On Being Kidnapped ("Daniele vs. Ajmal")

Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo has returned home to a "hero's welcome" 2 weeks after being kidnapped in southern Afghanistan. For weeks we saw Daniele's face on television, and heard his story - about being kidnapped on the road in Helmand, being bound hand and foot and forced to watch his driver beheaded, 'thinking he was next.'

Well, Daniele's back home and of course everybody's grateful he's ok. But we hear very little about his translator/fixer Ajmal, who still remains missing in Taliban hands. Ajmal was a friend and classmate of my translator Najib. I've written a fair amount about Dr. Najib in this blog. A correspondent once told me that 'you're only as good as your fixer' which is absolutely true. They interpret not just language but the outside world. They are your enabler, sometimes your protector, and they work long hours with little credit for little pay.

So here this Italian reporter does a really suicidal and stupid thing: he drives into a war zone because he wants to "see for himself" what it's like. And what happens? His 25 year old driver with 4 kids gets his head chopped off, his translator, a young university graduate, gets kidnapped and no one knows his fate, and the director of the hospital, who was the messenger between government and Taliban negotiators, has now disappeared as well. Meanwhile, in a highly-criticized exchange deal, five Taliban get released from prison, which just made it a hell of a lot more dangerous for every other journalist in this country. The price on our heads just went way up.

It reminds me of a story that Najib told me about a Canadian reporter named Quil Lawrence, actually a former IRP fellow, who reports for the BBC and was posted here in Afghanistan a few years ago. Najib is always telling stories about Quil - Quil playing guitar in the car on long road trips through the Hindu Kush, Quil skinny dipping in the Qargha Reservoir, Quil cursing like a taxi driver in Dari. So I admit I was getting a little jealous of hearing all the homage de Quil til Najib said "Do you know when I first started liking that boy?" and he told the following story:

It was June, 2002. Another very popular fixer here named Farouq was having his 27th birthday party. (Farouq later told me this was the first birthday party he ever had as an adult. Before, during the Taliban time and before that during the war years, there was never anything to celebrate.) So, this was a big party, much more than just a birthday, and everyone was invited: all the foreign correspondents, of which there were a lot more then in Afghanistan, plus all Farouq's classmates from medical school. And yes, there might have been alcohol, technically illegal in this muslim country.

Well, either it was the booze or else the presence of so many foreign women gave some neighbor a prostitution fantasy, but someone called the cops, and all of a sudden a dozen police bust the party, swinging their sticks and pushing people around. They handcuff birthday boy Farouq and try to drag him away. And the only person that stepped forward was Quil. And Quil said, according to Najib, "This is a democracy, this isn't Taliban time. If you arrest him, you arrest me." And Quil actually went with Farouq to the police station and continued to argue there. And Farouq said it saved him a beating.

See, you can't really do the foreign correspondent thing without taking risks. The problem is that when you take risks you're not only risking yourself. It's your native staff that might be in more danger. George Packer writes about this in Iraq, a brilliant article, and worth clicking on the link if only just for the headline photo. It's a scene we've seen a thousand million times before: the American-looking soldier knocking on the door of the muslim-looking citizen. But this photo adds a twist: the faceless translator whose wild eyes make the other two seem about as relevant as cardboard cutouts.