Crimes of War

A seminar for editors sponsored by The Crimes of War Project and The Freedom Forum

Day Two, Luncheon Discussions

How Do You Get it in the Paper?
Steve Coll, Managing Editor, The Washington Post

SHERRY RICCHIARDI: This is the perfect segue for a journalist who has written what Roy Gutman calls a definitive article on Sierra Leone to take the podium, Steve. By the way, your article's in the packet, so they've all had a chance to read it.

STEVE COLL: I wonder, actually, if it might be helpful just to stick with the subject and move off my otherwise sort of vague mandate. I'd be happy to take some questions on any subject, including the choices that newspaper editors in the United States face in covering human rights and other stories of this kind abroad. I have some thoughts that I was prepared to offer about the predicament of American print media in this field and I'm happy to offer those thoughts in response to your questions. But I'd like to stick with Sierra Leone for a minute because this crisis is quite grave and immediately under our feet.

I think that I have no real dissent from the analysis just offered. I have sort of some areas where I might lean in a different direction, but I do think that this test of the international community's commitment to the UN mission in Sierra Leone has been a long time coming. It's been very easy to see that it was coming. It's now upon us. And the speed and nature of the deterioration in UNAMSIL's military force in Sierra Leone, I think, is a quite worrying beginning. Especially coupled with a lack of any sort of coherent strategy or diplomacy so far at the Security Council. We'll see. I certainly agree that if the mission collapses along the trajectory that it's declining on now, that the consequences for civilians in Freetown and in other urban areas where the United Nations has created sort of cordons of stability over the last year or so, the consequences for civilians could be quite severe if the RUF comes in or, indeed, sort of rises up out of the urban areas where it now resides.

But to the fundamental question of what is Foday Sankoh wanting and what is he doing here, I mean, I agree that it's a mystery. I think, though, that the evidence isn't very encouraging. On the one hand, this is a man who's in his sort of what, late 50s perhaps, perhaps early 60s. He hasn't been in the bush fighting for some time. He's been first in prison for a while during the later part of the conflict and then for the last couple of years he's been living in five star hotels. The impression you get of him is a guy who's gotten used to that, who has no real interest in going back to take up arms and to fight again.

The promise of legitimate politics, which was his inducement to enter the Lome process, that is that this process would lead ultimately to an election that he could contest, a presidential election that he could contest. I think he fantasizes about victory there and is using his military machine as a Charles Taylor-like guarantor of his electoral prospects. I think Taylor feels like the lesson he learned in Liberia was that if you hold the threat of a return to civil war over the heads of the people, that will increase the number of votes that you receive. Sort of defensive votes. And I think that Sankoh, who is a creature of Taylor and a creature of Qaddafi, certainly a creature of their history and their tactics and outlook, has a similar program in mind. But he doesn't want to go back to the jungle and fight. That was my impression of him. Because life is quite pleasant being a sort of a big man in politics and having an entourage and a government house and the prospects of more.

However, his organization is of quite different character. While he's been in prison and in hotels in Togo and other places, many of his commanders have been out, you know, carrying the fight, for the last five years in particular. These are young men between 20 and 35 years old and they really don't know much else. The RUF is kind of a quasi-military, quasi-political organization with a lot of economic aspects. Fighting the war for them, for the commanders, has been a way to make a living. The diamond smuggling that runs out of the north through Liberia and ultimately to European sort of spot diamond markets is not sort of wildly lucrative, but it's lucrative enough to keep these guys comfortable and keep them well-armed. I think that the United Nations and the Western members of the Security Council are probably under no illusions about this, but the RUF has imported and acquired quite a lot of significant weaponry over the last two or three years while Lome has been going on. They have a significant number of surface-to-air missiles that would be effective against helicopters, helicopter gunships. They have a substantial number of automatic weapons and mortars.

My travels there just briefly last November took me from Monrovia across the border to the eastern sector of Sierra Leone. I spent some time at an RUF camp in the east where they've been based and down through Daru, up through Shagrma and then to Corp Dionne across the Makeni. So we pretty much traveled the whole sort of territory that they control. They, you know, they do have quite a lot of weaponry. On the other hand, their logistical situation is very poor. There's not a lot of gasoline. They're very dependent upon the Liberians, and the U.N. forces are substantially better equipped. That's why they've been systematically stripping them of their equipment over the last six months, getting ready for this. And they have taken a substantial number of armored personnel carriers and weapons and ammunition, and I think fuel is probably the thing that they are most in need of.

I really -- I mention the difference between Sankoh and his commanders because it's not clear to me who's going to make the decisions that are ahead. It is a very disciplined organization. It's very coherent vertically. There is a lot of responsiveness by the commanders to Sankoh. On the other hand, I'm not sure that he can lead them to disarmament. I don't see any evidence that they, that the commanders see anything in Lome that's good enough for them. Lome contemplates them walking into a Nigerian-supervised tented camp surrounded by barbed wire, laying down the weapons and status that have been their ticket to, you know, sort of imported designer clothes and reasonably comfortable options in the field, in exchange for -- I don't know what the fee is, but it's not much. It's $20 or $100 or something like that.

You know, all of their soldiers would love to go. The kids who don't have the privileges of the commanders are ready for peace, no question. Many of them were abducted or otherwise forcibly enlisted in the RUF and many of them are quite desperate to return to something like normalcy. But the commanders, who are going to ultimately decide between war and peace here in the next couple of months, I don't really see right now that the process has something in it for them, and I think Sankoh knows that. He's always been intimidated by them.

Sankoh, by the way, gives the impression of a fairly, you know, sort of unstable and unpredictable person to the people who are around him. He's quite volatile. He can be coherent and sort of rational. On the other hand, he says quite a lot of things that are really sort of wildly, demonstrably untrue. And he seems to adhere to the tactical manuals that he read quite a lot of while he was in prison about being deceptive, about always zigging when others are zagging, about always saying one thing and doing another. And I think he just sees himself as continuously in this rhythm of changing up, always changing, changing, trying to keep his opponents off balance. And it's a little bit astonishing that a guy with, you know, sort of essentially 5,000, a force of 5,000 teenagers, has succeeded in keeping the entire international community off balance through what is really pretty much dog-eared Libyan revolutionary manual stuff.

This is a really astonishing and inspiring society that has retained its coherence, that has not allowed itself to be Driven along tribal or other lines, that did revolt democratically against a succession of illegitimate rulers, including the most recent mutation of the RUF and its allies from former Sierra Leone military. And, you know it does suffer from the loss of a lot of its elite and a lot of its educated leadership. The diaspora outside of Sierra Leone is a far more sort of impressive group in educational terms than the leadership that remains.

But it's true that Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, the current president, was legitimately elected and seen as a legitimate leader. And, in fact, the election in '96 was a kind of popular uprising against both the RUF and some other ex-military factions that threatened an undemocratic future. So it's really -- I think it's a very grave time for Sierra Leone.

A PARTICIPANT: I just wanted to say one thing about Foday Sankoh and the press. The Committee to Protect Journalists this last week put out its list of the ten worst enemies of the press and he was number one, because of the RUF's responsibility last year for killing at least eight journalists when they went into Freetown. A number -- and in the wake of that -- a number of Sierra Leonian journalists left the country and, by the way, in all of these discussions that we have here, I think we always have to remember the people, the journalists who are the most at risk are the local journalists there who are on the line all the time, you know, covering the immediate aftermath of massacres when a lot of us are in our offices in New York or where ever. And they are also the ones who are targeted. When the RUF when into Freetown, they had the names of those journalists that they wanted to go kill. They were, you know, very specifically targeted.

We helped several -- five journalists -- Sierra Leonian journalists come out to exile last year after that, one of whom just received political asylum in the U.S. a couple of weeks ago. In the whole panorama of atrocities committed by the RUF the deaths of eight journalists and the fleeing of a number of other independent journalists may not seem that great, but one of the key elements if Sierra Leone is ever going to become a functioning democracy has got to be a free press. I recently raised some money for a Sierra Leonian journalist who's been in exile in Liberia, who actually said he wanted to go back home and get himself reestablished. So we got him some money to do that. I would imagine that he will now change his mind or at least want to wait and see what happens. So until there are stable conditions there, there's not going to be any functioning independent press that can help in that democracy building.

STEVE COLL: I just wanted to say that I just learned something before we sat down that relates to Sierra Leone, and we owe Mr. Otunnu a great debt because he told me he was the person who actually carried out Sorious Samora's remarkable video that was taken last January. Sorious Samora, if you haven't seen it, he was the cameraman who somehow found the courage to get up and start shooting and recorded, first, what the rebels were doing and then recorded, got the other side and showed what IKALMOG was doing in a terribly retaliatory way. And that video, I mean, which no one had really seen apart from the BBC's report by Fergel Keen which incorporated the horrific treatment of a young boy named Moses. In the piece, you might recall it, the beating, the savage beating of that little boy and the recruitment of these other young boys.

But, finally, when it got shown at the Roy Peck Trust, which is a group that helps freelance cameramen, and he won the Roy Peck Prize and then suddenly he was flown to CNN and then his footage was used on Nightline and seen throughout the world on CBC as well. Suddenly, then, people were paying attention a little more to that story. But I have just learned, in fact, we owe you an enormous debt for getting that video out of Sierra Leone.

A PARTICIPANT: How are we going to get our editors interested?

STEVE COLL: That's a hard one. And I -- to some extent don't feel competent because I've not worked at other newspapers besides the Post and I recognize, you know, that we're privileged by our ownership and resources not to have to wrestle these things to the ground everyday. I do think that what Mike said that, you know, had a lot of value by way of senses of direction. Now I'm talking to American newspaper editors, I think, by and large, who's challenges are probably quite different from those of you who may be from Europe or from elsewhere. But the obvious pace and nature of globalization and the pace and nature of the digital revolution do create opportunities for rational new commitments to foreign reporting. You know, globalization includes human migration of which in the States is manifesting itself as the biggest immigration wave since the 20s, and it does blur the lines between local and international coverage in ways that newspapers editors who are committed to such coverage can exploit. And the web, similarly, creates both -- creates enormous opportunities, I think, to broaden the reach of the reporting that a newspaper does undertake. One of the things that interests me a lot about the web as it affects international reporting, is that it enhances enormously the role of newspapers in creating independent records of events of this sort. Because it's such a low-cost and deep medium, you know.

I went over to the Balkans last year during the war just to walk around a little bit and I remember we went to Belgrade and then came around, well actually we went to Macedonia and Albania first -- and I remember standing on a slope in Macedonia, I think it was Stankavich, one of those famous camps that all the visitors went to and, of course, it was all sort of so European. You know, the German tents off the slope with perfect irrigation ditches and lots of gravel and every flap in place and the scale of the exodus from Kosovo was in some ways reinforced by this kind of European architecture. But you're standing there and you realize that it would be possible in an orderly way over a period of weeks or months to systematically record the nature of this migration for history. A newspaper could undertake this because the web would allow you to store the information that you assemble. And, in fact, you could walk down these very neatly arranged German rows with your low-cost video camera and start taking testimony and start recording stories and start sorting out the map of this event.

And from that you could extract sources of newspapering, narrative and synthesis and other kinds of journalism that speaks to the role that newspapers have always played in conflicts, as diarists, as independent witnesses, as honest witnesses. And yet you could supplement that with a sense of the record, fullness of the record.

And I think that a newspaper that sees a channel in its own readership through the population under its feet or through a story overseas it simply feels its commitment -- is necessary to commit to, it can create a source of impact in its work that really will galvanize readers and make them respond. I think that's one level. The only other thing I would say is that, of course narrative is a very useful device for pulling stories that can seem abstract and distancing for American readers into their bloodstream and that doesn't require any less commitment of resources than any other kind of coverage, but it can pay off in a way that keeps people coming back to it, including editors who are otherwise skeptical about such things.

A PARTICIPANT: I wonder if you could address then what I see as a conundrum, and I'll pass your paper quickly, but please don't take it as that you need to defend the Post, but the Post has cut the number of international pages -- news pages that it has. There's been a steady reduction in the American networks in the number, in the amount of time and resources that are given to the international news. This isn't exclusive to the United States. The same thing has happened with Canadian Broadcasting, the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. has shrunk its pages. So every time we have these discussions, the points you make, although the point of creating a matter of record is very interesting, are made and yet the shrinkage occurs in the daily journals of our lives. How -- why is this?

STEVE COLL: Well, actually we're expanding our foreign coverage. We've added two bureaus in the last year and we're going to be adding newsprint over the next year or two and on the web we have tens and tens of thousands of new readers for our international coverage that provide motivation for everybody in the organization to support this expansion. I don't know -- I mean that's easy when you're in Washington, D.C., and when you have a newspaper that has a global reputation that you can try to reinforce but I think that there's a real structural problem that general interest publishers worldwide, certainly in the West, face that you can't wish away. You need to sort out how you're going to win given the structural changes. And that structural change as it affects say the resources and the space and the ability to extend foreign reporting, is most difficult in this sense. The number of channels for journals and globally is expanding at a mind-boggling rate.

You ask what happened to the networks. They had a proprietary broadcast franchise with three federally protected spectrums, spectral, whatever, that yielded to a cable world that typically created 30 or 40 channels for the average American information consumer. Now, between digital cable and the web, the number of channels that's available is literally infinite to publishers. So this means that the ability to maintain the economics that funded the foreign staffs of the networks and general interest newspapers are being rapidly eroded by all of these channels. The barriers to entry, to publishing, because of the web have fallen from hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that were required to start up a newspaper to your twelve year old who can start a web site with a $100 check from you.

So, publishers have to reckon with this change. And they can't put their hands over their ears and say it's not happening, our quality, our values will prevail. This is -- it's structural. You can't reverse it.

At the same time, it will create opportunities because already you see far more entrants and far more information available in the same process of atomization that threatens kind of the big general interest organizations -- there's much less friction between an individual and information that can be published and distributed if it's valid. And news organizations have to think about how to aggregate all of these individual actors into an experience for their readers, both in print and on the web, that holds on to the original purpose of newspapering: honesty, independence, a commitment to accountability, a commitment to giving voice to people who don't have voice, a commitment to holding institutions to account, and so on. To be able to manage the structural change in a way that preserves and advances those values without just sort of standing still and being washed by the tide. And that's what happened to the networks, of course. I really don't blame them because the web hadn't happened and the web, I think, is more opportunity than threat potentially for these kinds of organizations. Whereas cable and the loss of the sort of oligopoly of these three networks that wasn't -- that was all threat. That was all decline, there wasn't a lot alternative.

A PARTICIPANT: As you talked about the new technologies and the aggregate of your reporting, what's often called synergy, how are you as managing editor protecting the quality of the work when reporters used to file one story a day of great excellence, are now filing for your 3 o'clock deadline for the web as well as doing chat rooms and some they may have hat cams or whatever that famous speech was?

STEVE COLL: Right. Well, it's incumbent upon us to do all of this and if we give up our values or change our values in any significant way, we won't have achieved anything. We will have squandered this inheritance. I think that I and my colleagues believe so far that there was enough excess capacity in our news room to be able to handle what we're doing so far. Part of what we need to do is to create enough publishing success to justify extending our resources rather than simply doubling up or tripling up the demands on the resources that we already possess. That part of the equation, though I'm alert to it and though I think that we will make mistakes and maybe even substantial mistakes -- I hope that I'm not wrong in believing that the values part of what happens to an organization like the Post in this transition is actually not the hardest part of it. It's hard but, you start with a community that is organized out of these values. That's why people are there. That's why they came to the paper, that's why they want to go out and report. And if you can create a culture that puts those values first, then figuring out how to distribute those values across new mechanisms, new means, is less of a challenge.

So I don't worry about so much about what happens inside our channel right now. I don't see evidence that of erosion of what we're doing. In fact, I see the reverse. There's a sense of energy and a reinforcement of what it is that we do. The thing that makes me wary is the context in which we now operate because there is no question but that the pressures all around our channel are far more severe and have a far more varied character. And some of it is really unattractive. And in order for us to succeed as publishers, we can't close our eyes to the publishing environment in which we're working in. We need to be responsive. On the other hand, if the context ends up sort of turning us in some new direction that we don't want to be facing, then it won't matter what, you know, what we do inside our own organization. That's the thing that's much more difficult to control and I think for me, personally, a lot harder to evaluate.

A PARTICIPANT: Could you talk about your coverage of Sierra Leone? Do you have people on the ground anywhere near the -- anywhere near Freetown?

STEVE COLL: We're scrambling right now. we have a West Africa bureau. It is one of two bureaus that we've added in the last three or four years. It's located in Abidjan. Our correspondent, Doug Farrah, has been in Salvador. He's been everywhere. He is a hell of a reporter on the ground and he was in Burkina Faso reporting on arms trafficking to the RUF when this sort of collapsed again and he is going to be there either today or tomorrow or at the very latest Monday. He's been scrambling like a bat out of hell to get there. He'll get there. I hope that being there will be more useful than it was last time. We were there last time when the invasion occurred. Jim Rupert was at Lungee the day that the AP reporters were shot in Freetown. I don't think we gave that coverage the visibility that it deserved and I don't know whether giving it more visibility would have made much of a difference to the thinking of Washington's decision makers. But certainly you can be sure it's going to be visible this time around.

Steve Coll, Bio.
Managing Editor, The Washington Post