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When you’ve been a journalist and foreign correspondent for 27 years, you know a thing or two about covering wars abroad. Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East Editor, has lost track of the number, but speaking to the Politics Society he admitted that it had been a remarkable year and a privilege to explain what’s been going on. Dangerous? Of course. “A good day for us might be a final day for someone else.” Reporting on atrocities, such as describing how 4 or 5 kids playing on sledges in Bosnia had been killed, is a moral dilemma. “It can be intrusive,” he explained, “asking to film parents who’ve just lost those children; but it can raise awareness of the plight of civilians in war zones. The justification is that you’re shining a light into very dark corners of the world. Sometimes you have to look into the darkest corners to help people to understand what’s happening.”
“This year has been a year of extraordinary change,” Jeremy told us. “This year various factors came together and pushed people over the edge, first in Tunisia, then Egypt, culturally and in other ways the leader of the Arab world.” Social media allowed communication between organisers, but you can’t put the success of the rebellion down to that. “To make a protest work in Egypt you must have the support of the poor who don’t have computers.” Jeremy told us there had been doubt as to how effective the rebellion would be. “But I crossed a bridge, turned round and I had 10,000 people behind me.”
So many stories. Most people will think of Jeremy’s coup in Libya: the interview with Colonel Gadaffi in February, which, though he’d been angling for it, took him by surprise when it happened. No time to change or to prepare probing questions. Suddenly he’s bundled into a James Bond look-alike car, not to a desert meeting place but to a smart Italian restaurant, with small talk on the menu before the real interview began. “What do you say to a dictator?” he pondered. The BBC’s Middle East Editor can talk spaghetti with a dictator as well as extracting from him some irritable, defensive answers: “My people love me, they love me all.”
“This is period of irreversible change, driven by the huge demographic that 60% of the population in the Middle East is under 30. They sense they’re losing out on the bounty of their countries, they have connections with the outside world and they want a part of it. The corruption they see adds to their anger. There will be more changes to come: Syria, Iran, the Palestinian front….” Jeremy Bowen should know. The Politics Society lapped it up, then plunged into questions ranging from Sharia law, how far the revolution is revolutionary, if we have replaced one regime with another, the threat of Al Quaeda and the real meaning of the term ‘US war on terror’. It was a dynamic, heady 90 minutes.
11 October 2011
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