Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [53]
I CAN’T FIND ANYONE free to work on the kidnapping story, so when Farouq—the paper’s main political reporter—walks into the office that day for the first time since my arrival, I nearly weep with joy. It is a struggle not to hug him; his face is pale with sorrow over the death of his daughter. The skin is pulled tight across his skull; Farouq is so skeletally thin that my first impulse every time I see him is to hand him a sandwich. “I am so sorry, Farouq,” I say. “I am so sorry to hear of your tragedy.”
He blinks back tears. “Yes, I had something very bad happen in my life,” he says, unable to look at me.
“I am so, so sorry.”
He shows me photos on his cell phone of the infant daughter he just lost and kisses the small screen. I ask if he needs more time off, but he says he wants to work. We go over what stories I need, and he says, “Do not worry about the front page. I will take care of the front page. It is my specialty.”
There’s a catch, of course. Farouq writes only in Arabic and requires translators for all of his stories. We have no good translators. Bashir and Talha struggle along, but often I cannot understand the results of their labor. I’ll need to hire at least one translator in addition to several more reporters. If Faris will let me, that is.
Farouq asks me to call the French embassy, because I’m the only one in the office who speaks French. I speak to both the ambassador and the press attaché, but they have no new information. So Farouq taps his sources in the security department in the region and we get most of the story from them.
I end up writing the piece myself, based on Farouq’s notes and al-Asaadi’s background, and get it on the Web by ten fifteen P.M. the same day. This is thrilling, but I wish I could travel south to where the kidnappings happened to do some real reporting. It’s tough to be stuck in the office, orchestrating coverage. None of my journalists can go either. No one has a car, enough money to get down there, or—most significantly—the drive to get the story in person. Not one of my reporters has expressed the slightest interest in trying to get face-to-face interviews. But how else can we get to the truth about what happened?
I’m learning that in Yemen the truth is a slippery thing. Two days after the kidnapping, fifty-one Yemenis are killed in a stampede at one of Saleh’s election rallies at a stadium in Ibb, a city a couple hours south of Sana’a. As usual, the number of victims reported fluctuates throughout the day, from hundreds to dozens. Both the Yemen Observer and the Yemen Times report more than sixty dead, until the government news agency announces the official count as fifty-one.
The exact circumstances of the stampede depend on which newspaper you read. We report that the stampede was caused by overcrowding, as more than a hundred thousand people were crammed into a space meant to hold half that. Exits were poorly marked, and when people rushed out at the end of Saleh’s speech, they trampled each other. The Yemen Times reports that two hundred thousand people were packed into a stadium with a capacity of ten thousand. People were crushed when fences installed to control the crowd’s movement collapsed, trapping people underneath as the crowd swarmed over them. Still other reports say a hundred and fifty thousand people had been crammed into the stadium. The truth is elusive.
When Farouq asks the deputy security manager in Ibb how such tragedies could be prevented in the future, the man shrugs. “We don’t have another rally,” he says. “So it’s not really a concern.”
I am struck by the casual, fatalistic view Yemenis take of tragedy. Stampedes, car accidents, kidnappings, and terrorist attacks rarely seem overly to trouble anyone or trigger societal self-analysis. A stadium collapse and stampede in New York would provoke public outcry and a demand for improved safety standards and crowd control, but this doesn’t happen in Yemen. Perhaps it is simply that