by Brian Tetley
That night, we stayed at Para Lodge, downstream from the falls, and next day went close to this magnificent spectacle in the lodge’s motor launch. It was an experience from a time removed. Elephants balanced with uncanny sure-footed ease on narrow ledges, invisible to the eye, carved in the walls of the cliffs lining the falls, more like mountain goats than five-ton herbivores. Spray shrouded everything. Slowly, the launch drifted away from the eddies and back downstream—hundreds of crocodiles basking on the shores and sandbanks, slithering down to the water as we glided by. Here was magical footage for the Nile series.
That afternoon, we motored down to the shores of Lake Albert. For me, these were all the faraway and remote places I had hungered for when I was in Britain. It was enchanted country. Beyond Lake Albert’s shimmering waters, we could make out the foothills of the Ruwenzoris, the fabled ‘mountains of the moon’.
Later, Amin set up his tripod about thirty yards from a herd of elephants while I kept the engine running. As the elephants cropped the grass and came nearer and nearer, stately and graceful despite their size, he kept filming and I switched off. They came to within three or four yards before turning from his perfectly still silhouette. The only noises were the rumbles of their stomachs, the chaffing of the grass as they moved through it, and my rapid breathing.
As they ambled away, he slowly panned his camera after them, kites soaring high on the thermals above the lake, its waters glinting silver through the heat, which made all the images shimmer.
I thought, ‘He sees all life through a lens, as removed from conscious reality as if he were watching a movie.’ Perhaps that’s why so many of his kind die at work.
Next night at Chobe Lodge, near the Karuma Falls Bridge, the Acholi barman asked me to wait until the others had gone to bed. Each night, upstream on the bridge over the Karuma Falls, he told me, hundreds of Acholi and Langi were being machine-gunned. Later, by the light of his lantern, I saw the bloated corpses floating in a Nile backwater, while from far away came the sound of machine guns.
In the morning, the bridge pavement was covered with what looked like tar. I thought it odd. I had never seen dried blood before. An old English rigger who lived in a caravan a few hundred yards from the bridge told us, ‘They’re killing thousands. Every night. At first, I couldn’t sleep but now it makes no difference.’
My story appeared on the front page of The Observer on March 14, 1971; mine because Mohamed Amin’s only fear was that he wouldn’t get back into Uganda if it carried his name as well.
‘I have to come back,’ he said.
He did. Many times. Towards the end, at considerable risk.
8. Bloodbath in Bangladesh
MOST PEOPLE WHO MEET MOHAMED Amin expect the kind of five-star conversation you might have with a Hollywood star or an international celebrity. But unless you have something to offer in exchange, the conversation is usually brief and forgettable. He dislikes small talk at any level. Celebrity hunters usually cross him off their list as a ‘bore’.
But professionals who work with him, or against him, rate him at the opposite end of the scale. When it comes to shop talk, they spend hours in conversation.
‘I really liked and admired him, as a mate and a pro, and still do,’ recalls John Platter, ‘always acknowledging, however, that we parted company as businessmen. While he also relished the commercialism, we purist hacks grandly eschewed the dreary penny-collecting side of journalism in favour of distinguished pauperism.
‘And, of course, as an employer himself, Amin never underworked or overpaid anyone. But at least, he drove himself as hard if not harder.
‘I do not have to guess at his present circumstances—the flood of documentaries, books, and everything else spells tycoonery, with which I am sure he is very comfortable. He deserves it. His talents and restlessness destined him for it. I can’t think of any of his contemporaries who would resent it.’
Adds Roy Lipscombe on his friend of 25 years, ‘As I remember it, Mo had precious little of anything in the early days…perhaps an elderly Bolex mute camera and a couple of stills cameras. I shall be interested to see how much he has amassed from various enterprises around the world since then…that’s if he’ll ever tell you.’
Recalls Brendan Farrow, ‘One day, I was ribbing him a bit about his expenses. “A star like you,” I told him, “all those awards, all that fame, all those books under your name! You don’t need the money.” He came back sharply, “Yes, and I didn’t get any of it lying in bed or drinking in bars.”’
When, towards the end of March 1971, BBC Panorama’s Alan Hart asked Mohamed Amin to go with him to cover the East Pakistan conflict, he refused. (After the collapse of the conciliation talks between the East Pakistani opposition and the Pakistan Government, a guerrilla war between the Mukti Bahini and government forces had flared into ugly life.)
The East African Safari motor rally, one of the biggest assignments of the year for Amin, was about to start.
‘I couldn’t do it because it clashed. The rally was a money maker.
‘Alan said he understood. But he rang me again the next day and asked me to meet his flight to Nairobi the following morning. I said, “Fine, but please don’t travel all this way to talk me into taking this assignment because I cannot go until after the rally, which will be too late for you.”
‘He said, “No, I just want to come to Nairobi to have a chat with you.”
‘I picked him up next morning. Alan never went up to his room at the Panafric Hotel. He just checked in, dropped his baggage, and then took me to the coffee shop, where I told him again just how important the rally was. Nothing would persuade me to go. He asked me what kind of money would compensate me. I told him it wasn’t a matter of calculating the loss. It was all to do with the contracts and agreements I had that continued each year. I was adamant. But he said, “Well, tell me what would persuade you to do the job? Give me a figure.”
‘I told him, “This is ridiculous. If you want a figure you’ll have to turn it down because it will be ridiculous, so why bother?”
‘He said, “No. Go on—give me a figure.”
‘So I said, “Right. I’ll charge you £1,000 a day and I want a minimum guarantee of ten days work.”
‘In 1971, that was a lot of money. The average rate for cameramen was around £100 or £150 a day. Alan took me up to his room while he called the editor of Panorama at his home in London. I think the editor fell out of his bed but Alan persuaded him that it was worth it.
‘The deal was that it would be just me and Alan. No soundman, as it was best to keep the number of people to an absolute minimum, which I prefer when I’m working in a dangerous situation. It’s best not to have anybody else to worry about.
‘We flew to Karachi that evening. We wanted to go to Dacca and work on the side of the Pakistan Army. But the doors were absolutely shut. Nobody was prepared to give us any permission so we took a Japan Air Lines flight to Calcutta, one of the most pleasant flights I’ve had. With Alan, you flew first-class all the time.
‘We arrived quite late at night. There was a transport strike which apparently was quite common in Calcutta, so there were no taxis or buses. But the JAL crew gave us a lift in their transport, an armoured vehicle they had requisitioned from the airport police.
‘Hundreds of newsmen, waiting to go in and cover the rebellion, were staying at the Palace Hotel. We spent the night at another hotel, the Hindustan International. I always prefer to stay away from the pack. You tend to worry about what the others are doing and can’t get on with the job. You’re also influenced by what everybody else is doing.
‘Nicolas Tomalin of the Sunday Times joined us on the flight from Karachi. As he wanted to stay close to us, he also checked in at the same hotel.
‘Alan asked me to arrange a vehicle to the border. The strike didn’t make life very easy but eventually I found a Sikh who agreed to take us to Banapur. We set off at six in the morning. The border post officials refused to allow us
to enter, but after a lot of talking said we could go in without our passports being stamped.
‘We refused to accept that. If we got arrested by the Pakistani troops when we were in the country illegally, we reckoned we could be lined up in front of a firing squad. At the least, if we were in the country legally, we’d have a chance of talking.
‘Finally, they stamped our passports but, understandably, the taxi driver refused to go with us. We gave him some money and told him to wait, saying we’d be back at any time during the next two or three days. There was no transport at all in East Pakistan.’
In blisteringly hot weather, the roads crowded with refugees fleeing the carnage of East Pakistan, Amin carried his heavy camera equipment for three or four miles, until he flagged down a man on a bicycle rickshaw and persuaded him to take them to one of the main towns in the region, Jessore, about 25 miles inside the country.
The sweating coolie was pedalling the three heavyweight newsmen slowly through the milling refugees, when Amin waved down an ancient fire engine heading for the border. Speaking Urdu, he asked the firemen to give them a lift to Jessore. They refused.
‘Then I started negotiating with them to hire the engine but again, they refused. Eventually, however, I got them to agree to sell the fire engine for hard currency—about a thousand dollars.’
Hart produced the wad of dollar notes and the three jumped into the antiquated machine. There was little power left in the old engine but since the roads were crowded with refugees, it made no difference.
‘We passed several massacres—men, women, and children slaughtered in their homes. We filmed this gruesome evidence as we drove towards Jessore. It wasn’t clear who had done the killing but the locals told us that these people had been killed by the Pakistani soldiers. It was also evident that there was a lot of killing by the Bengalis as well.
‘It took me time to realise that this was a war between Bengalis and Punjabis. Since my parents were Punjabis, I realised that if I spoke in Punjabi, I might get slaughtered, too.
‘So whenever I was asked where I was from, I said Africa—easy enough to prove—and since they had never seen an African before, they were quite happy to accept the fact.’ He had reason to be wary.
Time, calling the conflict ‘A Second Vietnam’, said the genocide was ‘the most incredible, calculated thing since the days of the Nazis in Poland’. At the end, estimates of the dead varied between 200,000 and one million. An estimated 7.5 million refugees fled to India.
‘All along the route,’ remembers the cameraman, ‘the stench of decomposing bodies hung heavily in the air. We saw many, including that of a three-year-old child still clinging to its mother.’
‘When we rolled into Jessore, we met the rebels, who took us to an old two-storey house that was their headquarters, where they had some prisoners—about a dozen West Pakistani businessmen and priests—whom I filmed.
‘Later, their hands tied with rope, we saw the same group being paraded up and down the streets. They were clutching the Qur’an in their hands. I did several takes and asked the people what they were going to do them. They said, “Nothing. They’re our prisoners.”
‘We then drove around, filming the results of the killings and the destruction of property, houses, and shops. About midday, we decided to drive back to Banapur with the material that we had and perhaps try another border post farther north.’
What happened next shocked viewers worldwide.
‘As we were driving through one square in Jessore we saw a mob killing a small group of people. I filmed this massacre, first from a distance, then closer when I saw it was the same West Pakistanis that we had filmed earlier. They were being beaten to death with sticks, stones, knives anything. Their bodies were still twitching, the most gruesome thing I had ever seen.
‘There was nothing I could do. My policy was never to get involved. Try to interfere and the next thing you know, you’re being beaten to death yourself.
‘But Nicolas Tomalin tried to stop it. It was only then that they realised we were there. One of the leaders walked up to us with a pistol by his side and said, “These people have been killed by the Pakistani Army.”
He obviously had no idea we had filmed what had happened. I didn’t think we should argue but Nick said he thought they should be taken to the hospital.
‘The Bengali asked, “Why? It’s nothing to do with us. They were killed by the Pakistani soldiers and they should do something about it.”
‘Nick was pretty insistent. He said, “Since you had nothing to do with it, that’s another reason you should take them to hospital.”
‘This made the guy very angry and he pulled out his gun. “I’m going to kill you if you keep telling me to do something.”
‘I cut in and told Nick, “Look there’s nothing you can do about this so let’s get the hell out of here.”
‘I didn’t have any doubts the Bengali could just as easily shoot us. So we got back into the fire engine and drove off.’
This time, Hart drove, Amin by his side. What the refugees, filing by on either side, thought of this odd trio aboard one of Jessore’s fire engines can only be guessed. But after the horror minutes before, the photographer welcomed the comedy.
‘How will you claim for this on expenses?’
Hart paused.
‘I’m not sure. I don’t think the BBC has bought a fire engine before.’
Near the border, they passed the firemen and stopped to try to sell the engine back to them. ‘But they were pretty sure that we wouldn’t get very far.’ The newsmen left it at the border and walked across. The taxi was still waiting.
‘On the way back to Calcutta, our Sikh driver hit and killed a dog,’ Amin remembers. ‘Alan Hart went berserk. I’ve never seen anyone so upset. Alan screamed and shouted at the driver for killing the dog. I said, “Come on Alan—what’s a dog after the massacre we’ve just seen. You weren’t that upset then.” But he wouldn’t calm down. And I thought, “Oh well. That’s an Englishman. Killing people may not be distressing but never hurt a dog.”
‘At Calcutta, Alan caught a flight to Britain. The film was shown as a special the day he landed, since there was no Panorama that night. It caused a tremendous outcry.’
Hart, who appeared as anchorman, was indefatigable. As soon as the programme ended, he flew back to Calcutta, where he was met by Amin. Using a dirt road which bypassed the border posts, the same day, they went to Dinajpur, where they met members of the Bangladesh liberation army, the Mukti Bahini, whose front line was pockmarked by dugout trenches, tunnels, and guerrilla-type hideouts.
Schoolchildren were undergoing training from Sandhurst-groomed secessionist officers in a soccer stadium. Half of the 50,000 fanatical freedom fighters came from the East Bengal Regiment, the paramilitary East Bengal Rifles, and the Bengali police.
‘After about a week, we drove back to Calcutta. To really balance this programme, we needed a couple of interviews from the other side, the government and political leaders. We had to go to West Pakistan.
‘But we didn’t want to take the film with us in case it was confiscated. On the other hand, we couldn’t ship the film from Calcutta to London because at that time, the BBC was banned in India.’
Hart flew to Karachi to set up the interviews, Amin went back to Nairobi to ship the film from there, returning to Karachi on the same flight.
‘It arrived early in the morning and the customs guys told me they couldn’t let me take all the equipment into the country without a letter from the Ministry of Information.
‘It’s routine but obviously I tried to talk my way around it. They wouldn’t have it and I told them I had to inform the correspondent with whom I was working who was waiting outside.
‘So I was allowed to go out where I saw Alan and an old friend of mine, Ronnie Robson.
‘Alan, who was a bit cross, said he needed to talk to the customs officer himself and came in with me. But the customs guy wouldn’t listen to him either and Al
an—because it was late at night, I suppose—got very angry and started shouting, “We’ve come here to interview your fucking President and stop fucking us about,” or words to that effect. But they were adamant. They weren’t going to let the equipment through until they had a letter from the Ministry of Information. I left the gear at the airport.
‘I was in Karachi at the time,’ remembers Robson, ‘and if anyone should have been browned off, it was Mo. He’d had the long flight. He was the one still on the wrong side of the barrier. He was showing no concern.’
In Karachi, Amin went to the Ministry of Information and found a man to go with him to clear customs. Then back to his hotel where, exhausted, just as he was about to sleep, there was a loud banging on his door. There were three men.
‘Are you Mohamed Amin?’
‘Yes, who are you?’
‘We’re Special Branch.’
‘Come in.’
‘Can we see your passport? You’re under arrest.’
‘What for?’
‘We’ve orders to arrest you. We can leave you in your room, but you can’t go out.’
‘Immediately, I was concerned that they had been tipped off that I had been in East Pakistan and that it was going to cause me trouble. My passport had at least two East Pakistan entry stamps in it. That didn’t seem to worry them, but they asked me to hand it over. I refused. They left me with a warning that the hotel was guarded.
‘I immediately told Alan and Ronnie what had happened and Alan said, “That’s a great pity.” He’d already arranged an interview that day with the [then] opposition leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto at his Karachi home. In fact, Bhutto was one of the key men in the talks between the Mukti Bahini and the Pakistan authorities.
‘The interview was set for seven that evening. I told Alan that if he could get me out of the hotel, it was fine with me. I’d film the interview.’