written by: Anna Callaghan
Last August, on a street corner in Salahedin, Syria, journalist Niklas Meltio watched three rebel fighters get slaughtered right next to him. Nothing remained of two of the men; the third lay bloodied on the ground gasping for air. After completing a course in battlefield first aid in October, Meltio wonders if there was anything he could have done.
The group had been standing near the front lines when a passing opposition tank shelled the corner, a reminder of the unpredictability of violence and the need to know how to act in its presence.
Budgets for news organizations are declining and foreign correspondents and bureaus are often the first to be cut. News outlets that once backed staff journalists reporting from overseas with infrastructure and training now rely on freelancers who tend to be untrained and inexperienced in covering conflict zones. This is dangerous both because of the quality of reports coming from war zones and because they are taking incredible risks.
Meltio, a freelance photojournalist based in Finland, has photographed conflict in Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and most recently, Syria.
“That’s where the conflict and the crisis culminates,” Meltio said. The front line, he said, marks the intersection between history and suffering. “In order to show what’s really going on, I have to be there.”
Nicole Tung, a photojournalist who has always been drawn to conflict reporting, has been covering Libya and Syria since the beginning of the Arab Spring in 2011. She confronted the reality of war on April 20 of last year when her friends and colleagues, Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, were killed in Libya.
“I’ve always sort of lived with a guilt,” said Tung who, nearby when they were injured, still wonders if there was anything she could have done. “I feel like I owed it to both Chris and Tim to go better prepared into conflict areas.”
Meltio and Tung are two of many freelancers who entered a conflict zone with no formal training, just the type of person that Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC) is targeting.
Journalist Sebastian Junger founded RISC in 2011 after Hetherington was killed. Junger later learned that, though Hetherington’s injuries were severe, he might have been saved if someone around him had been trained in first aid. But, like most freelance journalists in the field today, none of them were.
“Now that the money has dried up, the news organizations are relying more and more on freelancers,” Junger said. Formal news organizations typically provide hostile environment and medical training to prepare staff journalists for what they might encounter. This type of training is often prohibitively expensive for freelancers.
“I have to eat,” said Meltio, who attended RISC’s second training session at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York City in October.
Formal training is expensive, but organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists are making an effort to help journalists protect themselves. Their online handbook has extensive information for journalists who are headed into conflict zones. The guide covers topics including preparedness, risk assessment, information security and comprehensive gear checklists. They have links to training courses and other safety guides produced by journalism organizations. The number of informal ways to acquire knowledge is notable, however, it does not eliminate the need for formal training.
For months after Hondros and Hetherington were killed, Tung could not pick up her camera. Tung completed RISC’s inaugural session in April. When she finally went back to the front lines, it was sobering.
“I began to believe that we shouldn’t be going into conflict zones without knowing how to deal with an emergency situation,” Tung said. “There are no more excuses.”
RISC provides three-day training in battlefield first aid for experienced and published journalists. Each training session costs anywhere from $30,000-$50,000 and is paid for entirely by donations and at no charge to the participants.
Deputy director of RISC, Lily Hindy, said the course consists mainly of hands-on drills run by combat medics. It is designed to teach students how to assess a situation and to give them the skills to deal with it.
Bleeding out is the number one most preventable battlefield death. At RISC the issue relates to Hetherington.
“The point is to stabilize the person and keep them alive until they can get to a hospital,” Junger said, adding that in most warzones there are doctors around. “You have to just get them from the battlefield to a doctor, and we don’t really need to teach more than that.”
Hostile environment training, something RISC does not provide, focuses on preparing journalists for situations they may face in the field. The courses range in length and cost, but are designed to make journalists more aware of their surroundings and learn how to approach reporting from war zones. Common lessons include navigating landmines, how to recognize different types of ballistics and what to do if ambushed. Most include segments on first-aid, but medical training is not the main focus like it is at RISC.
“Those are all extremely useful things to know,” Hindy said, “but what would have saved Tim was if someone knew how to stop the bleeding from his wounds.”
Battlefield medicine, unlike hostility training, is not something journalists can learn as they go. Junger recalls that while shooting the documentary “Restrepo” in Afghanistan with Hetherington, their hostile environment training came by working in a hostile environment. Anyone can get wounded in a conflict zone, whether they’ve had the training or not; the point then becomes whether or not someone can save their life once they have been injured.
“You’re not going to learn how to stop an arterial bleed,” said Junger of hostility training courses. “We’re focusing on the most critical need.”
The training, at no cost to the participants, and the valuable skill set are what drew Niklas Meltio to the training program, while Tung attended for more personal reasons.
“You get used to the ‘bang bang’ and the circumstances,” Meltio said. Over the course of three days, he learned skills that gave him greater confidence to act in the field if necessary.
“This will actually determine if you’re going to make it home or not. It’s the best insurance you can have in this world,” Meltio said.
Though Tung hasn’t had to use what she’s learned to help any colleagues, she did try to help wounded Syrians when a shell landed close to a building she was in.
“You’re learning a lot of information,” Tung said. “I was surprised how I knew what to do. Things just become instinctual.”
RISC looks for people like Meltio and Tung when selecting candidates to participate in the course. It has received around 300 applications so far and have trained 48. Each applicant is vetted by Peter Bouckaert, director of emergencies at Human Rights Watch, who ensures that admitted candidates have experience working in a war zone.
“The ideal candidate is someone who has been in conflict zones before and just doesn’t have any training,” Hindy said, reiterating that the organization wants people who are going to make a life out of war reporting. The point is to “get them out of the field, get them trained and send them back.”
Ideally Junger and Hindy would like to run RISC training four times a year. Holding one in each New York City and London, with Istanbul, Nairobi, and Bangkok being other potential sites. The idea is to get as close to modern conflict zones as possible.
This relies on staffing and fundraising capabilities as RISC is completely sustained by outside donations, many of which were one-time contributions to get the organization off the ground.
“The more we expand, the more it costs us,” Junger said when speaking about the uncertain future of the organization, though he believes the importance of freelancers has the power to attract additional funds.
“Most of the reporting in warzones comes from freelancers and we all rely on that information,” said Junger. “God forbid we don’t know what’s going on over there.”
RISC is designed to keep reporters and their colleagues inside conflict zones, and to keep them alive. Life on the front lines is not easy. Insurance is costly and financial return on investment is low for most freelancers. In that environment you’re only as good as your last story, taking risks is part of the job description and you’re essentially on your own.
“We have no editors to bounce ideas off of. The quality kind of slips,” Tung said when speaking about the reports coming out of conflict zones today. “You’re relying so much on your own knowledge, your own experience, your own instincts and the local people that help you.”
The newspaper industry has experienced 23 consecutive quarters of decline, and as shrinking budgets make covering even state capitols difficult, coverage of foreign capitals becomes a luxury. The New York Times announced this week that they’re seeking 30 managers to accept buyouts. Executive editor, Jill Abramson, said their attempts to cut expenses through leases on national and foreign bureaus haven’t been enough to maintain the current size of the newsroom.
The New York Times has 24 foreign bureaus, 13 of which have only one reporter, and the others have between two and five. According to a study done in July by the American Journalism Review, 10 newspapers and one chain employ 234 correspondents to cover the world. And twenty newspapers and companies have cut their foreign bureaus entirely since 1998.
Newspapers are attempting to navigate the turbulent landscape of the media industry. This new environment calls for new organizations to fill the void created by the absence of formal newspaper infrastructure abroad. Like many other similar organizations, RISC was born out of new needs within the industry.
By safeguarding the reporters who brave the front lines, RISC attempts to preserve the information coming from corners of the world that would otherwise go unnoticed.
“Newspapers are relying more and more on freelancers. It’s up to the news organizations to be a part of that and support us,” Tung said.
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Anna is currently working towards her Master of Arts in International Relations and Journalism at New York University. Check out her personal blog and be sure to follow her on Twitter!
