Photographers Blog

Congo on the wire

Finbarr O’Reilly talks to the CBC about his coverage of the Democratic Republic of Congo and his photographic exhibition “Congo on the Wire” that was displayed as part of the Contact Photography Festival in Toronto.

Hardship deepens for South Africa’s Poor Whites

Children walk through a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 6, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

Sitting in a deck chair at a white South African squatter camp, Ann le Roux, 60, holds a yellowing photo from her daughter’s wedding day.

Taken not long after Nelson Mandela became the country’s first black president in 1994, it shows Le Roux standing with her Afrikaans husband and their daughter outside their home in Melville, an upmarket Johannesburg neighborhood.

Sixteen years later, she lives in a caravan and a tent shared with seven other people, including her daughter and four grandchildren, at a squatter camp for poor white South Africans.

She is one of a growing number of whites living below the poverty line in South Africa who blame affirmative action and the ANC-led elected government for their plight.

Le Roux had to sell her house after her husband died and she lost her job as a secretary at the city planning council — where she had worked for 26 years — after she took time off work to recover from the loss of her husband.

“They wouldn’t take me back because of the political situation,” she says, looking down at the fading photo.

South Africa’s child-rape epidemic

“Don’t ask me to smile, I don’t know how to smile,” says Fumana Ntontlo, as she poses for a portrait, hands folded in her lap, on the bed of her one-room shack in South Africa’s Khayelitsha township.

The walls and roof of her tiny home are made from corrugated metal, insulated on the inside with splintered and stained plywood, from which hangs a faded blue fabric pouch holding several pairs of well-worn shoes. Some yellowed and curling magazine pictures are taped at eye-level and a lace curtain flutters in the breeze of a small window protected by metal burglar bars. A bare bulb hangs from the ceiling by a wire.

Ntontlo is a “survivor” – the word used by health workers to describe victims of sexual violence.

She was eight years old and playing hide-and-seek at a cousin’s house when another distant relative, who was about 15 at the time, convinced her to hide behind the couch with him. He then lay on top of her, pressing down hard on her small frame. He lifted her skirt and entered her, says Ntontlo.

“I was crying, but he slapped me and threatened to beat me more.”

Now 30 years old, Ntontlo was too embarrassed and confused at the time of the incident to tell anyone.

Congo On the Wire exhibition, Bayeux, France

When I first started reporting from Africa eight years ago, it was almost impossible to generate any interest in the Western media for a story about Congo. This was immediately following the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the world was still reeling in the aftermath.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have since dominated our news coverage and resources during the first decade of the millennium.

Even as Democratic Republic of Congo’s war-related death toll rose above a staggering five million, making it the most lethal conflict since World War Two, the war in Central Africa remained largely unnoticed and under-reported.

But lately there has been a slight shift. In October 2008, a fresh upsurge of violence drove some 250,000 people from villages in the country’s eastern Kivu provinces, bringing to more than one million the number of internally displaced Congolese.

Congo’s war victims usually perish far from sight, deep in the bush, the latest ghosts in that country’s turbulent history. But last October, the war was accessible. Foreign journalists descended en masse into Goma, a town bordering Rwanda, and booked into hotels with picturesque views of smouldering volcanoes overlooking Lake Kivu.

The media could enjoy coffee and croissants for breakfast, drive up to the front line fighting or the squalid camps home to hundreds of thousands of displaced Congolese, then return to file stories and pictures in time for dinner and a night at the bar.

Finbarr from the field

On Jan. 14 Reuters hosted a live video Q&A with our renowned photographer Finbarr O’Reilly about his experiences in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Finbarr addressed what drew him to Africa and the most difficult aspects of being a photographer in a war zone.

Finbarr is still available to answer questions, submit them in the comments section below or send a Twitter message with the hash tag “#finbarr” .

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Check out “Death all around,” his multimedia report from a Congolese refugee camp, dispatches from Chad and Afghanistan, selected photos from his portfolio, and an audio slideshow from his most recent Congo assignment.

Death all around

A Congolese refugee in a tattered baseball cap, worn clothes and blue flip-flops begged me for a cigarette at Kibati, a camp for 65,000 people displaced by fighting in eastern Congo.

I scolded him, saying smoking was bad for his health, as if anything could be worse for your health than living in this conflict-racked corner of Democratic Republic of Congo.

Machine gun fire erupted nearby and people dived for cover, ducking into rows of flimsy tents made from torn sheets of white plastic stretched over sticks.

“Mister, mister, come lie down in here,” a voice called from one tent as bullets hummed nearby like an electrical current.

I snapped a few blurry pictures of people running before crawling through the curtain door of the tent, where a man and two children huddled on the ground. I kneeled above them and took a few more photographs.

Caught in a rebel offensive in eastern Chad

GOZ-BEIDA, Chad – Harsh light and shifting shadows in the windblown desert of eastern Chad can conjure strange images, but this was no mirage. Lurking in the shade of a thorn tree was the dark outline of a pick-up truck carrying a dozen men brandishing weapons. Ruled by the gun, this lawless corner of Africa borders Sudan and has inherited the violent power struggles from neighbouring Darfur. The shapes under the tree spelled trouble. I quickly ordered the driver of our battered Suzuki Samurai to U-turn, but as we accelerated away, kicking up sand, the sharp “crack-crack-crack” of gunshots split the air

We stopped and seconds later hordes of sweaty gunmen swathed in turbans and “magical” leather amulets swarmed us, shouting and shoving their weapons in our faces, pulling us roughly from the car while banging their fists on the roof. Grabbing our driver’s mobile phone, documents and cigarettes, and a satellite phone belonging to my travelling partner, an American human rights researcher, the gunmen ordered us to follow them back into the desert.

We’d set out from town that morning to interview far-flung civilians displaced by years of conflict stemming from Darfur and now destabilising both Chad and Sudan. The two oil-producing rivals accuse each other of backing rebels trying to topple their respective governments. There are 250,000 Sudanese refugees in a dozen camps in eastern Chad and 180,000 displaced Chadians, the U.N. says.

Rampant banditry plus ethnic and tribal animosity fuelled by competition for scarce water and arable land mean few can return home.

Ambushed by the Taliban in Afghanistan

HOWZ-E-MADAD, Afghanistan, October 23 2007  – Canadian and Afghan National Army troops abandoned a dawn ambush of Taliban fighters at a mud village in southern Afghanistan and were walking across a dusty field when the first Taliban shell struck.

It exploded about five meters (yards) away from four Canadian soldiers mentoring and training their Afghan counterparts.

As a photographer embedded with the Canadians, I was hit by the blast and then enveloped by a cloud of dust and smoke as we scrambled for cover behind a mud wall shielding us from Taliban positions on the opposite side of a grape field.

Canadian and Afghan troops quickly returned fire and I focussed on taking pictures of an Afghan army soldier shooting a heavy mounted machine gun from a nearby ditch.

A second shell from an 82-millimeter recoilless rifle exploded immediately in front of him and he disappeared in the flash of light as sand blasted me and the shockwave knocked me over. I was sure he was dead, or at least wounded. A moment later, he bounded out of the ditch and ran towards me through the smoke, the heavy machine gun blazing from his hip, Rambo-style.

Outside the wire

 Hunting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan with Finbarr O’Reilly

SANGSAR, Afghanistan, July 17 (Reuters) – The grinding metallic noise of tanks and diesel engines fade into the desert night and the only sound is our breathing and the crunch of dozens of army boots on dry earth.

It feels like we are alone in the barren, moonlit landscape, but we’re not. Somewhere out there lurk the Taliban.

A cacophony of barking floats through the heavy air as dogs from nearby mud villages pick up our scent.

Foreign troops from the NATO-led coalition and the Afghan National Army (ANA) are on the hunt for Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province.

It is a strategic point in the fight against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban drug smuggling routes into neighbouring Pakistan.

As a photographer embedded with Canadian troops, I tag along for combat missions.

Inside the wire

Kandahar Air Field (KAF) is a sprawling NATO military base in southern Afghanistan, ringed by desert and mountains and home to some 10,000 foreign troops and support staff, all living inside the wire, meaning within a secure perimeter set up by foreign forces. It is built on a swamp and smells like it too. “Emerald Lake” is the festering cesspool emitting sulphur fumes that permeate the grounds. Pity the Romanians whose tents line its bubbling shores.

On my first day in Afghanistan, camp is a sweltering mess of muddy roads due to unheard of summer rains hitting the desert. Kandahar town is flooded and houses are collapsing due to a week of precipitation. Farmers crops are at risk of rotting, which could makea lean winter season even leaner. I’m here for a three week embed with Canadian troops and my tent, shared with several other Canadian hacks, is three inches deep in water. My folding army bunk hovers above the slop.

The base is impressive, with all the various nationalities of the NATO force living in their own tented areas, protected by reinforced concrete barriers. Most people gravitate towards the American facilities. They have a full-sized basketball court and Olympic-sized gym and weight room. There is a mini strip mall called the Boardwalk, complete with Tim Hortons, Burger King, Pizza Hut and Green Beans, which is just like Starbucks and provides all the usual options ranging from blueberry muffins and cheesecake to mocha frappe lattes, world music CDs and “Oral Fixation” breath mints. All the clients carry guns slung over their shoulders or on hip holsters. There was a sushi restaurant, but it closed down after a salmonella outbreak. The Amerian PX store is awesome, selling everything from Sports Illustrated (swimsuit issue) and Esquire magazines, recent DVDs, camping clothes and gear, hunting knives, gun cleaning equipment, junk food, pet food, foldable deck chairs, shelving units, stereos, computers and other electronics. I can buy none of these things where I live in Africa and since it’s all subsidised by George W., prices are fantastically low. I do some shopping.

Theres also a camp massage parlour, but without “the happy ending.” I try it anyway. The masseuse is a stocky Kyrgystani woman actually named Olga. She smells likes onions and beetroot and gives a massage that still hurts two days later.

Walking back to my tent, I’m offered a lift in a pick-up truck by a drawling grunt from Arkansas who introduces himself as “Bulldawg” and tells me a lewd joke about the difference between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Keeping to the speed limit, Bulldog takes me on a 16km/hr tour of the base, near the old dumping ground for all the rusting Soviet hardware from previous failed efforts to win a war here, and along the air strip where Chinook helicopters clatter in and out of camp.

This is a nice place to run come evenin time, good view of the mountains, nice sunset n all. But dont do it alone. A mortar round come in an tag you and you be stuck here, aint no-one to get help. Theres Taliban over there watchin us right now, you can be sure.