Why Is a War Correspondent’s Profession a Calling?

Of the 50 short on-the ground narratives about various conflict zones, British journalist and war correspondent Lindsey Hilsum has structured her autobiographical text in ten segments. Within those segments, the events are neither chronological nor confined to one country.

The narratives refer to warzones in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, with less than a handful in Asia and one in North America, and in terms of specific countries, the maximum references are to Syria, followed by Ukraine, Palestine/Israel, Rwanda and Russia.  The absence of Asia, by and large, and Latin America is explained by British priorities and possibly the journalist’s available budgets.

Why is a war correspondent’s profession a calling? Because, in Hilsum’s words, ‘the act of documenting someone’s story makes it count for something, or at least for something more than if it had never been recorded at all.’ She finds reporting from warzones ‘rewarding and exciting,’ the feeling of ‘living through history’ in which ‘nightmares, anger, tears and bouts of despondency are all normal…it is hard to believe that humans are inherently good.’

Sometimes she was an eyewitness to history; at others, among the first on the scene. In 1994, Hilsum served with UNICEF in Rwanda, the only foreign reporter when the Hutu genocide of the minority Tutsis began and led to 800,000 killed, one of the most brutal mass crimes of the 20^th century. She reports that ‘I was alone in a city I scarcely knew with no petrol in my car. Barricades manned by red-eyed drunken men armed with broken beer bottles, machetes and nail-studded clubs had sprung up all over town.’ And on the Palestine West Bank, ‘we were the first outsiders in nearly two weeks who hadn’t come to kill them.’

Hilsum has the courage to introduce the human interest despite the brutality, and by and large, with welcome non-romanticism. She states that some ‘details were tantalizing in their mundanity…There was nothing that could be called victory. There was certainly no glory,’ pointing out the ‘futility and cruelty of war which never achieves the results promised by those who start it.’ In using the words of interviewees verbatim, Hilsum notes that the most courageous people in war have been civilians, and ‘war brings out the best and worst in people.’ In countless instances of inhumanity, she saw that in Uganda ‘children became the most feared fighters because they knew no restraint,’ and one with ‘a louring volatility I have never seen in an adult soldier.’

Hilsum has no respect for American overseas interventions; the Afghans did not believe bin Laden had orchestrated the 9/11 attack from Afghanistan, and regarded the Americans as just another foreign invasion. The USA had equally little impact with its ‘reckless and aggressive behaviour’ in Iraq when its invasion had brought anarchy in its wake – ‘an ignorant, ahistorical intervention by outsiders.’ The Iraqis that had welcomed the US intervention ‘were now trembling with fury and outrage…US troops were regarded as liberators for less than 24 hours.’ So, is ‘totalitarian oppression’ better than the bedlam that follows it more often than not? This remains an imponderable question.

Hilsum considers terrorism in Europe: ‘If you thought about it too much it was unnerving so on the whole, we didn’t…Jihadism only has currency because their generation is looking for identity and meaning.’ Like W.H. Auden, she ‘knew human folly like the back of [her] hand.’ Therefore, she writes that ‘the online world increasingly demands binary attitudes; the only authentic response [varies] between happy warrior and bitter pacifist,’ whereas ‘experience tells me that that war never turns out as planned, and taints everyone it touches.’

Hilsum predicts that the ongoing conflict in the Sahel presages wider wars and greater African numbers who will try to escape to Europe and the US, and that refugee flows caused by climate change are only starting. She observes that the top five refugee-hosting countries include only one developed nation – Germany. Western societies are riven by polarising politics, AI disassociates the decision-makers from the killed while she regrets that ‘journalists focus on what is critical now.’ Deploring the destruction of ancient monuments, she states ‘the moment of history in which they [the combatants] were living was more important to them than preserving emblems of the country’s past.’

With unsentimental but often evocative prose, Hilsum notes that ‘Nothing bonds you to your colleagues as intensely as being under fire.’ Her own experiences were ‘too painful to recall but too searing to forget,’ for example, ‘In Mexico it’s more dangerous to be a journalist than a drug trafficker.’ And there are also rare flashes of humour – as in Ukraine when ‘statements of questionable veracity [about the author’s alleged connections with the British Queen] would speed up our passing through almost any roadblock.’

The poems are sometimes more eloquent than the text. After all, from time immemorial poetry has dealt with the tropes of passion and battle. Assessing a poem is a deeply subjective exercise, but the context for the poems is apposite, the poets sometimes familiar, others unexpected like Enheduanna, the world’s (2300 BC) earliest poet with her hymns to Sumerian goddesses Inana and Nanna; and touching when they concern the futility of settlement of disputes through force.

A student or practitioner of international relations would be on the lookout for any suggestion of bias, and to the author’s credit there are few, save a predisposition to oppose actions by Russia and Syria on account of ‘dictatorships’, irrespective of the legitimacy of their positions, and when ‘similarities between enemies can be almost unbearable.’ Russia according to the author has ‘belligerent imperial ambition’ which reflects the UK’s government and media’s prejudices.

It has to be questioned whether the non-chronological, non-geographical system of the book best serves the author’s interest. It seems so designed to appeal to the emotions rather than a reasoned train of sequence. It is for each reader to judge the validity of this format.

Krishnan Srinivasan is a former foreign secretary.