Apart from that occasion, John had always avoided travelling with the military for protection. It’s known as embedding and carries its own risks. You are travelling with the military and subject to their whims. You are, to all intents and purposes, enlisted in the army for those days and must forfeit your independence of movement and choice. The people the army are fighting regard you as just another soldier. Embedding can provide you access to a fight or an area you would never otherwise have seen, but it keeps you away from what is really going on. And John believes (rightly in my view) that it destroys the objectivity of your position as a journalist.
/CHECKPOINTS
You’ll come across checkpoints along the road, at border crossings, or even in an airport. The road checks are the ones that pose the most danger, but being aware of your body language and using a skilled approach to people during any meeting will help ease your journey anywhere you travel.
Authority breeds arrogance, and that can be dangerous in a place where laws mean little. Before travelling through Yemen as tourists in 2005, my friends and I had a pile of travel passes printed off to give out to each checkpoint along the way. There were maybe 60 stops over four days of driving through the Hadramaut valley. At each one we were asked for a different level of search or bribe, even though our papers were in order. As frustration grew with the sticky heat of the day, it was difficult to approach each new checkpoint as a new conversation. When our car radiator fizzled out in the middle of a scrubby desert on day three, we looked ahead and saw a well-manned checkpoint about a kilometre away through the desert heat. They saw us and didn’t help. We wanted to scream and shout, but we eventually started the car again and chugged to their barrier, where they handed us water with big smiles and waved us through – no bribe, no search. It’s difficult to avoid judging one experience by your last, but you must.
When I met the senior news producer Shelley Thakral in Iraq she was a point of calm in all the madness, and the first visiting journalist in Basra who looked me in the eye and asked me if I was all right. It had been months since someone did that. She makes the following observations:
‘Your personality changes the more you work in these areas. You become more laidback. When it comes to checkpoints and crowds, calmness, patience and an understanding of the local culture are the way forward. Whatever you do, the guards will still insist on going through the whole frustrating procedure and you have to be very patient to put up with it. In Sri Lanka we were crossing back and forth into the Tamil Tiger region. We were tired and hot, struggling with heavy cases full of camera kit, but the guards don’t help to haul them up onto the table to be checked, even if you’re a woman. You feel resentful as they ask you to open them. But whatever you may think, it is necessary. You have to be calm and laidback.’
Assuming the guards are not actually hostile, there are some tried and tested ways to win them over. It starts with driving slowly and without your lights on full glare. Some countries may require you to have the lights on inside the car as you approach. Check the local guidelines.
Leith Mushtaq recommends: ‘Be friendly, but not too friendly. Give them some cigarettes, offer them something for tomorrow, but don’t give them everything. Make a deal. Ask them to be your escort today and offer them something for the next time. Go out of your way to find information about what is up ahead.’
Marc DuBois says: ‘The key is drinks. Often you find guys out in the middle of nowhere and a little cold water goes a long way. It opens a conversation. We also used to ask people if they had any mail to deliver to checkpoints further up the road. Nothing better than arriving at a checkpoint with mail from a little further back. If that doesn’t win over their trust, nothing will.’
As Dr Carl Hallam observes: ‘Checkpoints are interesting if they have a gun and you haven’t. You have to be very, very humble and avoid eye contact altogether. Don’t rush them, be patient. Take off your dark glasses and turn off your VHF radio, if you have one. If it blurts out at the wrong moment, it could frighten the person checking your papers. And always wait for the second car if there is more than one of you. Don’t drive off without the others.’
If a checkpoint isn’t a direct confrontation, it is always a negotiation. Marc DuBois has spent 12 years travelling round the world with MSF. Visiting Sudan in 2009, after 13 NGOs had been expelled by the government, was one of his more difficult recent projects. As he explains, all negotiations begin with one question – where should you target your efforts?
‘You have to know who is in charge. One of the biggest problems in negotiating is the failure to understand who is in charge in a given situation – whether it be a village, a checkpoint, a border or a government office. Often I see a person negotiating in vain with someone who doesn’t have the capacity to make a decision. With officials, it’s not always very clear. You can be in a meeting with someone whose political rank and title are correct, but in terms of real power it might be the national security person sitting in the corner that you need to win over. You need to understand that dynamic because it can be dangerous if you get it wrong.’
I like to have my documents handy – I don’t like rummaging around in pockets and glove compartments at checkpoints manned by jumpy individuals. You want to spend as little time there as possible; they’re notoriously dangerous places.
/FAKE CHECKPOINTS
There are times when you need to be more than cautious, such as at fake checkpoints. Faking a checkpoint is an easy way to make a quick buck out of bribes, or robbery or kidnapping. Sometimes the fake checkpoint will have a particular target, so you might get through, but it is not worth trying your luck at getting through unless your pass has been previously negotiated by whoever is your local fixer on the ground with the right know-how and contacts.
Samantha Bolton recalls: ‘You are always told that you should turn on your lights and slow down. That’s the correct procedure. But I have also followed my instincts and run a checkpoint. In the Democratic Republic of Congo I was in the car with another girl. We were slowing down for a checkpoint, but even from a distance we could see they had bloodshot, bleary eyes and were moving around like they were drunk. We were out late after curfew and I didn’t feel right about it, so when they lowered their guns and surrounded our car, we suddenly sped up and went through the tin cans that were supposed to be the barrier. They tried to shoot at us, but I knew they were so drunk that it would be hard to hit us.’
Imad Shihab is an Iraqi journalist I worked with in Baghdad and Doha. In 2007 we evacuated together to the Green Zone when our entire office of local cameramen and producers were kidnapped. Some time later we found out that our largely Sunni staff were actually arrested by the mainly Shia police forces, but the Interior Ministry, which was in charge of the police, was not the best communicator at the time.
Imad fled Iraq in 2009, when he became a target for trying to bring fair and balanced reports to the world. But he spent the worst years of the fight there, talking his way around the country street by street. He managed to stay safe, and from his hiding place he told me how to approach the most deadly of checkpoints. The advice can be applied to any country, not just to Iraq.