/CRIMINAL ATTACKS
The threat of criminal attack obviously applies to places such as South Africa, where there is a high level of crime directed at homes and cars. But it also applies to places such as Mexico City, and Colombo in Sri Lanka, where kidnappers may be staking out your house. The information given here is not just for war zones.
The most fundamental piece of advice is never take the same route to work two days in a row. Never let your pattern become predictable. Leave at different times of the day if you can. One day have breakfast at work, the next have it at home. Have dinner out and return home late, but not every night. Look for any unusual cars outside your accommodation. Note down number plates so you can see if someone is returning again and again out of the blue. And if your instincts tell you to be scared, go to a hotel, or stay with a friend for a few nights.
Mary O’Shea had some interesting experiences as a new driver: ‘I moved to South Africa having driven for all of two weeks of my life. I landed in Johannesburg, bought a beat-up Ford Fiesta Flite (a tin can on wheels, specially manufactured for the African market) and had it kitted out with shatterproof windows, a tracking system and so forth, which ended up costing more than the actual car itself. Having diplomatic plates and being instructed never to stop at traffic lights is perhaps not the ideal starting point as a first-time driver. We were always reminded that most “incidents” take place as you get home, so the idea was to speed into the garage and get the gate shut behind you asap. Perhaps it’s not surprising that I managed to ram into my garage wall twice. Always keep an eye on cars around you to check if you are being followed. And if you see people lurking outside your house, drive past.’
/CAR-JACKING
The threat of being car-jacked is not confined just to those times of going into and out of your driveway, or to and from work. It could happen along the road too.
Qatar, where my Al Jazeera colleagues and I now live, is the kind of place where you can leave your keys in the car for days on end and no one will even think of stealing it. But back at her home in South Africa, senior news presenter Jane Dutton lives in a different world, where a simple trip to the shops can mean risking an attack from violent criminals. She explains the everyday precautions her colleagues, friends and neighbours take in order to minimize the risk:
‘I live next to the beautiful Vall River outside Johannesburg. The road heading there is one of the worst in the area for hijackings. The police have cut all the trees right back. And my family all drive very defensively, hyper-aware of the rear-view mirror – looking for cars that might be following, driving too close, or just behaving in a threatening way. Attackers used to put bricks out on the road to slow you down, so you have to watch for that too.
‘Everyone knows not to stop at traffic lights, and never to pick up hitch-hikers. You must put your bag on the floor of the car and lock the doors and windows before you leave. In some areas further north from where I live, near Pretoria, they actually have signs warning passing drivers of a “Hijack Corner” coming up ahead.
‘Once I had a flat tyre while driving past the edge of a township with a particularly bad reputation. There I was in my high heels, vulnerable as anything. It was the fastest wheel change in history. You hear alarming stories all the time. Just last week my brother was driving home and a car rounded off on him to slow him down. He followed his instincts and sped onto the wrong side of the road until he came to a police car parked nearby. The policeman kicked a girl out of his car, popped his siren on and gave chase. That’s what it’s like in South Africa – more often than not you have to rely on yourself rather than the law.’
/CONVOYS
If the roads are dangerous, it’s a good idea to move in carefully organized convoys. Nick Toksvig has worked with teams carrying valuable camera equipment and potential hostages around all sorts of hostile environments. He explains how it’s done:
‘During Israel’s war on Lebanon in 2006, Sky News and Fox News teamed up when moving by car. We always travelled in a five-car convoy with radio contact between the vehicles. We kept the vehicles spaced about half a kilometre apart in case of bombing from the air. It meant that in all likelihood we would lose only one car.
‘Driving from Beirut to the south we had one car filled with 250 litres of fuel, another filled with personal belongings, and a third with technical equipment. We let the fuel vehicle go in front – if a car was attacked, that would be the least valuable cargo – and the rest of us kept well back on the journey down.’
That said, a convoy can also be a target. On my way out of Baghdad for the last time I was looking for a cheap ride home. A group of gorgeous Italians offered me a seat in their car and told me to meet them at 4.30 a.m. outside our hotel the next day. (We always left before curfew as the streets were safest then.) I woke up at 4.25, my alarm having failed to go off for the first and only time in my life. As I huffed and puffed with my bag to the front door downstairs, the Italians were shutting their doors and about to head off. They shouted at me to jump into the car behind them and the whole convoy left on time. Instead of being surrounded by beautiful men, I found myself alone with a Canadian human shield, clicking on her knitting needles over murmured stitch counts.
We drove safely through the pitch-black, empty streets of Baghdad and onto the main road to Jordan. Dawn was breaking, and through the fudge of the grey morning I saw something that looked like a tank pull up onto the side of the road. It was still curfew and these were US forces, so our driver began to slow down. The Italians’ car, though, was still heading fast towards the tank when it was pumped full of bullets and came to a screeching halt. We slowed to a crawl and I leant out my window to wave to the soldiers as we approached the vehicle that was now more of a sieve than a taxi. The driver was dead – I could see that. The others, I have no idea, because the US soldiers shouted at us to move on as we were driving through the middle of an operation. We had broken curfew, as almost everyone did, in order to make it out of the city safely, and that car of happy men on their way home had borne the brunt of that calculated risk. It was a shocking day.
At times like that you realize nowhere is safe. Technology is never as advanced as it needs to be when it comes to identifying one person from another – the ‘enemy’ from the Red Cross or Red Crescent; the press van following an exit plan from a van full of fighters heading to the border; the refugees huddled around a fire from the locater flare for an artillery bombardment.
Historically, one-third of all deaths during war are from so-called ‘friendly fire’, and that statistic is getting no better. John Simpson, a BBC news correspondent, remembers one terrible occasion:
‘In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, I thought it would be safe if my team and I tacked ourselves onto a convoy of American and Kurdish special forces. I remember saying to the others, “The Americans aren’t going to attack us if we’re with them.” But they did. A US Navy plane dropped a 1000-lb bomb right in the middle of our group. Eighteen people died, most of them burnt to death. My translator, who was standing close to me, had his legs blown off and died of blood loss. The rest of us were injured in different ways, none seriously. The fault was mine, and I still feel the guilt strongly.’