Reporting Under Fire (24 page)

Janine di Giovanni reported from Helmand Province when the United States and Great Britain were at war in Afghanistan.
Courtesy of Janine di Giovanni

Janine di Giovanni continues to board international flights that take her to the world's most dangerous places. After the Arab Spring in December 2010 launched a series of revolutions and revolts, she traveled into Syria, Egypt, and Libya. She contributes to television and radio news on three continents; Americans hear her on NPR and PBS. Her articles appear in German, French, British, Canadian, and American newspapers including the
New York Times,
the
Sunday Times
(London), the
Guardian, Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue,
and
Harper's Bazaar.

For thousands of years, history has told of continuing war in the Middle East. After World War II, Britain granted independence to territories throughout most of its colonial empire and
signed Palestine over to the United Nations in 1947. In turn, the UN announced plans to partition, or divide, Palestine into two states: one as a Jewish homeland for settlers and Holocaust survivors; the other, a state for Muslim Arabs. In May 1948, the Jews established the state of Israel. Jerusalem, sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, stayed divided. And the issue of a homeland for Palestinians was left hanging.

Since 1948, a series of wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors has kept the region in turmoil. In 1988, Yasser Arafat, chief of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), reversed his position and acknowledged Israel's right to exist. Six years later, the PLO and Israel reached an understanding, but the violence has continued. A Palestinian nation has never been established.

Iraq invaded its small neighbor Kuwait in August 1991, touching off a series of events that led to the Persian Gulf War. The United States, in tandem with its allies in NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), responded with air strikes against Iraqi military installations and oil fields in January 1992. The Allies crushed Iraq's military, but its dictator, Saddam Hussein, stayed in power until he was captured during the Iraq War late in 2003.

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States forever changed the American nation. Within weeks the US military invaded Afghanistan to hunt for Osama bin Laden, leader of a Muslim terrorist organization called al-Qaeda, as well as to overthrow the Taliban, Afghanistan's ultraconservative Islamic government.

Most of the world was caught off guard in 2010 when a young man named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest
institutional corruption in Tunisia. This act sparked the overthrow of his government and others across the Arab world and was quickly tagged the “Arab Spring.” At issue for Arab nations is whether they can evolve into Islamic democracies or whether they will succumb to ultraconservative Muslim governments who base their laws on a very narrow interpretation of the Koran. Foreign correspondent Robin Wright is among the journalists traveling throughout the Middle East to study and interpret the matter.

The Islamists are not only coming. In several countries, they've already arrived.—Robin Wright

In the 1950s, sets of orange-covered biographies of famous women lined library shelves across the America. With large print and characters illustrated in solid black silhouettes, these kid-friendly books drew boys and girls to sit down and read them cover to cover. There was
Dolly Madison: Quaker Girl
and others on Florence Nightingale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Amelia Earhart. A set stood on a library shelf in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where a schoolgirl named Robin Wright devoured every one. Like the hundreds of people she went on to interview and write about in the next 50 years, these women became part of her journey. Robin Wright wanted to be like one of these women, “women who had done things on their own.”

Robin Wright grew up in a family that liked to ask questions. Both of her parents were academics who encouraged her to follow her own path. Her mother, Phyllis, had followed her own muse: she had danced with Agnes de Mille as a young woman and was still in community theater with a role in
The Vagina Monologues
at the age of 91. Robin's father, L. Hart Wright, taught his law students using the Socratic Method: series of questions and answers—always to be followed by another question.

At suppertime, her father quizzed Robin and her sister about current events and the world in general. Much was going on— the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union had spawned crisis after crisis, even as Third World countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East were fighting wars of independence. At the dinner table, the Wrights played “geography,” tossing out names of countries from Burma to Zambia, as well as the add-a-letter-to-make-a-word game “three-thirds of a ghost.” But these dinner table games extended to another serious subject: the brawling world of big-league sports. In the Wright household, sports held equal weight, and Hart Wright loved them all. He schlepped his daughters to college games and filled their heads with scores and stats. Robin grew up knowing her state and world capitals, and she could talk baseball, basketball, and football for hours.

Many kids who grew up reading those orange-covered biographies went on to study history at the University of Michigan, and Robin was one of them. She had absolutely no plans to become a journalist until she had a happy accident. A sorority sister suggested she write for the
Michigan Daily,
the nation's biggest college newspaper, which ran six days a week with 24- and 36-page issues. Robin told herself, “Maybe I'll go off and join the paper and write an article about sports just as a joke to my
father.” She ended up “loving it” and joined the
Daily
's sports page. By her senior year in 1969, Robin Wright had worked her way up to become the first female sports editor of a student paper in the United States.

The year 1969 was a turbulent one for American students and Americans in general. Bitter protests against the Vietnam War gripped the Michigan campus. But as hot as the political scene was in Ann Arbor, there was other news to cover. Michigan's ailing football team had a new coach, Bo Schembechler, and he was turning things around. Robin traveled with the team to Saturday games at Big Ten stadiums, and she had a quiet deal with the players: in return for not following them into the locker room—in 1969 it was unthinkable for women sportswriters to interview players as they showered and dressed—they promised to save some comments just for her. Come Monday morning,
Daily
readers opened the sports page for an exclusive bit of news by Robin Wright.

On New Year's Day 1970, as Michigan played in the Rose Bowl, Robin did her part to break the gender barrier in sports reporting. As she made her way to the press box, two sheriff's deputies blocked her from entering. True to form, the only women allowed in the press box were there to serve food or send Western Union teletypes updating the game. But Wright had a scoop—a U of M player had shared important news with her. That morning, Coach Schembechler had had a heart attack. “I was the only one who had information about the best story of the day,” Robin recalled years later, but she had no way to share it. “The boys in the press box knew I always had good stories,” so she sent them a note about her predicament. In support, “the entire male press corps got up and walked out.” Nervous Rose Bowl officials quickly saw they weren't going to get any press coverage at all, and they let her in.

Wright earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees in history at Michigan. When she cast about for a summer internship, there weren't any in history, so she took one from the
Christian Science Monitor,
a national newspaper based in Boston. Again, she loved it, another happy accident. But for a young woman who had read those orange biographies, her choice of a career made sense. Robin Wright became one of those women who did things on her own.

Almost from the start, Robin reported from overseas when she moved to Africa, first for the
Monitor,
later for the
Washington Post
and for
CBS Evening News,
when she learned the art of reporting in front of a camera. For seven years in the 1970s, she witnessed the violence that accompanied change as old governments fell and new ones rose. She covered revolutions, interviewed dictators, and watched bloody uprisings as black South Africans rose up against apartheid. Robin got the first story about the murder of black South African Steve Biko, an activist with two small boys, who was “arrested and detained” by the white government and died in prison after being beaten by his police interrogators. She recalled how she “broke the story about Steve Biko when he died. I got in to see his body after he'd been brutalized, and I got the pathologist's report about how he really died … one of the biggest scoops as a young journalist.” In return, the South African government tried to get her expelled.

A small quote taped to her monitor reads, “The things you are scared of are the most worthwhile.” “The fact is I'm afraid of a lot of things: elevators and airplanes … I'm not brave,” Robin said flat out. “I'm actually hideously afraid of things like war and being in war zones. You never overcome fear, but when I think about the privilege of seeing history play out in front of me, [it] has made that fear worthwhile.” Critics
sarcastically tagged young women reporters like her as “mercenary groupies.”

Her job was rarely easy and sometimes dangerous. She occasionally needed financial backing to work, and in 1976 she won a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation to study the dismantling of Portugal's African empire. She went to Angola to report on five British mercenaries, regular “blokes” lured from day jobs as factory workers and bricklayers with the promise of tax-free dollars as soldiers of fortune in Africa. They commanded a pro-democracy militia in a small town but had no ammunition to defend themselves.

Early in 1976, Robin found the mercenaries in the tiny town of Santo Antonio do Zaire at the Angola-Zaire border, where the Congo River poured into the Atlantic Ocean. Angolan forces, backed by Cuban troops, stormed the town with a tank and machine guns. Civilians and soldiers ran for their lives.

Robin's first-hand report of the attack appeared in the
Christian Science Monitor
on February 9, 1976.

This reporter was present during the surprise assault on the coastal city, which is the northernmost point before the Zaire border.

The attack began at 8:45
AM
, Feb. 6, with the sound of T-54 Soviet tanks and the crash of mortars falling on the hospital and airfield on the outskirts of town. At first many people thought the sounds were thunder from the gale-force of the rainy season that was drenching this steamy little town located six degrees below the equator.

There had been no warning of the attack …

Within seconds of the first shellings, the entire town was in chaos. People and troops fled down the street toward the river, the only exit on the peninsula.

At the port where half a dozen fishing boats were docked, women and children were fighting and pulling each other out to get a place.

… This reporter and one mercenary headed for the single small motorized boat that had just been repaired the night before. Approaching the vessel—smaller than a tiny tugboat—we saw it, too, was swarming with people clawing for space.

Of the 350 people in that small town, 22 made it out alive, including Robin and the two mercenaries. The attackers slaughtered the rest.

Robin returned to Angola when three captured mercenaries went on trial, and the revolutionary government tried to call her as a witness. She refused to testify, on the grounds that she was a journalist, not a participant in the fighting. Accusing Robin of spying for the CIA (the Central Intelligence Agency), the Angolans put her in prison, which she described as “a memorable week.” In 1977, she won the Overseas Press Club award for the best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and initiative.

In 1980 Robin moved to Rome. Often the only woman on the plane, she traveled with Pope John Paul II as he faced down a military dictatorship in Brazil and Ferdinand Marcos, the corrupt president of the Philippines. The next year she moved to Beirut, Lebanon's capital city. Once known as the “Paris of the Middle East,” Beirut had been leveled to rubble during Lebanon's civil war. Robin made Beirut her home for five years. She reported on Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and watched the rise of Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim terrorist organization backed by Iran. In the early hours of October 23, 1993, she was awakened by a huge explosion five or six miles distant: a
suicide bomber had driven a truck loaded with explosives into a barracks and killed 241 US Marines as they slept. As of 2014, the bombing represented the single worst attack on a group of American military since World War II.