Janine di Giovanni is an award-winning author and journalist, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, a foreign policy analyst, and a professor at Yale. She is a Senior Fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where she teaches two courses in Human Rights that focus on recent conflicts and wars. She is the former Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Affairs in New York.
For many years she was a front-line war reporter, working in the most violent countries on earth. She was recently awarded a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue her research on minorities in the Middle East for a book project called The Vanishing, which will come out in 2021, and will be published by Public Affairs.
Could you tell me a bit about what you’re currently working on and also what brought you to Yale?
I’m beginning a project called “The Vanishing,” which is about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine. I’ve worked in the Middle East for a very long time — nearly three decades actually — and I’m fascinated by minorities and how they manage to create communities, sometimes in hostile environments, and maintain their culture and their traditions. Even though they’re not Christian, a good example would be the Yazidi people of Iraq, who I’ve worked with for a long time, since the days of Saddam Hussein. I’m interested in the Christians in the Middle East because, since the rise of the Islamic State but also Jihadist groups in general, they have been persecuted, they have been targeted. In terms of ISIS, the method was basically to eradicate them. Either they were subjugated – the women were taken into slavery in some cases – and they were either forced to convert or to pay a tax so that they could stay in places like Mosul, or they were killed. Hearing the news on Easter Sunday of [the Sri Lanka bombings], is making me think of it more. I’ve worked in Sri Lanka and it’s a country that really haunts me because it has paid a terrible price in terms of loss of civilian life with the civil war which ended in 2009 and the [2004] tsunami. It’s a very vulnerable, post-conflict country, and for this to happen, again a minority being targeted, it’s just horrific.
As someone who has worked extensively in war zones and conflict zones and written about real tragedy, how do you continue to do your work? It must be emotionally exhausting.
You know, I cry a lot. It’s interesting because so much is made of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and so many people say they have it now. My colleagues and I work in active front-lines. We’re not in a UN compound behind a fence, we’re living with families — in the case of Bosnia or Kosovo, we’re embedded with civilians, not with armies but with civilians. Believe it or not, in the 90’s, after the genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica, both of which I covered, a famous psychiatrist decided to do a study of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder on war reporters. I was one of the people he chose, and he followed us for three years. At the end of it, I didn’t have it. I asked him why, and he said it was because I was a writer, and because I believed so strongly in what I was doing. I just believed, and I still believe, that people who have gone through tremendous suffering and trauma need people to witness it, otherwise it just vanishes. If reporters weren’t there to see the genocide of Rwanda, how would we know it happened. If reporters weren’t working right now on the Trump administration, trying to uncover all of the abuse of power, how would we know. So, I genuinely feel like what I do is a public service. I’m not hindered by bureaucracy like the UN or the World Bank, so in that way I can get closer to people. I don’t sit in meetings in Baghdad or Kabul, I’m in the field talking to people, working with them, listening to them, recording their oral histories — in some cases helping them, and that does get exhausting. I remember during the Siege of Sarajevo, at one point I felt like I ceased being a reporter and was much more of a social worker. And I’m not a social worker, so that was difficult.
I don’t know if there’s an answer to your question. I try to protect myself the best I can in terms of self-care, which is really about getting enough sleep, not drinking too much, surrounding myself with people I love. Also, I’m a mother, and that has a huge impact on my life. So, I think the answer to your question is just, I’ve never become hardened, I’ve never become cynical. Today I was reading the New York Times about Sri Lanka, and I was in tears. For me, civilians who are praying in a church or worshiping in a mosque or a temple, there’s something sacrosanct about that, and it threw me back to 1994 in Rwanda when Tutsi people sought sanctuary in churches and they were slaughtered, often by a machete. My mind probably works in a different way than most people, but I still feel it intensely and that’s a good thing, because if I didn’t feel things I wouldn’t be able to write about it.
You mentioned that you’re often embedded with civilians. Do you ever struggle to maintain that critical distance that’s often required of journalism when you’re so caught up in what’s happening on the ground?
I’m less of a reporter in the sense of a traditional journalist, “just the facts, ma’am.” I’m much more of a human rights investigator. I really feel like, as a reporter, I never had that strict sense of I’m not supposed to get involved with people, because I always got involved with people. My fixers on the ground, I tried to get them out of war zones, I tried to get them educated. I found a little boy in South Sudan in a refugee camp in 2014 who was an unaccompanied minor. He was introduced to me by someone at UNICEF. With a friend of mine who works for the UN, I got him out to a refugee camp in Uganda and a close a friend of mine who is wealthy has been paying for him to be educated and he is now at university. I think that you can make a difference. In the Torah it says, “If you save one life, you save humanity.” Well, you often can’t save an entire village or a country, but you can do individual acts of generosity and kindness that make a huge difference.
Twenty years ago, during the war in Kosovo, I was kidnapped by a Serb militia and taken to the woods, along with two French journalists. They made us kneel down in the forest and they put their guns at our heads and they said “Say your prayers.” Something happened, it’s a long story, but they didn’t kill us. When I came walking down the lonely mountain where they had taken us, there was a refugee man who stopped me and said “God saved you today, because the Serbs usually don’t change their mind.” He had seen them march me into the forest. I’m still in touch with him. He got to Sweden and is a professor.
Another time, there was a little boy, during the Siege of Srebrenica, right before the massacre, who was brutally injured by a shell. He was blinded. I used to sit with him in the hospital, all the time. Every afternoon I’d go, not as a reporter, but as someone who was absolutely horrified at what had happened to this little boy. Recently, about two years ago, he wrote to my old newspaper and said: “Can I find her?” After my article that I wrote about him came out, he was adopted by a family in the US, in Florida, who brought him to the US, got him the best medical care possible and educated him. He recently contacted me and just said, “I wanted to thank you for what you did for me and for my country.” I get a lot of people, Syrian people, Iraqi people, Palestinian people — people I write about in-depth — who write to me and say, “Thank you for what you’ve done.” That means the world to me, much more than a front page of a newspaper.
You’ve worked in so many different parts of the world, but I wanted to ask specifically about your work in the Balkans, during the Bosnian War. Could you tell me a bit about what that experience was like?
It was a war that shaped me. The reason I am who I am today is because of Bosnia, because of Sarajevo. It was a desperate time. A war that happened in the middle of Europe. A war where the international community abandoned civilian people who were being brutally targeted by shells, by bombs. It was a time of absolute desperation; it was a time of the United Nations really making huge mistakes. Kofi Annan, both there and in Rwanda, was responsible for letting down millions of people and in my view is responsible for their deaths because he did not protect them, which was his mandate. That’s a tough view, but I was on the ground and I saw the agony of Rwanda and Bosnia while the decision makers were sitting in New York City in the UN Headquarters. It was a time of great outrage but also a time where I feel that we made more of a difference. When we would write about the atrocities that were happening there, it seemed that people sat up and took more interest. Now, I’ve worked in Syria since 2011, and people have grown tired of it. They don’t really want to hear about more suffering, they’ve had enough. It’s a conflict they don’t understand and it’s a conflict that they don’t want to understand. So, I feel in many ways that the public has become much more selfish. When I was a very young journalist working in Bosnia, I genuinely felt that we made a difference. I’m really proud of what my colleagues and I did, because I think we affected policy. We definitely affected policy. We were there recording, bearing witness to extreme and grave human rights violations.
Coming back briefly to what you’re currently working on, “The Vanishing.” What’s the process like — are you traveling back and forth to the areas you’re focusing on?
Yes, I always work in the field. There are some academics or writers who can make something work by being in libraries and using academic sourcing. But I’ve always been a field person. Last year I was at the Council on Foreign Relations and I spent that year basically going back and forth to Iraq. This year, starting in July when my Guggenheim grant kicks in, I’ll go to Israel and Palestine for the first week of July and work there for a couple of weeks, and then I’ll move on to Iraq and work there. I start teaching again at Yale in September, so I won’t be able to go again until the October break. I’ll basically use all my breaks, and I’ll be going between Iraq, parts of Syria that I can still get into, Egypt, and Palestine.
In addition to the work you do as an investigative reporter, you’ve taught at various universities and been involved with a number of institutions, such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center on Conflict, Negotiation, and Recovery. How do you balance those responsibilities with those of journalism?
Well, as I said, I don’t really consider myself a journalist anymore. I think of myself more as a writer, primarily. I’ve always been a writer of books and long essays. I’ve never been a kind of knocking-on-the-door “how do you feel?” [journalist]. I do much more long-term investigations. If I have to put myself into a box, which I don’t really, I would call myself an academic-slash-writer-slash-human rights activist investigator. I know, it’s rather confusing. I mean, a journalist for me is someone who writes for The Huffington Post or The New York Times as a news reporter. That’s not really me.
Right. I’m just curious because you’re involved in such a broad spectrum of things. You mentioned that you don’t get bogged down in bureaucracy when you’re out on the field investigating but at the same time you’re involved with some institutions that do have an element of bureaucracy to them. So I was just wondering how you balance that?
Oh, I see. Well, I’ve always been a free spirit. There was a point where I thought journalism was turning into something that I don’t really like. It was becoming more and more motivated by social media, so people were reading newspapers and long articles less and relying on Twitter and Facebook for their news. That’s not me. I’m someone that spends years doing research and then writing it. When I decided that I wanted to go back and be more involved in the academic world, I first went to The Fletcher School and I was a fellow there. I had two Master’s degrees already in Comparative Literature, one from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which is an extraordinary place for writers. I went to Fletcher and I studied transitional justice, international security, and peace processes on a much more academic level. After that, I was selected by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) to be something called their Edward R. Murrow Fellow. I spent a year there, basically being part of the CFR system. But, in terms of bureaucracy, yes, I had to submit paperwork for my expenses and things like that, but they kind of left me on my own. I chose my project; I did my project. I had to fulfill certain obligations, but I’ve always been very fortunate in that I kind of operate like a free spirit. And I always tell my students not to plan too far ahead because you have to be able to be flexible and jump into things when they happen, and unexpected things happen all the time. So, from the Council on Foreign Relations, I was recruited by Yale and chosen to be a Senior Fellow at Jackson by Professor [James] Levinsohn, who is an incredible visionary. He is really an extraordinary academic and thinker, and I’m really proud to be a part of Jackson as it’s becoming a school. So that’s basically my trajectory, but you’re right, it doesn’t fit the standard climbing the bureaucratic ladder. It’s very different, it’s out of the box. But, I really encourage people to be out of the box. It’s a lot easier to join an organization and start out as a P3 [entry-level professional pay grade] and obey all the rules and suck up to your bosses, and then become a P4 and then a P5 [mid-career professional pay grade], and spend your life doing that. But you’re going to be very thwarted by internal politics, and I’ve never had the stomach for internal politics. I’m a field worker, pure and simple. I’m someone who goes in the field, keeps my head down, stays far away from the bureaucratic wrangling and just gets the job done.
I think you’re right that more and more the news we consume these days is the clickbait stuff that appears on our timelines, and less and less the kind of work that you and others involved in long-term investigative reporting are producing. Do you see that changing or do you think with social media this is just how we’re going to continue to consume our news?
To be honest, if I start thinking about it that way I would get so despondent, so I just do my job. I’ve carved out a niche, and I’m a very lucky. Angels have come to my aid, like the Council on Foreign Relations, Yale, and the Guggenheim, who kind of say, “We recognize the work that you are doing, keep going, and we’re going to support you.” But I’m very privileged. I have a lot of photo-journalist friends whose work is so important, but they’ve just lost all funding. I think if you choose to go down this path, you really have to find a way to be creative about it and to be open. And you have to spend a lot of time fundraising. As much as academic institutions fundraise, in a way if you’re a freelance reporter trying to do investigations into OxyContin abuse in America, you’ve got to fundraise too.
Coming back briefly to Yale. What has your experience been like with Jackson and what, if anything, has stood out to you?
Jackson is an incredible place, it really is. It brings together a mixture of practitioners who are all remarkable. One of my favorite fellows is my colleague Sue Biniaz, who was basically John Kerry’s legal counsel and is a brilliant lawyer. To be able to work side-by-side with someone like that, or the economists that are there, and be part of a community — especially if, like me, you do a very lonely, solitary thing — is a pretty powerful thing. And I think Jackson is growing. It has a reputation now as being one of the best schools of foreign affairs and American diplomacy and is attracting some of the best speakers. I’m trying to work on different areas that I might bring to Jackson, like refugee studies. I’ve worked with refugees for thirty years in Rwanda, Bosnia, Palestine, Somalia, South Sudan and, of course, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, so that’s really my area of expertise.
I teach two courses a semester, which everyone says is crazy, but I find it extraordinarily energizing. One course is called “Four Conflicts” — in the autumn I teach Rwanda, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, and Kosovo, because they’re all conflicts that are linked by humanitarian intervention, whether it worked or it didn’t. In the spring we look at conflicts of Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. That’s one class. The second class I teach is “Reporting War and Humanitarian Catastrophes,” and that is a really interesting class as well. I get a lot of people who want to be writers and journalists, or are going to go work for the UN, and need to know how to work in conflict zones. It’s very, very practical. We talk a lot about interviewing techniques of people who are deeply traumatized. Let’s say you stumbled into a village of Yazidi people after the ISIS massacres, how would you talk to those people, how would you interview them, how would you document it. This is something that does not get looked at a lot, so it’s an important class.
And do you know how long you’re going to be at Yale going forward?
My son is in an American high school right now and I’m going to be in the US until he finishes. He finishes in 2022. So, I don’t know. I’ll stay as long as they’ll have me. I’m very impressed. I’ve taught at other Ivy League colleges, but I’m really, really impressed by my students here. I’m very close to them, I’d like to think that they’re close to me. We have tremendous dialogue. It’s not me sitting there, lecturing them and boring the pants off them. I make them think, and I make them come out of their comfort zones. Some of them are just really remarkable people and it’s fascinating to see how the semesters go. I love teaching. Way back before I became a war reporter, I was en route to be an academic. I was finishing my second master’s degree at the University of London in Comparative Literature and I was about to start a PhD. And then the world changed. The Berlin Wall came down, wars sprung up all over Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and somehow I ended up doing that. Or, you know, people always say to me, “You didn’t choose it, it chose you.” And I think that’s very true.
Interviewed by Zainab Hamid, Timothy Dwight College, Class of 2019