When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  His book also prompted a scathing review in The Guardian. It described how ‘an ageing, grey-haired reporter on a horse, riding across the range with an assorted bunch of Afghan guerrillas’ was now revealed to be ‘one of the secret weapons used by MI6 to force the British public – otherwise cosmically uninterested – to take some notice of the anti-Soviet battles going on in Afghanistan’.605

  The headline was ‘Playing the Great Game with Incredible Gall’ and the author was the literary editor of The Guardian, Richard Gott. Later that year Gott had to resign from The Guardian amidst allegations that he had been a KGB agent during the Cold War. Gott denied the charges, published in The Spectator magazine, but admitted he had gone on expenses-paid trips to Vienna, Athens and Nicosia to visit a senior Russian official in the 1980s.606

  But Gott had at the very least been talking to intelligence-gatherers too – they just happened to be from the other side. But surely if it is defensible for a journalist to give unclassified information to a diplomat in return for a briefing who should care what ‘side’ they are on? If it is not illegal, information is information, news is news. Journalists take information from a range of sources and assess it before using it. In principle an intelligence source is no different from any other.

  But there are four problems which can arise with material from intelligence sources. The first is that by its very nature it is often difficult to check. This can create the second problem, which is that the story achieves an outcome which the journalist may not anticipate. The chief of the defence staff during the Falklands War, Lord Lewin, considered it perfectly justifiable to feed misinformation to the media, especially if it helped to deceive an enemy. The other two problems involve ‘deals’ – either that the intelligence sources expect that they will receive something in return from the journalist or that they ask the journalist not to use other information which they have gathered from other sources.

  Applying these principles and pitfalls to Sandy Gall’s relationship with MI6, he believes his lunches were nothing secret, he was simply looking for information and they were looking for information. Of what he got from them, he says that if journalists are offered something, and it sounds like an interesting story which they would be interested in, their natural inclination would be to say yes. Of the information he gave MI6 he says it was effectively in the public domain because there was nothing that he had not or would not use in his broadcasts.

  In terms of trying to achieve an outcome he clearly had common ground with MI6 in wanting to highlight what the Russians were doing in Afghanistan. But in his case there seems to have been an additional personal motive based on his past experiences: ‘When the Afghan thing started I thought, well, I do know how the Soviets act, I mean I have seen them in action, and it’s not very pleasant. And so this looks to me like a re-run.’607

  Massoud does seem to have received more arms from the West after Gall pointed out the guerrilla leader’s problem with re-supplies but there is no evidence that has yet come to light to make a direct linkage between Gall’s reports and those arms supplies. Gall told me, ‘I never manoeuvred for anything like that to happen. I felt that was not my job.’ His reports on the problems the mujahideen were having getting the right kind of missiles to shoot down Russian helicopters may have influenced a sequence of events which led to the United States supplying the very effective Stinger missile and this in turn may well have led the Russians to decide to withdraw. But again it is difficult to prove direct linkage.

  On this issue of deal-making with ‘spooks’ the only reference which Gall makes to any such discussion is an incident in 1988 when the Pakistani ISI were escorting the satellite dish into Afghanistan. Gall recalls a conversation with an ISI colonel who asked him, ‘What sort of line will you be taking in your reports, Mr Sandy Gall?’

  ‘Why, the same as I always do. I shall be impartial.’

  ‘We hope you will be positive, very positive, Mr Sandy Gall.’

  Gall remembered that this line was delivered as a not very veiled threat. But he maintains it had no effect on his impartiality.

  It was two decades after Gall’s reports before an explanatory note was included in the broadcasting regulations about ‘due impartiality’. It explained: ‘The approach to due impartiality may vary according to the nature of the subject, the type of programme and channel, the likely expectation of the audience as to content, and the extent to which the content and approach is signalled to the audience. Context … is important.’608

  Citing the importance of context has given regulators the flexibility and freedom to adjust to particular circumstances but it has also allowed enforcement to be influenced by the prevailing political winds. It would be possible to argue that Sandy Gall’s open endorsement of ‘the most famous guerrilla commander of them all’ over ‘lesser commanders’ was a breach of the requirement for due impartiality. But it could also be argued that this was within the context of British support for a guerrilla army which was fighting what was still seen as Britain’s potential enemy in the world, the Soviet Union.

  It would certainly have been better if we at ITN had ever transmitted a report which provided a different kind of context – one which fully explained Britain’s underreported role in the war, thus allowing viewers to have a wider picture in which to consider Gall’s report from one battlefield.

  Whatever our collective shortcomings over telling the full story about Britain and the mujahideen, nobody can ever doubt Sandy Gall’s bravery, his humanitarian commitment to the people of Afghanistan and his knowledge of the country. One British ambassador in Kabul said, ‘He always reminded me how much I didn’t know about Afghanistan.’609 The charity Sandy Gall’s Afghanistan Appeal continues to train Afghan professionals to provide artificial limbs, mobility aids and physiotherapy. In 2010, like Charles Wheeler, he was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, in his case for ‘services to the people of Afghanistan’. It is the class of honour usually awarded for non-military foreign service, typically to FCO officials at department head level and above. His wife, Eleanor, and two of his daughters, Fiona and Michaela, help run the charity. A third daughter, Carlotta, has covered Afghanistan extensively for the New York Times.

  Two of the key figures in Gall’s work in Pakistan and Afghanistan died violent deaths. Zia ul-Haq was killed in 1988 when his presidential plane crashed in mysterious circumstances. Ahmed Shah Massoud helped to overthrow the Communist government left behind by the Russians and became a minister in the power-sharing government which was then formed between different mujahideen groups. But he fell out with the Taliban and a war began between them. In August 2001 two men claiming to be Belgian newsmen of Moroccan origin arrived at Massoud’s camp asking for a TV interview. They waited three weeks before they met him. As they began the interview they detonated explosives inside the camera and the battery belt. Massoud died on his way to a field hospital. The Taliban had got their man, probably with the help of al Qaeda. Two days later 9/11 happened and partly in retaliation, a whole new Afghan war began.

  12

  LINDSEY HILSUM

  On Monday 20 January 1997 in a sweltering, airless African courtroom, award-winning reporter Lindsey Hilsum says she crossed a line. In the dock, behind a bullet-proof glass screen, was a mayor from Rwanda, Jean-Paul Akayesu, accused of organising mass killings in an area near the country’s capital, Kigali.

  Hilsum says, ‘I did something journalists have gone to prison to avoid. I testified in a court of law on information gathered in the course of my work.’ But she adds, ‘I did so, but not without doubts.’

  Helping to bring those responsible to justice might seem a noble cause. But in the intriguing world of media ethics nothing is that simple. She was an eyewitness for the prosecution in a case that would go on to make legal history. Wouldn’t any journalist welcome the opportunity to make that sort of mark for posterity? Well, no. It is exactly the sort of decision that most journalists hope never to have to m
ake because it places them in an invidious position: choosing between their professional ethics – being impartial observers of events – and, in extreme cases, placing those to one side in favour of being human beings with feelings and passions and cares. It is not an easy choice to make, but a number have had to face up to making it.

  Lindsey Hilsum was placed in that difficult position because she had seen what had happened in Rwanda. Her reports, which had been broadcast on the BBC and published in the Western press (The Guardian, The Observer and The Independent), were a record of the horrors that she witnessed during those first days of the Rwandan massacres in 1994. That was why the prosecution wished to call her as a witness: she could tell the court what she had seen and confirm that what she had written was true. Before the prosecution could move on to specific instances and charges, it had to establish general historical facts that were beyond doubt: that there had been massacres, how events had unfolded and what had happened. Likewise, the prosecution needed to prove that the massacres amounted to genocide.

  Hilsum’s testimony was special because she had been one of only two Western journalists in the country when the massacres began; she was therefore in a ‘privileged’ position as an impartial observer. The case was being heard by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). It was a parallel companion of the tribunal that was trying those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the former Yugoslavia. At the time both tribunals were ‘at the cutting edge of a growing movement to establish international institutions of justice and accountability for mass violence’.610 So it was an important process, not just a sideshow.

  Rwandan paradise

  The conflict within Rwanda – nominally between the Hutu and the Tutsi peoples – had become mass murder on a truly dreadful scale. No one will ever know how many died, but estimates range between half a million and a million dead. Victims were often chopped to death with a machete, or clubbed to death with heavy pieces of wood or metal. Many victims were killed by groups of people: that was how many of the perpetrators gained strength for their acts of murder.611 Shooting was considered to be too quick a release by many of the killers – even those who had access to guns – because the deaths were seen as punishment for being Tutsi (or a ‘moderate’ Hutu, i.e. a supporter of an opposition political group). They were an act of vengeance. For many victims – perhaps the majority – death did not come easily or quickly. It was lingering. There are many stories where people pleaded to be shot because it was quick, but most pleas were rejected by killers fuelled by bloodlust.

  Lindsey Hilsum came to get involved in Rwanda because for most of the 1980s she had been a freelance journalist, working mainly in Africa. Sometimes she worked for aid agencies in countries where war had introduced poverty, hunger and disease. She had been mainly based in Nairobi. In 1993 she was offered a two-month contract in Rwanda by UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund. She had never visited the country before, but had been engaged to produce a newsletter that would help aid agencies operating in Rwanda and Burundi work together more coherently and understand what was going on in both countries politically.612

  What would she have learned about the unknown country? Land-locked Rwanda is a small but densely populated country by African standards. Roughly halfway between the size of Wales and Scotland, and with a population greater than both, it is mountainous and fertile. Described by some as a paradise, and others as a heaven-on-earth, its lush hills are home to mountain gorillas; it is a predominantly agrarian society and its main exports are coffee and tea, but also some tin ore.

  Hilsum discovered that Rwanda is populated by two main ethnic groups, the minority Tutsi and the majority Hutu, although most experts agree that that is a distinction that obfuscates rather than clarifies the picture; in the south of the country live the Twa, who are the forest, or pygmy people. In truth, in 1994 she would find that the Tutsis and Hutus shared the same language, culture and religion and lived on the same hills together. The main languages are Kinyarwanda and French, which is the second language. In the years since the massacre English has also been added to the list. The distinction, what Hilsum refers to as the ‘ethnie’, is probably closer to the ancient Roman division between patricians and plebeians; in pre-colonial Rwandan society, which was essentially feudal, the Tutsis were the traditional overlords of the Hutus, but there was considerable intermarriage and social mobility between the two groups. Stereotypical descriptions of stature say that Tutsis are tall and slender, whereas Hutus are shorter and stockier, but there are many members of one group who very closely resemble those from the other. What was not in doubt, however, was that Rwandans were conscious of the distinction; they could tease it out through conversation. Perhaps uniquely among post-colonial African states, the country retained a colonial requirement that individuals’ ethnicity was entered on their personal identity cards. So it was documented for all to see.

  Rwandan society was described as obedient and orderly. When Hilsum arrived she noted that nearly everyone turned out to do a form of national service, unpaid communal work that had in the past enabled roads to be built, forests planted and terraces to be constructed in order to combat soil erosion.

  The country was a colony for around eighty years, beginning in the late 1880s. It was first a part of German East Africa then, during the First World War, it was taken over by Belgium, which had also taken control of its neighbour, Burundi, where Tutsis formed the majority and Hutu the minority. Belgium retained control until 1962, when it decamped from the whole of central Africa almost overnight. Both the German and Belgian colonists delegated some local control to the Tutsis, who were accorded privileges and educational advantages in return: in effect the Tutsis did the colonial master’s dirty work, and the Hutus resented it.613

  When Hilsum arrived in Kigali, the country’s capital, in 1994 she stayed first in a hotel and then, after a few weeks, moved to a suburban house, with its own nightwatchman, a sort of guard. She found a country in the grip of a war of insurgency. It had begun three years earlier when an army of well-organised and mainly Tutsi insurgents invaded from bases they had established years earlier along the Ugandan borderlands with Rwanda. They demanded the right to settle in Rwanda. The insurgents, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), had been established by Tutsi refugees and their descendants who had fled the country after the Belgian colonists had been evacuated in the early 1960s. In October 1990, in the commune of Kibilira, local Hutus took revenge on Tutsis living in the area, killing more than 300 people. By the end of the month the war reached a stalemate and the RPF decided to resort to guerrilla warfare to break the deadlock.

  Reacting to the insurgency, Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, announced the introduction of a multi-party system, and the abolition of the ethnic identity cards. He introduced the former, but never abolished the latter. In 1991 there were ceasefires, political demonstrations and political and ethnic violence. It seemed that the country was slowly beginning to fall apart. The demonstrations and ethnic violence continued into the next year. But the year also saw the establishment of the CDR (Coalition pour la Défense de la République) and the creation and consolidation of militias by extremist Hutu nationalists, including one called Interahamwe (a term that translates roughly as ‘those who attack together’). Initially posing as a self-defence organisation its members were trained in weapons use and in killing techniques. Its members were instructed to make lists of all Tutsis living in each area.

  That spring saw a new RPF offensive which caused up to 350,000 Hutu refugees to move southward to escape the fighting. But in August a peace conference formally opened in Arusha, Tanzania.

  Over the following sixteen months extremist militia-inspired political violence escalated. There were hundreds of deaths. Early in 1993 the RPF extended the territory under its control, leading to the displacement of further large numbers of people. Habyarimana resisted signing a power-sharing agreement.

  In the spr
ing the presence of French troops briefly became an issue. It already had a small military presence in the country, ostensibly to protect its interests and citizens. But, as conditions in the country deteriorated, it sent in reinforcements. Its garrison became a sticking point in the peace negotiations and a timetable was agreed for the troops to be withdrawn, to be replaced by troops either from the United Nations or from the Organization of African Unity (OAU). In March a new ceasefire agreement was signed in the Tanzanian capital, Dar-es-Salaam.

  But as conditions deteriorated the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned that with almost one million displaced people the country faced famine and a major humanitarian catastrophe.

  In July 1993 an independent commercial radio station opened in Kigali. Only later would the full significance of this event be appreciated. It was set up by people who had close links to President Habyarimana; the studios were even powered from a link to the presidential palace electrical supply. Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC) began broadcasting a mix of programming, including talk shows presented by ‘shock jocks’, which were loosely modelled on their Western radio counterparts, although there much of the similarity stopped. Some presenters were clearly drunk while on air, and their brand of shock-jock presentation was virulent bigotry. Other programmes included phone-ins, interviews and commentaries; but no news programming was included in the mix. Broadcasts were mostly in the vernacular Kinyarwanda language, with a small minority also in French. RTLMC’s language was both earthy and raw. It was radically different to the staid state-owned Radio Rwanda. People RTLMC regarded as enemies were called cockroaches,614 among other names; and in case listeners were in any doubt they were told where the ‘enemies’ lived, so that they could easily be found; some were described as those who ‘deserved to die’.615 The station was able to assess what impact it was having because some of its targets phoned in. For instance, on 20 November 1993 one caller complained to a broadcaster that he had been stoned after being named in a broadcast.616 RTLMC implied that all Tutsis were ‘traitors’. It did not openly support Habyarimana’s government, thus appearing to be independent.