Regrets Only: An Africa Journal: In Memoriam

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

In Memoriam

There is newly-(re)opened museum focused on the news business in Washington. It’s called, appropriately, the Newseum. One of its features is a memorial honoring journalists who have been killed in the line of duty. It lists the names of 1,843 reporters, broadcasters and photographers from around the world who died between 1837 and 2007.

I worked with two of the reporters whose names are on the memorial, a kind of glass wall in an almost chapel-like setting on the Newseum’s third floor. I stopped in this week to sit a while and remember these colleagues.

One was Hitoshi Numasawa of Japan’s Kyodo new service. He was Kyodo’s bureau chief in Nairobi. He was killed on Dec. 6, 1994 when a small plane he was flying in struck a television tower in bad weather shortly after takeoff from Nairobi's Wilson Airport. He was en route to Goma in the Congo (then called Zaire), where Japanese troops had been deployed in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. One of his sons and one of mine were best buddies.

The other name etched on the memorial that I wanted to honor is that of Dan Eldon, a young British-American photographer who was working for the Reuters news service in Somalia when I met him. He was killed on July 12th, 1993 in Mogadishu by an enraged mob as he tried to cover a US attack on supporters of a Somali warlord.

The Journalists Memorial used to be located in the Newseum when that building was located in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington. Speaking at a ceremony at the memorial there in 2006, a senior US television executive, ABC News President David Westin, said we honor the meaning of the lives and deaths of journalists “by taking to heart every day what they have shown us about the importance of reporting the news.”

He went on: “They believed that the good of their country, their community, and their fellow citizens depends on people knowing as much of the truth as they could find and report.”

We honor you, Toshi and Dan.

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Why?

It is October, 1997. I am standing in a rubble-strewn Brazzaville street as the city returns cautiously to life after a bloody civil war. Armed men are all around me, most of them looting, occasionally firing off bursts of bullets in celebration. But I am not concentrating on this anymore. Instead, with the hand holding my microphone limp by my side, my tape running senselessly. I am looking at another corpse -- this one of a man, perhaps in his 20's, his legs charred. I know there will be no voice to record. But his lips are apart, his arms outstretched, fingers together, as if in prayer. It seems another one of Africa's dead is trying to speak to me. And I feel I owe him this one last consideration. I think maybe he wants to share his anguish, his despair, his pain. Or maybe a last word to a parent or a wife or a child. I feel badly -- because I do not know for sure. I do know though that I have seen corpses like this before -- victims of war, or of genocide, or of famine, or of sickness. A symbolic path of the dead now runs through my mind -- a personal collection reflecting the real path their corpses have left across much of Africa: from arid Somalia in the northeast, across Sudan and into northern Uganda, down through steamy Rwanda, Burundi and Congo in the center of the continent. Some have been young men in uniform, their bodies shattered by a bullet or a shell. Some have been old men, thin beyond belief, weakened by hunger or disease. Some have been women, their dresses in tatters, their faces etched with silent agony. Some have been children, too young to die, their skulls cleaved in half. Some I have met in battle-scarred streets, some in burned-out buildings. Some I have seen sprawled amidst flowers in an open field, some floating, limbs bound, in muddy water. Some I have found in groups thrown into a dirt pit, some alone in the aisles of a gutted church. I have, at times, had imaginary conversations with these dead of mine -- their unrecorded voices playing on endlessly inside my head, sometimes loud, sometimes just a whisper. I tell them I am sorry and if it were in my power, I would restore them to life. But I can't. It's not in my power. Perhaps the only help I can give is to try to tell their story.

The Reporter

Alex Belida has been in international broadcasting since 1971. He spent nearly eight years in sub-Saharan Africa as a correspondent for the Voice of America, based first in Nairobi (1993-1996) and then in Johannesburg (1996-2000). He covered conflicts and humanitarian crises in Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville, northern Uganda, Angola and Lesotho as well as political unrest in Zimbabwe and catastrophic flooding in Mozambique. He suffered gunshot wounds while reporting in Somalia.
While in Africa, he was elected Chairman of the East Africa Foreign Correspondents Association in Nairobi and served as Treasurer of the Foreign Correspondents Association of Southern Africa during his Johannesburg assignment.
Before going to Africa, he served as VOA's Senior White House reporter for four years following stints as coordinator of the 1988 Presidential Election coverage and as National News Editor. Before those Washington assignments, he was based in Germany, where he served as Soviet affairs, East-West security and German affairs correspondent (1982-1985).
Following Africa, he served as Pentagon correspondent. In 2004 he was named Managing Editor and in 2007 became Senior Advisor for News at VOA. He retired in 2011.
Before joining VOA, he worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in both New York and Munich, rising from reporter to Assistant News Director. He has a BA from Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., and a MS in Journalism from Columbia University in New York. In 2006, he received the prestigious Alumni Achievement Award from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He also has an honorary doctorate in communications from the Somali National University.

The views expressed here are his own.

Regrets Only: An Africa Journal

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

In Memoriam

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