio all across Spain. By the afternoon they were
released. It was one of the longest days in the life
of many of us.
Hostility towards journalists in
Iraq was increasing as discontent with the
occupation was growing, in addition to power cuts,
water shortages, lack of medicine, poverty and
increased unemployment, overwhelming insecurity and
the reappearance of fundamentalist groups. One
morning when we rushed off to cover a car bomb
explosion outside a police station located on Sadoum
Street, we became aware of the people’s changed
attitude. Hugo Infante, from UPI, was the victim of
an attempt to steal his equipment, and US
photographer Eros Hoagland was wounded in the leg
when he was surrounded by a group of furious
individuals. Violence joined the frustration.
Actions of this kind have further
intensified in response to the publicly known abuses
perpetrated at the sinister Abu Ghraib prison. I was
in Abu Ghraib for the first time in that exhausting
month of May, and saw the victims and those who were
tortured. I saw mothers crying, coming as suppliants
to the doors of that hell to ask for the release of
their sons, and begging them to stop the torture.
I was with Sabah, a woman aged 67
who, after three months without news of her sons,
was still living in hope. One night, US soldiers had
broken into her home in west Baghdad and taken away
Nassir, aged 27; Hamed, 29; and Jalil, 31. The
soldiers were looking for weapons but found nothing.
They also arrested her husband, an elderly man, whom
they freed because of his severe health problems.
They were accused of belonging to the resistance but
it turned out that they were just bakers.
At the Baghdad Correctional Center,
the expectations of those who saw the occupation as
their salvation definitively collapsed. They were
shouting: "Between Saddam and Bush, we prefer Saddam.
It’s more tolerable to be tortured by your own
president than by the colonizer."
At the prison’s main entrance,
hundreds of relatives and friends of the prisoners
were patiently waiting to see the detainees entering
the building. Women, men and children of all ages,
watched by dozens US soldiers stationed at the
control posts, surrounded the prison, enduring the
suffocating heat. A US officer prevented the entry
of journalists; he said that people are allowed in
every day, but the relatives present refuted that.
The soldiers were keeping a constant watch on the
women who came to claim their relatives. Armored
Humvees, full of soldiers and weapons, were guarding
the prison, but the mothers did not leave their
posts despite the intense heat.
There, I also met Hakima, who had
been looking for her son Ali for 11 months. "We were
at home resting when the Americans came in. They
have captured my son, they have beaten him up until
he was bleeding," she told me in desperation, with
the pain that only a mother can feel, pointing at
the sky with her hands and claiming, "How aren’t
they not going to torture them in prison if they did
it right in our home?" "By humiliating us like this,
they are going to turn all of us into human bombs.
We want the US terrorists to get out of the country
and give our children back to us," said a woman from
Baghdad demanding the return of her sons. That was
the prelude to the present situation, where all of
us are victims.
UNDER FIRE FROM ALL SIDES
A week later, the US army violently
burst into the Al Fanar hotel. After broadcasting
from the Palestine—the hotel located next to the
Sheraton within an area guarded by KBR security
personnel and the military—I went to the Al Fanar,
where I was staying along with more than 50 other
journalists from all over the world. The building
was surrounded by guards in military and civilian
clothing who refused to let me enter.
Inside, there were all my colleagues,
many of them also my friends. From the outside, I
could hear screaming, windows being broken and
crashes. I tried to call the cell phones of the
journalists who were in their rooms, but it was
impossible to communicate with them. Ringing,
ringing, but no answer. There was no explanation on
the outside, but a profound anguish and consulting
each other. The army had broken into the hotel in
search of terrorists and for that, had created havoc.
When I got in, the door to my room was destroyed,
and my belongings turned upside down. The operation
was unleashed by a tape of a Shiite demonstration in
Kerbala being edited by French television
journalists on which songs of war could be heard.
The episode immediately reminded us
of when the US troops shot at two reporters from
Arabiya TV the day before, and the killing of the
much-loved Spanish cameraman José Couso when a
missile was targeted on the balcony of his room in
the Palestine Hotel in April 2003.
This is the reality. As in other
conflicts, journalists in Iraq are under fire from
all sides. Every day that goes by, we learn
something new.
When you are covering a war, it is
very difficult to fully understand what is going on
because you are the victim of disinformation,
threats and the lack of an overall vision of the
conflict. The legendary British correspondent Robert
Fisk, who is also covering the war on Iraq, pointed
out that "not being able to have access to the
warfront produces two types of journalists: those
who, convinced of the justness of the war and the
evil of the other side, write nothings, and those
who become like "sheep" and follow the dictates of
the army.
This war is producing a new category.
Journalists of much experience, serious, responsible,
honest, courageous and brave who, trapped by an
unusual and highly dangerous situation, are seeking
to postulate new working alternatives. From handing
over a recorder and list of questions to local
interpreters so that they go out to search for the
material, to having people come to the lobby of one’s
hotel to interview them. In this war, journalists
cannot verify military operations in the battlefront
or report on casualties.
The paradox occurs with freelance
journalists, of whom there are few these days. We
come from different countries, and even if we have
no guards or special vehicles, or ostentation, we
move around with less paranoia and trust in coming
close to the people. That is the only way of doing
journalism. And so our work becomes a craft. Forced
by our vulnerability, our alternative is to blend
into the environment, and this ends up fostering a
daily contact with the people.
Preparing for my return to Baghdad,
the news is not encouraging. The general
recommendation is that I should not go. It would
appear that it is not enough to cover my body with
the abbaya and chador, which I always
wear from head to foot as mandatory attire. Not only
for protection, but also out of respect for a
society with very different identity, culture and
religion. Nor do I travel in the front seat of a
vehicle pretending that the driver is my husband, "being
used" by my male colleagues so that they can travel
in the back seats likewise merging into the
environment with the beards and the tan they have
acquired.
It’s true, the risks were exactly
the same. Car bombs explode at the same distance,
mortars don’t change their trajectories, shootings
happen over and over again, incendiary devices
explode, comrades are kidnapped and others
slaughtered, the heat is the same, the cold and the
same uncertainty.
Yes, wars kill journalists—the 40
journalists slaughtered in this conflict confirms
that, and those killed by the hundreds in all these
wars of this great war that humanity fights
throughout its history.
But we need to be there. We need to
keep telling that story. That is the simplest and
most convincing answer to the recurring question as
to why journalists go to war. If we were not there,
massacres, abuse and uncontrolled ambition provoking
the death of a million defenseless people and
suffering at the hands of human brutality would go
unnoticed. New methods and creative alternatives are
being sought in the changing and dangerous inferno
of Iraq, but it is always better to be there as long
as you can resist, until the logical limit and
protected by common sense. We are there to prevent
the last window of people’s hope from being closed,
and for as long as the people allow it. •
December 19, 2004
Taken from El Universal de México
