Then, one day, Egypt hit the news again. European and African heads of state were coming to Cairo for the first Euro-African summit—an attempt by the Egyptian regime to act as a “bridge between the continents.” The city creaked under the security measures, and I was happy because “my” area had been out of the news cycle for a while. But that happiness was to be short-lived.
Just before the opening, all of the journalists were brought together in a room in the Cairo Conference Center. Our mobile telephones were confiscated, and we were told that we wouldn’t be able to leave until the closing address. The journalists who’d flown in from Europe were the most furious, but protest was futile.
There we sat, and I felt like yelling out, “What are we doing here while a band of crooks is bleeding this country dry?” Later that day, the European and African leaders would feed us their great quotes, which we would have forgotten before we’d even broadcast them. Imagine if a people’s uprising had happened right outside the door. The correspondents would all have chimed, “Nobody expected this.” But why would nobody have expected this? Because we’d had other notions, or because we only looked at what the news agencies had indicated was “the story?”
I had already abandoned the idea that you would know what was going on in the world if you followed the news. But now, in the Cairo Conference Center, I realized that the most important element was missing from the news about the Middle East. A dictatorship is not an obstacle to good journalism in the same category as, say, the routine incompetence of travel agencies that drives you crazy. Dictatorship itself was the most important thing to report about in the Arab world. In some countries, it was harder to see just how dreadful it was through the thick clouds of propaganda and misinformation, but in essence all of the twenty Arab dictatorships were set up in the same way. Writing “around” this was like reporting on France or the Netherlands in 1943 without mentioning the occupation. In reportage, analysis, and cross-talk, I now felt, you should first highlight the dictatorship, and only then talk about the exceptional events—the news.
Locked up in the Cairo Conference Center, I decided to change course and from then on to cover everyday life in a dictatorship as a central part of my work. Over the ensuing months, I discovered just how difficult that was.
The problem lay in the basic principles of quality journalism. People watch the news, listen to the radio, and read the papers because they want to understand more about the world. What they read and see has to be correct. That’s why you need a first name, a last name, both sides of the story, proper checking, and double-checking—you need verifiable information. As The New York Times boasts on its front page: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” In a democracy, it’s an extremely useful and lovely principle. But in a dictatorship, only a minuscule part of reality is verifiable and fit to print; the rest gets stuck in four big filters.
The first filter is fear within the resident population, which prevents correspondents from finding out very much at all. As an Iraqi girl said to the BBC after the fall of Baghdad years later, her life under Saddam was “like having someone inside your head checking every time you wanted to say anything, whether it was risky or not.”
The fear differed from country to country; but even when smoke-screen-free or brave people told me things, I couldn’t get any further because I couldn’t check anything. There were virtually no reliable and verifiable figures or statistics against which I could set these cases in a broader perspective—which was the second filter.
But newspapers also have background or feature sections where correspondents can air their views, don’t they? It’s true that I could get some things off my chest there; but that also had its limitations, and the best stories in particular stayed out of shot. When I decided to write a background article about the vulnerability and powerlessness of ordinary people, I realized it was only worth doing if I could give an example that would touch readers’ hearts. So, in one instance, I scrolled through my files and came up with a Dutch woman living in Baghdad—she would let readers feel what dictatorship was like.
She was one of the last remaining Dutch people in Baghdad; I had met her on my first trip to Iraq. Due to the sanctions, there was no Dutch embassy in Baghdad, so the consul in Amman had given me her number. He told me that she was an old lady who had married an Iraqi Christian in the early 1950s. She hadn’t left Iraq for decades, and still spoke Dutch like the Queen. At first, she refused to meet me. “We don’t associate with Catholics,” she said tartly down the telephone, and she clearly only half-believed me when I told her that de Volkskrant had swapped its Catholic colors for a more progressive outlook before I’d even been born. Eventually, she agreed, and a few hours later we were standing outside her house in the rain. A shutter opened and I stepped forward, but the door remained closed. My minder, Mazjdi from the Ministry of Information, looked at me, and I looked at him. We were in an area that obviously used to be quite well to do, with nice trellis-work and an expansive but empty garden.
Finally, the door opened and an awkward greeting ensued. She probably hadn’t dared to turn me down. We were offered a glass of lemonade, and Mazjdi leafed through a few magazines. I had told him that I was conveying the best wishes of the embassy, and he didn’t mind us speaking Dutch. The old lady began to tell me that she couldn’t leave the country because the regime was asking for twenty thousand dollars per exit visa. Her husband was ill, and the necessary medicines weren’t available. Her own heart problems were simple to treat in the Netherlands but not in Iraq, so she’d been served a death sentence.
Because Saddam Hussein refused to cooperate with weapons inspectors, Iraq could not trade. In order to prevent the country from starving, it was allowed to export oil, with the income being controlled by the UN—the so-called Oil for Food program. Did she have enough to eat? Without betraying any emotion, the lady explained that everyone in the neighborhood received the food distribution correctly, at least until the UN functionary left—if he turned up in the first place. If he wasn’t there, everyone handed everything back in, and the regime’s offices had first choice. The rest went to the most loyal families, and the other neighbors had to go and beg from them. I talked about the Netherlands for a while, but she clearly wanted to get rid of us. One last thing then: Why had the front door remained closed for so long? She nodded icily at Mazjdi. “You didn’t say you were bringing him. He was on the television recently. Secret service, high up. My seventeen-year-old granddaughter is staying here. If he sees her, he’ll come back later to ... you understand? First, I had to let her escape through the back door.”
That was dictatorship. By Allah, how I wanted to use this story. I’d got it reasonably fact-checked, but then Mazjdi handed me over to another minder for a day. He was a former ambassador who’d returned to the Ministry of Information and had been working for a Japanese correspondent for years. They trusted one another, the Japanese correspondent trusted me, and so we could talk. I discussed the Dutch lady in veiled terms. “She certainly won’t have exaggerated,” he said decisively. “That’s why so many people become informants, and why every father sends one son into the army. That’s how you build up connections, in case you get into trouble.”
I had no reason to mistrust the former ambassador, but the old woman didn’t make my article. I felt there was too much of a risk that Mazjdi would find out about it, either through a Dutch Iraqi or through the embassy. The woman has since died.
One of my beer-drinking partners in Cairo was Gie, a Flemish man who managed a sweet factory for a multinational. “I wanted to import eight tons of a special oil,” he once told me. “I couldn’t find out anywhere what the requirements for such a container of oil would be. The ministries of environment, transport, economic affairs, and health all told different stories, and no one returned my calls. However, my factory couldn’t continue manufacturing without this oil, so I imported it. The container hadn’t even got to the harbor when it was seized—the oil had to be destroyed or
redistributed, and it was going to cost me sixty thousand dollars. I called my lawyer, who called a contact, who called another contact. I ended up paying a ‘consultant’ six hundred dollars for ‘legal advice,’ and my oil was allowed through customs. I’ve got a special little chap who will go to prison for me if we get caught. Any Western companies who say they don’t operate through bribery in Egypt are liars. If they didn’t, they’d have gone bankrupt long ago.”
Gie’s problems illustrated beautifully how corruption and mismanagement wreck a country’s economy. Yet the story didn’t find its way into the economic supplement because I didn’t want to put Gie’s career at risk, and the Egyptian embassy in The Hague reads everything—which is why, in reality, Gie has a different name and isn’t Flemish.
The vulnerability of the sources was a third filter that kept the realities of daily life under a dictatorship out of the news. And there was a fourth one. Sometimes I’d hear something, I’d have it fact-checked, and I’d have sources with first and last names ... but then it wouldn’t be news. One example was the traffic mortality rate in the Middle East. Because of the poor state of the roads in the region, the clapped-out cars, the corrupt police, and the useless hospitals, an Arab is fifty times more likely to have a fatal car accident than a European. It’s a bloodbath in the Arab world—day in, day out. In this instance, the usual impediments to getting a good story don’t exist: There are figures available, you can get great quotes from UN press guys, and the names and last names of the victims and their relatives are not that important for the human angle. So I waited for an exceptionally big accident on the Cairo to Alexandria motorway, and grafted my story onto it.
So then I had the one article ... but that’s as far as it went. How was it possible that the biggest bloodbath in the Arab world was only good for one piece?
The answer was, once again, because Arab lands are not democracies. Compare them with the Netherlands. While I was in the Middle East, an increasing number of my countrymen were concluding that mass immigration cost more than it delivered. A certain person offered that opinion, it received media coverage, and when his message got hold he was invited to speak more often. This inspired supporters to write in, hold demonstrations, and organize events; in this way, resistance to further immigration made it onto the political agenda. It took time because, even in a democracy, the elite can keep certain issues off the agenda. But sooner or later the issues come to the surface, and that’s precisely the difference between ours and a closed system such as a dictatorship. The mainstream Arab media will never report that, “Today, thousands of Egyptians hit the streets to protest against the president’s appointment of his half-illiterate brother as government advisor.” No, and neither would they report: “Today, the secretary of traffic safety in Egypt has given a petition containing 3 million signatures to the president and asked him to act against the children of generals and politicians responsible for 200kph hit-and-run accidents.”
If something deviates from the everyday, and verifiable information is available, it can become news. But, to remain news, an issue has to have legs; it must stay in motion. “We’re following this story closely,” they say on CNN; but without development there’s nothing to follow. That’s why the hunger in Wau in Sudan was not a story for the editors: “Oh, no, not another conflict with no end in sight.”
I once asked a TV colleague back at the studios what he thought the news was. He gave an embarrassed grin: “If it bleeds, it leads. We like to open with attacks, kidnaps, murders, and large, bloody accidents, because they grab the public’s attention. You also have to divide the number of deaths by the number of kilometers from the studios back home. Dead whites are bigger news than dead blacks or Asians, and dead Christians are bigger news than dead people of other faiths—except that, as American colleagues pun: Jews are news. So an attack in Jerusalem could make the headlines, but a small bomb in Algiers or Delhi won’t make the broadcast.”
The jokes were charmingly cynical and became something of a running gag. But they also seemed to have a function, specifically to reiterate that nobody knows exactly why something becomes news. You can list the requirements for something to be news, but why it actually makes the news programs ... The only certainty for journalists in the West is that if something really important happens, sooner or later ordinary people will make themselves heard.
That’s the West, but in dictatorships people are oppressed. Protesting and getting things on the agenda are impossible, and so much remains out of shot—not only everyday life, but also things that have a huge effect on people’s lives. In Egypt, 75 million people live in a residential area the size of the Netherlands, and each year the population increases by 1.5 million. In order to keep up with this population explosion, the authorities need to create five hundred thousand new jobs a year, build one hundred thousand new houses, ten thousand new schools, one thousand new centers of higher education, one hundred new hospitals, and a handful of new universities ... This is how much pressure population growth creates—not only in Egypt, but also in Yemen, Syria, and other Arab countries. That’s 6 million more people every year, and when there’s no water or work for them they may very well decide to come to Europe. But until they do that in their masses, the population explosion is not news:A further sixteen thousand Arabs were born today
By our correspondent
CAIRO—Today the population in Arab countries, just like yesterday and the day before, grew by sixteen thousand people ...
Neither traffic deaths nor population growth were news, but at least there were statistics about them. By contrast, nobody knows how many Egyptian girls have their vulvas mutilated annually—“female circumcision,” they call it. Nor do we know how many people in the Arab world have been locked away without a fair trial (or a trial of any kind). Nor how many billions of skimmed dollars various generals have managed to secrete in foreign accounts. And there’s no chance of finding out how many Arabs are killed or handicapped each year by such criminal mismanagement. Nobody knows, and nobody dares to protest about it.
An Egyptian doctor friend told me about the chaos and corruption in the hospitals. Doctors were committing fatal errors because their qualifications hadn’t been acquired through exams, but bribes; patients had to bribe doctors to receive treatment; corrupt buyers bought too-expensive medicines or the wrong ones in exchange for fat commission fees. That’s what I’m going to write about, I thought enthusiastically. But there were no figures about damage, waste, and bribery, and that doctor could, at the limit, only be quoted anonymously in the paper. In the West, the victims of such a system would set up a Patients Association; but, like the wife of that doctor said, “The only time I’ve voted freely in my life was on Idols. And I swear to you, if I set up a fan club for my idol, I’d have the secret service on my back.”
This was journalism in a dictatorship, but how could it be any different? You can’t fill a radio news program or a newspaper with personal impressions and anecdotes that you don’t even know to be true, or at all representative. That’s why those colleagues who spoke really good Arabic and had more experience and contacts than I did stuck to the news stream from the news agencies. And that’s why even the most brutal dictators didn’t deport those news agencies. They didn’t need to, because the agencies had already put on their own gags.
It was as simple as that, and that’s why so much remained out of sight and why you had to start from scratch when people suddenly did want to know more about the Arabs. Like after September 11, 2001.
Chapter Six
September 11 and the Blank Spots in the Dictatorship
It’s hard to imagine now but, before my appointment in 1998, de Volkskrant had had serious discussions over whether having a correspondent in the Arab world was still necessary. Couldn’t it be covered from Israel? At the end of the 1990s few were concerned about Islam, and the peace process between Israel and Palestine seemed to be limping towards a resolution. Once there was peace at last, the
Arabs would climb aboard the democratic bandwagon, along with the rest of humanity. “The end of history,” it was called at the time, and a columnist grumbled that everyone was starting to look like everyone else: “The world is going to be one giant McDonald’s.”
It’s all part of the game, but in that climate my observations to my bosses about our distorted representation of Arabs had little effect. To them, the Arab world was on the same rung as Latin America on the ladder: One page-long background article once in a while was enough.
I was stuck with it. Because you can hardly squeeze anything out of it, a dictatorship is like a map with uncharted areas. During quiet periods, correspondents can talk around these blank spots by limiting their reporting to events for which there is verifiable information: Summits, diplomatic breakthroughs, bombings. But when something big happens, the public wants to know things that the correspondent can’t find out. What do you do then? There’s competition in the news industry, too—not only between domestic and foreign news, but also between correspondents who want to get their own area on the front page, or who covet someone else’s job or travel budget. When you’re asked what’s going on in your area, it’s not a good idea if you reply, “It’s hard to know.” You run the risk of the editor-in-chief looking at you during the next round of cutbacks. Why should we invest in you if you never know anything?
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