when the dust clears

One photo of the February 23, 2010 Paharai rally for justice at Muktangan, Dhaka, by Brian.

These photos are by Erin from the February 23, 2010 Pahari demonstration at Muktangan, Dhaka .

I turn over this space today to my girlfriend Erin. We have been absorbing the troubling news from Afghanistan through our laptops here in Bangladesh. Here is her response. —BP

We will have to continue to battle the mechanisms of the dominant culture, if for no other reason than to preserve through small, even tiny acts, our common humanity. We will have to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the cruelty outside our door. Hope endures in these often imperceptible acts of defiance. —Chris Hedges, “Zero Point of Systemic Collapse”

I’m not in the habit of airing my views publicly—not in writing, certainly. Indeed, the written word and I have a long, troubled history. Our relations remain strained. But as my long-standing disenchantment with my country hardens into a knot of pure rage, I feel the need to register my objection somehow, somewhere, even if no one reads it. Readership, for now at least, is not the point. The point is simply to say no to the wars being waged in “my” name—the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the “war on terror,” that ludicrous but deadly legacy of Bush & Co.—no to the arrogance, mendacity, and hypocrisy of our leaders, Obama included. The point is also to acknowledge the ever-widening chasm between what America is and what it claims to be—or worse, what many Americans believe it to be: a force for good in the world, despite all evidence to the contrary. This is hardly an earth-shattering revelation; many brilliant writers have picked apart this persistent naïveté, not to say ignorance (though it is that), with greater eloquence than I could ever hope for. This is merely my first tiny act of defiance.

So why now? It’s not as if this is anything new. The invasion of Iraq, for instance, is fast approaching its seventh anniversary. I marched against it in Amsterdam, caught up in a wave of popular resistance to what has proven to be a greed-driven disaster initiated under false pretenses (a fact that the rest of the world, and even many Americans, understood at the time). But that march was the extent of my resistance. Internally I rejected the war in all its guises, but I was paralyzed by my usual demons—timidity, self-doubt—and also, I suspect, by complacency. Complacency born of perceived powerlessness, and also of distance. While my country brutalized another, my life remained wholly untouched.

The same is true now. After languishing in Iraq’s shadow for most of the past decade, Afghanistan is back on the front page of the New York Times (though it has not dislodged the Olympics from center stage, meriting at best a small photo or two, not a splashy slide show). To what does it owe the honor of such distinguished attention? Last week, U.S. and NATO forces launched their Marjah offensive, in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province, the first major assault since “escalation” was determined to be the proper course of action by the powers that be. (Why Obama believes he will “succeed” where all others have failed is beyond me. Why he believes we have the right to try is not so much beyond me as against me. I oppose that arrogance with all my being.) Ten days into the campaign, at least 46 Afghan civilians have been killed—46 people who would still be alive were it not for us.

Until the moment I read this February 15 NYT headline—“Errant U.S. Rocket Strike Kills Civilians in Afghanistan”—the naïvest part of me, larger and more resilient than I’d like, still resided in some murky maybe-this-time-will-be-different fantasy land. Maybe, whispered this corner of my subconscious, no innocent bystanders will be harmed in the making of our war. The article instantly swept away that last bit of magical thinking, and anger rushed in to fill the void. But more than the headline, it was Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s passive expression of “sympathy” that truly enraged me. So hollowed out by overuse (and misuse) as to be utterly devoid of meaning, “We deeply regret this tragic loss of life” nonetheless captures the essence of the American approach to war, effectively severing our actions from their consequences. “Loss of life” conveniently erases the actor in this and other scenarios. These people didn’t lose their lives—we took them. Unintentionally perhaps, but needlessly, pointlessly.

Then again, if we are to listen to McChrystal, “This is all a war of perceptions. This is not a physical war in terms of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants” (emphasis mine). That may be the case for Washington strategists, military and otherwise, but it couldn’t be farther from the truth for those at the other end of the missile—certainly not for the people we’ve already killed, for their friends and families. For them, this is a mercilessly physical war, as all wars inevitably are.

Most Afghans don’t have the luxury of distance or escape. In a way, this fits in with something else that has recently elbowed its way to the front of my mind. About a month ago, Brian and I staggered off the bus in the middle of Dhaka, Bangladesh, after a 14-hour trip from Kolkata (Calcutta). The city, pulsing with people and furiously honking horns, threatened to swallow me up right then. I’ve since learned to navigate the crowded sidewalks, and I hesitate a little less before wading into the densest traffic. Dhaka’s rhythm, its near-perpetual motion, while still not exactly “normal” to me, have become familiar, expected. Even so, there are times when all of it—the stares, the horns, the dirt and dust—is just too much, and I retreat into my hosts’ beautiful, blissfully quiet home or the thoroughly Westernized café, where my relief is palpable and instantaneous.

It’s this privileged mobility that preoccupies me here. Not only can I seal myself off in plush surroundings to escape what feels oppressive, an overload of activity and attention, I can leave altogether. I can move, with some constraints, through a country that is not my own, where the vast majority has no such option. I can be here in the first place. By contrast, the people of Marjah—those who haven’t fled—are pinned, left with no choice but to wait out, if they’re lucky, our assault on their town.

At least some attempts to escape the violence have been thwarted, it appears. Citing a statement by the Italian NGO Emergency, Democracy Now! reported Wednesday that American-led NATO forces had stood in the way of wounded Afghan civilians seeking medical aid at the Emergency Lashkar Gah hospital in the regional capital. Host Amy Goodman spoke with Matteo dell’Aira, the hospital’s medical coordinator who has worked in Afghanistan for the past ten years. He described the situation on the ground: “There are a lot of checkpoints, and the coalition forces, it seems that they block the civilians and every kind of movement on the roads. Plus the area has been heav[ily] mined by the opposition, probably. So the civilians—actually, they are in Marjah, inside Marjah, and they cannot reach any medical facilities, which is our hospital, basically.”

I wonder how McChrystal would explain to these people, injured and almost certainly terrified, that this war exists only in their minds. How much longer can he, we, sustain the illusion that this so-called war of perceptions is any less catastrophic for the people forced to endure it? As dell’Aira told Goodman, “Despite the fact that some big brain thinks that a war can be a good way to solve problems, this unfortunately is not the reality, because every war is taking a lot of suffer[ing], a lot of dead people, and the civilians and the population, the majority of the population, is suffering a lot.” Suffering so that America can prove something to itself and to the world: We’re still the biggest and the best.

Throughout the Bush years, I held my nose and looked the other way, willing that era to end. And when Obama was elected, I joined the millions of Americans who believed—all too credulously, it turns out—that real change just might be possible after all. The burden of our expectations would have been too heavy for anyone to bear, I guess, and Obama has sagged under the weight. Perhaps that explains his decision to lead us still deeper into Afghanistan, making a mockery of his Nobel Peace Prize in the process. Whatever his reasoning, or that of his minions, I reject it. This time I will try to do as Chris Hedges urges: “resist the temptation to fold in on [myself] and to ignore the cruelty outside [my] door.”

Dhaka—21 February 2010

Several hundred people, many of them from the Pahari indigenous ethnic minority, gathered in Muktangan in Dhaka to protest the murder yesterday of five Paharis in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region to the south, allegedly by the Bangladesh Army.

Today was also “Amar Ekushey,” a national holiday that commemorates the killing in 1952 of several Bengali patriots who fought the Pakistani government to make Bengali a national language.

The protesters in Muktangan effectively boycotted the holiday, highlighting a cruel irony: As Bangladesh, part of Pakistan until 1971, celebrates its first giant step toward self-determination, it represses and kills an indigenous group within its borders struggling toward the very same goal. And no, these are not the Rohingya ethnic group from Burma persecuted by the government.

The violence against Paharis, abetted by Bengali settlers, reportedly continues.

Around 30 people showed up for my Valentine’s Day screening at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Size matters to some degree, so I was a bit disappointed by the small turnout, but Full Disclosure isn’t exactly in keeping with the warm and snuggly V Day vibe. Still, it was thrilling to have my festival debut. My stomach flipped and squirmed until the doc started rolling. Then I settled into the show.

Full Disclosure was paired with a 21-minute animated piece called Cohen on the Bridge about the 1976 Israeli raid on the Uganda’s Entebbe airport to rescue the passengers of a hijacked Air France aircraft. The subjects were related—men, guns, fighting, killing—but the messages were diametrically opposed. Cohen, conceived of and directed by Andrew Wainrib, is a paean to the commandos behind a young state’s audacious rescue mission. It is a story that focuses heavily on Israeli heroism and tactical excellence without delving into the moral and political complexities of the situation—and the consequences of killing.

Full Disclosure also dwells in the tactical, the day-to-day interactions between U.S. Marines and Iraqi civilians during the most violent periods of the occupation. But it digs into the cumulative and toxic effects of combat and war, not a single exceptional mission. And as much as Full Disclosure is my interpretation of events—it is edited, after all—it remains true to the facts and the essence of events I witnessed. The violence is rendered straight, in all its ugliness and ambiguity.

One friend who works with the armed forces, though not in the service himself, suggested I add “positive” moments to make the documentary appeal more to military audiences. In the overall context of this war, the number of upbeat and substantive interactions between Iraqi civilians and U.S. combat troops (which is who I spent most of my time with) was tiny. And handing out pencils to kids during a patrol or funding a well that gets destroyed by anti-U.S. forces just doesn’t count; such superficial hearts-and-minds activities have no lasting impact. This is, of course, my view, but it is supported by the sad facts on the ground—documented not only by Iraqi and UN agencies but by America’s own Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction—about the quality of life for Iraqis, the state of the economy, and the political environment.

The comparison between the films is absolutely unfair—mine is a personal and painful critique of “preemptive war”; Wainrib’s is a celebration of one military operation—but the pairing makes it inevitable.

During the Q&A, a young man named Ryan, who told me later that he had served in the military, asked me how I made particular “tactical decisions” in my videotaping. Specifically, he wanted to know why I chose to run into the gunfire rather than away from it during the sniper attack on Charlie Company featured in the documentary. I had journeyed to Iraq to be a witness to events, I told him. I couldn’t play that role behind a concrete barrier. I also had to admit that I was driven by a certain situational machismo—if these Marines could do it, I could too.

The Q&A was cut short because we started late and there was another film right after us, a doc about Norwegian death metalheads—not exactly snuggly Valentine’s Day fare either. I couldn’t help feeling somewhat deflated by the turnout for my screening. The Wilma Theater had been jammed for the opening night film, raising my expectations to rather unrealistic heights. But as we were wrapping up, the Big Sky programmer who championed Full Disclosure and led the Q&A told the audience that it rose above the other Iraq-related documentaries he had seen.

That didn’t stop me from second-guessing myself into a deep funk on the plane from New York back to Bangladesh. (The pee-soaked bathrooms on both Virgin Atlantic and Biman airlines didn’t help my mood.) What if I’d networked relentlessly, promoted harder? But I’ve gained a bit more perspective on events in Montana since returning to Dhaka. The fact that this was my first festival feels like an important milestone. And the programmer’s parting words have stayed with me, quieting my self-doubt. For now at least.

END

Missoula, MT, 14 February 2010

After a couple of warm, gray, and mud-sloppy days, the weather here is closer to what I imagined it would be—dry, sunny, and 24 degrees. The ducks in the Rattlesnake Creek, which runs beneath the diner where I’m eating breakfast (two scrambled eggs and pancakes), don’t seem to mind the cold—it is Montana, after all. They glide slowly upstream for a few feet, then turn around and float back down.

A few days ago, a young Bangladeshi man in Old Dhaka held a straight razor to my neck, scraping away millimeters of hair with the skill of an old timer. The kid’s own hair was immaculately styled, and he had a beautiful smile. His co-worker in the tiny storefront barbershop, a genuine old timer, ordered cups of strong tea sweetened and whitened with condensed milk for me and my girlfriend. Neighborhood kids lined up to watch my shave like it was a spontaneous performance staged for their benefit.

Today, after a sprint through New York, I’m in Missoula, a city of 50,000 plus. There’s so, so much space and quiet and stillness compared to Dhaka,  the city of 15 million where I spent the last three weeks (and to which I return in four days). There are some stately historic buildings here—the Missoula County Courthouse, the Wilma Building, the old Milwaukee Road Depot—but architecture isn’t the town’s most notable feature. The nondescript one- and two-story buildings are just bland foreground for the surrounding mountains—Mount Sentinel, Blue Mountain, University Mountain, and many others. They’re not as impressive as the Grand Tetons (most are less than half the height) but I find them … soothing, reassuring after so much concentrated city time.

I didn’t come here for the sights and lack of sounds, as much as I’m enjoying them. I’m at the Big Sky Film Festival to screen Full Disclosure and to watch other documentaries. Full Disclosure screens tonight at 9:45. From the emptiness of the streets after 10PM, I gather that this is not a nightlife town, but I’m hoping folks will come out anyway. Presidents Day is tomorrow and they can (presumably) sleep late.

I have seen three films in two days: Sergio, the opening night extravaganza, Trail of Tears, and 9500 Liberty.

9500 Liberty is the cinematic fruit of a serious commitment and investment by filmmakers Annabel Park and Eric Byler. A couple of years ago, I was pitching story ideas to the Washington Post’s “Outlook” section. The editor suggested I take a look at the video section of the WP website, which featured a piece by Park and Byler about the battle between long-time—and overwhelmingly white—residents of Virginia’s Prince William County, and, ostensibly, undocumented workers. 9500 the feature-length doc is built on that clip plus an enormous amount of footage collected over years.

The filmmakers quickly uncover the nativist and profoundly anti-Latino, anti-brown currents within the “Help Save Manassas” campaign, which pushes the Board of County Supervisors to pass an ordinance requiring police officers to question the immigration status of anyone they have “probable cause” to suspect is undocumented. But Park and Byler let the movement’s members speak for themselves—not just the scary racist zealots, but others moved by an inchoate fear of the changing character of their community, culturally as well as racially. The defenders of the Latino community stand out, as they should in my view, but so do HSM members who are gradually converted after their leader attacks the Chief of Police. The chief, a respected community leader, had the temerity (read: courage) to question both the feasibility of enforcing and the legality of the law. That marked him as a traitor—and a target for HSM. The portraits the filmmakers are complex, deep, and compassionate. 9500 may not be slick (and, really, who cares?) but it is a brilliant doc.

Sergio, a biopic directed by Greg Barker about the United Nations Secretary General’s man in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, killed in an August 2008 truck bombing, leans heavily on reenactments.  No footage exists of Vieira de Mello trapped under the slabs of concrete and rubble of what had been the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, yet the filmmakers decided to put this situation at the center of the story. So the frantic hours that two U.S. soldiers, Master Sergeant William von Zehle and Staff Sergeant Andre Valentine, spent picking and scratching their way toward Gil Loescher and Vieira de Mello, were reenacted on a Los Angeles set—by von Zehle and Valentine themselves.

Trail of Tears, directed by Chris Eyre (Cheyenne/Arapaho), is a film based on the Cherokee Nation’s decades-long battle with the U.S. government to keep their land and sovereignty against the inexorable push of white settlers into their territory. Archival footage not being an option, Eyre reenacted the entire story with a cast that includes amateur and professional Cherokee (and Cherokee-speaking) actors, Wes Studi being the most prominent of them all.

As a journalist—more accurately, a news guy who stumbled into film making—and a slavish devotee of the empirical, I distrust documentary reenactments. They can be compelling, engaging, and rooted in fact, but, to me, they’re more entertainment than documentation. To appreciate the films, I tried to view them as historical dramas, narrative features simply “inspired by events”. On that level, I enjoyed both, though Sergio veered too deeply into hero worship for my tastes. All this said, I’m trying to loosen my rigid views, given that all documentaries, even those assembled from verite footage and interviews, are simply interpretations of events and approximations of life. Integrity is what matters.

I must admit to playing hooky from the film fest for a big chunk of yesterday.  I took advantage of Montana’s spaciousness, breathable air, and the unseasonably warm temperature to run, an activity that’s hazardous in Dhaka because of the scary traffic and thick air. I stomped and splashed on the path along the Clark Fork River, managing to get both lost and unlost twice. My body wouldn’t let me play speedster—too out of shape and jet-lagged—so I concentrated on enjoying the scenery and not slipping on the slush. I watched the day transform even as it was ending. The setting sun brilliantly spotlighted patches of snow and brush on the mountains while the rest of the landscape, illuminated by light filtered through thick clouds, stayed gray.

I’m on deck for my performance this evening. I’m both nervous and excited.  Several of my New York friends have notified their Missoula comrades and urged them to come out. I emailed invitations to the heads of several student groups at the University of Montana, which is right across the river. We’ll see what happens.

ENDS

Dhaka—3 February 2010

A few months ago I received a call from Dr. Shahidul Alam, a mentor and colleague who has become a friend. Alam, an accomplished and peripatetic photographer, journalist, and activist, invited me to Dhaka to join a team charged with setting up a media academy for Bangladeshi journalists. Such an academy had been part of his plan for years, but he’d been consumed by other projects—building a career as well as a world-class photo agency, a degree-granting school of photography, and an international photo festival.

Years ago, he identified the mission: Create a training institute for aspiring and working journalists that would raise the generally low professional and ethical standards in Bangladesh. The core mission, however, would be a civic one: To inculcate in students a sense of responsibility to the public and a firm commitment to building a more democratic society.

A tall order, to be sure, but a familiar one. In collaboration with colleagues, advisers, and workers, the Drik photo agency, Pathshala South Asian Institute of Photography, and Chobi Mela photo festival have become prime movers in Bangladesh. They have also become internationally recognized entities. Pathshala graduates fill staff photographer positions at the leading newspapers; along with their Drik peers, they field assignments from abroad and shoot for outfits like European Press Agency, The Guardian, New York Times, and others.

Alam had signed on other “media experts”—David Brewer and DJ Clark, two media trainers with years of international experience, and Arnob Chakrabarty, a Bangladesh-born Dutch journalist, who had committed to three years in Dhaka and was shipping his family over. Was I in, he asked me as we Skyped from our respective homes in Brooklyn and Dhaka? I couldn’t give him a quick answer.

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I love Dhaka and I fear Dhaka. I have made good friends on previous trips, in 2002 and 2008. I’ve had life-changing experiences here—seen amazing photography, heard brilliant and inspiring lectures. I have learned to dart through honking and careering vehicles—cars, rickshaws, mini taxis, buses, trucks, motorcycles, three-wheeled cycles—without hyperventilating. Or (so far) getting killed. But I must admit that many of the everyday sights still shock my bourgeois American sensibility.

I’m often transfixed by the visible signs of privation, the pollution, and the glaring disparities in the distribution of wealth. The air is thick with dust and fumes; trash litters sidewalks in most parts of the city; rail-thin rickshaw pullers weave through shiny Toyota sedans, their well-scrubbed upper-middle-class occupants peering out the windows; beat-up secondhand buses crammed with riders ply the streets.

Bangladeshi friends tell me that visiting Europeans and Americans like me fixate on these things, which are undeniably real and dire, but that we completely miss the country’s hopeful and positive aspects—its tremendous human and natural resources, its potential. Moreover, they insist, there is nothing inevitable about poverty in Bangladesh. Rather, it is a symptom of a tragically corrupt and dysfunctional political system. Three decades of abysmal leadership and a kind of brutal pettiness that keeps the two main parties at each other’s throats have retarded progress and warped development. That conflict is rooted deeply in the nation’s short history. Party #1, the Awami League, descends from the secular movement that fought Pakistan for Bangladesh’s independence. Some stalwarts of party #2, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, were aligned with Pakistan during the war, even though the party’s founder fought with the secularists in the liberation struggle.

In theory, Bangladesh has freedom of the press. In practice, news organizations tend to be politically partisan and aligned with power brokers, or simply timid. Successive governments have stifled critical and independent reporting, leaving only a handful of outlets with genuine editorial chutzpah. The media academy’s goal is nothing short of revolutionizing that system.

__________________________________________

I accepted Alam’s offer and joined the core group: Alam, Chakrabarty, Clark, Shameem Ahmed, formerly a prominent news reader in Bangladesh and now a media and management consultant; Erin Hollaway, former managing editor of National Geographic Adventure (and my girlfriend); and two advisers hired by the Goethe-Institut, a potential funder, Dietmar Zimmermann and Ute Mattigkeit. Brewer, head of Media Helping Media, a UK-based group that provides training to media workers in countries where freedom of expression is under threat, participated via email and Skype.

We held a series of meetings over five days, first to get a sense of the media landscape in Bangladesh and then to help shape Alam’s vision. A consensus was reached early on that the academy should be integrated into the well-established structure of the Pathshala photo school rather than starting from scratch. We agreed upon a swift rollout focused on TV journalists because of the immediate need: Licenses for ten stations were recently granted by the government. They are scheduled to begin broadcasting next year. In other words, there’s a market.

It was decided that the academy would strive to respect the division of labor that exists in Bangladesh TV news at this point while also pushing the news media into the future. According to a 2006 AC Nielsen study cited by Chakrabarty, 41 percent of Bangladeshi households have a TV. There are 257 daily newspapers in this country of 150-plus million. But there are also cutting-edge news services such as bdnews24.com, which performs just as its name suggests, providing web content—news, entertainment, stock quotes—in Bangla and English, plus subscription-only reports sent to mobile phones. Hookups with Thomson Reuters, Deutsche Welle, and BBC provide fresh international news.

Four initial modules were hammered out for the media academy: Producing + Content Editing; Camera; Video Editing; Multimedia Reporting. Other modules will be added as the program finds its footing. Print, radio, and investigative reporting are currently on the list of necessary inclusions.

Each module will stress a set of essential functional skills. Camera operators, for instance, will gain proficiency with a range of ENG equipment, broadcast/streaming formats, software packages, and videography and audio techniques. But all modules will incorporate a set of core competencies: storytelling, visual language, media standards and practices, research and reporting, and teamwork.

Zimmermann and Mattigkeit recommended starting small, with an intensive two-week workshop for journalists. But other participants asserted that skills taught in such short sessions seldom stick. Based on his experience setting up training courses across Asia, Clark proposed a program that would extend over 12 weeks but would be full-time for only two, allowing working journalists to participate. Each module will begin with a six-week introductory course designed to bring students up to similar skill levels. A two-week, full-time intensive training will follow, with classroom and hands-on components led by international and local trainers. The course will continue with a four-week practicum during which students produce an actual TV program, either in collaboration across modules or in situ at their organizations. Instruction and guidance from trainers will be provided as needed in personal meetings and/or via email and phone.

Alam is now seeking partners that could offer the academy degree-granting status, he said. Down the road, he may attempt to navigate Bangladesh’s Byzantine educational bureaucracy and apply for such status. The ultimate goal is to offer a three-year master’s program that would incorporate theoretical courses. But the front-end goals are clear: Raise funds for equipment, hire qualified local trainers (they do exist), flesh out the curriculum, and get butts in seats. If all goes according to plan, the first group will start in May or June.

Formal business plans and a more extensive market study are in the works, but Alam (and the core group) have consulted with media execs and practitioners. Some have expressed lukewarm interest. Others have offered tentative buy-in. A few have actually committed to providing students and facilities.

During a five-hour mother of all meetings called by Alam, news media executives, print and TV reporters, NGO representatives, educators, and media consultants floated strategies, ideas, and criticisms, as well as the occasional pointless bloviation. The country’s most prominent TV journalist, Munni Saha, who reported on last year’s bloody mutiny by members of the Bangladesh Rifles, a paramilitary force, was perhaps the most passionate (and mercifully succinct) about the academy. The country needs such an institution, she told the group, and people will pay—maybe not CEOs at first, who prefer to hire unskilled people because they are dirt cheap, but individuals who recognize both the Pathshala name and the urgent need for rigorous professional training.

Throughout the session, Alam listened, stepping in occasionally with vital bits of information and finally weighing in with a definitive pronouncement. “We need to be predictive and anticipate what’s going to happen,” he declared in a sonorous baritone. “I’m going to do it.” A few participants felt the need to drag on for another 30 minutes, but the rest of us were already dreaming of the buffet.

Negotiations continue, ground has been broken for a new building to house the academy, and trainers are being identified. If the success of Pathshala the photo school is anything to go by, the academy could very well become a major force in news media—in Bangladesh, in South Asia, and beyond.