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The history of domination in Latin America. MONROE: Let's reformulate!
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SpecialSeries
War correspondents reporting feelings from the front line
(Photo Truthout.org/Seinforma)
Exclusive Interview
JAVIER ESPINOSA
“Human beings are above news”
JAVIER ESPINOSA
“Human beings are above news”
In the Lebanon, meanwhile
In the moment I am writing this text, I suppose that the son of Javier Espinosa is having one year old. The first time we had a telephone interview, he was living in Jerusalem with his wife, Mónica Prieto, also a correspondent, and his five-month old baby. He stated that he left Madrid in 1994, and that now that he had a child he wanted to spend more time at home. We had a second interview, also via telephone, on a Sunday around the middle of the year 2007. His son was ten months old and I could hear whimpers on the back of the conversation. They had recently moved to Beirut, to witness the tense parliamentary (to elect successors of two anti-Syrian representatives who were murdered) and presidential elections.
“For the moment, everything is normal here -said Javier-, like in Madrid. There is no danger. You only see signs: if you go to a coffee shop, they count how many guns you have bought. It is a very European country, and very beautiful. Everybody lives great, do you have the beach, an incredible weather, and the people are very nice. For the moment, this is the ideal place. But war has its own dynamics and, finally, you learn. Militias are being formed here, their leaders are all crazy, they are sectarian, and they have a religion and little history because this country has been created by the French colonization. I hope I am wrong, but all these components together lead to a war, sooner or later. When the conflict begins, we will see how the situation evolves.”
Sri Lanka and Yugoslavia: the beginning
The way in which Javier Espinosa started his career as war correspondent is curious, almost eccentric: it began on a trip for both pleasure and work. An explanatory remark to understand him: more than a conflict itself, he is interested in learning other cultures, other landscapes and other people. That is to say, what he likes the most is to travel, and he wants to do it, as he says, “even in a wheelchair, if necessary”.
In 1989 he was working as a free lance reporter for El País (Spain). He had worked as a sport reporter on a Canary Islands’ local newspaper (“I was born in Malaga, but I lived in the Canary Islands until I reached 18 years old. I always say that I am Canarian. The fact that I was born in Malaga is a mere coincidence”). That summer, he planned to go on vacation to the south coast of Sri Lanka: fifteen days of rest among the palm trees and lying on the white sandy beach, and then he would go to the Guerrilla zone, 200 km to the north, to witness the civil war. “They are like two different countries -he explained-. The south is a tropical luxury, Thai massages and very good hotels, and in the north people are killed in the jungle, there are refugees, bombs, very terrible conflicts.
In that moment, Jaffna, the capital city (to the north of Sri Lanka) was completely devastated by the guerrilla, the Tigers of Tamil. They were placing bombs everyday. I was not aware of what I was doing there. I remember that we entered into the rebel’s area and that another car of the Red Cross asked us what we were doing there at that time, because the rebels threw bombs on every car that was not identified by the Army. We heard the message of the Tigers of Tamil through the loudspeakers, like the Big Brother: Guys, we have to fight; ¡long live the war! There was no electricity and no running water. They had big boards where they placed the names of the people that had died the day before. There were special female suicide brigades. It is the most incredible war I have ever seen. It was very surrealistic.”
During his stay in Jaffna, he realized that he was interested in traveling to other countries that were under similar circumstances. He started to make interviews in places where there were no manifest conflicts (like the elections in Angola and Mozambique, countries that were in war, but with no fights in that moment). During almost the whole 90’s he worked as a free lance reporter, so he had flexibility to go where he wanted. He saved money to travel every three or four months to a conflict and then he sold the interviews and articles when he was back.
During those years he spent almost six months in Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1995. It was his first long stay in a war and his training as correspondent. “Yugoslavia was a very hard war; there were many bombings, those that you see on the movies. I was in the street and five minutes later there was a street battle. It had been a normal country, like any other European country, until the war began. The people had chalets, a remarkable education, and they lost everything in a couple of days. As the Yugoslavian money became worthless, millions of bills were lying on the floor or were used as wood during the winter.
When I was a correspondent during that war, I was interested in the current affairs, how it was to be near Sarajevo or how the refugees were arriving to the city. Any day in a war is a different story, because the situation is anomalous; however, now I go to a war with specific stories. Yugoslavia served as training for war correspondents.”
Rwanda: tractors of corpses
Espinosa traveled to Rwanda twice: two months after the beginning of the genocide, on June 1994, and then during the cholera epidemic that took place in the refugee camps. “In Rwanda I have seen the hardest things I have ever seen in my life. I have never seen such a huge toll of deaths in any other place. 5 thousand people could die in a week. You were eating at a restaurant and, when you went out of the place, you could see corpses of people that you had just seen on the road. People were buried with tractors in common graves.
I was in an area that was controlled by the Tutsis. In that genocide, people were killed with machetes, not with guns. Millions of people were slashed with machetes in their eyes and foot. As they were too many and they didn’t have time to kill all of them, they first cut down their foot tendons so that they couldn’t run. They left them in the floor, bleeding, and then they came back and killed them. Many of the people that survived had their tendons broken and had terrible cuts on their heads, and they saved their lives because they had a very tough head and the machete couldn’t go through their head. But they remained marked forever.
Rwanda was a complete anarchy. 5 year old children were driving a check point with hand grenades on one hand, and asking for bread with the other hand. But they didn’t carry the grenades as a threat, they simply have it.
On the civil refugee camps (where there were Hutus and Tutsis who escaped from the war), people were so paranoid that the children went through the camp pointing at the Tutsis, who were put in a truck to be assassinated. The children identified the Tutsis for their height, since they were taller than the Hutus.
Most of the conflicts can be explained by the history. If you don’t know anything about history, all you can see is barbarity.
The thing is that in Africa many countries are fictitious, invented by us, the Europeans. The Hutus and the Tutsis lived very well until the Belgian colonization arrived and told the people that everybody should be able to distinguish the Tutsis from the Hutus. In 1934 the Belgian colonization handed out ethnic carnets to identify them and colonization also decided which country was to be directed by the Tutsis, who were fostered and were given education; and that the other ethnic group would be farmers. Therefore, when you see that they are killing each others, you realize that the Hutus have been crushed and mistreated for decades, and that such relationship was fostered by the Belgian colonization itself.
Journalism is not very useful in such cases, but it is a moral duty, since many of these tragedies are created by us. Iraq has been created by us and Africa has also been created by us. And for that reason, we have a duty to them, at least to tell the story, so that people cannot say: Oh, I didn’t know it.
I like to know people’s history. I am not interested at all in the history of the leaders and the running class. All that I have seen are liars; they cheat the people and betray them for money and for power (except for Mandela, in South Africa, the only one that I will always admire as a leader). Thus, you must have a close contact with the people on the streets, talk to the person that sells you a coca cola, with the base leader, with the civilian and with the refugees. First of all, because they are suffering the true conflict; secondly, because they don’t care about the leaders and, thirdly, because I think that the only purpose of journalists is to let the people that is suffering think that they are important for at least five minutes, since I think that what we are writing is useless. They tell us the tragedy they experienced and they think that their life will change. Of course, nothing will be better, but at least if you hear them, they have five minutes of hope.”
Sierra Leone: a surreal kidnap
Javier Espinosa arrived at Sierra Leone on January 1999, shortly after a bloody attack of the guerrilla in Freetown, where hundreds of people were mutilated by the militia of Johnny Paul Koroma, -Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC). He traveled in a Ukrainian plane, completely beat-up and full of mercenaries, as he described. The plane landed in Freetown, the capital city. “The city had wooden buildings, which had been burned by the guerrilla. All was reduced to debris. There was a curfew. There has been much talk about the guerrilla’s excesses, but the Government Army and the Ecomog (Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group) also committed the same excesses without any kind of judgment. They executed in the streets all those persons suspected of collaborating with the guerrilla, even if they were not. They killed some people like this in front of me, because they thought they were guerrilla men. They shot them in two minutes. At other times, the crowd simply killed them with machetes and sticks.”
The description of the horror seems unstoppable: the hospital was full of mutilated people (with their hands, feet or ears cut); around 50 thousand people sheltered in the Freetown stadium and thousands of people arriving to the capital city, escaping from the areas that were under the control of the guerrilla; the streets were taken by the Army (“groups of crazy men with uniform”); all the city had no electricity and no running water. The militias allied to the government were also patrolling the streets and establishing check points to avoid infiltrations by the guerrilla men.
Together with Patrick Saint-Paul, French journalist for Le Figaro, he advanced until the last check point. They didn’t know they were crossing the front line and that they were entering into the area that was under the control of the guerrilla: Nowhere Land. For a journalist, he said, it is “a gross mistake, a technical mistake, not to know where the front line is. You can not only get kidnapped but also get killed. You cannot cross the front line without knowing what is on the other side. It can go well once, but the next one you die.”
Nowhere Land was full of corpses and survivors; some were killed during combats and others were evidently executed, with their hands tied on their wrists. “That area was the most horrific one. Suddenly we came across a guerrilla patrol and they captured us”. It was a group of the Koroma militia, the same that had been conducting the recent attack to Freetown.
Johnny Paul Koroma had taken the government of Sierra Leone after a coup d’état to the constitutional president, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah. The Nigerians, however, expelled him almost a year later, in 1998. The short-term president organized his soldiers to take Freetown on January 1999, a bloody event remembered due to the several mutilations. In that moment, however, nobody knew who was responsible for that massacre.
The kidnappers took the journalists with commander “Rambo”. “He was very drank, drugged, smoking marijuana -remembered Espinosa-. They have chosen to stay near a beer company and they were drinking all day long. We made him and interview and then the guy said: ‘You can’t leave, you are kidnapped’. And we answered him: ‘Hey man, we have just made an interview with you, we have to publish it’. ‘No, you cannot leave’. ‘Ok, but at least let one of us to leave’. And Patrick left the place, escorted by a patrol, and went to Freetown. He reported that I had been kidnapped.
There was a moment in which I was about to die. I heard ‘shut them down, shut them down’ and they point at us. I don’t know why they didn’t shoot.
The commander was completely irrational, and also the people surrounding him. He had never been interviewed by a journalist and he was fascinated with that thing.
My release was as random as my kidnap. That day I had told them that I wanted to leave. We played chest and it told them: ‘Look, I am done here; if you want this interview to be published I must go back to my hotel because my computer is there’. Some said yes, the others said no. then they told me: ‘You cannot leave because one of our bosses said so’. ‘Hey, I am leaving anyway; this is not serious, ¿how can the media come here if you are going to kidnap every journalist that comes here?’ The conversation was kind of surrealistic, but that’s how it happened. Finally, the boss said yes, that he wanted to let me out. They released me and I went walking to the Army check point, which was like three kilometers away.
They released me with a girl that was a sexual slave for them, because they were afraid that the Army would kill me and then blame them for the murder. I don’t know why the thought that I would be safer with her.
Up to the moment we made the interview, nobody had ever had contact with that guerrilla. In Sierra Leone there were many guerrillas, not a single one. And nobody knew which of those guerillas had attacked the city. Everybody thought that the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was responsible for the attacks, but the attacks came from the revolutionary army.”
The terrorist practice
He remembers clearly how the guerrilla men were organized: the camp was a big rectangle, whose center was full of women with their children, surrounded by the combatants. The entire troop was at open air (“the higher luxury was to have a roofed house”). They had military battalions and units of children between 7 and 10 years old (“their own sons and sons of other people they kidnapped in villages and made them kill their mates so that they couldn’t come back”). Some of these children were already captains or colonels. The soldiers, including children, used to be drugged. Women were sexual slaves or were in charge of cooking and taking care of the babies (“there were many babies. Life didn’t stop, they kept having births and the kept marrying each other”).
“In the middle of the camp, they had a Coca Cola with a Nigerian on top of it and a message saying ‘Thanks Nigeria’. A little macabre; but the terrorist practice was widespread. I saw check points of Nigerian groups, decorated with skulls from people they had killed.”
After his release, Espinosa didn’t go back to Sierra Leone until the second attack to the city made by the guerrilla on the year 2000. “At that time, the British arrived to Freetown and stopped the advancement of the guerrilla, but half of the country, or three-fourths of it, was still on the hands of the guerilla.
The last trip I made to Sierra Leone was for the elections. Since then, the war ceased, but the process is not over yet, because anybody, with some money, can support a coup d’état and cause a new conflict. It is not easy to recover from the horror they have committed there. In these conflicts, where the guerrilla or the Army occupies an area, they force the population to take part in their politics. Either you take part or you get killed.”
The people stories
Among the horrific images or the indescribable horror and the tiny gestures, Espinosa shudders with the smallest hint of humanity. “I get immediately saturated with horror. That thing of seeing two hundred corpses, it is not that I am not impressed by that, I get immediately saturated and I don’t care much about it; and that is because it is so vast that I cannot assimilate it.
I get more impressed with the people stories at war, the civil people who try to survive the conflicts. In Sri Lanka, among all the horror that was there, I was touched by an old man who was in charge of the hotel in which we were staying. He only received clients every four months, from the United Nations or journalists. And that old man strived to serve us the better food he had, which was nothing: he always cooked shrimp omelets; but the guy went out all mornings to look for shrimps and eggs. He showed us pictures of Jaffna before the war, how beautiful the city was, like the rest of the country. I remember that I told him: ‘Well, maybe sometime the situation will get better'… but he said: ‘No, this is going to get worst’. A year later, the Army took Jaffna and devastated it. I don’t know what happened to that old man.
I was also touched by Mandela’s vote, in South Africa. I almost cried, because it was so nice to see that he was doing that. The story of South Africa is a typical story in which all components of war were present: there were militias, people had guns, and they had many fighting and deaths. There were refugees. It was surely a war. And then a guy comes and says: ‘No, we won’t have a war here, because we, the ones who may want to go to war, sacrifice ourselves and say that we don't to go to war’. And because of that single man and the people that followed him, they decided not to start a war. All I had seen was wonderful. What leaders usually do is to lead peoples to catastrophe; but this time, there was a guy that saved their people.
The story that I wrote of which I am most proud of is the day in which Mandela casted his vote; an event that, by the way, was not reported. By that time I was a freelance journalist for El Mundo, and they had sent a special correspondent and published their story, not mine. But mine was very beautiful. They only published a small part of my chronicle.”
Slow hardening
“Human beings are above news. When somebody tells you: ‘Hey, record this, we are going to beat that guy up... and then you don’t record anything. I am not interested in that… I am not going to promote a beating.
Sometimes I have been with criminals and I thought if I should have taken advantage of them or not. I am not sure about that. I made interviews to some mercenaries who fought in Yugoslavia because you think: is it necessary to show people that they are criminals?
The bad thing about going to conflicts is that finally you become a little cynical. To get close to a war catastrophe you must try to lift a wall so that the situation does not upset you; if not, you cannot work, because you get influenced by the pain. Imagine a father whose entire family has just been murdered. You must try to think that you are not there and that to ask is something kind of automatic. In the end, it is a little cynical.
A problem with wars is that sometimes they are treated as a show, like in Iraq. It is a very mediatic war, pictures only show the horror, blood, but you don’t know why that is happening. You have to explain the horror, since it doesn’t come out of nowhere. People in Palestine don’t blow themselves just because, but because they have been living in pigsties for more than 50 years.
I think that is the great danger of being a war correspondent: finally, you loose sensitivity and you do it as any other job, as if you were working at a bank.
It is difficult to reach a balance. I have seen many people that became very cynical, they see war as a normal thing; but it is also true that if you get involved and you start to cry every time you see a disgrace you cannot work there, because the war itself is a disgrace. I never really went to therapy; I don’t know if it has affected me. I am much more cynical now, after so much wars, I admit it."
A human being increased by twenty seven folds
“When you got to a war, you realize that everything is relative. When I see the people in Madrid, worrying about the car, about the house that has not enough balconies, it seems funny… or the lots of power, people feels important when importance is so relative. In a war, you are important today and the next day your head is blown and you are nobody. You learn to value people for their goodness and all the rest is nonsense. You realize that in the West there is a lack of values. War makes you underestimate everything, the relation with your bosses and the society in general. It shows you the hypocrisy that is present in our society, and the needs or things that are present but unnecessary in the society.
Among all my experiences, the most impressive one is my experience in Africa. That experience changed my values and showed me what was important. They really appreciate silence. They may spend one hour watching at a bird or elephant. That is unthinkable in the West. Our concept of life is related to having something to do all the time. There you can enjoy every minute because it may be the last one. They have a very positive thinking, although they have many reasons for escaping and flying to Europe in masses, I have never heard an African committing suicide, maybe in Kenya, but it is not very common.
I am not a religious man. In all the wars I have been -except the African wars- I have seen priests involved in the conflict. Sometimes they are the main instigators of such wars, like many cases in Europe and in the Middle East. In Asia there is always a religious component too.
I am particularly interested in wars because there you can see very bad people and also very good people. You see human beings increased by twenty seven folds. Everything is potentiated. I also like history. Ultimately, war is history and you can see it with you own eyes.
I don’t know if I will continue to work as a war correspondent for my whole life. I think you get saturated. I know correspondents that, at the end, went to places without any interest at all. I don’t to end like that. The day in which I finally loose interest in war I won’t work anymore. The good thing is that nobody can force you to go, even your company. I don’t have the same resistance that I had when I went to Yugoslavia, to be without sleep for four days. You get saturated with wars. And in that same moment you have to leave.”
* Ana Maria Carrano, publisher and magazine editor, is our correspondent in Caracas, Venezuela. Her journalistic activity has been always tied to the local cultural environment.
In the moment I am writing this text, I suppose that the son of Javier Espinosa is having one year old. The first time we had a telephone interview, he was living in Jerusalem with his wife, Mónica Prieto, also a correspondent, and his five-month old baby. He stated that he left Madrid in 1994, and that now that he had a child he wanted to spend more time at home. We had a second interview, also via telephone, on a Sunday around the middle of the year 2007. His son was ten months old and I could hear whimpers on the back of the conversation. They had recently moved to Beirut, to witness the tense parliamentary (to elect successors of two anti-Syrian representatives who were murdered) and presidential elections.
“For the moment, everything is normal here -said Javier-, like in Madrid. There is no danger. You only see signs: if you go to a coffee shop, they count how many guns you have bought. It is a very European country, and very beautiful. Everybody lives great, do you have the beach, an incredible weather, and the people are very nice. For the moment, this is the ideal place. But war has its own dynamics and, finally, you learn. Militias are being formed here, their leaders are all crazy, they are sectarian, and they have a religion and little history because this country has been created by the French colonization. I hope I am wrong, but all these components together lead to a war, sooner or later. When the conflict begins, we will see how the situation evolves.”
Sri Lanka and Yugoslavia: the beginning
The way in which Javier Espinosa started his career as war correspondent is curious, almost eccentric: it began on a trip for both pleasure and work. An explanatory remark to understand him: more than a conflict itself, he is interested in learning other cultures, other landscapes and other people. That is to say, what he likes the most is to travel, and he wants to do it, as he says, “even in a wheelchair, if necessary”.
In 1989 he was working as a free lance reporter for El País (Spain). He had worked as a sport reporter on a Canary Islands’ local newspaper (“I was born in Malaga, but I lived in the Canary Islands until I reached 18 years old. I always say that I am Canarian. The fact that I was born in Malaga is a mere coincidence”). That summer, he planned to go on vacation to the south coast of Sri Lanka: fifteen days of rest among the palm trees and lying on the white sandy beach, and then he would go to the Guerrilla zone, 200 km to the north, to witness the civil war. “They are like two different countries -he explained-. The south is a tropical luxury, Thai massages and very good hotels, and in the north people are killed in the jungle, there are refugees, bombs, very terrible conflicts.
In that moment, Jaffna, the capital city (to the north of Sri Lanka) was completely devastated by the guerrilla, the Tigers of Tamil. They were placing bombs everyday. I was not aware of what I was doing there. I remember that we entered into the rebel’s area and that another car of the Red Cross asked us what we were doing there at that time, because the rebels threw bombs on every car that was not identified by the Army. We heard the message of the Tigers of Tamil through the loudspeakers, like the Big Brother: Guys, we have to fight; ¡long live the war! There was no electricity and no running water. They had big boards where they placed the names of the people that had died the day before. There were special female suicide brigades. It is the most incredible war I have ever seen. It was very surrealistic.”
During his stay in Jaffna, he realized that he was interested in traveling to other countries that were under similar circumstances. He started to make interviews in places where there were no manifest conflicts (like the elections in Angola and Mozambique, countries that were in war, but with no fights in that moment). During almost the whole 90’s he worked as a free lance reporter, so he had flexibility to go where he wanted. He saved money to travel every three or four months to a conflict and then he sold the interviews and articles when he was back.
During those years he spent almost six months in Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1995. It was his first long stay in a war and his training as correspondent. “Yugoslavia was a very hard war; there were many bombings, those that you see on the movies. I was in the street and five minutes later there was a street battle. It had been a normal country, like any other European country, until the war began. The people had chalets, a remarkable education, and they lost everything in a couple of days. As the Yugoslavian money became worthless, millions of bills were lying on the floor or were used as wood during the winter.
When I was a correspondent during that war, I was interested in the current affairs, how it was to be near Sarajevo or how the refugees were arriving to the city. Any day in a war is a different story, because the situation is anomalous; however, now I go to a war with specific stories. Yugoslavia served as training for war correspondents.”
Rwanda: tractors of corpses
Espinosa traveled to Rwanda twice: two months after the beginning of the genocide, on June 1994, and then during the cholera epidemic that took place in the refugee camps. “In Rwanda I have seen the hardest things I have ever seen in my life. I have never seen such a huge toll of deaths in any other place. 5 thousand people could die in a week. You were eating at a restaurant and, when you went out of the place, you could see corpses of people that you had just seen on the road. People were buried with tractors in common graves.
I was in an area that was controlled by the Tutsis. In that genocide, people were killed with machetes, not with guns. Millions of people were slashed with machetes in their eyes and foot. As they were too many and they didn’t have time to kill all of them, they first cut down their foot tendons so that they couldn’t run. They left them in the floor, bleeding, and then they came back and killed them. Many of the people that survived had their tendons broken and had terrible cuts on their heads, and they saved their lives because they had a very tough head and the machete couldn’t go through their head. But they remained marked forever.
Rwanda was a complete anarchy. 5 year old children were driving a check point with hand grenades on one hand, and asking for bread with the other hand. But they didn’t carry the grenades as a threat, they simply have it.
On the civil refugee camps (where there were Hutus and Tutsis who escaped from the war), people were so paranoid that the children went through the camp pointing at the Tutsis, who were put in a truck to be assassinated. The children identified the Tutsis for their height, since they were taller than the Hutus.
Most of the conflicts can be explained by the history. If you don’t know anything about history, all you can see is barbarity.
The thing is that in Africa many countries are fictitious, invented by us, the Europeans. The Hutus and the Tutsis lived very well until the Belgian colonization arrived and told the people that everybody should be able to distinguish the Tutsis from the Hutus. In 1934 the Belgian colonization handed out ethnic carnets to identify them and colonization also decided which country was to be directed by the Tutsis, who were fostered and were given education; and that the other ethnic group would be farmers. Therefore, when you see that they are killing each others, you realize that the Hutus have been crushed and mistreated for decades, and that such relationship was fostered by the Belgian colonization itself.
Journalism is not very useful in such cases, but it is a moral duty, since many of these tragedies are created by us. Iraq has been created by us and Africa has also been created by us. And for that reason, we have a duty to them, at least to tell the story, so that people cannot say: Oh, I didn’t know it.
I like to know people’s history. I am not interested at all in the history of the leaders and the running class. All that I have seen are liars; they cheat the people and betray them for money and for power (except for Mandela, in South Africa, the only one that I will always admire as a leader). Thus, you must have a close contact with the people on the streets, talk to the person that sells you a coca cola, with the base leader, with the civilian and with the refugees. First of all, because they are suffering the true conflict; secondly, because they don’t care about the leaders and, thirdly, because I think that the only purpose of journalists is to let the people that is suffering think that they are important for at least five minutes, since I think that what we are writing is useless. They tell us the tragedy they experienced and they think that their life will change. Of course, nothing will be better, but at least if you hear them, they have five minutes of hope.”
Sierra Leone: a surreal kidnap
Javier Espinosa arrived at Sierra Leone on January 1999, shortly after a bloody attack of the guerrilla in Freetown, where hundreds of people were mutilated by the militia of Johnny Paul Koroma, -Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC). He traveled in a Ukrainian plane, completely beat-up and full of mercenaries, as he described. The plane landed in Freetown, the capital city. “The city had wooden buildings, which had been burned by the guerrilla. All was reduced to debris. There was a curfew. There has been much talk about the guerrilla’s excesses, but the Government Army and the Ecomog (Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group) also committed the same excesses without any kind of judgment. They executed in the streets all those persons suspected of collaborating with the guerrilla, even if they were not. They killed some people like this in front of me, because they thought they were guerrilla men. They shot them in two minutes. At other times, the crowd simply killed them with machetes and sticks.”
The description of the horror seems unstoppable: the hospital was full of mutilated people (with their hands, feet or ears cut); around 50 thousand people sheltered in the Freetown stadium and thousands of people arriving to the capital city, escaping from the areas that were under the control of the guerrilla; the streets were taken by the Army (“groups of crazy men with uniform”); all the city had no electricity and no running water. The militias allied to the government were also patrolling the streets and establishing check points to avoid infiltrations by the guerrilla men.
Together with Patrick Saint-Paul, French journalist for Le Figaro, he advanced until the last check point. They didn’t know they were crossing the front line and that they were entering into the area that was under the control of the guerrilla: Nowhere Land. For a journalist, he said, it is “a gross mistake, a technical mistake, not to know where the front line is. You can not only get kidnapped but also get killed. You cannot cross the front line without knowing what is on the other side. It can go well once, but the next one you die.”
Nowhere Land was full of corpses and survivors; some were killed during combats and others were evidently executed, with their hands tied on their wrists. “That area was the most horrific one. Suddenly we came across a guerrilla patrol and they captured us”. It was a group of the Koroma militia, the same that had been conducting the recent attack to Freetown.
Johnny Paul Koroma had taken the government of Sierra Leone after a coup d’état to the constitutional president, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah. The Nigerians, however, expelled him almost a year later, in 1998. The short-term president organized his soldiers to take Freetown on January 1999, a bloody event remembered due to the several mutilations. In that moment, however, nobody knew who was responsible for that massacre.
The kidnappers took the journalists with commander “Rambo”. “He was very drank, drugged, smoking marijuana -remembered Espinosa-. They have chosen to stay near a beer company and they were drinking all day long. We made him and interview and then the guy said: ‘You can’t leave, you are kidnapped’. And we answered him: ‘Hey man, we have just made an interview with you, we have to publish it’. ‘No, you cannot leave’. ‘Ok, but at least let one of us to leave’. And Patrick left the place, escorted by a patrol, and went to Freetown. He reported that I had been kidnapped.
There was a moment in which I was about to die. I heard ‘shut them down, shut them down’ and they point at us. I don’t know why they didn’t shoot.
The commander was completely irrational, and also the people surrounding him. He had never been interviewed by a journalist and he was fascinated with that thing.
My release was as random as my kidnap. That day I had told them that I wanted to leave. We played chest and it told them: ‘Look, I am done here; if you want this interview to be published I must go back to my hotel because my computer is there’. Some said yes, the others said no. then they told me: ‘You cannot leave because one of our bosses said so’. ‘Hey, I am leaving anyway; this is not serious, ¿how can the media come here if you are going to kidnap every journalist that comes here?’ The conversation was kind of surrealistic, but that’s how it happened. Finally, the boss said yes, that he wanted to let me out. They released me and I went walking to the Army check point, which was like three kilometers away.
They released me with a girl that was a sexual slave for them, because they were afraid that the Army would kill me and then blame them for the murder. I don’t know why the thought that I would be safer with her.
Up to the moment we made the interview, nobody had ever had contact with that guerrilla. In Sierra Leone there were many guerrillas, not a single one. And nobody knew which of those guerillas had attacked the city. Everybody thought that the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was responsible for the attacks, but the attacks came from the revolutionary army.”
The terrorist practice
He remembers clearly how the guerrilla men were organized: the camp was a big rectangle, whose center was full of women with their children, surrounded by the combatants. The entire troop was at open air (“the higher luxury was to have a roofed house”). They had military battalions and units of children between 7 and 10 years old (“their own sons and sons of other people they kidnapped in villages and made them kill their mates so that they couldn’t come back”). Some of these children were already captains or colonels. The soldiers, including children, used to be drugged. Women were sexual slaves or were in charge of cooking and taking care of the babies (“there were many babies. Life didn’t stop, they kept having births and the kept marrying each other”).
“In the middle of the camp, they had a Coca Cola with a Nigerian on top of it and a message saying ‘Thanks Nigeria’. A little macabre; but the terrorist practice was widespread. I saw check points of Nigerian groups, decorated with skulls from people they had killed.”
After his release, Espinosa didn’t go back to Sierra Leone until the second attack to the city made by the guerrilla on the year 2000. “At that time, the British arrived to Freetown and stopped the advancement of the guerrilla, but half of the country, or three-fourths of it, was still on the hands of the guerilla.
The last trip I made to Sierra Leone was for the elections. Since then, the war ceased, but the process is not over yet, because anybody, with some money, can support a coup d’état and cause a new conflict. It is not easy to recover from the horror they have committed there. In these conflicts, where the guerrilla or the Army occupies an area, they force the population to take part in their politics. Either you take part or you get killed.”
The people stories
Among the horrific images or the indescribable horror and the tiny gestures, Espinosa shudders with the smallest hint of humanity. “I get immediately saturated with horror. That thing of seeing two hundred corpses, it is not that I am not impressed by that, I get immediately saturated and I don’t care much about it; and that is because it is so vast that I cannot assimilate it.
I get more impressed with the people stories at war, the civil people who try to survive the conflicts. In Sri Lanka, among all the horror that was there, I was touched by an old man who was in charge of the hotel in which we were staying. He only received clients every four months, from the United Nations or journalists. And that old man strived to serve us the better food he had, which was nothing: he always cooked shrimp omelets; but the guy went out all mornings to look for shrimps and eggs. He showed us pictures of Jaffna before the war, how beautiful the city was, like the rest of the country. I remember that I told him: ‘Well, maybe sometime the situation will get better'… but he said: ‘No, this is going to get worst’. A year later, the Army took Jaffna and devastated it. I don’t know what happened to that old man.
I was also touched by Mandela’s vote, in South Africa. I almost cried, because it was so nice to see that he was doing that. The story of South Africa is a typical story in which all components of war were present: there were militias, people had guns, and they had many fighting and deaths. There were refugees. It was surely a war. And then a guy comes and says: ‘No, we won’t have a war here, because we, the ones who may want to go to war, sacrifice ourselves and say that we don't to go to war’. And because of that single man and the people that followed him, they decided not to start a war. All I had seen was wonderful. What leaders usually do is to lead peoples to catastrophe; but this time, there was a guy that saved their people.
The story that I wrote of which I am most proud of is the day in which Mandela casted his vote; an event that, by the way, was not reported. By that time I was a freelance journalist for El Mundo, and they had sent a special correspondent and published their story, not mine. But mine was very beautiful. They only published a small part of my chronicle.”
Slow hardening
“Human beings are above news. When somebody tells you: ‘Hey, record this, we are going to beat that guy up... and then you don’t record anything. I am not interested in that… I am not going to promote a beating.
Sometimes I have been with criminals and I thought if I should have taken advantage of them or not. I am not sure about that. I made interviews to some mercenaries who fought in Yugoslavia because you think: is it necessary to show people that they are criminals?
The bad thing about going to conflicts is that finally you become a little cynical. To get close to a war catastrophe you must try to lift a wall so that the situation does not upset you; if not, you cannot work, because you get influenced by the pain. Imagine a father whose entire family has just been murdered. You must try to think that you are not there and that to ask is something kind of automatic. In the end, it is a little cynical.
A problem with wars is that sometimes they are treated as a show, like in Iraq. It is a very mediatic war, pictures only show the horror, blood, but you don’t know why that is happening. You have to explain the horror, since it doesn’t come out of nowhere. People in Palestine don’t blow themselves just because, but because they have been living in pigsties for more than 50 years.
I think that is the great danger of being a war correspondent: finally, you loose sensitivity and you do it as any other job, as if you were working at a bank.
It is difficult to reach a balance. I have seen many people that became very cynical, they see war as a normal thing; but it is also true that if you get involved and you start to cry every time you see a disgrace you cannot work there, because the war itself is a disgrace. I never really went to therapy; I don’t know if it has affected me. I am much more cynical now, after so much wars, I admit it."
A human being increased by twenty seven folds
“When you got to a war, you realize that everything is relative. When I see the people in Madrid, worrying about the car, about the house that has not enough balconies, it seems funny… or the lots of power, people feels important when importance is so relative. In a war, you are important today and the next day your head is blown and you are nobody. You learn to value people for their goodness and all the rest is nonsense. You realize that in the West there is a lack of values. War makes you underestimate everything, the relation with your bosses and the society in general. It shows you the hypocrisy that is present in our society, and the needs or things that are present but unnecessary in the society.
Among all my experiences, the most impressive one is my experience in Africa. That experience changed my values and showed me what was important. They really appreciate silence. They may spend one hour watching at a bird or elephant. That is unthinkable in the West. Our concept of life is related to having something to do all the time. There you can enjoy every minute because it may be the last one. They have a very positive thinking, although they have many reasons for escaping and flying to Europe in masses, I have never heard an African committing suicide, maybe in Kenya, but it is not very common.
I am not a religious man. In all the wars I have been -except the African wars- I have seen priests involved in the conflict. Sometimes they are the main instigators of such wars, like many cases in Europe and in the Middle East. In Asia there is always a religious component too.
I am particularly interested in wars because there you can see very bad people and also very good people. You see human beings increased by twenty seven folds. Everything is potentiated. I also like history. Ultimately, war is history and you can see it with you own eyes.
I don’t know if I will continue to work as a war correspondent for my whole life. I think you get saturated. I know correspondents that, at the end, went to places without any interest at all. I don’t to end like that. The day in which I finally loose interest in war I won’t work anymore. The good thing is that nobody can force you to go, even your company. I don’t have the same resistance that I had when I went to Yugoslavia, to be without sleep for four days. You get saturated with wars. And in that same moment you have to leave.”
* Ana Maria Carrano, publisher and magazine editor, is our correspondent in Caracas, Venezuela. Her journalistic activity has been always tied to the local cultural environment.
Javier Espinosa, a correspondent for the Spanish newspaper El Mundo has witnessed Rwanda's tragedy, the Yugoslavian war, the Lebanon war, and Iraq, the United States intervention in Haiti, the Pinochet case in Chile, the Chiapas conflicts, and the intifada in Palestine. He has been awarded three times the Bayeux-Calvados War Correspondents Prize.
***
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War correspondents reporting feelings from the front line.
SPECIAL SERIES
The Latin-Canadian Organization of Human Rights and Freedom of Expression / Organización Latino-Canadiense de Derechos Humanos y Libertad de Expresión
(Photo Courtesy Javier Espinosa / Seinforma Canada)
11/02/2008
By Ana Maria Carrano / Seinforma Canada
Special Series*
Caracas.- Like almost all Spaniards, Javier Espinosa speaks hastily, as if he is being chased. A sort of natural rush, that seems to minimize the importance of his words or, perhaps, to make them sound more daily or “familiar”. Also, as a good Spaniard, he has a certain Dalilian perspective: he defines the situations that most surprised him as “surrealistic”. That is the adjective that helps him to decipher incomprehensible images, the circumstances of unusual luck or the absurdity of some moments.
By Ana Maria Carrano / Seinforma Canada
Special Series*
Caracas.- Like almost all Spaniards, Javier Espinosa speaks hastily, as if he is being chased. A sort of natural rush, that seems to minimize the importance of his words or, perhaps, to make them sound more daily or “familiar”. Also, as a good Spaniard, he has a certain Dalilian perspective: he defines the situations that most surprised him as “surrealistic”. That is the adjective that helps him to decipher incomprehensible images, the circumstances of unusual luck or the absurdity of some moments.
He points out that his first experience in a war, in Sri Lanka, was surreal. He saw ten children with cyanide pills around their necks, ready to kill themselves if they were captured. The celebration of an Old Night in Sarajevo was also surreal, when he climbed a mound with a friend to see the gunshots clearly, without realizing that the whole city was watching them and that they were becoming a target of the guns. Surreal was to see the bullets that same night through a hole, passing very near them, with champagne on their hands and death aiming at them, while they were constantly laughing, probably because they were nervous. But the most surreal thing that happened to him, perhaps, was the complete story of a kidnap in Sierra Leone, particularly the minutes
in which the journalist was telling to commander “Rambo”, the head of the guerrilla who imprisoned him that it was more convenient for “Rambo” to let him free than to keep him imprisoned. Surely, he should have been talking hastily, in the “Spaniard style”, because that event seems to have had little importance, according to his story.
(Photo Courtesy Javier Espinosa / Seinforma Canada)
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"(...) I get more impressed with the people stories at war, the civil people who try to survive the conflicts (...) The bad thing about going to conflicts is that finally you become a little cynical. To get close to a war catastrophe you must try to lift a wall so that the situation does not upset you (...) War makes you underestimate everything, the relation with your bosses and the society in general. It shows you the hypocrisy that is present in our society, and the needs or things that are present but unnecessary in the society (...)" Javier Espinosa.
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