April 2, 2014
A Reporter’s View of China and the World
Keith Richburg
Visiting Professor of Journalism; Foreign Correspondent, Washington Post, and bureau chief
in Paris, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Nairobi, and Manila
A Reporter’s View of China and the World
Keith Richburg
Visiting Professor of Journalism; Foreign Correspondent, Washington Post, and bureau chief
in Paris, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Nairobi, and Manila
Minutes of the 24th Meeting of the 72nd Year
The 24th meeting of the Old Guard’s 72th year was called to order by President Ruth Miller at 10:15 A.M., with 117 in attendance. Joan Fleming led the invocation. Arthur Eschenlauer read the minutes of the preceding meeting. Three Old Guard members had guests: Rhoda Wagman brought Graydon Vanderbilt, Al Kaemmerlen brought his wife Mea, and Charlie Taggart brought his wife Sydney.
President Miller announced that Old Guard member Ted Meth, also the spouse of Old Guard member B.F. Graham, had passed away, and asked meeting attendees to observe a moment of silence in his memory.
President Miller then called to the podium Landon Jones, describing him as “Introducer Extrodinaire,” to introduce the meeting speaker, Keith Richburg. At the Washington Post for 33 years, Mr. Richburg served as Foreign Correspondent, writing over 3,000 articles, and also served as Foreign Editor, and as Bureau Chief in Paris, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Nairobi, Manila, and New York. Now Visiting Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, Mr. Richburg teaches an undergraduate seminar in foreign reporting using a case study approach. Students are assigned a theme to follow around the world, report on to the class, and write a blog. A perspective of his course is that America’s view of the world is driven by foreign correspondents whose reporting influences policy which influences public opinion.
Mr. Richburg’s informative and entertaining talk was punctuated by many appreciative peals of laughter from the audience. What follows is largely in his own words. He began by noting that he would be taking us on a chronological tour around the globe with places he had been, stories he had covered, and lessons he had learned.
When growing up in Detroit, Michigan he was always interested in foreign affairs, maybe because Detroit is close to Canada, a foreign country with French language radio and TV stations. He first visited Princeton University as a high school student to participate in a model United Nations program. He remains an avid Detroit Tigers fan, that team’s color is Orange, and so when he returned as a Visiting Professor, he knew everything was right with the world and he felt right at home.
Mr. Richburg majored in International Relations at the University of Michigan. While there he was on the staff of the student newspaper, the “Michigan Daily.” He started as a cartoonist, and the White House requested a copy of a cartoon he’d done featuring President Jimmy Carter. He switched to being a writer after a senior editor at the paper told him he thought he was even better at that.
In the summer of 1978 he had an Internship at the “Washington Post” which was just then in the glow of Watergate. He considered himself one of the Watergate Babies, and once back home he immersed himself in Sam Ervin’s Congressional hearings, and Woodward and Bernstein’s articles in the “Detroit News”. Journalists were the good guys then, and that’s why he decided to go into this. Going to work full time at the Post, he was in the Metro Section, knew he wanted to get overseas, but had no oversees experience. To get some he went to the London School of Economics for a Master’s Degree, came back, and waited his turn. He got up early and listened to local radio station WTOP hoping to hear something a young reporter could get a break from. One day he heard that there were riots in Haiti. At the time the Post’s Miami correspondent was on a rare trip to Cuba, so he thought maybe that’s it. He packed a small bag, took his passport with him, and got to the Newsroom early. Reporters are up late finishing stories and no one likes to get there early, so early arrivals can get a choice of assignments.
In those pre-Internet days there was a bank of newspapers from around the country and the world lined up on the foreign desk where one could catch up on what was going on. He was killing time reading those when the Assistant Foreign Editor came in read the latest teletype reports, and said “oh my god there’s rioting in Haiti. Who here has a passport and speaks French?” Mr. Richburg said I do, and the Editor said “get to Haiti as quick as you can.” (Mr. Richburg added that he was not making this up!) He took his bag and ran for the ran for the elevator, and as the doors were closing behind him he heard the Editor yelling after him “what’s your name anyway?”
He wound up staying in Haiti for several months and covered the fall of Baby Doc Duvalier in 1987. When they finally dragged him back to Washington they said ok you did a good job and his reward was his first Foreign Bureau which was South East Asia, in Manila. This was just after fall of Marcos. He thought he was going there to cover a democratic evolution in government, but didn’t realize there would be a long period of instability there. The Philippine revolution which had started in 1986 led in 1987 to student street protests in South Korea that ended up toppling the Military Dictatorship there. He was asked to go cover that. Noting that the Foreign Bureau’s location is a base from which you often “parachute in” to cover regional stories, Mr. Richburg then went to Indonesia, where he got his first dose of tear gas. He could tell at the time that the Suharto regime was getting old and creaky and something was going to happen, so he resolved to keep his eye on the situation.
Fast Forward - four years later he wanted another foreign job, but there was nothing really open elsewhere so he went to Hawaii for an Academic Fellowship. He was only there for a few months when the Post’s Nairobi Bureau opened up. He thought that a great chance because the other story that had happened on his watch in Southeast Asia was the fall of Berlin Wall and of Communism in Eastern Europe. He thought at the time that change would sweep Africa too. There were some signs of it: the World Bank was requiring governance as a condition of loan, the Zambian President had been voted out of office, and two Dictators of other countries had been toppled. So in early 1991 he thought that while based at the Nairobi Bureau he’d be seeing the same type of democratic transition in Africa too.
What he did not realize was that while the old order was being swept away, Democracy was not rising in its place as it had in Europe. He saw chaos. There was civil war in Somalia and he picked Somalia as his first focus. He really saw how foreign reporters drove the US intervention there. There was famine and he wondered why the US was involved so much more in the former Yugoslavia when so many more people were dying daily in Somalia than were dying in a year in Yugoslavia. Was it because one county was in Europe and the other in Africa? The media started a drumbeat to help Somalia, and in 1992 President H.W. Bush announced an aid program in Somalia. It was greeted as a great gesture, but all of a sudden in 1993 the intervention went very badly, degenerating into an attack on UN peacekeeping troops. What had happened in a nutshell was that the US went in to feed people but not deal with the root of the problem, which was the need for disarmament among warring Warlord led Militias there, leaving that messy issue to the lightly armed UN forces in Somalia. Twenty four Pakistani UN force members were killed which led to a hunt for the Warlord. During that hunt many US Army Rangers were killed, an event later immortalized in the movie “Black Hawk Down.”
In 1994 President Clinton said the United States was going to decrease the number of its troops in Somalia, basically so they could cover the withdrawal of all US troops there. So 1993 was a very bad year in Somalia and left a bad taste for humanitarian interventions. March 1994 marked the final withdrawal, by which time the American public, the military and the media were exhausted. Mr. Richburg went back to his home in Nairobi the first week in April, exactly 20 years ago, to reacquaint himself with his dogs, get some rest, and write some good stories about Africa.
The phone once again rang in the middle of the night. The Post’s Foreign Editor in Washington was calling to say that something was going on in Rwanda. We think a plane has been shot down. Can you get there and see what’s going on? One really can’t cover the 40 some odd countries in Africa. While there was another Post Bureau in South Africa, the Post’s correspondent there was basically tied up covering the preparations for the first all race election in South Africa. In effect Mr. Richburg had all the other African countries to cover, and he had been focusing on the hot spots. At that time Rwanda was not on his radar screen. As it turned out, the Presidents of both Rwanda and Brunei had been on that same plane. What did he then do in pre-Internet 1994? First he got a book off the shelf to find out what the Capitol of Rwanda was, then he called a travel agent to find out how to get there.
He first went to Tanzania. There he first realized there was something more the assassination of two Presidents going on, something more sinister.
There was a massacre. He could literally see that because he stood on a bridge in a refugee camp in Tanzania and saw bodies floating down the river from Rwanda, hands bound, many also headless or with limbs cut off. It took a month of talking to refugees coming out, and to aid workers, and calling the Hotel Rwanda all day to get one call through, to piece together that it was a systematic massacre, a systematic campaign of genocide, a low tech genocide using machetes. The orchestrated campaign included broadcasting code words such as “clear the bush” over the radio. He thinks 800,000 people were killed by the time of the French intervention three months later. He went into Rwanda several times. It was unsafe and one had to be careful. He remembers driving up to check points where young men high on something were asking people who looked like him are you Tutsi? Or Belgian? His story was stripped across the front page of the Washington Post.
He heard many years later that President Clinton regretted not doing more in Rwanda, but they had no idea what was going on. He questions that because correspondents were reporting what was going on at the time, and the on-site UN Force General kept asking for more troops but was denied. They knew, but had “compassion fatigue”, and also knew that mentioning genocide would trigger a public reaction just 6 months after “Black Hawk Down”. The Rwanda story eclipsed what should have been the great story of that time, the election of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa.
Later that year (1995) he went back to Kigali to check how things were going. While there he got call about a new bureau in Hong Kong. Did he want to go? Before the caller could hang up the phone Mr. Richburg was at the airport, then in Hong Kong in for five years. But the main story he covered during that time was the was fall of Suharto in Indonesia. He had gone back there again and saw a bubble of discontent among young people and that they were no longer afraid of police. He had seen that before in South Korea. Once people loose fear of authority, things change. So he spent some time in 1997 in Indonesia, which is the largest Muslim country in the world, covering the Suharto fall. It paid off in 1998.
It was at that time that the internet first started to change what foreign correspondents did. Suharto’s troops had opened fire on unarmed students at a Catholic University there. Mr. Richburg had gone back to that University to reconstruct what had happened, where students had been standing when they were killed, becoming martyrs. That became a front page story. A few days after the story was published he went back to the University. A small makeshift monument to the students had been built on the campus. While he was there students came over to him to thank him for his story. Someone had obtained a copy of his story, greatly enlarged it, and hung it all over the campus. Everyone there knew who he was. In the old days nobody ever would have seen a story like that which had been published in the US. All of a sudden his story was larger than life and he knew things were changing.
During that time he also was in and out of China. He’d been there before in the 1980s when there had been lots of people on bicycles wearing Mao suits or green Army uniforms. Now 10 years later he could see things were changing in China as well. The biggest change was that it was more open. People would talk to you. You could take Chinese people out to dinner at the new restaurants. It was only five or six years after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the government was more interested in International recognition, to get beyond Tiananmen square, so they welcomed foreign correspondents. That would change in 2009 when the government had gotten more powerful and didn’t need foreign correspondents as much.
Five years later the Post Editor called and asked if he wanted to go to the Paris Bureau. How great, who wouldn’t want to go to Paris. But he literally hadn’t unpacked his bags in Paris when he got a call from the same Editor who said there is a little bit of rioting going on in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Could you go there and help our Israel correspondent? He thought he’d take a week off and do that. That was the second Intifada. Six months later he said I have to go back to Paris to unpack and pay the rent. I flew back on September first, then 9/11 happened. I got a call. Can you get to Afghanistan?
Afghanistan was a pretty closed place and the way you had to get in was with the Northern Alliance. This was a week before Bin Laden came out and said he was the one, and no one yet knew who was responsible for the attack. The way you had to get there was through Moscow, sitting there for a week or so until you got a Visa to Kirgizstan. There you had to go to their foreign office so they would let you go to the border area, a security zone. There you had to hook up with a Northern Alliance official who would take you across a river in a small boat. Then you would sit in a small town on the Afghan border and figure out how to get to Kabul. This all took a couple of weeks.
Around late or October or so he ran into an Afghan MD with a small Jeep who was taking medical supplies to Kabul. He agreed to give Mr. Richburg and his Italian photographer a ride in the back of the Jeep. They drove half way to Kabul, some 12-14 hours, then stopped for the night in small cave along with a truck driver, had rice and beans for dinner, then fell asleep in their sleeping bags, fully dressed. When they woke up the whole area was covered in snow. When can we go he asked? The truck driver and the MD said we have to turn back, we can’t get across the mountains until spring. Thinking that the boss won’t like this, he asked how can I get there? The answer was nothing can go across that mountainside except horses. How much are those he asked?
In those days the Washington Post had money and could spend it. Mr. Richburg had huge stacks of $100 bills hidden in his clothes. By this time the US had started a bombing campaign in Kabul so we knew it would fall at some point. He said bring me some horses. It took about six to eight hours and then an Afghan came over the mountainside, like in a Budweiser commercial, leading a string of horses. He’d never seen a horse, said that one looks good, and also got one for his guide, one for the photographer, one for the luggage at a cost of $10. He needed a receipt. The seller was illiterate so he wrote out a receipt and asked him to put an X here. When Mr. Richburg left the Post he told Don Graham the Publisher if you ever get to Northern Afghanistan you have four horses you own there.
They rode across the mountains, ending up on the edge of Kabul where they saw refugees who said the Taliban are leaving. How to get into Kabul? He saw a taxi which had brought refugees fleeing the bombing and was about to go back to Kabul, and asked the driver if he could take them, which he did. Where do you want to go the driver asked? What’s the best Hotel in town he replied? The Intercontinental. Take us there. It was a beautiful Hotel on a hillside. The whole staff was lined up outside watching the bombing. Here’s this taxi with the two of us with backpacks, no showers for a while. He asked the Manager if he had any rooms. The first thing the Manager said was do you have a reservation? No? No, no problem. No one else is staying here. They were there for three months.
It was an amazing time to be there, after the Taliban had fallen. The women were still wearing their Burkas with the head covering around their shoulders. They went walking around and felt perfectly safe. The men and women were saying where are you from. The US they’d answer. They’d say thank you, thank you America. Thank President Bush. People were walking up literally to kiss your hand and thank you, they were so grateful to be rid of the Taliban control.
That was something he did not see in 2003 in Iraq. His job there was to be an unimbedded reporter in the southern part of Iraq. He went to Kuwait first. A colleague had gotten there first and had rented a car for me. He spent a couple of weeks waiting for the invasion of Iraq, spending the time outfitting the car with extra fuel, water and tires. As he was leaving the Avis lot the Manager said you can’t take this car into Iraq. Absolutely not he said. The first thing after the invasion he and the photographer drove to Baghdad and to Fallujah. Over the next three months we drove 50,000 miles. By the time we got back to Kuwait the car had been pretty much beat up. When the Avis Manager saw the car you could see his face drop. Did you leave Kuwait? Oh no, just driving around. He knew someone would have to pay for the car. Since the rental was still in the name of his colleague, he said give her the bill. The lesson of Iraq was that we encountered nothing but outright hostility as we were driving around Southern Iraq. No one was thanking us. They were saying where is the food where are the roads where is the water? What have you done here? It was an interesting time - the first suicide bombing occurred there, and the first insurgency began there and spread up to Baghdad.
One last story from a front page “Washington Post” story about Jessica Lynch a US soldier whose convoy had been ambushed. She was shot and stabbed yet fired to her last bullet, then taken hostage, then rescued by the US Army at the Hospital in Najaf where she was being held. It was like a scene out of a movie, but didn’t make sense to Mr. Richburg. So he drove to the hospital and heard a different story from a Doctor there. Jessica Lynch got separated from her convoy, was in a traffic accident, made a wrong turn, her Humvee went over a bridge, she got a broken leg. Villagers got her out of her vehicle and brought her to the hospital. There her leg was fixed and she was given the only bed in the hospital. Everyone else was on the floor. The Doctor said he even slept on the floor in her room to be sure she was all right, and other staff slept outside her room. Then one day these helicopters came, tied up all of us, locked us in a closet and took Jessica away. All they needed to do was knock on the door. So Mr. Richburg wrote this story, which ended up on Page A43 under the supermarket ad. Then months later “Time Magazine” came forth with a cover story that the Jessica Lynch story was a complete fabrication, never mentioning his earlier story in real time. The old saying is that in the fog of war the first casualty is the truth.
Mr. Richburg concluded by noting that we need foreign correspondents in the field. When you cut foreign correspondents you don’t get stories like these. We are all a little bit poorer for that. That’s why when I go to my Princeton University class I am encouraged by young people who aren’t turned off. Being a foreign correspondent can be unsettling and can be harmful to your social life. But it is an adventure nothing can match.
Q: Why are you still alive and what sacrifices did you have to make? A: Being alive is a matter of dumb luck and following my gut. I was driving back to Kabul in what seemed like a quiet time. My photographer and I were supposed to be a in convoy of journalists but we basically slept late and missed the convoy. It was ambushed and four journalists were killed. As I tell my students, no story is worth a life. You have to evaluate what you can get vs. the risk. As for my sacrifices I missed own birthday party because I had to go to cover a story. You miss all the birthday parties and weddings. One reason I came back to the US was to spend his last years with my father.
Q: How are foreign correspondents sometimes used to affect events on the ground? A: Everybody tries to use us. It’s been going on for ages. For example, one of my colleagues was at the demonstrations against the Shah of Iran. The crowds were yelling “Down with the Shah” in English. Then they would say to the French reporter if you wait 15 minutes we’ll yell it in French, and to the Spanish reporter wait 20 minutes and we’ll yell it in Spanish. They know exactly what they are doing in a lot of these cases. In my class someone asked why are the demonstrations in the Ukraine getting so much attention while the demonstrations in Venezuela are not? The answer is there is no chance the Venezuela demonstrations are going to topple the government and everyone knows that. However the journalists in Venezuela are saying you should come and cover these folks. What they want is for these demonstrations to look more important than they are. Journalists always have to make these judgments and say we’ll cover it when it is big. Every time a Foreign leader grants interviews it is usually when they have a message to get to Washington. We are willing to be used that way as long as we can ask our own questions too.
Q: Young Americans students - how do they qualify given their experience in this culture, given the challenges they are going to face? Are they idealistic? A: Today’s students at least at Princeton are incredibly smart. Most have travelled and lived overseas. Half my class can speak or have studied Chinese. Others have studied or speak Russian or Arabic. A big difference is that went I went overseas in my 20s you kept in touch with people you met by sending letters in red and blue envelopes and you might hear back three months later. Now these kids they keep in touch by Facebook or Twitter. I gave an assignment to one kid and he came back with interviews with students in Africa. I asked how he’d done that and he said oh by Skype. I Skyped this guy in Kenya. Incredible. They live in a much more connected world than we did. Are they more idealistic? Yes, but so were we at that age. You only become more cynical when you’ve seen a Iot. Some want to go overseas, or join the foreign service, for the right reasons. I hope they don’t get too cynical too soon.
Q: What are the negative impacts of the 24hr/day news cycle, especially the Malaysia air crash. A: You know how many times I’ve jumped up at breaking news about the crash? There is no breaking news. They see a piece of wreckage, but they are not sure. I say to students you live in this amazing world where you look at stuff on your cell phone while I am speaking. On the other hand there is so much garbage flowing around. What is an authoritative source? What is a rumor? When I was a Senior Fellow at the Kennedy School the Boston Marathon bombing happened. I tried to follow it on Twitter. There was so much misinformation. There were stories that the Kennedy school had been bombed. It wasn’t so. Take social media for what it is - a tip sheet not a source. I’m Old Guard. One needs a firsthand source. Wikipedia is not a source. Follow the footnotes and if they cite an original source, go to that. What you see on the Internet is not real. While I was in Hong Kong I went to Cambodia and Vietnam. Cell phones didn’t work there. I’d call the office and say I’m going in for two weeks and I’ll phone you some stories when I get out. After 1999 they’d say call us tomorrow. In Africa days I’d go into Congo and spend a month trying to reconstruct what was happening. These days your cell phone rings minutes after wheels down. There is no time to reflect.
Q: How do you decide what to follow today? How about Rwanda today? What can we anticipate? A: Actually Rwanda is doing well, it’s a little boom town, some Hi Tech, it’s on the backpackers circuit. The current leaders are so much better than what was there before we give them a pass to see what will happen. Very few resign at end of their term in Africa.
Q: If Hillary runs will be hearing something different about Benghazi? A: I’m not sure she will be running. I’ll defer to Ambassador Chris Hill who will be speaking at Princeton University this Thursday. But nothing about Benghazi seems to have stuck and it was in 2012. I don’t see how if it wasn’t an issue when Romney ran for President, why now? I think people are tired of the issue. There are more important issues.
Q: If you were assigned to this country what topic would you choose. A: I got to the NY Office just before the Eliot Spitzer issue. Then I covered Obama in 2008. By that June all the regular campaign reporters were exhausted because Hillary kept running in the Primary. Nobody wanted to go with Obama any more. In the West you actually could spend time with the candidate. One night Obama was going to bed and the journalists hijacked their bus and went to Mt. Rushmore. Obama said where are the journalists? When told he said I want to go too. They opened up the place and we actually got a chance to ask him questions. Do you see your face up there someday Mr. President? Oh no, I don’t think they will get my ears right.
Respectfully submitted,
Richard I. Bergman
[1] A condensed version of these Minutes was read at the April 2, 2014 Old Guard Meeting.
President Miller announced that Old Guard member Ted Meth, also the spouse of Old Guard member B.F. Graham, had passed away, and asked meeting attendees to observe a moment of silence in his memory.
President Miller then called to the podium Landon Jones, describing him as “Introducer Extrodinaire,” to introduce the meeting speaker, Keith Richburg. At the Washington Post for 33 years, Mr. Richburg served as Foreign Correspondent, writing over 3,000 articles, and also served as Foreign Editor, and as Bureau Chief in Paris, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Nairobi, Manila, and New York. Now Visiting Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, Mr. Richburg teaches an undergraduate seminar in foreign reporting using a case study approach. Students are assigned a theme to follow around the world, report on to the class, and write a blog. A perspective of his course is that America’s view of the world is driven by foreign correspondents whose reporting influences policy which influences public opinion.
Mr. Richburg’s informative and entertaining talk was punctuated by many appreciative peals of laughter from the audience. What follows is largely in his own words. He began by noting that he would be taking us on a chronological tour around the globe with places he had been, stories he had covered, and lessons he had learned.
When growing up in Detroit, Michigan he was always interested in foreign affairs, maybe because Detroit is close to Canada, a foreign country with French language radio and TV stations. He first visited Princeton University as a high school student to participate in a model United Nations program. He remains an avid Detroit Tigers fan, that team’s color is Orange, and so when he returned as a Visiting Professor, he knew everything was right with the world and he felt right at home.
Mr. Richburg majored in International Relations at the University of Michigan. While there he was on the staff of the student newspaper, the “Michigan Daily.” He started as a cartoonist, and the White House requested a copy of a cartoon he’d done featuring President Jimmy Carter. He switched to being a writer after a senior editor at the paper told him he thought he was even better at that.
In the summer of 1978 he had an Internship at the “Washington Post” which was just then in the glow of Watergate. He considered himself one of the Watergate Babies, and once back home he immersed himself in Sam Ervin’s Congressional hearings, and Woodward and Bernstein’s articles in the “Detroit News”. Journalists were the good guys then, and that’s why he decided to go into this. Going to work full time at the Post, he was in the Metro Section, knew he wanted to get overseas, but had no oversees experience. To get some he went to the London School of Economics for a Master’s Degree, came back, and waited his turn. He got up early and listened to local radio station WTOP hoping to hear something a young reporter could get a break from. One day he heard that there were riots in Haiti. At the time the Post’s Miami correspondent was on a rare trip to Cuba, so he thought maybe that’s it. He packed a small bag, took his passport with him, and got to the Newsroom early. Reporters are up late finishing stories and no one likes to get there early, so early arrivals can get a choice of assignments.
In those pre-Internet days there was a bank of newspapers from around the country and the world lined up on the foreign desk where one could catch up on what was going on. He was killing time reading those when the Assistant Foreign Editor came in read the latest teletype reports, and said “oh my god there’s rioting in Haiti. Who here has a passport and speaks French?” Mr. Richburg said I do, and the Editor said “get to Haiti as quick as you can.” (Mr. Richburg added that he was not making this up!) He took his bag and ran for the ran for the elevator, and as the doors were closing behind him he heard the Editor yelling after him “what’s your name anyway?”
He wound up staying in Haiti for several months and covered the fall of Baby Doc Duvalier in 1987. When they finally dragged him back to Washington they said ok you did a good job and his reward was his first Foreign Bureau which was South East Asia, in Manila. This was just after fall of Marcos. He thought he was going there to cover a democratic evolution in government, but didn’t realize there would be a long period of instability there. The Philippine revolution which had started in 1986 led in 1987 to student street protests in South Korea that ended up toppling the Military Dictatorship there. He was asked to go cover that. Noting that the Foreign Bureau’s location is a base from which you often “parachute in” to cover regional stories, Mr. Richburg then went to Indonesia, where he got his first dose of tear gas. He could tell at the time that the Suharto regime was getting old and creaky and something was going to happen, so he resolved to keep his eye on the situation.
Fast Forward - four years later he wanted another foreign job, but there was nothing really open elsewhere so he went to Hawaii for an Academic Fellowship. He was only there for a few months when the Post’s Nairobi Bureau opened up. He thought that a great chance because the other story that had happened on his watch in Southeast Asia was the fall of Berlin Wall and of Communism in Eastern Europe. He thought at the time that change would sweep Africa too. There were some signs of it: the World Bank was requiring governance as a condition of loan, the Zambian President had been voted out of office, and two Dictators of other countries had been toppled. So in early 1991 he thought that while based at the Nairobi Bureau he’d be seeing the same type of democratic transition in Africa too.
What he did not realize was that while the old order was being swept away, Democracy was not rising in its place as it had in Europe. He saw chaos. There was civil war in Somalia and he picked Somalia as his first focus. He really saw how foreign reporters drove the US intervention there. There was famine and he wondered why the US was involved so much more in the former Yugoslavia when so many more people were dying daily in Somalia than were dying in a year in Yugoslavia. Was it because one county was in Europe and the other in Africa? The media started a drumbeat to help Somalia, and in 1992 President H.W. Bush announced an aid program in Somalia. It was greeted as a great gesture, but all of a sudden in 1993 the intervention went very badly, degenerating into an attack on UN peacekeeping troops. What had happened in a nutshell was that the US went in to feed people but not deal with the root of the problem, which was the need for disarmament among warring Warlord led Militias there, leaving that messy issue to the lightly armed UN forces in Somalia. Twenty four Pakistani UN force members were killed which led to a hunt for the Warlord. During that hunt many US Army Rangers were killed, an event later immortalized in the movie “Black Hawk Down.”
In 1994 President Clinton said the United States was going to decrease the number of its troops in Somalia, basically so they could cover the withdrawal of all US troops there. So 1993 was a very bad year in Somalia and left a bad taste for humanitarian interventions. March 1994 marked the final withdrawal, by which time the American public, the military and the media were exhausted. Mr. Richburg went back to his home in Nairobi the first week in April, exactly 20 years ago, to reacquaint himself with his dogs, get some rest, and write some good stories about Africa.
The phone once again rang in the middle of the night. The Post’s Foreign Editor in Washington was calling to say that something was going on in Rwanda. We think a plane has been shot down. Can you get there and see what’s going on? One really can’t cover the 40 some odd countries in Africa. While there was another Post Bureau in South Africa, the Post’s correspondent there was basically tied up covering the preparations for the first all race election in South Africa. In effect Mr. Richburg had all the other African countries to cover, and he had been focusing on the hot spots. At that time Rwanda was not on his radar screen. As it turned out, the Presidents of both Rwanda and Brunei had been on that same plane. What did he then do in pre-Internet 1994? First he got a book off the shelf to find out what the Capitol of Rwanda was, then he called a travel agent to find out how to get there.
He first went to Tanzania. There he first realized there was something more the assassination of two Presidents going on, something more sinister.
There was a massacre. He could literally see that because he stood on a bridge in a refugee camp in Tanzania and saw bodies floating down the river from Rwanda, hands bound, many also headless or with limbs cut off. It took a month of talking to refugees coming out, and to aid workers, and calling the Hotel Rwanda all day to get one call through, to piece together that it was a systematic massacre, a systematic campaign of genocide, a low tech genocide using machetes. The orchestrated campaign included broadcasting code words such as “clear the bush” over the radio. He thinks 800,000 people were killed by the time of the French intervention three months later. He went into Rwanda several times. It was unsafe and one had to be careful. He remembers driving up to check points where young men high on something were asking people who looked like him are you Tutsi? Or Belgian? His story was stripped across the front page of the Washington Post.
He heard many years later that President Clinton regretted not doing more in Rwanda, but they had no idea what was going on. He questions that because correspondents were reporting what was going on at the time, and the on-site UN Force General kept asking for more troops but was denied. They knew, but had “compassion fatigue”, and also knew that mentioning genocide would trigger a public reaction just 6 months after “Black Hawk Down”. The Rwanda story eclipsed what should have been the great story of that time, the election of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa.
Later that year (1995) he went back to Kigali to check how things were going. While there he got call about a new bureau in Hong Kong. Did he want to go? Before the caller could hang up the phone Mr. Richburg was at the airport, then in Hong Kong in for five years. But the main story he covered during that time was the was fall of Suharto in Indonesia. He had gone back there again and saw a bubble of discontent among young people and that they were no longer afraid of police. He had seen that before in South Korea. Once people loose fear of authority, things change. So he spent some time in 1997 in Indonesia, which is the largest Muslim country in the world, covering the Suharto fall. It paid off in 1998.
It was at that time that the internet first started to change what foreign correspondents did. Suharto’s troops had opened fire on unarmed students at a Catholic University there. Mr. Richburg had gone back to that University to reconstruct what had happened, where students had been standing when they were killed, becoming martyrs. That became a front page story. A few days after the story was published he went back to the University. A small makeshift monument to the students had been built on the campus. While he was there students came over to him to thank him for his story. Someone had obtained a copy of his story, greatly enlarged it, and hung it all over the campus. Everyone there knew who he was. In the old days nobody ever would have seen a story like that which had been published in the US. All of a sudden his story was larger than life and he knew things were changing.
During that time he also was in and out of China. He’d been there before in the 1980s when there had been lots of people on bicycles wearing Mao suits or green Army uniforms. Now 10 years later he could see things were changing in China as well. The biggest change was that it was more open. People would talk to you. You could take Chinese people out to dinner at the new restaurants. It was only five or six years after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the government was more interested in International recognition, to get beyond Tiananmen square, so they welcomed foreign correspondents. That would change in 2009 when the government had gotten more powerful and didn’t need foreign correspondents as much.
Five years later the Post Editor called and asked if he wanted to go to the Paris Bureau. How great, who wouldn’t want to go to Paris. But he literally hadn’t unpacked his bags in Paris when he got a call from the same Editor who said there is a little bit of rioting going on in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Could you go there and help our Israel correspondent? He thought he’d take a week off and do that. That was the second Intifada. Six months later he said I have to go back to Paris to unpack and pay the rent. I flew back on September first, then 9/11 happened. I got a call. Can you get to Afghanistan?
Afghanistan was a pretty closed place and the way you had to get in was with the Northern Alliance. This was a week before Bin Laden came out and said he was the one, and no one yet knew who was responsible for the attack. The way you had to get there was through Moscow, sitting there for a week or so until you got a Visa to Kirgizstan. There you had to go to their foreign office so they would let you go to the border area, a security zone. There you had to hook up with a Northern Alliance official who would take you across a river in a small boat. Then you would sit in a small town on the Afghan border and figure out how to get to Kabul. This all took a couple of weeks.
Around late or October or so he ran into an Afghan MD with a small Jeep who was taking medical supplies to Kabul. He agreed to give Mr. Richburg and his Italian photographer a ride in the back of the Jeep. They drove half way to Kabul, some 12-14 hours, then stopped for the night in small cave along with a truck driver, had rice and beans for dinner, then fell asleep in their sleeping bags, fully dressed. When they woke up the whole area was covered in snow. When can we go he asked? The truck driver and the MD said we have to turn back, we can’t get across the mountains until spring. Thinking that the boss won’t like this, he asked how can I get there? The answer was nothing can go across that mountainside except horses. How much are those he asked?
In those days the Washington Post had money and could spend it. Mr. Richburg had huge stacks of $100 bills hidden in his clothes. By this time the US had started a bombing campaign in Kabul so we knew it would fall at some point. He said bring me some horses. It took about six to eight hours and then an Afghan came over the mountainside, like in a Budweiser commercial, leading a string of horses. He’d never seen a horse, said that one looks good, and also got one for his guide, one for the photographer, one for the luggage at a cost of $10. He needed a receipt. The seller was illiterate so he wrote out a receipt and asked him to put an X here. When Mr. Richburg left the Post he told Don Graham the Publisher if you ever get to Northern Afghanistan you have four horses you own there.
They rode across the mountains, ending up on the edge of Kabul where they saw refugees who said the Taliban are leaving. How to get into Kabul? He saw a taxi which had brought refugees fleeing the bombing and was about to go back to Kabul, and asked the driver if he could take them, which he did. Where do you want to go the driver asked? What’s the best Hotel in town he replied? The Intercontinental. Take us there. It was a beautiful Hotel on a hillside. The whole staff was lined up outside watching the bombing. Here’s this taxi with the two of us with backpacks, no showers for a while. He asked the Manager if he had any rooms. The first thing the Manager said was do you have a reservation? No? No, no problem. No one else is staying here. They were there for three months.
It was an amazing time to be there, after the Taliban had fallen. The women were still wearing their Burkas with the head covering around their shoulders. They went walking around and felt perfectly safe. The men and women were saying where are you from. The US they’d answer. They’d say thank you, thank you America. Thank President Bush. People were walking up literally to kiss your hand and thank you, they were so grateful to be rid of the Taliban control.
That was something he did not see in 2003 in Iraq. His job there was to be an unimbedded reporter in the southern part of Iraq. He went to Kuwait first. A colleague had gotten there first and had rented a car for me. He spent a couple of weeks waiting for the invasion of Iraq, spending the time outfitting the car with extra fuel, water and tires. As he was leaving the Avis lot the Manager said you can’t take this car into Iraq. Absolutely not he said. The first thing after the invasion he and the photographer drove to Baghdad and to Fallujah. Over the next three months we drove 50,000 miles. By the time we got back to Kuwait the car had been pretty much beat up. When the Avis Manager saw the car you could see his face drop. Did you leave Kuwait? Oh no, just driving around. He knew someone would have to pay for the car. Since the rental was still in the name of his colleague, he said give her the bill. The lesson of Iraq was that we encountered nothing but outright hostility as we were driving around Southern Iraq. No one was thanking us. They were saying where is the food where are the roads where is the water? What have you done here? It was an interesting time - the first suicide bombing occurred there, and the first insurgency began there and spread up to Baghdad.
One last story from a front page “Washington Post” story about Jessica Lynch a US soldier whose convoy had been ambushed. She was shot and stabbed yet fired to her last bullet, then taken hostage, then rescued by the US Army at the Hospital in Najaf where she was being held. It was like a scene out of a movie, but didn’t make sense to Mr. Richburg. So he drove to the hospital and heard a different story from a Doctor there. Jessica Lynch got separated from her convoy, was in a traffic accident, made a wrong turn, her Humvee went over a bridge, she got a broken leg. Villagers got her out of her vehicle and brought her to the hospital. There her leg was fixed and she was given the only bed in the hospital. Everyone else was on the floor. The Doctor said he even slept on the floor in her room to be sure she was all right, and other staff slept outside her room. Then one day these helicopters came, tied up all of us, locked us in a closet and took Jessica away. All they needed to do was knock on the door. So Mr. Richburg wrote this story, which ended up on Page A43 under the supermarket ad. Then months later “Time Magazine” came forth with a cover story that the Jessica Lynch story was a complete fabrication, never mentioning his earlier story in real time. The old saying is that in the fog of war the first casualty is the truth.
Mr. Richburg concluded by noting that we need foreign correspondents in the field. When you cut foreign correspondents you don’t get stories like these. We are all a little bit poorer for that. That’s why when I go to my Princeton University class I am encouraged by young people who aren’t turned off. Being a foreign correspondent can be unsettling and can be harmful to your social life. But it is an adventure nothing can match.
Q: Why are you still alive and what sacrifices did you have to make? A: Being alive is a matter of dumb luck and following my gut. I was driving back to Kabul in what seemed like a quiet time. My photographer and I were supposed to be a in convoy of journalists but we basically slept late and missed the convoy. It was ambushed and four journalists were killed. As I tell my students, no story is worth a life. You have to evaluate what you can get vs. the risk. As for my sacrifices I missed own birthday party because I had to go to cover a story. You miss all the birthday parties and weddings. One reason I came back to the US was to spend his last years with my father.
Q: How are foreign correspondents sometimes used to affect events on the ground? A: Everybody tries to use us. It’s been going on for ages. For example, one of my colleagues was at the demonstrations against the Shah of Iran. The crowds were yelling “Down with the Shah” in English. Then they would say to the French reporter if you wait 15 minutes we’ll yell it in French, and to the Spanish reporter wait 20 minutes and we’ll yell it in Spanish. They know exactly what they are doing in a lot of these cases. In my class someone asked why are the demonstrations in the Ukraine getting so much attention while the demonstrations in Venezuela are not? The answer is there is no chance the Venezuela demonstrations are going to topple the government and everyone knows that. However the journalists in Venezuela are saying you should come and cover these folks. What they want is for these demonstrations to look more important than they are. Journalists always have to make these judgments and say we’ll cover it when it is big. Every time a Foreign leader grants interviews it is usually when they have a message to get to Washington. We are willing to be used that way as long as we can ask our own questions too.
Q: Young Americans students - how do they qualify given their experience in this culture, given the challenges they are going to face? Are they idealistic? A: Today’s students at least at Princeton are incredibly smart. Most have travelled and lived overseas. Half my class can speak or have studied Chinese. Others have studied or speak Russian or Arabic. A big difference is that went I went overseas in my 20s you kept in touch with people you met by sending letters in red and blue envelopes and you might hear back three months later. Now these kids they keep in touch by Facebook or Twitter. I gave an assignment to one kid and he came back with interviews with students in Africa. I asked how he’d done that and he said oh by Skype. I Skyped this guy in Kenya. Incredible. They live in a much more connected world than we did. Are they more idealistic? Yes, but so were we at that age. You only become more cynical when you’ve seen a Iot. Some want to go overseas, or join the foreign service, for the right reasons. I hope they don’t get too cynical too soon.
Q: What are the negative impacts of the 24hr/day news cycle, especially the Malaysia air crash. A: You know how many times I’ve jumped up at breaking news about the crash? There is no breaking news. They see a piece of wreckage, but they are not sure. I say to students you live in this amazing world where you look at stuff on your cell phone while I am speaking. On the other hand there is so much garbage flowing around. What is an authoritative source? What is a rumor? When I was a Senior Fellow at the Kennedy School the Boston Marathon bombing happened. I tried to follow it on Twitter. There was so much misinformation. There were stories that the Kennedy school had been bombed. It wasn’t so. Take social media for what it is - a tip sheet not a source. I’m Old Guard. One needs a firsthand source. Wikipedia is not a source. Follow the footnotes and if they cite an original source, go to that. What you see on the Internet is not real. While I was in Hong Kong I went to Cambodia and Vietnam. Cell phones didn’t work there. I’d call the office and say I’m going in for two weeks and I’ll phone you some stories when I get out. After 1999 they’d say call us tomorrow. In Africa days I’d go into Congo and spend a month trying to reconstruct what was happening. These days your cell phone rings minutes after wheels down. There is no time to reflect.
Q: How do you decide what to follow today? How about Rwanda today? What can we anticipate? A: Actually Rwanda is doing well, it’s a little boom town, some Hi Tech, it’s on the backpackers circuit. The current leaders are so much better than what was there before we give them a pass to see what will happen. Very few resign at end of their term in Africa.
Q: If Hillary runs will be hearing something different about Benghazi? A: I’m not sure she will be running. I’ll defer to Ambassador Chris Hill who will be speaking at Princeton University this Thursday. But nothing about Benghazi seems to have stuck and it was in 2012. I don’t see how if it wasn’t an issue when Romney ran for President, why now? I think people are tired of the issue. There are more important issues.
Q: If you were assigned to this country what topic would you choose. A: I got to the NY Office just before the Eliot Spitzer issue. Then I covered Obama in 2008. By that June all the regular campaign reporters were exhausted because Hillary kept running in the Primary. Nobody wanted to go with Obama any more. In the West you actually could spend time with the candidate. One night Obama was going to bed and the journalists hijacked their bus and went to Mt. Rushmore. Obama said where are the journalists? When told he said I want to go too. They opened up the place and we actually got a chance to ask him questions. Do you see your face up there someday Mr. President? Oh no, I don’t think they will get my ears right.
Respectfully submitted,
Richard I. Bergman
[1] A condensed version of these Minutes was read at the April 2, 2014 Old Guard Meeting.