by Mark Austin
Well, that’s all happened. But still the war goes on. And now fewer and fewer people understand why.
We can’t win it in any recognised military sense. At least, not without putting troops into Pakistan. And even then it’s unlikely. In fact, it would only make things worse.
So people ask, ‘Why?’ And when the bodies still come home, the sadness becomes tinged now with anger.
The war invaded our lives in another way last week too. It was when an American soldier went berserk, slaughtering 16 men, women and children as they lay sleeping in their beds. We know these things happen in war and perhaps we shut our minds to it when the war is perceived to be ‘worth it’.
But when the cry is already ‘What on Earth are we doing there?’ such atrocities stamp on our sensitivities, they tear at our tolerance and make the call for an exit from Afghanistan ever louder.
Politically, too, things are starting to go awry. President Karzai, corrupt and weak, is making great play of telling NATO to keep its troops out of Afghan villages and in their bases. It is very difficult to fight a war on that basis. And this war can only be fought with the consent of the Afghan government and people.
And then there’s the Taliban deciding to withdraw from any talks about peace with the Americans.
PM David Cameron and US President Barack Obama are both speaking bravely about ‘real progress’ and finishing the joint mission in Afghanistan.
And in a way they are right to do so. But the war has invaded all our lives. The cost in cash and in fatalities is being questioned. And there’s no greater challenge to politicians overseeing a conflict than a growing cry of ‘Why?’
Just after the deaths of the six soldiers, I interviewed the then defence secretary, Philip Hammond. The exchange went like this:
MA: What would you say to the families of young soldiers about to deploy to Afghanistan, and who are maybe thinking, ‘Why on earth are we there?’
PH: We are there because our national security interest demands it.
MA: But it doesn’t, does it; our national security interest doesn’t demand it. There’s a bigger security threat from Pakistan or Somalia than from Afghanistan right now.
PH: If we cut and run, you can be sure you will see a resurgence of international terrorist training in Afghanistan.
So this was the problem. After eleven years in Afghanistan, the international community was in a situation where they couldn’t leave, because the security situation would deteriorate. The Afghan national forces simply were not – and still are not – up to the job. It is the war with no end. It is an expensive mess.
Now, clearly, American and British troops fought, and some still fight, with remarkable courage and tenacity in Afghanistan. There are numerous stories of incredible bravery and sacrifice that have been told and recognized many times.
I can speak best of the British forces that I worked with in Afghanistan. And having spent time with them; having slept, eaten and drank alongside them in various godforsaken hell-holes, and been protected by them as well, I can testify to not only the courage, but also to the decency, warmth and friendliness they showed to the Afghan people in the most hideously difficult circumstances.
But could I say now, as things stand in Afghanistan, that it has been a sacrifice worth making? I honestly don’t think I could. And it breaks my heart to say that.
So, intervention is littered with failures and difficulties. The best of intentions often end up buried in an unforeseen quagmire. But that doesn’t mean intervention is wrong. It can work and has worked, in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and East Timor. But these missions all had something in common. They were limited in scope and time and commitment, and most important of all, they were doable.
Interventions that become wholesale exercises in nation rebuilding, that try to impose Western ideals on a culture not fully understood or appreciated, are likely to end in chaos and failure. Or in the case of Afghanistan, just never end.
But if there’s now often little political will for international military interventions around the world, you would assume there would be unanimous support for international justice for those guilty of atrocities, war crimes and genocide.
Well, your assumption would be wrong. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has the idealistic goal of putting on trial the perpetrators of the world’s worst atrocities – genocide, major war crimes and crimes against humanity. Over 120 countries support it, but the United States is not one of them. Nor is China, nor Israel.
And that’s not the only problem. There are several flaws. Without an international police force, it relies on the cooperation of member states, some of whose leaders may one day be wanted for prosecution by the court. Also, the wheels of international justice turn frustratingly slowly. The ICC was founded in 2002, and it was ten years before it secured its first conviction.
Furthermore, nine out of its eleven investigations to date have focused on Africa, leading to claims of neo-colonial bias. It’s also massively expensive; over one billion dollars has been spent, but it has thus far only convicted four people.
The ICC has two main purposes: to provide justice and peace of mind for victims and their relatives; and to act as a deterrent to others. On both counts, it has not been very successful. Victims are frustrated by the long delays and the frequent failure to convict, and atrocities continue unabated. The international community has failed to prevent terrible crimes in Syria, and attempts to refer the conflict to the ICC were blocked by Russia and China.
In 2005, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for the warlord Joseph Kony, whose guerrilla group, the Lord’s Resistance Army, was responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 people in the Central African Republic. From 1987 to 2006, the armed group also abducted more than 20,000 children to use as soldiers, servants or sex slaves, according to Unicef.
But despite a search involving Ugandan and US forces, Mr Kony continues to avoid capture. Though Ugandan soldiers did manage to recover Mr Kony’s bathtub, which his slaves carried around for him in the bush for years. So no bath, but also no justice. His victims deserve better.
The genocide in Rwanda and war in Yugoslavia had their own international criminal tribunals and both have been severely criticized. The Rwanda court sat for about fifteen years, cost around £1.5 billion, and after a genocide in which up to a million people were killed, indicted only ninety-three people.
It took the Yugoslavia court twenty-two years to arrest and convict Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb commander dubbed the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’. He was responsible for the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, as well as the four-year siege of Sarajevo during which nearly 10,000 civilians died.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but at the age of seventy-four. The relatives of his victims will be asking, ‘Why so little, so late?’ Many of them are still looking for the remains, the bones, of their loved ones. It will not seem like proper justice to them.
And what message does it send to victims in Syria or in Yemen? What hope does it give them? And what message does it send to the tyrants of today?
A better way forward than cumbersome and slow international judicial processes may be independent national inquiries, backed by prosecutions within national court systems supported by outside legal help. Such prosecutions would ideally begin while the crimes and the evidence are recent and the witnesses still alive. They could, if necessary, be staged in neutral countries. It already happens to some extent: Sweden and Germany have both investigated and prosecuted war crimes in Syria using evidence partly gathered by human rights organizations in the country, under a mechanism created by the UN in late 2016.
There has to be a system with more teeth and more urgency than that which currently exists. At the very least, there has to be an international consensus that war criminals must be tracked down and not allowed to disappear because it’s too difficult to find them or because some political deal is done to give them immunity. As the journalist Janine
di Giovanni, who’s covered Bosnia, central Africa, Rwanda and Syria, has said: ‘Then perhaps the Robert Mugabes, the Bashar al-Assads, the Joseph Konys will know that they will never get away with what they did. That we will hunt them down, that we will find them, we will get them. That they will never hide or walk away.’
Unfortunately, as it stands, they will instead be bolstered by the likelihood that no international force will come to stop or arrest them, and that international justice will probably never catch up with them. And this, in the twenty-first century, is an abandonment of every conceivable moral obligation.
ANCHORMAN
THERE ARE TWO truisms about working in television news: you have the most fun as a reporter, but you make the most money as a newsreader. Trust me, I’ve done both.
It’s also true that this state of affairs is not fair; reporting is much harder work. It involves long, often unsociable hours; repeated, unpredictable interruptions to family life; tedious drives, endless flights, and accompanying it all, the nagging, ever-present fear of missing a big story.
An anchorman or newsreader has none of those worries. All he or she is required to do, for the most part, is look presentable and read clearly, with correct pronunciation and without too many slip-ups. You earn your money when big stories break while you are on air – or, heaven forbid, things go wrong in the studio – but otherwise it is pretty straightforward.
My daughter Beatrice summed it up nicely when aged about five. Her class was asked by the teacher to tell everyone what their parents did for a job. ‘My mum’s a doctor and my dad reads out loud at night,’ announced Beatrice.
The former Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman is openly contemptuous of the job of news presenting. ‘You need a skill or two to be a successful newsreader,’ he writes, ‘mainly the ability to knot your tie, put your trousers on the right way round, and to sound as if you vaguely know what you’re talking about.’
Very amusing, and not far wrong – apart, obviously, from the fact that he seems to assume it is a job for men…
But given how simple it’s supposed to be, I was, in the beginning at least, a pretty terrible newscaster. I was nervous, hesitant, and rattled through the script just to get it over and done with. I would also sometimes develop a bead of sweat on my upper lip that made me look shifty and unconvincing – all qualities, if that’s the word, not regularly associated with delivering the nation’s news of an evening.
I was inexplicably promoted before I was remotely ready and was asked to present an evening news programme with Kirsty Young. After a few links she turned to me and, in that soft but firm Scottish voice of hers, said, ‘Just slow down, Mark. We really do have to make this last half an hour!’
It was often rabbit-in-the-headlights stuff. A joke started going round.
Q: In a room full of secret service agents how can you tell which is Mark Austin?
A: He’s the stiff one.
I also had the unerring knack of, every now and then, looking at the wrong camera. The red light on top of the ‘live’ camera should have been the clue, but even that proved too difficult.
In the early days I was named ‘Wally of the Week’ by the Daily Star newspaper. Twice. The first occasion was when I warned viewers who didn’t want to know the score of an England football match, the highlights of which followed the news, to ‘look away now’. We then put up a caption with the score and I remained silent… until the director cut back to me and I said, ‘Great win there for England.’ It was an ad-lib from nowhere. Utterly inexplicable!
The second occasion was for another programme, on which I was supposed to announce that the African nation of Eritrea had won its first ever World Athletics Championship gold medal in a particular event. But I actually said the medal was won by Ethiopia, a country that just happened to be at war with Eritrea at the time.
Punctuation − or the lack of it − is another pitfall awaiting the inattentive anchorman. One night on News at Ten, I was supposed to open the programme with the following sentence: ‘Good evening, paedophiles in Britain who fail to notify authorities when moving home will in future face the wrath of the law.’
Unfortunately, the pause after ‘Good evening’ was rather shorter than it should have been, and it sounded very much like I was saying ‘Good evening paedophiles…’
Cue much Twitter faux-outrage and hilarity along the lines of ‘You speak for yourself, mate…’ Within minutes, Jonathan Ross, who happened to be watching at home, was posting a video of the mistake to his five million followers. It wasn’t helpful. Before the end of the programme, and completely unbeknown to me, it had gone viral and the ITN press officer was getting calls from newspapers anxious for a comment.
When I came off air I returned to the newsroom completely oblivious to my gaffe, until I picked up my mobile phone and noticed a text message from my daughter: ‘You’re all over social media. Congratulations.’ I logged on to Twitter and all became embarrassingly clear. Thanks, Wossy.
It got worse. On the following Friday, the clip got another public airing, this time on the BBC’s Have I Got News for You. Paul Merton’s quip was right on the money: ‘And people say commas aren’t important!’
He’s right, but the BBC isn’t immune either. One of their news presenters opened a programme like this: ‘This is BBC World News. I’m Jonathan Charles kept hidden for over two decades and forced to bear children…’ A little comma there may have helped.
On another occasion, I fell victim to a lack of concentration and too much punctuation. I was reading out an introduction to a very serious story about an earthquake in Pakistan. Thousands of people had been killed and we had sent our top reporters to the scene to cover the aftermath.
What I was supposed to say was that our international affairs editor Bill Neely ‘saw first-hand relief efforts getting under way’. Instead, because of a rogue comma, I actually said he ‘saw, first, hand relief efforts getting under way’.
There were gasps and not a few chuckles in my earpiece, and my co-presenter, Mary Nightingale, turned to me with a look of horror on her face as the videotaped report from Neely mercifully began to play. ‘Did you really say what I think you said?’ said Mary.
‘Yes, I think I did.’ I replied.
It is slightly depressing when you have covered some of the biggest stories of our times that the most common question you get asked is: ‘What’s the worst mistake you’ve made on television?’
As you see, I have plenty of contenders.
But because of technological advances, the job of newscasting has dramatically changed over the last fifteen years or so, and it no longer just involves reading a script from an autocue. Mobile and lightweight broadcasting technology now enable news anchors to get out to the scene of big stories and present entire programmes from location.
This is something I have done a lot of over the last couple of decades. It enables the newscaster to have a role in actually reporting on the story and to have ownership of it in a way that I think really resonates with the viewer. It makes the job more difficult, but also more rewarding.
I agree it is pointless sending news anchors out of the studio to simply read a few scripts. That’s a complete waste of time and money. The key for anchors on location is to add real value to the programme by being there. It is something I felt very strongly about at ITN and was keen to do at every worthwhile opportunity.
It was a huge privilege to work for ITN, a pioneering news organization whose great tradition, it always seemed to me, was built on the very best eyewitness reporting by gifted correspondents, who transported the viewer to the heart of the story. And I was also convinced it was at its best when taking the programme on location to front original journalism, highlighted by compelling camerawork and sharp writing. I believe combining experience as a reporter or foreign correspondent with the job of anchor can make a real difference to the coverage.
Presenting from location, when the story warranted it, added to the sense of an ambit
ious, risk-taking, news organization that offered an exciting and different product to the BBC. They had decided, two or three years ago, to cut back on location anchoring, in the face of growing criticism about the way licence fee money was being spent.
Rather than embracing and exploiting that difference, ITV News, under new leadership, chose to become more like the BBC. It was a strange way, in my view, to take the fight to the opposition and to try to attract some of their viewers. It was all rather odd and sad. Long, studio-based interviews or conversations with correspondents now eat up precious minutes that could be given to first-hand reporting.
One of the reasons I was given was that they no longer had the money to do it. I am sure that is partly true, but news coverage is about choices. I am not convinced this was the right one. At Sky News there is no such reluctance to present coverage from the scene, in fact it is part of their raison d’être and one of their strengths.
ITN’s former editor, Deborah Turness, was a great proponent of taking the show on the road. She was hugely imaginative and bold and came up with some cracking ideas – among, it has to be said, numerous less good ones. But that was her way, and by and large it worked! She was fearless, risk-taking and unswervingly loyal, and it was her who sent me on one of the most amazing trips of my lifetime: to the Antarctic.
Climate change was one of Deborah’s obsessions, and she came up with a series called ‘Three Degrees from Disaster’. The investigation highlighted that if temperatures were to rise by just 3 degrees Celsius more, we could reach the point of no return. Melting ice caps would lead to a dramatic rise in sea levels, threatening the lives of millions of people around the world.
The then ITV News science editor Lawrence McGinty travelled around the world to see the environmental hotspots where climate change is already most obvious. His amazing journey covered the massive destruction of the Brazilian rainforest, the deserts forming in China due to drought, the risk of flooding in the Seychelles and the melting ice sheet in Greenland.