‘Look for the human’: Finding hope in a time of turmoil

Episode transcript

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Clay Collins: Welcome to “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s host, Clay Collins. It’s an extraordinary time in terms of unrest: bold protests in China, an uprising for women’s rights in Iran, and even some so far limited outcry in Russia over its war in Ukraine. Peter Ford, The Monitor’s Paris-based international news editor, has also written from just about everywhere, from Asia to Europe, from the Middle East to Latin America. He joins us today. Welcome, Peter. 

Peter Ford: I’m very happy to be here. 

Collins: Those three countries I mentioned, all known for keeping the lid on pretty tight, all seem to have gone off more or less at once to different degrees and with different drivers. You’ve said that this was mostly coincidental. What’s the same or different about these movements? And might any of them bring lasting change? 

Ford: Well, could any of them be lasting movements? I think they could be. And to be honest, even if they’re short lived, they could at least be signs of things to come. I mean, it’s not as if these authoritarian governments are playing whack-a-mole, but it’s still true that when people dare to do something that they haven’t done before, like stand up to repression, they might develop a taste for it, and they might develop the courage that it takes, and who knows where that might lead? In China, there have been demonstrations in nearly 20 cities sparked by frustrations over three years of draconian COVID-related lockdowns. I mean, that’s absolutely unheard of in recent Chinese history. Nothing like it since Tiananmen in 1989. And the demonstrations did seem to help change the government’s mind. They’ve relaxed the policy now. That was highly unexpected. In Iran, the massive nationwide demonstrations began as protests against hijab rules, the rules on women’s veils, but they’ve broadened now to include far more social and economic demands. But the Iranian government’s reaction has been harsh repression. I mean, they are executing demonstrators now. And in Russia, we know that President Putin’s war in Ukraine is unpopular from opinion polls. But there’s little in the way of outright opposition on the streets, because people, frankly, are cowed by the very strict laws that punish dissidents. And there’s no sign that Mr. Putin is changing direction there. 

Collins: Because we’re talking about Russia, I just want to shift briefly to Ukraine itself and the situation there. Can you talk about the Monitor’s approach to reporting from inside Ukraine? I think we’ve had five different very experienced writers so far cycling through. 

Ford: Well, yes, obviously, Ukraine has dominated my year. Our approach to covering it is to be there as often as we can and in as many different places as we can while keeping our correspondent safe, but also to look for the unexpected, look for the human. Because to be honest, you can write about the geopolitics in Washington. You could write about the aid that the West is giving Ukraine. But I think what readers are more interested in is how individual Ukrainians are living this experience, which is a difficult one to imagine. And I think we can do a good job of bringing it home to the readers of our paper. 

Collins: The humanization is obviously, as you say, a really good way into these stories. But reporting, broadly speaking, also includes looking a lot at historical context and breadth. Can you talk about that a little? 

Ford: Yes. I mean, clearly, a big part of the Monitor’s job is to put current events into context that makes them more comprehensible and also shows ways in which those current events are not necessarily leading in the gloomy direction that might appear. I mean, when we look at the story, like, for example, the Middle East, we are always looking for the geopolitical background, geopolitical history. We ran a story recently about how China has suddenly popped up in the Gulf as a challenger to the United States, as a leading superpower actor. Now, that is a major geopolitical shift on a smaller scale. There was that alleged plot in Germany the other day trying to overthrow the government. And our story did an interesting thing. It didn’t just report what happened, but Lenora Chu, our correspondent there, she went into the way in which the German government can do all kinds of things to surveil politically legal political parties because of the country’s Nazi past and the modern German’s desire to avert any sort of repetition of that. It allows the government to do all kinds of things that would be quite unthinkable in the United States, as violations of individual rights. 

Collins: That alleged German coup attempt was a huge story to Americans, obviously, partly because it resonated with January 6th here. But what about story, choice and going places people are paying a lot less attention to? 

Ford: It’s something that we really like to do when we can. I mean, recently a correspondent, Scott Peterson, went to Somalia, which is generally and still is a very dangerous place to go, but it’s somewhere that he has been many, many times back since the early 1990s when it was in the news and the Marines were there and Black Hawk Down, the rest of it. Scott has a particularly close relationship with Somalia, and he was very anxious to go. So he took all the necessary security precautions, like armored cars wherever he went. And he was able to get close to the story, which is, I think coming up on us now but not many people are paying a lot of attention to it, which is another huge famine in Somalia. And he used his knowledge of the country and his coverage, frankly, of earlier famines to write sort of stories that you wouldn’t see anywhere else, to be honest. 

Collins: Famine is certainly one of those tough international stories that just seems so cyclical. I mean, it’s so protracted. You think about the Horn of Africa and the Middle East in those terms. How do you encourage reporting that transmits a credible sense of hope? 

Ford: Well, hope obviously is fundamental to everything that we do at the Monitor, but credibility is key as well. I mean, we’re not selling fairy tales. When Scott was in Somalia reporting on the famine, he also, because of his knowledge of the country, was able to get a very insightful story about the way in which the clans, which have dominated Somalia politics for the last 30 years or so, are being encouraged to drop their internal differences and fight together against the Al Qaeda branch, the Al Shabab, who have been making life impossible for Somalis for for about the last 15 or 20 years, and who are the ones who make it such a dangerous place to be. That was a story with limited but credible hope that people could organize themselves to make their lives better and get rid of Al Qaeda. But as I was saying, credible hope is our business. It’s what the Monitor is all about, whether we’re reporting from Somalia or from Ukraine, from China, from Latin America, there is always somebody who is looking for a sensible solution and who is showing and believing in hope. And those are the people that we like to report about. 

Collins: Thank you, Peter, and thanks for shepherding such an important part of the Monitor. 

Ford: I enjoy every moment of it. 

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Collins: Thanks for listening. To find a transcript in our show notes with links to some of the stories discussed here, go to CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Samantha Laine Perfas. Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton were our sound engineers, with original music by Noel Flatt, produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2022.