Interview: Caroline Hawley, BBC correspondent (Evening Standard)
By David Rowan
After three years risking her life day by day, the BBC's woman in Baghdad, Caroline Hawley, can be forgiven for feeling a little on edge. The woman who brought the bloody chaos of the Iraq war into our living rooms every night - a tiny figure in a flak jacket - looks almost out of place in the bland setting of a TV Centre meeting room. A young-looking 39-year-old, her steely gaze gives some clue to the toughening experience she has been through.
She is giving her first interview during a stay in London, where she has been attending training courses and catching up with friends and family. For the first time she is prepared to talk openly about the pressures of having covered the world's most intense conflict - one which caused many hardened male correspondents to retreat while she stayed in the field.
"I was in an internet cafe yesterday when someone burst a balloon - I jumped out of my skin. Whether it's balloons popping, cars backfiring or doors slamming, sudden noises still make me jump."
The Iraq she leaves behind as she moves to the (relatively) peaceful posting of Jerusalem is, despite the removal of Saddam and its first democratic elections, "teetering on the edge of civil war". She admits that she has had enough, for now, of living on the edge.
The job has also taken its physical toll. "I got heatstroke in the summer and was delirious, wanting to die. They thought at first I might have MS. I ended up having three bags of intravenous fluid. I thought: 'Living with long-term stress is probably not good for your health.'" So next week she moves with her partner, Luke Baker, to the relative calm of Jerusalem. They met, bizarrely, during a 2003 tour of Abu Ghraib prison, hardly a location conducive to romance. "It's an odd place to meet, I know," she smiles.
Baker is a Reuters journalist, whose own dispatches have included numerous eyewitness accounts of Iraqi carnage. "I was incredibly lucky to meet him," she says, softening. As for dates, they did go to one particular favourite restaurant, but that too was later bombed.
It was while in Baghdad that she decided to write her will. "We had several-bombs go off close to the office - one at the Mount Lebanon hotel shattered our windows - and mortars were fired in our street. Then, in October, as we were driving back from covering a bomb that killed more than 100 Shiite workers, another bomb went off 20 seconds behind us. The Iraqis with us got out of the car as the police just started shooting wildly in the air, while the cameraman and I froze on the floor. But then Iraqis do seem to have a fatalism about these things."
She has a reputation as one of the BBC's most driven young reporters - "ferociously single-minded and intelligent", says one colleague. But she only became a journalist "by accident", after Newsweek's Jerusalem bureau offered her work just before the first Gulf war. "They called asking if I wanted to be a stringer [a local freelance], and I had no idea what that meant," she says. "I'd studied Arabic and Farsi at Oxford, and had gone to see Jerusalem for myself. But I was more interested in doing aid or human rights work. I'd been rather aimless."
Her father, Sir Donald Hawley, had been a career diplomat, latterly High Commissioner in Malaysia. She was born during a posting to Nigeria, and was sent to boarding school back in Britain - "not a pleasant experience", she says with a shudder. She joined the World Service and, in 1999, began reporting for BBC News out of Cairo. The Baghdad posting came in 2003.
How did a woman fare gathering the news in a Muslim society? "Sometimes it can be easier to get people to talk to you. Once we were hanging around a police station after being told to leave, when a guy came forward to talk who had been atrociously beaten up. I wonder if, had I been a man, they would have taken me more seriously and kicked me out."
Hawley's closest brush with death came when she was on holiday in Jordan last November with Luke. As they relaxed at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in "quiet, sleepy" Amman, an al Qaeda suicide bomber blew himself up in one of a series of hotel bombings that killed 60 people.
Hawley knew instantly what had happened. "There's that terrible noise that numbs you, and I remember turning around to see this ball of fire coming down the stairway," she recalls. "We ran outside, and looked for ambulances for what seemed to be one or two injured people. Finally, after we'd got an ambulance for a man who was very badly wounded, we went back inside and saw five people with terrible injuries, including a waiter who had just died being brought out on a tablecloth." She was in such shock that she forgot her first-aid training, something that still bothers her today. "My real guilt is that I wonder if I could have done more," she says. "I just didn't think of doing first aid. But afterwards it just played over and over again in my mind: 'Why didn't I put them in the recovery position? Why didn't I do anything for them?'"
Back in Baghdad there was the spiral of - often fatal - kidnappings to worry about as well as the bombs. "I knew Margaret Hassan [the aid worker killed by her captors in 2004] and the two French journalists who were kidnapped. It can't not affect you. I remember really struggling over a live report for the Six [O'Clock News] when Margaret was killed."
The only time she felt personally at risk was when, while filming in a house, her security adviser said he'd seen a car driving round showing an unhealthy interest. "So we quickly cut it short. I was lucky. But I certainly had nightmares."
The nightmares, she says, were her way of dealing with the pressures. "I remember one where I'd been kidnapped and released, and then I put on a miniskirt to walk down the street, which obviously would be an invitation to trouble." She laughs. "In another that I still remember vividly, the kidnappers had come into my bedroom with a chainsaw. They found me in my cupboard hiding behind my coats."
Why, then, did she keep going back? She was, after all, a freelance with the freedom to work elsewhere. "I'd lived in Baghdad for two-and-a-half years, so it was like going home," she says. "I was there before the war, though I was kicked out [for breaking free of her Saddam-era minders] and I was desperate to go back. I don't consider myself a war reporter - I happened to cover a country that had gone through a conflict, though at that time we hoped it would get better."
She leaves Baghdad with a degree of anger. "When I heard politicians say things were going well, it was if they were in a parallel universe," she says. "Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of the war, I don't think things needed to turn out quite as they did. It took six weeks for the Americans to pay a single civil servant, and they must have known that millions of people were relying on civil-service salaries. They had just done no planning."
She has an answer to the coalition official who accused her of being able to "smell sewage in a bed of roses": "We could smell the sewage and they couldn't, because they were all sitting in Saddam's marblefloored palace."
She joins the Jerusalem bureau as one of the BBC's rising stars. But any reputation that foreign correspondents have acquired for thrill-seeking, she says, does not apply to her. "When a bomb went off very close to the office near the end of my time in Iraq, I didn't enjoy it - I thought: 'I'm exhausted, I just don't have the adrenaline left to report on this for the next few hours.' When you've seen people blown up, when you know people who have been kidnapped, it's not sexy."
(Evening Standard, March 3 2006)
After three years risking her life day by day, the BBC's woman in Baghdad, Caroline Hawley, can be forgiven for feeling a little on edge. The woman who brought the bloody chaos of the Iraq war into our living rooms every night - a tiny figure in a flak jacket - looks almost out of place in the bland setting of a TV Centre meeting room. A young-looking 39-year-old, her steely gaze gives some clue to the toughening experience she has been through.
She is giving her first interview during a stay in London, where she has been attending training courses and catching up with friends and family. For the first time she is prepared to talk openly about the pressures of having covered the world's most intense conflict - one which caused many hardened male correspondents to retreat while she stayed in the field.
"I was in an internet cafe yesterday when someone burst a balloon - I jumped out of my skin. Whether it's balloons popping, cars backfiring or doors slamming, sudden noises still make me jump."
The Iraq she leaves behind as she moves to the (relatively) peaceful posting of Jerusalem is, despite the removal of Saddam and its first democratic elections, "teetering on the edge of civil war". She admits that she has had enough, for now, of living on the edge.
The job has also taken its physical toll. "I got heatstroke in the summer and was delirious, wanting to die. They thought at first I might have MS. I ended up having three bags of intravenous fluid. I thought: 'Living with long-term stress is probably not good for your health.'" So next week she moves with her partner, Luke Baker, to the relative calm of Jerusalem. They met, bizarrely, during a 2003 tour of Abu Ghraib prison, hardly a location conducive to romance. "It's an odd place to meet, I know," she smiles.
Baker is a Reuters journalist, whose own dispatches have included numerous eyewitness accounts of Iraqi carnage. "I was incredibly lucky to meet him," she says, softening. As for dates, they did go to one particular favourite restaurant, but that too was later bombed.
It was while in Baghdad that she decided to write her will. "We had several-bombs go off close to the office - one at the Mount Lebanon hotel shattered our windows - and mortars were fired in our street. Then, in October, as we were driving back from covering a bomb that killed more than 100 Shiite workers, another bomb went off 20 seconds behind us. The Iraqis with us got out of the car as the police just started shooting wildly in the air, while the cameraman and I froze on the floor. But then Iraqis do seem to have a fatalism about these things."
She has a reputation as one of the BBC's most driven young reporters - "ferociously single-minded and intelligent", says one colleague. But she only became a journalist "by accident", after Newsweek's Jerusalem bureau offered her work just before the first Gulf war. "They called asking if I wanted to be a stringer [a local freelance], and I had no idea what that meant," she says. "I'd studied Arabic and Farsi at Oxford, and had gone to see Jerusalem for myself. But I was more interested in doing aid or human rights work. I'd been rather aimless."
Her father, Sir Donald Hawley, had been a career diplomat, latterly High Commissioner in Malaysia. She was born during a posting to Nigeria, and was sent to boarding school back in Britain - "not a pleasant experience", she says with a shudder. She joined the World Service and, in 1999, began reporting for BBC News out of Cairo. The Baghdad posting came in 2003.
How did a woman fare gathering the news in a Muslim society? "Sometimes it can be easier to get people to talk to you. Once we were hanging around a police station after being told to leave, when a guy came forward to talk who had been atrociously beaten up. I wonder if, had I been a man, they would have taken me more seriously and kicked me out."
Hawley's closest brush with death came when she was on holiday in Jordan last November with Luke. As they relaxed at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in "quiet, sleepy" Amman, an al Qaeda suicide bomber blew himself up in one of a series of hotel bombings that killed 60 people.
Hawley knew instantly what had happened. "There's that terrible noise that numbs you, and I remember turning around to see this ball of fire coming down the stairway," she recalls. "We ran outside, and looked for ambulances for what seemed to be one or two injured people. Finally, after we'd got an ambulance for a man who was very badly wounded, we went back inside and saw five people with terrible injuries, including a waiter who had just died being brought out on a tablecloth." She was in such shock that she forgot her first-aid training, something that still bothers her today. "My real guilt is that I wonder if I could have done more," she says. "I just didn't think of doing first aid. But afterwards it just played over and over again in my mind: 'Why didn't I put them in the recovery position? Why didn't I do anything for them?'"
Back in Baghdad there was the spiral of - often fatal - kidnappings to worry about as well as the bombs. "I knew Margaret Hassan [the aid worker killed by her captors in 2004] and the two French journalists who were kidnapped. It can't not affect you. I remember really struggling over a live report for the Six [O'Clock News] when Margaret was killed."
The only time she felt personally at risk was when, while filming in a house, her security adviser said he'd seen a car driving round showing an unhealthy interest. "So we quickly cut it short. I was lucky. But I certainly had nightmares."
The nightmares, she says, were her way of dealing with the pressures. "I remember one where I'd been kidnapped and released, and then I put on a miniskirt to walk down the street, which obviously would be an invitation to trouble." She laughs. "In another that I still remember vividly, the kidnappers had come into my bedroom with a chainsaw. They found me in my cupboard hiding behind my coats."
Why, then, did she keep going back? She was, after all, a freelance with the freedom to work elsewhere. "I'd lived in Baghdad for two-and-a-half years, so it was like going home," she says. "I was there before the war, though I was kicked out [for breaking free of her Saddam-era minders] and I was desperate to go back. I don't consider myself a war reporter - I happened to cover a country that had gone through a conflict, though at that time we hoped it would get better."
She leaves Baghdad with a degree of anger. "When I heard politicians say things were going well, it was if they were in a parallel universe," she says. "Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of the war, I don't think things needed to turn out quite as they did. It took six weeks for the Americans to pay a single civil servant, and they must have known that millions of people were relying on civil-service salaries. They had just done no planning."
She has an answer to the coalition official who accused her of being able to "smell sewage in a bed of roses": "We could smell the sewage and they couldn't, because they were all sitting in Saddam's marblefloored palace."
She joins the Jerusalem bureau as one of the BBC's rising stars. But any reputation that foreign correspondents have acquired for thrill-seeking, she says, does not apply to her. "When a bomb went off very close to the office near the end of my time in Iraq, I didn't enjoy it - I thought: 'I'm exhausted, I just don't have the adrenaline left to report on this for the next few hours.' When you've seen people blown up, when you know people who have been kidnapped, it's not sexy."
(Evening Standard, March 3 2006)
posted by David Rowan at Friday, March 03, 2006
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