Ed during his time in Afghanistan © Ed Gorman
Before his ‘In conversation’ event in Belfast later this week, we caught up with former journalist Ed Gorman to discuss his book Death of a Translator, his experiences in Afghanistan and the impact of conflict.
What spurred you to write Death of a Translator?
This is a story about adventure in the hills of Afghanistan during the Soviet war in the 1980s but also the story about the consequences of war reporting on a young mind and the long term effects of experiences that I had while travelling with the Mujahidin. I always knew that I should tell my story; firstly because it offers a portrait of a now long-forgotten war and secondly, because I thought that writing about trauma and my treatment might be of benefit to others with similar conditions.
What made you decide to head out to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in the mid-1980s?
I was a young, hot-headed and somewhat reckless journalist keen to make my name and tackle what I saw as the ultimate challenge – reporting a war. I was making slow progress in the early stages of my career when an opportunity arose to travel to Peshawar, in what is now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan, and try to link up with the Mujahidin resistance. I jumped at it, viewing it as the perfect way to start my career as a foreign correspondent in a wild and historically fascinating part of the world. It was also a war that was being ignored by the media and western governments because it was so difficult to cover. All in all it added up to a real challenge and as an ambitious 24-year-old I was up for it.
How is the country different now compared to 30 years ago?
When I first visited Afghanistan with the Mujahidin in 1985, Afghanistan was completely underdeveloped with few roads and very limited communications. There was almost no healthcare provision, only a basic education service and a central government which barely influenced life in the countryside. Almost continuous war over the last 38 years has transformed Afghan society in almost every respect and not entirely to the good of the Afghans who live there. War is an accelerator of growth, innovation and change and this has been the case in Afghanistan which has had billions of dollars of donor and war-chest money spent on it with big improvements in education, health care, democratic procedures and so on. But the question remains how much of this intervention has helped Afghanistan grow as a nation or tended to disrupt it?
What about the landscape of Afghanistan; how has the conflict impacted the country’s environment?
Between 1979 and 1994, the Soviet army destroyed huge areas of cultivated land by bombing, burning and mining it and destroyed thousands of villages as part of a scorched earth programme to try to deny the Mujahidin a supportive environment from which they could fight. I do not know how much of this rural infrastructure has been re-built but the impact at the time was dramatic, depressing to see and utterly ruthless. Apart from the landscape, the damage to the people was incalculable with millions forced into exile and hundreds of thousands of Afghans killed or injured.
You’ve also spent time covering many other conflicts including those in the Balkans, Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland throughout your career as a journalist. What have your experiences taught you and what can we learn from them?
This is a very difficult question to answer – perhaps it should be another book in itself! I guess that witnessing conflicts at first hand brings you face to face with the worst in humanity but also the best – when people have to show their true qualities as compassionate human beings in the face of often terrible privations and brutality would be one short answer…
What can audience members expect from your talk?
I hope they will hear an interesting story about a distant war and how we used to go about covering it. We were mainly young freelance journalists travelling to Afghanistan on foot with guerrillas we hardly knew – and did not know if we could trust – and then experienced their war first hand, before getting back out again to file our stories. This was in the era before mobile phones and there were no taxis or hotels. We roughed it and much of it was exciting and a real adventure. But there was a dark side too which many of us who went there had to come to terms with later on…
To hear more about Ed’s experiences, his event ‘Death of a Translator’ will take place at Queen’s University Belfast on Thursday 6 December.
Book your place now.