Her nerve was her rage against the oppressor
So that’s a great journalist gone – Lyse Doucet on Sue Lloyd-Roberts.
BBC journalist Sue Lloyd-Roberts, who forged a career in secret filming in secretive states, has died of leukaemia at the age of 64. Her courage, compassion and commitment to expose injustice the world over was an irritation to human rights abusers, and an inspiration to many journalists, including me. I’ll miss her as a loyal friend and colleague. And her brave journalism will be missed by many.
I always wondered : “How does Sue Lloyd-Roberts do it?”
How did she keep her nerve when she posed as a European gems importer and filmed with a hidden camera in Rangoon, under repressive military rule, in 2007?
How did she keep calm when she crossed army lines in 2011 with a fake Syrian identity card to become the first Western journalist to secretly film opposition protests at the very beginning of Syria’s uprising?
Doucet asked another journalist how Lloyd-Roberts kept her nerve.
“Her nerve was her rage against the oppressor and the unjust and her absolute determination to expose and if possible humiliate the villain,” he replied.
And that is the story of Sue Lloyd-Roberts’ bold breathtaking journalism over more than 40 years.
We need more like that, not fewer.
Channel 4 News aired a short tribute to her last night, which had this bizarre exchange between a clearly furious Lloyd Roberts and a Gambian cleric who supported FGM:
Lloyd Roberts [voiceover]: “The chief imam here preaches that FGM is enshrined in Islamic law, and that genital mutilation is good for women. Why?”
Cleric [voiceover translation]: “Because I know that women who have a clitoris suffer from an irritating itching. They want to scratch it all the time. And what’s more, it makes a woman leak water from her private parts.”
Lloyd Roberts: “I’ve had a clitoris for 60 years and this has never happened to me.”
Cleric [voiceover translation]: “…Well, you are therefore an exception among women.”
https://youtu.be/Dfp4IccdWB8
I’m gonna take a wild guess that that cleric was of the male persuasion.
Elsewhere in Africa.. (somewhat OT, and not meant as a comment on those who defended the boy and his father in the earlier threads) UGH !! http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34551890
(In case anyone wasn’t aware… http://bashirwatch.org/ )
So, that link is “not meant as a comment on those who defended the boy and his father in the earlier threads”.
Then what do you mean by posting it?
A lad played with electronics, and took the result to school. That is something that some kids do. A teacher found him playing with it, and told him to put it away. Being that it was an alarm clock, the alarm went off during class.
Everyone had a good laugh at the old-fashioned method of waking people up (we all use smartphones for that now, don’t we?) and when the teacher had settled the room, the kid was encouraged to learn more about how electronics work, and enter the results in the next science fair.Oh, no – that didn’t happen, because the lad wasn’t a Nice® White™Christian© Boy, was he?
Instead, the school called the cops, and the cops handcuffed his hands behind his back… etc., etc. – all the while pretending that it was because they were afraid that he’d built a bomb, which is only something brown people do, not Nice® White™ Christian© Boys with Nice® White™ Christian© Names, like Mr. Timothy McVeigh.
Of course, their behaviour belied their words – they took none of the steps that would be taken if they were genuinely thinking that – and it was obvious from the get-go that it was all about punishing Uppity® Brown™ Moslem© Boy. Perhaps it was because he was as cocky when he was ‘caught’ as his white peers are encouraged to be, instead of showing the deference deemed necessary by one of his hue. In any case, with the number of non-white children killed by the police in the USA – police who seem to think that a justice system is only for white people – there was a real risk that he would have been shot en route to the Police station, with some cock-and-bull story invented about how he’d tried to escape, and his name would only have been remembered on lists of victims of the USA’s uniformed Mafia.
Unfortunately for the racists, however, that didn’t happen. What happened instead was that there was a huge groundswell of support for yet another kid being treated abysmally by the system that is set up to fail them.
There is absolutely no way that anyone could have predicted that. A little bit of local tutting, perhaps, about the brown boy who invited his own execution by firing squad because of his behaviour – that would have been predictable.
And the racists are furious. How dare the Uppity® Brown™ Moslem© Boy get rewarded for surviving what was, to everyone else on the planet, an egregious show of white power by the authorities? How dare the empathetic amongst us try to show the kid that not everyone in authority is out to get him, just because he’s brown.
There was no prior agenda, cooked up by the lad and his father. No-one thought or said “If you take a deconstructed old electric alarm clock to school, the President of the USA will be really impressed!” In what universe would that even have been plausible, prior to it actually happening?
As for the link itself: the boy’s Sudanese-born father was one of the current President’s rivals. Why wouldn’t he take an opportunity to gloat? This was a PR dream for the opposition, especially since the current President is wanted for human-rights abuses. “See, you should have elected the guy with the clever kid, not the arsehole you currently have!”
Try having non-white Muslim family living in the USA. It has been nerve-wracking for fourteen years. Then tell me that this was all pre-planned.
@tiggerthewing
I guess you haven’t been paying attention. I am brown myself (barely lighter than Ahmed) and was born (so to speak) Muslim. I wore a hijab at 15, rebelled at 16 and am still shunned by some relatives…
I fully stand by my comments on the earlier thread.
And why any decent human being would want to bask in the genocidal glow of a tyrant escapes me (your explanation makes no sense).
And Ahmed and his father’s meeting with Bashir seems to have given Obama second thoughts about the clock. It won’t be ticking at the White House after all.
@ 6 Helene
https://twitter.com/metaquest/status/656267624368635904/photo/1
Wrong again, Helene. Ahmed visited the White House and even received an unscheduled hug from the president.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/us/politics/ahmed-mohamed-student-clockmaker-visits-white-house.html?_r=0&referer=http://www.google.com/
It’s true Ahmed didn’t bring his Scary Clock along, though.
My mistake. Based it on tweet from the WH press secretary…. The USA Today logline also has it wrong.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/19/no-meeting-texas-clockmaker-obama-hosts-white-house-astronomy-night/74247030/