War zone chronicles: Failure to react equal to complicity

By Lydia Polgreen

NEW YORK: We are living in the most thoroughly documented time in human existence. There are billions of us carrying cameras in our pockets, and the videos we make ricochet across the internet with astonishing ease: silly things, like dance moves and pratfalls, along with deadly serious things, like police officers murdering unarmed civilians or children choking on chemical weapons. And yet we see through a glass darkly. We consume a stream of snippets, served to us chopped up and sometimes algorithmically curated, often stripped of context.

It is precisely because of this never-ending stream of images that the devastating new documentary “20 Days in Mariupol” seared into my brain when I saw it in a theater recently. The film is the work of an astonishingly brave team of Ukrainian journalists who remained in the city of Mariupol at the very beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, risking their lives to document the siege.

If you paid any attention to the news from Ukraine then, you probably saw some of this team’s work. Mstyslav Chernov, a Ukrainian journalist and filmmaker, along with Evgeniy Maloletka, a still photographer, and Vasilisa Stepanenko, a field producer, documented the siege for AP. Woven into a documentary that unfolds over 95 excruciating minutes, these moments become something else: a chronicle of what it means to witness and document atrocity, the extraordinary risks these journalists took to tell these stories.

I recently returned to field reporting after a decade as an editor and media executive, working safely behind a desk and in conference rooms, to discover a changed world for journalists. The crucial concept of the neutrality of journalists in conflict, a tenuously accepted idea in the best of times, has all but vanished amid a thicket of propaganda, lies and disinformation. I have watched helplessly as friends and colleagues have been jailed, beaten and killed simply for trying to do their work with honor and integrity.

This work has always been difficult and dangerous, but it has become ever more so, most especially for journalists like those who made this film: local journalists, many of them freelancers for international organizations, covering brutal events unfolding in their own backyards.

Since 2003, about 1,700 journalists have been killed in the line of duty around the world. The deaths of Western journalists tend to get the most attention: the horror of reporters beheaded by the Islamic State group; celebrated photographers who died under artillery fire in the post-Arab Spring battle for Libya; a legendary foreign correspondent killed by government shelling in the Syrian city of Homs.

But the butcher’s bill is the longest for local journalists covering the crises in their homelands, countries like Syria, Iraq and Yemen, as well as places like Mexico, where drug cartels frequently target journalists for assassination. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, at least 17 journalists have been killed in Ukraine, 11 of them Ukrainian.

Governments are jailing more journalists, too. Last year, the number of detained journalists spiked to 363, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, in authoritarian countries like China, Eritrea, Iran and Myanmar but also in troubled democracies like Turkey. (Disclosure: I serve on CPJ’s board.) As I write this, Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has been held prisoner by the Russian government for more than 100 days for simply doing his job.

Last month, I went to the borderlands between Sudan and Chad to report on the crisis engulfing Darfur. I have visited the area many times, even crossing the border on foot to try to document war crimes in Sudan when the Sudanese government refused to permit me to enter Darfur legally. These days, the region has become so lawless, and respect for the vital work of journalists so meaningless, that I was required by Chadian authorities to travel with a security detail.

So it is not surprising that images like the ones captured in “20 Days in Mariupol” feel so vanishingly rare.

Despite the exceptional courage of the team and the remarkable scenes they capture, a feeling of futility hangs over the film. It’s not hard to understand why. Most of us got into journalism hoping to change the world. Surely, showing atrocities will lead to action. But the more common pattern is this: A horror is revealed, and then, for a long time, not much happens.

The revelation that Syria’s dictator, Bashar Assad, had used chemical weapons that maimed and killed children brought global condemnation but little action. Today, the regional foes who once swore to isolate and remove Assad from power are beckoning him back into the fold of acceptable autocrats. I asked Chernov about this. A few times in the documentary, he mentions being apart from his young daughters. Each day in Mariupol risked a greater chance he might never see them again. If he was so unsure of the impact of his work, why stay?

“If you don’t do anything, you also feel like a criminal,” Chernov said. “Like you are helping the killers. You are helping the criminals to continue to do their crimes. And I can’t. After all we lived through, this is not something I can do. I am aware that my efforts are not as productive as I would want them to be. But still, at least, at least do something.”

As he spoke, I thought of another journalist I admire, working half a world away. Hiba Morgan, a journalist of Sudanese and South Sudanese origin, is one of the few reporters still working in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. She is the correspondent for Al Jazeera, and with her team, she has documented at great peril the street-by-street fight between two rival generals and their troops to control the city and the country.

Chernov’s film left me feeling something that was quite the opposite of futility. Morgan, like Chernov, is a journalist committed to going to and staying in the hard places, the painful ones, and telling the stories of the people she finds there. These brave journalists do this work not because they think they can make an immediate difference, but because doing nothing in the face of such cruelty is intolerable. Their work is humbling, inspiring and necessary. It demands and requires our rapt attention.