Photojournalist and filmmaker Paul Conroy joined Channel 4 News’ international editor Lindsey Hilsum at the Frontline Club on 6 June, to give a personal account of his experiences in Syria, detailed in his new book Under the wire: Marie Colvin’s Final Assignment.

Encouraged by his friends, Conroy wrote the book as he recovered from serious injuries suffered while reporting the siege of Homs in February 2012.

“In a way I was bringing Marie [Colvin] back to life, revisiting everything…but all of the time that I was writing this, I knew there is going to come a day – one day – when I am going to have to write that chapter.”

Along with French photojournalist Remi Ochlik, Sunday Times foreign affairs correspondent Marie Colvin was killed, and French journalist Edith Bouvier was seriously injured when a make-shift media centre came under intense fire from government forces, in the rebel-controlled district of Baba Amr.

Lindsey Hilsum and Paul Conroy in conversation. Photo credit: Millicent Teasdale

Without a doubt, said Conroy, the media centre was a deliberate target. Reading an excerpt from his book, he described the room as:

“. . . the headquarters of a hunted and starving band of outlaws, bound together by their desire to survive . . . targets of a murderous regime. They were the media and this was their temporary home.”

Hilsum asked him about the role of a “camera as shield”. While fighting his way out of the city and after field surgery to his injured leg, he continued to film footage of his fellow wounded:

“I had a flip cam; all my other cameras had been blown up. I felt a bit useless . . . but I thought I might be able to get something out of what’s happened.”

He added that during the attack his laptop was demolished and few images from his camera were recovered after it was found and returned. Conroy then explained how he escaped through a secret tunnel with the help of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Commentators have subsequently expressed opinions that this help has made his views biased in favour of the rebel group. On this, Conroy said:

“Anyone who says I was a cheerleader for the FSA has got to suck it up really – they saved my life. I actually saw, because of those guys, what was happening.”

“That is why we went, that is why Marie died, that is why Remi died . . . Syrian activists who stood on rooftops and were blown to pieces . . . and everyone else who has died out there, and suffered and been maimed and wounded. There is no reason the world shouldn’t know this.”

With the death toll now estimated at 80,000 by the UN, there is little hope of a conclusive resolution anytime soon. The Syrian conflict threatens to destabilise the region further, against a backdrop of cynicism towards diplomatic efforts.

Audience members asked about the implications of a lack of international support, which may have caused more radical groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra (JAN) to gain power. It is a reflection of how much the situation has changed since his time in Baba Amr, Conroy said, when the lone “jihadist” who showed up was kidnapped and escorted to Lebanon by the FSA.

Now, JAN has become a “definite presence” in the country:

“The Jihadists are a powerful fighting force and if you look at the situation, for years now Syrians have sat there and nobody has lifted a finger.”

Conroy has worked in combat zones around the world – the Balkans, Iraq, Congo, Rwanda, Libya and Syria – as well as spending seven years with the Royal Artillery as a soldier. His friendship with Marie Colvin goes back to 2003, when he made an ill-fated attempt to raft himself into Iraq to cover the final assault on Baghdad. Colvin, well known for not working well with photographers, was rather impressed by his efforts and the two struck up a friendship over their shared loves of sailing and whiskey. The two worked together in Libya in 2011 before being paired to cover Homs.

In spite of this adventurous background and the risks he has taken, one of his most serious injuries came a little over a month ago in Exeter. When walking down the High Street he was hit with a projectile after walking away from an altercation with a man. He now has a titanium plate holding up part of his face.

Hilsum told the audience she was shocked at the time to get a message saying he might lose an eye.

Conroy said: “I could not honestly have worn a patch could I?”

On the same day as this event, the Frontline Club published its white paper, Newsgathering Safety and the Welfare of Freelancers.

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/newsreview/features/article1267580.ece

You can watch the event or listen to the podcast below:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/in-conversation-with-paul

By Alan Selby

The advent of new media has seen an increasing pressure placed upon journalists to become multidisciplinary, but often to the detriment of each medium. During an evening moderated by David Campany, reader in photography at Westminster University, writer A. A. Gill and photographer Tom Craig mounted an impassioned defence of collaborations between photographers and writers. The duo were speaking in the lead up to a new exhibition of their work, a collection of 20 of Craig’s unseen photographs accompanied by text from Gill, which is opening at the Flaere Gallery in March.

The audience were guided through an eclectic series of images from Gill and Craig’s travels, which have taken them from the blistering heat of Chad to the freezing depths of the Arctic. As their presentation began, Craig explained that his dissatisfaction with the news media was a driving force behind their collaboration:

“I was becoming disillusioned with the imagery that I was seeing appearing in the news and feature print media. The reason for that was I felt increasingly individual photographers were going to places with very specific agendas. They had a photograph in mind before they even got there… I think it’s a dangerous place to be in, because it represents a place where it’s very difficult to be impartial.”

Discussing the unique marriage of text and imagery that the pair have produced, Craig added:

“I believe that the power of the image and the written word are great on their own, but they’re a lot greater when they’re combined… I’m at an advantage, I can tell the quieter story because I know there are other things that will be said about it.”

Craig provided the foil to Gill’s inimitable sense of humour throughout the evening and, despite claiming that Craig’s interests amounted to taking photographs of people taking photographs, and of the backs of people’s heads, Gill praised his approach:

“What you want is a photographer who’s aware of himself, and aware of changing the dynamic he is in. Tom does that, he’s very sensitive.”

In response to questions from the floor, the pair discussed how they first met on assignment in Chad, and how they approach the assignments that they undertake. As the proceedings reached their conclusion, Gill offered up his own evaluation of their work together:

“What we do gets rarer and rarer, because a lot of journalists now are expected to take their own pictures. A lot of us are expected to have phones that can take print ready pictures. Then there’s everything that’s happening on the internet: everybody is a photographer, and everybody is a journalist. What you have is this babel of karaoke news. I feel like we’re a Farrier and a Thatcher, we’re doing two jobs that are from the last century, but that’s what we do, and we do it well. When we do it well I don’t think there’s anything else that can touch it.”

Watch the event here:

Colvin and Ochlik died the day after Syrian activist, Rami al-Sayed. His video footage, uploaded to YouTube and Bambuser, was used by the world’s media to report what was happening in Homs.

It is a sad day for journalism – "old", "new" and what they have become together.  

In Colvin’s last report for the newspaper on Sunday, she had described the desperation of the brutal government assault on Homs, part of a crackdown which has claimed the lives of an estimated 5,400 Syrians since March 2011.

This is a collection of Colvin’s final broadcast interviews and tributes from the world of journalism. 

One of the comrades’ best capers was to open a bar in Kosovo. They called it Tricky Dick’s after Richard Holbrooke, the American envoy who’d negotiated with Slobodan Milosevic. It seemed like a good investment at the time. International monitors from the Kosovo Verification Mission were flooding the province.

“The ambitious cocktail list included The Verifier, a frothy blue concoction that brought many a UN monitor to his knees.” Unfortunately Tricky’s made the mistake of playing some Serbian turbo-folk music and the Kosovo Liberation Army tried to burn it down. Tom’s conclusion: “I guess you learn from your mistakes and maybe we should have heeded the old Albanian epithet ‘Kusgutet permutet’ – he who runs too fast steps in the doo-doo.”

Tom’s self-deprecating humour belied a rare talent for tough reporting and sensitive writing which came to the fore at the height of the Kosovo war in 1999. “Its awful, mind-numbing culmination is to be found in the supposedly holy city of Pec, where yesterday we lost count of the freshly dug graves in the Albanian cemetery after about 500,” he wrote in The Times.

He’d come a long way since leaving BBC local radio in search of adventures abroad. Tom worked for The Times in Brussels under George Brock until the Rwandan genocide of 1994 convinced him to become an aid worker with Medecins Sans Frontieres. One of his tasks was to persuade haulage bosses with 20 ton trucks to bring hundreds of tons of supplies from Nairobi to the refugee camps.

He was rightly much prouder of that… than he was of his first job in the Balkans as the European Commission’s spokesman for emergency reconstruction in Sarajevo. He soon tired of pontificating from his podium at the Holiday Inn. He decided to get back to reporting because he knew he’d enjoy it far more. And he did.

He always found something to smile about in the midst of Balkan chaos. In 1997 Albania went potty. The whole nation had plunged its meagre savings into pyramid schemes that came crashing down. Tom wrote: “The tanks rumbled up and down the Boulevar of Martyrs in Tirana and we hacks had a great time for a month while everybody else helicoptered the hell out of there.”

This was also the year Tom met a young student leader in Belgrade called Milena. SHE was demonstrating against Milosevic. He was covering the protest. When firing broke out, Tom ran towards the shots and found himself beside a proud blonde girl in a tweed sports jacket. Later, he was having a beer with a friend and saying he’d seen a girl he liked when he looked out of the window and there she was again in the middle of the road, with a crowd gathering around her.

Tom said it was as if the fates were calling to him. “I walk boldly across the space,” he wrote in a tragically unfinished memoir. “The clock stops briefly; the images all around are fuzzy, the bodies and crowd indistinct. I am talking to her, explaining that I’m a journalist and so, so interested in her story….” They were married a few weeks later.

“Long-term investment number 1: Slav wife,” he wrote. “Current status: near penniless genetic engineer. Daily running costs: Pack of Marlborough Lights. “My wifey, Milena, is not just beautiful. This genetics business is going to make millions, easily outstripping annual turnover at Tricky Dick’s, knocking aside the mortgage on 60 Lyal Road, Bow, like so much copper tossed to an Underground busker.”

When Tom came on to The Sunday Times foreign desk he was great company on the desk but he obviously preferred the freedom of being on the road. At the same time Tom could be disparaging about the mystique of foreign news reporting. “Those of us delivering the warped facts, the blood-tinged statistics, assume a status that is honestly ill-deserved.”

Well, I disagree, Tom. I think your status as a respected foreign correspondent was richly deserved. Here was a man of extraordinary courage and exceptional humanity, a superb writer and raconteur with an unfailingly sunny disposition towards his colleagues at work. He may just have been too modest to see how good he was.

When Tom told me he had only a short time to live, we sat together in the garden at St Joseph’s for a couple of hours. I wondered how he might like to be remembered and we settled on an idea that Tom really liked. Milena and I are going to set up a fund in his name that will give one young reporter a year the chance to be a foreign correspondent.

We’ll invite proposals for an assignment, we’ll pay for the one we think Tom would have liked best and if John thinks it’s good enough, we’ll publish the result in The Sunday Times. We’re going to call it the Tom Walker Trust. It’ll be our way of preserving Tom’s memory… and keeping his spirit alive in the exploits of other young people who move with four lungs.