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[In the Abidjan cattle market during the First Ivorian Civil War in September 2002. A soldier] stood, soaked in sweat, boots too tight, pointing an A… - Janine di Giovanni
" "[In the Abidjan cattle market during the First Ivorian Civil War in September 2002. A soldier] stood, soaked in sweat, boots too tight, pointing an AK47 at me and looking as if he had every intention of using it.
There was an African man near my foot, groaning in pain, bullet wounds in his legs. A moment before, I'd squatted in the dirt and tried to drag him into my taxi. I wanted to get him to a hospital. The soldier said the man on the ground was a rebel, and I knew if I left him behind, he would kill him.
The soldier raised his gun, the safety catch off, and pointed it at my heart. ... His impatience was turning to rage when Bruno [Girodon], who was on the other side of the cattle market, suddenly spotted me and pulled me roughly by the arm away.
"This is Africa," he said. "Are you crazy?" He dragged me back to the car, silently fuming.
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About Janine di Giovanni
Janine di Giovanni is a journalist, war correspondent and author currently serving as the Executive Director of The Reckoning Project. She is a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, a non-resident Fellow at The New America Foundation and the Geneva Center for Security Policy in International Security and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the Blake-Dodd nonfiction prize for her lifetime body of work.
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After eight brutal years, it is hard to find anything shocking about the Syrian civil war. But somehow, the government forces under President Bashar al-Assad always find a way. On May 15, Syrian bombs destroyed the Tarmala Maternity and Children’s Hospital in Idlib, the 19th medical facility attacked since late April.
Mr. al-Assad’s campaign against hospitals is not just inhumane — it represents one of the most repellent aspects of modern warfare. Hospitals were once off limits; even in conflicts where the international laws of war were routinely flouted, medical facilities were spared.
[M]ost mainstream journalists have been refused visas to visit regime-held areas of Syria. At the start of the war, I was initially allowed into regime territory but was followed by minders from the Ministry of Information. In 2012, after I went undercover and reported a government-sponsored mass killing in the town of Daraya, which was later verified by Human Rights Watch and "characterized by the UN appointed Independent International Commission of Inquiry as a 'massacre,'" according to Amnesty International, my government visa was revoked and I was told I would be thrown in an "Assad prison" if I tried coming back.
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I became a journalist partly because my mother was prevented from becoming one, and also because I inherited her insatiable curiosity. She read all of my stories, even the most brutal from war zones, although I would often lie about where I was to prevent her from worrying. Recently she read a personal essay that explained in detail how I almost lost my eyesight and spent three weeks in a hospital in Paris. This time she wept, saying: "Why didn't you tell me? I was only 95 when this happened. I could have flown to Paris and taken care of you."
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