What Was I Thinking: A Memoir

by Paul Henry

  ‘Well, I feel I’m getting quite close to finding out what’s going on,’ I said.

  ‘You must be getting quite close for people to want to kill you,’ he said.

  So in a way the trip had been a success, because I had got closer than anyone else. But I hung up wondering how I could explain to people that was a success and that this was the time to leave. Was I leaving because I was scared or because I was not stupid? Why was I leaving instead of staying when I was so close and could presumably go all the way?

  So I decided to stay.

  After that phone call I started sleeping on the floor in case anyone tried to shoot me in my bed. Every night I would wake up at the slightest sound, which was often gunfire. It was an uncomfortable and unpleasant time.

  When I needed to arrange meetings I communicated with people I didn’t know and couldn’t see via messages I put in newspapers with my contact details and where I could be found. There would have been no point making my location secret. One of the people who worked for me passed on the newspapers to people in the impenetrable forest or wherever they would be likely to see them. Then he was killed, and I had reason to think it was because he was a local and helping me. That changed things for me. It was my adventure but it wasn’t just my life at risk. And for what? I was sure Douglas Kear was dead. Staying didn’t really make sense.

  Not long after, one of the Africans from Kampala who had contacted me before came to see me.

  ‘We need to go and meet some people,’ he said. ‘I’ve arranged it.’

  It was a four-hour walk to get to the meeting place, and I had a very bad feeling about it. I thought about calling it off, even as we were on our way. Then I realised that, as dangerous as it was, this could be as close as I would get to finding out what happened to Douglas Kear. So I carried on, knowing it was quite dangerous. We came to a clearing where the meeting was to take place, and while we were waiting my companion told me he had a gun. I was furious.

  ‘You shouldn’t have brought a gun,’ I said. ‘There is no chance that you can kill all of the people that are coming to this meeting before they kill us, so why would you kill any? You kill one and there’s no chance we’re going to stay alive.’

  The next minute about 20 men carrying machetes and guns came out of the bush. There were a lot more we couldn’t see and only a couple, obviously the leaders, did any talking. My companion was translating, but not everything that was being said, and things seemed to be getting tense.

  ‘Tell me what you’re saying,’ I asked. ‘Tell me what they’re saying. Have they seen Douglas Kear? Can they bring me his hat? I know he was wearing a hat. I need to see something because I’m not doing anything else until I have some evidence that these people know he’s there.’ If they had wanted to take me then, they had the perfect opportunity.

  I used to make a point of touching people in tense situations because I knew it helped calm things down. I went up to one of the leaders and put my hand on the arm that was holding the machete.

  ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ I said. ‘This is the only reason I’m here. If you want publicity in return for Douglas Kear or information, I will give you publicity. I will put you in touch with radio audiences around the world. I will come back here, and talk to anyone who wants to talk to me, but before I file another report I need to have some evidence that you have seen the man I am looking for.’

  There was a lot of aggro going on and I ascertained that there was more being discussed than I knew about, and this had almost nothing to do with Douglas Kear. The men offered to take me into the bush to meet more people, but not to see him.

  I was a tool to get a message out and it became obvious that I was potentially another international story, another white person killed in this terribly unsafe part of the world where you should not go if you wanted to stay alive. I think that was one of the times when I came very close to death.

  They definitely did not know where Kear was, so in the end, having made my offer, I simply said I was going and turned and left. I was sure I was going to be killed as I was walking back. All I knew about finding my way out of the jungle was to keep walking down. It was like following a river — keep going and you will come to the sea in the end. I kept going and for the hours it took I was thinking, ‘Are they behind me? Am I being hunted down now?’

  I didn’t see my contact again. God knows whether he was one of them, or if he was trying to get me killed. After I got to Kisoro, there was no way I was going back to meet those people again. Within a few days I decided it was time to get back on the plane and go.

  The most widely accepted theory about the fate of Douglas Kear is that he was not killed by his captors but died when, being an old man, he succumbed to the rigours of being dragged through the jungle and treated roughly.

  One of the big lessons from the experience was something a Time photographer said to me: ‘The funny thing about this game is that the further down the road you go, the better the story you get, but the less the chance you have of getting the story out.’

  Often when I was in the middle of a dangerous situation, I found myself thinking, ‘I must bring the kids back here.’ Five years later I was back in Kisoro on holiday with Lucy, sleeping in my old room. The roses were looking fantastic and the whitewash had held up well. There was even a photo of me on the dining room wall.

  I wanted to take her across the border from Uganda into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, just so she could say she’d been there. I had hired a RAV4 and employed my old contact from the New Vision newspaper to be our driver, and one day we set off for the border. I took Lucy in to see the police chief there, who was another old friend. There was another conflict going on at the time — French peacekeepers arrived at the same time as us.

  ‘How are things today?’ I said. ‘Do you think it’s safe for us to go across?’

  ‘I think you’ll be all right,’ he said. So we headed for the border along with a couple of people who were going to the market. The border was a 30-metre strip of no man’s land between a pair of trees on each side.

  We went to the hut on the Ugandan side, where they checked our passports, and then we walked quietly across. And you could have heard a pin drop as we were walking. It seemed a lot longer than 30 metres. There were people sitting around with semi-automatic weapons, their gaze following you every step of the way. This is a place where so many people are killed that everyone is suspicious of everyone else. Lucy, who had never even seen a gun before, reacted with a mixture of fright and excitement, which is just the right response in an environment like this.

  People say it was irresponsible to have taken a child to a place like that, and it sounds irresponsible when I recount it, but there is something about being there and knowing you’re okay. It’s living on the edge, but it is living — it’s really living. The closer to the edge you are, the more living it is.

  We went into the little kiosk on the Congo side with our passports. A large sombre Congolese woman was in charge.

  ‘Why would you come here to this tragedy?’ she said.

  ‘I was here five years ago working,’ I told her, ‘and I wanted to show my daughter, because it’s a sad but beautiful part of the world, and people should know about this part of the world.’

  ‘It is a sad part of the world. How long will you be here?’

  ‘We just want to literally walk through the village and then we’re going to go back.’

  ‘I’ll keep your passports so that you will go back,’ she said, and waved us through.

  We walked along the track, and the trees on either side were all shot up. There had been a lot of killing here. There was a lot of movement inside the little shacks on one side. People were starting to run and get their guns. They seemed strangely at one with their guns.

  ‘We’ve got to go,’ said Lucy. ‘We’ve got to go, we’ve got to get out of here, let’s go now.’

  ‘We’ll just get a Coke,’ I said.

  W
e walked into the little border village and it was effectively closed too. However, there was no shortage of people sitting around waiting for something to happen.

  I went up to someone sitting outside his shop. ‘We’d like a Coke,’ I said. ‘Can you get us a Coke?’

  So he opened his little shop and got us a Coke. I opened my hand, in which I had a collection of different kinds of money — Ugandan and American — and he took some and gave me old Congolese money, back from when it was Zaire, which was very cool. I gave Lucy and my driver their Coke.

  ‘Okay,’ said my driver. ‘We are out of here right now.’

  ‘We don’t run,’ I said, as we turned around and headed back with our Cokes. ‘No one runs in a place like this, we just stroll back.’

  When we got back to the Congolese woman and our passports, I said: ‘I didn’t buy you a Coke.’

  ‘It would have been nice if you had,’ she said.

  She handed us back our passports.

  ‘No stamp?’ I asked.

  ‘You never came here.’

  ‘That’s a real shame,’ I said, ‘because this 15-year-old girl is going to want to talk about this amazing experience when she gets home.’

  With that, the woman got a scrap of paper out, stamped and signed it, and handed it to Lucy. We walked out.

  ‘I so wish we were still over there,’ said Lucy, when we were safely back in Kisoro.

  My experiences in Africa and parts of Asia made me start thinking about what could be done to help people whose lives were a few short years of hungry, miserable poverty. I set up something called everyhorizon as a foundation to channel some of my own and other people’s money to where it could be useful.

  I saw so much need and I saw how easy it would be to deliver solutions. I thought, naively, I could dramatically change these people’s lives by spending a small amount of money in the right place at the right time. I could do that because I could so easily set up chains to these areas through people I knew, and for $100 you could do so much in these little villages. Before long I discovered the great flaw in that idea. If you ask people for money, those people have a reasonable expectation that you should tell them, indeed prove to them, what you’ve done with it. And that costs a fortune. So I let the foundation dwindle away and decided just to do things with my own money.

  One of my many pet hates is people who promote the good work they do and I have no intention of doing that. But I would like to tell the story of one aid project which demonstrates how effective aid can be if it’s done without a bureaucratic mindset.

  In Phnom Penh all of the city’s rubbish goes to one dump. Trucks arrive all day, ferrying rubbish. Because the city is so poor, by the time the rubbish goes to the dump it has been picked over by umpteen people who have extracted anything of value. It is pure rubbish.

  Children live and work in this dump. Their families live around it on stilt houses in lakes of ooze, which seeps out of the dump. Some of the children burrow into the rubbish where they live. In a day, they may find enough rags to get a dollar. Around the dump, work the adults who buy the rags. You can hardly call this system exploitation because no one gets any profit worth speaking of.

  One aid organisation took the kids off the dump and put them into schools. Those kids lost their place in the only social structure they knew and their entire way of life. They weren’t quite equipped for anything else, but they couldn’t get back into the dump. Meanwhile, the charity had moved on to its next media-friendly crisis because all the kids were off the dump. Like so many charities, they had not appreciated the realities of life. If your choices are thief, beggar, prostitute or the dump, the dump is the best one. The kids are not unhappy, despite having no education, being poorly nourished and being prone to infections from standing in shit and on sharp things.

  Another charity went there and offered the children a dollar a week if they would go to school for one day a week. They also gave them shoes to reduce the risk of infections. On the day they took them to school they gave them a great nutritious meal, which was the only food they gave them.

  This didn’t disrupt the families who the children were supporting. It didn’t disrupt what they actually did. But it did improve their lives dramatically for next to nothing.

  “BECAUSE MY RESOURCES WERE ALWAYS SO SLENDER, ESPECIALLY COMPARED TO THOSE OF MY RIVALS, I HAD DEVELOPED A LOT OF STRATEGIES TO COMPENSATE. IN THIS CASE, I WENT TO THE PRIME MINISTERIAL RESIDENCE, BUT MY COMMONWEALTH GAMES ACCREDITATION DIDN’T COUNT FOR ANYTHING. SO I STARTED TALKING AND CONNED MY WAY THROUGH THE FIRST, SECOND, THIRD, FOURTH LEVEL AND I GOT RIGHT TO THE PRIME MINISTER’S PRESS SECRETARY.”

  * * *

  I HAVE NEVER BEEN much interested in sport — certainly less interested than someone doing my job should be. I once bumped into Graham Henry, the All Blacks coach, at the airport. He was surrounded by a group of burly young men.

  ‘Hello, Graham, where are you off to?’ I asked. On reflection I should have known that the All Blacks were playing an important test the next day.

  So when the Commonwealth Games were being held in Malaysia in 1998 and Derek Lowe thought it would be a good idea for me to go, I wasn’t keen. The logistics would be impossible because there would be thousands of journalists already there with full accreditation and facilities.

  But on my way a real news story emerged. The Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, had his deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, imprisoned for sodomy. That and the synchronised swimming were the highlights of the trip.

  Because my resources were always so slender, especially compared to those of my rivals, I had developed a lot of strategies to compensate. In this case, I went to the prime ministerial residence, but my Commonwealth Games accreditation didn’t count for anything. So I started talking and conned my way through the first, second, third, fourth level and I got right to the Prime Minister’s press secretary.

  The angle I was interested in was that Mahathir had chosen to take this extraordinary step at a time when the world’s media were watching. If he was truly appalled by sodomy, surely he wouldn’t want his country to be known for it.

  The Prime Minister was refusing all interviews. But I told everyone I encountered that I wanted to tell his story his way. I would give him an opportunity to answer questions he would be keen to answer. Because there was so much media attention, he agreed to a few press conferences and I was invited to one. I sought out his press secretary, who by now I had got to know.

  ‘The thing is,’ I whined, ‘I’ve got a little tape recorder and a cell phone and that’s me, this is my whole network here. What I’d really like is a one on one with the Prime Minister.’

  At the end of the press conference there was a barrage of questions but Mahathir ignored them all and left. An assistant took his place at the podium and pointed at a New York Times journalist and at me and said, ‘Could both of you come with me, please?’

  We were taken to another room as the other journalists filed out and from there I was ushered, alone, into another room. There were guards everywhere and suddenly Mahathir came in. And the thing that will never leave my memory is that, despite being the leader of a country with a population of 20 million, he had a badge pinned to his chest — one of those black plastic ones with white writing reversed out — and it said simply ‘Mahathir’.

  We had 20 minutes together and it was extraordinarily frank. I asked him why he had chosen this worst of all possible times to do something that brought so much negative publicity to Malaysia?

  ‘Look at me,’ said Mahathir. ‘I’m an old man. I don’t know if I’ll be around tomorrow and if I weren’t, and I hadn’t addressed this, a sodomist would be running my country. I can’t let that happen. I can’t run that risk.’

  That was a very disarming answer because it appeared so truthful. After the interview I walked out, clutching my minidisc recorder and passed the other journalists who were still milling around. As far as I knew, I was the only person in the world to whom Mahathir had expla
ined the reason for his extraordinary actions. The other people there could have put it out over their global networks instantly. I was going to cue it up and play it over the phone to Ewing Stevens in the middle of the night.

  Malaysia was bizarre but not that gruelling. Cambodia on the other hand was one of the worst places I visited as an international correspondent. I went to cover the Hun Sen uprising. The background was very complex but it was essentially the dying days of the Khmer Rouge and the ultimate end of Pol Pot’s grip on power. Hun Sen was a former member of the Khmer Rouge who worked to overthrow Pol Pot and ended up running the country.

  At the time I went, Hun Sen had tried to take over and was exerting pressure. The king was standing by, waiting to see what would happen and which way the police and army would go and which way the militants would go. No one had seen Pol Pot for a long time and I was interested in seeing how close I could get to finding him. He was known to be still alive and living in a stronghold in the countryside.

  When I arrived I did what I always did, which was to make a story of whatever I found there. I discovered you could buy landmines near the airport. You went to a little building and a man took you out the back where for a couple of dollars you could choose from a selection. I briefly thought of getting a couple for my front garden to keep strangers out.

  I went to Siem Reap in search of Pol Pot, made some enquiries and got nowhere, so decided to return to Phnom Penh. I did, however, have my usual departure tax meltdown when I was told I had to hand over $25 to an airport official. Given the huge number of holes in the ground and the generally dilapidated state of the airport, I found it hard to see how such monies were being used.