by Mark Austin
Reporters and camera crews would soon begin to fly in from around the world. We needed to stay ahead. ITN had decided to send in another reporter and camera team overnight. It was Robert Moore, an experienced correspondent, first-rate operator and a good friend. I was glad it was him. Meanwhile, Glenda had decided to hire a small plane to move several drums of aviation fuel much nearer to the scene. Now it would only take minutes to refuel rather than hours. We would be able to film most of the following day. It was a master stroke.
Shortly after first light on the Monday, we were airborne with Pingo again. This time the rescue helicopters were there before us. Seven of them by now, covering a wider area than simply Chokwe. We decided to head to Xai-Xai, another town where people were stranded and dying. It emerged that in three days the Limpopo valley had experienced 75 per cent of its normal annual rainfall.
Xai-Xai, like Chokwe, was almost completely submerged. Rescues were taking place, but thousands were still stranded. We watched one helicopter lower towards the raging floodwaters, where a young boy was struggling to stay afloat. A crew member was winched down and tried to grab the boy, but the waters were carrying him off very quickly. The boy drifted away. The pilot quickly swung the helicopter around with the winchman still below. It was dangerous and difficult. The rescuer tried again, and this time, mercifully, he was able to grab the child and lift him to safety.
Rescues like this were happening all over the place. Below us, two men in a boat were pulling a fallen pine tree through the water. Only when we looked more closely did we see a man clinging to the pine. Later, a family of six were rescued; they’d been surviving on corrugated sheeting they had managed to wedge between two branches of a tree.
Pingo put us down in Xai-Xai and we transferred to a rescue boat to get more footage. It was another dramatic day. Combined with footage from the day before, we cut nine minutes for the Evening News.
That night, everybody was arriving. Matt Frei of the BBC, Jon Snow of Channel 4 News, and many other ‘big hitters’. Snow was gracious enough to tell me that we had beaten everybody and that our Sunday piece was ‘powerful television’.
The following day was again remarkable, and because we had pre-positioned our fuel, we stole a march on our rivals. There was one very awkward moment when, as we were refuelling close to Chokwe, another helicopter set down close to us and Matt Frei jumped out. They were also low on fuel and wanted to know if they could use the drums in the field. It would save them a two-hour round trip to Maputo. I was on the verge of saying yes when Glenda intervened. ‘Listen, that is our fuel that I arranged for our helicopter,’ she said. ‘We’re not handing it out to anyone, particularly the BBC.’ She was adamant, and in the cut-throat, win-at-all-costs world of television news, she was probably right.
Glenda was a prodigiously good fixer on the ground on big stories. She got things done and was effective and well organized. She was also fiercely competitive. Matt Frei was rather taken aback. He thought we were being churlish. But off he went to Maputo.
I felt bad, he was a friend. But it meant we were still ahead.
I upset another friend that day, too. Our own Robert Moore was putting together a piece on the displaced people and those in makeshift hospitals. As darkness approached he wanted to do a piece to camera on a roof in Chokwe, where scores of people were still waiting to be rescued.
He asked to borrow Pingo and the helicopter to drop him nearby. But it was getting late and we needed to get back to Maputo. We agreed that Pingo would drop Robert and his camera team, then fly us back to Maputo and return to get Robert. There was just enough daylight left.
Things were going to plan until Pingo hit some technical problem with his aircraft that required attention in Maputo. By the time it was fixed, darkness was falling and there was not enough time to get Robert. He spent the night in Chokwe, where he tells me he was eaten alive by mosquitoes and had no food or water. He also told me that at one stage he had to take refuge in a tree as snakes started appearing in the flood water. I am not sure he has ever forgiven me. To this day he thinks it was somehow my idea of a practical joke. Robert, it wasn’t. But it was still highly amusing.
As we edited that evening, a call came in from London asking whether we had the pictures of the baby born in a tree. We hadn’t. It turns out that a film crew from the South Africa Broadcasting Corporation travelling in one of the SADF helicopters had filmed the rescue of the baby and mother, Carolina Chirindza. She had gone into labour while clinging to the branches of a flimsy tree. Her mother-in-law held a sarong under her to catch the baby and prevent it falling into the crocodile-infested waters below. Mother and baby – named Rosita, after the infant’s grandmother – were lifted away and taken to dry land, where an exhausted Carolina cradled her newborn in drenched linen. Rosita became the symbol of the floods. By now, an appeal for donations in Britain had reached £20 million. The incredible story of the baby born in the tree was to boost that still further.
Such was Rosita’s celebrity that in the coming months the family was given a three-bedroom house by the local authorities. Carolina was offered a job as a cleaner by the district administrator, and slowly she was lifted out of poverty. Four and a half months after her birth, Rosita and her mother travelled to Washington DC to lobby Congress for more aid to help tens of thousands of Mozambicans affected by the catastrophe. A plaque has been erected on the mafura (mahogany) tree where she was born.
The full impact of the flooding only became clear a few weeks later. The damage was colossal. Farmland and crops were destroyed for hundreds of square miles. In 2000, nothing was grown at all over 1,500 square kilometres of some of the most productive arable land in Mozambique. Thousands of homes were destroyed, farms were ruined, clinics and schools washed away. Hundreds of people died from cholera due to filthy water, and malaria killed many others. More than 100,000 farming families lost their livelihoods. And it was not only crops that were destroyed – 20,000 head of cattle, the mainstay for some of the poorest families, were swept away in the floods or died from disease in the aftermath.
Irrigation systems all over the country were broken and the infrastructure was devastated; the main railway lines from Mozambique to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Swaziland were destroyed. And there was another, much under-reported consequence of the flooding. Much of the landmine clearance work in that part of the country was set back many years. The power of the floodwaters moved mines that had been marked for clearance. And the markings of many others disappeared, meaning the painstaking, life-saving work would have to be done all over again. The bill for damage and relief efforts of the flooding ran to well over £1 billion.
The suffering of those poor people was appalling. And yet, a few months later, Andy and I were sitting in an elegant banqueting hall in a plush New York hotel waiting to hear if we had won an Emmy award for our coverage. It has always sat uncomfortably with me that we should win awards for covering events that involve natural disasters, conflict, tragedy and death. It seems to me exploitative and unnecessary. What we do is not entertainment; it is real, it is news. We haven’t created anything, as such. In Mozambique, we had merely been witness to and reported on a terrible catastrophe in which real people died and suffered enormous losses. It just didn’t seem right that we should gather in black tie, eat good food, drink fine champagne and toast our ‘good fortune’ at being there. It all felt a bit exploitative, even fraudulent.
Anyway, win we did. And boy did we celebrate – despite my reservations. At one stage we actually left the award itself in some bar in downtown New York, before Andy’s wife pointed out that it was missing. It was still there when we went back, and it has been on a shelf at home to this day.
Andy went on to win Television Technician of the Year at the Royal Television Society Journalism Awards a couple of months later, and we also won a BAFTA.
Derek Maude was right: ‘Don’t give me a good reporter, give me a lucky reporter.’
In Mozambique, we were luck
y. Very lucky.
TERRY LLOYD
IT WAS NEVER a foregone conclusion that Terry Lloyd would go to war in Iraq in 2003. On the face of it, he was an obvious candidate. He was a very experienced, tenacious war reporter who knew the Middle East; he was comfortable covering conflicts and would not let the team down. In normal circumstances, he would have been a natural pick by the new editor of ITV News, David Mannion. What’s more, Mannion was one of Terry’s best mates.
But these were not normal circumstances for Terry Lloyd. Terry was recovering from a crisis in his personal life. His marriage was on the rocks, he’d been drinking heavily, and his work and family life had suffered. But at the beginning of 2003 he was on the mend and the old Terry was coming back. When it became clear that war with Saddam was almost inevitable, he threw his hat in the ring like many other reporters.
For David Mannion it was not a straightforward decision. He knew Terry was still getting over what had been a tough time. But he also thought it would be the perfect opportunity for Terry to lose himself once again in the job he loved. And he wasn’t the only one. Terry was very keen to go. He always used to say, ‘There’s only one thing worse than going to war… and that’s not going to war.’ He was only half joking.
Terry was one hell of a reporter. It was he who revealed to the world Saddam Hussein’s massacre of thousands of Kurds in the town of Halabja in northern Iraq in 1988. It was the first real evidence of Saddam’s slaughter of his own people with poison gas during the Iran–Iraq war.
Six years later, he reported exclusively from the Balkans on the discovery of mass graves at Ovcara, which contained the remains of almost three hundred Croatian men who had been marched at gunpoint, by Serb militiamen, from the nearby hospital in Vukovar.
And in 1999, when journalists were refused entry into Kosovo, Lloyd and his cameraman, Mike Inglis, trekked for days over snow-capped mountains from Montenegro to film the Serbian advance and talk to refugees on their way out. This is part of his report on the way back along the mountain path:
At long last, we were approaching safety along the beaten track, which has become a lifeline for so many. Journeys end back at the foot of the mountain range. It’s been an exhausting experience, and it can only be sheer terror which forces the young and the old, the women and the children to make that arduous and perilous trek across the mountains. Thousands have pushed the limits of human endurance already, and many more will try if they can.
It was typical Terry Lloyd – less concerned about the state of the war than of the civilians caught up in it. They were the story. And he was going to find them.
He was well-used to danger, but said he’d ‘never been so frightened’ as when he was attacked by the footballer Eric Cantona on a beach in Guadeloupe. Lloyd tracked down and confronted the Manchester United star two weeks after Cantona had aimed a kung-fu kick at a Crystal Palace fan, an incident caught on live television. Terry maintained he was on the receiving end of a similar kick.
In truth, Terry took kicks aplenty in life, but he always got up, dusted himself off and went back to it. He was one of life’s erratic, maverick, unpredictable – but ultimately good and warm-hearted – guys.
In 2003, he only had one thing on his mind. Getting to Iraq, to the heart of the story, and doing what he did best: putting together well-constructed, sharply written, cleverly shot news reports for ITN. David Mannion had to let him go.
Terry relished that opportunity, and it showed.
And so it was on a mid-March evening in 2003 that Terry and I met up in the restaurant of the Sheraton Hotel in Kuwait. It was the gathering place for international media awaiting the outbreak of war. It was a place of strutting reporters and camera crews, all bravado and talk, but which, if my own feelings were anything to go by, only served to conceal an inner apprehension and fearfulness about what the coming days and weeks would bring. It was a particularly tense time for Terry and me and our camera teams, because we knew that we would be operating inside Iraq on our own.
There were two types of correspondent in that war: embedded and unilateral. The embedded reporters and camera crews in Kuwait were already in place in the desert, attached to the military and awaiting the first move across the border. They would be stuck with their units for the entirety of the conflict, producing ‘pooled’ eyewitness reports for most of the main UK news broadcasters. It is the way the military prefers to do things, and the broadcasters have little option but to sign up to the rules and regulations imposed by the armed forces. The camera teams get fed, watered, transported and protected, but they also get censored. The military’s media liaison teams closely watch everything that is being filmed, edited and transmitted, and control what you can say in your scripts. I personally don’t like it, and would rather not sign up to anything that allowed a military officer to control what I broadcast. But it enables footage to emerge from the front lines that would otherwise be too difficult or too dangerous to access. It is a trade-off, but in my view an unsatisfactory one unless you are very fortunate with the senior officers and minders you are placed with.
In Kuwait, Terry and I were not embedded. We would be unilaterals: free-roaming, unrestricted and uncensored, but also largely unprotected. It was the way we both preferred it. We could make our own plans in consultation with each other, and we could head for wherever we felt the story was taking us.
Even though we were not attached to a military unit, the Ministry of Defence still insisted we were accredited as war correspondents. Terry and I had to go to another hotel in Kuwait to pick up our credentials and to get a briefing from a senior British officer, Colonel Chris Vernon, someone I had come to like and trust. But our meeting in Kuwait was a difficult one. Vernon essentially warned us to stay away from British troops. ‘I don’t want you anywhere near my battlefield’ were his exact words. It was the clearest possible indication that they didn’t want independent journalists roaming freely around the conflict zone.
The colonel made out it was a safety issue. ‘We won’t have the time, the men, the inclination to protect you. You’ll be on your own and you should be aware of the risks of doing that,’ he said. But that wasn’t the whole truth.
They didn’t want reporters they couldn’t control anywhere near the war. They wanted to manage the message. They wanted their version of events to be the story. They wanted the reporters with them to be in uniform, part of the military operation. They wanted them, in fact, to be part of the war effort. They even gave embedded journalists the honorary rank of major.
This was nothing new; censorship in war is as old as war itself. But the stark reality of it in Iraq made me anxious. I totally understand that war reporters have to be very careful about reporting any information or event that will be of comfort or use to the enemy. Of course it should be that way. I would never, without agreement, report the disposition of forces or British losses or anything else that could help the enemy or pose a threat to British troops.
But, equally, I believe you cannot wittingly report partial truths or half truths or be used for propaganda purposes. There has to be the fullest reporting possible. It seemed to me, in Iraq, that the control demanded by the British military was well beyond what should be journalistically acceptable. Censorship may be tolerable when the war is going well, when journalists have successes to report. But when things take a turn for the worse and the difficulties really emerge, I feel you need to be able to say that – which is not a view often shared by the military. It is then that military needs and journalistic demands become hopelessly irreconciled.
I was alarmed. ‘Fucking helpful, that is,’ I said to Terry after the meeting.
Terry was more pragmatic. ‘What do you expect him to say? They want to control us or ban us. We just have to do our job.’
He was right, and it made me more determined than ever to do that job properly. Embedded journalism was a necessary part of our coverage. But perhaps more important was our own journalism, free of censorship and restriction
. Embedded reporters would not be able to tell the whole story. It was, therefore, crucial that we could. Can there be a more important role for journalists than to report without fear or favour what happens when our young men and women go to war in our name? Or, at least, in our government’s name?
The colonel’s attitude reinforced my belief that Terry and I had, now more than ever, a responsibility to the viewers. It may sound pompous, but that is honestly the way it felt to us.
Colonel Vernon was, however, very forthcoming and useful about the British intentions in the early days of the war. He led us to believe that British armour and troops, both the 7th Armoured Brigade, known as the Desert Rats, and the Marines, would be heading straight for the port city of Basra in southern Iraq, and also that there would be little to stand in their way.
Furthermore, intelligence from inside Basra suggested that the population there would welcome British forces with open arms, and that there would be celebrations and dancing in the streets. A sense of liberation.
The British were hopeful that upon the outbreak of war, the inhabitants of Basra would mount a popular insurrection against Saddam Hussein’s forces in the city. In fact, they would encourage it, with the aim that it would trigger similar revolts in other cities in southern Iraq with a predominantly Shia population, as was the case in 1991 in the wake of the Gulf War. There was no love lost between the Shias and Saddam, who was born a Sunni and treated Shiites appallingly as a result, despite being a secular dictator.
Such a scenario would hugely assist the efforts of US–British forces to overcome resistance from loyalist militias and the regular Iraqi army, and would enable them to concentrate efforts on toppling the regime in Baghdad.
We were also told that the liberation of Basra would remove a threat to northern supply lines, help secure the southern oilfields and enable a full-scale relief and humanitarian effort to get under way pretty quickly. The British, it seemed, had it all thought out, and they were prepared to tell us.