Being Mark Tully
By Rone Tempest Posted Jul 1 2002
When I first started covering South Asia two decades ago, about the only safety concern a foreign correspondent had, other than the normal terrors of road travel, was deciding when to be Mark Tully.
“Tully-sahib” is the legendary former British Broadcasting Corporation correspondent whose broadcasts in English, Urdu, Hindi and Bengali reached over one billion people on the Indian subcontinent via short-wave radio. In those pre-CNN, pre-Internet, pre-cell-phone days, Tully was by far the most famous foreign journalist of his time.
That meant that no matter where you went in South Asia – from the front lines of the civil war in Sri Lanka to the Afghan mujihadeen camps in Baluchistan – people excitedly demanded to know if you were Mark Tully. In their minds, Tully was the one omniscient foreign witness to all the events affecting one-fifth of the world’s population.
In crowds, most of us in the foreign press corps quickly gave up trying to explain our own names and affiliations. All that was necessary was to quickly assess whether “Being Mark Tully” would get us through the next checkpoint or flaming roadblock. Since Tully was immensely popular, it was usually easier to go with the flow.
I remember one mid-80s trip to Darjeeling, the tea plantation region in India’s upper Bengal State that was then under siege by Nepalese insurgents. While traveling with some American and French colleagues, my vehicle was stopped by some knife-wielding rebels. Once they determined we were from the Mark Tully tribe of foreign correspondents, their deadly kukri knives were sheathed, replaced by broad smiles and promises of safe passage.
A similar encounter with Tamil Tiger gunmen in Sri Lanka had the same result for a British colleague and me. “BBC. Mark Tully!” we said to our putative captors, pointing to our short-wave radio set. Release followed immediately, with apologies. And they didn’t even take our radio!
In truth, it wasn’t always about being Tully. It was just that, in those more innocent times, Tully personified the journalist as an independent and welcome voice. Despite the relatively difficult communications of those times, there seemed to be an understanding of the journalist’s role and a sense that the journalist was needed.
For one thing, the idea of the West-against-Islam had not yet been crystallized. After all, weren’t the Americans helping the Afghans in their holy jihad against the Soviet Union occupiers? Many South Asians saw the Western Press, particularly the BBC and the Voice of America, as the best way to find out what was really happening in their own countries. It was like the old cartoon showing the Iranian television anchorman at the time of the Shah: “That ends our report, for the local news tune to the BBC.…”
As the deaths of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and other foreign journalists in Pakistan and Afghanistan illustrate, working conditions in South Asia have deteriorated dramatically since then. This is a much, much more dangerous place for foreign journalists than it was just 20 years ago. In that time span, the region has gone from a rather protective, respectful reporting environment to one of “journalist as target.”
By the time of some of the early Muslim-Hindu battles over the Ayodhya temple site in India’s Uttar Pradesh in the 1990s, the legacy of protection for foreign journalists under the British raj had begun to wear off. Journalists, both foreign and domestic, increasingly came under direct attack. The practice of putting a large “Press” sign on the windshield of your car began to disappear. Journalists began to don turbans, shawls and loose fitting shalwar camiz so they could better blend into the populace.
Last November, I was in a convoy of journalists making our way from Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan to Kabul. About midway through the rough seven-hour trip, two cars in the front of the 10-car convoy were stopped. Four foreign reporters were taken from their vehicles, beaten with stones and rifle stocks and executed.
The assailants, who have still not been caught, released the two Afghan drivers, telling them to “stop driving foreign reporters to Kabul.” Later it became clear that the arrival of the foreign journalists had been expected and that they had been specifically targeted by the attackers. The 20 or so other journalists in the convoy, myself included, were saved only by the warnings of the escaping drivers who turned us around as they fled.
Unfortunately, this was not a freak occurrence in the Afghan-Pakistani theater. Pearl was killed after making what most us would think was a routine rendezvous with some anti-American elements in Karachi. He was lured to the meeting site with promises of information, and he clearly was the target of the group from the very beginning.
Likewise, foreign reporters traveling in the Pushtun areas of eastern Afghanistan are frequently unnerved by the threatening conversations they hear from the crowds. This March, a group of journalists visiting a city near the American-led “Operation Anaconda”military campaign attempted to retreat by road back to Kabul” after their translators overheard menacing conversations about kidnapping journalists and holding them for ransom.
On the way back, the journalists were abandoned by their armed Afghan escorts, and a Canadian reporter was seriously wounded when an attacker threw a hand-grenade through the window of her car. She survived only because a U.S. special-forces unit managed to call in a helicopter to pick her up.
In Jalalabad this April, I was with another reporter when Pashto-language fatwas (a legal statement in Islam, issued by a religious lawyer on a specific issue) began to appear on walls calling for the killing of foreign troops and journalists. No distinction was made between armed soldier and unarmed reporter. They were all to be killed.
This helped us decide to leave town. There is an old foreign-correspondent's maxim: “Never get killed for an inside story.” The day before, a bomb had exploded in a local market during an assassination attempt on the Afghan defense minister. The story played inside the newspaper, so that rule seemed to apply here.
On the way home, however, we found the road ahead blocked by opium-poppy farmers protesting a United Nations-backed government campaign against their crops. Flanked on both sides by hirsute Afghans, I simply slumped down in the car seat and we made it through safely.
I never thought once about invoking Mark Tully. These are different times.