The As It Happens Files (30 page)
Read The As It Happens Files Online
Authors: Mary Lou Finlay
Not long ago, I came across a story told by a survivor of the Rwandan massacre. He said that on the day that the movie
Schindler’s List
was sweeping the Academy Awards in Hollywood, the massacre of more than half a million Rwandan Tutsis was just two weeks away. In other words, at the very moment that the world was solemnly promising never again to permit another genocide, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were about to be hacked to death in their homes by their neighbours. We did nothing to prevent it.
But who, apart from Canadian General Roméo Dallaire and a handful of others, knew what was going on in Rwanda? Most of us had no inkling until the killing had reached hideous proportions. That was our excuse in Rwanda. I thought we shouldn’t have that excuse again, so we kept an
eye on Darfur. When U.N. people or other NGOs sent someone to investigate, we sought them out. When U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour went in to see what was going on, we interviewed her. We spoke to Canadian Parliamentarians and members of the Arab League. I even broke down and interviewed Mia Farrow about Darfur. I usually avoid movie stars who act like foreign affairs experts, but Mia did a great job of reporting the misery she was witnessing.
As It Happens
wasn’t alone, of course, in trying to draw attention to this poor, beleaguered region, and today everybody knows where Darfur is. And what’s all this attention done for Darfur? You guessed it. Four years of shedding light on Darfur have brought countless truces signed and broken, thousands more rapes and murders, continuing misery for hundreds of thousands of displaced people and growing friction between Sudan and all its neighbours. There are seven thousand peacekeepers there now, many of them under-equipped and ill-trained and all of them undermined by the government in Khartoum and its proxies in Darfur. The U.N. promises seventeen thousand by next year—if Khartoum agrees.
Barbara Frum wouldn’t be surprised. In 1978, when I was interviewing Frum about her time on
As It Happens,
I had asked her if there was ever a sense of crusading on her show, if she’d won any victories for her causes:
Well, my big victory story happened at the very beginning—the best thing that ever happened to me. The first story I ever did was supposed to be an exposé and I was supposed to be a crusader, and the cause that I went after raised a third more money the year after I went after them than they did the year before. It taught me a good lesson about
journalism: it’s a very slow drip on a very big rock and if you get a little too pretentious about what you’re doing, you’re dooming yourself to all kinds of disappointment.
Darfur has been a steady disappointment. Not that the media coverage has garnered support for the Janjaweed, of course, but neither has it put a dent in their murderous activity. And here’s a really scary thought: what if all the media attention has only encouraged the Sudanese rebels to go on fighting a hopeless fight in the mistaken belief that the forces of righteousness—or anyway, NATO and the U.N.—will eventually join the fight on the side of the underdogs, the way they did in Bosnia and Kosovo? What if the media attention has been an
obstacle
in the way of a ceasefire? I don’t think that’s the case in Darfur, but it’s something to be wary of in the way we cover conflict—another reason to feel humble.
In any case, it will be up to other people to tell this story now, as well as all the others. History leads me not to expect much progress on any front very soon. But history is also full of pleasant surprises, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, peace in Northern Ireland and the election of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa.
It was quite near the beginning of my tenure at
As It Happens
that South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission completed its work and the Commission’s head, Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, agreed to talk to us about his work there. It had been gruelling, he said, hearing about the particular cases of injustice, cruelty and torture that had been inflicted on black South Africans by their white brothers during the apartheid regime. He felt great compassion for them.
But Tutu said he also felt sorry for the torturers, because they did not emerge unscathed. They were broken men. And it was important to remember that the men who had committed evil acts were not themselves evil, he said; they were capable of redemption. It was this aspect of redemption, Tutu thought, that had persuaded Nelson Mandela to look for a man of the cloth to chair the Truth and Reconciliation hearings.
Bishop Tutu was a great admirer of President Mandela. He marvelled that the former prisoner could have gone through what he had and come out of it a noble man, not a bitter one. But Tutu went on to say that he thought forgiveness was more in keeping with an African’s nature than seeking revenge:
Part of the reason why so many come out in this particular kind of way that we have found so astonishing is that in our African worldview, there is a thing called
ubuntu.
A person is called
ubuntu,
and
ubuntu
is the essence of being human.
Ubuntu
is compassion,
ubuntu
is hospitality,
ubuntu
is warmth,
ubuntu
is sharing,
ubuntu
is caring
.
And because of our sense that I am because you are, because we say a person is a person through other persons, my humanity is caught up in your humanity. If I want to enhance my humanity, it is by the process of enhancing yours. If I de-humanize you, whether I like it or not, inexorably my humanity is diminished
.
And so, in part, it is a form of self-interest, this thing of not wanting to revenge, because revenge, anger, bitterness—all of these are corrosive of
ubuntu,
of the harmony that is for the
summum bonum,
the great good. And so, in a sense, I am not paying back to you, I do not
settle scores with you, because the anger is dissipated, and you become a better person, and in that process, I become a better person, too.
Ubuntu.
The essence of being human.
This is what it means to be human.
When you get right down to it, isn’t that what all our stories are about? All the ones I’ve written about here and all the ones I haven’t, the ones we’ve shared on
As It Happens
and the ones yet to be told?
This is what I will miss most of all: the chance to speak to people like Desmond Tutu and to share the conversation with the rest of the country and the world. The chance to speak to all kinds of people every day, with all kinds of stories.
But Bishop Tutu would be very familiar with this adage, too: to everything there is a season. I had a wonderful time hosting
As It Happens,
and now that season is over. It’s a relief to know that the show is in safe hands, with Carol Off and Barbara Budd hosting and a splendid production crew. Happily, I can still be a listener, which I was before and which has always been a rewarding pastime. The conversation will go on, I hope, for many years to come—the conversation, the music, the laughs, the goofs, the scoops and the nuts.
Happy 40th anniversary,
As It Happens!
Here’s wishing you 40 more.
The great fear one has when giving thanks is that at least one important name will be omitted, especially when the debt owed is as large as mine. There are, for instance, the legion of producers, production assistants and technicians whose hard work is reflected in every interview and every story contained in the book, and the interview subjects themselves. Without them, there is no show, nor any book. I’ve put the producers’ credits elsewhere with the list of interviews they produced and which I excerpted for the book. Special thanks are due to: Howard Bernstein, who lured me to radio in 1988, Jeffrey Dworkin, who first planted the idea of hosting
As It Happens
in my mind, Alex Frame, who gave me the job, Linda Groen, who guided me through the first years, and Barbara Budd, who made it fun. I am very grateful to George Jamieson and Mark Ulster for reading the manuscript in its early stages and bringing it more in line with the way things really happened and to John Perry for his help tracking down elusive subjects. Thanks also to Barbara Brown for putting the CBC’s resources behind me, and to Ken Puley and Brent Michaluk for giving me room in the radio archives and retrieving all the tapes I wanted to listen to again.
I am grateful to Ariel Rogers and Fogarty’s Cove Music for granting me permission to quote from Stan Rogers’ song “MacDonnell on the Heights,” to the Gourds for granting me
permission to use “Rugged Roses,” and to Michael H. Goldsen, Inc., for the right to reproduce the first verse of “Moonlight in Vermont,” written by Karl Suessdorf and John Blackburn. Kim Bolan’s and Salim Jiwa’s books on Air India were helpful in reconstructing the events surrounding that tragedy.
Many friends and family members have held my hand when the going got rough and otherwise provided support and occasional escape, and I would like to thank them here, among them Tom Axworthy, George and Brenda Berry, Keith and Aileen Coates, John Coates and Catherine Graham, Sheila Crutchlow, Eva Czigler and Peter Herrndorf, John and Lynn Diamond-Nigh, Matthew Hart, Shira Herzog, Carole McDougall, Colleen Orr, Karen Saunders, Joanne Simpson and Paul Mader, Ruth-Ellen Soles, and Wendy Trueman. Val Ross, even as she was struggling to complete her own book and fighting cancer, was helpful and encouraging to me. Mel Bryan, Philip Lewicki, Craig Lockhart, Renzo Galleno and Lirio Peck kept me fed and watered.
To my dear and supremely literate friends Russ Germain and Joan Donaldson, to Wendy Germain and my son David McDougall, who were also prevailed on to read the work in progress, and whose suggestions I found in every case to be an improvement on what I gave them, my heartfelt thanks. I owe an additional debt to David for all the other kinds of support and diversion he has provided throughout the writing of the book and while I was working on the radio show before that.
It was Cynthia Good who first persuaded me that this book should be written and she has steadfastly guided me through its every phase, giving unlimited encouragement, advice and the necessary connections, up to and including my agent Margaret Hart and my contract with Knopf Canada. I thank Cynthia and thank Margaret for following through.
Thanks, finally, to Louise Dennys, Diane Martin, Sharon Klein, Deirdre Molina, Michelle MacAleese, Brad Martin, Duncan Shields, Scott Richardson and all the good people at Knopf Canada and Random House of Canada for taking a chance on me, for finding in my rough proposal the makings of a book and getting it to market. I am especially grateful to Kathryn Dean for her unflagging attention to detail in the writing. And thanks to Gillian Watts for proofreading.
As always, I must remind readers that any errors or omissions that remain in the text are mine alone.
Above all, many thanks are due to my hugely patient, wise and agreeable editor, Michael Schellenberg. I have always known the importance of good editing on the radio and in television and film, and now I am filled with admiration for the transformative power of a skilled book editor. I am indebted to Michael for his gentle poking and prodding, his judicious cutting and re-arranging, and because he made me believe in this project and kept everything on a positive plane from beginning to end.
As It Happens
Interview Credits
Chapter Two
Dame Barbara Cartland 1 September 1997
Chapter Three
Big Cabbage 31 December 1976
Chapter Four
Colin Angus 31 May 2004
Derek Lundy 18 September 1998
David Hempleman-Adams 4 May 1998
Derek Hatfield 10 March 2003
Chapter Six
Greg Kelly 2 December 2002
Neil Morrison 2 December 2002
Chapter Seven
Troy Hurtubise 29 November 2001
10 December 2001
Chapter Eight
King of Redonda 29 May 1998
Chapter Nine
Aaron Naparstek 26 March 2002
Chapter Ten
Elizabeth Jordan 31 May
2002 Mike Brady 2 Jan 2003
Chapter Eleven
Eva Sobolska 19 September 1997
Barbara Budd 1 April 2004
Perrin Beatty 1 April 1999
Chapter Twelve
Don Cherry 13 December 2001
Adrienne Clarkson 22 February 2005
Felix Monserrate 22 October 1998
Chapter Thirteen
Dennis Mills 5 April 2001
Ezra Levant 17 May 2001
Chapter Fourteen
Jeff Greenfield 22 November 2000
Bart Voorsanger 26 October 2001
Jan Hoffman 26 October 2001
Chapter Fifteen
Lata Pada 21 June 2002
16 March 2005
Chapter Sixteen
Sally Edginton 12 January 2000
Mike Rees 17 November 2005
Chapter Seventeen
Salam Pax 3 September 2003
4 February 2004
Chapter Eighteen
Mike Stevens 23 September 2000
18 November 2003
Chapter Nineteen
Desmond Tutu 23 December 1998
As It Happens
Producers 1997 to 2005
Laurie Allan
Jennifer Bakody
Kevin Ball
Jaeny Baik
Jet Belgraver
Leith Bishop
Jon Bricker
Barbara Budd
Affan Chowdhry
Marie Clarke
Bob Coates
Anita Elash
Natasha Fatah
Brooke Forbes
Kathleen Goldhar
Datejie Green
Linda Groen
Kent Hoffman
Chris Howden
George Jamieson
Sinisa Jolic
Adam Killick
Lesley Knight
Anna-Liza Kozma
Tim Lorimer
Reuben Maan
Sarah Martin
Alison Masemann
Dara McLeod
Mark Morrison
Neil Morrison
Lynn Munkley
Max Paris
Leslie Peck
John Perry
Meagan Perry
Tina Pittaway
Catherine Porter
Jamie Purdon
Kevin Robertson
Thomas Rose
Neil Sandell
Harry Schachter
David Shannon
Robin Smythe
Ann Sullivan
Mark Ulster
Carlos Van Leeuwen
Talin Vartanian
Gordon Westmacott
