‘It’s important to understand that trauma is normal and positive behaviour. In Angola in 2002 I was going into these areas where the level of starvation, malnutrition and death was horrid. I went through a few nights of being unable to sleep, having bad dreams, intrusive images, panic attacks. What the counsellor said afterwards was, “Thank God you went through that. You are a human being. It is a positive reaction to a situation – a human reaction based on human compassion. It’s natural to be affected by these people. It’s like experiencing a fever: it doesn’t feel good at the time, but in reality it’s burning up bad germs inside your body. It is a positive thing. Imagine seeing that sort of suffering and degradation and not having it affect you deeply. That’s the thing to worry about.”
‘It’s also not unusual to have an overwhelming feeling of pointlessness. Looking at the big picture can be depressing. Humanitarian aid doesn’t fix a political crisis. But it can fix lives. So remember the individual instances where you helped people or affected their lives for the better. Forget the overall picture if it isn’t a positive one. Try to remember what would happen if you weren’t there.’
/ANETA’S CHOICE
Alina Gracheva is a stellar camerawoman. She has many impressive achievements to her name, but it is her report ‘Aneta’s Choice’, about a Beslan mother, that stands out. It is a story that has affected her deeply ever since:
‘By September 2004 I thought I’d seen it all and could give advice to a rookie like Rosie any day.
‘But then came the Beslan school siege.
‘It was getting dark outside when Aneta Godjieva made tea for us and finally agreed to record an interview. It was hard to believe that this prematurely aged woman was in her thirties – about my age.
‘The day before she had been a hostage stuck inside School Number 1 with her daughters – two-year-old Milena and nine-year-old Alana. And now we wanted her to tell us what had happened. She spoke enough English to tell it in her own words:
“Chechen gunmen had seized the school on the first day of classes. Hundreds of children and parents had been trapped inside for days in stifling heat with no food, water or clothes. Russian forces outside had the building under siege. The children were terrified and exhausted.”
‘Aneta continued in a simple, dispassionate tone that betrayed no emotion. “The terrorists said all the women with all the infants can go. I asked if my older daughter could take my younger daughter out, and I would stay behind instead. They said no. Either I had to stay and risk all of our lives, or leave Alana behind and save two lives. The terrorists were yelling and rushing us.”
‘Aneta had a few minutes to make her choice. Save herself and one child, leaving the other alone and scared, or stay behind and risk the lives of all three of them. She left the school carrying the infant Milena, and told her older daughter Alana to keep close to her friends.
“What would you do in my situation?” Aneta asked me, breaking the unwritten rule that the person with the camera is not supposed to be a person at all.
‘Alana was killed by a bullet in her neck, one of 186 schoolchildren who died during an armed battle that ended the siege.
“Every day I go to my dead daughter’s grave to ask her for forgiveness,” Aneta said.
‘Tears were welling up in my own eyes, but I had to keep the camera focused on Aneta. It was good material.
‘We drove back through the hot, empty streets of Beslan. They were full of the sound of human wailing; it came from behind every fence in town. What would I do if I had to make this choice? I have only one son.
‘In situations like this my brain and body go onto autopilot. I still have to finish the job – get back to the hotel, tape-edit the report and send it via satellite to CNN studios in the States in time for a prime-time show.
‘The report played out that night, and we moved on to our next story – about survivors from the siege being sent by train to a sea resort far away from the grief-stricken town to recover. But somehow the further I was getting away from Beslan, the more I felt Aneta’s pain. By the time I got to London I was a wreck. Aneta’s words kept sounding in my head. London didn’t feel like the fun party town I left just a few weeks ago.
‘It was not for the first time I’d reacted like this. I was familiar with stress and had had similar reactions to events I’d covered in the past. Most vividly I remember a scene we had filmed in the middle of the jungle near Kisangani in Congo, then still called Zaire, during the uprising that led to the fall of the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Rebels had blocked the approach to a refugee camp. There were reports of killings. Two weeks later the journalists and UN were allowed to drive on the narrow jungle road into the camps. The site looked like a horror movie: there were wounded and dead bodies on both sides of the road. A woman lying on a rug was trying to tell us something. It was not clear what she was saying, but she was pointing at the top of her head. When the camera zoomed in, instead of hair there was a round gash. It was crawling with maggots. In my mind, and in my banter with colleagues, she became ‘Mrs Maggots’. For months afterwards her image would come to me at night and keep me awake.
‘Another ghost who had haunted me was a Chechen mother, begging to borrow my driver to take her son to a hospital. A cluster bomb had blown up next to her house in a rebel-held town called Shali that was coming under regular attack from advancing Russian troops. On this sunny winter afternoon a spray of shrapnel had pierced a thousand holes in her fence, hitting her 15-year-old son. His body, still warm but clearly dead, was lying in the middle of the yard and there was no point in taking him anywhere.
“Please take him to the hospital, he is wounded,” she was insisting. Her husband shook his head and told us to leave.
“Stop it, Fatima. We don’t need a car. He is dead.”
‘Back in the 1990s I lived in or near the war zones I would cover. My husband and virtually all my friends were war reporters. It seemed the most normal sort of life. We would respond to the traumatic things we saw by drinking harder, popping Valium, making wild jokes and driving too fast. Mostly, we would respond to the pressure of work with more work – the relentless logistical task of creating television in the most remote and dangerous parts of the world. We became hyper-competitive, almost manic. And if we couldn’t stop the war or protect its vulnerable victims, we could still achieve victories by getting video images to air faster than the competition, track down a guerrilla commander for an exclusive interview, take an extra risk, go someplace the other guys wouldn’t go. Some of my friends got killed doing the job, some of them cracked up and quit. Some of them are still out there, living life in just the same way.
‘By the time I met Aneta, I was older and perhaps wiser, now living in London with a child of my own. I’d still go out into the field on assignment, but I’d struggle to summon the same mad passion to get the story at all costs. In between missions I’d be back at home with a mortgage to pay, schoolteachers to meet, rose bushes to prune and a leaking roof to fix. There isn’t much point in talking about Aneta’s choice at parties I go to. It would ruin the atmosphere. But Aneta’s story is still present in my life of buying groceries and walking the dog.