[Feature] What I learned in 20 years of EUobserver interviews

In equity, it was over 40° Celsius outdoors. They had been stylish shorts (beneath the knee), with a wise shirt and footwear, and Amman is a liberal metropolis with many foreigners.

However safety males already checked out me as if I could be mentally handicapped once they checked my credentials on the door.

And after I entered the ministry foyer, a press officer sped towards me, shuffled me right into a aspect room, and vanished.

He returned ages later and defined, with a painful smile, that my shorts violated protocol. They’d despatched somebody out to purchase me trousers, he stated, however the store was closed and I had missed my slot within the minister’s agenda.

My lengthy stroll again via the foyer to the exit felt like a kind of dangerous goals, the place you end up in public bare from the waist down.

And joking apart, I had missed an essential alternative.

I had visited the Zaatari refugee camp on the Jordan-Syria border a couple of days in the past and met beautiful folks.

The interview was an opportunity to deal with their wants on the highest stage. However simply not whereas sporting shorts.

Be on time: Even outdated hacks lose their approach within the labyrinths of the European Parliament’s 372,000 sq. metre, 17-floor Altiero Spinelli constructing in Brussels.

However there isn’t any excuse for displaying up half an hour late to interview one in all your heroes — former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko, who led the Orange Revolution in 2004.

Once I arrived, amid frantic telephone calls, I may have cried with reduction to see him nonetheless ready.

I apologised, sat down, requested my query, and … nothing.

Yushchenko (fairly rightly) blanked me by studying paperwork, chatting with aides, and making telephone calls, as my recorder went on for a full quarter-hour.

My reduction turned to peak social nervousness by minute 5, which nonetheless left 10 to silently ponder my fecklessness.

I may have spent an hour speaking to him, as an alternative of what I bought.

Plan questions: The burgundy maze contained in the Justus Lipsius constructing of the EU Council, down the street in Brussels, is even uglier than the Altiero Spinelli complicated.

However an EU official escorts you from A to B for safety causes, so I arrived on time to interview Robert Cooper again in 2011.

Cooper was a British diplomat and mental who was the EU’s mind on Iran.

As a substitute of getting my geese in a row on the most recent EU-Iran dossiers, I assumed I might improvise, and he’d gush with high quality materials.

However Cooper handled my dumb questions with the contempt they deserved (as recorded on the day):

Rettman: so, do Arab nations really feel extra sympathetic to the EU or the US?

Cooper: silence

Rettman: silence

Cooper: *exhales theatrically through nostrils*

Rettman: so, do you …

Cooper: there are variations

Rettman: may you increase on that?

Cooper: silence

Rettman: will get coat, flees.

My prime suggestions had been impressed by Sure, Minister, a massively-popular British TV comedy of the Nineteen Eighties, wherein politicians had been additionally suggested to “look believable, keep sober, and say [their] traces in the appropriate order”.

And with Jordan in thoughts, male journalists may properly comply with Russian diplomatic gown code if assembly VIPs.

“A darkish blue or gray swimsuit, with mixtures of various jackets and trousers allowed, however solely so long as the colors match,” Russia’s gown code says.

“Pockets are purely ornamental and never for use for arms. Fragrance should be utilized in moderation; arms and nails should be properly groomed. No seen tattoos or piercings”, it provides.

From Chizhov to Panti Bliss

I’ve interviewed a marvellous number of folks for EUobserver since I joined virtually 20 years in the past.

A number of fails apart, most went properly, however some had been confrontational and likewise taught me harsh truths about my job.

Once I met Israel’s EU and Nato ambassador Haim Regev in Brussels on 30 November Israel was being accused of battle crimes in Gaza.

Once I noticed Russia’s now former EU ambassador Vladimir Chizhov in December 2021 Russia was getting ready to invade Ukraine in plain sight.

Each of them had well-rehearsed ‘lines-to-take’, however I needed them to go additional, in order that EUobserver may add one thing authentic to the broader press protection.

There are psychological research on how you can get folks to say or do greater than they meant to.

One, by the US intelligence service, the CIA, known as From Mice to RASCLS, which stands for reciprocration, authority, shortage, consistency, liking, and social proof.

Utilized to journalism, “reciprocation” may imply you’d give the ambassador a tidbit of data from one other supply in the course of the interview, placing him mildly in your debt.

You’d domesticate an air of “authority” to your media (simpler for those who’re the Monetary Occasions) and make them really feel prefer it’s a “scarce” alternative to say one thing particular.

“Liking (flattery)” helps. So does “social proof” — name-dropping different VIPs you’ve got met.

And all this might be meant to lubricate “consistency”, wherein folks first concede a small level, then, by logical extension, concede issues that are politically incorrect.

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However in my expertise, veterans like Regev and Chizhov are too shrewd to get tripped up, so do not waste your time.

As a substitute, be pragmatic: the very best you’ll be able to hope for is that they aimed to provide you some small scoop by way of information anyway.

It is OK to cite their propaganda, refusals to remark, even lies, as long as you juxtapose them with arduous details in your story — readers aren’t silly.

You can even purpose for a human-interest angle, asking a VIP for private anecdotes, to lend your article a pulse — Chizhov, for one, beloved making dangerous jokes.

However for all the thrill of clashing with bullies just like the Russian ambassador, my most rewarding interviews had been pleasant ones, with distinctive folks whose values I may relate to.

These included chess legend and Kremlin critic Gary Kasparov, Irish drag queen and LGBTI activist Panti Bliss, and Roman Catholic archbishop Santiago Agrelo Martinez, who sheltered refugees in Morocco.

Additionally they included Ukrainian Nobel-Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviychuk, Turkish muezzin Metin Balci, and Armenian genocide-survivor Yepraksi Gevorgyan.

Great folks

Interviews are finest each face-to-face and on location — that goes virtually with out saying.

I’ve had lumps in my throat in some telephone interviews — as an illustration, with Matviychuk, in regards to the Revolution of Dignity.

She cried herself when she recalled her husband’s telephone name on the morning of 20 February 2014 from the Maidan Sq. in central Kyiv — the place snipers had simply opened hearth on civilians.

“He informed me he beloved me then stated: ‘Goodbye’,” she informed me (he was unharmed, dozens died).

Matviychuk has an intimate and evocative approach of talking, nevertheless it was nonetheless completely different after I met Metin Balci, a well-known muezzin and imam in Istanbul, as an illustration.

We spoke sitting cross-legged in our socks in a side-chamber of the Blue Mosque, surrounded by his acolytes, who held on his each phrase, making a mystical environment.

Balci embodied the gentlest type of Islam, and he did it with a joke that despatched ripples of laughter via the room, in a second that you simply could not replicate on the telephone.

Once I requested how he felt earlier than he sang the daybreak name to prayer, I held my breath for a transcendental reply:

“Principally, I really feel sleepy,” Balci replied.

Youngsters typically have disarming questions and my good friend’s son as soon as requested me: “What’s a very powerful story you’ve got ever performed?”.

I contemplated my previous EU-news scoops, investigations, op-eds, and options.

But it surely’s an interview that stands out as essentially the most fulfilling article I’ve performed.

Gevorgyan was 107 after we spoke, and had seen what Turkey did in 1915, however which it nonetheless denies.

She was one in all 33 dwelling witnesses of the Armenian genocide and it felt like EUobserver was, in its tiny approach, serving to set the historic file straight by publishing her testimony on the centenary of occasions in 2015.

We spoke in her dwelling close to Yerevan, amid apricot timber, with storks flying overhead.

And Gevorgyan, who had studied Armenian, English, and Russian literature, informed her story so fantastically that she took me on a journey via historical past.

It is one factor to learn in regards to the Ottoman Empire, WW1, Hitler, Stalin, or the Chilly Battle, nevertheless it’s distinctive to see a century of recollections shine in Gevorgyan’s uncommon blue eyes.

“We had been fortunate as a result of we had wild herbs and grass. We ate them to outlive,” she stated, talking of her escape from Turkey in 1915, aged seven.

“We danced within the streets of Berlin!”, she stated of the Purple Military’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, when she was a younger girl.

Either side

I am glad I used to be there on time, dressed OK, and ready questions.

However with folks like Matviychuk, Balci, or Gevorgyan, my recommendation could be to close up, hear, and empathise, letting them steer the dialog — as a result of they’re extra fascinating than you.

Many humble individuals are additionally higher storytellers than you.

Karen Matevosyan, a retired Armenian policeman I spoke to in Nagorno-Karabakh, informed the story of a 1988 pogrom in Azerbaijan so eloquently that I hardly edited one phrase, and I can nonetheless see one of many victims — a girl within the snow — in my thoughts’s eye years later.

Muharrem Zymberi, a former miner in Kosovo, informed what occurred when a Serb sniper killed his son so vividly that we needed to cease the interview as a result of my interpreter broke down in tears.

These sorts of dialog inform your protection of Ukraine, Turkey, Armenia, or Kosovo for years afterward.

My finest interviews have formed me as a journalist and as an individual, moderately than vice versa.

However no matter your values are, for those who hearken to either side, you may get nearer to the guts of the matter.

And there are two interviews on my thoughts as I write in regards to the Gaza battle in the present day.

“It is written in The Bible. Jacob stated: ‘Our place is right here: Israel, and the centre level is Hebron.’ These should not my phrases. Jacob stated them,” Levi Shlomo, a Jewish settler, informed me in his dwelling in Hebron, within the Israeli-occupied West Financial institution, in 2014.

“A few of my neighbours invite me for tea, and others threaten to kill me … If they need actual peace, then why do not they [Palestinians] simply allow us to reside right here?”, he added.

Nasser Nawaj’ah, a Palestinian bedouin from Susya, a distant village within the West Financial institution, stated: “I might like to drink tea with them [Jewish people] in the event that they stayed in their very own borders”.

“But when somebody takes your land and says that God gave it to them, they usually demolish your private home, they usually throw stones at your youngsters — then how are you going to drink tea with them?”, he stated.