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Feels weird, though, to be talking about ‘appropriate dress’. I’d just come back from Kuwait; for tiresome medical reasons I’m now considered unfit for combat zones. Frankly, I wasn’t particularly fit last time round, 12 years ago, in the first Gulf war; my army instructor timed me trying to get into my gas mask and Nuclear, Biological and Chemical protection suit in nine seconds. ‘Oh dear, Ms Leslie,’ sighed the Scottish sergeant, ‘you were dead about seven minutes ago.’
Like everyone else, I’m glued to ‘rolling news’ and, as a foreign correspondent, I feel oddly guilty about not being there. I tell myself that for decades I’ve been involved in conflicts all over the world, been sniped at, mortared, seen the bodies, examined entry and exit wounds, so don’t need to prove my credentials in that area any more. And yet…. Perhaps it’s because foreign correspondents feel they belong to the same tribe. We all, of course, have fierce intra-tribal conflicts, but whenever one of our fellow tribesmen or women is threatened by outsiders – local gangsters, enemy troops, government spinners, religious fanatics – we spring to each other’s defence. Leaving Kuwait felt to me like tribal desertion. Mind you, my fellow tribespersons, who are usually fuelled by a combination of adrenaline and booze, were already having a hard time even before a single mortar was fired. Muslim Kuwait is ‘dry’ and the non-alcoholic Budweiser on sale achieves the impossible: it gives you a quivering hangover while at the same time depriving you of the booze hit. One fellow hack mused, ‘This stuff should be banned under the chemical weapons treaty.’ We all laughed, and then fell silent. Jokes about chemical weapons suddenly didn’t seem so funny after all.
On Wednesday night, Index on Censorship held its annual awards ceremony. I was on the panel of judges, a token non-leftie – my fellow panellists included Sir David Hare, Ursula Owen and Sheena McDonald. I’d expected some fireworks between us, but mostly we were remarkably united. I did throw a bit of a wobbly about the evils of ‘moral equivalence’ when one of our number nominated the American Library Association, which is under pressure from assorted fundamentalist right-wing loonies. How on earth can you compare the trivial ‘ordeals’ of American librarians with the grotesque persecution of men like the Iranian Dr Hashem Aghajari (one of our winners) who was sentenced to death for speaking out against the rule of corrupt Islamic clerics? (I was, of course, delighted to present the unanimous award for Services to Censorship to Zimbabwe’s so-called ‘minister of information’, Jonathan Moyo.)
Back to the war. ‘Military incompetence’ is a favourite theme of newspaper commentators opining from the safety of their office eyries. Good thing the military doesn’t expose journalism’s own incompetences. One national newspaper supplied its correspondents with up-to-the-minute NBC suits. When the chaps opened their protective kits in Islamic, anti-Israeli Kuwait, they found that the suits were plastered with Hebrew lettering. Someone in their procurement department must have purchased a job lot from the Israeli Defence Force. We promptly nicknamed their chief reporter in the desert, a jolly Irishman, ‘Yossi’. Good luck ‘Yossi’, Dave, Jamie, Richard, Keith, Cavan, Ross, Bob and all the rest of my fellow tribespersons. Let’s hope we share a few thoroughly alcoholic Budweisers soon.
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