Plàcid Garcia-Planas (Sabadell, 1962) can cover the maps with pins marking each country he has gone to as a war reporter: the former Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq or Palestine. In his different texts –usually marked by the violence of conflicts– his particular observation stands out about what may seem more banal and that reflects, despite everything, an essential part of the human condition. This is the case of the place where Mussolini was hanged –and which now houses a McDonald’s– or the hotel that hangs a portrait of a 20th-century leader –Hitler included– in each of its rooms.
(You may be interested in: Mariúpol, the key port for the outcome of the war in Ukraine).
One of the main features of the journalist’s job is doubt: it is part of the job. However, what makes the difference in a war reporter?
For me, reporting is the essence of journalism. Everything fits in a report: information, a small opinion, an analysis, a fact, a small interview. Without freedom and without a doubt, there is no journalism, much less reporting. However, I cannot make a distinction between war reporting and other types of reporting. Being a reporter is a category: if you are not a good reporter in Parla, you will not be a good reporter in Aleppo. Reporting, in the end, is putting the right word at the right time.
Is it closer, therefore, to the values of journalism itself than to the characteristics of the conflicts?
The main thing is to be a reporter: if you only know how to do it well in a war, it means that you are not a good reporter.
(Also: After Palestinian attack, Israel will close the passage with the Gaza Strip).
International information can be essential for ordinary citizens, but it runs the risk of being of poor quality due to the precarious nature of the job. Why?
Journalism has been completely precarious. This type of reporting, however, is more precarious because it is more expensive: it is haute couture, it costs more to go far away and send a story. People, moreover, are more interested in what is closest – which does not have to be good or bad – and this happens especially when what is closest is painful: economic crises, viruses, suicides. There is a reader’s interest in the international section, but in the end it is above all a question of money: sending a journalist abroad is very expensive. From the reader’s point of view, the international section is not a mass sport.
Has that mystique associated with this class of reporters disappeared then?
When there are not many problems in a country, one is usually interested in those that do. However, when a State already begins to suffer certain obstacles, then the crises of others fall into a second category. I know both sides of the trench: the newsroom and the street. Once I had a debate at the round table on Cadena Ser, with several journalists, where they told me that there were wars that were of no interest to anyone. I am number two in the international section of La Vanguardia, along with Ramón Aymerich, and the truth is that we cannot fill all the pages with a rape of girls on one side, an earthquake on the other, a massacre on the next. People have saturation of the other’s pain. You cannot force people to read and understand all the pain in the world, especially in a situation where there is enough here. In this sense, one can propose here an exhibition of photographs of the Syrian war, but propose in Syria an exhibition of images of its war. They want to forget, right? They will say: hey, don’t turn my pain into something aesthetic.
Does this saturation of pain make us oblivious to it?
Yes, of course. I think it was Saint Teresa who said that excess kills pleasure. Saturation also kills the absolute capacity to absorb the bad. That is why I cannot fill the pages with tragedies.
The journalist who comes to cover these areas, however, how much of an ego and love for adrenaline does he have?
There is much more ego than is recognized. A few years ago there was an exhibition in Madrid of war correspondents entitled ‘Creators of conscience’. It seems something typical of the Pope: there is a conscience and I believe it, and in my magnanimity I contribute it. Obviously, war correspondents are necessary, but nobody is forced to go to war. When someone says: “I’m going because someone has to tell,” he is telling the truth, but it is also true that there is a certain ego. And this is not bad: the ego moves the world, but recognize it, do not dress up as Teresa of Calcutta.
(Also: Weird underwater museum has tanks, cannons, and military machines.)
Does objectivity exist or can one only achieve honesty?
I believe that objectivity does not exist, but that there can only be honesty. That is, the effort to be what we call objective. In the same way that there is no love, but acts of love.
Love does not exist?
No, there are acts of love, actions of love. Therefore, as the saying goes, ‘works are love, not good reasons’. There is no such thing as democracy in the abstract: there are countries that have more democratic laws and facts than others. It is something of facts, action and verb.
Your stories on many occasions resort to paradox. A clear example is the report in which you mention that the area where Mussolini was hanged is currently a McDonald’s. Does this explain anything about human nature?
The paradox is a fantastic tool to dissect people and situations, because the human being, from the moment he gets up until he goes to bed, is a machine of contradictions. The paradox shows the differences between what we do and what we say, between what we feel and what we do. The paradox, therefore, does not explain human nature, but is human nature.
In an interview conducted a few years ago, because of the book Tot està per dir, you argued even then that technology had advanced faster than biology. And furthermore, that the internet had killed the figure of the correspondent. Why?
Because all machines already think faster than us. In other words, why is reporting an essential tool for me? Well, because it is capable of providing elements for reflection. I have chronicled the Syrian war, and it is likely that the war has not changed, but I have provided food for thought for the people who read me. But biologically it no longer gives us time to reflect, to think. Now we are constantly saturated with data and, like it or not, subject to a biology that cannot possibly evolve so quickly. Therefore, we have a lot of data, but little information. A journalist I don’t remember described it as a flood: in this, the first thing we lose, curiously, is drinking water. Now what there is is a brutal flood of data, and what we are losing is the data that is useful to us.
(Also read: Alert in Paris: policemen shoot at a car that tried to ram them).
So, have we gained noise, but lost the ability to discern it?
Right, the word is noise. And I refer to biology because it is important: we need time, we cannot be as fast as machines. There is a clear dysfunction.
He has covered the war in the Balkans, Afghanistan and many other conflicts, and yet his texts are usually characterized by that strong flexibility and freedom that reporting allows. Could you better express terror and pain without the linguistic corsets that are sometimes imposed?
I am lucky to have worked in a narratively liberal newspaper. That report when I discover that where Mussolini has been hanged there is now a McDonald’s would have been very surreal in other newspapers. Each correspondent is a world. Sometimes you read other newspapers and it seems to you that the correspondents are all the same. Not here, here each correspondent thinks differently. The crucible, in that sense, is very wide. So I can’t say for sure, but that might help. In the great majority of the newspapers I would have been hit to write in this way.
As for Afghanistan, was the error as obvious as it seems now?
Since 2010 I already knew, and I said so in an interview, that we would end up retiring. Why? Because it is impossible to fight against a landscape. The key question in Afghanistan is why did no one resist the Taliban? No one stood up. Look at Barcelona and Madrid in 1936: there was a coup and the working masses took to the streets to try to stop it. But why didn’t anyone do it in the Afghan case? Well, because 90 percent of the population, with more or less intensity, thinks the Taliban is okay, or even thinks like them. If not, there would have been a resistance, but the truth is that nothing came of it. In three days the Taliban planted themselves in Kabul.
(Also: Emmanuel Macron, a convinced reformer faced with the challenge of uniting France).
Was there a tacit collusion?
Well, yes, unfortunately 90 percent of the Afghan population is very traditional. They treat women the same or similar to that of the Taliban. The women’s demonstrations – who are the ones who are going to suffer the most – were from cities and socially very limited. Very few fought, there was no effective resistance. Although it is also not true that nothing has been done in 20 years: schools, hospitals have been built… but you cannot change a country in two decades either. The French, when they invaded us, came with the ideas that we would later adopt, but here we ended up beating them. It was seen as a foreign imposition: in any case we will do it ourselves. It has been said that Afghanistan was a tomb of empires, but the truth is that it has been a tomb for themselves. You just need to see how the population is.
Did Afghanistan, in journalistic terms, awaken an idealism similar to that of the Vietnam War?
Not at all. Something very curious happened to me in Afghanistan, which also shows how misinformed we were. I have never been embedded in any army, but halfway through the occupation, around 2010, together with Guillermo Cervera, the photographer, I decided to go with the Afghan army. We went to their offices in Kandahar and they told us directly: “Ok, tomorrow here, at 10”. She surprised us and asked if there was nothing to sign. That was, at least, what was done in other armies. They told us no, that it was the first time in ten years that someone had asked for it. Until then – I don’t know if it was done later – no one had asked to accompany the Afghan army in Kandahar, which was the toughest area. And that was the army we wanted to pass the junk to get away.
(Also read: Rafael Correa’s move to get rid of Ecuadorian justice).
So, is the saying that ‘journalism is the first draft of history’ applicable?
Yes, it is the first heartbeat. Historians criticize us a lot, but in the end they all go to the newspaper library. I directed the Democratic Memorial of the Generalitat de Catalunya, the body that manages historical memory from the Second Republic onwards. I found myself surrounded by historians who talked all the time about the civil war and who, on the other hand, had never been in a war. And I think that something is lost along the way. To provoke them, he told them: “Do you know what a reporter is? A reporter is a historian who is still alive”.
PELAYO OF THE HERAS
Ethics Magazine
@draculayeye_
More news in depth
-‘We are caught between polarization and little credibility in leaders’
-Ramón Jesurún: Was there censorship of certain media outlets?
-Fernando Botero, the greatest Colombian artist of all time
#war #reporter #historian #alive