From ABC's Media Report today.

John Simpson is one of the BBC's most recognisable correspondents. For more than 30 years he's reported on wars and violent upheavals. But recently, he's found that his attitude to covering stories of violence and suffering, has changed. Here's his reflections on why, after so many years as a correspondent, he now sees the world differently.

John Simpson: The explosion was just close by. The windows of my hotel billowed inwards like sails in a storm, and the walls shuddered. A pause, then the alarms and sirens started up all round. My camera team and I got there quickly. The stench of high explosives still hung over everything. The screaming had mostly stopped and the rescue workers were dealing with the still living, and collecting up bits of bodies. The police were starting to take out their frustration and anger on the photographers.

This was in Kabul, just the other day, but I've seen these things dozens and dozens of times during my career. I've never been a great one for the kind of reporting that tells you how the journalist feels when something terrible happens. It seems to me that we need news reporters to be crisp and accurate, and unexcitable, like ambulance crews. And you certainly don't want an ambulance man leaning over you and telling you how he feels about your injuries; you just want him to say they'll get you sorted out in no time flat.

But in Kabul the other day, and in Baghdad a couple of weeks earlier, I couldn't help noticing a change within myself. I tried to find out dispassionately what had happened, of course, but when I looked at the bodies on their stretchers, and the injured moaning in pain, I felt a new kind of anger. I knew immediately what it was all about.

Last year, after four miscarriages over a period of some years, and virtually giving up all hope of having a baby, my wife and I had a son, a healthy, active, jolly little boy we've named Rafe, short for Ranalf. With 6-billion people on earth, having a child is scarcely a rarity, but in our case it was so unexpected, so gratifying, that Rafe seems to us like a miracle. I already had two daughters by my first marriage and have always, fortunately, been close to them, even more so now that we all weirdly have children of the same sort of age. But I confess that when my daughters were young, I wasn't so aware of their uniqueness. Everyone of my age seems to have children then. I understand things better now.

And to see the spectacle of other people's lives snuffed out wantonly on the streets of Baghdad or Kabul, or London for that matter, for some scarcely-understood political or religious motive, seems to me nothing short of blasphemy. I don't just loathe the stench of high explosive, I've come to loathe the attitudes of people who use high explosive for their own purposes: insurgents, terrorists, the intelligence services of a dozen countries, governments which target towns and cities and always have a ready apology when they kill the wrong people. High explosive means hospitals with blood on the walls and corridors, and ordinary people like you and me lying on the floor, or on a gurney, ears ringing with the noise of the explosion, nostrils filled with the stench of it still. The screams of others who are worse hurt than us. The fear and despair of the small number of doctors who have to deal with so many life or death cases, and know that they're condemning many of them to a slow, painful death.

'The armed struggle', said an African resistance song from the 1980s, 'is an act of love'. Try explaining that to the people lying in the hospital corridors.

The idea that some civilians are decent and righteous, while other deserve everything they get, or else shouldn't have been in the way, seems to me to be intolerable. I hope I never did think that attacks on civilians, any civilians, were justified, but now I know for certain they aren't. Having been through the first and second Gulf wars, and watched the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999, I don't really care any longer what the cause is. It's the civilians on the receiving end who matter.

I'm sorry if this sounds pious or sentimental, I don't mean it to be, but I have finally understood something, through the blessing of having another child, late on, it's that life itself is immensely valuable. Not just the lives of people who think and look and maybe worship like you and me, people who are nice-looking, or well-educated or rich, people who are the right type of Christian or the right type of Muslim, all the lives. I realise this is terribly sententious, the moral equivalent of a motto from a Christmas cracker, still, just because something is obvious doesn't automatically mean it's totally lacking in value.

I'm certainly not going to stop going to the kind of places where these things happen, but at the grand old age of 62, my reaction to them has changed. The fact is, my time reporting on violence and bombings in places like Baghdad, and Kabul, has shown me one essential thing: that the lives of the poor, the stupid, the old, the ugly, are no less precious to them and to the people around them, than the life of my little son Rafe is precious to me.

This entry was posted by Cam, P and Indigo, on Thursday, August 16, 2007. You can leave your response.