The progress of journalist John Pilger

By TIM WATKIN

It was 2 am. The bar was dark and all but empty. Still, the conversation was nimble; the young guy beside me had a beard and a brain. Lacking the former and having clearly lost the latter, I had admitted I was a journalist and was enduring his exhaustive views on the failures of the New Zealand media.

"That John Pilger, now there's a real journalist," he insisted.

Through the half-light I saw a chance for redemption.

"I'm interviewing him tomorrow night," I replied. Instant credibility was gained by association.

In a generation when journalists rank alongside used-car salesmen in public trust polls, few, if any, other reporters throughout the world could elicit this response from those outside the profession. What's more, Pilger was breaking award-winning stories in Vietnam before this guy was born.

Yet respect has stuck to his name, largely because his defiant, compassionate and unapologetically crusading reportage over more than three decades has challenged the more commonplace journalism that contains, to use his own words, "a conditioned deference to authority and to the 'prevailing view' in the name of objectivity."

Although associated with his more high-profile work in Cambodia, East Timor and Iraq, he has practised his craft in the eye of many news hurricanes: in Soweto with apartheid-oppressed Africans, in Prague with Czechoslovakia's Charter 77 protesters, in an LA kitchen with a dying Bobby Kennedy, in Eritrea with freedom-fighters, in Thatcher's Britain with villages of striking miners.

What is so striking about Pilger's work is how simply he discloses meticulous research and mind-opening detail. He has a gift for telling the stories of ordinary people without trivialising them, of looking at an issue in a new way that leaves viewers wondering why so few journalists are asking these questions.

To his critics, however, he is unbalanced and, therefore, distorts his stories in favour of the causes he supports.

Pilger learned his trade in the days when tabloids in Britain were popular for their campaigning and their unfettered analysis, rather than their models' unfettered clothing. After starting his career in 1958 on the rightwing Daily Telegraph, he was working for the Daily Mirror in 1965 when he was asked to prepare a list of story ideas on youth volunteers for a series called "Youth in Action."

Pilger learned of an organisation called VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas), had the gall to plan a year-long trip through almost every country he'd ever wanted to visit, and was stunned to receive the proposal back with "Yes!" scribbled on it. His career as a foreign correspondent had begun.

After leaving the Mirror, TV documentaries, books of his reportage and a New Statesman column have become his main journalistic activities.

The latest landmark of that career was screened in New Zealand this week, when TV One ran his documentary Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq, about the death of hundreds of thousands of children, strangled by international sanctions imposed after the Gulf War.

Before travelling to Iraq, he turned his camera on the country of his birth, Australia, and the plight of the Aborigines in the lead-up to the Sydney Olympics. The documentary, Welcome to Australia, told of the obstacles placed in the way of Aboriginal sportspeople through the 20th century.

In a mostly unsuccessful attempt to stimulate what Pilger calls "a useful debate," it screened in Australia a year before the Olympics and met with criticism that an ex-pat could dare to knock his own.

"I think it's true of all colonial countries," the man who lists "mulling" as one of his recreations says on the phone from his London home.

"They are very sensitive, at least their institutions like the media, are very sensitive to any kind of criticism. Whereas here [Britain] it's an entirely different view. But this is an old and more confident society in many ways."

Australia's sensitivity is writ large in Prime Minister John Howard's belligerent response to the recent report by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which expressed deep concern that the country's 430,000 Aborigines continued to be disadvantaged in jobs, housing, health and education.

Howard announced a cut in cooperation with the UN and, in words reminiscent of dictators down the years, said he wanted the matter "resolved in Australia by Australia through Australian institutions."

"I think it's indicative of the depth of resistance in the Australian establishment to settling with the Aboriginal people, and that should not be underestimated," says Pilger. "When a government is prepared to say that it will bar UN officials from Australia and withdraw Australia from certain UN human rights committees, then you get a very clear idea of the almost unique resistance to settling the Aboriginal issues in Australia."

He says international opinion is turning against Australia because of its unwillingness to address a past during which Aborigines were shot for sport and science, and labelled as flora and fauna, until the middle of the 20th century.

"I don't know if Australians understand this, but they are acquiring a really bad name, a very tainted name, around the world. Immediately after the Olympics, the New York Times ran an editorial that really attacked Australia. That wouldn't have happened a few years ago.

"People have got to bring direct political pressure on the Government to change their policies, otherwise Australia's name is going to get worse."

It's a viewpoint that has limited currency in a country bathing in the afterglow of "the best Olympics ever." Well before the Olympics, as Pilger says in his film, the public relations industry was declaring the Sydney Olympics the dawning of a golden age for the lucky country. The Games have come and gone but has anything improved?

"I think the feelgood factor has been reinforced but I don't think there's been any improvement whatsoever where it matters. On the contrary," Pilger adds, with his well-developed eye for the revealing juxtaposition, "shortly after Cathy Freeman won her gold medal, John Howard and his cabinet met to revise the Land Rights Act, which meant mounting yet another attack on the basic rights of Aboriginal people.

"So you could say that under cover of the Olympics, the Government has proceeded in its policy of denying the Aborigines the rights that everybody, including the UN [and since the interview, Oxfam] now says are overdue."

Acknowledging the manipulation inherent in "a big corporate bash" such as the Olympics, Pilger is still pleased that Freeman lit the flame.

"There's no doubt that Cathy Freeman has delighted the Aboriginal people. They have a hero and that's important. I don't think she's being used by the Government. I think she's a genuinely popular figure, there's no doubt about that. But she is an aberration. She has all the opportunities most Aboriginal sportspeople don't have.

"There are annual Aboriginal Games in the Northern Territory which are played in a dustbowl without a blade of grass, hardly any goalposts, no swimming pools, hardly a stand for people to sit on.

"If there were swimming pools," Pilger continues, his Aussie twang still apparent, "the kids wouldn't get trachoma because their eyes would be clean.

"If there were more paved roads the dust wouldn't fly up and, again, they wouldn't get trachoma. There is so much that is crying out to be done that isn't being done."

Considering the question of what governments should do to improve the conditions of indigenous minorities or, you might say, closing the gaps, it's hard to avoid comparisons with New Zealand.

The starting place is different. As Pilger puts it, "at least the Maori people were recognised as a human entity and won a few wars," but the end goals of redress, equality of opportunity and reducing poverty and social exclusion are the same.

Pilger believes a democratic government must have the courage to spend money on those at the bottom, "and right at the bottom are the indigenous people."

"Unless they do that there's just going to be trouble. When there are groups left out in any society, there's trouble. If the New Zealand Government is doing that [spending on disadvantaged groups], that's a positive thing. The worst thing is when a government, as in Australia, follows a redneck view of the world rather than leading."

His criticism of Australia extends to an insistence that it must also face up to its acquiescent part in the Indonesian oppression of East Timor.

"Australia owes that country massive reparation, and I think those reparations should be in the form of reconstruction resources and skills that are directed at the incoming government."

For all the delight at East Timor's independence referendum, Pilger says a major injection of funds from its well-off neighbours, New Zealand included, is needed to rebuild 25 years of destruction. Although rich in oil and gas for its size, he believes it might be even harder for the East Timorese to maintain control over these resources than it was to evict the Indonesians.

"The big battle is that the country doesn't simply become a pauper client of the World Bank or is exploited by foreign multinationals."

But even that battle can be fought only when the East Timorese have all made it home. Pilger points out the ongoing suffering that has largely slipped out of public awareness. About 120,000 people are still in West Timorese camps, hassled and harried by the Indonesian militia.

"It's a situation that should end. It wouldn't be tolerated in any other part of the world by the so-called international community. They'd bring pressure on the [Indonesian] Government to end it."

Considering the death of one of our own soldiers, Private Leonard Manning, at the hands of that militia, and the presence of so many others, it is remarkable that there hasn't been more media and public pressure on the Government to kick up more of a fuss about the issue.

But then, we have remained more or less silent on the future of West Papua, too. Discussed briefly at the recent South Pacific Forum, the Melanesian people's fight for independence has been all but ignored here. Pilger doesn't see Indonesia letting them go in a hurry.

"The resources in West Papua provide something like half the resources for the whole of Indonesia. It's rich in everything. It has every right to break away because the way it was grafted on to Indonesia was as scandalous as the takeover of East Timor, but I don't think it'll happen in the immediate future."

Another country, another justice fight, another plea for dignity. From the ease of their own lounges, many people find it hard not to turn away from the seemingly endless news of suffering and struggle. So, after decades in this milieu, does Pilger feel weary in the face of such repetitive suffering?

"No, on the contrary, I think a lot of things change. Nothing is static. East Timor is effectively free now. That's astonishing. The fact that next year there will be an election, I would never have predicted. I would never have predicted in my lifetime that there would have been a black government, however imperfect, in South Africa.

"I would never have predicted the power of the Aboriginal activism in Australia. It's a difficult situation, but it's achieved a lot.

"Nothing is perfect and nothing will ever be, but it moves forward. Often at snail's pace, but there is forward movement."

* John Pilger, who is in Auckland this week, will speak at the Turning The Tide public conference on modern conflict resolution at AUT on Thursday. To register, call (09) 917 9788. He will also address the 2000 Media Peace Awards on Friday.