POLICY OF TRUTH

They almost stopped at Lalibela. The little-known story behind ‘Band Aid’ and ‘Live Aid’ is that the original horrific footage of the Ethiopian famine only happened through the most spectacular karma.

The agreed official flight-plan of cameraman Mo Amin and the BBC’s Michael Buerk and Mike Wooldridge was to land at Lalibela en route to the famine centre at Mekelle. But Amin had a hunch; he argued with their pilot and over-ruled their accompanying Ethiopian government minder into over-flying Lalibela.

He was right but for the wrong reason. Amin feared some embarrassed Ethiopian functionary would ground them and abort their mission. He was correct: they would have been grounded but not by Ethiopian authorities. Instead, while their twin-engined Otter was flying up from Addis Ababa, Lalibela had been captured by the rebels.

If their plane had landed, the next steps would have been inevitable. First, the team, with its much-prized BBC contingent, would have been taken hostage by rebels, eager for publicity. Then after some weeks, they would have been taken west across the border into Sudan and set free.

Possibly, though not certainly, they might have filmed famine scenes behind the rebel lines. But to no good. Television executives in London and elsewhere would have granted far less credibility to reports made under duress. Any resulting story would have been given a low priority.

Far more pertinently, the Ethiopian regime would have felt compelled to deny their report and insist it was rebel propaganda. Without Mo Amin’s intervention, the world would neither have seen his pictures nor heard Michael Buerk’s commentary that so scarified Bob Geldof into action. Without Mo Amin’s hunch, the chain reaction would have never happened.

Television cameramen rarely if ever get star ratings. It’s the men or women with the microphones, BBC’s Kate Adie and John Simpson or RTE’s Orla Guerin who get the kudos on the frontline. Even if they’re facing worse dangers, camera and soundmen are still the poor bloody infantry.

But Mo Amin is different. Head of Reuter’s African Bureau, he’s a general not a private. Ever since the Sixties, this photo-journalist has regularly scooped his East Africa rivals. That Mo Amin was instrumental in exposing the Eighties Ethiopian famine is no coincidence.

But it wasn’t why he came to Dublin in early February. Instead he was accompanying an exhibition of photographs by colleagues, Dan Eldon, Hos Maina and Hansi Kraus, all killed last July in Somalia. Mo Amin himself isn’t unscathed. A year earlier, he’d lost his own left arm filming in Ethiopia.

The Saturday morning after a less than satisfactory interview by Gay Byrne on The Late Late Show, we limited our discussion to three topics : Ethiopia and the ‘Live Aid’ phenomenon, Somalia and, finally, the communications revolution in a global village where ease of access has not necessarily meant any increase in truth and understanding.

As early as May ’84, relief organisations knew there was a horrendous famine in Ethiopia. But they couldn’t fully publicise it since the government was restricting entry to the Northern provinces where it was most hideous.

Their pretext: the civil war then raging in the North. Earlier in ’84, an ITN team had been allowed North but had ignored the famine to focus on the war to the mutual if differently-motivated embarrassment of the Ethiopian government and the relief agencies.

But the government had allowed access to the more peaceful South. In May, Mo Amin had written a front-page story for Kenya’s Sunday Nation while Michael Buerk had contributed to an early BBC famine appeal in July.

But the pair weren’t partners since Amin wasn’t a BBC employee. Instead he had his own independent brief as head of Visnews, later Reuter’s. Although the BBC was then a secondary shareholder in Visnews, the company’s function was to both send out agency footage of Africa to television stations around the world and rent out camera and other technical assistance to correspondents covering African stories.

So Mo Amin already had his own Ethiopian contacts of over ten years’ standing. Using them, he finally got permission to travel to the Northern famine zones in October, together with a soundman and the BBC’s East Africa radio correspondent, Mike Wooldridge. Only at the last moment did Michael Buerk, then based in Johannesburg, enter the equation.

The Ethiopian authorities hadn’t expected Buerk and were most suspicious. According to Amin: “I told my contact in Addis and he hit the roof.” They postponed their flight from Nairobi for two days but when they reached Addis, he says that the Ethiopian officials then “had second thoughts about all this and they actually withdrew our permission.”

A complicated game began. Beholden to Ethiopia’s leader, Mengistu, bureaucrats feared for themselves if they stepped out of line. As Amin confirms: “At that time, nobody wanted to make a decision since they were so scared of repercussions from Mengistu.”

Still the deputy commissioner of the government relief agency, the RRC, accepted the team had been genuinely invited to Ethiopia and renewed their permits. But with a catch: their permits were effectively useless since they weren’t given any government planes to fly to Mekelle.

But if they had permission without a plane, somebody else might have a plane without a permission. “So,” says Amin “we were wandering around and I bumped into somebody from World Vision and I told him about our plight.” Indeed World Vision did have a plane and had been looking for permission to fly to Mekelle for weeks. The obvious deal was done.

Amin then returned to the authorities who, he says, “were quite shocked.” But the Ethiopian national pride which doesn’t accept dictation from outsiders, now worked in their favour. Mo Amin: “The Ethiopians are very honourable, they didn’t like to be seen to have lied to us.”

Amin, Buerk and Wooldridge had all covered famines before but even these seasoned reporters were totally unprepared for what they discovered at Mekelle and the two other towns on their itinerary, Korem and Alamata. According to Amin, they were so shocked they were on automatic pilot, almost sleep-walking as they worked:

“We were not talking which is the only time I ever remember when you’re on an assignment or a shoot with a correspondent that there was no communication. We were so stunned by what we saw that not a word was exchanged during the time we were in the camps. And there was very little talking when we were out of the camps. Mike (Buerk) never said to me I would like this shot or that shot and I never asked him what he wanted. He knew what I was doing and I saw what he was doing. It was so incredibly shocking that there was nothing much to say.

“In Mekelle” he adds, “there were over 80,000 people and just food enough for 50 and people were dying all over the place. In the past, I’d seen a lot of famine but the scale of it was much lower. Because of the war, everybody was rounded up in one place. The other striking thing was the dignity of the people. They just sat there with their heads up, knowing they were going to die and knowing their children, wives and relatives were going to die. But they didn’t make a noise at all. They took it as fate.”

And yet even then, the story wasn’t guaranteed massive exposure. Compassion fatigue was a regular ailment in Western newsrooms long before Bob Geldof popularised the phrase. Now Michael Buerk made the difference. If Mo Amin’s tenacity and Ethiopian contacts had got the trio to Mekelle, Buerk’s commentary and BBC access forced the television networks to screen their story.

If the rebels at Lalibela might have killed the story, now desk-bound editors at Western networks could have spiked it. For when Mo Amin’s harrowing footage was sent to Eurovision and NBC without Buerk’s commentary, both rejected it.

Mo Amin: “When the material first arrived in London, Visnews immediately offered it to Eurovision but Eurovision then said they were not interested in the story - African children dying in famine, we’ve seen it before. So they killed the story and it was then offered to NBC who were our close allies in the States and NBC said ‘No thanks, we don’t need it, it’s no big deal, Africans dying in famine’. They didn’t even want to see the pictures and the American presidential elections were going on.”

Other news stories were given higher priority. That the BBC did run with it was due to two factors: Buerk’s commentary which contextualised, personalised and emotionalised the famine and the fact that there were no major competing stories in the U.K. that day.

First shown on the lunchtime news, it immediately provoked a massive public response. Furthermore, the BBC’s decision forced NBC to reconsider.

So says Amin: “The head of the NBC office in London got back to New York and eventually persuaded them to look at it. It was fed down the line from London and it was (NBC anchor-man) Tom Brokaw who was in the newsroom who later said he’d never seen the newsroom so quiet and by the end, half of them were in tears.

So they ran it and President Reagan, who probably wouldn’t have understood what was going on, gave 40 million dollars that night towards famine relief. And then of course, Eurovision asked for the story the next day.”

Now the Ethiopian government was caught offside especially since the news team had diplomatically and quietly left the country without contacting the authorities.

“I don’t think they knew what hit them,” Amin recalls “because the pressure was incredible from every quarter, their friends and their enemies. So the nations from around the world, particularly the Western ones, started sending them aircraft and food loads. Suddenly Addis airport which normally had one or two planes a day, now had 200 or 300 aircraft around. “It was amazing that only a week after the pictures were shown, you had British, German and various airforces operating in a country that was absolutely closed and out of bounds to Western nations because of the war going on. They had Soviet and Cuban troops in the country but they had to do it under pressure.”

Mo Amin’s testimony has a moral for both consumers and gatherers of news. He believes editors often misjudge the public :

“This was a classic example of a story that probably would never have run, that could have gone in the bin, that almost went in the bin. It could have gone by the decision of half a dozen people in different parts of the world not giving the opportunity to their public, their audience, to find out what they thought about it.”

If the quality of information truly related to the quantity of investment and man-hours worked, then we really should understand the quagmire of Somalia. Once American troops arrived, the major US networks deployed massive resources – in one case, a staff of over 60 – to monitor the operation. But the American mission is emerging as a sham and a failure and the American public still don’t understand why.

Till now, Mohammed Amin’s manner has been moderate but he is scathing about American involvement in Somalia. One might anticipate American cultural insensitivity; I don’t expect his account of basic military incompetence and disorganisation.

Obviously the death of his younger colleagues still grates but picture this scene as Reuter’s African bureau chief lands at Mogadishu airport, not yet aware the worst has happened:

“We heard there’d been an incident but we didn’t know the details. So I landed and tried to find out from the Americans who were at the airport what was happening. But they couldn’t tell me anything. There was just complete chaos and we’re talking about people being based there for seven or eight months. They hadn’t just arrived. They had a massive infrastructure or they said they did.”

Next he approached the Pakistani troops also stationed at the airport. Since his father came from a Pakistani background in East Africa and he knew the language, Mo Amin got a more sociable reception but he still found all the signs of a totally disorganised operation.

“I was amazed sitting in the control-room. They had three sets of communication, telephone, their own internal radio and walkie-talkies. But none of them could speak to anybody but Pakistani troops.”

Desperate for news about his colleagues, Amin suggested the Pakistanis phone the American hospital. But instead he says “they said we’re sorry but we have no link with them. All we can do is phone a particular office and leave a message for an American liaison officer. The message is given to him but it’s up to him to call us back. We have no control.”

Next the commanding Pakistani major contacted a contingent of his own forces, a hundred soldiers with six A.P.C.s who were manning a roadblock. Since their earlier operations had caused the local Somalis to be most hostile to the Pakistani troops they needed all those hundred soldiers to secure the hotel and find anyone from Reuter’s who might know what had happened.

Amin was astonished: “ I thought, shit, these guys aren’t answerable to anybody. If they’re running an operation at a roadblock, obviously there’s a lot of troops involved. But they’re not asking any central command can we do this or that? They’re just running the operation themselves. And I asked the major and he said that’s the way it’s always been. The Americans do what they like, we do what we like. There’s no central command here.”

Amin was staggered: “Even to me who runs a media operation, I couldn’t run my camera-crews like that, making up their own minds about where they’d go.”

As far as Mo Amin is concerned, such disorganisation also explains the October military disaster when 18 Americans died. By his account, the US military couldn’t run a massacre in an abattoir.

Then, the communications foul-up was an entirely internal American responsibility. To simplify, America sent two special forces groups to Mogadishu, a quick reaction force under the locally-based American General Montgomery and the elite Rangers group, answerable to the Pentagon.

So on October 3rd, the Rangers were assigned to take out General Aideed, the local Somali warlord villain of the piece. Mo Amin says: “It was chaos, a complete cock-up because nobody else knew this operation was going on. So when they were shot down, the Rangers called Montgomery for help to get the quick reaction force in. But by then, the Somalis had sealed the place so the quick reaction force was nailed and they withdrew.”

The Pakistani and Malaysian forces, understandably irate that they’d neither been consulted nor forewarned, were then asked to assist. After over six hours’ hard fighting, the Rangers were rescued but at the cost of 18 American deaths and, as has been conveniently forgotten, about 200 hundred Somalians also killed.

The consequences were twofold. Aideed could even more convincingly present himself as a Somali national hero while the sight of American bodies being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu caused the US public to successfully demand the withdrawal of their forces.

But did American viewers get the true story? Did American taxpayers and grieving parents learn how their high command had wasted resources and lives? Mo Amin thinks not.

“The information doesn’t get back,” he states. “Some of it gets back since I think there was a story in The Washington Post which explained what happened. But not enough of it is said. CNN wasn’t there on that day. Neither were any of the other broadcasters and we all got pictures from our local Somali cameraman.”

This was three months after his colleagues, the three cameramen plus Reuter’s soundman, Anthony Macharia had died. They were the victims of a mob, enraged after another American UN gunship attack on Aideed’s headquarters that killed at least 16 Somalis.

The deaths were even more tragic since the cameramen had been requested by local Somalis to visit the compound to record the carnage after the Cobra gunship attack.

“Normally we don’t go out unless we feel reasonably safe. Those were our instructions,” Mo Amin explains. “But then some of Aideed’s senior people came to us and said come with us and see what the Americans have done. I believe and always have done that this was a sincere move by the Somalis since it was in their self-interest. It has been suggested it was a plot but they could have killed the journalists anywhere and at any time. They could have blown the whole hotel up if they wanted.”

A convoy of six cars left the hotel but the first two got separated at a Somali roadblock, possibly Amin believes, “because somebody was asking for cigarettes or something else.”

At the compound, the crowd were volatile and then “went berserk”. Key leaders had been killed and, isolated from their Somali minders, the cameramen were stoned and beaten to death as sacrificial victims.

Between Somalia, Bosnia and elsewhere, journalists have become regular casualties of war. Yet till the Eighties, the media had a light body-count. Mo Amin thinks there are two main reasons for the change.

“In the last couple of years, there’s been so many wars where there’s no proper lines drawn. In the past, you’d know whose side you were on. It was dangerous but at least you knew you were okay with whoever you were with. Now there are situations where people have been killed on the side of the people you were with, like this situation in Somalia.”

“Another reason unfortunately is that there has been more and more young journalists, some trying to make a name and others inexperienced in covering these wars. And I think also that responsibility lies with the editors who hire people. There’s a tendency not to send your own staff and to find freelances. You get them cheap, you’re not risking your own staff.”

Editors will be sympathetic to their own staff with a family but Amin argues that “they don’t want to know whether Joe Bloggs has a wife and kids or whether, indeed he’s experienced. Still you can’t remove the blame entirely from those offering themselves to be hired. In Bosnia, there’s been so many casualties of inexperienced journalists.”

Mo Amin speaks with authority as both a bureau chief and a frontline reporter. In his former role, he acutely understands how Western editors can distort our understanding of Africa.

He thinks that "the people sitting in London and New York don't understand Africa. They often like to pretend they know the world but they don't know the world. This is not being disrespectful to the editors. It is simply a fact of life. They've got to rely on the people on the ground."

Take the deployment of personnel. Those stations with African correspondents only locate them in either South Africa or Kenya. For example, CNN, till recently, had only one correspondent in Nairobi to cover 54 countries.

He argues that "this means that the only story that gets a look at the moment is South Africa. It's a very important story and it needs to be run but I find that the rest of Africa doesn't matter anymore."

In consequence, present Nigerian turbulence will remain uncovered unless and until it erupts into civil war. Amin even confesses: "that there are times I have been told by my own editors who are somewhat better informed than a lot of other editors, who cares about this?, who cares about Nigeria."

Business is also a consideration. Note that you'll generally see more news stories and documentaries from Asia and Latin America than Africa. The reason: there's a continental television infrastructure to which those programmes can be profitably resold.

Unlike Africa. There, television stations were mouthpieces of dictators, disbelieved by the population. They were also often mismanaged and strapped for cash. As Amin confirms: "The customer in Africa who would run those stories more prominently just don't pay enough money."

So our news usually comes from two sources: over-extended local correspondents or visiting firemen parachuted in on special assignments. The latter can be resourceful and dedicated but they can't be expected to understand the complexities of any country after a single, brief visit.

"In Africa," Mo Amin believes,“contacts are crucial . . . It's who you know and how you can get around the system . . . Sometimes you have the press secetary to the President and that man is totally useless. To call him up is to mess up your chance of seeing the President but there's always another guy who might not be listed and who's very junior who's the guy to go through."

Still he's not totally negative about Africa which he dubs "the last Continent that got left behind." He's even upbeat about the future, speculating hopefully that "in the next few years, there will be a lot of development of television in Africa. There are more and more private stations starting . . . But much more importantly, there's an awareness of producing more material from Africa which isn't just about death and disaster.

"Africans," he says, "resent the fact that when journalists come they're looking for starving kids and dead bodies. As far as I'm concerned, if that is there, it should be photographed and brought to people's attention. But there's a hell of a lot of other things in Africa. Culture, tradition, lifestyle, music ,wildlife, development projects , all sorts of things that have been ignored."

To that end, Reuter's are now initiating a weekly, half-hour current affairs programme, 'Africa Journal'. Servicing the new African stations, Mo Amin hopes "it will give the perspective that it isn't all death and disaster." He also claims that the project already "has a lot of interest from subscribers outside Africa, including some fairly large stations."

Is anyone at RTE listening? With his record , Mohammed Amin's words are not ignored by the wise.