Note – this was originally written on November 9, 1971 and published in the Gateway Newspaper and on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio network worldwide. I wrote this before I had any first hand knowledge of war. Now I have too much, but I am pleased with my younger more innocent friend for getting it right.

Remembrance Day. It was called Armistice Day in the beginning, but times changed and the Armistice decayed.

The holidaying atmosphere does more harm for the memory of the dead than not bothering to remember at all. For the majority of people, November 11 is a day off with nothing much to do. For others who have been fed through the school system, colouring God knows how many pictures of Flanders Fields and spending the eleventh watching the cenotaph services on television out of a sense of obligation, the day is nothing except tradition.

Remembrance Day does not mean feeling sorry for the dead but instead actually trying to understand the horrors of war. To spend the day feeling sorry for the dead puts a premium on dying for the glory of a political system that ceased to mean anything years ago. We have become so full of the idea that to die for your country in a war is the highest form of honour that we become almost eager for another so we too can make the “noblest sacrifice”.

I remember that after we had searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments. Many of these were detached from a heavy, barbed-wire fence which had surrounded the position of the factory and from the still existent portions of which we picked many of these detached bits which illustrated only too well the tremendous energy of high explosive. – Ernest Hemingway “Natural History of the Dead”

Remembrance day originated as a vehicle for showing people the horrors, futility, and wastefulness of war in any form.

Instead, we have transformed the dead into heroes, while they aren’t anything except dead. We have supported the idea in movies and books that war is a time of great adventure and wonderful romance when in fact it was quite a bit different. We forget the manner in which people die in a war, we forget the destruction of culture and industry, we forget the waste of young men, and we forget the complete destruction of the world’s civilisation,

Men do not on a whole want to die. So why did they die?

The answer is that they were forced to die against their will. They were caught up in a machine that was a product of their times, A machine built of political ideology, national pride, flag waving, and rampant nationalism.

“It was thus, without any of the pre-conditions of war, that those prosaic midwestern names of Edmonton, North Battleford and Saskatoon tumbled into that deep sub-strata of history which holds all the dark misery evoked by the mention of Lidice, Dresden, Coventry, Hiroshima and Vietnam. – Ian Adams “Trudeau Papers”

They went, for the most part, willingly to war because they did not know any better. They did not know the horrors of the battlefield and as a result they were dead before they knew it.

They died in the mud of France, the sands of Africa, the seven seas, and in the skies. Their deaths were not pretty. Few of them were able to die with the noble dignity portrayed by Hollywood. Even fewer of the civilian victims died with dignity.

How for example can a child of two feel the romance in glorious combat when his city is firebombed and a shower of phosphorous eats into his body? How can a man feel the honour of saving democracy from the foe when he is trapped in the hull of a ship sinking into the depths of the ocean? How can the residents of an insignificant German village feel proud of their fight against the enemy when a pitched battle between two armies reduce the place to rubble?

How can you feel proud of our glorious dead when you know the permanent harm they and the survivors did to our civilisation?

When the last post sounds on Remembrance Day you could do worse than refuse to honour the fallen.

The only people who should honour the dead are the living who came through the wars with the knowledge of what it was really like.

For those of us who have not had the experience of being part of a world destroying machine the day should be spent in trying to learn what really went on during the wars. We should be forced to watch films of men dying, cities burning, and the terrible destruction of war so we will not be so eager to join when some power mad leader sounds the call to arms.

“It has therefore never been possible to establish the exact death toll taken by the nuclear explosions. But on that night, and in the following two weeks, it has been estimated that more than three million died. At the same time the population of the three cities of Edmonton, Saskatoon, and North Battle were calculated respectively at 750,200, 140,000 and 25,000, a total of 915,200 people. As far as it has been possible to tell, only 143 people survived from these three cities, and only twelve were traced from what used to be the metropolitan area of Edmonton. – Ian Adams “Trudeau Papers”

Most of us have seen film footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the American Air Force dropped the Atomic bombs. We saw the bomb itself go off with its awesome power and we saw what it did to the cities. We saw the survivors and the ugly burns they had. We saw the dead and the dying, the blinded and we saw what was left of their homes.

What we might not realize though is that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not alone in that type of horror. Dresden was firebombed by the allied air forces and totally destroyed. There were no vital Nazi war industries in the city. Dresden was killed as a symbol to the German people what would happen to them all if the Nazis didn’t surrender.

If only a small part of each child’s education was devote to the horrors of warfare instead of memorizing “In Flanders Fields” it would put a greater depth of meaning into Remembrance Day.

Until the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day. The change in Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in the heat the flesh comes to resemble coal tar, especially where it has been broken or torn, and it has quite a visible tarlike iridescence. The dead get larger each day until they sometimes get too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem tight enough to burst. The individual members may increase in girth to an unbelievable extent and faces fill as taut and globular as balloons. – Ernest Hemingway “Natural History of the Dead”

Perhaps if more of us had the opportunity to talk to the ageing warriors in the Legion we would get a better perspective of what the wars were like. When you sit across the table from some old man and buy him a beer and get him talking you hear about the great times he had in France during the first war. You hear about the time they had a twelve hour leave from the trenches on the Marne and they went to Amiens to get drunk but the town was dry so they spent the day looking for women but there were none. You might near how it rained for three weeks and the trenches filled with water and they slept in the mud and had a great time playing cards.

After a while, when he has had his third beer and the memories come back you can drag out of him things he has forgotten for forty years. The stench of the trench that he learned to ignore after a few months. The time his best friend was killed five yards out from the wire and it took him six hours to die and they could not drag him back to safety because the bullets were too thick. The time he was trapped under a crossfire in a shell hole for a day and he had to share it with the week old corpses of a mule and a German.

The first thing that you found about the dead was that, hit badly enough, they died like animals. Some quickly from a little wound you would not think would kill a rabbit. They died from little wounds as rabbits die sometimes from three or four small grains of shot that hardly seem to break the skin. Others would die like cuts; a skull broken in and iron in the brain, they lie alive two days like cats that crawl into the coal bin with a bullet in the brain and will not die until you cut their heads off. – Ernest Hemingway “Natural History of the Dead”

Even then you have the feeling that things were worse; they don’t say it but you get the feeling that the constant terror of death and the hopelessness became a constant companion.

They don’t tell you about the times they broke under the strain, of the times they hid in a shell hole instead of facing the enemy because the horror became too much.

They don’t tell you of what it was like to have your youth wasted and warped through years of war. Nor can you ever fined out what six years of death and killing did to their minds.

For today’s generation the remembrance services are of little relevance in their present form. There are too many flags, too many trumpets, too many speeches that amount to little more than “We should be sorry because its the Christian thing to do so bow your head and let’s get back to making this country safe against attack.”

It is clear there is not an Armistice among the world powers these days but a state of subdued, judicial killing under the guise of what is called “bush wars”. Suez, Cyprus, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, Hungary – the list is long and will get far longer before people kill themselves off, or mature enough to realize that war is no solution to their problems.

We agreed too that the picking up of the fragments had been an extraordinary business; it being amazing that the human body should be blown into pieces which exploded along no anatomical lines, but rather divided as capriciously as the fragmentation in the burst of a high explosive shell. – Ernest Hemingway “Natural History of the Dead”

November 11 is a time to remember that war is wrong and never worth the cost.

Time to remember the dead, only for what they are, not what the histories and the speeches say they were. They are nothing more or less than dead.

Time to remember that you would not want to die and that it is possible to do something about future wars.

Time to remember and feel sorry for the people that are living, who will live in years to come, and who are going to die violently because of a war.

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

I was recently asked about the day that I photographed one of the 20th century’s preeminent portrait photographers.

Yousuf Karsh burst into global celebrity when in 1941 he took this photograph of then Prime Minister Winston Churchill. For the next several decades the world’s mighty and famous clamored for his talents.

His waiting list for a portrait sitting extended into years and I can’t imagine what his services cost.

He could have worked in London, Paris, New York but instead he kept his studio in Ottawa, on the sixth floor of the Chateau Laurier Hotel. It just so happened that for several years I worked as a broadcast journalist on the seventh and eighth floors of the same building and we often rode up and down in the hotel’s elevators together.

And so it came about one day that I took my own photograph that catapulted me into minor Ottawa journalistic celebrity.

Here is my account of that day as I wrote it for Scrum Magazine, published by the National Press Club in 1996.

KARSH BY GRANT

Over the years, Yousuf Karsh and I have developed a remote, vaguely European, nodding acquaintance by sharing elevators and holding doors open for each other. Karsh lives in the Chateau Laurier Hotel where until recently he had his portrait studio. CBC Northern Service and my office is also in the Chateau.

So it was quite normal for me to stop and chat with Karsh one day as I made my way from the Chateau to Parliament Hill. We said good morning with 19th century civility and talked about the October sun and fall colours.

Karsh asked me what kind of cameras I had in my bag. I explained that there were no cameras, that I used a camera bag to carry my recording equipment. Then I remembered the tiny Olympus (one button does everything) tucked into an outside pouch. I pulled it out.

“I wonder if you would take my picture?” I said, knowing that I was pushing the limits of our courtly relationship, but the thought of having my portrait done by Karsh for nothing made me bold.

“No, I am sorry. You see I am on my way to work. If I took your picture that would be work.”

“Well can I take yours?”

“Yes that would be nice.” And with that he instantly struck a pose.

Months later, I finally got around to dropping off a copy at his studio.

A few days later I answered my phone and I had one of the shortest conversations I can recall.

“Karsh here. I want to thank you for the picture. My wife says it’s the best picture she’s seen of me.”  And he hung up.

Shortly after, he retired from full time portrait work. Too much young competition I suspect.

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

My art sense was instilled in my ancestors’ genes just about the time the Philistines were the paragons of fashion taste and we all thought them far too arty by half, and poseurs at that. So for a carpet to make it with me it should have a glowing depiction of say, Genghis Khan charging at the viewer, sword raised, blood drops splattering, and the thunder of silver hooves. Or perhaps, a fully detailed depiction of Nelson’s victory off Trafalgar with all of the ships carefully depicted and every piece of ship’s rigging just so.

And not for me the muted green tones of pistachio nut used as wool dye, or the dusty red of animal blood, applied according to arcane recipes handed down from the time of King Darius the Great. Absolutely not. Color should be color the way it used to be when AnscoChrome defined yellow and blue for us in snapshot photography, or LePages Poster Paint taught us the value of an eye stabbing red.

1) The people who are into Persian, Afghan, etc. carpets are feckless loners who probably got turned onto their obsession when they were allowed to crawl around too long on a carpet without a diaper.

2) There is more complexity, contradiction, misinformation, and dishonesty in the carpet trade than any other business I can think of with the exception of mobile phone contracts.

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

I’ve been asked more than once lately for a list of tips and techniques for taking good photographs while traveling. I’ve resisted adding my thoughts because there is a tremendous amount of excellent material already available on the web. Just do a search for “travel photography tips” and there you go.

But, if by adding some of the things that I have been taught and those that I’ve learned, I can cut down on the vast welter of indifferent and downright boring photo collections I keep coming across then there may be some use to my thoughts.

Equipment – Let’s get this question out of the way right off the bat. “What kind of camera do I need while I am traveling?”

I loathe this question because there is no answer. Your needs, hopes, dreams, etc for what you get out of your travels are so personal and idiosyncratic that I might have a better chance of answering a question along the lines of, “What kind of socks shall I wear?”

Now, I realize that my attitude here is not helpful so let me give you some broad guidelines.

If you already have a camera that takes decent pictures and you like using it then use that. It doesn’t matter if it is a film or digital, large or small, if you are comfortable with it then don’t bother with a new one – unless you can spend a few weeks if not months getting to know the new one before you go. You cannot take good pictures if you don’t like your camera and especially if you don’t know how to use all of its features.

If you have to buy then I would recommend a digital camera.

(Yes I know that film is still superior to digital in many ways and that you can be very creative with film processing and so on, but that debate is for some other time. I recommend that travellers use digital but if you want ot use film then go ahead. Film cameras have been dragged around the world for some hundred and fifty years with outstanding results, so go ahead)

Now, you have a choice; large or small.

Large cameras, the so-called DSLR’s similar in size to 35mm film cameras produce stunning work but if you have an additional lens or two, some small accessories, ac adapters, filters, a flash, then you run the risk of looking like a Sherpa headed up a mountain with the expedition’s monthly food supply.

Large cameras also attract the attention of thieves which is okay as long as you are religiously diligent about keeping your equipment secure at all times.

Which brings me to two really useful security practices.

• If you put your camera bag down on the ground, put one of your feet through a shoulder strap. This stops the stoop, grab, and run thief.
• Keep the camera strap looped around part of you body or double loop it around a wrist.

While on the subject of straps here is something you must do if you have those kind of camera straps that are emblazoned so boldly with the name Nikon or Canon, or any other name. Throw them away. Do not use branded camera straps. They say to robbers, “Hey! Come steal me! I am worth a lot of money”

In fact, I make it a practice to remove all photographic brand names from all of my equipment, either by unpicking the stitching if it is a camera bag logo or covering up the Nikon name on my camera and lens bodies with duct tape.

I don’t go as far as some professionals who go to work on their hugely expensive bodies and lenses with sandpaper and dabs of paint to make their equipment look worthless, but the principle is sound.

Which brings me to small cameras, the unfortunately named Point and Shoots.

I always, at all times, carry a Canon PowerShot in a pocket. Canon. All of the other manufacturers sldo make palm sized digital cameras that rival if not exceed the capabilities of entry level DSLR’s. The digital quality of these things is amazing and for anywhere from 200 to 500 dollars you can have an inconspicuous shot taker that will give you gallery sized prints. And, because they look just like the 60 dollar Point and Shoots you can buy in any drugstore or even corner store, you will not be a target for thieves.

Ultimately, if you are going to be doing a lot of travelling on your own and you have any doubts about being able to properly look after your camera gear, then get something like a Canon S95 or anything even roughly similar from other manufacturers and use that. The results will be great.

So, gear aside . . . follow these principles.

Do not, under any circumstances, use the digital zoom feature. If the camera allows it, disable it permanently. Only use the optical zoom. Digital zoom ruins pictures irretrievably. when you get home you will be able to use the superior picture zooming and cropping feature or your photo processing software but don’t expect good results.

Which leads me to something that the brilliant, but now dead, Robert Capa the war photographer famously said, “If your photographs are not good enough it’s because you aren’t close enough.” Even if you have a zoom lens, always try to get closer to your subject, the results will be superior. This is particularly effective if you pull your lens back to wide angle and move closer.

Get low or get high but don’t take your picture from your normal standing position. The blandest of snapshots can be dramatically improved by dropping the camera to within a  few inches of the ground or by shooting from a high angle.

Think about the background in the picture. The brain is really very good at photoshopping what it sees which explains why you are always so surprised when you get back home and display the wonderful portrait you took of a peasant in the Albanian hills to see a power transmission tower growing out of her head. Really work on this and be very suspicious of any photo composition you see in the camera that looks too good.

If you are not a well experienced photographer then one of best ways of improving your photographs is to compose them by using the rule of thirds. There are four spots in any image where if you position the centre of interest of a picture; the peasant’s eyes, the mountain peak, the cavorting sea lion, etc, the result will be vastly more pleasing than the county sheriff’s booking photograph technique. The spots are located one third of the way in from each edge of the image. Some cameras display this grid as a picture taking option. If you know what you are doing you can break this rule but if all you did was to follow the rule of thirds people would still call you an outstanding photographer.

If there is a postcard of the place you are thinking of photographing then buy the postcard and forget the picture. Really, there is no point in taking pictures that everyone else is taking. Unless you can get to the Taj Mahal at four in the morning as a murder of crows streams across the face of the full moon rising behind the minarets while star light reflects off the pool then don’t bother, just buy the postcard.

Get in the habit of periodically turning around while you shoot.

It truly is remarkable how often you will see an unexpected photo when you turn your back on the running of the bulls in Pamplona, or the Pope’s procession in St Peter’s Square. Turn around and really look.

Take notes, either in a notebook or into a digital recorder, of what, where and when. I have really remarkable photographs of people and places that I haven’t the vaguest idea of whom or whence. You don’t have to be elaborate. Just “Outskirts of Cairo, the Pizza Pizza across from the pyramids”, “Joe Bloggs and unamed local bimbo, western Macedonia, Tuesday”

Throw out your pictures. Seriously now. Whenever you get a chance while traveling and certainly when you get home, go through your photographs and delete every one that is out of focus, pointless, dumb, a duplicate, or is flawed in some way. I aim for two or three keepers out of a hundred but I know others who are pleased with one out of three hundred. And nobody beats National Geographic Magazine which may illustrate one article with 15 pictures selected from the 12,000 that were shot.

Not only will crap photographs clutter up your computer but even worse, you may be tempted to post them on line and urge your friends to look at them. Please don’t do that – it is an affront to nature. Delete the crap, all of them.

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

This week in Afghanistan the NATO General in charge of training the new Afghan Army, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, said he would like to see all Afghan National Army soldiers reading at the First Grade Elementary School level by October of 2011.

Think about that statement for a moment and be very amazed.

Things are so bad in the Afghan National Army that only about 15% of its soldiers can read at the Grade Three Elementary School level. Grade Three is the baseline for declaring someone literate.

The importance of being able to read in any army, or military force of any other kind for that matter, is paramount.

If you cannot read and you have never seen a Claymore Land Mine before then you are going to miss the significance of the words embossed onto the front of the thing, “Front Toward Enemy”

If you are given a map and told to get to a particular village that you have never heard of before in order to be saved from annihilation you will be challenged to the point of death in finding it.

For generations Afghanistan has raised many thousands of fierce and competent warriors but their effectiveness in anything more complicated than a platoon sized action has always been problematic.

Yet there is another problem. A lot of Afghans cannot see well, particularly the middle aged.

Through a combination of poor diet, disease, and the natural aging process many Afghans wouldn’t be able to see the words in the Cat in the Hat even if they could read. Add also the inability to see great distances and you end up with a severely handicapped soldier.

During my time in Afghanistan after the Taliban ran away, and for several years since, it has been difficult and expensive for Afghans to get proper glasses. And for some reason, the wearing of glasses, unless you are a cleric, intellectual, or a greybeard, is considered unmanly.

The lack of glasses not only causes real problems for recruits in the national army and the national police but also for the many thousands of former members of the dozens of warlord armies left over after the ouster of the Taliban. The international community implemented a disarmament program for them together with financial support and training in whatever field they wanted.

If you couldn’t and wouldn’t read, needed glasses, and had no education it really didn’t matter as long as all you wanted to do was to go back to farming. But if you wanted to become a small shop owner you needed literacy and you likely would need glasses. For the many hundreds who wanted to become tailors, (it’s inside and warm work) and you couldn’t see well then glasses would be as necessary as a needle.

It’s not generally known but Afghanistan had a not bad army and air force during the Soviet occupation and through the Taliban regime. It all fell apart during the final months following September 11th.

In my travels through the country it was not unusual to meet former tank battalion commanders, fight pilots, jet engine mechanics and other trained professionals who were unable to find any kind of work even remotely as skilled as what they had been trained for.

When the U-S Military, together with NATO, announced they were going to rebuild the army and national police a lot of their veterans got their hopes up.

It quickly became clear that unless you had serious pull with a government minister and were willing to hand over a very large chunk of money, none of the former armed forces personnel would be taken on as recruits, and even if they were it would be at a level very far below what they were trained for.

The situation lead to a series of demonstrations, some of which turned violent and sometimes fatal. So, the Afghan Government came up with a scheme that would see all of these former Commissioned Officers and Non-Commissioned Officers write examinations to test their knowledge.

I oversaw several of these as an international observer.

It was heartbreaking.

As you can see from the pictures a lot of the men were well past the nominal maximum age of 35 to qualify as recruits. But if they scored high enough, and bribed the right people, there was a chance of an exception.

The examinations were held in unlit and dark former factory buildings, abandoned schools, and bombed out barracks. The examination questions were poorly printed and in a very small font. Anyone with any kind of need for reading glasses simply had zero chance.

It was terrible to hear them whispering in desperate tones to their neighbors for help with the questions. They begged piteously and unsuccessfully to be allowed to stand outside in the light where they might have a chance to read the exams.

A few could speak english and were brave enough to ask me for help. At first I refused but the suffering was too intense so I started to quietly help them. Here I was aided greatly by my Afghan staff who were also acting as observers. I got them to help the poor buggers as well but I knew that there wasn’t a chance in hell.

Many months later I ran across a soldier with a rank of what might have been sergeant but I am not sure about that. He recognized me from one of the examinations and just about smothered me in hugs while thanking me for helping him.

He was a former regimental commander but was lucky enough to be taken on as a raw recruit and had risen in rank to Sergeant because he could read and was not too proud to wear glasses. It wasn’t all my doing. He’d found a deputy minister who had taken what amounted to a lifetime mortgage on his military salary in return for getting him accepted as a recruit.

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

“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

A few years ago I was splitting a bottle of Dewar’s Scotch with one of the most senior drug control police officers in the Afghan government, (drinking is an activity more common than you would think in that Islamic nation,) when the conversation turned to torture.

There had just been a sensational case involving the return of a Kabuli from many months in Guantanamo Bay. He had been hauled off the streets of Kabul, tortured by Americans at their

Bagram airbase north of the city, flown to Cuba, subjected to who knows what abuse, and then returned with no charges having been laid, and no apologies. This happened before we learned the true horrors of torture inflicted as U-S Government policy and before the reek of its contamination forever rotted American prestige. But even then you couldn’t be in Afghanistan more than a day before you learned that torture is built into the very fabric of the culture.

On the very first day I was in the country I met a linguist working for the NATO military command trying to maintain peace in Kabul. He offered to give me a Dari phrasebook, Dari being an offshoot of Persian or Farsi and the language of the new Afghan government.

We went to get it at his office in a crumbling ruin of a three storey building in the middle of the NATO base downtown. It had to have dated from the earliest part of the 20th century and had probably never seen a new coat of paint. When we walked into the main room I could see long streaks of dark that had dripped or run down the walls from just above head height. There were also misshapen blobs of darkness on the stone floor.

He saw me looking. “This used to be an interrogation centre during the Soviet occupation.”

“You mean, that’s blood?”

He nodded.

This wasn’t my first sight of a torture chamber. On my second trip to Albania, during the Kosovo War, I’d met with a senior security official of the Albanian secret police. The meeting was held in an unheated, unpainted, and foul smelling room in the downtown Tirana secret police headquarters. Apart from the filthy stench of the room it was a typical Albanian government office. There was the padded chair for the official, two hard backed chairs for myself and my interpreter, a computer that was only one step above a lump of rock, a phone that didn’t connect to anything, and two large ringbolts on each end of the desk. On the floor, just where I had my feet, were two more ringbolts.

This explained why I hadn’t had a lot of help from my translator during the interview. He knew exactly where he was.

“Mr Rick. That bad place. Very bad things happen there.”

No kidding. The whole floor, it turned out was a series of, not to put too fine a point on it, torture chambers. It also explained the smell.

I told that story to my police friend over the scotch. He grunted knowingly. “Same thing here. Anybody arrested by the police will get knocked around. Even I do it. But the secret police, they are the real monsters.”

That’s when I learned about the made in hell pact between some seriously sick American security people and the Afghan secret police.

If the holding cells at Bagram airbase were too full of suspected terrorists, or the waiting time for a torture chamber was too long, the Americans would hand over whomever they wanted questioned to the Afghan Security people who were conveniently located in a four storey white building just across the street from the American Embassy.

Now the curious thing about these Afghan torturers, and I met one a couple of years later when I was with the UN, was that they were not very good at their job. Oh sure, they could rip out fingernails, clamp electrical cords to testicles, and do awful things with body orifices, but they had a terrible record of actually learning anything from their victims. My drunken drug trafficker hunter put it this way.

“They like what they do too much.”

And sadists, as we know well from the endless and ongoing research into the lack of effectiveness of torture make really crummy information gatherers.

As a job, torturing is about as good as being a tenured professor or carpet bagging politician, in other words it is a job for life.

The black leather coated pain merchants in the Kabul white building working with the Americans were the same ones who worked for the Taliban. They also worked for their predecessors the Soviets and probably all the way back to when the British Army ruled the place.

In Albania torturers had survived a certifiably insane dictator, the fall of communism, the bankruptcy of Albania when it got caught in a Make-Money-Now internet scam, and a succession of not very able governments.

So called advanced nations won’t have anything to do with torture. Even the United States government twists syntax, logic, decency, and common sense into uncommon and rather startling sexual positions in order to deny what goes on.

Canada and the United Kingdom face political scandals over whether their troops have willing handed over prisoners to the Afghan government knowing that they would be tortured. The government denials are no less farcical than the American denials.

Remember what I said about not having to be in the country a day to know what was going on.

The really odd thing about the torture culture as I saw it in Afghanistan, Albania/Kosovo, and to a lesser degree in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kenya, is that every professional intelligence officer will tell you that torture does not work, results in absolutely crap information, and weakens the justice of your cause.

But politicians really like it a lot.

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

I cannot remember the last time in Calgary that I used my car horn. I am not even sure that it works. I do know that if I did use the horn here it would be taken as a deadly insult worthy of gestures and incoherent rage.

That is in hornless Calgary. Elsewhere, things are radically different.

In Tirana Albania one morning I went to get into my hired car only to be told by the Albanian driver; "Sorry Mr Rick, car broken."

"Oh too bad. What’s the matter with it?"

"Horn broken Mr Rick."

And that was it, the vehicle was off the road until the horn could be fixed. So essential is the horn in Albanian traffic that you cannot, must not, drive without it. Just as bats navigate through a forest at night by bouncing a constant stream of ultrasonic pulses off objects as they fly, so too does the Albanian drive. There’s no great technique to Albanian horn use, you start the vehicle and hit the horn, and keep hitting it, until it is time to turn off the engine again. This is done regardless of whether there are even any nearby vehicles or pedestrians.

Jakarta is similar although the Indonesian drivers speak a much more subtle horn language. A light tap of the button means, "Here I am, over here." a sharper double tap means, "I am passing you." rapid pulsing means, "Move over you cretin I have to get by."

In Kabul Afghanistan it is a little more complicated and I cannot claim to have figured it all out.

First off, as in Jakarta, no one ever looks to their left or right as they drive. You are responsible only for the vehicles you see in front of you. Anybody to your sides or behind is at peril unless they look out for you. So, tapping the horn when you see someone creeping closer to your side is a polite way of saying, "I am just a little bit in front of you so I have right of way and you better back off."

The horn is absolutely vital on the main route out of Afghanistan, the Jalalabad Highway. For  six months, several times a day, I drove back and forth over a 20 kilometre section of it.

There’s been a widely seen documentary of the Jalalabad. It’s that long car chase sequence in the second Matrix movie, the one where every third vehicle crashes or blows up and indiscriminate machine gun fire peppers everything. That scene is exactly what travel on the Jalalabad Highway in Kabul is like.

The traffic on the Jalalabad Road usually includes the following; Pakistani trucks carrying loads that can reach a tottering thirty feet, Milli buses with people hanging off every conceivable handhold, tonga drivers squatting on their carts full of leaking human waste, lashing away at their arthritic horses, Afghan Generals pedaling chinese bicycles, blacked out landcruisers rushing at near sonic speeds to a drug deal, every piece of NATO military equipment, and lets not forget herds of goats and sheep, packs of kids running across the road, and Kabul policemen sitting on kitchen chairs in the middle of intersections, chatting with passers-by, oblivious to the hurling traffic six inches on either side.

Without a horn to warn people off, to let them know I want to pass, or to part the bloody sheep herds, I would be immobile.

At night things are hellish which is why I simply stopped driving at night.

Like the drivers I encountered in East Africa there is a belief that overuse of headlights is bad for the car or soul or something so they are only turned on when the driver wants to see something. It really is frightening when out of the pitch blackness ahead of you a set of headlights springs on for a second, headed toward you on your side of the road, and then flicks off. If it is a drug dealer or a warlord the vehicle will have been fitted with up to three or four extra sets of lights you’d swear had once been laser intensity 747 landing lights, all permanently set on Hi-beam, and aimed at eye level

During the day the other essential for driving is a never bending arrogance. You never allow space to develop between you and the other vehicle. If you do then some bright yellow Corolla taxi packed with scowling faces will push in and unless you are quick another two or three will dive right in behind.

The same thing used to happen in

Jakarta except there the drivers are more skilled. I’ve seen semi trailers squeeze into a couple of car lengths of space at over a hundred klicks an hour. Indonesians don’t get nearly as worked up about tailgating as we do in Canada. They regularly ride with six inches of clearance from your back bumper.

At intersections in Kabul everything goes. There is no right of way. It is everybody for themselves. This leads to all sorts of interesting near misses, screaming tires, and of course horn honking. But you must not let up or you will never get through. As for pedestrians, well, they are on their own and safer for it too because they can pick their moments and edge through the ebbs and flows in relative safety.

If the traffic is blocked it is perfectly okay to swing out and drive down the wrong side of the road. You are under no obligation to get out of the way of oncoming traffic. It is a matter of nerves, the old game of highway chicken beloved of Hollywood 1950′s teen movies.

Frequently this personal lane building leads to gridlock. When all the traffic in one direction has spread to cover the whole road it brings all traffic to an utter standstill.

Personal lane building is a necessity on the Indonesian highways. The traffic density in Indonesia is so high that valuable space such as road shoulders cannot be allowed to go to waste, and neither can the space between lanes. On four lane divided highways, just about identical to the Trans Canada through Alberta, I have been in traffic screaming along at 120 klicks an hour spanning five lanes of vehicles where we would have just the two. It really is something to have a semi trailer six inches to the right, another six inches to the left, and one front and back at six inches. Somehow it all works.

Overall I would say that anyone who complains about traffic or driving abilities anywhere in North America simply hasn’t a clue.

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