Fergal Keen

Fergal, thank you so much for joining us. Could you introduce yourself for us, please? Yeah, I'm Fergal Keen. I've been around a long time. Feels like forever. I love that as an introduction. Doing what in all that time, Fergal? I've been a foreign correspondent, war correspondent with the BBC for 37 years. Before that I was a reporter in Belfast in Ireland for Irish TV and radio. And before that I was a newspaper reporter.

Ja millaisia tarinoita sinulla on, jotka ovat todella tarkoittaneet sinua karjaasi? Puhuin yhden ystävänni viikonloppuun, joka oli ollut minun kanssa. Ja luulen, että demokraattinen kehitys Suomessa, kun katsoin, että viiden vuoden aikana tämä maa muuttui rauhallisesta rauhallisuudesta. Ja huomioitukset, joita niin monet ihmiset, erityisesti lapset, käsittelevät.

Muutamalla siitä, kun olin Pertoriaan unionin ulkopuolella vuonna 1994 ja katsoin Nelson Mandelaa, kun olin vain 30 tai 40 metriä hänen puolestaan. Katsoin hänet, jonka kärsivät hänen kärsivänsä, käsittämällä kansalaisen demokraattisen Suomalaisen presidentin. Se on sellaista asiaa, jonka mukaan ajattelee, että en koskaan tunne sitä taas. Ja se on totta, ettei. Se on yksi elokuvan kokemus.

Aika nopeasti myöhemmin oli toinen tärkeä tarina, joka tarkoitti karjani ja itseäni. Ja se tarkoitti minun psykiatrian. Ja se oli Rwandaissa, jossa oli noin 800 000 ihmisiä, joita on toiminut 100 päivää aikana.

And these neighbours egged on by the government, who basically taught people to entirely subvert the moral order. In other words, they told them that to kill your neighbour was the right thing to do.

It's estimated that more than a million people have been forced from their homes by a campaign of butchery that shows no sign of ending. They, over many years, had pumped propaganda into the population, told them that if they didn't kill the minority, the minority was going to kill them. That's the Tutsi minority, who were set upon by a Hutu extremist government. And I witnessed that, and I witnessed the appalling...

Se on se, että se on se, että se on se.

And then meeting the genocidaire, the people who'd carried out the killing, from ordinary peasant farmers on roadblocks, listening to their rationalizations, to the men who had planned it and given the orders. You don't shift something like that from your consciousness.

I've been sort of covering the conflict in Gaza since the Hamas attack on October the 7th. And it became clear to me that all of the trauma that I had witnessed being inflicted on children in the previous more than three decades of reporting as a BBC war correspondent, I was seeing it again day after day.

12-vuotias Leanne Khalaf löytää ystävyyttä hänen perheensä, kun pommi alkaa. Minun isäni kutsuu isäni ja isäni hakemaan heidät, sanoo hän. Ja me pysymme toisiamme kädessä. Ja se muistaa minua reflektoimaan...

missä olemme nyt, kun puhutaan sellaista lainsäädäntöä, joka pyrkii suojamaan lapsia, sellaista huolta, joka pitäisi olla heille tarjolla, ja seuraavaksi seuraavaksi seuraavaksi seuraavaksi seuraavaksi seuraavaksi seuraavaksi seuraavaksi seuraavaksi seuraavaksi

where you had children suffering because of Israeli blockades, which made drastic limits on food, which put severe limits on medical care. The destruction of so much of the healthcare system in Israeli attacks. The Israelis say that's because Hamas are hiding in hospitals. But whatever the consequence of these has been,

To create an environment where children have lived from day to day. So many of them wondering if they were going to wake up the following day. Today there are kids dying in wars in Ukraine. There are kids dying of diseases in Gaza and as I say many other parts of the world. And there are people, mostly there are people who live beyond our concern in the West.

I think that came from my own childhood. I grew up in, I suppose, what people would call a broken home. And that was a home that was disrupted by alcoholism, where I was traumatized by the presence of my father's alcoholism. And it was an environment where sudden disruption was always possible. Fear was constantly present, tension was constantly present.

And where I learned very early to be quiet, not to speak up. I was feeling ashamed because of how alcoholism was affecting my home. And it's a very common thing in the children of addicts or children who experience that kind of severe dysfunction in their home environment. And so I was conscious when I went into journalism of

Feeling a need and later as my kind of social conscience developed a responsibility to tell the stories of those who could not readily find access to media, who could not readily express themselves in a manner that... And those were particularly children, you felt? Yeah, yeah. In a manner that adults would stop and listen to.

It's about listening to their stories and allowing them to be told with a very important caveat. And that is of course that in the telling of the story, you don't re-traumatize the child. And so for nowadays, I will not interview a child without having carefully gone through the ground beforehand with their guardian, hopefully with a mental health practitioner. And when we finish the interview, we always now make sure there is someone there who is in a position to counsel the child and comfort them.

You were asleep, cradled in my left arm, and I am learning the art of one-handed typing. Your mother, more tired yet more happy than I've ever known her, is sound asleep in the room next door, and there is soft quiet in our apartment. It was first broadcast back in 1996. Like many foreign correspondents I know, I've lived a life that on occasion has veered close to the edge. War zones, natural disasters, darkness in all its shapes and forms.

In a world of insecurity and ambition and ego, it's easy to be drawn in, to take chances with our lives, to believe that what we do and what people say about us is reason enough to gamble with death. Now, looking at your sleeping face, inches away from me, listening to your occasional sigh and gurgle, I wonder how I could ever have thought glory and prizes and praise were sweeter than life. And it's also true that I am pained, perhaps haunted is a better word,

by the memory, suddenly so vivid now, of each suffering child I have come across on my journeys. To tell you the truth, it's nearly too much to bear at this moment, to even think of children being hurt and abused and killed. And yet looking at you, the images come flooding back. I wonder if you could talk us through how did this essay come about and why was it so important for you to write about it? I wish I could claim the credit for having the idea, but it wasn't my idea. Whose was it?