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Back from the horror
• Fran Sevilla recounts some of
his experiences as a war
correspondent in various countries
BY LISANKA
GONZALEZ SUAREZ—Granma International staff writer—
FRANCISCO José (Fran) Sevilla frequently wakes up in
the middle of the night believing that he is in Iraq
or Lebanon, and shaking at the memory of people that
he has seen suffer and die in those wars.
“When I think that, at the end of the day, I always
have a return ticket with me and have the privilege
of living in a country without war, I fall into a
sense of guilt at being alive,” he confides while we
talked in the safe and tranquil atmosphere of
Havana.
For
24 years Sevilla, from Spain, has lived in the
function of providing news, covering a string of
wars, natural disasters and social conflicts whose
principal protagonists are innocent victims.
His
baptism of fire was in Nicaragua in 1983, where in
spite of seeing the first casualties of the battle
with the Contras and the harsh living conditions of
the Nicaraguan people, he was also able to
appreciate a people inspired, a revolution underway.
From there he traveled to Paraguay and Chile, where
he was a witness of the terror unleashed by the
Stroessner and Pinochet dictatorships.
“In
Guatemala I had my first encounter with horror. It
was during the government of General Mejías Victores;
sometimes regime officials told me everything, with
incredible sangfroid; it was the barbarity, a total
disregard for life. I remember a village in the
Quiché area, north of the capital. At that time I
was moving around with a British journalist, when a
woman came up to us – the soldiers had taken off her
sons and were probably going to murder them – and
she asked us to talk with the captain in an attempt
to save them. Knowing that we couldn’t do anything
was terrible, a tremendous feeling of impotence that
marked me for ever. Later I also lived in the former
Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in the occupied
Palestinian territories, but now, although what I
see still affects and pains me, I see a it as dog
eat dog and nothing surprises me anymore.
A
SURVIVOR
In
the last six years, Sevilla has risked death on more
than a few occasions, something that is always
within the realm of possibility. But that afternoon
in May 2004 when the militia detained him for the
second time in the same day in the Iraqi city of
Nayaf, he thought his time had come. He was
returning from reporting on the exit of the last
Spanish soldiers from the base at Diwaniyah and
decided to go into the city to find out about fierce
confrontations between the U.S. troops and the
militia of the Shiite cleric Muqtada Al Sadr. The
Shiite militias forced him to get out of the vehicle
in which he was traveling with his interpreter Samir
and shoved them up against a wall accusing them of
being spies.
“The worst moment was when they pulled us out and
hit Samir; they placed a plastic bag over his head
and took him away. They wanted to execute me right
on the spot there; they took my documents off me, my
passport, money, phones, they were stripping me to
kill me, but when one of them came out to get my
watch, I hit him hard, stared at him fixedly and
said: “If you want to kill me, kill me, but I’m not
going to let you humiliate me.
Then
another guy with a singsong voice arrived, fired a
round from his submachine gun and took me somewhere
else where they locked me up in a kind of cell.
After a few hours, strangely enough, an individual
appeared to whom I had been talking a few weeks
before to interview Muqtada Al Sadr, who seemed to
recognize me and said that I was a Spanish
journalist, so then things got a bit easier. But I
think that what really saved us was the speed with
which my country acted; when they arrested us I had
time to communicate with National Radio via a
satellite phone that I had on me. In total they
kidnapped us for six hours, it wasn’t very long, but
for me they were very difficult hours. When I think
that good friends of mine, José Couso and Julio
Anguita in Iraq, and Julio Fuentes in Afghanistan
were killed, I have a bit the sensation of being a
survivor.”
Recently surfing the Internet I came across a
message from Fran Sevilla which read: “I am afraid
that this war continues being an insanity that
should never have started and that it has to be
recounted so that it is not forgotten.” What does he
think of the situation now? I asked.
“I
have come to think that in the end what the invasion
was about deconstructing a state that has an
economic and military capacity, and the only one in
the region, and that is never cited in the light of
its potential development; and the only one in the
Middle East that, in addition to being enormously
rich in oil, has water, which is another natural
element that is scare in the region, and
tremendously fertile soil; it was a regional power
to be deconstructed and that is what has been done,
and this incredible chaos has been organized. Right
now there is a campaign against professionals and
university professors, because the aim is to make it
impossible to reconstruct.
“Iraq was artificially created by Britain in 1920
to protect its strategic and commercial interests in
the region and to secure the route from India, its
main colony, to the metropolis. They selected the
Kurdish north, which in theory was going to be
Kurdistan, split off from the Ottoman empire, an
independent country, the Sunni center and the Shiite
south, mixed them up and imposed a puppet king, King
Faisal, who came from the other side of the Arab
peninsula. There is an additional problem, the
United States, and while the occupation troops
continue in Iraq there isn’t going to be any
solution to the violence, so I am pretty pessimistic
in relation to that country’s future.
“I
have been in Lebanon many times. The first was when
the civil war was ending, and the last, last summer;
it has been a terrible war, savage, merciless,
extremely clearly against the civilian population,
along the same line as what the Israelis are doing
against the Palestinians. Entire districts in Beirut
and villages in the south of the country were
completely flattened; and worse, when it was known
that a cease fire was going into effect, Israel
applied itself to sowing the south with cluster
bombs.
“I
will never forget a house that was bombed and they
killed more than 50 civilians who had taken refuge
there; when they cleared away the rubble dead
mothers appeared embracing the bodies of their
children. What I felt was terrible, what a sensation
of anger, of impotence, of pain! There have been
times when I had the impulse to pick up a weapon,
but the fact is that I would lose credibility as a
journalist and I think it is better to retain that
credibility, because one more combatant can’t do
anything and one journalist can perhaps do more.”
“How can I not feel involved, to give you one
example, when I am in Palestine and see Israeli
brutality, I have always defended journalistic
commitment to the hilt and I believe that exercising
this profession, which I designate as an almost
craft trade in a very old sense of the term, above
all in covering wars.”
THREE TYPES OF WAR FOR THE MEDIA
“Wars have changed a lot,” he added, “Less than one
century ago, in World War I, 90% of those who died
were soldiers; now, 90% of those who die are
civilians. Another thing; language is fundamental, I
never talk about collateral damage, I always talk of
civilian victims, the death of innocents, and I
never say smart bombs. They are trying to impose a
series of terms on journalists in order to
manipulate the content of our articles. In my case,
I will not agree to that, I have always talked of
the invasion of Iraq, of the occupation of Iraq; I
don’t talk about the coalition, but the U.S. or
international occupation forces in Iraq. That’s very
important and for that you have to be highly-trained
and know how to choose your language correctly.”
Fran
Sevilla has never traveled to Iraq embedded with the
U.S. troops, but by his own means, in order to see
what he wants to see and not what others want him to
see.
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