Lyse Doucet
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Media TribeShaunagh talks to Lyse Doucet
This week on the Media Tribe podcast I’m chatting to the indomitable BBC Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet.
We talk about Lyse’s extensive reporting in Syria, particularly her time in the besieged Yarmouk where children told Lyse they had to eat boiled grass in order to survive, being present during the attempted assassination of Hamiz Karzai, the then Afghan President and growing up in New Brunswick, Canada.
If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Media Tribe on your usual podcast app and download my chat with Lyse.
For those that don't know Lyse
Lyse Marie Doucet OBE, CM is a Canadian journalist who is the BBC's Chief International correspondent and senior presenter. She presents on BBC World Service radio and BBC World News television, and also reports for BBC Radio 4 and BBC News in the UK.
For more on Lyse
Follow Lyse on Twitter and view her profile on the BBC here.
Episode credits
Hosted and produced by Shaunagh Connaire and edited by Ryan Ferguson.
Episode transcript
Shaunagh Connaire:
Welcome to Media Tribe, I'm Shaunagh Connaire. And this is the podcast that tells the story behind the story. It's an opportunity for you and I to step into the shoes of the most extraordinary media folk who covered the issues that matter most.
Lyse Doucet:
... because not only had we been in Kandahar, but my camera person, Phil Goodwin, happened to be there right at the moment where one boy leaned in to say hello to the man he revered and another boy leaned into the president's car, the man he wanted to kill. And my camera person was filming all of it.
Shaunagh Connaire:
This week I'm speaking to the BBC's Chief International correspondent, Lyse Doucet. Lyse reports regularly from the Middle East and Afghanistan, where she's been reporting for over three decades. Lyse's list of awards include an Emmy and a Peabody for her teams reporting from Syria. Lyse, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Lyse Doucet:
It's a great pleasure to be connected to New York, to you.
Shaunagh Connaire:
Lyse, where to start with your career, you've for the past three decades or so covered a lot of conflict. Do you want to tell our audience how you became a journalist? How you got to be the international correspondent at the BBC?
Lyse Doucet:
So I graduated from the university of Toronto from a master's degree in 1982, which I know must seem like ancient history, but it was also a very difficult time to graduate. Albeit not as difficult than now, but difficult still, in difficulties sometimes in the mind of the person receiving the difficulty. It was a recession in Canada. There were no jobs for journalists and any media that I approached said, well, either you need experience. And all I had was writing for a university newspaper and two articles in the real estate news in Toronto, or they said you needed to go to journalism school. And the thought of being in a class with everybody wanting to be a journalist, I just thought there has to be a better way.
Lyse Doucet:
And also from the beginning, I didn't want to sit on the Metro desk doing whole news. I wanted to do foreign news. That's what I did my degree on. And my degree at the university of Toronto, for one reason or another to this day, I don't know why I focused on Africa so much and not just that, but an African agriculture. So I got a volunteer placement, which was a genuine thing. I did volunteer work all through school. And by the luck of the draw, I was sent to West Africa to a village with the wonderful name of Adzope, a short drive outside the Capital of Cote d'Ivoire, Abidjan. And I worked there for four months. And then after that, well, I started to become what I already thought I was, but it was evident to me, but not to anyone else, reporter journalist. And it was one of those classic, right place, right time. There I was in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, Ivory Coast, and the BBC is setting up its first West Africa office as the correspondent to Alexander Thompson has to cover more than a dozen countries.
Lyse Doucet:
And here I am with a funny name to a British audience, wrong accent, wrong CV, wrong everything. And then the sky is open and God descended down and said, give Lyse Doucet a job. And of course it was at the time when, let us be honest, a country and a culture, which was very, very conscious of accents was just allowing the Scots and the Welsh to read the news on the BBC. And so I kind of slipped in, but of course, and that was the time before social media, but the BBC would often get letters saying, where's Lyse Doucet from? Where's your accent from? And yes, the occasional letter, which said, can't you find British journalist who speak with a British accent? What's Lyse Doucet doing on the BBC? But despite their best efforts to get rid of me, and there have been many along the way here I am, more than 30 years on, I'm still at the BBC.
Shaunagh Connaire:
I'm so glad you brought that up Lyse, because I always wondered. I mean, so what year was that?
Lyse Doucet:
With your lovely accent.
Shaunagh Connaire:
I know, I don't know how I bloody made it to TV either but somebody in HR let me on. But I mean, it's such a relevant point because that was, I mean, what year are we talking about when you actually started?
Lyse Doucet:
So that was '83. And so a lot of people, I come from the East coast of Canada where there's a lot of Irish and Scottish, and now that people have gotten over my accent, my accent now is not so different on the BBC. Because there's a lot of different accents on the BBC now, both different British accents, but also accents from around the world. And often I get confused with my colleague Orla Guerin, my lovely friend, Orla Guerin, like Orla is 100% Irish like you. And they will say to me, "Lyse great reports, from Turkey from Egypt." Then I'll say, "Well, sorry. That wasn't me. That was actually Orla." Orla and I one year did an event together at the Edinburgh Festival so we could prove to people there was Lyse Doucet and there was Orla Guerin and we were different people, exactly the same, but completely different. So people sometimes to this day think that I'm Irish and are surprised when they say I'm Canadian.
Shaunagh Connaire:
You grew up in New Brunswick. And do you find, or did you find that your upbringing in a relatively smallish place in Canada has kind of shaped your form of journalism? You bring a great sense of humanity and empathy to every story you do. You really, really do. Do you feel like your background and your upbringing contributed to that?
Lyse Doucet:
Growing up in a small community has many disadvantages. I see the advantage of people I've met along the way, who've grown up in a university city, who've grown up in an urban environment with all of the advantages and assets that that gives you. It opens, literally opens your eyes to a much bigger world, but there are advantages too to growing up in a small town. And to this day, when I'm asked about my skills, I would say, I think one of my biggest skills of all is having grown up in a small town where people don't shut their door, where religion is not something rigid in a text. Religion is a way of living. It's a way of the community coming together. It's people's beliefs, but I would like to believe beliefs about treat others as you would like to be treated. It's a friendliness and an openness.
Lyse Doucet:
And I can see the difference sometimes with whether to say to descend into stereotypes. Perhaps a little bit more reserved British colleagues. So they, some will go and I exaggerate just a bit, they'll sit down for an interview. "Yes, thank you very much, Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister. Are we ready to start? Are we ready? Ready to start?" Whereas I will sit down and say," Hello, how are you? How is your children? How's everything? Wow, that's so great." And then the producer will say, "Lyse, please don't start talking because if they say it when they're chatting, they're not going to say it later."
Lyse Doucet:
So I have this approach to journalism, which is to be personally very personable, but as a journalist, I'm a journalist. And because I've been in journalism so long, some of the people that I've known along the way have become presidents, prime ministers, people of note. And when we meet, we are still friends. But when we sit down, there is the journalist sitting with the president, the prime minister and king, whatever the person who's a CEO.
Lyse Doucet:
So, and I feel that has served me well, because what it does is that, you know when our profession can be demonized, people can sometimes suspect worst of us, think the worst of us. And I do joke. And it's not exactly a joke where I say journalism is an excuse for bad manners because we sometimes think, Oh wow, we're so important, wow we're doing girl on the television, we're on the radio, we're bringing the news, which is why when I speak to young journalists, are we saying manners matter? And which seems so obvious, but it's not always obvious. Say thank you. So I'm not going to say that a small town gave you more manners, but maybe it's a certain approach to life which may be a bit different.
Shaunagh Connaire:
Absolutely. Let me ask you if this is a rather big question, Lyse, it might be difficult for you to answer. Is there a moment in your career that you could take a step back and say, I'm very proud of that moment?
Lyse Doucet:
I'm always proud to be a journalist. There have been moments where I stood in front of a camera and you're sometimes just staring into the darkness and you know that you're announcing some important news to the world, an election won or lost, a war fought or finished. And that's in the case of the, either the BBC World Service or BBC World News television, you are literally speaking to the world and that you know somewhere out there in the darkness people are watching or listening and they're going, "Oh my God, wow. Did you hear that on the news?" But there have been moments where I've been fortunate or misfortunate, unfortunate to be either in what, for some people, I mean, for people who aren't journalists, because journalists must be the only people in the world when a bomb goes off, they run toward the explosion rather than away from the explosion. I mean, even the medical staff sometimes pause for just a moment.
Lyse Doucet:
So there are places which I would say was right place, right time. And I would just say, wrong place, wrong time. One of them was, it was the one year anniversary of the attacks of September the 11th. And the BBC said, "Well, would you like to go back and do a one year anniversary piece in Afghanistan?" And I said, "Well, there's really one big story. And that is where is Al-Qaida?" And I said, "But it's a difficult, but it's a dangerous story and I'm willing to do it, but it will be difficult and dangerous." And the producer said to me, "I don't want to do anything that's difficult or dangerous." And I said, "Well, okay. Plan B is President Hamid Karzai who I've known for many, many years. I knew him decades before he became president."
Lyse Doucet:
I said, "We can go and do one year in the life of President Karzai." And he goes, "Great, great story." So we went to Kabul and hung around the palace day in, day out. Well, it was a little bit, much of a muchness until one day he said, "Well, actually my brother, my half-brother is getting married and it's going to be in Kandahar and no journalists are coming, but you can come along with me." So we went with him and what was supposed to be the marriage of his half-brother, which never mind that the bride was in a different country, country next door. It was all men. It turned into an assassination attempt against President Karzai. And that was when the eyes of the world were not just on Afghanistan, but we're on Hamid Karzai. He was seen as the man who would give the United States, the future, this kind of stability and security it wanted, not just in Afghanistan, but all the way to the United States, the memories of the attacks are still so fresh.
Lyse Doucet:
And so there we were, so the place was flooded by Rangers. And so I get these calls from around the world because not only had we didn't Kandahar, but my camera person, Phil Goodwin happened to be there right at the moment where one boy leaned in to say hello to the man he revered and another boy leaned into the president's car, the man he wanted to kill, and my camera person was filming all of it. So we had all of it from start to finish the assassination attempt on camera. And then when we were in this place where we're all protected, when people would call me up, BBC would say, "Lyse we've heard that the foreign minister, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah is doing this." And I'd say, "Just a minute, hold on, Dr. Abdullah, what is happening there? What is?"
Lyse Doucet:
So literally the room of the people who, in the room where it happened as Hamilton said. That was the room where it was happened. And of course, no journalists could get to Kandahar. And there we were with a scoop of the world. So for me as a journalist, that was quite an important moment. And in a country where I had spent so much time and had so much affection for this country. There was another thing too, is that we flew then in the dark of night, in the early hours of the morning, back to Kabul and President Karzai, the next morning was going to get up and thank the United States for saving his life. He watched television before he did, and he saw our report and he realized the person who had saved his life obviously the American bodyguards had helped, but it was this Afghan boy who loved the president and when he saw the other young Afghan coming forward, opening fire on his revere hero, he jumped on him. And it was that young boy who saved the president's life. And then afterwards, the bodyguards then open fire.
Lyse Doucet:
So the president then got up and announced that he wanted to honor this boy. And he was the hero of Afghanistan. So in some way, that was quite crucial then, because the difference between the president saying a young Afghan saved my life and the Americans, the superpower saved my life was really, really quite crucial in terms of the narrative in Afghanistan at that time. And indeed beyond.
Shaunagh Connaire:
I do you remember that story, Lyse, and correct me if I'm wrong, but were you guys in the kind of green zone in Kandahar? So it should have been safe because the Americans are allegedly protecting.
Lyse Doucet:
Yes, we were surrounded by, but it was just, they were still trying to work out the security detail for the president. And in fact, his close protection had been demanding from the White House, armoured vehicles, better protective gear. And the White House was dragging its feet. And because of that attack and because of the film that we were able to show what had happened with the security details, not for the Afghans, not being trained enough, but it wasn't properly trained. It wasn't necessarily their fault. President Bush got on the line and said, "Give them whatever it takes." So one of the bodyguards who was actually injured, came up to me, Pete, and said, "Thanks, Lyse. We actually ended up getting granted too late, but we ended up getting the equipment, the armoured vehicles that we needed."
Shaunagh Connaire:
Well, that's extraordinary. I mean, there you go impact, direct impact. Before I move on to my next kind of bigger question, I'd love to talk to you a little bit about Syria. I mean, you've covered Syria so extensively, I've heard you refer to it as a civil war, a sectarian war, a proxy war and a war against children. I have noticed that that seems to be a theme in some ways for you, Lyse, that you really want to tell the story of children at war. I mean, you did it in Gaza with the really wonderful film that James Jones directed as well. Is that very important for you to kind of somehow document war through the lens of children?
Lyse Doucet:
One of my male colleagues after I did Children of Syria, and then we did Children of the Gaza War, he said, "Lyse, why are you doing another film about children?" And I said, "You know, it's not just 'a film about children'". Through Syria, Syria solidified for me, the view that whatever conflict we cover, no matter how complex and consequential it is, and they don't get much more complex and consequential than Syria, that if you drill down that these are at their very heart human stories. They are stories about mothers and fathers and children and streets and neighbourhoods and societies. Yes, of course, there's not just the politics of the nation. There's the very, very difficult politics of the region and the politics beyond the region, which is threaded through it. But the stories which really matter, which carry it forward are the stories of people not so different from you or I, and I've always felt that part of my job as a journalist is to narrow the gap, is to show that these are people who get up every day and have to find some measure of hope and humanity and even humour.
Lyse Doucet:
And so doing stories about children were part of that understanding for me, because I learned in Syria trip after trip into Syria, and we were lucky to keep getting visas. I would come out and think, who was the person who most, who stays with me because of their story because of their courage? And time and again, it was the story of a child who not only had lived through something that no, even no adults should live through, but the child was able to articulate the story. It doesn't have to be told by the mother, the father, the uncle, the neighbour. The child, the little boy or girl they themselves could tell this story and tell it so well. And often, as you know, in our journalism children often feature almost as decorations, their smile, they're cute or they're crying, they're sad. It's an important element in the story. And for me, I didn't want them to be the element. They were the actors in the story.
Shaunagh Connaire:
Yeah. And I mean, that comes across in both of those films so vividly. I remember one little girl saying, I think it was Madaya or Yarmouk that they had absolutely no food. And of course, President Assad was using food as a weapon of war. People were starving, but this little girl turned around and told you that she had eaten a cat. Her and her family had eaten a cat. How can you not relate to that when you have a little girl on television saying that that's how desperate they were? It was just so poignant and I mean, so desperate.
Lyse Doucet:
I mean, who couldn't relate to their child, the shock of a child trying to be as grown up as possible, telling you in a matter of fact way that their cat was eaten. I mean, it's beyond it's unthinkable. And you know, you mentioned the siege and here it is Syria this modern war of our time using the most medieval of tactics, the siege, using hunger as a weapon of war. And if I hadn't told you the story of being there during an assassination attempt against President Karzai, I would have told you how we got into finally after months and months of lobbying and trying every possible contact to get into a besieged area, close to Damascus. These are areas where food and families couldn't get into the besieged area and people couldn't get out and journalists couldn't get in. But after a lot, a lot of effort, we finally got in to the besieged enclave of Yarmouk on the Southern edge of Damascus.
Lyse Doucet:
Not only was it another playing ground with the war between Syrian government forces and the opposition, on top of it you had the rivalries between different Palestinian groups and right in the middle were the innocent civilians. And getting into Yarmouk, I wanted to see for myself, feel for myself what it was to be besieged. How can anyone living anywhere in the world, understand what it's like to be besieged, to wake up and all you have to eat is grass? I mean, every time, time and again, when we met people who by one negotiation or another, or the end of the battle were able to escape from a besieged area, we'd say, "What did you eat?" And they'd use the word in Arabic for grass. And I would think grass? And they would literally be pulling out herbs and weeds and not from the earth to eat.
Lyse Doucet:
So we finally got into Yarmouk and it was the most searing experience that we experienced in Syria, which is saying a lot for myself and for my Syrian colleagues as well, which is extraordinary. The intensity of the devastation, literally the not a building left standing, but also the intensity of desperation. People moving towards us, begging with us to please, please, please, to help them to leave. It was just, we all broke down crying at the end. I mean, how can we begin to understand. That for me as a journalist was that was actually, being able to get in and to try to convey that to people outside, to begin to understand how do we stand in someone else's shoes and shoes that are full of holes and battered and worn, the shoes of a person who's got literally nothing to eat, except grass that's boiled with a bit of salt and pepper.
Shaunagh Connaire:
With Yarmouk for anybody that is listening. So Yarmouk has been, it's a Palestinian camp, I guess just as you said, Lyse on the outskirts of Damascus. And it's been there since the late '40s, as far as I know after Arab-Israeli War. But so you have this camp where people are, as you say, eating boiled grass, because they're that desperate. And then a few miles down the road, you have Damascus.
Lyse Doucet:
The contrast was surreal but was also surreal is that I would go to Syrian government officials who I'd known for many, many years since I was first based in the Middle East in 1994, which in Jordan, where I opened the BBC office. And so for five years, I was first a year in Jordan where I covered the Jordanian-Israeli peace process. And then I moved to Jerusalem, but I used to go to Syria a lot. And this was a completely different time. This is when the current president's father was in control, President Hafez al-Assad. It was a time of authoritarian rule where you would ask these Syrians in a market what the price of tomatoes were, and they would look at you like their eyes blinking and you think, Oh my God, they're thinking what my God, this is what's the right answer to this.
Lyse Doucet:
People didn't discuss politics, but they were such kind people. So cultured, so refined, beautiful, beautiful culture, food, tapestries, their curved wood. Everything about Syria was so, so beautiful. So I would say to some of these people I'd known for years that "Listen, five minutes away, do you realize that people are starving?" And they go, "No, no, you're this." And I'm to this day, I don't know, had they convinced themselves that this was the case? Were they lying to me? In some cases they were lying, but refusing to accept the reality for them, all that mattered was that rockets, crude missiles were being fired from some of these besieged areas into the city. And people were dying in the city in the government controlled side. And of course that mattered too. Would it doesn't matter that the bombardment of the besieged areas was by air power artillery and what was coming into Damascus was crude rockets.
Lyse Doucet:
What really mattered, Arvin say, "In war, what matters more than the facts, the material facts is the perception of these facts." And the perception of the people of Damascus was that they were also besieged in some way, because they felt so threatened. So it was very, very, very hard. Every war unfolds on the ground and unfold in the narrative about what's happening on the ground and people's perceptions of what's happening on the ground. And I think the perceptions matters more in the end, in terms of the evolution of the war in people's attitudes than the actual facts on the ground.
Shaunagh Connaire:
Well, that's such an interesting point. And I think, Assad was kind of originally pro-Palestinian I would have said so. And he, I assume he said that some of the rebel groups had kind of crept into Yarmouk, and that's why he was attacking them with, as you say, the most sophisticated weaponry out there. I want to stick to Syria just for a moment longer. And this will be a difficult one for you, Lyse. I know you were very good friends with Marie Colvin. You know, how do you as a journalist kind of keep going when you see somebody so close to you, lose their life while being a journalist? And of course, Marie was killed in Homs.
Lyse Doucet:
It's such, it's a really difficult question. And the question was asked time and again, in events after Marie died, Vince attended by Paul Conroy, wonderful human being and really talented photographer that was with Marie till the end. He survived the attack on that makeshift press centre in the besieged city of Homs where Marie was killed and where her family took the case to court and won that it was a deliberate attack. It was murder by the Syrian government forces. The Syrian government denies it to this day. But the question always asked is, was it worth it because not only did Marie go once into Homs, she came out, survived, and then went back again. And there's this moment in Paul Conroy's film, which I urge everyone to see if you haven't seen it yet, where he admits that he says to Marie, he said, "Every bone in my body tells me, you know, all my instance, tell me," I'm paraphrasing "that we shouldn't go in." And Marie says to him, "Well, I'm going in. Then you can stay here."
Lyse Doucet:
And then of course, Paul has to go in with her. He survives and she doesn't. But if she hadn't gone in the second time, she kept, she was so driven. We have to go tell their story. The women in the basement are still there. The people that she'd met were pleading with her to tell the story of the world. And she felt that responsibility so enormously. And of course, as a journalist to be there as one of the only journalists there is extraordinary moment for her journalistically. So she went back in and sadly it costs her life. And my colleague and very good friend, Lindsey Hilsum, also had a meeting, a dinner with Marie in Beirut just before Marie went in with the smugglers. And Lindsay who's among the bravest of the brave she's Channel 4 International Editor, she said, "Marie, this is beyond my threshold of danger." And Marie just looked at her and said, "It's what we do. It's what we do."
Shaunagh Connaire:
I'm going to move to a lighter question, which we discussed before I press the record button about perhaps a crazy experience that you've had in this industry that never quite made it to air.
Lyse Doucet:
I'll tell you a story in the sense of always be prepared for the unexpected, expect the unexpected. And this like comes from a question that I'm often asked, and I'm sure you're asked about it, Shaunagh, as well, where people say, "It must be difficult to be a female journalist." And in my case, "It must be difficult to go to all those places where women are treated so, so terribly." So I often tell stories of which come down to hospitality over ideology. And this one was in 1991. I was the BBC's Pakistan correspond, Pakistan and Afghanistan. And I was sitting in my office in Pakistan and the phone rang and this representative of one of the turned out to be one of the more extreme Mujahideen, Afghan opposition groups fighting groups said, "Hello." And I said, "Yes, this is the BBC office." He goes, "Yes, we would like to give you the news that we have taken the city of Khost in East Afghanistan."
Lyse Doucet:
I said, "Oh, fantastic, great." He said, "We would like the BBC to cover it." And I said, "Well, wonderful. We would also like to cover it." He goes, "Fantastic, so who will be coming?" And I said, "Well, I'll be coming." And then he said, "Oh, what we want the BBC to cover it. Sorry, you don't understand. We can't have any women coming, we can't have any women journalists." And to this day I don't know where I found this and I just pause for half a second. And I said, "Well, listen, I will come as a woman, but I will dress like a man." He said, "Okay, that's fine."
Shaunagh Connaire:
Oh, my God.
Lyse Doucet:
So there we were and the pictures are still, they were published and they still pop up occasionally. So there I was wearing the shalwar kameez, the tunic and trousers. My hair was up in the pakol hat that they wear. And when we were driving into this cross Pakistan-Afghan border, my Pakistani colleague Rahimullah Yusufzai said, "Lyse, the men and the pickup truck in front of us are discussing whether you're a man or you're a woman and they can't figure out what it is." But of course, when the moment came to hold the press conference with the commander, this commander with this huge big beard who later was put on the terrorism list in the United States and its Haqqani Network is now on the terrorism, but back in the day, it wasn't.
Lyse Doucet:
So you have this big commander, standing there, with the place bristling with guns, all of the men. And who is given the seat of choice? Well, of course me, because there I am, the journalist dressed like a man, but obviously a woman. So I'm given all of the respect and honours that should be accorded to a woman that I'm sitting in the best seat of all, which is right next to the commander. So it's this sort of thing that as long as we found a way forward, that allowed them to save face, I protected my journalism and they protected have never approached to the way things should be.
Shaunagh Connaire:
Wow, well Lyse, I knew you have some type of bunkers stories. So you definitely ticked that box. Lyse, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. What a really fun and interesting conversation. Thank you.
Lyse Doucet:
Well, thank you for your questions, which are full of your zest and your energy. I always say that we're defined by our questions as journalists. So very lovely. Very nice to hear your questions.
Shaunagh Connaire:
If you liked what you heard on this episode of Media Tribe tune in next week, as I'll be dropping new shows every week with all sorts of legendary folk from the industry. And if you could leave me a review and rating, that would be really appreciated. Also, get in touch on social media @shaunagh on Twitter, or @shaunaghconnaire on Instagram and feel free to suggest new guests. Right, that's it. Until next week, see you then
Shaunagh Connaire:
This episode is edited by Ryan Ferguson.
