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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 July 1999 Issue No. 436 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 July 1999 Issue No. 436
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Special Interview Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
One of the most interesting contributions to the recent Sunday Times Hay Book Festival was by Timothy Garton Ash. It was a talk about his recently published book, History of the Present, which contained essays, sketches and dispatches from Europe in the 1990s. As the title suggests, Garton Ash is writing about witnesses who record history as it happens, foremost among whom are those journalists who report on wars or revolutions.
The writer, a journalist himself, claims that the words of such journalists comprise the raw material of history, the stuff that will be studied by future generations. He argues that without the coverage of events by journalists much human experience is never recorded, taking events in Kosovo as an example. Since virtually no journalists have been able to operate there, we have only a fragmentary picture of the terror and mass expulsions that have taken place.
Stories published about the events have been largely second hand, told in Macedonia and Albania by those expelled, and after the transforming filters of memory have got to work. He contrasts this hazy picture with stories filed by John Simpson and Robert Fisk who, being in Belgrade, have been able to provide unmediated accounts of the city during its bombardment. Garton Ash himself witnessed the velvet revolution in Prague in 1989, producing the only account of the crucial debates that went on between leaders of that revolution.
For 20 years he has been writing what he calls history of the present in near and remote parts of Europe. This has meant working at the frontier between history and journalism. Academics tend to sniff at such an enterprise and call it journalism with footnotes. In academia the word journalism is, after all, a put down. On the other hand, when a news editor describes a story as academic, he usually means it is boring and unreadable.
The author claims that there is no clear distinction between quality journalism and contemporary history. The one shades into the other. Journalists must have more than a passing acquaintance with the history of the region on which they report while historians need journalists to supply facts on the ground.
The work of both the journalist and historian calls for some literary craft. Description has to be vivid, characterisation compelling. A historian is interested in truth, while a journalist is after facts. Yet in filing stories journalists try to answer the same questions as historians about causes and consequences, structure and process, the role of the individual and the masses.
Garton Ash gives an example of how journalistic reporting falls short of the writing of history. In 1997 and 1998 he made a number of trips to Kosovo, though he did not know then that the events he was witnessing would end in a war. Yet what is valuable in such an enterprise, insists the writer, is to preserve the vitally important sense of what people did not know at the time. Because historians write their accounts a long time after events, usually after all the relevant official archives have become public, they can arrange the material in such a way as to justify the already known results. For instance, in the future they will write the story of Kosovo as if war was the inevitable outcome of all the preceding events, much in the way that the history of the 1930s in Europe is treated as nothing more than a prelude to World War II.
