Hunting Season On Journalists

"I heard an unusual noise in the street. I went out to see what was happening. Once I got to the door, I saw a pickup, parked next to theirs. There was a man on the ground who had a weapon. He immediately pointed it at me and said, 'Go back inside, go back in!'"
Ambeiry Ag Rhissa, local MNLA ethnic Taureg (separatist group) official, Mali

"We didn't get a sense they were worried. Ghislaine was a tenacious reporter and had the best sources Claude was very comfortable with conflict zones, having worked in Afghanistan and Iraq."
Nicholas Champeaux, journalist, Radio France Internationale

There they both were, exiting from a surely satisfactory interview with their subject, a high-placed MNLA Taureg; mission accomplished, they had their news break and their story: hold the presses. Where were they abducted? Why within earshot in broad daylight of a base where several hundred French soldiers and UN peacekeepers were lounging in their barracks. And despite having interviewed the Taureg official, his presence did not deter their abduction and murder.

A wasted interview. Who will write that story? No need. Another story popped up to take its place. This one too weighted with drama, misfortune and misery. Two French journalists kidnapped in the town of Kidal by Taureg militias. The message surely was that the French intervention in a purely Marlian matter was offensive to the Taureg. Was the assent for an interview with a Taureg leader the carrot that hid the mauling to come?

Having a yearning to be in dangerous places to report on conflicts marks the ethos of a war journalist. There is something in the everpresent danger, the need to never stop looking over one's shoulder, but having the opportunity on occasion to interview the principals in conflict zones, those who are thought to have created the situations that resulted in the deaths of far too many people, to discover through the words emanating from their very mouths what motivates them, and then to carefully record those words, the impressions gained, and the conclusions of the interviewing journalists.

It is heady stuff, the feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction. A journalist in these situations feels they face death innumerable times through their enterprise, but they are compelled to act as they do. They enter the theatre of conflict with the full awareness that in so doing they are surrendering themselves to Dame Fortune; they may come away from their presence with world-shattering stories; they feel they have a obligation to report in fulsome detail and accuracy what others report minimally from a safe distance.

They are a fully endangered species, meeting their unfortunate end in Syria, in Egypt, in Somalia, in Russia, in Turkey -- all points radiating out from such zones -- and in fact anywhere in the world where their profession is seen as interfering and representative of the hated imperialists by religiously-inspired terrorists who fight the glorious battle of their religious devotion, in abject surrender to the jihad that is incumbent upon them by virtue of their faith. Terry Waite, among others, knew the dangers, and so presumably did Daniel Pearl, when they embarked on dangerous interview assignments, anxious to acquire that elusive triumph of a "scoop".

The scoop happened to be the gruesome, public death of one, and the maddeningly-long brutal incarceration of the other. Echoes of which occur throughout the world in the fate that others experience, and will doubtless continue to occur as long as human nature expresses itself as it seems destined to do, to that time when eternity becomes a final eruption of humanity-caused mass extinction. But for the time being, reporters and journalists seek every opportunity available to them to chronicle current events of dire circumstances.

One of those is what is occurring in Mali with the presence of Taureg militias battling Malian authorities for a homeland of their own in the vast desert preserves that represents their traditional homeland. The presence of al-Qaeda-in-the Islamic Maghreb ensures that misery and oppression, danger and conflict remain the reality of existence there. In Kidal the birthplace of a Taureg uprising that sent the country into a chaos of challenge and conflict two French journalists were kidnapped and slaughtered.

Four other Frenchman had been released after spending three years as hostages in Niger by Al-Qaeda; their release was costly, but the reason for such abductions; to earn operating costs for the Islamist militias, and it cost France $36-million to have them released. Evidently no such opportunity existed for Claude Verlon and Ghislaine Dupont, abducted and speedily killed, two bullets for one, three for the other, and slit throats for good measure.

"The killers are those we are fighting, the terrorist groups who are opposed to democracy and elections", huffed France's foreign minister, Laurent Fabius. Democracy and elections? As though those are the issues uppermost in the minds of the Islamist jihadis? Can it be that this French government led by President Francois Hollande is that blissfully ignorant of the agenda of those whom they oppose? The measure of vicious vituperation, scornful hatred against the West by Islamists is their willingness to martyr themselves for the pleasure of taking with them as many victims as possible.

"An abduction or a car bombing was like a natural, uncontrollable disaster. Getting kidnapped was bad luck, which is what Anderson thought right up to that moment on 16 March 1985 when he left the bright, cosmopolitan world of Beirut in which his other friends lived and enjoyed themselves, and moved, in the space of just a few minutes into utter darkness. We made jokes to mitigate the terror of this black hole. If we drove through Beirut wearing hoods, surely no one would harm us -- they would assume we had already been abducted Or if we pointed a gun at a friend's head as we travelled across town, no one would stop our car -- only once in Lebanon had a kidnapper ever been kidnapped. Terry Anderson never made these jokes; because he was the man who made them necessary.
"When the kidnappers of Islamic Jihad eventually prevailed upon Anderson to make a video film, he must have felt truly abandoned. He seemed to slur his words and on the screen I could not see his lower teeth. Had he been beaten up? If he meant what he said on the video, then he was genuinely outraged when President Reagan negotiated the release from prison in Moscow of Nicholas Daniloff, a US News and World Report correspondent, by freeing an accused Soviet spy in return. Why would Reagan submit to one blackmail and not to another, Anderson asked, apparently unaware that Reagan had been trading guns for hostages from January of 1986. Reagan's argument was simple: the United States had diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union while Terry Anderson's captors were 'faceless terrorists'. But they were not. His principal captor was so well known that American agents tried to arrest him near Paris when he was on holiday in France. The French, mindful of their own hostages, forced the Americans to leave him alone. The French were obeying Lebanese rules.
"We all went along with these unwritten laws. In a land where there was no active police force, no law, no right of appeal, no claim to friendship or journalistic integrity that was sufficient to free our friend, what else could we do? Terry Anderson was the man who proved this, who paid the price for staying on the story."
Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation - The Abduction of Lebanon