Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Response by Orla Guerin

Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, graduates, ladies and gentlemen.  First of all, Geoffrey, I congratulate you on your sources.  It’s a great honour and a great privilege to be with you today and frankly quite a welcome relief.  Thank you for giving me a very good reason to escape the madness of the Middle East. 

Many of you may already have fixed career plans and tempting job offers and if so I wish you every success.  But for those who are still looking for a road map and a lucky break, take heart.  Sometimes, as I know very well, the pieces can fall into place in spite of your own best efforts.  As a foreign correspondent its key to have good instincts and good timing, and a nose for being in the right place at the right time.  Which is why I was staying with friends in a remote farm house in the Irish countryside, without a telephone, when one of the biggest stories of my early career broke.  That was the coup attempt against President Mikhail Gorbachev in  Russia in August 1991. Fortunately we heard the initial reports on the morning radio news.  Now, by that time, my employers in Irish TV were frantic. They had a vague idea of what part of the country I was in, and they had taken the only action they could think of  - they had been calling every police station in the county, and had managed to persuade the Irish Guardia (the Police) to fan out across the hill tops looking for me!  Fortunately I managed to talk to the news desk from a phone in the local Post Office and the man hunt was called off.

I touched down in Russia before the sun set that day and spent the next sixty days reporting from dawn until dusk on the decline of Gorbachev, the rise of Boris Yeltsin and the collapse of the Soviet Union.  By my side through that marathon were two translators Andrei and Gallina.  They stuck it out because they believed that freedom and democracy were worth fighting for.  In the years since then I have met many others, in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East who have put their lives on the line for the same reason.  Here in Western Europe democracy has become background music, as automatic as cash dispensers and as repetitive as 24 hour news – that is to say on channels other than the BBC !   But a few hours from where we sit, other people are still struggling and dying for the kind of freedom that has become so flavourless and tasteless for many of us.

I have now spent much of the last thirteen years travelling through collapsing empires and disintegrating societies, and I should say in my own defence, that they were always in disrepair when I got there.   Among other things I have learned that no door is ever completely closed and there is almost always a way in.  When Albania started imploding after the collapse of pyramid investment schemes the BBC and many other media organisations headed for Tirana.  We touched down on a sleepy airport on a luke warm afternoon, throwing the airport police into complete panic.  They looked like they had never seen a TV set, much less a TV crew. They were clearly very frightened of  the sight of what was a huge pack of journalists, followed by about a hundred steel cases with editing and camera gear and satellite dishes.  We needed entry visas and they were too scared to give them.  Finally my producer came up with the right line.  He approached one officer conspiratorially and whispered “Don’t worry, we are here to prop up the regime.”  Five minutes later we were in.

Every conflict has its own grotesque language but there is one constant in them all – a silent army of  broken women and children, whose stories often go untold.  Modern satellite technology has made its easier for us to report from the front line of any war zone, but the world’s attention span is getting shorter, and many conflicts compete for air time.  In many cases the battles get more attention than the aftermath.  What matters as much as how many shells were fired is exactly where they fell.  For many years news reports from the besieged Bosnian capital Sarajevo contained the rather loose phrase “sporadic shelling today.”  Bland and almost comforting it suggested a crime without any victims.  As we raced around Sarajevo streets, dodging the snipers, a Bosnian friend explained it to me like this. He said “Orla, when people say ‘sporadic shelling’ they mean the shell didn’t fall on their house and didn’t kill their child.”  

In the Middle East, which is now my home,  we spend our days chasing bloodshed which is often one step ahead. Attacks can come just hours apart. The victims still lying on the ground in one place when the next bomb goes off.  Jerusalem, especially, is a city of the dead.  People killed at random on buses, in restaurants, while shopping in the market.  The coffee shop one street away from my house has a shiny gold plaque outside the door bearing the names of the eleven young people who were killed in a suicide bomb there this year. 

Across the divide Palestinian areas are now choked by Israeli troops.  Arial Sharon has reoccupied almost the entire West Bank.  So imagine this, you are a Palestinian and your wife is in labour. You want to take her to the hospital. Will Israeli soldiers let you through the road blocks ?  Maybe and maybe not. You are dying of cancer. Will you be allowed to travel for chemotherapy ?  Maybe and maybe not.   You are sitting your final exams in University and your entire future is riding on this point. All of your hopes and your plans, maybe you will get there and maybe you won’t. 

Its just a few months since I interviewed an Israeli mother who handed me the nail pulled from her daughter’s heart after a suicide attack.  Soon afterwards I interviewed a Palestinian mother, living in desperation in a refugee camp in Lebanon, dreaming of a lost home in a lost place, Palestine. She told me she wanted her son to be a suicide bomber.  “How old is he?”  I asked. With a face full of pride she smiled and said “His name is Atef and he is four.”  I asked her why she wanted this death for her only son.  “It is the way we will get our land back” she said.  Last Friday I interviewed a Palestinian father whose two young sons were killed by shells from an Israeli tank.  He showed us shaky amateur footage of the tank firing straight down the street where the boys were running away, but couldn’t run fast enough.  What will his other sons be when they grow up ? 

I have no answers for the tragedy that is the Middle East and for the moment neither does anybody else.  After a lengthy wait we finally heard the American blueprint for Israelis and Palestinians this month.  George Bush thrilled Israelis and left Palestinians almost without hope.  I find myself in rare agreement with the American commentator Thomas Friedman, who wrote many years ago: ‘when it comes to discussing the Middle East people go temporarily insane.’   Sadly policy makers are not exempt.  America’s policy is undermined by internal disputes, by arguments between the Pentagon and the State Department, and the result is an approach which down plays cause and effects, and which may only maintain the bloody status quo.

My job as a journalist is to try to find the truth between two warring people who share so much and so little; and to keep viewers watching even though the suffering drags on and little seems to change. If  instead the audience looks away - in fatigue or in frustration - that part of the Middle East failure is mine.

In the Middle East the truth is, quite literally, hard to get at.  Reporting from the West Bank involves getting through Israeli road blocks, finding back ways into closed military zones.  We have had Israeli troops confiscate our press cards and attempt to take our camera and our footage.  They have also, as Geoffrey mentioned, opened fire around us.  We had an incident earlier this year when we made our way into the city of Jenin, which had been occupied by Israeli troops. The first horrific sight that we saw was a crippled Palestinian woman sitting crying in a wheelchair in the middle of a deserted street, with Israeli troops looking on from a distance.  When we tried to move her they tried to force us back.  Eventually we managed to persuade them that this hungry, frightened woman could not be left abandoned on the middle of the street. But at this point they realised that we had caught the episode on camera, and they wanted to take our camera and our footage.  Eventually I explained to the Captain in charge that if he wanted the camera he would have to take me as well, and that I would be far too much trouble.  After two or three minutes he decided that I was right.

Working as a foreign correspondent teaches you many things. Apart from how to bribe, smuggle and navigate, and I could say lie, cheat and steal, you learn the mechanics of survival – how to drive under fire, where to hide in a gun fight and how to run in a bullet proof vest.  And if you can,  you learn how to leave each conflict behind when you get out.  But war tends to stick with you.  Ten years have passed since I met a Muslim doctor in Sarajevo who had lost his beloved wife.  He held her wedding dress in his hands, faded with age after more than twenty years. “She had eyes as blue as Elizabeth Taylor’s” he said.

The busy news agenda deletes old tragedies to make way for the new ones. These days we  prize forgetting. This is the era of war as spectacle, passively consumed, and the era of governments who treat civilian casualty tolls as dirty words. 

I hope during your time here you benefited from generosity, tolerance and patience from your lecturers, as I did from mine.  And I am sure you also learned how to question.  One of my first interviews on Irish television many years ago was with the, then, Prime Minister, Charles Haughey, and I asked him a question he didn’t like.  He leapt to his feet and glowered up at me (because I was much taller than him) and said “You cannot ask me that question – you will never work in this town again.”   It didn’t seem like a very promising beginning.  The last person to tell me I ‘couldn’t ask that question’ was the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who is also smaller than me. During an interview a month ago, he leapt to his feet and glowered up at me when I asked him why he was not taking action against Palestinian suicide bombers. The question is always there to be asked, and the duty to question belongs to us all.

All of you have earned your honours and are to be congratulated on reaching this point.  I have some advice for life from a legendary BBC camera man who has covered the globe more than once. “Work like you don’t need the money and dance like nobody’s watching !”  To it, I would add, remember the Albanian police, even if the front door seems closed there is always a back way in.

I am very honoured to receive an honorary degree from the University of Essex.  I am particularly pleased that without actually doing any course work I have managed to be associated with a University of this calibre and this reputation. Thank you very much.