The Story of a Fixer

Editorial

This article appeared in the August 17, 2009 edition of The Nation.

July 29, 2009

In these days of the disappearing newspaper, we hear a lot about the invisible costs of newsgathering. Sometimes the invisible cost is a life. Ian Olds's haunting documentary Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi, which airs on HBO August 17, reveals how the story of a war gets told: the brokering of deals so that an interview can take place; the bridging of vast distances in language, culture and geography between Western reporter and native source. In this process, a fixer is more than a facilitator. He is the conduit, a vital link in the chain that ultimately connects an audience--in this case, the largely American readers of this magazine--to fighters on the front lines of a war being waged in their name.

The Nation's Christian Parenti is the Western reporter in the film. Parenti hired Ajmal Naqshbandi in October 2004 when he first went to Kabul to write about the US occupation of Afghanistan. He stayed at Naqshbandi's guesthouse, along with "an anarchic mix of foreign reporters, contractors and other unidentified free agents," as he wrote in an award-winning piece about Naqshbandi published in Playboy. Naqshbandi helped him on all of the Afghanistan stories he wrote for The Nation in the wake of the US invasion: "Who Rules Afghanistan" (November 15, 2004); "Afghan Poppies Bloom" (January 24, 2005); "Afghanistan: The Other War" (March 27, 2006); and "Taliban Rising" (October 30, 2006).

It was Naqshbandi who enabled Parenti to interview Taliban fighters face to face on the desolate Zabul-Kandahar province border for "Afghanistan: The Other War." In a film rife with tension, that encounter makes for one of the most rattling scenes: several nervous Talibs cradle their guns, hanging back warily while Parenti shouts out his questions: "How does the Taliban sustain itself? Does it receive support from Pakistan?" The Taliban leader answers bluntly: "Yes, Pakistan stands with us. And on that side of the border we have our offices. Pakistan is supporting us. They supply us. Our leaders are there collecting help." The ominous approach of a reconnaissance plane ends the interview. As their car speeds away, Parenti pronounces Ajmal "the best fixer in Afghanistan" and himself "the most relieved American reporter in Afghanistan."

Movie Review: 'Burma VJ': Documentary on Brutal Repression of Protesters in 2007

By Desson Thomson
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, July 31, 2009

It was pitchforks at the Bastille, muskets at Concord, Mass., and rocks at the Intifada. But in this age of instant dissemination, the cellphone video has become the revolutionary weapon of choice.

We see this most palpably in "Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country," a documentary that uses a mixture of real and fictional footage to revisit Burma's brutal reprisals against its own people in 2007. In August and September of that year, many Burmese rose in protest against the government's sudden hiking of gasoline prices. Those public demonstrations were spontaneous and scattered. And the government dealt harshly with them. But when Burmese monks -- considered sacrosanct in this culture -- joined the growing ranks, the conflict was drawn more sharply. The stakes got higher for both sides. And the cellphones started recording.

"I decided that whatever happened to me, I would do it," says "Joshua," the narrator of Anders Ostergaard's movie, justifying the dangerous decision to film as much as he could, and show it to the world. Joshua is the movie's only fictional element, a composite character meant to represent all the unnamed people who risked their lives to hold their government morally accountable.

Filmed by members of the Democratic Voice of Burma, a collective of underground video journalists (the VJ in the title), these scenes were smuggled to the outside world, processed in a studio in Oslo, transmitted around the world and -- significantly -- shown to the people of Burma (renamed Myanmar by the ruling junta).

"Joshua" may be made up, but the footage we see is indisputably real. Some of it is poignantly subtle, like the taxi driver who states he'll support this growing revolution if it takes off. In the context of these dangerous times, when government informers are everywhere, such a public declaration amounts to bravado. More obviously courageous is the spectacle of emboldened, head-shaven monks in red robes as they defy curfew orders and march in numbers through the streets as armed troops mass.

There is, of course, bravery from the unseen people behind the lens who could be killed merely for owning recording devices. Thanks to them, we can patch together the heartbreaking chronicle of popular demonstration and government brutality during those significant months. Fragmentary images -- filmed surreptitiously from hidden vantage points or concealed within clothes -- show palpable fear in the streets. They show beatings. And we realize we are sitting in the jittery eye of an evil, gathering storm.

The movie also provides a momentary, grainy glimpse of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning, pro-democracy activist. There she is, standing in the doorway of the house that has famously become her prison on and off since 1989. She is expressing solidarity for the demonstrators who have just marched to her home. It's a moving scene because we know that even today she faces indefinite home detention. The following day, the violence begins in earnest, and the video journalists -- nameless but unified in their determination -- are there to film it.

Of course, we have seen this kind of electronic activism more recently in Iran. But for the cellphone journalists of Tehran, we'd know little about the popular uprising that followed the country's disputed election. And we'd know nothing of Neda, the young woman whose videotaped -- and eternally replayed -- death has become the movement's most iconic moment.

As we watch "Burma VJ," and other documentaries like it, we can sense the beginnings of a paradigm shift in the way history is written, and the way the meekest can become empowered. Citizens no longer need to tell their sad stories to their children and grandchildren over a generation. They can inform the world immediately. Thanks to the new guerrilla narrative, the world has a constant flow of images to file in its collective consciousness. And that camera-testable accountability slowly becomes a global civic right that fulfills the noblest purpose of journalism -- to bring truth to power.

Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country (84 minutes, at Landmark's E Street) is not rated and contains real images of brutal repression. In Burmese and accented English with subtitles.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073003914.html