In the hours following the first reports on that grim Thursday afternoon in February, Stanford students and faculty began to wonder aloud: what did Danny Pearl die for? As a former war correspondent and casualty of combat, I think I am in a good position to answer that question.
Danny was a compassionate reporter working to help his readers understand an increasingly complex and dangerous world. In Pakistan, he was on his way to interview an extremist Muslim cleric with direct links to terrorist cells.
There are some basic realities to reporting on armed conflicts. People die in war zones—soldiers, civilians and journalists alike. Journalists must take calculated risks, and while no news story is worth dying for, sometimes things go wrong.
Three years before Danny’s abduction in Karachi, I was reporting for the Associated Press, driving in a government convoy through the embattled streets of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Our car came under fire from a teenage gunman. My friend and cameraman, Myles Tierney, was killed instantly in the hail of bullets. I was struck down by one bullet that punched through my skull and lodged inside my brain. Unconscious and partially paralyzed, I came within a whisper of losing my life. My surgeon warned my parents that I had about a 20 percent chance of surviving the first of two operations on my brain. Today I remain physically scarred—my left arm is functionless and I walk slowly with a limp. I am frequently asked, “Was it worth it?” My only answer is that I’d do it again with the prayer not to be hurt in the same way.
I took these risks in large part because of my own moral convictions. I suspect Danny had a similar motivation.
I believed then and I believe now that I had a duty as a reporter to tell the world about the mess the West and the former Soviet bloc had created in post-Cold War Africa, Asia and Latin America. As a reporter who came of age after the fall of the Soviet Union, I felt we had to know that the so-called New World Order included dozens of forgotten, regional conflicts.
On the surface, our world may seem safer without the looming threat of a superpower confrontation but, in fact, it is a far more dangerous place for the nations that were armed in the name of ideology. At present, more than 50 wars are being fought on our planet. That’s something we tend to forget here in the West, just as we overlook our complicity in these wars. For example, I have never reported on a war in Africa fought with guns made in Africa.
The United States and Great Britain armed Afghanistan’s mujahideen freedom fighters throughout the 1980s to defeat a Soviet occupation force. When the Soviets pulled out, Afghanistan was left in disarray, reeling from poverty and instability. Religious zealots from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia used this opportunity to back an insurgency that eventually ousted the government of Burhanuddin Rabbani and installed its own extremist regime, the Taliban. While reporting from Pakistan and Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, I and many other reporters covered the rise of the Taliban, which even then had very clear links to Osama bin Laden.
How can we be surprised by the current war in which we find ourselves embroiled? The warning signs were all there, reported by journalists from around the world. We just ignored them.
Danny Pearl died in vain only if we ignore his reporting and that of his colleagues.
We have honored the New York firefighters and police officers who died in the World Trade Center on September 11 as heroes, as well we should. Danny Pearl, a casualty of the same war, was equally heroic. He was on a rescue mission, too—from ignorance, misunderstanding and the blind hatred that can result from both.
Ian Stewart is a 2001-02 Knight fellow at Stanford and the author ) of Freetown Ambush, published this spring by Penguin Books Canada.
