(no subject)
Yesterday a chance came up to cross the border, but the circumstances were a bit unpropitious. The situation at the crossing is quite difficult - there are several different gates between Tunisia proper and Libya proper, for various passport or administrative checks, and men with guns at all of them. So what happens is that me and Elodie, my colleague, get to one and start filming till the men get annoyed and tell us to leave, then we sort of wander vaguely round the side and advance to the next gate by climbing round buildings or over barriers. Then the process is repeated.
In this way yesterday we eventually negotiated our way to the very last fence, beyond which was Libyan passport control. There was a crowd of people there - Bangladeshi refugees arriving, aid workers giving out bottles of water, armed guards from both countries, some journalists. While we were milling around there, a convoy of Mercedes pulled up and a load of Libyan officials in suits got out and started shouting to the media. This caused a bit of a surge in the crowd at the gate, and soon we had all spilled over and were in a big crowd around the cars. These men were trying to get journalists to come with them on 'a trip' into Libya, and they were pretty aggressive about it, shouting at everyone, telling people to hand them their passports. To my astonishment, a girl in front of me did, and it promptly disappeared into a pocket.
We were torn. We really wanted to see some of western Libya, which has had practically zero coverage, but you don't really want to just get into some strange guy's car without any details, and he didn't have any details. 'Where are we going?' I said. They had no idea. When will we be back? 'Insha'allah.' Not very encouraging. Plus we were in a huge crowd, shoving us in different directions, which is always a bad place to call a situation.
I tapped the guy in front of me on the shoulder and asked what he reckoned about it all. It turned out to be Ben Brown, looking impossibly suave and unruffled in a pressed pink shirt and with neat hair. I was there in combats with an ancient Moroccan headscarf wrapped round my face. 'Yah, hard to tell,' he drawled, doing some kind of Roger Moore thing with his eyebrows. Of course Ben had his own 4x4 and a whole team of producers and fixers with him, so less to worry about on his side.
Well in the end we decided to stay. So did the Beeb and TF1 - all the big media in fact. A few people did leave though, including a photographer freelancing for the New York Times and the girl from Canadian radio who was still trying to get her passport back. The Mercedes sped off, and a load of Tunisian guards pushed us back into their country. It was interesting though - one of those situations that comes up quite often, where you need to make some kind of decision in quite awkward conditions. It was useful for us because now we have a good feel for what it's like up at the crossing. If the situation comes up again, we'll be able to call it a lot better.
After that we were sick of being around other journalists, so we abandoned the border and tried to get a handle on how on earth things work for the refugees who are coming across the frontier. Most of them don't speak English or French (or Arabic, usually), so finding someone who can explain what it's like is quite hard. The camp is absolute chaos - we couldn't work out who on earth was in charge of anything, and it covers acres and acres of desert. We tried to follow a couple of people through the labyrinthine process to see how it works - here's what we ended up with. (Grrr, YouTube is still cropping our lovely widescreen pictures into 4:3 for some reason..)
Getting stuff back is difficult. I finished editing that piece at 7pm last night, but it didn't finish sending till midnight. However, our driver-cum-fixer invited us round to his place afterwards for dinner, and we had the most amazing home-cooked Tunisian feast - couscous, tagine, salad, patisseries. Tunisian 'tagine' is not at all like what it is in Morocco - here it's a thick quiche-like thing, more or less like a Spanish tortilla. When we came out - stuffed full full full - it was pretty late. A troop of camels grazing just out in the scrubland. Beautiful open sky. Thousands of stars.