(MINNEAPOLIS) — Over the past weeks, three foreign journalists have lost their lives covering the crisis in Syria. For me personally, the death of New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid hit the hardest because we had shared a friendship for nearly 20 years. The two other fatalities were also extremely disturbing. Marie Colvin was the quintessential war correspondent.
She wore her eye patch as a reminder of her near death experiences as she brazenly covered conflict throughout the globe. For those who knew and admired her, her death was a terrible tragedy. Then, there was Remi Ochlik, the young, dashing French photographer who was just beginning to make a name for himself. His big break came from covering the “Arab Spring” in Tunisia, then Egypt, Libya, and finally Syria. He was at his prime – young, energetic, and willing to go the extra distance to get the best shot. Tragically, his life was cut short long before its time.
These latest deaths awaken memories of former wars which had a heavy toll on the journalist community. Somalia, Iraq, and Bosnia are among the conflicts that come to my mind, but there are plenty more. Every time journalists are injured or killed, their colleagues are reminded of their own vulnerability. Like many of my colleagues, my obituary could have been written more than once.
Life as a Correspondent
I began my career as news photographer during the height of the Lebanese civil war. As glorious as this sounds, I managed to stay clear of the conflict by remaining in Egypt. During the course of the 17-year civil war, numerous journalists and photographers were killed and wounded. Their fate, however, had little impact on me as I didn’t know who they were.
As the civil war in Lebanon intensified, the press began to relocate to Cairo which became a Middle East base. It wasn’t so much the fighting that they were fleeing, but the risk of being captured and held hostage by extremist groups. I became friendly with the “new arrivals” in hopes of picking up a little work here or there. Unfortunately, there was little news to cover in Egypt at the time and my new friends spent most of their time traveling in search of stories elsewhere.
When the journalist crowd wasn’t hopping from one hotspot to the other, they spend time in Cairo socializing and reminiscing about the “good old days” in Beirut. Although I felt out of place, I still enjoyed listening to their stories about covering the civil war. Invariably, they mentioned colleagues who had died or were taken hostage and the conversation would become emotional. Suddenly, my experience in Egypt seemed so mundane. What little I had to say at these gatherings was insignificant.
Towards the end of 1985, I left Egypt to go on holiday. When I returned, I tried to get together with a fellow photographer, Mark Fletcher, who was a freelancer like me. When I inquired about his whereabouts, I learned that he headed to the Sudan in the hopes of holding the first interview with the elusive South Sudanese rebel leader John Garang. Mark and I both taught English as a second language in Cairo as a way to supplement our meager earnings from freelance photography. We worked at the same language institute, where we would meet and talk about what we wanted to do in the future. His obsession was to get a “scoop” by being the first to locate and interview John Garang. But talk was easy, and I never thought that he would go through with this plan. When I heard that he actually left for the Sudan, I felt envious at first, but then I was relieved because his absence meant less competition for me in securing freelance gigs in Cairo.
Losing Colleagues, Losing Friends
Months passed without any news from Mark until one day a colleague called to say that that my friend had died when the “aid” flight he was on was shot down by rebel fighters in south Sudan. I put “aid” in quotes because it was widely known that many of the supposed aid flights that were sent down from the capital Khartoum were actually carrying ammunition for government troops fighting against the rebels. Besides Mark, seven humanitarian workers were also killed.
When I heard the news, I headed to the bureau where the colleague who broke the news to me worked. We poured a drink, and reminisced about Mark for a while. Then, out of the blue he said, “he left all his possessions with me, what am I suppose to do with them? I’m not even sure where he’s from.”
Other than this colleague, I only knew of one other person who remembered the South African photographer, Mark Fletcher. And unlike the tributes that poured out across the world for Anthony, Marie and Remi, there was no memorial ceremony for Mark after he died. He wasn’t remembered or talked about in journalistic circles. He never made it onto the commemorative plaque at the Newseum, the journalist museum in Washington DC where hundreds of fallen newsmen and newswomen are commemorated for their achievements. As the years rolled on, I even forgot Mark’s name.
When I searched the net in the hope of finding a thread of information about him, I found a small blurb in the LA Times about the downing of the aid plane. The news brief didn’t even mention that he was a photographer. The only detail about his mission was that he was working for the rock music charity Band Aid. They might as well have said that he was an English teacher. The bottom line is that he was following his dream of becoming a photo-journalist.
A decade later, I met John Garang in Eritrea. After the interview, I pulled him aside and asked him if he remembered a plane that his rebel fighters had shot down in May 1986 that was carrying aid workers. He said “yes, but wasn’t there also journalists on board?”
Mark Fletcher’s death was in some warped way my rite of passage to becoming a news photographer. Finally, I could say that I knew a journalist who had died in the line of duty.
About Contributor: NORBERT SCHILLER has lived and worked in the Middle East and Africa as a news photographer for over a quarter of a century beginning in the early 1980s. He worked for numerous news agencies, magazines and newspapers including the Associated Press, Agence France Presse, European Press Agency, United Press International and the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel.
During that time he covered three Iraq wars; conflicts and famine in the Horn of Africa; Islamist insurgencies in Egypt and North Africa and the Arab Israeli conflict, to name a few. He also continues to travel back to the Middle East for work a few times a year.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MPN’s (Mint Press News) editorial policy.