World Affairs
World view - Lindsey Hilsum defends the cameras in Beslan
Published 20 September 2004
Television journalists have been criticised for their coverage of the Beslan atrocity. What should we have done? Turned off the cameras and pretended it wasn't happening?
More than a week after leaving Beslan, I can still hear the desperate wailing - the sound of unbearable, overwhelming grief; the noise of a whole town crying. It was the men I found it hardest to take. At the funeral of Albina Budayeva and her three-year-old daughter, Valeria, a plump man in a pork-pie hat walked across the courtyard to the table where the coffins lay. He should have been a jolly man, the kind who makes everyone laugh. His big, vulnerable shoulders were heaving as he sobbed. Another man, with a round, red face, wept uncontrollably into a blue handkerchief. Albina's husband, Oleg, stood silent, in shock.
Television journalists have been criticised for the coverage of Beslan, as if somehow it was our fault that you saw such painful images. What should we have done? Turned off the cameras and pretended it wasn't happening? As the people of Beslan buried their children in a field on the edge of town, the sky darkened and the rain came down in torrents. Earth-moving machines were digging still more graves. The mourners seemed oblivious to the cameras. They were too deep in their own sorrow. These were the most public of burials, but each one was none the less unbearably private. Pall-bearers carried the coffins, some of which remained open in the Orthodox Christian tradition. I turned away as a middle-aged woman in glasses, tears mingling with the rain, leaned over the grave to kiss her son for the last time. He looked about eight. It was unspeakable. That was the moment to stop filming, and we did.
The allegations of intrusion were inevitable, and I'm sure there were occasions when we got too close. But I suspect most critics are wrestling with the pain of being impotent spectators, and projecting their discomfort on to the bereaved families. Journalists should be sensitive - I was shocked when a Russian TV crew tried to interview mourners at a funeral. When we asked if we could film the same funeral, however, the family assented. The couple who kindly accommodated the Channel 4 News team said they wanted the world to see what had happened in Beslan.
Writing in the Observer, Peter Conrad mused on whether Sky News had sent a female correspondent because she would be "more emotionally ingratiating". This is insulting to all female journalists, as well as showing absolutely no understanding of how such deployments are made. The female Sky correspondent was sent because she was in Moscow and therefore the nearest to Beslan. Her gender had nothing to do with it. Nor did mine. The serious issue is whether images distract from explanation, and whether viewers and readers can deal with explanation when emotion is at its height.
Primo Levi, the great Italian writer who survived the concentration camps, once wrote that "to understand is to justify". I struggle with that, because as a journalist, I feel I must try to understand what motivates people, however wicked their actions. A teacher at Beslan High School, who survived with her three daughters, told me that they had pleaded with the hostage-takers at least to release the babies and toddlers. She told me the hostage-takers replied: "Why should we take pity on your children when you take no pity on ours? . . . Our children are dying and no one cares."
A website connected with Shamil Basayev, the Chechen separatist leader said to have masterminded the Beslan siege, says 42,000 Chechen children have died because of Russian military operations in Chechnya. We care about children who die in one go, and whom we see on camera. We care less about children who die over a period of time in a prolonged war that has scarcely been reported. Most journalists - including myself - deem Chechnya too dangerous to cover, because the chance of being kidnapped is very high. The result is that Russian atrocities and the suffering of Chechen children have gone largely unreported. The issue is not too many cameras in Beslan, but too few in Chechnya.
We are left in a kind of moral hopelessness. Nothing can justify the murder of those children in Beslan. But President Vladimir Putin's obdurate policies in Chechnya have contributed to the brutalisation of Chechen society, enabling terrorists to justify their actions by trading numbers of dead children.
The cameras have moved on from Beslan, leaving its people to grieve. But the result is that we may not see what happens next. The danger is that armed fathers - some of whom may have contributed to the atrocity by shooting at the school in a mad effort to free their children - may take revenge on people from the neighbouring Muslim republic of Ingushetia, home to several of the hostage-takers. That, it seems, is what happens when grief turns to anger, and the murder of your children means you can justify doing anything.
Lindsey Hilsum is international editor for Channel 4 News
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