l-r: Charles Glass, Sigrid Rausing, Janine di Giovanni

On Tuesday 5 May, Middle East editor of Newsweek Janine di Giovanni and veteran broadcaster and journalist Charles Glass joined an audience at the Frontline Club for an insightful discussion chaired by Sigrid Rausing, editor of Granta magazine.

Reflecting on the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and the human realities of war, di Giovanni and Glass discussed their recent contributions to the latest edition of Granta: The Map is Not the Territory, which explores the distinctions between representation and reality.

“The theme that comes to me over and over when I think of Iraq is loss,” said di Giovanni. Her article, After Zero Hour, looks back on her time reporting on the Iraq conflict, remembering old friends who have since disappeared, emigrated or fled.

Di Giovanni described driving the length and width of Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion, aware that, as the impending war approached, many of the places she visited would soon cease to exist.

She read an extract from After Zero Hour: “With that invasion and the insurgent war that followed, Iraq would virtually disappear. The land of date trees, oasis and desert would be marked by checkpoints and graves.”

Glass followed with a short extract from his article, The Battle of Kessab, which examines the fate of the eponymous town in Syria. Kessab was the last remaining Armenian town in Syria, after the Turkish army relinquished control of portions of its border with Syria to Islamist rebels in 2014.Rausing responded to the reading: “What you describe so beautifully in the piece is really the context of the Armenian genocide. How everything that happens reminds people of the original genocide.”

An audience member asked Glass and di Giovanni to comment on the importance of lyrical writing in journalistic articles.

“We have the great privilege of writing poetically for Granta,” said di Giovanni. “For me, writing in a lyrical way in terms of narrative and characterisation is much easier.”

“This kind of language is so important,” said Rausing. “It’s the only kind of writing that will endure and have a life after.”

The discussion then covered the role played by journalists in stimulating positive political change, by providing on-the-ground evidence that can filter into policymaking.

“In some sense there’s a limit to what journalism can do. We can bring awareness, we can tell the story,” said di Giovanni. “The gap between reporting and policymaking is huge… there is an enormous gap between what is happening in the Security Council and in Obama’s office and what is actually happening on the ground. And that is hugely frustrating.”

A final audience question discussed the role of long-form journalism and an increased focus on human stories to encourage empathy and eliminate compassion fatigue.

“For the most part newspapers don’t have space… there are very few outlets. Thank god these things exist, but it’s hard to make a living doing that,” said Glass, highlighting Granta, The New York Review of Books and The Guardian as some of the few publications that champion longer pieces.

“For me it always comes down to the people,” said di Giovanni. “Then you could weave in the humanitarian disaster, you could get the political involvement in it, you could bring in the diplomacy… but I think it’s coming back. I think people want to read longer pieces.”

Subscribe to Granta magazine here.

Granta 131 explores the gaps between representation and reality, and what happens when those distinctions blur. Looking at the human realities behind the topographies of war, Janine di Giovanni and Charles Glass will be in conversation with Granta magazine’s editor Sigrid Rausing about their contributions to the issue.

Janine di Giovanni is the Middle East editor of Newsweek. A war and conflict reporter for twenty-five years, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was recently made an Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University for her work on trauma victims. She also advices the United Nations Refugee Agency and the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. In ‘After Zero Hour’ from Granta 131, di Giovanni recounts her experiences reporting on Iraq’s seemingly endless cycle of conflicts and remembers old friends who have disappeared, emigrated or fled.

Charles Glass is a broadcaster, journalist and writer, who began his journalistic career in 1973 at the ABC News Beirut bureau and was chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since then, he has been a freelance writer, and is the author of four books on the Middle East including the forthcoming Syria Burning. In ‘The Battle for Kessab ’ from Granta 131, Glass recounts the fate of the last Armenian town in Syria, after the Turkish Army relinquished control of portions of its border with Syria to ragged units of Islamist rebels in March 2014. Glass places this event in the wider context of the 1915 Turkish genocide of Armenians and Turkey’s continuing denial of those events.

Sigrid Rausing is the publisher of Granta magazine and Granta Books. In 1993-4 she lived on a collective farm in Estonia doing fieldwork for a PhD in Social Anthropology at University College London, followed by a two-year honorary fellowship in the same department. Her book Everything is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia was published by Grove Press in 2014. She serves on the advisory board of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, and is an Emeritus member of the international board of Human Rights Watch. In 2010 she was made an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

Your wonderful and kind messages mean so much to us, as has your friendship, council and support over so many years. There is no prize in our trade that we could ever value as much as your belief in us.

– Vaughan and Pranvera Smith

 

Thank you to Stewart Purvis, Richard Gizbert, Tina Carr, Emma Beals, Allan Little, Mani, Stuart Hughes, Richard Sambrook, Jon Snow, Marina Litvinenko, Martin Bell, Tom Fenton, Anthony Loyd, Lyse Doucet, Bill Neely, Lindsey Hilsum, Charles Glass, John G Morris, Salim Amin, Liz Palmer Gary Knight, Jon Lee Anderson, Jeremy Bowen, Matt Frei and Jean-Jacques Gonfier.

On Wednesday 16 October animated anecdotes, socio-political retrospectives and media insights dominated the discussion about the fascinating life of talented journalist Alexander Cockburn.

Chaired by journalist and broadcaster Charles Glass, the event at the Frontline Club hosted Cockburn’s brother and Middle East correspondent since 1979, Patrick Cockburn, as well as Ellin Stein, author of the book: That’s Not Funny That’s Sick: The National Lampoon and the Comedy Insurgents Who Captured the Mainstream. Also speaking, were close friends of the late Cockburn, professors and acclaimed writers, Joe Paff and Robin Blackburn. The evening also featured readings from Cockburn’s last work: A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip through Political Scandal, Corruption and American Culture.

From left to right: Patrick Cockburn, Robin Blackburn, Charles Glass, Ellin Stein and Joe Paff.

In the presence of Alexander Cockburn’s close family and friends an intimate tone was set. Glass started discussions with a friendly warning:

“Never cross a Cockburn, if you cross one of them . . . they will swarm over you like a squadron of B-52s. . . . That’s one of the qualities I admire of the Cockburn’s, they always come to one another’s defence.”

Alexander Cockburn’s loyalty to others, his beliefs and his engaging writing skills were aspects emphasised by all the speakers. After listing the various papers Cockburn wrote for when he moved to America in the 1970s, Stein praised Cockburn’s “unity of vision” and went on to say: “He tied the aesthetic into its social use.”

Cockburn’s ruthless journalistic approach when working in America was described by his brother as being unique:

“He won the reputation for lots of British reporters as being radical, . . . going from radical incisive British journalism to America and being part of a new wave. Actually I think it was Alexander and that was it.”

Stein went on to read extracts from his published work that, according to her, exemplified Cockburn in his “attack mode” and another in his “positive mode”.

Evident to the audience was that Cockburn was no doubt a man of multiple ‘modes’. His daughter Daisy Cockburn spoke warmly of her father’s eccentric habits and how she admired his detailed letters to her with his “muscular and robust approach to language”.

From left to right: Patrick Cockburn, Robin Blackburn and Daisy Cockburn.

Cockburn’s tenacity and endless energy evidently took shape not only in his writing, but in all that he did. Paff gave lively examples of Cockburn’s relentless enthusiasm to organise every aspect of life, from his attention to detail in cooking recipes to the arrangements of Paff’s own son’s wedding. All this summarised well a man who had time for everyone and anyone. In Paff’s words:

“He saw more in them [the ordinary man] than they saw of themselves, and they loved him for this.”

Alexander Cockburn’s approach was evidently a humanistic one. His persistent challenging of the dominant power structures meant he often had to fight the media outlets that supported them.

“What still strikes me about Alexander,” said Patrick Cockburn, “is how fundamentally serious he was, how judicious in weighing the evidence, how averse to conspiracy theories, how little influenced by conventional wisdom.”

According to Blackburn and Paff, Cockburn was not short of unconventional material for his polemical writings. Paff explained in a satirical tone:

“The year he arrived in America – 1971 – was the year we [America] were blowing up islands in the Barrier Straits with nuclear weapons. . . . It became wackier than ever. They suddenly thought they could mine with chemicals weapons and build canals. . . . So Alexander had this array of targets to hit here.”

Praised by Glass for his “insight and foresight”, Cockburn notably criticised the Enron Corporation at a time when the mainstream press continued to sing its praise. Similarly, he expressed concern for the US’s new foreign policy strategy in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Cockburn’s disagreements with fellow journalist Christopher Hitchens seemed to be on everyone’s mind during the Q&A. His brother diplomatically urged everyone to read the book for more insights.

Paff concluded on the issue of journalists who challenge the status quo:

“In this world it’s counter-punch not punch, we are receiving the blow and trying to stay alive.”

The discussion ended as it had begun, with a warning. This time from Paff, who mocked the “looming clock of doom” with its ever-present “apocalyptic threats”. His was a cynical reminder that behind the strategic socio-political threat always lies a far greater hidden one.

Watch it back and listen to the podcast:

The occurrence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) amongst soldiers is being downplayed, claims author and former Territorial Army soldier Jake Wood.

“When I got back from Afghan we had this briefing and it said that 99.9 per cent of soldiers will not suffer from PTSD. Clearly that’s bollocks” he said in a Frontline Club discussion on Wednesday 10 April: Soldiers’ Traumas – From World War Two to Afghanistan.

Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith referred to PTSD as the “unreported or underreported suffering of war.”

 Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith (left), Jake Wood (centre), Charles Glass (right)

During the discussion, led by Smith, Wood shared emotionally charged excerpts from his book Among You, which describes his experiences as a soldier in Afghanistan and Iraq, and his battle with chronic PTSD.

Wood, who worked in parallel as a business analyst, claims returning home and not being able to disconnect from the reality of war was the final trigger for his PTSD. He also spoke about feeling guilty for surviving and for his actions whilst he was fighting:

“I may alienate a few people here when I say this, but when I went to Afghanistan I wanted to kill.”

War related PTSD has been linked to desertion – an issue which veteran journalist and author of Deserter, Charles Glass, said is not being dealt with.

According to Glass, the Ministry of Defence refused to reveal current desertion rates, and his book examines the previously suppressed story of the 150, 000 US and UK deserters in the Second World War.

“It is part of a deliberate historic amnesia to take this out of the narrative, so what I was trying to do was to put it back into the narrative.”

Audience member Stephenie Stockley gave a poignant account of her 94 year old father’s desertion in the Second World War. She spoke about the fight to get him a pardon and of the negative impact of his 70 year battle with PTSD on her family.

Another attendee described Glass’ book as “an incredible way of persuading people to not join the army” and raised the question about modern conflict resolution.

In response Glass criticised leaders, who had no first hand war experience, for making decisions to start battles without truly considering the consequences.

“It was very easy for them to regard the army as a tool for their policies… but perhaps if they had had the experience they would have thought twice about what they were going to be doing to the people at the receiving end…as well as to people like Jake who come back shattered.”

Wood received treatment from the army for three and half years, but feels he never recovered from his PTSD.  As a consequence he lost his banking career and was forced to endure a legal battle to get his soldier’s pension.

He also talked about the breakup of his relationship and his desire for companionship.

“I know that I would like a partner again, that I could learn to love… and she can maybe learn to love me.”

Wood hopes to continue writing.

Watch the full discussion:

Charles Glass is a veteran broadcaster, journalist and writer. His latest book Deserter explores the widely untold stories of the British and American deserters in the Second World War. He follows a group of soldiers into the heat of battle and explores what motivated them to take their fateful decision to run away.

Jake Wood is a former soldier who worked in parallel as a business analyst. In Among You he tells the story of his time serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the battle he faced upon his return when diagnosed with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Through his own experiences he examines the harsh reality of front-line combat, the courage of the troops and the devastating after-effects of service that some suffer.

They will be joining us in conversation, chaired by Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith, to talk about their respective works and the comparisons in the trauma suffered by soldiers from World War Two to Afghanistan.

Last night’s talk looked at the future of fixers in foreign reporting and at the relationships that develop when the ‘mad circus of the international press’ arrives to cover a news story, desperately needing to hide their ignorance of the country, culture and language.

The discussion was chaired by Charles Glass, broadcaster, journalist and writer, who was joined by Ilene Prusher, an independent journalist based in Jerusalem and author of the recently published book Baghdad Fixer; and Patrick Cockburn, senior Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, presently, The Independent.

Lending some sense of reality to the discussion was Suliman Ali Zway, a Libya-based freelance journalist who switched from a career in construction to working as a fixer during the Libyan revolution. What started as translation work soon developed into ‘explaining the country, the culture and what led to such a revolution.’

Not only is a fixer’s local knowledge literally life-saving to foreign reporters, but Prusher also enjoys the camaraderie that comes through working with the often extraordinary characters who became her fixers. From Afghan poets to doctors who worked in hospitals at night and as fixers with journalists during the day, these people acted as a cultural membrane that inspired the story of Baghdad Fixer.

“I think there has been a steady progression towards recognising the important work that fixers do, that they are actually journalists in their own right. A few days ago, Lyse Doucet said to me: ‘I’m trying to ban this word.’ Part of the idea of this book is to expose it – some people really respect what they do but there are also journalists who put them in danger” said Prusher.

Glass agreed that the fixers always seem to suffer the worst fate, and are abandoned by the journalists and the news organisations that depend upon them so totally. Ali Zway was in agreement:

“Eventually the foreign journalist will leave and if they write something about someone they don’t like, you’re left behind. It’s not that the foreign journalist does not want to help you, but there is not a staff job for fixers within newspapers that would ensure your safety or ensure that your family is looked after when you’re gone. The problem is the relationship between the fixer and the organisation, not the fixer and the journalist.”

A BBC World Service producer in the audience asked what he could do in his role to try and make his fixers safer; Ali Zway’s answer was very straight forward – insure fixers the same way you would insure your staffers.

Other questions looked at the role of foreign correspondents and fixers in a future of diminishing budgets, of increasingly dangerous and scattered front lines, and of the demands of new media.

Cockburn agreed that the front lines had changed, adding that the fighters had changed too, no longer trying to cultivate the press but instead targeting the foreign reporters.

For Prusher, covering conflict was:

“…an extremely important thing to be doing with my life and that I got to be a witness through this small window in history – to see a society in the midst of conflict, in transition – is kind of a privilege …. Now, I feel overwhelmed by the pressures that new media have put on journalists. It used to be that you could go out into the field and focus on your story, and these days it seems there is a competition as to how much you can tweet whilst you’re in the field, updating all day long, this is one of the barometers by which we’re judging journalism. I wonder if that is really the recipe for great journalism.”

In 2007, following the murder of Ajmal Naqshbandi in Afghanistan, the Frontline Club set up the Fixers’ Fund, a special project to raise money for the families of fixers killed or injured around the world while working with the international media.

Watch the full event here:

Voted journalist of the century in his native Poland Ryszard Kapuściński is renowned across the globe for his coverage of the developing world during the final stages of European colonialism.

Whilst covering revolutions and coups across Africa throughout the ’60s and ’70s he was known to carry two note books. One he would use to record the facts used in his reports, the second for observations and experiences that would form the content of his many books that in his 40s gave him fame on the global stage. He described his work as “literary reportage” which allowed him to translate incommunicable stories of suffering from the developing world to audiences in the developed world.

We will be joined by a panel including Artur Domoslawski the author of Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life to discuss the work of this renowned journalist and his influence on journalism today. We will be asking to what extent Kapuściński blurred the line between journalism and literature.

Chaired by Victoria Brittain, former associate foreign editor at the Guardian where she covered Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Her books include Hidden Lives, Hidden Deaths: South Africa’s Crippling of a Continent, Death of Dignity: Angola’s Civil War and the forthcoming Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror. She is co-author with Moazzam Begg of his book Enemy Combatant, A British Muslim’s journey to Guantanamo and Back. She is author and co-author of two plays about Guantanamo.

With:

Artur Domoslawski, a writer on international politics for the weekly review Polityka and for the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, and for two decades reported for the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. In 2010 he received Poland’s prestigious Journalist of the Year award. A Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 2005-6, he is the author of five books, and is currently working on a book about contemporary Latin America.

John Ryle, a British writer and specialist in Eastern Africa. He is co-founder and executive director of the Rift Valley Institute, and Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology at Bard College, NY. He is a board member of the Media Development Loan Fund and of the scholarly journal African Affairs.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones, an award winning full time translator of Polish literature ranging from novels to reportage, biographies and poetry. One of her most recent works is Artur Domoslawski’s book, Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life.

Voted journalist of the century in his native Poland Ryszard Kapuściński is renowned across the globe for his coverage of the developing world during the final stages of European colonialism.

Whilst covering revolutions and coups across Africa throughout the ’60s and ’70s he was known to carry two note books. One he would use to record the facts used in his reports, the second for observations and experiences that would form the content of his many books that in his 40s gave him fame on the global stage. He described his work as "literary reportage" which allowed him to translate incommunicable stories of suffering from the developing world to audiences in the developed world. 

We will be joined by a panel including Artur Domoslawski the author of Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life to discuss the work of this renowned journalist and his influence on journalism today. We will be asking to what extent Kapuściński blurred the line between journalism and literature.

Chaired by Victoria Brittain, former associate foreign editor at the Guardian where she covered Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Her books include Hidden Lives, Hidden Deaths: South Africa’s Crippling of a Continent, Death of Dignity: Angola’s Civil War and the forthcoming Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror. She is co-author with Moazzam Begg of his book Enemy Combatant, A British Muslim’s journey to Guantanamo and Back. She is author and co-author of two plays about Guantanamo.

With: 

Artur Domoslawski, a writer on international politics for the weekly review Polityka and for the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, and for two decades reported for the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. In 2010 he received Poland’s prestigious Journalist of the Year award. A Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 2005-6, he is the author of five books, and is currently working on a book about contemporary Latin America.

John Ryle, a British writer and specialist in Eastern Africa. He is co-founder and executive director of the Rift Valley Institute, and Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology at Bard College, NY. He is a board member of the Media Development Loan Fund and of the scholarly journal African Affairs.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones, an award winning full time translator of Polish literature ranging from novels to reportage, biographies and poetry. One of her most recent works is Artur Domoslawski’s book, Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life.

Veteran investigative journalist John Pilger cannot explain what has driven him to travel the world and cover some of its most important stories for the past half century. From being the youngest journalist to be named Journalist of the Year – and winning the award twice – to witnessing numerous conflicts – Pilger’s reputation precedes him.

“I can’t start to analyse why I do it. I’ve always felt that being a journalist was an enormous privilege, being allowed to go into people’s lives, gaining their trust, finding out what the hell is going on – I pursued that as a journalist.”

“Labels have been stuck on me but I never put one on myself. I tried to give you a glimpse of that in my own development tonight.”

In conversation with journalist and writer Charles Glass, Pilger explained to the audience the ins and outs of his extraordinary career.

He left his birthplace in Sydney, Australia, in the 1960s and joined Reuters, later moving to the London Daily Mirror – then Britain’s biggest selling newspaper.

From then he pursued his one goal in life, “a pretty simple ambition at that point – I wanted to be a journalist and travel the world.”

His critical reporting from an often appraised neutral eye is a characteristic that has won Pilger his reputation for excellence. On covering his first conflict, Vietnam, he said: “I didn’t go there thinking this was a wrong war. I just knew very little about it.”

“But starting to understand how Vietnam happened changed me very quickly. When I went to the MeKong delta and saw villages hit by Napalm, all kinds of questions arose for me. [Martha] Gelhorn was the first to identify this was a war against civilians, which is a precursor to wars now, and a precursor to how I would approach a war now.”

He described a number of anecdotes which defined his career through a series of past video clips. They covered Cambodia, East Timor and Myanmar’s tragedies and struggles; Aung San Suu Kyi’s detention, the American invasion of Iraq and the rise of Wikileaks, to name a few.

He But he also looked to the present state of the media – blasting the Leveson inquiry as “extraordinary waffle shop.”

“Leveson has not even mentioned that the media’s greatest and most disreputable role has been in the promotion of wars that has cost a vast number of lives and devastation of countries,” he explained.

“Most media is an extension of established order and power, with the occasional honourable exception.”

“Journalism students should be taught to be sceptical of their employers, sceptical of their governments. Governments are still portrayed as benign if they’re ours, and if they’re other’s, they’re not.”

“Media is an extension of power but when we recognise that we become aware of official drivel and understand that the truth is subversive. It always is.”