“You no speak okay?”

I nodded my head and slouched lower in our wreck of a Toyota Corolla shuddering up to the checkpoint. Snow sleeted down the mountain slope to lash through the yellow of the headlights.

“Say nothing okay. Nothing.”

I’d already had a lot of practice at this already, about a dozen times through the night. I was about to cross through yet another of the unofficial and always dangerous border crossings and military checkpoints throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina in the last days of the Yugoslav War.

I didn’t bother to ask who this group was. They’d be one of up to a dozen rag tag army militias or freelance brigands out to shake down travelers, hunt rival gang members, and just generally allow their varied psychoses run wild. All armed of course with anything from the standard and almost always rusty AK-47 up to shoulder mounted rocket propelled grenade launchers.

What I was doing was foolish in the extreme and the relief agency I was consulting for had collectively had a heart attack when I announced my plans.

It was a week before Christmas 1995 and I was travelling the length of the Former Yugoslavia with just a driver, headed for the dismal little town of Tuzla. There was no other way to get there other than disguise myself as a mute Bosnia/Serb/Muslim – whatever it needed to be in order to get through the myriad of little kingdoms and fiefdoms of a county hell bent on destroying every living thing in it.

The only people moving through this nasty patchwork of armed checkpoints, manned by men who clearly had lost any sense of restraint and who always reeked of slivovitz at any time of day or night, were international peacekeepers, gonzo foreign correspondents, and me.

As we coasted up to this latest checkpoint I mused yet again about my private theory that slivovitz had caused the Yugoslav war and its endless slaughter of its peoples.

You might know slivovitz as plum brandy but the stuff they made during the war was not nearly as nice as the stuff you can get in the liquor store. It had so much alcohol content that you could power an aircraft engine with a bottle of it.

At the end of that year I’d already spent several weeks in Croatia, Herzegovina, then still a separate and self styled country, before moving into Bosnia. What I was doing involved meeting a lot of local officials, local military commanders, gangsters, and relief workers. Except for the international relief workers, any and all meetings with the others started with a toast of slivovitz brewed under somebody’s unmade bed.

Let me tell you that a shot of that stuff at seven in the morning is precisely like pounding a six inch spike into your forehead. And it would never stop at one.

There were days when I would have to crawl off into some sleeping place I’d found in a roofless building at noon and sleep for several hours before starting all over with the slivovitz at night. No one else seemed to be affected by the stuff at all although they drank it like Russians drank vodka.

I am convinced that the former Yugoslavs turned into such murderous killers because of the toxic effects of slivovitz. But it was a private theory no one else ever bothered to consider, yet it gave me comfort while trying to decode the bizarre twistiness of Yugoslav politics.

A wrap on my window and some guttural Serbo Croat, or whatever the local faction had decided to rename their language. I rolled down the window and my driver leaned across and a highly slivovitz wave of spirited arguing started. A package of cigarettes got handed to the guard and the Corolla clutch shuddered forward.

At any one of these checkpoints, and I lost count at well over a couple of dozen during that 20 hour journey, I faced arrest, robbery certainly, a beating probably, and if I really came across a crazy I could have ended up with an AK-47 round to the back of my head.

So you ask, why dear stupid Mr Rick were you doing this?

CNN. That was why.

CNN had bought a house near the road to the Tuzla airbase that the American military were about to start using as they flooded the country with peacekeepers. I wanted publicity for the American aid agency I was advising and the only way to do that was to show up on CNN’s doorstep, try not to act like a Canadian, and offer to help fill their hours of empty airtime before the heavy lifters started landing.

Two other houses also got sold to media outlets and somebody bought the forest blocking the camera positions on the houses from a view of the airstrip. The forest didn’t last the day.

My plan worked. I got my employers noticed by the big networks as well as by most of the rest of the international media waiting at Tuzla for the troops.

To the BBC and Sky I was “British born”, to the American media networks I was either a presumed and unstated American or conveniently misidentified with the city of the aid agency paying me.  NBC was really creative and I was described coyly thus . . .“Mr Grant lives near Buffalo New York” (technically true because at the time I lived in Ottawa Canada).

The first thing the international military did, and most of the work was done by Canadian troops, was to dismantle the dozens if not hundreds of checkpoints throughout the country. A couple of days later I was able to sail south from Tuzla almost without stopping until I reached Split on the Adriatic coast. Ten hours later I was back in Canada in time for Christmas feeling pretty good.

But that nightmare ride through the snow and checkpoints will always sit in my head like some foul little animal that somehow managed to get itself soaked in slivovitz and slowly rot

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant

An odd thing is happening to journalism amid the chaos of humanitarian disasters these days.   It’s becoming as managed, influenced, nuanced and manipulated as the worst of government spin controlled journalism.

Over the past years I’ve experienced at first hand a most remarkable change in how the media works  in humanitarian disasters such as Albania, Kosovo, East Timor Afghanistan and as I see now, in Haiti. Amid the hellish dangers of such places there is now in place a formal dance of intricate detail between United Nations officials, aid workers, reporters, and news managers.   It’s a dance that allows a reporter newly parachuted into some vile human emergency to hit the ground running and be filing within hours, if not minutes, direct from the front lines or from the edge of a mass grave.

The days of a foreign correspondent needing to spend huge amounts of time just finding out where to go for information in a disaster area, after spending hours if not days just trying to find accommodation and a filing point are gone.

Instead, there is an mobile world wide army of disaster officials, information officers, spokespersons, and spin doctors that can provide the itinerant reporter with everything they need, including food, lodging and transportation.  Indeed, it is now possible for a lazy reporter, and there are too many of those, to file as though from the circles of hell yet in reality be sitting in the closest five star hotel.

In fact I believe that information flow and control by UN Agencies and relief groups is now so thorough, so complete, that it is possible for a reporter to make a name reporting a humanitarian disaster without leaving Ottawa, Toronto, New York, London, or wherever.

Now, I’ve been on both sides of the fence.  While I advise aid groups on how to handle the media and I have managed information campaigns directed at foreign correspondents, I have also spent time in the back-of-beyond amidst the starving and the murdered with a microphone and taperecorder.  As a result I can bring a unique, if schizoid, perspective of what’s going on.

What I’ve seen over the past years is a disturbing acceleration of news management that started about the time of the Great Ethiopian Famine and the Collapse of Somalia, but then continued to a somewhat greater extent in Bosnia.  I say disturbing from the viewpoint of a former broadcast journalist, yet I am in the thick and heart of that very management.

In places such as Chechnya, East Timor, Bosnia, and a bunch of smaller cesspits of human disaster, and in others to come, there exists a sophisticated world wide media industry managed by aid groups and United Nations agencies.

Every aid group of any significance now has a corps of information people who at the very drop of a starved nomad, the spark of an ethnic cleansing house burning, the wail of a war orphan, will be on an aircraft within hours doing their damndest to race the true foreign and war correspondents to the sharp end, the place where people are dying.

Until a few years ago the only people racing to the nasty sharp end were those journalistic firefighters or Bang Bang Artistes who only come alive during the overture to Armageddon.  They’d get the word out and that would goad the UN and aid groups to mobilize and it would trigger the usual influx of other reporters.

But these days for every hard bitten disaster journalist plunging into the front lines there is a humanitarian spokesperson or media manager right there beside them.

The aim isn’t to necessarily get the name of your organization into the reporters’ stories, although that is nice when it happens, but rather to become a source of information for those who haven’t or won’t leave home base.

The goal is to establish yourself and your organization as a credible source of information, to become an ersatz reporter or news agency that others will turn to as a matter of course.  This results in publicity and sometimes media prominence which pays off hugely in increased government funding and public donations.

The United Nations Office of Humanitarian Affairs, and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees play this game seriously and very well.

Every day in a disaster area now starts the same way.  The local UNHCR spokesperson will hold a morning briefing on latest developments.   If a military force is involved then a senior officer will follow, then a series of lesser briefings will be hosted by the aid groups active in the region.  Throughout the rest of the day an army of aid information officers will chat up, lobby, spin, and befriend reporters and especially the all important news producers with the big television networks.

At the same time, information is being relayed to domestic media back home from the head offices of the aid groups.  News releases tailored for domestic if not local interest flow on a daily basis, op-ed pieces are written, interviews and news conferences are arranged for returning aid workers.

The ease of getting information out of even the most isolated disaster area through internet links, satellite phones, and certainly in the cases of Sudan, Iran, East Timor and Albania/Kosovo, by mobile phone means that outfits such as CARE Canada, WorldVision, the Red Cross, or any of the other biggies, can and do provide domestic news outlets in Canada with information before even their own reporters can.

It’s not just information.  When Albania was overwhelmed by Kosovar refugees I was able to provide video clips over the internet for any agency that wanted them.  Local radio stations which are notoriously understaffed and utterly unable to put anyone into the field were able to connect into the CARE web site and download a 30 second report for use on their newscasts.  It didn’t matter to them that the piece was supplied by a CARE official who mentioned the organization’s name as much as decency allowed and clearly had a point of view if not bias — it was material they could use.

Aid agencies and organizations these days now have elaborate written Communication Strategies every bit as tightly focused and as effective as those in any major corporation.  More and more aid groups are building communications departments which, if you blur your eyes just a bit, look an awful lot like news gathering operations.  In fact, quite a number of these departments are staffed with former journalists.

It is now entirely possible for an unscrupulous reporter to cobble together a mass of first hand material, in word, picture, and sound from aid agency sources and produce a seemingly on the spot report from say, Iran, and yet never have left this country.  I hope to god it hasn’t happened yet but I just know that it will.

In the meantime the true professional disaster reporters will continue putting their lives on the line.  Of the perhaps two or three hundred real Bang Bang Artistes in the world a significant number are Canadian.  Whether they are working for the Globe, , the CBC, the National Post, any of the American networks, or some other global news outlet, they do their job so well and honorably that people like me don’t have to bother worrying about getting their attention.  They decide on their own whether something is a story and that’s the way it really should be.

I wish their tribe long life.

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant

I’ve been watching the television coverage out of Haiti since the earthquake earlier this week. No matter who I watch, with the exception of Al Jazeera, the major world networks seem to be driving their correspondents to ever lower forms of journalism in the mad rush for the most sensational of stories. I’d be disgusted except I’ve seen this many times before both as sinning journalist myself and as a Spokesman/communications type for the United Nations and many other relief organizations in wars and disaster areas for more than 15 years.

I’d write about Haiti but this piece from the days of Albania Kosovo that I published in the National Press Club Magazine Scrum really says it all, so here it is.

After six weeks in Albania I’ve come to agree with how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle characterized reporters in his book, "The Lost World"

The term he used is Porcus ex grege diabola — the Devil’s Swineherd.

I suppose the usual and politically correct Canadian disclaimer should be inserted here, "Not all reporters. . .only some. . . a few. . . and certainly no one working for the CBC, the Globe, etc and etc. But the truth is different.

The media scene in Albania is no different from what it always is in disaster areas, indeed in many cases it’s the same people who were in Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Ethiopia, or any other Bang Bang arena, but it is the most recent.

Here are some excerpts from the SITREPS, or situation reports, that I sent back to the people who sometimes hire me to be a Disaster Tourist.

April 20

“Well, the ravening beast is in full voice.  Reporters from everywhere are tripping over themselves in a desperate attempt to find something to report.

There’s been a lull in the refugee story.  In fact the story is in desperate need of a strong verb.  I’m getting pretty sick of hearing BBC news stories on shortwave that every day start, "In the heaviest night of bombing yet, NATO warplanes. . . . ."   Essentially the 800 or so reporters in this country find themselves in the odd position of having to go out and dig up news themselves.

Let me give you an idea of how the media circus looks in Tirana.

First of all, and as always, the reporters have taken over the main hotels.  The Hotel Tirana International and the Hotel Europark Rogner have been booked solid for the last month.  As a result, the managements have been able to continue jacking up the room rates.  A month ago it would have been possible to get a decent cheap room in either hotel for 50$US.  Today the same room goes for 230$ and the bill must be paid every three days or armed security guards will forcibly evict the unfortunate.

The roofs of both hotels look like NASA space tracking stations and shoving matches have broken out between twee coiffured television anchors trying to use the best standup positions.  I’m beginning to wonder whether hotel rooftops are now the only place where television correspondents can report from.

April 22

Of the several hundred reporters in town there is a significant number who rarely leave the hotels and do all of their reporting by stealing from the BBC and CNN.  This is normal and one sees it worldwide but it’s disgusting none the same.  The true Bang Bang artistes who go up-country every day and get their hands dirty doing real reporting are openly contemptuous of these wretches who for some reason are all male.  They should be presented with white feathers.

They trade rumor for fact and gossip as news.  A lot of stuff is simply made up.

April 23

The hot story possibility at the moment is the end of the millennium equivalent of the avenging archangels, otherwise known as the Apache helicopters.

You wouldn’t believe how excited some of the media are about the silly things.  Despite the fact that there are serious doubts that such behemoths of the air can actually contribute anything of significance to the war effort there are a lot of reporters who think that the arrival of the helicopters will be a defining moment in the history of the century.

The worst offenders are the CNN people.  Despite being universally chided by their colleagues, American and otherwise, for being so relentlessly American centric and toy obsessed, they continue to devote huge resources to a story that may never happen.

An entire team of shooters and producers is on round the clock death watch at the airport.  Another is rooted into the native habitat of CNN, the rooftop of a five star hotel, also 24 hours a day.

Any tiny rumor that the Apaches have landed anywhere in the country will cause grown men and women to vomit with excitement.

The other day, one of the pygmy giants of small J journalism pulled off another in his series of lifetime reporting achievements and garnered predictable derision by announcing the actual arrival of the Apaches.  The problem was that dear old irresponsible Geraldo, standing on the roof of a five star hotel, thought that the regular, bog-standard, milk-run helicopter that passes over Tirana ten times a day was an Apache. 

That’s like confusing a minivan with a  Greyhound bus.

April 24

I now understand what Shakespeare meant when he warned, "Beware yon Casius, he is a lean and hungry man." or words to that effect.

What prompts this is a bizarre and revealing conversation I had with a freelance writer and photographer yesterday evening in the Rogner Hotel which contains the main gathering place, (read boozing place) for the international media in Tirana.

I’ve taken to wearing a CARE armband as a form of identification for getting past the plethora of busybody guards which infest every government and private building of consequence in this town.  Last night I forgot to take it off before entering the "gathering place" and since there was no one I recognized I found myself on my own.  It only dawned on me much later that the reason why no one was inviting me to their table or willing to continue a conversation past a few words was the damned armband.  Wearing it in a crowd of more or less off duty reporters in their private domain has the same effect as the presence of an insurance sales agent at a private party.

So there I was, standing alone at the bar, when this twenty something wanders up wearing the de rigeur multi-pocket vest stuffed with film rolls, pens, scabrous bits of paper, and draped with a shiny new Nikon.  Young freelancer on the make.  He might as well have been wearing a sign.

"Are you with CARE?"

Oh boy, I think.  This will not be a high quality media contact for sure.  "Yes I am."  Introductions follow and. . .

"Any chance of getting out to the refugee camps?"

"You bet.  There’s one just down the road near Dures."

"No.  What about in Kosovo?"

"Nobody is in Kosovo except refugees and Serbs."  I’m puzzled already.

"Well why not?  Why doesn’t CARE have any camps in Kosovo?"

"Because the Serbs control Kosovo, there’s a war on, and no one is allowed in."

"Well I’m an American and I’m sure I can get in.  If CARE is American why aren’t you in Kosovo?"

"It doesn’t matter if you are American, you might as well be from Alpha Centauri, the country is at war and if you did get in you’d be shot because Serbia is at war with the U-S along with the rest of NATO."

"Look.  I’m an American citizen and I pay taxes and I have the right to ask a government agency under the First Amendment to give me the information I need in order to inform the public.  The American People Have the Right to Know buddy."

This guy is a wingnut freshly polished by some minor state second rank journalism school.  "CARE is independent of government.   It is an international organization.  We have no operations in Kosovo.  I can’t help you."

"Don’t you realize that you need the media?  I can cause a lot of trouble in the states for you."

"Just out of curiosity, how long have you been in Albania?"

"Hit the ground running this afternoon, I should get into Kosovo tomorrow if I can get some help out of people like you."

"Well I wish you luck.  Tell you what.  See that guy over there with the cane, the guy in his sixties?  He can help you.  He’s a senior officer with the Kosovo Liberation Army.  I’m sure he can lay on a helicopter for you to Pristina."

With that, the dumb dork went over to the KLA representative who like me, but only when I’m wearing an armband, is shunned by the reporters.

I stripped off the armband and the rest of the evening passed in conviviality.

As for the freelancer.  Look for him being the lead correspondent on your neighborhood weekly shopper newspaper.

May 14

Journalist to Relief Worker.  "Are there any dead kids around?"

"No."

"Why don’t you?  You had some in Somalia."

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant