The personal cost of war journalism

A Marriage in Wartime

Author: Anjan Sundaram

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Price: Rs 699   
Pages: 208

Anjan Sundaram, war correspondent, has made a home in Shippagan, a small coastal town in Canada, with his wife Nat – also a war correspondent once, whom he had met in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – and their newborn daughter, Raphaëlle. Despite being an outsider to Acadian life and unaccustomed to harsh winters, having grown up in Dubai, he found comfort in the love and security of his family. But he is at heart a journalist, making it harder for him to accept a quiet life.

Dedicated “to journalists everywhere whose work has cost them,” his recent book, Breakup, is a story of balancing one’s duties at home and work. Neither is easy. As much as it is a story of the personal cost of war, Breakup is also the story of the horrors of war that often go unrecorded. Sundaram is determined to risk himself, his family life and his future to access the stories that do not reach the world.  
 

In 2013, the Yale graduate and award-winning author of Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship (2016) and Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo (2013) discovered the barbarity of the civil war between Muslims and Christians in Central African Republic (CAR) – the “world’s most isolated major war”. CAR’s struggle (and its consequent violence) had been an African reality for centuries, and yet its past and present had been unreported, dismissed and omitted from mainstream journalism. “People know more about the moon, than of this war,” he writes.  

After multiple flights through Rwanda, Ethiopia and Cameroon, Sundaram and his old friend Lewis Mudge, an investigator for the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, with the help of a local reporter, Thierry Messongo, reach the capital city of CAR, Bangui and then Gaga, one of the centres of the war.

They find CAR to be a scene of roofless houses in a dry landscape; of “ghost towns” and mass graves washed out with disinfectants; of disconnected radio antennas and dead networks; of mindless but planned massacres; of dense forests and angry and unforgiving people; of survivors isolated in the “refuge of anonymity”. While teenagers proudly wave guns here, there are also the saviours, like the Italian nuns who let hundreds of people in and feed them.

Facing death and loot, the small team continues to get as deep as it can to the atrocities of the war and meet its perpetrators as well as its victims. In this civil war, no religion is safe; both adherents bleed and get killed – Muslims at the hands of the Christian Anti-Balaka rebels, and Christians at the hands of the Islamic Seleka supporters. Despite their contempt for one another, they share a goal: of ethnic cleansing and of restoring the power each believes they historically deserve.

“Justice became personal and imaginary. Central Africans kill those they imagine are guilty of crimes, and those whom they imagine will be guilty of crimes,” Sundaram writes.

Originally published as a shorter piece in Granta under the title, “A place on earth: Scenes from a war”, Sundaram’s reportage won the 2015 Frontline Club Award.

Breakup, however, is more than an eye-opening ground report of a war. It is also about the residual, silent trauma that he carries back home. The hope of his family had kept him going in the war-trodden country. On his return, as the rush of war eases, he notices the breakdown of his marriage. It is the only time in the book that Sundaram lets his emotions show on paper, bringing his third memoir to a sad end.

CAR is still what Sundaram witnessed years ago, perhaps even worse: a rich country with poor people; its gold, oil and diamond resources going to waste – or being poached for illegal use – in this prolonged conflict.

The dark reality of the geopolitical space that Sundaram discovered in his brief time there still holds true: some lives are worth more than others. Headlines are still made and forgotten. Like CAR, the distant echoes of Ukraine, Syria, or closer home, Manipur, resonate, then fade over time. The difference, though, is that the world has more global access to news, which is in a dire need for improvement, as Sundaram mentions in a piece he wrote earlier this year for Foreign Policy, “Why the world’s deadliest wars go unreported”. He points out the gaps in the Global South’s news coverage and their dependence on American and European news agencies for updates on world events.

Many contemporary journalists have raised similar concerns. For instance, in her acceptance speech for the Rashtriya Patrakarita Kalyan Nyas Award, 2022, Palki Sharma Upadhyay, known for her previous primetime show on WION (World is One), reminded us that “the world today is a grand storytelling competition. It is important to tell (our) stories in the right manner because stories sway people; they change the course of policies, politics, and indeed, the world”. She recollected her favourite example of this from World War II, when in 1945, America had prepared a list of target cities in Japan on which to drop the atom bomb. US Secretary of War Henry L Stimson had decided Kyoto should be spared. Having seen the culture and beauty of Kyoto on his honeymoon, he did not want it destroyed. “The story of Kyoto won and the story of Nagasaki and Hiroshima lost that day,” Upadhyay said.

There are, of course, other political and theoretical connotations to this story; it is, nonetheless, an important reminder that stories save people. Perhaps, CAR could have been saved, too, had its story been told earlier.