BBC newsman on genocide, war, a newborn baby

Please note: The linked material is linked to the assignments in my syllabus for COMM 387 (Lit./Journ.) and is required reading for students in that class. It won't do anybody else a bit of harm to read it, either.

Fergal Keane is a senior correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corp. He has covered wars, genocide, famine and the AIDS crisis, mostly in Africa, but he is best known worldwide, perhaps, for his "Letter to Daniel," a commentary aired on BBC on the birth of Keane's son in 1996. In it he stated some of his values as a reporter in perhaps an especially moving way.

Keane, who is Irish, has had a distinguished journalistic career. Some would say he displays a typically Irish awareness of the moral dimensions of social and political upheaval. His first job was on a small newspaper in Limerick, and he moved on to cover trouble spots in Northern Ireland, Africa and Asia. He now is able to pick and choose his assignments, having recently reported on the aftermath of the government crackdown in Mynamar (a country the Brits still call Burma). But his career was shaped by covering the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Keane was one of several BBC reporters in Rwanda in the spring of 1994, when government backed militias murdered hundreds of thousands of people. "For some of us," he said years later, "it has left an enduring mark, a sense that we failed, not so much as journalists, but as human beings, because we saw things we were powerless to stop." Ten years later he was interviewed for an American public television show on what he saw and how it changed him. Read it. Read also Keane's more recent commentary from Darfur where a similar holocaust is slowly playing out:

I have no doubt that in a few years time there will be investigations by the United Nations and the EU [European Union] and several others into why the world failed the people of Darfur.

We already know why, just as we did in Rwanda.

We cared, but we did not care enough.

But note also that Keane is still covering the tragedies and still speaking out. This month (December), for example, he helped the Disasters Emergency Committee, a British charity, raise more than £13 million for refugees in Darfur and Chad.