The Rory Peck Trust: Award 2000

The Rory Peck Awards 2000

News from the edge

By Nik Gowing

Even the most war-hardened cameramen and journalists must have felt that cold shiver of shock. The early radio and agency reports had merely talked of an "American and a Spanish journalist". The blandness conjured up images of young, rooky hacks. Of unknowns who were new to war and pushing their luck up country, way out of Freetown. Chancers. Damn fools who should have listened to advice.

Then the American became "veteran war correspondent Kurt Schork working for the Reuters news agency". And the Spaniard became "award winning news cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno of the APTN agency" (pictured left). They were not household names outside the news business. But they were icons of nerve and brilliance to those of us who frequently read Schork's words on our newsroom VDUs and laptops, or viewed Moreno's often stark news video.

How could two of the most savvy and experienced reporters ever be killed in this way?

A nerve in our business may just have snapped.
Two days earlier in Southern Lebanon, Abed Takoush, another name known only in the news business was killed. Takoush was driving BBC correspondent Jeremy Bowen and his cameraman Malek Kenaan, a Lebanese freelance working for Reuters. Takoush was still inside his car when it was hit by an Israeli artillery shell. Or was he targeted and murdered in a final act of Israeli military spite?

Takoush's death and Jeremy Bowen's narrow escape created shockwaves, especially in the BBC newsrooms.

In our news world, where reputation, nerve and toughness mean a better chance of professional success, emotion is usually suppressed and rarely comes easily. But that week the mask of macho invincibility slipped.

Suddenly even the most hardened and experienced were asking: can we ever be safe? Is it worth the risk? And if we don't do it, then who will?

The new era of lightweight, go-anywhere, ever cheaper video and uplink technology has created a new transparency in war. As we have seen in locations like East Timor, Kashmir, Zimbabwe and Kosovo it allows correspondents and cameramen to report more rapidly from more parts of the world than ever. In doing so they have taken risks to expose tyrants, authoritarian rule and the determination of some to commit crimes against humanity.

That is why many fear that the deaths of Moreno and Schork have suddenly marked a victory for terror and shutting down war zones to even those with both the rawest of nerves and the best in training and proven intuition in the battlefield. With it there could be a high price for principles of democracy and human rights.

"What the public doesn't realize when they're watching the news is the compulsion to tell the story, which differentiates people like Kurt and Miguel from the rest of us -" said Richard Holbrooke, US ambassador to the United Nations who knew both men. "The risks they take to make sure the world knows what is happening in what otherwise would be the dark recesses of people behaving at their absolute worst".

But what price that compulsion now? Most of the major news corporations in Britain already refuse to send staff and freelancers to even medium-risk conflicts without a five-day hostile environment training course and insurance.

News organizations described collectively as "almost totally remiss" by Chris Cramer, President of CNN International when he launched the Rory Peck Training fund in May this year, are now accepting a responsibility many freelancers have long accused them of ignoring.

But a training certificate and insurance policy will never stop high velocity bullets. Suddenly the issues have become more fundamental.

More conflicts than ever are within states between the power-hungry factions the International Committee of the Red Cross labels the "new warriors". That applies to a wide spectrum from the rebels of Sierra Leone to the Russian government forces in Chechnya. All these belligerents are determined to do their dirty work unwitnessed by journalists. They consider harassment and intimidation of journalists an acceptable part of their war. International norms of behaviour mean nothing.

"It is a disgrace that many of the recent deaths of camera operators and reporters in the Balkans and Indonesia remain unsolved mysteries," Richard Tait, Editor-in-Chief of ITN told the Rory Peck Training launch. "Official indifference endangers everyone reporting and filming in war zones. We need to increase political pressure on undemocratic governments to see the protection of news teams as a responsibility which they must take seriously".

But what about the risks to local freelancers with the kind of £600 camcorder we can all buy in a video store - the unattached opportunists whom the broadcasters might be forced to fall back on even more? How good are they? What about their journalistic reliability? Might they be party to a conflict and therefore not impartial?

Sorious Samura from Sierra Leone, a freelance, won the 1999 Rory Peck Award for a most extraordinary portfolio of war coverage from all three sides of the war in his country. The risks were enormous. His income was a pittance. But he proved that it can be done by a 'local'.

Recent coverage of Chechnya was a worrying precedent. Because of the active Russian obstruction of the rights of journalists, most major news organizations forbade staff and freelancers to venture into the republic, especially to Grozny itself which, after all, was the focus of the news. The risks were simply too great.

The few broadcasters who bothered and were camped across the border in the freezing squalor of Ingushetia relied on coverage and tapes smuggled out by Chechen freelancers commissioned by satellite telephone. The video filled a void, but often the origin, dates, timing and circumstances were murkier than good journalism required.

Moreno was one of the very few willing to take the risk in Chechnya. He spent three weeks living underground and grabbing video footage inside Grozny, then a week with Chechen fighters in the southern mountains. His was compelling video footage of a city struggling desperately to survive the Russian bombardment.

As he told me on the day he returned to London and related his Grozny experiences live on air to BBC World: he had never been so scared in his life.

But at least - like Schork - he had borne witness to horror.

Nik Gowing is a presenter for BBC News, and committee member of the Rory Peck Trust

This feature was first printed in The Guardian on Monday, 29 May 2000.

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