Breaking the mold, picking up the pieces and recreating reality: Iraqi sculptor-turned-reporter Ahmed Fadaam encourages Elon student journalists to retain curiosity

By Hannah Williams
Oct. 23, 2008

ELON, N.C. – Ahmed Fadaam set aside his clay and took up reporting when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 to keep an accurate account of the war that rages still in his home country.

Fadaam urged students to seek out the truth report it honestly in creative detail to maintain an informed public in a reporting class at Elon University Wednesday.

Detail-oriented sculptor embraces journalism

“Art was my life, I was not trying to be the man who chased stories,” Fadaam said. He said he wanted to remain in Iraq to witness the events in his homeland so that he could relay a first-hand account of what happened there to his children.

Reporting was a natural extension of his artistic background, Fadaam said. He credited his insatiable curiosity and attention to detail for his journalistic success.

This accidental reporter started working as a translator for NPR’s The Connection hosted by Canadian journalist Dick Gordon, went on to run the video desk for the Agence France Presse and concluded his journalism career in Iraq as the newsroom supervisor of the Baghdad Bureau for The New York Times. 

Fadaam became an unpopular person with his countrymen, as his reporting work for the western media affiliated him with the U.S.-led invasion.

“After a while, it became unimportant whether you were working with the French or the Americans. Everyone is American.”

Despite the hostilities he encountered, Fadaam won numerous awards for his reporting in 2007: a New York Festivals Gold World Medal and a UN Silver Award for his radio coverage, a Gabriel Award for his national news coverage and an Edward R. Murrow Award for continuing coverage. 

Watch Fadaam explain how being an artist led to being a journalist and the challenges he faces as such. 

Artistic ambassador reports from across the Atlantic

Fadaam left his home in Iraq, relocated his family to Syria and moved to the United States last May to take up a visiting fellowship at the University of North Carolina. He’s continued to work in media, recording pod casts for Ahmed’s Diary, a blog for Dick Gordon’s The Story.

“As long as you are doing your job, and you believe in it, and you know that you are telling the truth and people will listen to you, then it’s not important [the resistance you face]. Keep doing what you are doing.”

A man in Baghdad once asked Fadaam why he was working with the media. Fadaam responded that the media only portray one side of Iraqi society – looters and destroyers. He said he wanted to show the capable side of the society.

Writing for the media can be a form of resistance itself, said Fadaam. It can be patriotism.

“When you want to fight back, you can do it with words. With bringing facts. With telling the world what they are missing,” Fadaam said.

Open communication is necessary to bring healing

“Iraq is not Saddam,” Fadaam said. He explained that there are a lot of misconceptions about Iraqis in America and about Americans in Iraq.

Americans know very little about the Iraqi culture outside of Hussein’s regime, and Iraqis know very little about America outside of the violence they’ve seen in Hollywood movies and during the invasion and occupation.

“Try to talk to each other away from policy, away from government, away from war,” Fadaam encouraged. “People to people.”

Fadaam suggested these stereotypes could be overcome if people were more informed and understood the difference between a public and its government.

Changing media landscape breeds distrust and confusion

Before the war, Fadaam said, there were only three newspapers and two TV stations, all government-owned.

Now, there are over 150 newspapers and from 70 to 80 TV stations, said Fadaam, each owned by a competing political party.

“They [Iraqis] don’t know who to trust,” Fadaam said. “Who’s telling the truth? Whom to follow?”

Patriotism melds with art and communication

Fadaam, haunted by images of death and destruction, gave up sculpting for a while. He has returned to his clay and said he hopes to continue to report as well.

Fadaam is currently constructing a life-size statue depicting the struggle of women in the Middle East as a gift for Elon University.

 “Clay is like a germ, it’s like a disease. Once it gets you, you can’t get rid of it,” Fadaam said. “Journalism is the same.”

War reporting trying, but necessary, says Jurate Kazickas at Elon University

War reporting trying, but necessary, says Jurate Kazickas at Elon University
Female reporters fought to cover war

By Hannah Williams
Oct. 9, 2008

 

At age 24, Jurate Kazickas quit her job at Look Magazine, took her $500 prize money from the game show Password, secured a press card and bought a plane ticket to the war zone that was Vietnam. The year was 1967.

Kazickas authored a chapter in War Torn, a compilation of stories from female correspondents in Vietnam. She offered the book for $5 at Elon Thursday and donated the profits to Elon's School of Communications.

Kazickas, drawing on her own personal experience reporting from Vietnam, spoke about female war correspondents from World War II to Iraq at Elon University Thursday.

In Vietnam, as a freelance journalist, Kazickas said she wanted to focus on the fighting man.

“What was it like to be in a war you don’t understand? To have to kill somebody that you don’t even know?”

Kazickas said she often went the opposite direction of the high profile combat missions. She couldn’t – and didn’t wish to – compete with the major players, covering the major stories, she said.

During the war, she mostly wrote “hometowners” – stories about the “grunts”, 18- to 19-year-old soldiers, she met in combat and submitted to their local papers. A rewarding experience, she said.

Close call at Khe Sanh

She abandoned her rule of avoiding major press hot spots for the opportunity to cover the battle at Khe Sanh.

“I hadn’t been there for more than 24 hours when an artillery shell came over with my name on it,” Kazickas said. “I made the fundamental mistake of running to the nearest foxhole,” she explained – when she should have ducked for cover – and in the process was hit by flying shrapnel.

Kazickas’s pride suffered the worst blow, she said.

“When a marine is wounded, the first thing you do is strip all your clothes off,” Kazickas explained. As a female reporter traveling with marines, the doctors were tentative to have her bare all.

“Sure enough,” she said. “I had a piece of shrapnel in my rear end.”  The doctors cleared the tent to remove the fragment.

Utterly humiliated, Kazickas asked, “Is it below my bikini line?”

She didn’t shed a tear until a soldier looked at her face filled with shrapnel and said, “Your days in showbiz are over” – assuming since she was a woman in Vietnam, she must be a showgirl.

A single tear rolled down her cheek, she said.

Enough war for one lifetime

Kazickas said she wanted to remain in Vietnam after recovering from her injury, which left no permanent damage, but returned to the States shortly thereafter.

“It wasn’t the same after that, I was really, really scared,” she said. “The next time I was in a fire fight I just found myself shaking.”

Kazickas said she went to Vietnam in favor of the war, growing up in a fiercely anticommunist Lithuanian household, but returned feeling the effort was futile.

“The daily in and out of death just killed me,” she said.

Why cover war?

Kazickas said she was drawn to Vietnam because, “It was the biggest story. It was the only story. It was on the front pages every day.”

Although she said that one war was enough for her, Kazickas vehemently said that war reporting was necessary to raise public awareness of atrocities.

“We as journalists have a duty, an absolute duty, to inform people on what’s happening,” she said. “We have to go to forgotten places, forgotten people and write about forgotten issues to broaden the human consciousness.”

 Furthermore, Kazickas highlighted the appeal of a combat zone.

“War’s very intoxicating. It’s erotic. It’s addictive,” Kazickas said; however, war is also extremely dangerous.

As a journalist contemplating war correspondence, Kazickas said you must ask the fundamental question: “Is any story worth your life?”

“Male or female, bullets and bombs don’t discriminate.”

The deadly reality of combat was one reason women have been historically excluded from war reporting, said Kazickas.

Women in war

“Women who wanted to cover the war had to fight on two fronts,” Kazickas said of female journalists during World War II.

First, women had to confront their editors, as they were not allowed to be assigned to foreign bureaus much less cover war, said Kazickas. Second, they had to take on the U.S. military who would not allow women in combat.

According to Kazickas, these male authorities claimed, “War was a man’s story. … War was too dangerous. … Women would be a distraction to the soldiers. … There was no women’s latrine.”

But the women who covered WWII were ambitious, curious, and adventurous, Kazickas said. “Nothing was going to stop them.”

Among the females famous for their reportage during WWII, noted by Kazickas, were Martha Gellhorn, Margaret Bourke-White, Dickey Chapelle and Marguerite Higgins.

Korea coverage

Higgins helped to pave the way for women to be war correspondents again in Korea, said Kazickas.

Countering the charge that there were no female latrines, she said, “There are no shortage of bushes in Korea.”

One of 100 female and 1600 total reporters in Korea, Higgins received a Pulitzer Prize for her war coverage, said Kazickas.

Editors began to realize the competitive advantage of having women on the ground as their female readership embraced the feminine perspective on war coverage.

Furthermore, male reporters became defensive, claiming that women had an unfair advantage, said Kazickas.

Female advantage in Iraq

Kazickas said over half of the war correspondents in Iraq are women. A huge accomplishment due in large part due to Christiane Amanpour’s televised coverage of the Bosnian conflict, she said.

“Seeing her while snipers were shooting in the back and in the trenches, Americans became a little more comfortable with the idea [of female war correspondents],” said Kazickas.

In a Muslim country, specifically, the female reporters have the advantage of being able to speak to both the male officials and the females in their homes, said Kazickas.

Reporting in Iraq is in no way easy for female reporters, however.

“It is enormously dangerous. Car bombs, suicide bombs. You just don’t know where the next explosion is going to come from,” said Kazickas.

Reporters in Iraq face an addition risk of kidnapping, said Kazickas.

Considering war correspondence?

The task of war correspondence is both high risk and high responsibility, said Kazickas.

“You just are not prepared for the horrors of war … but when you actually see something so horrible, it sears your soul forever,” she said.

Kazickas encouraged the audience to pursue careers in journalism, but said, “If you want to cover the war, talk to me first.”