By Khatchig Mouradian February 3, 2005 Born in London and educated in Dublin and Cork, Fergal Keane, a Special Correspondent for BBC News, has reported from some of the world's major conflict regions, from Northern Ireland to Rwanda and most recently Zimbabwe. Keane has been named Reporter of the Year in the Amnesty International Press Awards and won the James Cameron Prize and the Edward R. Murrow Award from the US Overseas Press Association and the George Orwell Prize for non-fiction for his book "Season of Blood". He has also been awarded a BAFTA and is the only journalist to have won both the Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year award and the Sony Radio Reporter of the Year in the same year - 1994. He is also the author of several books the most recent of which, "There will be Sunlight Later: A Memoir of War" is a look at war and mass murder from the Genocide of the Armenians in 1915 to the Iraq war. Two of his most controversial documentaries for the BBC are "The Accused" and "Armenia: The Betrayed". The former, a documentary on the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon in 1982, was aired on June 17, 2001, while the latter is an investigation of the Armenian genocide of 1915 and how it continues to haunt Armenians and Turks today and was broadcast on 26 January, 2003. We spoke in Beirut on January 4, 2006. Khatchig Mouradian- In a lecture in 2004, you say, "There are a few core principals of which I am very certain, but there's a great deal in this world of which I'm not sure about and that I question and argue with myself about all the time." Let's talk about those core principles. Fergal Keane- My responsibility as a journalist is to try and tell the stories of those who, otherwise, would not get a hearing in the media. The second and probably the overriding principle of my life is that the human rights of the individual are absolutely sacrosanct, and a journalist's responsibility to ensure these things overrides everything else. K.M. - Contrast mainstream media with alternative sources of information. F.K. - One of the great things about the modern age is that you can go online and read blogs. There are people from all parts of the world challenging mainstream versions of events. You have in America, for example, bloggers who take on very powerful media organizations and catch them out. I think this is a good thing, because it holds us to account. I work for the BBC, which is part of the mainstream media, but it is also a very broad church encompassing people of different kinds of political opinion. Most of the people who work there, regardless of their political views, hold true to the fundamental principles I described a while ago. Of course, it is easier, if you are a blogger, because you are not responsible to a charter and you don't have a set of laws to comply with. One of the phenomenal things that have happened in the last few years is the emergence of the citizen reporter. On July the 7th, when bombs exploded in London, within minutes of it happening, we were being inundated with emails and pictures from people who'd actually witnessed what happened. And my report for the television news that night opened with pictures taken by the mobile phone of somebody who happened to be passing by when one of the explosions took place. These are revolutionary times for the media. K.M. - Still, in these "revolutionary times", there are many prominent journalists who have made up their minds about issues they deal with and do not want others to confuse them with a different opinion. F.K. - One of the dangerous things of the age we live in is what I call "the ecstasy of righteousness". Some people take a position, on the Iraq war for example, and they feel so certain that only their point of view is valid and everybody else is a war criminal. We can scream at each other endlessly. The issue that you spend a lot of time dealing with, the issue of Armenia and Turkey, is a classic case in point. What would it take to create the intellectual space to go forward? For me, Orhan Pamuk is a heroic figure, because he is not a ranting fundamentalist for either side. He is the guy who is saying, "Let's think about this, let us begin the process with thought." And that comes to my fundamental point: Too often we don't begin with thought, we begin with emotion; we begin with our own instinctual prejudice. I grew up in Ireland and my first major journalistic assignment was covering Northern Ireland. So often we had people reacting according to a gut prejudice. The greatest thing one can do as a human being who holds passionate beliefs is to say, "Let me hang on a second and try and put myself into the shoes of the other person." If you're an Armenian who has suffered the kind of history that Armenians have suffered, it's very difficult to do that. However, it's essential, because otherwise you become defined by a sense of victimhood. It's so important to say, "I'm going to try to think about this." You may end up in precisely the same place, but you will have made the journey. Today, Turkish intellectuals like Orhan Pamuk and Halil Berktay are speaking up against the Turkish state's denial of the Armenian genocide with a similar intellectual openness. For me, the greatest movement in history is the Enlightenment. I fear we're moving backwards. Many people are talking and arguing like a talk show host. All debate and all discourse is reduced to simplicities. Life is complex, that's what I've learned covering wars and conflicts in many countries. K.M. - However, attempting to be as "objective" as possible, some journalists often tend to take the middle position in issues where the black and the white are quite discernible. F.K. - Sometimes you have to call something as it is. What I'm not talking about is moral equivalence. People use the word "objectivity"; I prefer the word "fair". You go, you examine both sides with a mind open enough, and then reach a conclusion and tell people about it, and if you don't reach a conclusion that's it. You are not obliged to reach a conclusion. One of the problems of the modern media --because we live in a 24 hour news cycle-- is that people feel obliged to do one of two things; either to try to make a conclusion which turns out to be wrong, or to get into moral equivalence, like saying that in Rwanda, they are all as bad as each other. K.M. - Having witnessed crimes against humanity covering wars and ethnic strife in different regions of the world, what is your stand towards the reaction of the international community today towards mass violations of human rights? F.K. - In the case of genocide, I believe passionately that there is a moral obligation of civilized nations to intervene and stop genocides. That's a non negotiable principle for me. It should be for the world, but what do you get instead? You get these niggling argument about the legal definition; legalism. "Is there intent?" It's very interesting to watch the argument about Darfur and look at the argument of what happened in 1915. Is there intent on the part of the government to carry this out? As a way of avoiding doing anything, we retreat into legalism. And in a sense the term "genocide" has become a huge part of the problem. Anything less than that doesn't move people. Crimes against humanity are just as odious as genocide, but people have become fixated on the "G" word. I believe that we have a complete moral obligation to intervene in the case of genocide or crimes against humanity. Otherwise international law means nothing; tear it up and go back to the way we lived in the Colonial Era, where countries had interests, where there were national interests and not international moral obligations. But please do not preach the language of human rights; don't preach the language of universalism and then do nothing about it. It's much more dangerous, because it holds up hope to populations who are abandoned. It gives them hope where there is no hope and it's an incredibly cynical way to show our children how the world works. A promise must have meaning, especially a promise to save life. K.M. - In your book "There will be Sunlight Later: A Memoir of War" you speak about "real idealism", let's talk about that concept. F.K. - In the immediate aftermath of Bosnia and Rwanda, in the late 1990s, there was a great mood for interventionism, let's go out there and let's sort this out. I thought it was not practical at the time, because I knew it was not going to be backed by action. At the moment, people want one of two things, either a completely interventionist foreign policy, or real politik a la Bismark, a la Kissinger. I think there is another way, one of real idealism; you do what you can, where you can. There was nothing insoluble about that problem in Darfur, for example. Real pressure from the UN Security Council could have solved the issue. This wasn't a nuclear power that was going to face you down. Would real idealism work in China? No, because this is a massively powerful economy, a nuclear power with a vast army. Are we going to be able to force them into submission? No. There are other ways you can try and pressure them. The point is you can be idealistic and realistic at the same time. They're not mutually exclusive concepts. In Darfur, you have a population from its homes, driven to refugee camps, prayed on by militia. Does that remind you, as an Armenian, of anything? Does it? The big thing was in 1915, but already in 1905, the world was screaming about the abuse of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. In 2005, the same thing is happening in Darfur. Isn't that striking? A hundred years, and we are doing the same thing. And whatever whether you want to call it genocide or crimes against humanity, we know that hundreds of thousands of people are being abused by state power and we are choosing to do nothing about it. K.M. - Five years after "The Accused", looking back at the way you presented the documentary, you do not have any regrets do you? F.K. - No, not a scintilla of regret. My only regret is that we weren't able to get out more of the truth. That's the only regret I have. It would have been better if we had more people in the phalange involved in this, decided to speak out, but I understand their reasons for not doing it. It says a lot about the nature of modern Lebanon, this is still a very dangerous topic. K.M. - It is often said that the Lebanese people have not faced their past and the best way of closing the wounds of the civil war permanently is to talk about it. What's your take on that? F.K. - One could say that at the moment the last thing Lebanon needs is to open the wounds of the civil war, and I accept that there is some validity in that. However, I don't think it's acceptable for intellectuals in this society to continue to refuse to investigate and analyze what happened here. I don't believe that all societies should have the same process of truth and reconciliation. Societies are different. In Northern Ireland, in many ways an old fashioned society where you have hatreds going back centuries, we understand the kind of dynamics that operated in Lebanon. I'm not saying "Open up your past", but I do think at some point that process is going to be unavoidable. I think that Lebanon's period of politically instability is hugely dependent on what happens in Syria and Iran in the next 5-10 years, because both countries still have an enormous influence on what happens here. If we see a gradual normalization of politics here, and lessening of the influence of outside actors all around, then I think you can create the space for intellectuals, for journalists, to start talking about those days critically. To do what people like you have done with Turkish intellectuals and writers: To reach to people in the other communities. You create a common ground where people can talk. And the important thing is to create an institution of memory, so that these things are out there, they are spoken about, and that they cannot be denied in the future. Otherwise, you go back and repeat this history again and again.
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