Reporting from Dangerous Places
No matter what you think of the controversial John McCain lobbying story of Feb. 21, this weekend The New York Times shows why it remains our most indispensable newspaper. The simple reason: it regularly sends writers to places where few reporters venture. In Sunday's Times, columnist Nicholas D. Kristof gives us a dispatch from the dusty town of Abyei in southern Sudan, where the brutal janjaweed militias have returned to an area that is supposed to be protected by a 2005 peace treaty. In "Africa's Next Slaughter," Kristof and photographer Naka Nathaniel document the potential for the renewal of a war in southern Sudan that cost two million lives in the 1980s and 1990s. Kristof and Nathaniel convey the importance of preventing renewed bloodshed in southern Sudan with a powerful video that accompanies the column. www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/opinion/02kristof.html?hp
Also in Sunday's Times, Lydia Polgreen proves how much punch a short, simple sentence can deliver with the opening line of "Scorched-Earth Strategy Returns to Darfur." "The janjaweed are back," she writes, letting the world know that genocide continues as a threat to the people of western Sudan. Polgreen deserves our gratitude for being one of the few reporters who is willing and able to travel to one of the most dangerous places on earth. Her courage pays off when she counters the propaganda of the Sudanese government with eyewitness accounts as she does in this passage:
“We are simply trying to secure the area from the bandits that are troubling civilians in the area,” said Ali al-Sadig, a government spokesman. “There is nothing abnormal about a government doing this.”
But residents of the towns said the rebels had been long gone by the time the government attacks began, leaving defenseless civilians to flee bombs and guns. In interviews, survivors of the attacks described a series of assaults that had left dozens dead, turned large sections of towns into hut-shaped circles of ash and scattered tens of thousands of fearful residents, including hundreds of children, who fled classrooms in the middle of a school day and have not been reunited with their families.
The story comes with impressive photographs by Lynsey Addario of the human and physical devastation caused by the janjaweed. nytimes.com/2008/03/02/world/africa/02darfur.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Do you know of other reporters who succeed in reporting from dangerous places? Leave us a comment if you do.