With Rebels in Misrata

In May myself and Correspondent Andrew Harding went to the besieged City of Misrata in Libya. After a long journey we finally arrived and in the course of a week there we made four films that ran on the BBC News. Here are two of my favourites that I wanted to share. Cheers, Chris.

There's more to think about in a War zone than just bullets

So you’ve just had the phone call deploying you to cover a War or a disaster in a hot and exotic place. In a rush you pack your technical kit and throw together a personal bag of clothes and toiletries. But if you are not experienced in this sort of environment you may forget some important items that are worth taking. Here is a list of things I never leave without:

A travel towel and sleeping bag – There’s a high chance you will be staying in a remote location, possibly one where the infra-structure no longer exists. At best you may find a local guest house that has a different interpretation of cleanliness to most of us.

A number of different multi-plug adaptors – Unless you have time to look it up before you leave you may not know what type of plug socket they use in your destination. Be aware the Multi-adaptors you can buy don’t work in South Africa, you need one like this:

South African style plug

Mosquito repellent and a net – unless you want to be on Malerone all year then the chances are you wont be on any anti-malarial medication. I don’t take it any more and instead I bathe myself in lots of strong repellent and make sure I wear long sleeves most of the time. It’s also worth taking a Mosquito net though it can be difficult to find anything to hang them from.

An inflatable pillow – As the Army say “Any fool can be uncomfortable”.

Dried foods, water purification tabs and rehydration salts – its worth keeping an emergency supply of these in case you end up in the bush for a night or two.

A solar charger for your phone. Very useful if you need to make a lot of calls (Yes that’s you Mr or Mrs Producer) Powermonkey make these – and they are available via my website: http://www.caparkinson.com/christians-amazon-book-store/)

A power inverter – These are crucial if you want to charge equipment or run a laptop in the field. Don’t expect to have regular electricity in even in urban areas, be prepared.

Ok, I own up that was more than six items. There are a million and one items that would be handy to have with you on assignment but baggage space is usually limited and from trial and error I’ve found these to be the most important. Good luck!

Editors Note: After chatting with colleagues I now want to add three more items to this list: Toilet paper, a torch and gaffer tape. I should have thought of them earlier! Thanks for the feedback. . .

The smell of decaying bodies is a tough one to forget. I’d seen dead bodies before, but not in the number that they littered the battle zones of Ivory Coast. My colleague Andrew advised me to breath through the mouth – easier said than done.

The town of Duekoue had just fallen into the hands of the troops backing the elected President of Ivory Coast Alassane Ouattara – a masscare followed. It’s hard to say exactly who killed who and why. All sides have been pointing fingers and no one can decide how many bodies have actually been found. I arrived with my team a few days after the event, the first foreign journalists to make it this far west, past the dozens of check points that line the road from Yamoussoukro. Luckily there was a big UN presence and as soon as we arrived in our beaten up Toyota 4×4 the Moroccan UN troops took us to see the bodies being collected for burial.

The dead were everywhere, covered in black plastic by the side of the road. I jumped out of the car and began to film. I worked on instinct, trying to not to think too much about what I was seeing. The sound of the bodies being loaded onto a flat bed truck seemed incredibly loud in the heavy, eerie silence. They were handed up from the ground and then slid across the metal floor before bumping to a standstill.

A Moroccan Officer reprimanded a group of Ouattara soldiers at a nearby check-point – “No more killing” he told them angrily. They looked sullen, denying any responsibility. I just kept filming, sucking the images into the camera, hoping that by documenting this I was somehow making a difference, telling a story that needed to be told.

That night the Moroccan troops allowed us to use there officers mess in the UN base as an edit suite and a place to sleep. They looked after us well, bringing us coffee, bread and even a plate of Arabic sweets. They were good guys, eager to help and not upset by us taking over the one place where they could come to watch the football and forget where they were.

This was my fourth trip to Ivory Coast in the space of a year. My first had been fun, a football film in the run up to the World Cup. But quickly things had deteriorated and the last few trips had all been to document the countries gradual journey towards war. Abidjan had been a terrifying place for foreign journalists since the incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo had refused to recognize his election defeat and in January my team were stopped and threatened with death at a particularly nasty check point.

In recent weeks the forces of Alassane Ouattara had swept through much of the country and had advanced deep into Abidjan itself. Just getting in to the country to cover the story had been a huge effort. We had flown to Bamako in Mali and driven for nineteen hours to get to Bouake, the capital of the northern portion of the country.

After filing our film on the massacre in Duekoue we headed towards the front line in Abidjan. The road towards the city was deserted, market stalls that would normally be sprinkled along the route, abandoned. Finally we came across the main staging point for Ouattaras soldiers at a Shell Garage in an area called Gesco. We found hundreds of fighters exhausted and sprawled in any shade they could find as they tried to sleep. We advanced further along the road, more bodies littered the route, rotting and covered in maggots. Civilians brave enough to venture out looking for food and water were so terrified they had they hands raised in surrender the whole time – even when being interviewed by my team.

That night the film that we made was the lead story on the BBC Ten o’clock News – we’d finally helped people notice this story and how important it was.

Abidjan was so dangerous that it was impossible to go any further into the city. In a deeply cynical move Laurent Gbagbo and his surviving die-head fighters had turned the city into a charnel house, a place of death, where everybody was a legitimate target. We tried to arrange a military convoy to take us to the Golf Hotel where President Ouattara had been based for months, protected by the UN. Thirty seconds after we left, we were forced to turn back when the fighters with us reported seeing wounded on the road and said it was to dangerous too proceed.

We spent five days on the edge of town filing stories. We stayed at a Bar/Guesthouse about twenty kilometers from the frontlines. It was basic, I shared a room with Correspondent Andrew Harding. The toilet stank, forcing me to hold my breath every time I went inside and the bed sheets were crawling with insects. But they cooked us an evening meal every night and had cold drinks – a welcome moral booster after filming in the sticky humidity of West Africa. Unfortunately one of my kit bags hadn’t arrived when we flew from Johannesburg to Bamako in Mali – it was the bag with my survival equipment. As the week wore on I missed not having a decent travel towel and sleeping bag and regretted the loss of my solar phone charger and water purification tablets.

Equipment was beginning to suffer from the heat and rough treatment. One of our BGAN’s stopped working, meaning we only had one to file both radio and TV. As I was filming one afternoon I noticed my lens was moving around in its mount. I kept tightening it with no improvement. Then the back focus started to slip substantially. In a panic I removed the lens and discovered that all the screws holding it together had worked there way loose and it was coming apart. I didn’t have time to fix it then and there and was forced to shoot one of our pieces on my Canon 5D Mark II. The picture quality of the 5D is fantastic but it was a relief when I was able to fix the lens with a screwdriver later that night. Returning to the ergonomics and ease of use I have with my Sony DSR 500.

Eventually on 12th April, Laurent Gbagbo was captured. We were in a town well north of Abidjan and were able to capture the amazing spontaneous celebrations. School children flooded into the street waving branches and singing while adults danced and pounded on car horns filling the town with a cacophony of noise. It was a brilliant ending to two challenging weeks. It’s been a hard time for Ivory Coast but I hope now things can slowly start to return to normal and that the healing can begin.

If you would like to use this article on your blog/Website then feel free. If you do so then please print my name, copyright notice and a link to my site at the end. Cheers

I’m always on the look out for important videos that will help to inform and educate myself and other Cameramen. I felt it was time that I gathered some of the most relevant and interesting in one place for readers of my blog to check out. If you have any others you think should be here then let me know and I’ll post a follow up.

Firstly I wanted to draw attention to the history of our craft. I always imagine that being a frontline Cameraman in World War two must have been even more intense than it is for us today. The battles that much bigger, the chances of being killed that much more. Below is the first clip from a Documentary about the the cameramen of WW2, there exploits and what they saw.

But as we all know, today although the fighting might not be on such a grand scale it can still be intense, nerve wracking and incredibly dangerous. Here is an excellent film by my colleague Robbie Wright that he shot while embedded with the US Marines in Falluja:

The growing problem for all Journalists in todays environment is that we often become a target ourselves, either accidentally or because we are seen as “the enemy”. Below are a number of films that show how quickly we can become targets and how serious this can be. Some of the films are graphic and quite disturbing:

Not all predicaments a cameraman finds him or her self in are life or death. Even in our own countries the Police can turn nasty and arrest you for no reason. The Cameraman below was detained though later the charges were dropped and I understand that the Police Officer was later fired:

And then there are the self inflicted, pointless problems that we sometimes have to face. I still do not understand why the Cameraman in the film below kept following these guys once he had gotten his shots. He was later fired when the footage from a rival network was aired.

And finally the trailer for a film about stills photographer James Nachtwey. An excellent insight into the life and thought process of one of the worlds best known Photojournalists. Enjoy.

I hope these films have given you something to think about. If you have any films that you think I should include in a follow up piece then please comment below.

If you would like to use this article on your blog/Website then feel free. If you do so then please print my name, copyright notice and a link to my site at the end. Cheers.

“You’re hooked. . .You need the action and you’re not going to get it wasting your life away shagging underfed anarchists, doing second rate coke and whining about evil corporations at Im-a-jackass.com. . .Global News needs men like you, men with the balls to step up and bare witness to history.”

Shooting War is a Graphic novel, a dark, dystopian vision of the near future as seen by a Correspondent in Baghdad. It’s the story of how a young Blogger, Jimmy Burns, is in the right place at the right time to film a suicide bombing at his local Starbucks in New York. His pictures are taken live by Global News Network who then hire him and send him to Iraq. The year is 2011 and President McCain is leading America deeper and deeper into a recession. Most of the Islamic countries have shut off oil supplies to the West, Europe and the US are being hit by regular terrorist attacks and fighting wars across the globe and Iraq has descended into a brutal civil war between rival extremist factions.

It’s a shame I didn’t get around to reviewing this book sooner as it was called “Book of the year” in 2008 by Forbidden Planet and British GQ put it in their list of One Hundred best things in the world. The two men responsible for the book are Anthony Lappe a feature writer, Blogger and Radio personality who also produced the Iraq documentary, Battleground: 21 days on the Empires Edge and Dan Goldman a writer, illustrator and designer.

I found the book by accident while browsing a comic book store in Leicester. As soon as I saw the cover design I was hooked: it’s a reflection of a Gun-battle in a Cameraman’s lens with his eyes showing over the top. The artwork throughout the book is outstanding, mixing photography and illustration in a way that really manages to capture the brutality, fear and passion of war.

The dialogue is sharp, highly political and at times extremely witty. At one point Jimmy manages to upset the Commander of a US patrol by filming something he shouldn’t, the Officer goes ballistic: “If I hear a peep from you I’ll drop you off in the middle of Baquba, naked with ‘Mohammed is fag’ written in Arabic across your chest.” Genius. . .

Journalist Jimmy Burns hides during a fire-fight in Baghdad

I love the fact that Jimmy is such a morally ambiguous character, he’s a self confessed liar, fake and fraud. You can’t love him but neither can you hate him. There’s a piece of all of his in him. The most interesting and charismatic character of all is the leader of “The Sword Of Mohammed” – a dangerous new insurgent group using the power of the internet and call centers to further the cause of jihad. He’s a realist and sees that the old fundamentalist ways will never be truly embraced by young Muslims: “The promise of 70 Virgins in the next life cannot compete with the pleasures of the modern world.” He says, “that is why the Wahabis, the Mullahs and the Salafis will never wield true power. Sixty percent of the Arab world is under the age of thirty and ninety percent of them want freedom, more technology and more learning. . .They are waiting for a leader to bring them out of the dark ages. And who do they get? Illiterate fairy boys who shriek at the sight of a woman’s ankle? Mullahs who whip the educated and talented in the streets for minor trespasses.”

If you are interested in World Affairs and  journalism then I do really recommend this book. Even if you are not a fan of the graphic novel I’m sure you will find it a cracking and thought provoking read.

To view the film we made on this trip to Akobo, follow this link to the BBC website

The UN airstrip in Juba looked identical to every other UN establishment I’d seen in Africa. A maze of blue Porta-cabins protected by a bored contingent of Asian soldiers – this time Bengalis in their distinctively bright green camouflage. We were traveling to the small town of Akobo in Southern Sudan alongside the NGO Save the Children and the UN Resident Humanitarian Co-ordinator, Lise Grande and her team. They were keen to show us the poor humanitarian situation and flag up a potential famine – a new report says 46 percent of children under five are malnourished.

We all piled into the ex-Soviet era Helicopter that had been painted in UN colours and began our long journey. We followed the Nile out of Juba and then headed East toward the Ethiopian border passing low over huge tracts of desolate scrub and dry river beds. It was a boneshaking two-hour flight but I was next to an open window and kept myself entertained by filming and taking photos.

A view from our UN chopper on the way to Akobo

As we came in to land at Akobo’s makeshift landing strip I filmed the ramshackle mud and straw houses that seemed to make up most of the town.

We had a couple of hours on the ground and were told that the Russian chopper crew had instructions to leave without us if we late – something that both myself and Correspondent Andrew Harding doubted they would do. A fleet of four by fours waited for us by the Air-strip and rushed us off to the Hospital to film malnourished children.

Outside the clinic there was a hive of activity with babies being weighed and food being handed out by harried staff. Screaming kids and scared, hungry looking Mums cued up waiting for their turn to take the handful of high energy bars on offer. I grabbed as many shots as I could before being bustled off to film inside with the kids who were considered to be in the worst state.

Inside I filmed a close up as one baby was given milk via a plastic syringe – his body too wasted to keep anything down. Another, called Dwal, had the glazed, sleepy eyes of someone who has given up hope. After gathering a few shots I left, realizing that my presence was disturbing Dwal who began to wail as if in pain every time I tried to film him.

We then rushed off to film the families who had been forced to flee from recent fighting. 2009 had seen a dramatic surge in ethnic conflict and many displaced families had been forced to flee to the town. We found one family living by the river, sheltering under a tree to keep out of the oppressive mid day sun. Despite their problems they seemed relaxed and friendly and didn’t seem remotely put out by our presence. I discovered that the South Sudanese are generally unphased by TV cameras, a fact that made my job much easier.

Traveling on a speedboat to find IDP’s near Akobo

Time was now short. We had a three PM deadline to meet back at the Airstrip. Having to rush in the heat of South Sudan isn’t good and I was beginning to feel very dehydrated. We hooked up with the local Commissioner – Goi Jooyul Yol, a fascinating guy who had been living in the US for many years – he took us to the local Army base and convinced the Colonel in charge to show us all the guns they had confiscated from the local tribesmen to stop them stealing cattle and abducting children from one another. It was an impressive, if slightly rusty, haul. About 400 weapons, mainly Ak-47′s were piled almost to the ceiling in the old and peeling shipping container.

At three PM exactly we emerged from the Army compound and ran over five hundred meters of rugged waste ground to the waiting Chopper. Sweaty and exhausted I downed a bottle of water and a whole packet of glucose biscuits before throwing myself onto the awkward canvas bench in the back of the Helicopter. It had been a tough day both mentally and physically. As the aircraft took off I dozed awkwardly hoping that our film might be able to expose the problems of the region and help to avert a disaster.

To view the film we made on this trip to Akobo, follow this link to the BBC website

And if you are interested to find out more about the situation in South Sudan then click on this link for an excellent site

On the same trip to South Sudan we also shot an excellent (if I do say so) election preview film. Unfortunately due to the changing situation in the country our film never had the chance to run in the UK. So that the pictures aren’t lost forever I’ve edited some of my favourite sequences together into a short “voice free” film that I hope will give you a small taste of Southern Sudan:

Taking a rest during a tough foot patrol

I’d always wandered how it felt to be shot at, to hear the crack of bullets breaking the sound barrier above my head and to feel the adrenaline flood through my body.

When it happened it was strangely surreal, like it was happening to somebody else. My heart rate barely seemed to rise above its normal level. It was Christmas day 2007 and I was in Helmand Province, Southern Afghanistan with the Royal Marines. I was embedded with Delta Company 40 Commando based at Forward Operating Base Gibraltar.

When the Taliban began their ambush we were crossing an open field between two large mud walled compounds. One of the Marines spotted something unusual and we went to ground. I thumbed the record button on my DSR 500 Sony Video Camera and began to frame up on the Marines who were poised and ready for anything. Immediately there was a distinctive bang and whistle from the trees to our front, “RPG” screamed one of the guys next to me. I buried my nose in the dirt at the bottom of the shallow ditch I was hiding in. The explosion was close, maybe ten meters behind us. It was followed by a number of single shots from an AK-47 that I could clearly hear whipping through the air above my head. The Marines began to return fire under the direction of Lieutenant Atherton, a baby faced young officer, incredibly calm for a man experiencing his first taste of battle. Jonesy, a black guy from Wales was next to me and he quickly opened up with his weapon. The sound of his Minimi machine gun was vicious as it went into action spraying controlled bursts of fire into the Taliban positions. “Incoming” screamed someone close as another RPG round exploded nearby. For a minute I’d forgotten why I was there and was too busy tasting the Afghanistan dirt to film. Eventually the Bootneck next to me asked if I planned on filming any of this, I laughed and began looking for shots. I felt detached, like I was watching the entire scene play out through somebody else’s eyes. The battle soon steadied and the frantic back and forth of small arms fire slowly died away, the Marines picking their shots looking to minimize damage to the surrounding village. After some time it appeared the Taliban had withdrawn, no more fire came our way and slowly we began to move back across the open ground and into the cover of an empty compound nearby.

50. Cal machine Gun FOB Gibraltar

I’ve thought about that day many times since. Every sight and sound is seared into my memory. It was the closest I’ve ever come to death, one of the few times I’ve ever had to consider my own mortality. But it is also one of my best memories, one of the highlights of my life. Looking back I felt more alive on that day than at any other time before or since. I guess that’s the addiction of combat, it’s that feeling that Soldiers and War Cameramen live for, the buzz that keeps them going back into hot spots again and again.

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