‘Words can’t describe…’
It was one of those phrases that slipped out in a live broadcast, only
to be regretted the moment the microphone was turned off. It just
wasn’t true. Of course there were words: short, brutal words that
could only be spoken in sentences that required a level of detachment
that was impossibly elusive amid the stench, heat and mental fatigue
that the tsunami left in its wake. In a place of tragedy, you will
witness suffering in three dimensions, against a 360-degree horizon,
and then watch it recede into sharp relief on a one-dimensional
surface as soon as you open your mouth to describe it.
The first significant detail that caught my eye on arrival in Banda
Aceh was the blanched, naked body of pre-pubescent girl spread-eagled
on some piece of indeterminate debris at one corner of a once busy
city junction. She lay unclaimed and untouched, and apparently
invisible to the soldiers, looters and gawkers on motorbikes who
passed in a disorderly flow within feet of her corpse.
Without doubt there were words available to describe the sound of
giant insects, the appearance of the body parts, the nature of that
smell and the physical sensation of dry retching. Almost every single
elements of this grotesque tableau could be clinically dissected with
language. The only element of this experience that could not be
described was the difficulty in putting the words and phrases together
in coherent speech.
A similar limitation applied to the television images you can normally
rely on to overcome the shortcomings of language. At the mass grave
outside Banda Aceh, the sight of the yellow and black plastic sacks
shovelled out of the back of the lorry compelled the observer to
watch, until one shiny envelope was split apart by the lifeless lurch
of a man’s body. Some involuntary reflex dragged the eyes away from
the corpse the moment before it crashed into the patchwork of covered
remains at the bottom of the pit. But the camera lingered long enough
to record images that would eventually have to be scrutinised and
judged and ultimately rejected before transmission.
Many more images and words found their way home than were stopped.
Yet, through the 20/20 filter of hindsight, those discarded words and
suppressed images are haunting reminders of unresolved dilemmas and
missed opportunities. As far as the words are concerned, you can
partly blame the nature of live broadcasting. It forces the reporter
to use language that preserves the composure and restraint needed to
bridge the gap between two worlds: the world you are describing and
the world you are broadcasting to. As for those discarded images, they
must be set against the ever-present struggle to justify your gaze in
a place of pure, distilled suffering.
In the hospital at Banda Aceh, you find yourself trying to communicate
with a woman whose child is lying unconscious beside her on a filthy
blanket. You need her to stand closer to her son so the images
recorded will best capture the nature of her suffering, but how do you
direct this distraught mother? You look into her face and speak, but
the woman looks to the translator with uncomprehending eyes seeking an
explanation for an encounter that makes no sense in her moment of
desolation. Out of this will come a moment of raw insight, fed into
living rooms across Ireland, but in a hospital ward in Banda Aceh, it
feels like unbearable intrusion.
With the benefit of detachment, you find some imperfect balance
between your responsibility to record history in all its graphic
detail and the need to respect the dignity of victims and survivors.
It tends to be much harder to provide your audience with a digestible
context for those disjointed images of horror. Selecting images for
broadcast is less a matter of taste, than of impact: better that the
viewer be disturbed by the reality you describe than simply shocked by
the images they see. By definition, shock is short-term and repeated
doses will eventually numb the senses of the recipient. In the wake of
disaster, there is every danger that the torrent of horrifying images
will reach saturation level where nothing more can move an audience
and there is no appetite left for the long-term substance of the
story. When the reporter poses the question ‘what next?’ too often the
answer is: ‘Something else. For God’s sake, something else’
In all of this the common denominator is the pressure on the reporter
to filter the reality they are seeing through the expectations of the
viewer at home. Any journalist with an ounce of integrity knows the
real challenge is to seek out the uncomfortable facts, even if it is
far easier to play the preconceptions of the hometown crowd. Yet, on
its own, that immutable principle is no longer enough in an
environment that exceeds your audience’s worst nightmare. In Aceh, you
didn’t have to search for the sum of all fears: it was at the
beginning of every conversation, in every corner of wreckage and every
tent in every refugee camp. Yet, when you began to assemble the
individual stories they took on the dimensions that were almost
impossible to convey. In the words of a top CNN executive, Chris
Cramer: ‘The complexity and enormity … it’s too big for the TV
screen.’
In the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, for example, reporters
never came close to properly quantifying the death of the innocents.
An early report by the World Bank and the Indonesian Government
concluded that 37 per cent of those killed in Aceh were under the age
of 18, and more than one in ten were infants. But as the days wore on,
aid workers began to realise the official estimate was tragically
inadequate. The number of children turning up in refugee camps,
particularly young girls, was lower than expected, as was the number
of orphans and kids separated from their parents.
The professional eyewitnesses came to realise their reporting of this
defining feature of the disaster was, by definition, inadequate, since
it sought to assess something that no longer existed. The only
acceptable option was to rely on the testimony of the survivors. They
told us that when the initial earthquake struck Banda Aceh, thousands
of children had gone to play on the local beaches, as they did every
Sunday morning. Immediately after the earth shook, the children ran
after the magically receding tide, excitedly collecting the fish that
were left flapping about on the exposed seabed. They were the very
first victims of the tsunami speeding towards shore.
At least there was spoken testimony to record this horror. The mental
scars inflicted by the tsunami were mute and invisible, but
omnipresent. The World Health Organisation (WHO) predicted that half a
million people in Aceh would need long-term psychiatric support and a
much larger proportion were left ‘totally psychologically undefended’,
in the words of WHO’s mental health specialist. Once again, the
figures were an unreliable guide to the dimensions of the problems, or
how it manifested itself in the lives of real people. As an
eyewitness, you recognised the psychological trauma when you came
across it, but were virtually powerless when you tried to communicate
it in any meaningful way.
In that squalid hospital in Banda Aceh, the body of a man was laid
out under a blanket, just yards from the lobby. His young son leaned
quietly against the wall as one of his neighbours asked us for help in
transporting the man’s corpse back to their village, a two-hour drive
away. Almost as an afterthought, he told us that both he and the boy
were the only surviving members of their families. They had no homes
to return to, even if they could hitch a lift. In the eyes of the boy
was a thousand-yard stare, full of disbelief, delayed grief and other
emotions that would remain invisible to the world.
At times, the heartbreak was impossible to communicate precisely
because it was so visible and overwhelming. In the biggest refugee
camp in Banda Aceh, the walls of a guardhouse were plastered with the
photocopied faces of missing children. A few yards away, a solitary
woman sat on the grass, crying herself into a stupor. When we
approached her to tell us her story, she grabbed my hands with
surprising force and kissed them. Then she poured out the story of her
gifted 21-year-old daughter missing since the morning of the wave with
an almost deranged intensity that could never come across in a simple
sound-bite.
The temptation, when faced with such overwhelming emotion, was to turn
to the expert outsiders for cool, calm insight. Among the thousands of
foreign aid workers who flowed into Aceh in the days after the
disaster were those English-speaking, media-trained professionals so
beloved of reporters in times of disaster. But many of them would
prove to be unreliable witnesses. One well-meaning press officer for a
big charity gave me an extensive briefing on her group’s work and the
looming humanitarian crisis in Indonesia, even as she struggled to
keep her eyes open after a gruelling journey from Connecticut to Banda
Aceh. In contrast, experienced hands like Paddy McGuinness of Concern
were refreshingly honest about the shortcomings of the international
aid community in the face of this disaster without precedent. By
extension, he helped expose the shortcomings of the media frenzy that
was defining the disaster in the eyes of the outside world.
The manic desire for a digestible story line was most pronounced out
at the military base at Banda Aceh’s airport. On a football field by
the runway, reporters from around the world formed an impatient,
disorderly queue for a seat on one of the US Navy Seahawk helicopters
flying aid to isolated towns along the coast of Aceh. They were
handled by a brutally efficient young American officer who insisted on
being addressed by his nickname, Smack, and kept repeating the mantra:
‘It’s cameras for butter’ (a reference to the aid the helicopter would
have to leave behind to make room for the TV crews). To sceptical
eyes, these helicopters were part of some gigantic American PR stunt
to win Muslim hearts and minds, and to some of the reporters at that
airfield, it certainly appear the operation was being played for
maximum spin.
For one full day, the European reporters sat helplessly as their
counterparts from the American networks, newspapers and wire services
were invited to skip the queue. By day’s end, I found myself in an
angry confrontation with Smack, both of us screaming incoherently
above the sound of a departing helicopter. My immediate complaint was
the lack of fair play, but later I was struck by the cynical logic
involved. To American strategists the sceptical foreign audience was a
secondary consideration; the primary target for this PR offensive was
the home front. Doing right by the world was one thing, but being seen
to do right by the folks back home was an altogether more important
consideration.
Despite my confrontation with Smack (or perhaps because of it) a US
Navy helicopter carried me and RTE camera-man Michael Cassidy to a
coastal town cut off from civilisation. The desperation of the crowds
that mobbed the helicopter on arrival revealed a second dimension to
the American operation. There would always be a place for that
jaundiced view of its PR implications, but not without recognition of
its profound virtue. Over a matter of days, it would turn into the
biggest relief operation in US military history. The dozen or so
Seahawks were the only hope for tens of thousands of traumatised,
homeless and starving people along a two hundred odd kilometre stretch
of Aceh coastline. The unique characteristics and immediate demands of
the Aceh disaster required a swift, logistical miracle that only the
American came close to delivering. In truth, the central importance of
the US Navy in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami should have
shamed the other western powers. The only obvious sign of a European
military presence in those early days were the crisp, unsoiled
uniforms of a couple of German military advisers.
Such obvious truths do not transmit well to an audience saturated by
images of American excess in Fallujah and Guantanamo. Although,
perhaps the ingrained scepticism of the US intervention in the Indian
Ocean was explained by other irreconcilable contradictions that
predated the tsunami. Inside Indonesia, for example, the Americans
became a proxy target for the unresolved religious and territorial
disputes that plague the largest most populous Muslim country in the
world. Far better that the radicals of the Islamic Defenders Front are
wandering the streets of Banda Aceh muttering darkly about US invasion
plans than fomenting anti-government opposition.
As always, how you viewed this unprecedented world event depended on
what part of the world you were looking at it from. In certain parts
of the world, the tsunami was cited against the enemies of Islam.
According to a columnist at an Egyptian nationalist weekly, the
tsunami was the product of US, Israeli and Indian nuclear tests which
were designed ‘to liquidate humanity’. Heretics closer to home were
Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Munajjid. Pointing to the devastation
inflicted on tourist resorts in Thailand, he said: ‘At the height of
immorality, Allah took vengeance on these criminals.’
The twisted rhetoric of Islamic radicals would be turned back on the
Arab world by plenty of conservative Western commentators, who
contrasted the US military relief operation in Indonesia to the
relatively paltry contribution of traditional Muslim benefactors in
Saudi Arabia. A classic of its type was Mark Steyn’s Irish Times
column comparing the Saudi’s initial tsunami contribution of $30
million with the $56 million raised by a Saudi telethon for the
relatives of Palestinian suicide-bombers.
There is always a danger of making too much of this self-serving point
scoring in times of international crisis. In this case, it did seem to
get pushed to the periphery by the relentless flow of compassion and
empathy that followed the Indian Ocean disaster. Indeed, you could
argue that the search for culprits in the aftermath of the tsunami was
less to do with geopolitical fault-lines, and more to do with what
Boris Johnson called ‘that immemorial human ache, to find someone to
blame’. If it is true that there was no human hand in the destruction
of those lives in Asia, and no human hand in their defence, then what
hope for the rest of us? Human flaws are much easier to come to terms
with than mankind’s insignificance in the face of nature.
The search for meaning in the aftermath of the tsunami did lead us to
some profoundly positive conclusions. Among them the media-sponsored
assumption that long-neglected debates about poverty, development and
overseas development should be thrust into the political mainstream.
And yet, predictably, the potential for a groundbreaking departure is
threatened by preconceptions and prejudice, the kind of false choices
that seem to separate global debate from the reality it seeks to
influence.
In Europe and the United States, that outpouring of emotion seemed to
fuel the worst instincts in media and politics. In some quarters, the
monetary value of our response appeared eventually became a bigger
story than the actual disaster itself. Equally, the shallowest form of
‘gesture politics’ was rewarded. Tony Blair was the tsunami’s
political loser because he did not cut short his holiday in Egypt,
while Gerard Schroder came out a winner because he rushed back to
Berlin from his holiday haven in Lower Saxony. What they actually did
to help was less important than what personal sacrifice they were seen
to make. What was exposed was the central paradox of our relationship
with global calamity: there needs to be a furious, uncontrolled
media-sponsored assault on our collective consciousness before we are
moved to act on a scale that makes an impact. Yet because this public
frenzy is so intense and uncontrolled it only has a short-life span
and a narrow focus. Before long, our attention is lost and the causes
and consequences of the disaster tend to fade from our memories.
In so many ways, this story has had that depressingly familiar
short-term feeling to it, and yet there may be reasons to hope it is
different this time. At this early stage, the response of the global
political establishment is breaking precedent. After Hurricane Mitch
inflicted devastation on parts of Central America in 1998, European
nations failed to deliver on promises of hundreds of millions of
dollars in aid. This time, the pledges of aid are much larger and are
beginning to actually reach the target countries. On January 6th, Kofi
Annan appealed for almost a billion dollars in emergency aid. Within
two weeks, the UN had received 759 million.
Of course, for the political will to be sustained there has to be the
continued public interest. Here again there are reasons to hope, if
only because the scale of international public interest in this
disaster was so much more intense than any one could have predicted.
Even in the United States, the level of awareness of this crisis was
intense, at least by the crude yardstick of television ratings. The
audience for the network news programme rose by an average of 10 per
cent in the weeks after the tsunami and the primetime rating for CNN
were up by 46 per cent. In a more tangible measurement, the American
people set an all time record for giving to foreign causes in those
first two weeks, donating more than $320 million dollars.
Of course, none of this guarantees a ‘paradigm shift’ in US foreign
policy, or for that matter Irish foreign policy. There is no guarantee
that the death of hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings in Asia
will change our behaviour towards all those other ‘silent tsunamis’
that kill thousands in the developing world every day. At time of
writing, we have still to get a straight answer from the Government as
to exactly when it will meet its once-broken promises on overseas aid.
In truth, it is not even clear why this particular natural disaster
made us feel the way it did. How much of our compulsive reaction to
this horrifying spectacle was explained by the nature of the images
that passed across our television screens? And how will we feel about
the next natural disaster that invites our sympathy, if it does not
match up to the bleak realities of this one?
Perhaps we can find some grounded optimism in Gordon Brown’s
assessment that the Indian Ocean disaster ‘showed how closely
irrevocably bound together are the fortunes of the richest persons in
the richest country to the fate of the poorest persons in the poorest
country’. In strictly literal terms, he was wrong; with the exception
of freakishly bad luck, the richest person can generally buy the kind
of protection from nature that the poorest can only dream of. Yet
there is a brutal truth buried in Brown’s logic.
To those of us who witnessed the horror at close quarters felt the
medium of television could never do justice to the reality. And yet
when the pictures eventually arrived home from the disaster zone, they
seemed to travel a shorter distance than usual. Perhaps the early
images of Westerners and tourist resorts forced us to look at the
endless succession of bodies in a different way. Maybe the inability
to find something to blame made us all feel suddenly more vulnerable.
Either way, the source of this pain seemed closer, more human and more
real; they seemed to demand of us something more than a passing moment
of media-sanctioned angst. When we all get a chance to look at this
disaster through the perfect prism of hindsight, these may be the best
conclusions we could hope for.
