10A • THEUNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NEWS
MONDAY,MARCH 24,2003
DAY, MARCH 24
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Nikols allowed Farah to take as many pictures as he wanted in exchange for helping him get a United States visa so he could leave Sierra Leone for America. Accompanied by the rebels, smoking the cigarettes Farah had given them and referring to him as their "brother," Farah took all the pictures he wanted, promised Nikols he would help him as best as he could and departed with his guide as quickly as possible.
Illustration by Lance Menelle/Jayhawk Journalist
Foreign correspondence has always been a dangerous job, but the environment of the combat journalist has changed drastically over the last decade. Gone are the days of two sides with clearly defined battle lines and rules of engagement that identify correspondents as non-combatants. The availability of weapons has transformed the battlefields. Today's warriors are not uniformed soldiers of the state military, but what Farah describes as "coked-out 12-year-olds with an AK-(47)."
Not the same
During World War II, many correspondents served as a sort of surrogate parent. They were in the field with and reported on the boys. When correspondents were injured, it was most likely because of their proximity to soldiers, legitimate military targets, said Bob Dotson, NBC News correspondent and 1968 University of Kansas graduate. Dotson opened NBC's first bureau in Dallas in 1977. He said from 1977 to 1979 he covered "all the little wars in Central America."
"Ernie Pyle-type war correspondents faced the same risk as the people they covered," Dotson said. "But that's not the case today. The whole game has changed a lot."
"In Afghanistan, it was an area of anarchy. A lot of people were killed by people without a political agenda — bandits, the people
who wanted to steal your equipment. Those journalists killed in the convoy were not wartime casualties; it was murder," he said, referring to the five correspondents killed traveling from Kabul to Jalalabad in Afghanistan in November 2001. The murderers emptied their pockets and took their equipment.
From 1992 to 2001,389 correspondents were killed in hostile environments, according to a report from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. Cross-fires have killed 62 of those correspondents. Murder has claimed 298 of them.
The Associated Press has lost 26 combat correspondents in its 126 years of operation. Nine of them were killed during the last nine years, which is more than AP lost during either World War I, World War II, Korea or Vietnam.
Humbleness is the key when dealing with insecure and hostile people in that kind of setting, professional correspondents and experts say. Training correspondents to be humble is one of the many lessons taught by hostile environment training companies like Centurion Risk Assessment Services Ltd. Other companies include the AKE Group Ltd. and Bruhn
"It was a young kid, 16 or 17, with an AK who wanted us to pay him to let us pass," Leford said. "My driver didn't want to pay, so he began to move the vehicle forward. The kid locks and loads, puts the gun to my head and tells us to stop. I'm yelling 'Stop! Stop!' From there, I smiled a lot, acted real humble, and made that kid feel dominant. Let him feel he is the tough guy and you are the weakling."
Joe Ledford, a photographer with The Kansas City Star, was on assignment in Sierra Leone in the summer of 2000. As he and his driver approached a check point, an RUF rebel forced them to stop.
Learning to stay humble
NewTech, which specializes in chemical and biological weapons awareness. These companies teach their students how to deal with kidnappers, interrogators, or any other hostile people. They teach students to be aware of their surroundings and their potential dangers. These companies give participants confidence in their ability to recognize the risks and the instincts on how to deal with them.
"You have to assess the risk each time," Dotson said. "Young people think they are bullet-proof. Peter Arnett grew to be a 67-year-old combat correspondent because he could assess the risk."
specializes in training its participants to handle a range of threats: from those to personal health and safety in conflict areas to combat first aid.
Centurion is the leader in hostile environment training. Located in Andover, England, 71 miles southwest of London, Centurion has trained more than 8,000 correspondents since its creation in 1995. The company
"Risks cannot be eliminated. They can be minimized," said Paul Rees, Centurion's founder and a 21-year-veteran of Her Majesty's Royal Marine Commandos.
The British Broadcasting Corporation hired Rees after his retirement from the military along with other retired commandos to train BBC correspondents to survive in a combat environment after it lost a film crew in Serbia.
Before the war on terror, Centurion offered its courses once a week in the United Kingdom and once a month in the United States. However, the company has seen an increase in corporations requiring their correspondents to take the course over the
last five months. Rees and his instructors now teach two courses every week in the UK, with 23 participants per class. Forty students are taught twice a month in the U.S. The company has trained more than 1,040 participants in the UK, 364 in the U.S. and 320 in other courses located around the world.
Centurion doesn't limit its programs to media corporations. Humanitarian and charity agencies, such as Catholic Relief Services, Christian Aid, and Amnesty International have sent personnel through the training. Freelance correspondents, who can't afford the $400- to $600-a-day courses, often get funding from the Rory Peck Trust, a charitable organization established in honor of its namesake, a freelance journalist killed in combat. Centurion also occasionally teaches freelance correspondents free of charge.
"We make the training as realistic as possible. We put so much time into everything we do," Rees said. "Everytime there is a new incident, we'll reenact what we know with the media types. We feed them back the information about what they should and should not do."
The use of correspondents
Companies such as the BBC, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, AP and Reuters have begun sending their combat correspondents to Centurion courses before they get to the field. Their goal is to expose correspondents to gunfire, land mines, kidnapping and hostile people in a controlled environment where they can learn from their mistakes. This prevents them from learning mistakes the hard—and perhaps fatal—way.
In January of 1987, Gerald Seib was a Cairo-based Wall Street Journal correspondent. The Iranian government invited Seib, a 1978 University of Kansas graduate, and 55 other correspondents to visit the Iran-Iraq war. Their visas all required
extension before they could leave the country. On Thursday, Jan. 29, the correspondents all renewed their visas and passports at an immigration police station, but Seib's was never returned. His name was similar to a wanted man's, and the Iranians said they had to work out the problem.
On Saturday, Jan. 31, Seib was still trying to extend his visa. That evening, four men in camouflage abducted him in the hotel parking lot. They blindfolded him and drove wildly through the streets of Tehran, screaming at Seib in Farsi. When the abductors removed Seib's blindfold, he found himself in prison in northern Tehran, where the shah's secret police had once tortured political prisoners.
For four days, Iranian officials interrogated Seib in English and accused him of being a spy for Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad.
As the time progressed, Seib's interrogators slowly scaled back their accusations, recognizing him as an American but a resident of Israel, then an American who had spent long amounts of time in Israel.
"The interrogations were the same thing. 'You're a spy, you're a spy for Israel, etc.'" Seib said.
Seib believed his best strategy was to tell the truth: He was a reporte, based in Cairo and had covered Israel along with Libya and Syria, allies of Iran, and Iraq, Iran's enemy.
Just as quickly as they captured him, the Iranians freed Seib to a Swiss Diplomat who specialized in American interests.
Seib believes that he was the victim of factionalism between two different leaders in Iran — the parliament speaker, who was identified with secret arms dealing with the U.S., and the Ayatollah, a religious leader of a faction that opposed the arms deals with
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