Unreasonable Behavior

by Don McCullin

  It was a ruse I had previously pulled off in war zones, but I was acutely aware that there could still be a reckoning when I tried to leave the country. And, sure enough, they really went to town on me and my luggage at Lusaka airport looking for the offending film. They didn’t find anything, because I had already airmailed all the exposed rolls to a friend in London with an instruction to keep them safe for me and Christian Aid on my return.

  After my Zambian experience, I expected even bigger problems in South Africa. For one thing, I did not know my way around. I had never visited the country before. This was not for want of trying, especially during the apartheid years, but the authorities never saw fit to issue me with a visa. Another problem was suggested by the attitude of the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, whose public statements about the Aids epidemic seemed to fluctuate between outright denial and affirming that it was all some kind of conspiracy against his country got up by the West. I was therefore agreeably surprised to find South Africa very accessible, and I experienced no shortage of help or of cooperation, especially in the townships.

  Looking back on the whole tour, I had only one serious regret. This was at a little town outside Lusaka where I came across a desperately ill woman being tended by her younger sister in the most deplorable conditions. I knew there was room in the local hospice, which I had just visited, so I suggested taking the sick woman there. They had no money for the fare, they said. I managed to persuade the driver of one of the little 4 × 4 community buses to pull up outside their home. And I turned round to see, advancing towards me, the young woman carrying her dying sister on her back, carrying her as a Smithfield porter in the old days would carry a hunk of livestock. It was an absolutely stupendous picture, a truly iconic image. It would have been one of the greatest pictures I had ever taken. But I had just put my cameras down to sort out the money for the driver, and I missed it.

  Originally, I thought that Christian Aid could have done more with the pictures I did get back. They were well exhibited, first at the Whitechapel Gallery, and subsequently at many other galleries. But I was never convinced that traditional art galleries were the right sort of place for campaigning. The kinds of pictures I had taken were not supposed to be viewed as art; they were designed to have immediate communication and impact. I wanted them to be an assault on people’s consciences.

  To my mind it would have been much better to have set up a gigantic, custom-built exhibit at Victoria or Waterloo Station, which would have been impossible to ignore by tens of thousands of commuters every day. But to Christian Aid’s great credit, it did hang in determinedly with its campaign. And two years later they sent me back to the same three African countries to provide photographic evidence of what progress had been made.

  Not a lot, I found. This was, of course, before the antiretroviral drugs could be deployed on any scale. On the other hand, there was ample evidence of Christian Aid’s campaign being taken more seriously at an international level. The first showing of my 2004 Aids photographs would not be in some tucked-away East London art gallery, but in the lobby of the United Nations building in New York, one of the world’s most coveted display areas with some 60,000 people going through it every month. I remember the opening ceremony well and for a special reason. While I was waiting for it to kick off, a short, very pleasant-looking man came up to me and said: ‘Come on then, Donald, take my hand.’ This is how I came to mount a speaking platform hand-in-hand with Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

  I am perhaps getting a bit ahead of myself here. Between my two Aids-related trips to southern Africa rather a lot happened in my life. In brief, I got married again, became a father again, and broke all my solemn vows of not going to war again. Vegetating in old age was, I’m happy to say, no longer anywhere near the top of my list of concerns.

  I met the woman who became my wife at Charlie Glass’s fiftieth birthday party where she was introduced to me by Mark Shand. So I knew from the outset that we had something in common in terms of friendships. Her name was Catherine Fairweather and she was, at that time, travel editor of Harper’s Bazaar, the fashion magazine. We talked mainly about her business, and about whether I would be prepared to take photographs for her magazine. However, on a non-business level, I could not help noticing that she was an exceptionally attractive woman. I also noticed, as she walked away from me, that she was wearing fishnet stockings, which I really hate. Happily, I was able to overcome that aversion.

  Our courtship, which included classical music concerts in the West End, was a bit on the refined side, but rapid in its progress. I would learn that Catherine came from a very distinguished family; and that her father, Sir Patrick Fairweather, recently retired from the Foreign Office, had been the British Ambassador in Rome, which explained why Catherine’s journalistic CV featured a long stint working for Vatican Radio. Catherine’s mother, Maria, who was of Russian and Greek descent, was a superb multilinguist who had worked in Brussels where she was a capable interpreter in seven different languages. Catherine herself was fluent in both French and Italian.

  Although I had long since shed the Finsbury Park–induced inferi­ority complex that had blighted much of my youth, I was nervously conscious of moving into a world where people quite simply knew more than I did, and indeed—given that I was still some way short of fluency in just the one language—more than I was ever likely to know.

  I soon felt sure about my feelings for Catherine, but I was deeply uncertain about how her parents might view our association. After all, at some point Catherine would have to go to them and say: ‘I’ve met this man, and by the way, Dad, he’s older than you are.’ However, when she did announce the fact of there being a twenty-eight-year gap in our ages, there was no explosion of parental outrage. I can’t honestly say that Patrick was thrilled to have a prospective son-in-law one year older than himself, but he was very gracious about it, which suggested to me that he must have been an outstanding diplomat.

  Travel was clearly an interest that we had in common. I did Morocco with Catherine and we all—father, mother, Catherine and I—toured the religious sites in northern Ethiopia, taking in the giant obelisks at Axum, and Lalibela’s incredible monolithic churches hewn out of volcanic rock. This was a successful enterprise in togetherness, but I could not get the others to share my eagerness to go south and spend time in the Omo River Basin, the habitat of some of world’s most primitive tribes. To realise my ambition in that respect, I had to put family unity on hold for a while, and return to Ethiopia on my own. Photographically, it was among the best moves I ever made.

  My trip through southern Ethiopia was in some ways reminiscent of my earlier journeys with Mark Shand around Irian Jaya and the Mentawai Islands in Indonesia. But, if anything, it was even more exotic and unnerving. The main characteristic of the tribes in Ethiopia was that they, like those in Asia, wore very little or frequently nothing, save for an exotic patterning of white body paint. The key difference was that African tribes like the Mursi and the Surma were a lot better armed, quite often with Kalashnikovs. Murders were an almost daily occurrence.

  Alongside the modern weaponry, many old traditions survived relatively intact, among them stick-fighting—sometimes to the death—between young males, drinking blood and, of course, female circumcision. The circumcisions were done with razor blades wielded by the women elders, who gave every appearance of doing respected and responsible work. I saw a couple of them walking importantly around after one ceremony with metallic silver Eveready torches dangling from their waists rather like badges of office.

  Married women were accorded the right to wear clay plates in their mouths. Some tribal traditions dictated that these had to be removed in the event of a spouse’s death, and only reinserted on remarriage. However, I did detect, among some of the younger women, a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the whole plate-wearing custom. I don’t think they would have at all minded its dying out.


  The economies of all the tribes were almost entirely based on cattle. People imbibed the blood with their morning milk. Cattle rustling between tribes was endemic, which probably explained the high level of armament. Where there were fields to be tilled, the women did the work, while the men strutted around or worked assiduously on freshening up their body paint. Both sexes relaxed by smoking herbs in large gourd pipes.

  They made the most wonderful pictures, of course, especially against a backdrop of what must be the most glorious landscape in eastern Africa. In the journal I kept at that time, I can see the note: ‘I have shot fifty-six rolls of film some of which exposed properly should be some of my best work, but of course I shall have to hold my breath until I get back to Batcombe and develop them.’

  The one thing my photographs failed to depict with any accuracy was the flies, huge, invasive biters which would come at you in droves. It’s true they eased off in the evenings, but then the mosquitoes would show up promptly for the night shift. I restricted my first visit to the Omo valley to three weeks, partly because of the flies, but mainly to get back to Catherine and tend my romance. Even so, I would return later and develop enough extra material for a book, which Jonathan Cape published in 2005 as Don McCullin in Africa.

  I was proud to marry a heavily pregnant Catherine at Bath Registry Office on 7 December 2002. Mark Shand, who had been so instrumental in the matchmaking, was once again my best man, albeit with the caution, ‘For the last time, I hope’. Our son Max was born three weeks later. Our joy at his arrival was matched, possibly even exceeded, by that of Catherine’s parents, who now had their first, much longed-for grandchild from their eldest daughter. Charlie Glass accepted an invitation to become my son’s godfather.

  When Max was three months old, both his father and his godfather took off for a war zone. This perhaps requires some explanation, especially on my part after twelve years of total abstinence from war since Iraq in 1991. I will try to provide it in the next chapter.

  44. MY PHONEY WAR

  Sitting in my Somerset garden with a mind to enjoy the birdsong and the soft rolling hills should, in theory, have provided the best of all antidotes to any thoughts of war. But in the early weeks of 2003, almost the total opposite was the case.

  My village was directly under a military flight path and the songs of the birds would be obliterated by the harsh engine noise of dive-bombing aircraft flown by pilots readying themselves for a threatened war in Iraq. At other times there would be the eerily familiar flapping sound of Chinook helicopters, taking me straight back to Vietnam. At any moment now, I’d think, the doors are going to open and I’ll have to jump out and sprint across a paddy field.

  Even without this overhead prompting, I probably would have been preoccupied with military matters. I had never got out of the habit of scanning the news for signs of potential conflict, and it did seem to me that the Americans were winding themselves up for a really big one—something that might be construed as payback for the aerial demolition of the Twin Towers in New York (11 September 2001), which in the United States ranked as a date of infamy on a par with, or even eclipsing, Pearl Harbor.

  While there was still a degree of uncertainty about whether the British prime minister Tony Blair intended to align himself with the American president George Bush in mobilising an assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Guardian newspaper asked me to write the commentary for a selection of pictures taken by other photographers during the 1991 Gulf War, many of which had not been published before.

  They were undeniably gruesome, with a heavy emphasis on the ‘turkey shoot’ of fleeing Iraqi soldiers, but absolutely true to the horror of that war. I wrote about the pictures: ‘They are a huge indictment of war’s ugliness. And they are crying out for us to put a stop to it.’

  The Guardian ran the images across sixteen pages of its G2 Section on 14 February, the day before London was clogged with a million protesters, my mother-in-law Maria Fairweather being one of them, all marching against any declaration of war on Iraq.

  I am not suggesting my commentary had much to do with it. I don’t think even the Guardian’s circulation department would fancy its chances of mobilising as many as 50,000 protesters, let alone a million. And, in fact, most of the actual feedback from readers about the Guardian’s Gulf War images was negative. They thought the pictures were too graphic for a family newspaper, and that there was an element of scaremongering about the display. Later on, after Blair threw in his lot with the Americans, it could be argued that they were nowhere near scary enough.

  Despite my keen interest in the approach to the war, I really did not expect to get involved in any way. With a new wife and young child to look out for, it seemed that this would have to be just another conflict that could only be followed imperfectly at a distance on a flickering television screen. The thing that altered my expectation was another of those Lucifer-like telephone calls from Charlie Glass.

  ‘We could make it to the war,’ Charlie said. There was even a way into it, he thought, through terrain that was familiar to us in Kurdistan, which could give us a distinct edge over any opposition. I have to admit, I was immediately excited. That part of me that was addicted to war was, I realised, as powerful as ever and Charlie was offering it a last chance to express itself. I was only a few months off my seventieth birthday, so the opportunity to cover any future conflicts appeared to be absurdly remote. It seemed be now or never; I decided on now.

  I flew to Turkey and made my way to the border with Iraq where a mob of newsmen had assembled, all hoping to get into Iraq before any shots were fired. There were a few, like the BBC’s Jim Muir and John Simpson, who I knew reasonably well, but there were also representatives from a host of different countries, most of whom I’d never seen before. And some had disturbing stories to tell.

  It appeared that they had been refused entry into Iraq from Kuwait by the American army, and been redirected to the north. This was not a good sign, as it indicated that there would almost certainly be no northern front to the military operation. In fact, the Turkish government had already risked American displeasure by denying use of its territory to invade Iraq. And the Turks were none too friendly towards us, either. They would bus us over the border down to Erbil, the Kurdish capital, but indicated that we would not be welcome back.

  When I met up with Charlie in Kurdistan, I found him chewing over another disappointment. The Kurds, apparently toeing an ­American-imposed policy line, were not disposed to be helpful. Our presence during their 1991 uprising was not cutting any ice at all. He did not think we could derive much advantage from our presumed strong Kurdish connection.

  The only route into the possibility of real action seemed to involve buddying up with Ahmad Chalabi, an exotic businessman who fancied himself as Iraq’s next leader after Saddam had received his comeuppance. In the months leading up to the conflict, Chalabi was said to have been prominent among those who persuaded George Bush’s administration that Saddam was hoarding a cache of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which we would all later find out was very much not the case. However, at that time Chalabi was seen as a significant figure, though some described him as ‘an American puppet’. He also assumed importance in our eyes from being, as far as we could judge, the only game in town. Charlie and I became regular callers on him and his support group.

  Chalabi’s residence, on a hill overlooking Suleimaniya, was a large house that had once been a palace for Saddam’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, more familiarly called ‘Chemical Ali’ as the man who had ordered the gas bombing of Halabja. Chalabi himself, however, spent most of his time in its garden. He would wander around the shrubbery rather flamboyantly making his top-security calls to Washington, giving an impression, which was actually entirely genuine, that the Pentagon or the State Department or even the CIA was on the other end of the line. More concrete visible evidence of Chalabi’s clout was provided by seven hundred heavily armed
followers of his cause, all allegedly kitted out by the Pentagon, who were billeted nearby.

  Following those supporters, we figured, was bound to lead us to the action. We thought we could be on to a winner. The only problem was that they did not seem to be at all inclined to go anywhere. Weeks went by and the only action we saw was Chalabi making his increasingly animated international phone calls. There was nothing much for me to photograph. To while away the time, I took a nice picture of some Erbil children playing in the street, and a few of Peshmerga fighters on training exercises, plus some shots of Chalabi in oratorical mode. But it was really only practice. I also got invited to photograph the remains of a suicide bomber in the local morgue, but I passed on that opportunity.

  In desperation, Charlie came up with the notion that we should ditch the idea of following Chalabi’s men, hire a boat, and sail the eighty miles down to Baghdad. He had an elegant name for this vessel, The Queen of Tigris, but nothing serviceable to attach it to. On our first visit to the riverside we were barred from renting a boat by the local Kurdish officials. We had better luck on a second visit, but the boats available to us all proved too small and nothing like stable enough for Charlie’s regular satellite transmission chinwags with ABC News in New York.

  So it was back to watching and waiting. In the meantime, my money ran out. Charlie generously bailed me out, and got clearance to elevate me to the rank of ABC temporary staff in the field. Even so, I was deeply conscious of already overrunning my expected leave of absence from Catherine and Max, and still in the process of getting nowhere fast.

  There was some excitement among the pressmen when it was rumoured that the Peshmerga were preparing a new assault on Kirkuk, as part of the overall war plan. This was not exactly what we had come for, but it was at least some indication of real action which Charlie and I would be excellently placed to cover, as we were among the few who had reported on the 1991 uprising. Jim Muir’s BBC team also took the rumour seriously, with tragic consequences. As their car manoeuvred into position outside Kirkuk it detonated an old landmine, killing the team’s Iranian cameraman and injuring a producer. But the rumoured assault on Kirkuk was never made. The Americans, it transpired, were firmly against it.