I had always thought that the “news” was a compilation of the most important things in the world. But after six months as a correspondent, reality set in. News is only what is different from the everyday—the exception to the rule. With an unknown world like the Arab one, this has a distorting effect. When someone is shot on Dam Square in Amsterdam, it’s news, but Dutch people know that people aren’t normally shot there. They’ve been there themselves, or they know someone who went there and returned safely. But how much do Dutch people know about daily life in the Middle East? Before I went to Syria, I’d seen “angry demonstrations in Syria” on the news; no wonder I’d concluded that they hated us and that Syria was unsafe. If you are told only about the exceptions, you’ll think they are the rule.
The question was, could anything be done about it? If you look at photographs or film footage of the Arab world—for example, the crowded streets of Cairo, Damascus, or Alexandria—what you notice are the dancing Arabic letters everywhere. It looks exotic, until you’re told that those strange letters spell out things like “Egyptian museum next exit,” “Lipton’s—the most delicious tea in the world,” or “Two for the price of one, on special offer.” And wouldn’t it make a difference if we stopped talking about newspapers Al-Hayat, Sharq Al-Awsat, and Al-Ahram, and used Life, The Middle East, and The Pyramids instead? If we didn’t talk about the Arab TV channels Al-Jazeera, Al-Manana, and Al-Mustaqbal, but The Island, The Lighthouse, and The Future? Would it make a difference if we talked about Devotion, God’s Party, and The Basis, rather than about Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al-Qaida?
For a while, I tried to translate the names of Arab media companies in my articles, but the editors took them out—they found it confusing. They were probably right, just like when they rejected my suggestion of having a joke section on the foreign pages, as a reminder that in other parts of the world people were having a laugh, too: “The dictator’s time has come, and God sends the Avenging Angel to the capital to collect him. But, as always, the Avenging Angel is immediately arrested and tortured. “Where’s the dictator?” God asks angrily when the shattered Angel returns to heaven. The Avenging Angel tells him what happened, whereupon God turns as white as chalk and asks in a trembling voice, “You didn’t give away my name, did you?”
Of course they couldn’t do that; they couldn’t just shove ha-ha hee-hee amongst photos of dying people and charismatic experienced world leaders. But they could include other things, at least in the supplements and human interest columns in the paper. From then on, I tried to write articles that indirectly punctured the image of Arabs as exotic baddies. I threw in an interview with the female presenters of the Arabic versions of Top of the Pops, Big Brother, and The Weakest Link—as a reminder that such programs are aired there. I wrote a piece on Chef Ramzi, the Lebanese Christian who was the biggest TV chef in the Arab world for a time. That was the point—you have celebrity chefs in the Arab world, and soaps, and shows with hidden cameras, and studios full of serious, grown-up men in suits arguing about football.
Those kinds of articles were readily taken up by the editors, but only for the background pages, which, according to surveys, are hardly given a second glance; or they were put on page four in the human interest column, which in de Volkskrant is tellingly called “It’s a Small World.”
I’d have to get into the news cycle, and I learned just how difficult that was when I tried to break down the cliché that Arabs are all the same and can be considered a single entity. I was contributing to that idea myself when I wrote about “the Arab world”—the only available term to describe those areas with inhabitants called Arabs. And then you had the Arab League, with its droning communiques about brotherhood and unity, and the Israeli government’s statements about “the sea of Arabs.”
All of this added to the impression that the area between Rabat and Baghdad housed 260 million identical beings. But take the wars that Arab countries have been fighting for the last fifty years, not against Israel but each other: Morocco against Algeria, Egypt against Syria, Sudan against Saudi Arabia, Iraq against Kuwait, Syria against Jordan, Jordan against Palestine, and everyone against everyone else in Lebanon. Or take the local stereotypes, another indication of underlying differences: Iraqis are said to be merciless but brave; Gulf Arabs, generous but hypocritical; Lebanese, cosmopolitan but unreliable; Jordanians, friendly but weak; Palestinians, persistent but untrustworthy; and Egyptians, intelligent but arrogant.
Even within Arab countries, there are enormous differences between people. You see it in the jokes they tell about each other: Syrians make jokes at the expense of the inhabitants of Horns city; in Baghdad, it’s always the Dulaymi people from the Anbar province; and the people of Cairo never have enough of jokes about the inhabitants of Upper Egypt, rumored to be over-proud and backwards. Palestinians laugh about the inhabitants of Hebron, who are supposed to be stupid and old-fashioned. As in the story of a man from Hebron who goes into an electrical shop in Jerusalem. “Could you repair this television?” he asks. The shopkeeper looks at the man and says, “You must be from Hebron,” at which point the man runs away. How does he know where I come from?, he wonders in panic. They must think they can diddle me. He goes to another shop, but the same thing happens; another, and it’s the same story. Now there’s only one shop left; otherwise, he’ll have to go to Ramallah. You won’t believe it, but he’s hardly asked whether they can repair his television when the repairman mutters, “Are you from Hebron or something?” The man can’t take it any more and tearfully asks, “How does everyone know I’m from Hebron when all I ask is if they can mend my television?” To which the repairman replies, “This is a radio, sir.”
The “Arab world” is as diverse as this, but colleagues and friends back home would have no idea. How could they? They would faithfully follow the news and would often know all the political maneuvers at a recent Arab summit. But the fact that the word “Arab” refers to a language, Arabic, and not to a belief, and that there are millions of Christian Arabs, too, including the host of that summit, is something they would not know. Let alone that there were hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews who used to live all over the Middle East until the creation of Israel.
After a major earthquake in Turkey, a distinguished foreign commentator called me to ask if I wanted to go to the disaster site. “Why?” I asked in amazement. “Well, with your knowledge of Arabic ...” Upon which I had to explain that Dutch is closer to Turkish than Arabic is. I came across the same misunderstanding later in Iran, where they speak Persian and where you make as good an impression speaking Arabic as you do speaking German in the Netherlands.
The ignorance of even loyal readers was sometimes so great that it seemed beyond remedy. But there were occasional opportunities—for example, when the next Arab League summit turned into a fight. When, as usual, the news presenter asked about the “hopeless division,” there was the chance to skip the diplomatic disputes of the day, and talk about the differences between the twenty Arab countries, who weren’t so much divided as holding opposing interests. It makes quite a difference if you have oil and gas or not, enough water or not, if you’ve been occupied by colonial powers, or you have to share rivers. Or if you have a border with Israel, Turkey, Iran, or the Straits of Gibraltar.
Planting tidbits of information like this was something, but not much. News has to be fast and concise, which is why the following article on language had to wait years in the “background” file on my computer before finding a place in the newspaper:Arabs are sometimes seen as a single unit, but the fact is they don’t even understand each other. Don’t they speak the same language? Hmmm. Actually, Arabic is made up of three different languages. There’s the classical Arabic of the Koran that almost nobody knows and in which you can’t hold a normal conversation. That’s why there’s Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a simplified form of the classical version used for reading and writing, news, speeches, subtitles, and literature. The advantage is that it’s the same everywhere
in the Arab world. The disadvantage is that it’s actually a dead language and is just as unusable for normal conversations as classical Arabic—that is, if you know it, because there’s a second disadvantage: Only half of the Arab population can read and write. Amongst themselves, Arabs speak dialects, and these are so different that you can’t talk about a single language. For example, “good” is djayid in MSA, kwayis in Egyptian, zein in Iraqi, and mnih in Palestinian. “I’d like to buy some bread,” is
Brit nashri khubz in Moroccan
Uridu an ahstiri khubzan in MSA
‘Ayez ashtiri ’eesh in Egyptian.
Spot the seven differences, and remember that the pronunciation differs as well. For example, in Cairo they swallow the difficult “q,” while in other Arab countries they pronounce it or deform it into a different sound. This might result in misunderstandings, like when the Sudanese go out into the street to celebrate istiqlal—independence. The Sudanese pronounce the “q” almost like a “rh,” giving “hip hip hooray, we’re celebrating istirhlal.” Which for other Arabs means “exploitation.”
I’ve probably profited from the ignorance about the Arab world. They’ve never said so, but I get the impression that the Volkskrant might have had its doubts about sending such an inexperienced guy to the Arab world. I imagine the head honcho pointing out my knowledge of Arabic, and this being what swung it. It was probably just as well that they didn’t know that, outside of the Cairo city limits, I could hardly understand a word of the various dialects.
Chapter Three
Donor Darlings and a Hitler Cocktail
For a short while, I thought I’d cracked the problem of journalism in the Arab world: News only shows what deviates from the norm, and if the norm is not known, you get a distorted image.
But I continued to feel uneasy. For a while I thought it might be guilt; I’d expected to be able to pick up again the friendships from my student days, but it hadn’t happened. As a student I’d been able to minimize the difference between myself and my poverty-stricken fellow students by renting a room in a working-class suburb. I’d looked down on the Western expats living on Zamalek, the elite island in the Nile, with youthful scorn. But when I became a correspondent, that’s where I went to live. As a student, adopting the Arab pace of life was wonderful: Taking time for other people, turning up late, making endless calls to see how things were. But now I had editors back home, and the media are organized like a factory. Or rather, an army—it’s not for nothing that we use the term deadline.
When we met I noticed how little I, as an educated Westerner, had in common with my old friends. And there was that unbridgeable financial gulf. The rent I paid each month was the equivalent of what some people lived on for three years. Move somewhere else then, you might say; but after a day’s hard work, I yearned for the peace and comfort of Zamalek.
Finding time to make new friends just wasn’t possible either. I covered ten countries, all of which required regular visits. A coup could happen at any time, a leader might die, or something might blow up, and then I’d have to work late or scurry over there—which is not very helpful when you’re trying to build a friendship. In my free time, I simply didn’t feel like hanging out with the people I was reporting on. How many group tirades against an American president or an Israeli prime minister could a man take? It was a Catch 22 situation: In order to hear what was going on, I needed “local contacts”; yet I’d only get those contacts if I lived in a way that was incompatible with the life of a correspondent.
But it was more than simple guilt, and it got worse when I discovered something strange. Dutch news teams, me included, fed on the selection of news made by quality media sources like CNN, the BBC, and the New York Times. We did that on the assumption that their correspondents understood the Arab world and commanded a view of it—but many of them turned out not to speak Arabic, or at least not enough to be able to have a conversation in it or to follow the local media. Many of the top dogs at CNN, the BBC, the Independent , the Guardian, the New Yorker, and the New York Times were more often than not dependent on assistants and translators.
The correspondents from the quality media lived, like me, in the nicest areas of the city. So let’s turn that around. Imagine that a Moroccan correspondent who speaks neither English nor any European language is sent to London. He goes to live in a posh house in Kensington, where he spends his free time and makes friends—all of whom have to speak Arabic. His children go to an Arabic school, and his wife joins the Arab Women’s Circle. What kind of impression of the U.K. would such a correspondent get? He can’t understand talk shows, election debates, or speeches given by the queen, or the prime minister, or the coach of the national football team. He can’t understand conversations in the street, the news, current affairs columns, soaps, jokes, or comedians. He keeps up with the press through a translation service; what they don’t translate, he doesn’t know. He can’t talk to ordinary British people—only Arab expats, British Arabs, Arab British, British people married to Arabs and, of course, fellow journalists from the Arab world. And that’s in a free country, where people being interviewed don’t have to worry about their interpreter’s other job in the secret services.
Many Western correspondents in the Arab world seem to work and live according to the precepts of this thought experiment of a Moroccan in the U.K. I once traveled alongside a BBC hero. The local assistant took him to the airport, where he sat down to wait for his business-class flight in the business-class lounge. When he reached his destination, an assistant helped him through customs with his bags, after which his usual chauffeur drove him to the office so he could go through the cuttings from the translation service. It was an efficient way of doing things, and the BBC guy surely got to know more than I did. But how many ordinary people did he speak to and what did he see of everyday life? I spent at least an hour sweating in the passport-checking queue, and then in another queue, and then I had to get my own luggage off the conveyor belt ...
The discovery that my peers and I were viewing “our” areas with blinkers on was painful, but it didn’t explain that feeling of something not being right. I began to suspect that there wasn’t just something wrong with what remained out of the frame in our coverage of the Arab world, but also with what was in the frame. Remember those lists that correspondents had of human rights activists, scholars, and other talking heads? Using their views for the news seemed like straightforward journalism—but was it?
Egypt and other Arab countries are police states where scholars are screened by the secret services before being appointed; it is an open secret that many academics have their connections, not their abilities, to thank for their jobs. Arab embassies in Western countries also keep an eye on the media, so being quoted is a risky business for academics—but it also has its attractions. An Arab academic who turns up frequently in renowned Western newspapers and magazines or on TV gets invited to multicultural arts events, think tanks, and academic institutions in the West. This means a visa, which means future visas will also be much easier to obtain. It means a free flight, tax-free shopping, and contact with publishers, sponsors, and institutions that give out work, travel, and living-cost bursaries. The daily allowances at Western conferences are often more than a month’s salary for academics from Arab countries.
An academic from the Arab world is different from an academic living in the West, and the same goes for human rights activists. They do earn a good wage, because it is paid for by Western governments (“donors” in the jargon). Local human rights activists are much quoted by correspondents because, let’s face it, it’s nice to have your questions answered for once. But the more of these activists I met, the less enthusiastic I became—with their routine one-liners, the way they immediately handed over their business cards in order to make sure that I’d spell their names and organizations correctly. The interviews they gave frequently included expressions like, “It’s a long way off, but we’re working towards it,” or “Giving up is simpl
y not an option.” I began to suspect that they’d read their interviews later on the Internet and thought, Hey, those Western journalists always use that bit about “never giving up, ” so I’ll keep saying it.
That’s the problem with human rights activists in the Arab world. Rich Arabs donate billions every year to Islamic missions and the building of mosques, but human rights activists only exist because of Western subsidies. Their chance of getting the subsidies increases as they become more famous and, of course, Western journalists can help them achieve such fame. The consequence is a dodgy tango between journalists looking for good quotes and human rights activists looking for publicity. I found it telling that, during my studies, not a single student knew any human rights activists, let alone supported them. How, I thought, would I look on a Dutch organization financed by Iran or Saudi Arabia? Equally telling seems the term that Western diplomats use for local human rights activists: “donor darlings.” Embassies had funds to spend on supporting human rights, but they could only give them to organizations with a Western political agenda, transparent bookkeeping, and other guarantees against fraud. Donor darlings fulfilled these requirements, and had something to offer in exchange. Dutch MPs, for example, would regularly make lightning trips to Egypt or other Arab countries. The embassy would send the MPs off to visit a few donor darlings, who would tell a polished story in fluent English that pushed all the right buttons: Development, gender, empowerment, civil society, and good governance. Back home, the MP would be able to write a glowingly enthusiastic report of his visit: You see, the Egyptians do want to be just like us!
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