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Keith Richburg in RÆSON | They never defeated the Iraqi army

"In Iraq I was living in a car for three weeks, literally living in car. We ran out of food and fuel: I became an expert on finding out where gas stations used to be, and go into the ground, break into the tanks and siphon the gasoline out."

RÆSON has met Keith Richburg, Washington Post's Paris bureau chief. He has been a foreign correspondent for almost two decades. From 1991 to 1994, he was one of the reporters who drew the world’s attention to the catastrophes in Somalia and Rwanda. Based on his experiences there, he published in 1997 a very well-written, honest and provocative book about his experiences in Africa as a black western reporter. After leaving Africa, Richburg has been stationed in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Paris, and has reported from the East Timor secession as well as from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

About the Americans' problems in Iraq he says: “To say that this is outsiders coming in, I think, is complete bullshit. They never defeated the Iraqi army. It appears that, in Washington, they never had a game plan for what would happen if they didn’t fight us. If they let us come in to Baghdad and then turn it into a guerilla war. [...] Iraq was never a democracy, so what are we trying to do here? That was the problem in Somalia: we went in, we fed people, we stopped the famine - and then some said: "let's try to build Somalia into some model of democracy in Africa". But it never works."

In 1993, he covered the famine in Somalia: "I took my own photographs, and I was constantly getting calls from the office saying: "Ew, did you have to send this stick-finger boy that's half dead lying on the ground?" And I said: "Yeah, that's the front page picture, put it in there!" [...] That's the job of the journalist: to get beyond the clinical nature of war that people would like it to be, and show you that there are real people involved, real people getting killed."

READ THE INTERVIEW NOW:

Keith Richburg in RÆSON | They never defeated the Iraqi army

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Photo (illustration): BrunoInBaghdad.com

Photo (portrait):
Francesca Luk