Our LVIth form students might have thought they were winding down as the end of term beckoned  but they were certainly woken from any post-examination  slumbers by Mark Austin’s reflections on life as a war correspondent on the front line. The talk was given on Wednesday 25th June in the Reading Room.

 

Mr Austin is one of Britain’s best known broadcast journalists and is one of the faces of ITN’s early evening news programme.  However, at heart he remains a foreign correspondent and he has reported from many of the world’s war zones such as Rwanda, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.  As he says he, “goes into places when most people are trying to leave them”.

 

Mark’s passion lies with Southern Africa where he was ITN’s special correspondent in the early 1990s.  He and his family lived in South Africa during the fall of apartheid and one could sense the pleasure he took in recounting this country’s first democratic elections as history, when he himself had lived through those tumultuous events and reported them to the world as they actually happened.

 

However, his early experience of South African politics did not consist of simply riding a wave of euphoria.  He held the audience rapt as he recounted the story of how, when reporting the last stand of Eugene Terreblanche’s white separatists, he and his television crew had been made to kneel down in a field with guns at their throats.  They had no option but to look straight ahead into the distance as they listened to their captors debating whether to shoot them or not.

 

Just two weeks after witnessing the jubilation of Mandela’s accession to the presidency Mark was thrown into the horror of reporting Rwanda’s genocide.  This veering from adrenaline-fuelled high to desperate low was to be a recurrent theme in his talk.  He spoke of witnessing dead bodies (many of them children) littering the roadsides of Kigali, many with limbs missing where they had been butchered by the Hutu militia.  At times like this all he could hope for as a journalist was that the world would sit up and take notice of the story.  Of course, this has not always been the case and he spoke of how he has gradually lost faith in the agility and willingness of the international community to respond to such humanitarian crises.

 

Part of the cause of such apathy could be the West’s perception that such problems are always ‘elsewhere,’ and only occur in far-off places.  However, Mark was at pains to point out that man’s inhumanity to man should not be seen as a problem that doesn’t exist in the West.  He had been clearly reminded of this when reporting the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the bloody civil war that followed.  We should never be complacent, he said, about the possibilities of this sort of violence erupting again and on our doorsteps.

 

Mark was perhaps most animated when talking about Zimbabwe.  In 2007 he had lobbied hard to have the ITN News reported live from the former British colony and his undercover reports (one of which he played especially for the Cranleigh audience) were critically acclaimed and won BAFTAs.  He had been due to fly back to Zimbabwe the day after this address to report on the presidential elections.  However, this had been aborted as the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, sought refuge from Mugabe’s henchmen in a foreign embassy.  As Mark spoke, prospects for any semblance of a free and fair election were in tatters and, questioned later by students, he was not optimistic about the prospects for peace anytime soon.  Certainly any interference by the former colonial powers would be counterproductive, he argued. While others have held out for a so-called ‘African Solution,’ he countered that the links made during the era of anti-colonial nationalism between the likes of Mugabe and Thabo Mbeki seemed still to be too strong for much prospect of this sort of resolution.  The only hope perhaps lay in the guise of the next generation of African leaders, such as South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, who have been more outspoken in their criticism of Mugabe’s regime.

 

This was as stimulating an hour as any these students will have spent this term.  The questions from the students and staff alike reflected this, ranging as they did from Mark’s brushes with serious injury to his reflections on international politics.  We look forward to seeing more of him on our screens and maybe one day breaking the news of Zimbabwe’s first free and fair elections post-Mugabe?