An interview with Boston Globe Middle East bureau chief Thanassis Cambanis.
By Tim Fernholz, Georgetown University
Thursday August 10, 2006
Thanassis Cambanis is right in the middle of the war in Lebanon. As the Middle East Bureau Chief for the Boston Globe, he has been reporting on the conflict since it began a almost a month ago. Cambanis first went to the Middle East to cover the Iraq War in 2003, venturing into Southern Iraq as an un-embedded reporter. Since then he has reported on Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon. As a reporter, he has been unafraid to confront the complexities of the Middle East, covering all sides with journalistic impartiality. Campus Progress caught up with Cambanis over the phone from Beirut a few days ago.
What is the day-to-day life of a reporter in a war zone like?
Anytime you report abroad, you find that a big chunk of what you do is logistics. The provocations are exponentially more difficult in a war zone. You have to find out what you think the story is, but in a war zone you also spend a lot of time figuring out how to get to the story. In Southern Lebanon, where I spent the last two weeks, drivers were charging $500 a day to drive journalists around and often refusing to go to any dangerous spots outside of Tyre, where I was based … gas was in short supply, you could buy it for maybe $50 or $100 a jerry can on the black market. There were very few translators willing to even go down to the south, and I ended up luckily finding a local man who was using my land line for an NGO, but he was out of work because of the war. He was willing to work with me as a translator.
Once you have all those logistics in place, you have to figure out how to literally get to a village in a situation where half the roads had been bombed so that they’re impassable. None of the roads on the map were actually in good enough shape to drive over, so we’re going through dirt tracks, through orange orchards, lemon groves, banana plantations, trying to find some way around a crater.
How much do you worry about your own safety?
You worry about it a lot—I certainly don’t want to die for a story. That being said, there’s always a lot of risk in a war zone. In this war, primarily, the risk has been getting bombed on the road. Israeli bombs have hit cars full of civilians, have hit in front of hospitals, have hit houses, have hit bomb shelters, and often have landed very near cars in which I’ve been driving. There is no sense of immunity from that; they might be able to see from a drone overhead that we’re journalists in a car, on the other hand, they might not see. The other thing, of course, I worry about in a war zone like Southern Lebanon as I get near the frontlines is getting caught in a cross-fire or the shelling.
How do people react when they learn you are an American?
Often, you hear the same refrain in this part of the world, which is: “We hate American government but we don’t hate America,” even from Hezbollah fighters. It’s a phrase I’ve heard countless times, from people all over the Middle East, serious, angry, often fighting with arms against American policy, and yet on a personal level incredibly friendly and receptive to Americans. Mind you, that’s not always true, and there are certainly times—for example, after an Israeli bomb dropped on an apartment building in the center of Tyre, young men who looked to be Hezbollah sympathizers if not fighters, were roaming the streets covered with ash saying, “Are there any Americans here? Show me who’s American.” I don’t know what their intentions were, they didn’t end up attacking anybody but I think if you weren’t able to evade them, you could be at risk.
As a reporter writing about what is a difficult and nuanced conflict, you must get a lot of criticism from people on both sides with very strong opinions—how do you maintain your credibility and objectivity?
The Middle East conflict is a pressure cooker. The challenge as the reporter when you’re getting pressure from the outside is when your credibility and your reporting is specifically called into question and you find yourself needing to defend your work. Most of the time we don’t actually find ourselves in that position; someone is attacking a story we write because they believe we’re glorifying terrorists, or ignoring the crimes of Israel, or some similar political objective…but there’s nothing actually in the reporting that they’re objecting to as unbiased or unfair or inaccurate.
How do you portray terrorists not as stereotypes, but as human figures?
Our job is to document the world as it actually is. To report [terror groups] and their leadership and their principles and philosophy is in no way an endorsement of those groups and what they do. There are people who object to any coverage whatsoever of Iraqi insurgents, of groups that embrace terror like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad. A first principle is that we have to know who the people are who make things happen in the world and why they do the things they do. I find it a little bit shocking when people vehemently lash out at me or my news organizations for covering these groups, many of whom do reprehensible, evil things, as if to say we should pretend they don’t exist and that would somehow make the world a better place.
Can you describe the split between Hezbollah, the Lebanese government and other political actors in the country?
Lebanon is a very fragmented and polarized country where people’s political loyalty usually lies with their ethnic or sectarian group. …Shiites support Hezbollah, and the rest of Lebanon supports the government…that in no way is one hundred percent true, but if you’re looking for a simple rubric to understand the politics, that’s the case. A future post-war government is going to need the support of Shiites as well. Part of what led to this crisis is that Shiites don’t see themselves as vested in the national government so they turn to Hezbollah for leadership. The other sectarian groups turn to government, and you end up with a split country, and the government can’t assert its own authority in the south of the country.
From what you see on the ground, how effective has the planning been for a cease-fire?
Whether this phase of the conflict goes on for another week or another month, the problem is what happens afterwards. That is a question that relies on people in Washington and Jerusalem and other capitals where this agreement is hammered out realizing the Hezbollah is going to have be part of the solution. Any international force is going to require the consent of Hezbollah … if it’s going to be effective. Right now, I’m not sure that’s something that the West is going to do.
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