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First lady of headlines, beyond frontiers
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Christina Lamb is no ordinary reporter. The foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times and long-time friend of the late Benazir Bhutto has the honour of having been declared an “enemy of the state” by Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe.

For her work as a journalist she has won several prizes, including Foreign Correspondent of the Year on four occasions.

And that is not all. Lamb is also an author and has written five books. Her latest offering, Small Wars Permitting: Dispatches from Foreign Lands, is a look back at her reporting from distant and often exotic corners of the globe.

As a child, Lamb had not thought of going off to be a journalist. At her home, what the neighbours were doing generated greater interest than what was in the paper.

“The only newspaper we got was the Daily Mail, which was for my dad to follow horse racing and to do the crosswords,” she says.

It was at the library that she discovered Hemingway and she started to write. At that stage, though, she was more interested in being a novelist than a journalist.

Life, however, had its own way of planning things. She went to study chemistry at Oxford University but realised she hated it.

So she switched to philosophy, politics and economics and ended up joining, and later editing, the university paper, Cherwell.

Later she worked as an intern at the Financial Times. There she was once sent to attend a lunch of South Asian politicians.

One thing led to another and Lamb managed to land an interview with the young and exiled Benazir Bhutto. And so began their famous and long friendship.

Off to Pakistan

“Benazir had a huge influence on my life,” she admits. Sometime after they had met, Lamb began work for the Central News in Birmingham.

"One day when she came home, there lay on her mat a gold inscribed letter that was the invitation to Benazir’s wedding. “It was something out of the Arabian Nights,” she says.

So Lamb took all the holiday she could, packed her bags and flew off. “It was an amazing introduction to Pakistan,” she says, describing the wedding in Karachi.

“Every evening after the ceremony was finished we would have all these discussions late into the night about how to deal with martial law because Pakistan was under General Zia.”

The trip to Pakistan had such an impact on Lamb that on her return to England she resigned from her job at Central News, flew back to Pakistan and based herself in Peshawar.

Those were the days of the Soviet invasion and she used to cross the border into Afghanistan to report for papers back in the United Kingdom.

And that is how Lamb entered the world of foreign reporting. Since her early days in Peshawar, she has reported from Brazil, Iraq, Nigeria, Bolivia, Argentina, Zimbabwe, South Africa ... the list goes on.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) for Lamb, major world events unfold in the places she travels to. Not long after she had been in Pakistan, General Zia was killed.

When she went to India on holiday, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. When she was in Brazil, a huge story broke as its president became the first in the country to get impeached.

Her first trip to Zimbabwe was in 1994 for a holiday when it was a success story, Lamb says. During a long weekend in Morocco, there was a bombing in Casablanca.

“You do start to think after awhile to not go where I go,” she adds.

Lamb, who has written a book on Zimbabwe, says she is determined to keep reporting from the country despite the threats from the Mugabe regime.

“It is very important that we still keep going into the country and reporting on what’s happening,” she says.

She was in Zimbabwe before the recent controversial general elections and says she never sleeps easy when she is there.

“I stayed the last couple of nights at a lodge that belongs to a friend in Harare,” she says. “The first morning there, she said to me that she has had phone calls from the secret police asking if there are any foreigners staying. She gave me the back-door keys so I could make an escape if I needed to.”

Lamb has interviewed many famous and fascinating personalities, including the late Princess Diana. “She went to Angola for the land mine issue,” she remembers.

“I thought she was very superficial and I was not very happy about going and covering her. Actually I changed my opinion because she was so impressive on that trip and she really worked very hard and I saw that she had something that I really saw with Nelson Mandela (another of her interviewees) — a kind of empathy with people terribly ill in hospital. She could bring a smile to people’s faces.”

Another well-known personality she interviewed was the acclaimed writer Paulo Coelho. The Brazilian author of the bestselling The Alchemist was so inspired by Lamb that he ended up writing a book about a female foreign correspondent in Kazakhstan.

“I am used to being somebody that writes for other people and I think I got a taste of my own medicine,” she confesses.

“One day I was in Portugal on holiday and got this e-mail from him with a long attachment and it was this book and it said I want you to read this because you inspired the main character.”

The book is called The Zahir and that was the first time she found out about it.

“I think it is a great advantage being a woman journalist because women are better listeners,” she laughs. Lamb is, in fact, optimistic and encouraging about being a female correspondent reporting from male-dominated societies.

“The great advantage in Islamic countries such as Afghanistan and others is that I can go and speak to women whereas my male colleagues are not able to go and speak to half the population,” she says.

Lamb takes care to dress in accordance with local customs and says she tries to respect different cultures. “I like wearing the salwar kameez — actually, very comfortable — and I think it looks good too,” she says.

She narrates an amusing incident that took place when she was living in Pakistan during the 1980s. She got an opportunity to interview General Zia but later realised her recorder had not picked up anything.

“So I had to phone his military attaché and say there were lots of bits I couldn’t hear. ... I think he realised I hadn’t got anything burnt. Fortunately — the advantage of it being a military regime — they had taped it too, so they sent me their copy.”

Besides being a foreign correspondent, Lamb is also a mother. Last October, when Benazir returned to Pakistan after an eight-year exile, Lamb was with her during the journey from Karachi airport when blasts occurred.

Her husband and son in England were very worried. “That was very difficult,” she says. “My husband told me that Lorenzo [her son] had asked: ‘Do you think mommy survived?’ It is horrible for a mother that you are putting your child in that position — when they are watching something and thinking my mother has been killed. I seriously thought about quitting over that.”

Benazir and Lamb once fell out over critical reporting of Benazir’s government but Lamb managed to keep in touch with the Pakistan prime minister.

On Lamb’s wedding, the former Pakistani prime minister sent her a present.“That was like a peace offering almost and then we became friends again,” she says.

Recently two of Benazir’s friends were in London and they met Lamb. “We went to her apartment in Kensington and to a restaurant where she used to go and where I have had lunch with her. We were all talking about previous times. And that felt very strange — it really hit me that she was dead.”

On the mention of Afghanistan, Lamb’s eyes seem to light up: “I love Afghanistan,” she says. It is as if Afghanistan represents a gateway into another world. “The very proud but hospitable and noble people,” she says.

“The love of beauty and the way you see a soldier with a flower tied around the Kalashnikov. The values they still have that I think is forgotten a lot in the West. Respect for old people. Oral traditions.”

“It is the first place I went to as a foreign correspondent. It is like your first love affair that you always sing quite fondly of,” she says.


June 28, 2008 | 2:13 AM Comments  0 comments

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