A veteran foreign correspondent looks back on a career covering conflicts

0:00It's Consider This, where every day we go deep on one big news story. For today's episode, I want to start with a recording from more than 30 years ago. In a tiny outdoor kitchen, Amabla Urarukundu makes dinner for her husband, Emmanuel, and their young son, Christian. They're Tutsis, the minority ethnic group in Rwanda. You're hearing NPR's Jackie Northam in Rwanda in 1994, back when she reported for the CBC. She'd hitchhiked there just days after the genocide began. The tape survived on a cassette she recently rediscovered while packing up her office ahead of retirement. Emmanuel knew that being Tootsie's, he and his family were in danger.

0:49I guess in many ways I got my real start because I covered the genocide in Rwanda. right from the very beginning to the very end. For this week's Reporter's Notebook, we're listening back with one of NPR's longest-serving international correspondents about how she got there, what kept her going, and why some stories never really left her. Well, I've got to tell you, I've never had any formal education in journalism. I had no experience when I set off from northern Alberta, Canada, to London. But I was determined, Dawn, to be a foreign correspondent. It was, I just, that's who I wanted to be. I wanted to be where the action was.

1:30And whenever I saw an opportunity to forward that, I would grab onto it. Consider this. What lessons has a life chasing history taught one of NPR's longest serving foreign correspondents? Coming up, we hear from veteran correspondent Jackie Northam about a life spent reporting on conflict around the world.

2:02From NPR, I'm Don Gagne.

2:07Jackie Northam:This week on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, we talked to legendary musician Jason Nerduce about being in a punk band when he was just 11 years old. We broke up when I was 12. And, yeah, I just felt like I needed to go through puberty without band drama. Don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games. Listen to the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. So you've decided you want to be more active. Exercise scientist Keith Diaz says, put away the smartwatch. Start by noticing your body's natural cues. For us to build a habit to check back in with our bodies, that behavior is much more likely to stick.

2:47Tracking what the body needs. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

3:03NPR's international affairs correspondent, Jackie Northam, followed history wherever it unfolded. From the fall of communism in Eastern Europe to the first Gulf War in Saudi Arabia, then Cambodia, Kenya, and even the Arctic. When I started, there were no cell phones, no internet. You sent your material back by unscrewing the mouse piece on a phone and using alligator clips, you know. And then many years down the road, they had satellite phones, but, you know, they were the size of a compact car. You walk in some business or some office and you beg them to let you use your phone. Or the military.

3:41Yeah. Exactly. I'm sure people wonder how you do what you do. Can you pick a big story you were deployed on and maybe give us some of the nuts and bolts? How did you get there? How did you get in and how did you get out? How did you file? I think it would still be Rwanda. I had just moved to Nairobi. I'd been there about two months, just enough time to find a place to live. And CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, called me and asked me if I could go into Rwanda. A plane carrying the presidents of both Rwanda and neighboring Burundi had crashed. And at that moment, it unleashed a long-planned and, let me say, well-orchestrated genocide.

4:25Militias from the majority Hutu tribe were slaughtering Tutsis. And they were using mostly machetes. And they were clubbing people to death. And this was in 1994. It started in April. And I went in four days after it started.

4:43A young woman suffering from deep machete wounds to her arms and stomach lies on a bloodied stretcher in a makeshift hospital room. Around her are almost a dozen other injured people who've just been carried in by Rwandan government soldiers. We actually had to hitchhike in from Burundi. They had closed the airports in Rwanda, and we flew into Burundi. We found a French priest who would take us into Rwanda. It was an extraordinarily dangerous assignment. The rule of law had completely disappeared. We were vulnerable as much as the Tutsis were at that time, the minority group that was being slaughtered.

5:19But, you know, once I got out that first time, I'd had a machete held to my neck. It was really dangerous. It was really disturbing, just the slaughter that was going on. Came out, went back to Nairobi. And at that point, I really had to decide, do I want to go back in? And it's difficult because it was so dangerous in there. But I just felt that if I'm sitting here in Nairobi and I want to pretend I want to be a foreign correspondent. You know what? And that story is happening next door, and there's so few reporters going in that I had to go back in. That really was the most difficult place to operate in, as you can imagine.

5:57In the middle of that answer, you just said, along with other things, that you had a machete held to your neck. How did that happen? What were the circumstances? Talk about that moment. Yeah, well, we had traveled up after we hitchhiked in. Somebody rented us a car, four of us, myself and three men. You know, when we were going in, we just saw this wave of humanity going the other way. They were trying to escape. And that really says something about what you could do for a living when you're going one way. And, you know, the sea of humanity is going the other. But we started seeing roadblocks, checkpoints all the way up, and a lot of dead bodies on the side of the road.

6:38And as we got closer to Kigali, the capital city, we were stopped. And they surrounded our car. And they thought that I was Belgian. I'm blonde and blue-eyed. And they hate the Belgians. They had colonized Rwanda brutally. And, yeah, they wanted to kill me. And, yeah. How did you get out of that? Did you have a Canadian passport? I did. It took me a long time to try and get that out of my jean pockets. on my shirt. My fingers were completely numb and I was shaking so badly, of course. But what saved me was one of the guys I was traveling with, Jean-Marc. He was an AP Associated Press photographer and he was French and they loved the French in Rwanda.

7:26And, you know, he just kept talking to this Hutu militia man with his, you know, with Michele to my throat and just, Bonhomie, you know, he's just laughing, joking with him, keeping it going, just trying to make friends with them, and it worked. I got my passport out. He saw I was Canadian, and Jean Lark did his magic, and he pulled back, and we went through. Did you ever seriously reconsider your career choice after that moment? No, no, no, no. I've never ever reconsidered my career choice. So there's a recent study that says global conflicts are on the rise, the highest level since World War II, And living in this particular moment seems to be particularly intense for so many people around the world.

8:18How does that impact the work that you do, the fact that there are so many conflicts affecting so many people in so many places? Well, it's tough. I mean, if we look at just recent things with the war in Gaza, it's very difficult at the beginning. All eyes are on that. Everybody's interested in it. They want to know all the bits and turns that go on. The problem is it's a protracted conflict. And fatigue sets in, whether it's, you know, for the listeners or the viewers or the readers and that, where it becomes incremental. And they don't lose interest, but they tune out in some ways. and the challenges to keep their interest, to remind them why this is important to know and to keep on top of.

9:08That's one of the real challenges. And we're seeing that a bit in Iran right now. This is getting dragged out. And it's so important, really, not only for the world, for the U.S., but the world as well. And so it's important to find new ways or find ways of informing people without making it sound repetitive. But it's really hard when you do these stories, and I've been doing them for so long, just that it can get to you. It really can. You just see suffering. You see sort of senselessness. You're seeing cruelty, that type of thing. It is a challenge to report on this stuff. I don't think you can be unaffected by it.

9:53And so, yeah, so the big thing is to just keep trying to tell it in ways that people will be interested because it is important. It's almost like you can take cover under the fact that you have a deadline, right? But then you hit the deadline and then it hits you. Is that kind of what you're saying? It's even more than that. I mean, it's 40 years I've been doing this stuff and it becomes cumulative. You know, it builds up inside you. And I just, I was telling somebody the other day, frankly, I have no capacity for reading or watching or hearing anything sad, certainly anything violent or that.

10:29I can't do it. It's hard to read a newspaper because there's just so much bad news, isn't there? You know, it just doesn't seem to be going away. Well, Jack, yeah, thank you for your work and for your friendship. Yeah, thank you, Dawn. It's been great working with you. This episode was produced by Lina Mohamed. It was edited by Adam Rainey. Our director is Megan Lim, and our interim executive producer is Courtney Dornay.

11:04It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Don Gagne. Every story from shortwave NPR science podcast starts with a question. Like, why do we have nightmares? How does AI affect my energy bill? At NPR, we are here for your right to be curious about the world around you. Follow Shortwave wherever you get your podcasts, because the more you ask, the more interesting the world gets. This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. From mail-in ballots to racial gerrymandering, a lot is at stake for America's free and fair elections. I spoke with journalist Ari Berman about what he calls a final blow to the Voting Rights Act.

11:47Jackie Northam:My fear is that we are returning to a politics of Jim Crow in the South. Listen to Fresh Air on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.