Evil cameras and even more evil Syrian rebels: Why war is good for business

 

By Jenerali Ulimwengu

The book A Mad World, My Masters by the BBC’s John Simpson contains some hair-raising tales out of war and conflict zones across the world. One of the most captivating stories concerns a strange camera that seemed to be possessed by some mysterious and evil spirit.

Simpson quotes a cameramen he met in Budapest, Dirk, a Dutchman, who relates his experience in Port au Prince, Haiti, where he and others had gone to interview the president.

 

The one who came after Baby Doc, he says, though he can’t remember his name. (I guess it was Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but that’s beside the point).

The cameraman says that prior to the interview, they had to leave all the cameras with the security guard so they could be checked for explosives and such things. When on the morrow they gave him his camera back, it had changed.

It was not covered in a cockerel’s blood or any of those signs suggesting a voodoo ritual, no. It seemed to him that the camera had become heavier.

He weighed the thing, he says, and the weight was exactly as it had been before. But it was, to him, definitely heavier. And he should know, having carried the camera with him around the world.

Also, the camera had a mind. The wide angles, the narrow angles, the close-ups etc went “auto” in the sense that they would set themselves without Dirk doing anything.

And it made great pictures, only they were not the pictures he had wanted. It would suddenly eject cassettes with that familiar noise, breaking the silence in which his group was hiding, observing an “enemy” unit down below, and these latter would shoot at them. He got hit once.

Big business

Then he rented it out to a countryman, who wanted to go cover another conflict. (Apparently this trade is transacted on a regular basis in this industry). He was killed after appearing to do incomprehensible things, like filming when there was no object to film.

Eventually the owner loaned it to a Turkish team, which went to film, secretly, the fall of Ceausescu in Bucharest. In the middle of the darkness-shrouded filming, the flash simply exploded, bathing the correspondent in glaring light. A Securitate bullet cut the Turkish correspondent down.

The owner managed to destroy the camera after that by laying it in the path of an oncoming tank unit. Even then, as the first tank crushed it, the lens popped out, flew high in the air and landed at the Dutchman’s feet on the pavement.

That’s a weird camera, right? But not as weird as some of the human species one encounters in conflict zones.

Consider the recent tale of Anthony Lloyd, a British war correspondent in Syria. He and his colleagues had cultivated a close relationship with one of the rebel commanders by the name of Hakim.

Hakim and his men would accompany them to the front where they would film and take notes. The fighters also went to great lengths to protect them, sometimes at personal risk to themselves.