Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

Haiti: Rural Development (and the Perils of Videojournalism)

By Kira Kay and Jason Maloney, for the Pulitzer Center
 

Video frame grab of USAID project sign, the only image salvaged from our day-long shoot on agricultural development

In the realm of the video news reporter, if you don’t have it on tape, it didn’t happen.  OK, it’s not always so extreme, you can narrate the occurrence of an event and use vaguely relevant or generic images -- say a compression shot of people walking on the street -- to cover that narration.  But if the element is highly specific, then no video equals no event.

Many, many times on a shoot we'll glimpse an incredible image out the window of our car, but know immediately that by the time we stop, get the camera set up and rolling, the moment will be gone.  And often, all it takes is for the camera itself to appear and be seen, to irrevocably change the moment.

So, very little can be as heartbreaking as when everything appears to be just right for filming:  the event is unfolding, the camera is rolling, the subjects are doing their thing, you’re getting great material… and then you later learn that due to some rare technical malfunction, the wonderful images you thought you’d recorded, the event you thought you’d documented, was gone for good (or for your purposes, never existed)!

Haiti: Hope and Tourism at Labadee

Jason Maloney, for the Pulitzer Center

Labadee's New Pier

When Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas docked in Haiti yesterday, history was made. First, it marked the inaugural passenger sailing of the vessel, the largest in the world with capacity for 6,300 cruisers. Second, it was the first visit hosted by the newly renovated port at Labadee, Haiti’s greatest hope for jumpstarting its fledgling tourist industry, representing an investment of 55 million dollars. Labadee has welcomed many Royal Caribbean ships over the years but until yesterday they did not dock and passengers were instead ferried in on launches.

Bosnia: Return to Sevarlije

By Kira Kay, for the Pulitzer Center

The smells coming from Ramiz Sinanovic’s homemade distillery weren’t so appetizing, but the promise of the fruit brandy it would eventually yield overrode the immediate discomfort. As Ramiz cranked the handle of the elaborate contraption, the call to Friday midday prayer echoed through the hilltops around us – Ramiz didn’t seem to mind that he was making booze at the time of worship. It is his only way of earning money, he explained to me – as a Muslim returning to the Serbian part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, there are not a lot of other economic opportunities around.

Ramiz is one of 1800 Muslim ethnicity Bosnian citizens – Bosniaks, they are called – who were once forced from their homes in this lovely little town of Sevarlije; all victims of the brutal ethnic cleansing that the 1990s war here is so infamous for.  Some were immediately killed, some managed to flee to somewhat safer areas, and others, like Ramiz, spent many months in nearby detention camps. The war was brought to an end in 1995, with the signing of the US-brokered Dayton Peace Agreement.

Bosnia's Fragile Peace: An Interview with Gordan Milosovic

Jason Maloney, for the Pulitzer Center

Recently, Milorad Dodik, the controversial prime minister of the Serb-majority part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, made public comments suggesting that Bosnian Muslims had staged two notorious attacks against them during Bosnia’s bloody civil war, presumably to win the support of the international community. The comments created an uproar among many Bosnians and received condemnation from the international community’s high representative in the country. One of the two locations of the massacres, the city of Tuzla, has now brought formal charges against Dodik for inciting hatred and intolerance.

We went to the capital of Republika Srpska, Banja Luka, to ask Dodik’s political advisor what the prime minister meant by his comment. What follows is an unedited version of his response.


This reporting is part of the Pulitzer Center's upcoming Fragile States project. Learn more

East Timor: On the Firing Line

Jason Maloney, for the Pulitzer Center

It was one of those bits of luck that you come to rely on from time to time as a reporter in the field: you take a chance on a questionable story element, travel a distance to cover it with pretty low expectations and then you hit paydirt:  it turns out to be one of the cornerstones of your work.

We’d been invited by the Australian-lead peacekeeping mission in East Timor - known as the International Stabilization Force (ISF) – to attend a shooting competition at an army base about an hour outside of the capital, Dili. We’d asked for a chance to film ISF operations in action, as their presence in East Timor is one of the main reasons many people had given us for the calm and stability you see on the streets today. The trouble was they didn't have many activities planned during our stay that would make for good TV visuals.  The media folks working with the ISF, though eager to help, had thus far only come up with a cultural event where some of their soldiers from New Zealand were going to perform the “Hakka”, a traditional Maori dance, at a local trade fair.

Then Major Kathryn Ames, the spokesperson for the ISF, brought up the shooting competition. She went right into management-expectation mode, explaining that it would just be a bunch of guys lying on the ground popping off a few rounds at distant targets, and that it would be very short. But we were thinking: guys in uniforms firing weapons?  Better than a Hakka. 

East Timor: Crafting desks, building a nation

Kira Kay, for the Pulitzer Center

Eduardo Belo Soares showed me a photo of himself surrounded by rebel soldiers, taken on the eve of East Timor’s vote for independence 10 years ago. On their faces were expressions of weariness combined with a bit of shock – as if it was just occurring to these fighting men that now the hard work was about to begin: the birth of their new nation was at hand.

Belo Soares was once a rebel too; he worked in the hills with the guerilla forces, running their communications system and acting as informal spokesman of the movement.  Now he runs a carpentry shop and a security company in the center of the capital city, Dili. He says his transition from fighter to citizen has not been easy, but that helping to build his new nation is, as he calls it, a moral obligation for him and his fellow Timorese, one he takes very much to heart.

East Timor: Ten Years On

Kira Kay and Jason Maloney, for the Pulitzer Center

Veterans, widows, children who never knew their fathers—all gathered on the red-earth hills overlooking the blue seas of the Wetar Straits. Before them, two dozen flag-draped coffins, very small, clearly designed to carry only a few bones each. For these families, this was a day of both great pain and great pride.

Ten years ago their tiny nation, East Timor, voted for and eventually won its independence from Indonesia after decades of often brutal occupation. The coffins contained the remains of Timorese guerilla fighters felled in battle, gathered from ad hoc burial plots across the country and brought here to be interred as martyrs at East Timor’s Metinaro war memorial, a vast and awe-inspiring series of terraced graves climbing up the hillside. Only the hymns of the Catholic mass were able to cover up the wails of grief from survivors for whom even the reward of victory was insufficient consolation.