Adventures in Correspondentland (34 page)

Because the rules of the curfew also applied to the media, covering the demonstrations was fraught. The security forces had started blockading hotels used by international journalists, to prevent us from filming the army slaughtering its own people. To outwit them, we had to switch hotels continuously, sometimes in the middle of the night.

We also refused to abide by the rules of the curfew, thinking,
hoping and occasionally praying that the army would not risk the diplomatic fallout of turning their guns on us. This was a tricky call, for neither the Royal Nepalese Army nor the Kathmandu Police were known for their media savvy or self-restraint. On the first morning of the shoot-to-kill curfew, our tactic was to venture out from the hotel into the empty streets a few metres at a time, a so-far-so-good strategy that initially worked well. But its first real test came when we edged towards our first group of soldiers, who were dressed in full combat gear.

In these situations, boldness is the only option – readers who have marched brazenly into the reception of a luxury hotel to make use of the toilet facilities with a feigned sense of belonging might recognise the feeling – and we neither deviated nor slowed down. The soldiers looked at us, and we at them. We kept on edging forward. More glances. A few more steps. No response. Then we walked past the soldiers, with their guns remaining at their sides.

Emboldened, we returned to our hotel, jumped into our four-wheel drive and drove through the abandoned streets in search of a demonstration. At a crossroads close to the city centre, there was a stand-off between security forces and protesters. As soon as we got out to film, the police started manhandling us. In situations like this, Paul, our bureau editor, would come into his own. A black-belt when it came to wrestling with pig-headed South Asian public officials, he spent ten minutes sparring over the semantics of the curfew. A clever ruse. It provided just enough time and commotion for my cameraman and I to slip away to film the protesters through the police lines, and to get a sense of how many Nepalis had bravely defied the curfew.

Clearly, it was thousands. Once Paul saw we had gathered
the shots we needed – the sequence ended with a policeman smothering our camera lens with his riot shied, which was pretty much what we had hoped for – he brought the argument with the commanding officer to a speedy and surprisingly cordial end. Then we were ordered off the streets. At this point, the police expected us to drive away, but a kindly resident beckoned us over and offered us refuge in his house. Even better, he had a rooftop with an aerial view of the disputed intersection and a patio from which to angle our laptop-sized satellite dishes into the sky and start broadcasting to London.

The police commander was temporarily flummoxed. No longer on the streets, we were adhering to the strict letter of the curfew. But although he could do little to punish us, his officers started threatening our hosts. Not wishing our hosts harm, we decided to leave. As we went down the narrow stairway and out onto the streets, a riot policeman tried to arrest one of our Nepali fixers and started dragging him towards a police van, where he no doubt would have received a beating, or even worse. Fortunately, in the tug of war that followed, your correspondent came out on top. With the team still intact, we beat a slow retreat, furtively filming tracking shots out of the windows as we crawled back to the hotel. By piercing the media blackout, we had achieved a smallish victory, but to us it felt much larger.

After that first morning of the shoot-to-kill curfew, the police and army could not control journalists any more than they could contain the demonstrators. With the protests swelling in size, and with well-dressed, middle-class Nepalis taking part, we had free rein. There were even times when the army was spooked by our presence. On one afternoon, when a wall of protesters pushed its way around the ring road, a truckload of troops took up position,
with rifles cocked like a firing squad. With their commanding officer barking out orders, it looked as if we were about to witness a horrible massacre. They had the firepower to mow down dozens of protesters, and this had the feel of a make or break moment. How ruthless were the military prepared to be? What sort of sacrifices were the protesters prepared to make?

When we jumped out of our vehicle to start filming, however, the troops immediately became camera-shy. With the demonstrators now within brick-and bottle-throwing range, the commanding officer first ordered his men to lower their weapons. Then, he shouted instructions for them to leave. On these kinds of moments, revolutions can turn, and the way was now clear for the demonstrators to surge even closer to the royal palace.

The following afternoon, at another main intersection along the ring road, the riot police were helpless again as the protesters ran amok. Now, they trashed an apartment belonging to a police officer, hurling its entire contents from the balcony onto the streets and then dousing them in petrol. Next, they ransacked a government tax office on the other side of the road, tossing its files into the air and again setting them aflame.

Just two days earlier, we would have thought twice before following the protesters into the courtyard of the government buildings, fearing the army would corner us all and then open fire. By this stage, the army and police had killed 15 protesters. But now the protesters were rampant. Amidst the bedlam of that courtyard, there was even just enough time to record a piece to camera, and, at the very moment we started filming, a protester hurtled into frame wielding an iron bar and started smashing up the tax office. He displayed such demented fury and exquisite timing that it looked as if we had primed him
to do so. Those 15 seconds of footage also neatly encased the havoc of Kathmandu. The king remained on his throne, but the mob was in the chair.

Once his staunchest backers, the Americans started distancing themselves from Gyanendra. The US ambassador even raised the spectre of a Saigon-style escape, with the king suffering the humiliation of being airlifted from the ramparts of his palace. Faced with so much hostility on the streets and now more reluctant to fire indiscriminately into the crowds, army chiefs also called for the restoration of democracy. With the demonstrations entering their third week and a massive rally planned for the next day, the king became so alarmed by the tumble of events that he appeared on television close to midnight to finally back down. Following a script virtually dictated by the army, an ashen-faced Gyanendra agreed to restore democracy. It was an extraordinary sight. A king and living Hindu god was begging the forgiveness of his people.

The following morning, shops reopened, the streets were full again of rush-hour traffic and the police turned their attention to scolding errant drivers rather than beating protesters with their bamboo batons. In a central park, not far away from the royal palace, a rave-like victory party erupted, while elsewhere in the city, as the lilac blossom started sprouting on the trees, the residents of the capital could once again enjoy the blooming of the Kathmandu spring.

Then, as we all looked forward to a respite after two weeks of dodging rubber bullets and worse, a call came through on Paul's mobile from Colombo. A female suicide bomber had carried out an attack on the army headquarters in the heart of the city, badly wounding one of the country's most senior military chiefs. Straight
away, we were checking the flight connections from Kathmandu to Colombo, for another corner of South Asia would doubtless soon be aflame.

On a coastline made ghostly by the drifting palls from funeral pyres and the attendance of so much death, the Suryakumar family huddled together on the brick-strewn ground where their beachside house had stood. When the Asian tsunami had hit Velankanni – a pilgrimage town close to India's southernmost tip – on Boxing Day 2004, they had lost four children in as many seconds. One had survived and been taken to the local hospital. Now, the family had just received word that she, too, had died.

Sarita, the young mother, thumped her forehead with her open palm, out of misery and in self-reproach. When the waves had hit, she'd raced into her home and grabbed hold of her two youngest children. But she had not had the physical strength to hold on. ‘I remember the look on their faces as the waves swept them away,' she told us. ‘No mother should ever have to go through this.' With that, her fragile body gave in to a violent spasm of grief, and she buried her head in the lap of her elderly auntie, whose sari muffled her wails.

The old lady wept, too, her head jolting from side to side. Then she admonished her niece. ‘You gave birth to them,' she cried. ‘You should never have let them go.'

This was a community where the waves had taken an entire generation. Along a stretch of coastline just a few miles long, 1500 children had been killed.

Now, bodies decomposing in the airless humidity littered the shores. Crows picked on the remains. Smoke from the bonfires covered wrecked houses in a grey film of ash. Fishermen stared blankly at their broken boats, many of which had been tossed hundreds of metres inland. Others tried to salvage and repair their nets, which were entangled in the concrete slabs and jagged bricks strewn throughout their communities. Some just peered vacantly out to sea, traumatised by the idea of ever venturing out again. Of the 15,000 fishing boats in the town of Nagapattinam – one of southern India's worst-affected communities – just three were seaworthy.

Having lost his two sons, his house and his fishing boat, Gopal knew he would be the last in a long line of fishermen from his family. All he had left was his daughter, a cheery little girl who tried constantly to rally her father even though both her eyes had been injured by the waves and were now wholly bloodshot. ‘Unless I get government aid, I might as well kill myself and what's left of my family,' Gopal cried.

Further inland, at one of Nagapattinam's many makeshift orphanages, two young sisters, Shivaranjini and Divya, told us that their mother had been killed and their father, another fisherman, had lost his livelihood. He no longer had the means to raise them and had had to give them up. ‘We came here hoping to get an education,' said ten-year-old Shivaranjini, an angel-faced young thing with neatly tied pigtails. ‘Then we can look after him.'

Every so often, parents came to the door of the orphanage in the hope of finding their lost children. They might have heard
there was a girl who looked like their daughter, or a boy who met the description of their son. Not once, however, did we witness a successful reunion.

If anything, in this trans-national disaster, Sri Lanka had been hit harder. Normally so enchanting, the road to Galle was lined with wreckage and misery. The destruction started just south of Colombo, first with some scattered debris and then with a few half-demolished seafront houses. Thereafter, it got steadily worse. In some places, all that remained of once-sturdy houses was their concrete foundations, laid out on the ground like life-sized architectural plans. Small fishing boats had been hurled hundreds of metres inland. The normally unspoilt beaches were scattered with rubble, splintered timber and uprooted palm trees.

Just over halfway to Galle was the small town of Peraliya, where hundreds of panicked locals had tried to escape the walls of water by clambering aboard a train that traced the line of the coast – a service known as the ‘Queen of the Sea'. Yet the force of the five-metre waves lifted the train from the tracks and overturned its packed carriages. Within seconds, they filled with water, drowning hundreds of passengers, while hundreds more were wrenched out to sea in the undertow.

Some 800 bodies were recovered from the wreckage of the train's rust-coloured carriages. The remains of another 700 or 800 victims were never found. So buckled and contorted was the railway track that it looked like a corkscrew ride at a fairground. Well over 1500 people were killed aboard the ‘Queen of the Sea', instantly making it the world's worst ever railway disaster – an astounding fact relegated to footnote status because of the scale of the catastrophe elsewhere. What made this disaster all the more remarkable was that Peraliya was a west-coast town, when
it was the east coast of Sri Lanka that should have borne the brunt of the tsunami. Such was the refractive effect of the advancing waves that the tsunami wrapped itself around the lower half of the island and devastated a coastline that one would have thought sheltered.

The fortress town of Galle on Sri Lanka's most south-westerly corner had produced some of the most disturbing television footage from the Boxing Day Tsunami, which is why we headed there first. We saw how the waves had upturned buses and swept them through the centre of town like broken twigs. Entire families had tried to climb through their windows and clamber onto their roofs, as they were buffeted in the swirling currents. Below the ramparts of the old city, the Test cricket ground was covered in muddy water and scattered with the carcasses of buses, cars and tuk-tuks. Most troubling of all was the number of dead bodies laid out at the sides of the roads. Nik, my cameraman, was among the first foreign journalists to arrive, and he saw piles of dead children. Death has an awful, sulphuric stench, and the air that night was full of it.

Remote and difficult to get to at the best of times, the northeast of the island had taken much longer to reach. Here, in the fiefdom of the Tamil Tigers, entire towns had been obliterated, almost wiped from the map. The Tiger stronghold of Mullaitivu, which had always shown the scars of civil war, had been virtually flattened. The tsunami had done in seconds what the Sri Lankan Army had failed to achieve in nearly 20 years.

On the waterfront, the shattered shell of a church, its concrete altar now exposed to the skies, and the private residence of the head of the Sea Tigers, which had undergone a speedy repair job, were pretty much all that remained. The landscape was empty
of humans, since everyone had relocated to tented camps further inland.

Among them were the surviving children from an orphanage, Tender Sprouts, that cared for the sons and daughters of victims of the civil war. Of the 175 children housed in its seafront dormitories, only 30 had survived. For weeks afterwards, some of these poor young souls were so traumatised that they could not even utter a single word. Others had learnt a new one: ‘tsunami' – a term that I myself had never used and that I'd found myself repeating over and over as I flew into Sri Lanka so as to lock it in my mind to get the pronunciation right.

It was far too soon to reach for consolation, and to ponder what good might spring from an undiscriminating disaster that had shown no regard for ethnicity, wealth, military rank or religion. In those early days, however, came the pregnant hope that the tsunami might break the impasse in the peace process between the government and the Tamil Tigers. It was not uncommon, after all, for natural disasters to produce a kind of peace dividend.

I had seen this for myself during the Bam earthquake in Iran, which by unfortunate coincidence had struck on Boxing Day the previous year and killed more than 26,000 people. Amidst the wreckage of the medieval town, we witnessed the improbable sight of an American emergency medical team from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, being protected by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard – not that the doctors, nurses and spinal-injury specialists needed any security. In a land where ‘Death to America' was still the fuming cry, Iranians queued up to have their photographs taken with Americans whose bulky ski jackets were embroidered with the Stars and Stripes. It had been
the first official US delegation of any kind to travel to Iran in over a decade, and its presence was all the more remarkable given that Tehran had been declared a founding member of the axis of evil by George W. Bush.

Hoping to achieve an almost immediate breakthrough in Sri Lanka, a negotiating team from Norway – the original brokers of the ceasefire agreement – flew to Colombo to revive talks. Encouragement also came from a speech at the national mourning service from the country's president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, whose husband had been killed by the Tamil Tigers and who herself had come close to being assassinated when a suicide bomber attacked her in 1999 at an election rally on the steps of Colombo Town Hall.

‘Nature has treated us equally,' said Kumaratunga, who had been left partially blinded by the assassination attempt. ‘Can't we treat each other likewise?'

But the Tigers were unimpressed. Blatant propaganda, they scoffed, intended primarily for international consumption. Shortly afterwards, Kofi Annan, the then UN secretary-general, was barred by the government from visiting Tamil-held areas during a tour of the tsunami zone.

Alas, disputes over the distribution of aid threatened to drive the two sides even further apart. Calculating that Tamils had borne two-thirds of the casualties and the damage, the Tigers argued they should receive a corresponding proportion of international aid. Fearing the Tigers would use the money to rebuild its navy, which had been badly hit in the tsunami, the government maintained that aid should not be distributed by a ‘terrorist organisation'.

Eventually, six months after the disaster, the Tigers and the
government arrived at an agreement, but it broke down within weeks. The hardline Buddhist party, the JVP, whose thugs had surrounded us in Trincomalee that time, petitioned the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Tigers were terrorists and thus should not receive aid.

Across the Bay of Bengal in Indonesia – the first country to feel the force of the Boxing Day Tsunami – talks in Aceh province between separatist rebels and Jakarta led to a landmark agreement ending almost 29 years of conflict. It was a triumph of disaster diplomacy. By contrast, the childish quarrel over aid in Sri Lanka led to a fast deterioration. Those Norwegian officials who returned hoping to revive their peace plan instead found themselves documenting a steep escalation in violence. Six months afterwards, there were five killings a day.

The chance of a more permanent peace had gone, and both sides prepared once again for all-out war. By year's end, when we visited tsunami-hit communities in Tamil-held areas, mothers told us they lay awake at night listening out for the wallop of crashing waves and the crack of gunfire as rebels once more took on the army.

Covering the tsunami entangled us in the usual ethical thicket of eavesdropping on the misfortune of others. Awful as it sounds, the most terrible days for the victims of natural disasters or conflicts often provided the most professionally rewarding moments for reporters retelling their stories. Rarely was the competition between rival news organisations more intense than in the aftermath of natural disasters.

Often, this was equally true of correspondents working on
the same side. Prized was the boast of being the first reporter on the scene, or the first to broadcast live, in high-definition quality, from the rubble. The aim was to own the story, to become the face and voice of it.

Grotesque as this sounds, for some there was an element of sport. This was partly because disasters came with the allure of awards, the pursuit of which could breed a certain callousness and insensitivity. A BBC film crew in the Congo had set the gold standard in the 1960s, after the evacuation of a planeload of Europeans. ‘Anyone here been raped and speaks English?' a reporter bellowed – a pitiless line of enquiry that the legendary foreign correspondent Edward Behr appropriated as the title for his memoirs.

Nowadays, the vast majority of correspondents are far more emotionally intelligent, and they approach disaster coverage with great humanity and sensitivity. From the Asian tsunami to Haiti, the best coverage is usually the most tender-hearted. But our trade abounds with tales of journalistic tactlessness. One particularly sorry example, which sounds too bad to be true, involved a reporter in Bosnia who was told he could film young children who had sustained terrible injuries from shelling. When shown a child who had the top of his finger ripped off, he was completely unmoved. ‘Is that it?' he reportedly asked, with a look bordering on disgust.

War and disaster zones could make decent-minded reporters completely take leave of their senses. Perhaps the most extreme recent example came from an Australian reporter in Iraq who had seen a group of young children playing on some unexploded missiles. She instructed her translator to ask them to do it again for the camera, and then repeated the charade for a second time so
the cameraman could shoot it from a different angle. What made this lapse even more inexplicable was that the very story she had set out to cover was on the dangers to children of the hundred or so decaying surface-to-air missiles littering Baghdad. I ran into her a few years later, and she seemed charming and thoroughly right-thinking, but in the pressure of that moment her judgement had gone terribly awry.