Fair Trade Journalism

I made the 24-hour trip to Egypt four times in two years to work on my master’s project in journalism. My last trip, in April 2008, finally brought me to the story I had been chasing: the biggest civil uprising against Egypt’s military government in three decades. Taking photos in the strike’s epicenter, the industrial city of Mahalla, I was kidnapped by the police on Apr. 10. My translator, trying to help me get away, was nabbed as well.

Hundreds have disappeared from the streets of Mahalla. Three times as many have been detained elsewhere around Egypt in recent months. President Hosni Mubarak turned 80 on May 4th, and his grip on the country seems increasingly desperate.

On the day I was detained, also captured were Reuters photographer Nasser Nouri, journalist Amina Abdel Rahman, and a convoy of journalists, doctors and lawyers who had been trying to enter Mahalla.

Why did my detainment matter? I was the first American, the first white person, the first student, and the first whose story had a twist of interest to the tech community. But in the month since I’ve been back, my translator and friend, Mohammed Salah Ahmed Maree, to whom I owe much if not most of the credit for my work there, has been behind bars.

Mohammed Maree (pronouned mar-EYE) is a student of veterinary medicine. He’s a kind man with a quiet, gentle voice who held my hand as we ran through the streets under police siege. When we got hit with tear gas, Mohammed negotiated safe houses for us to go in and wash our eyes. He always worried about my camera. When a passing train a few feet away was hit with rocks and I cowered in fear, he covered my body with his.

Mohammed was not a journalist before his home city erupted in riots and he saw me, a frightened American kid being roughed up by a crowd of protesters. He yanked me away and guided me to safety. When I couldn’t understand people’s distressed cries in Arabic (which was most of the time), he translated. It’s still unclear what his motivation was for helping me, at such a high personal risk. He once vaguely suggested he was merely returning a favor, “When I was in America, someone helped me.”

Mohammed is a victim of circumstance. His city of Mahalla is an industrial town, a poor, blue-collar city home to large factories that pay small salaries. Still, factory workers make more than most. Open rebellion carries a high cost in Egypt, and Mohammed saw it happen to his neighbors. Nevertheless, he ran towards the conflict, not away.

In the hours and days following our arrest, I realized that my idealized fantasies of taking gritty war photographs had been a naive dream. There’s nothing romantic about sitting in a cold prison for hours on end. After a few hours, I remember thinking, “Ok, game over—I’m tired of playing James Bond. I just want to go to sleep.”

But Mohammed didn’t exhibit the same urgency to just get the hell home. While we sat waiting for the police chief to come tell us why we had been re-arrested after having already been set free by the prosecutor, Mohammed deliberately put himself at risk again by offering a cell phone to another detainee. The phone was clearly contraband, as indicated by all the signs hanging around the station. But, for Mohammed, the instinct for self-preservation was overridden by the desire to help the other guy call home. That sealed his fate: The police chief saw the act of disobedience, and Mohammed was thrown into a cell where I could no longer see him.

As has been so widely publicized, I Twittered and text-messaged my way into media coverage, and help came after only 21 hours in prison. But for Mohammed, there was no one.

There are many examples of so-called fixers—the people on the ground who help get journalists where they need to be to get the stories and the pictures that make headlines—being forgotten after the foreign correspondents have gone home. Why aren’t fixers credited and protected more scrupulously? I was told that people like Mohammed know even better than the journalists they are helping what they are getting themselves into. After all, doesn’t Mohammed live there? Reports and rumors I’d heard of police brutality he’d seen firsthand. He knew he was risking much more than I, who vaguely imagined a motorcade of black Tahoes would come screeching up to the prison gate, loosing a platoon of American soldiers, lawyers and diplomats who would demand my release. But arguing that local journalists who help us do our coverage know what they’re risking is like arguing that sweatshop workers are better off in a sweatshop than having no job at all. Where’s the justice in that?

By the time I got home to cushy California, interest in the fate of my translator was drying up. I was the liability to my school, the one with the name people could pronounce, the one whose byline was on the article. But if it weren’t for Mohammed, I would never have gotten the story. I did a dozen interviews about what happened to me, and when the story ended in “my translator is still in jail!” people would murmur words of support, but little more. Mallory Simon at CNN has been the only journalist to act in solidarity and maintain interest in Mohammed. Joel Campagna at the Committee to Protect Journalists has been an excellent and tireless resource.

But few others cared at all. I had to kick and scream to get my journalism school to make calls on Mohammed’s behalf. Was I asking the wrong questions, or did nobody really care? What I learned was that there was no safety net in place, no default call to arms that journalists around the world would heed and come to aid a brother. I’ve had to call governments, embassies, Congresspeople, all on my own, and I’m afraid I haven’t done a good enough job as far as Mohammed is concerned.

Today, Mohammed is out of Borg al-Arab, the Egyptian equivalent of Guantanamo Bay, but still being held in a local prison on criminal charges under Emergency Law (the organizers of the protest we attended, by contrast, were recently released). What are the prospects for getting him out anytime soon? Journalists don’t have international licensing or unions, and information doesn’t come with the guarantee that “no journalists were harmed.” How many local fixers have sacrificed themselves for a story, while their employers were cruising home on 747s?


James Buck is a student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.