|
Magazine
The journalist as protagonist
AJIT DUARA
|
Winterbottom’s “A Mighty Heart” gives Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping and murder a political context that is global rather than regional.
|
PHOTO: AFP
Quasi documentary: During a shoot for “A Mighty Heart” based on the life of Daniel Pearl.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported the death of a Karachi businessman, Saud Memon, who died after interrogation by American and Pakistani intelligence earlier this year. Apparently Memon became a suspect because he owned the
plot where the journal’s South Asian Bureau Chief, Daniel Pearl, was executed on February 1, 2002 after being kidnapped. The book on Pearl, A Mighty Heart, written by his wife Marianne has been published and the movie adaptation by director Michael Winterbottom was released this year. But clearly, the story of Daniel Pearl malingers.
Dangerous consequences
The journalist as movie hero, sometimes tragic hero, is an inevitable part of any society that includes news as a consumer product. But what is its impact on the individual reporter? When the reporter becomes the reported, the consequences can be dangerous.
Daniel Pearl, who was based in Mumbai, shifted to Karachi sometime after 9/11. His abduction and murder while on a wild goose chase to a set-up interview that never materialised, dominated Pakistan-related matters in early 2002, at least as far as the Americans were concerned. It was the year of living dangerously, to quote the title of a Peter Weir movie set in the political turmoil of Indonesia in 1965. But that film was based on a novel. Pearl is involved in a far more brutal struggle in Pakistan and with consequences that make a direct link between politics and the media.
Interestingly, Winterbottom’s film, “A Mighty Heart”, implies that it is the treatment of political prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that is responsible for Pearl’s death. It also suggests that Pearl’s Jewish-American origin — the fact that a street in Israel is named after his great-grandfather — drives his kidnappers to murderous rage. This gives the film a political context that is global rather than regional. It imputes an international hardline Islamic perspective to the kidnapping of a journalist. Could this, in fact, have been the case?
We know that in the months following 9/11 the heat on the Government of Pakistan was oven hot. The kidnapping of an American journalist, otherwise a case that could have been handled by the U.S. Consulate in Karachi with assistance from the local police, suddenly became part of the “war on terror”. The then Secretary of State, Colin Powell, urged his chief ally, General Musharraf, to take tough action and secure the journalist’s immediate release. And tough action it was. Raids were conducted, the usual suspects rounded up and torture of prisoners to extract information on the whereabouts of Pearl was given the okay.
Moot points
PHOTO: AFP
Could the turning up of the heat, out of proportion to the case, have panicked or enraged the kidnappers to take the sudden and extreme step of killing Pearl on video camera? Had the Pakistani police been allowed to take their own measures, albeit slower and less efficient, to discover where Pearl was, would it have resulted in his ghastly murder? Had the Federal Government of Pakistan not allowed itself to be put under such high pressure by the Americans, would the kidnappers have put the knife to Pearl instead of perhaps negotiating? Had the international media not placed its relentless spotlight on the case of Daniel Pearl, could he possibly have escaped being such a high value target and been spared by his kidnappers? These are moot points, not raised in the film at all, and here lies the film’s intellectual dishonesty.
Let us take an almost exact contemporary example of the kidnapping of a Western journalist by an Islamic group. On March 12, 2007, the BBC man in Gaza, Alan Johnston, was taken prisoner by a fringe Palestinian group called the “Army of Islam”. He was a hugely popular journalist, sympathetic to the Palestinian position, and so both the BBC and the British Government decided to keep all channels of communication open.
At the time Hamas and Fatah were virtually at war, and fears were that Johnston might easily be killed in the crossfire and the bitter tug of war. But as luck would have it, Hamas took control of Gaza, and this organisation, condemned by Israel and the Bush administration as ‘terrorists’, used its clout and firepower to force the fringe Palestinian group to release the journalist on July 4, 2007, after four months in captivity. It was a near thing but the fact is that Alan Johnston is today a free man because excessive pressure without negotiating options was not the chosen policy.
When a journalist becomes the news it complicates and short circuits the wiring of information services. The media, particularly the electronic media, tends to lose perspective on the issue and goes into overdrive to project an assault on its tribe. This can often backfire, as it most certainly did in the case of Daniel Pearl.
More objective angle
One would have felt that, five years after Pearl’s death, when a noted Hollywood director decides to tell his story, he would choose an angle that is more objective, an angle that tells the story of what happens, not just to an American journalist and his pregnant wife, but to a nation, a leadership and a civil society when it is forced to join a ‘war on terror’ on the terms, conditions, and charters defined by the U.S. administration. Surely the fact that director Winterbottom was forced to shoot most of his film in India and create Karachi by setting up base in Pune and Mumbai would have told the makers something about the kind of country Pakistan has been turned into.
And if it had, “A Mighty Heart” would perhaps have been a different movie. Not a quasi-documentary on a ridiculously self-obsessed “rent a cause and save the world” woman played by Angelina Jolie, but a political film on a nation in crisis. Something like the depth of analysis that a Costa Gavras brings to a film like “Missing” (1982) and to a country like Chile on another 9/11, September 11, 1973 when Salvador Allende’s democratically elected Government was overthrown.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
|
