A dark, rancid corner Borri says journalists have failed to explain Syria’s civil war because editors only want ‘blood.’ (Alessio Romenzi)
He finally wrote to me. After more than a year of freelancing for
him, during which I contracted typhoid fever and was shot in the knee,
my editor watched the news, thought I was among the Italian journalists
who’d been kidnapped, and sent me an email that said: “Should you get a connection, could you tweet your detention?”
That same day, I returned in the evening to a rebel base where I was
staying in the middle of the hell that is Aleppo, and amid the dust and
the hunger and the fear, I hoped to find a friend, a kind word, a hug.
Instead, I found only another email from Clara, who’s spending her
holidays at my home in Italy. She’s already sent me eight “Urgent!”
messages. Today she’s looking for my spa badge, so she can enter for
free. The rest of the messages in my inbox were like this one:
“Brilliant piece today; brilliant like your book on Iraq.”
Unfortunately, my book wasn’t on Iraq, but on Kosovo.
People have this romantic image of the freelancer as a journalist
who’s exchanged the certainty of a regular salary for the freedom to
cover the stories she is most fascinated by. But we aren’t free at all;
it’s just the opposite. The truth is that the only job opportunity I
have today is staying in Syria, where nobody else wants to stay. And
it’s not even Aleppo, to be precise; it’s the frontline. Because the
editors back in Italy only ask us for the blood, the bang-bang. I write
about the Islamists and their network of social services, the roots of
their power—a piece that is definitely more complex to build than a
frontline piece. I strive to explain, not just to move, to touch, and I
am answered with: “What’s this? Six thousand words and nobody died?”
Actually, I should have realized it that time my editor asked me for a
piece on Gaza, because Gaza, as usual, was being bombed. I got this
email: “You know Gaza by heart,” he wrote. “Who cares if you are in
Aleppo?” Exactly. The truth is, I ended up in Syria because I saw the
photographs in
Time
by Alessio Romenzi, who was smuggled into Homs through the water pipes
when nobody was yet aware of the existence of Homs. I saw his shots
while I was listening to Radiohead—those eyes, staring at me; the eyes
of people being killed by Assad’s army, one by one, and nobody had even
heard of a place called Homs. A vise clamped around my conscience, and I
had to go to Syria immediately.
But whether you’re writing from Aleppo or Gaza or Rome, the editors
see no difference. You are paid the same: $70 per piece. Even in places
like Syria, where prices triple because of rampant speculation. So, for
example, sleeping in this rebel base, under mortar fire, on a mattress
on the ground, with yellow water that gave me typhoid, costs $50 per
night; a car costs $250 per day. So you end up maximizing, rather than
minimizing, the risks. Not only
can you not afford insurance—it’s
almost $1,000 a month—but you cannot afford a fixer or a translator.
You find yourself alone in the unknown. The editors are well aware that
$70 a piece pushes you to save on everything. They know, too, that if
you happen to be seriously wounded, there is a temptation to hope not to
survive, because you cannot afford to be wounded. But they buy your
article anyway, even if they would never buy the Nike soccer ball
handmade by a Pakistani child.
With new communication technologies there is this temptation to
believe that speed is information. But it is based on a self-destructive
logic: The content is now standardized, and your newspaper, your
magazine, no longer has any distinctiveness, and so there is no reason
to pay for the reporter. I mean, for the news, I have the Internet—and
for free. The crisis today is of the media, not of the readership.
Readers are still there, and contrary to what many editors believe, they
are bright readers who ask for simplicity without simplification. They
want to understand, not simply to know. Every time I publish an
eyewitness account from the war, I get a dozen emails from people who
say, “Okay, great piece, great tableaux, but I want to
understand
what’s going on in Syria.” And it would so please me to reply that I
cannot submit an analysis piece, because the editors would simply spike
it and tell me, “Who do you think you are, kid?”—even though I have
three degrees, have written two books, and spent 10 years in various
wars, first as a human-rights officer and now as a journalist. My youth,
for what it’s worth, vanished when bits of brain splattered on me in
Bosnia, when I was 23.
Freelancers are second-class journalists—even if there are only
freelancers here, in Syria, because this is a dirty war, a war of the
last century; it’s trench warfare between rebels and loyalists who are
so close that they scream at each other while they shoot each other. The
first time on the frontline, you can’t believe it, with these bayonets
you have seen only in history books. Today’s wars are drone wars, but
here they fight meter by meter, street by street, and it’s fucking
scary. Yet the editors back in Italy treat you like a kid; you get a
front-page photo, and they say you were just lucky, in the right place
at the right time. You get an exclusive story, like the one I wrote last
September on Aleppo’s old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, burning
as the rebels and Syrian army battled for control. I was the first
foreign reporter to enter, and the editors say: “How can I justify that
my staff writer wasn’t able to enter and you were?” I got this email
from an editor about that story: “I’ll buy it, but I will publish it
under my staff writer’s name.”
And then, of course, I am a woman. One recent evening there was
shelling everywhere, and I was sitting in a corner, wearing the only
expression you could have when death might come at any second, and
another reporter comes over, looks me up and down, and says: “This isn’t
a place for women.” What can you say to such a guy? Idiot, this isn’t a
place for
anyone. If I’m scared, it’s because I’m sane. Because
Aleppo is all gunpowder and testosterone, and everyone is traumatized:
Henri, who speaks only of war; Ryan, tanked up on amphetamines. And yet,
at every torn-apart child we see, they come only to me, a “fragile”
female, and want to know how I am. And I am tempted to reply: I am as
you are. And those evenings when I wear a hurt expression, actually, are
the evenings I protect myself, chasing out all emotion and feeling;
they are the evenings I save myself.
Because Syria is no longer Syria. It is a nuthouse. There is the
Italian guy who was unemployed and joined al-Qaeda, and whose mom is
hunting for him around Aleppo to give him a good beating; there is the
Japanese tourist who is on the frontlines, because he says he needs two
weeks of “thrills”; the Swedish law-school graduate who came to collect
evidence of war crimes; the American musicians with bin Laden-style
beards who insist this helps them blend in, even though they are blonde
and six-feet, five-inches tall. (They brought malaria drugs, even if
there’s no malaria here, and want to deliver them while playing violin.)
There are the various officers of the various UN agencies who, when you
tell them you know of a child with leishmaniasis (a disease spread by
the bite of a sand fly) and could they help his parents get him to
Turkey for treatment, say they can’t because it is but a single child,
and they only deal with “childhood” as a whole.
But we’re
war reporters, after all, aren’t we? A band of
brothers (and sisters). We risk our lives to give voice to the
voiceless. We have seen things most people will never see. We are a
wealth of stories at the dinner table, the cool guests who everyone
wants to invite. But the dirty secret is that instead of being united,
we are our own worst enemies; and the reason for the $70 per piece isn’t
that there isn’t any money, because there is always money for a piece
on Berlusconi’s girlfriends. The true reason is that you ask for $100
and somebody else is ready to do it for $70. It’s the fiercest
competition. Like Beatriz, who today pointed me in the wrong direction
so she would be the only one to cover the demonstration, and I found
myself amid the snipers as a result of her deception. Just to cover a
demonstration, like hundreds of others.
Yet we pretend to be here so that nobody will be able to say, “But I
didn’t know what was happening in Syria.” When really we are here just
to get an award, to gain visibility. We are here thwarting one another
as if there were a Pulitzer within our grasp, when there’s absolutely
nothing. We are squeezed between a regime that grants you a visa only if
you are against the rebels, and rebels who, if you are with them, allow
you to see only what they want you to see. The truth is, we are
failures. Two years on, our readers barely remember where Damascus is,
and the world instinctively describes what’s happening in Syria as “that
mayhem,” because nobody understands anything about Syria—only blood,
blood, blood. And that’s why the Syrians cannot stand us now. Because we
show the world photos like
that 7-year-old child
with a cigarette and a Kalashnikov. It’s clear that it’s a contrived
photo, but it appeared in newspapers and websites around the world in
March, and everyone was screaming: “These Syrians, these Arabs, what
barbarians!” When I first got here, the Syrians stopped me and said,
“Thank you for showing the world the regime’s crimes.” Today, a man
stopped me; he told me, “Shame on you.”
Had I really understood something of war, I wouldn’t have gotten
sidetracked trying to write about rebels and loyalists, Sunnis and Shia.
Because really the only story to tell in war is how to live without
fear. It all could be over in an instant. If I knew that, then I
wouldn’t have been so afraid to love, to dare, in my life; instead of
being here, now, hugging myself in this dark, rancid corner, desperately
regretting all I didn’t do, all I didn’t say. You who tomorrow are
still alive, what are you waiting for? Why don’t you love enough? You
who have everything, why you are so afraid?
With the exception of Alessio Romenzi, the names in this article have been changed for reasons of privacy.
Maximum risk The author dodges sniper fire in Aleppo’s Salaheddin neighborhood. (Alessio Romenzi)
