Steven Vincent, RIP

I am at our big annual Quaker gathering in the Shenandoah Valley this week. I saw the accounts of the murder in Basra of freelance journo Steven Vincent. What a tragedy.
Just recently, he published an oped in the NYT strongly criticizing the degree of control that the Shiite parties have won over the security forces in Basra. So the circumstances of his killing are extremely fishy indeed.
I was looking at the blog he’d been keeping during his latest visit to Iraq. He wrote well and (obviously) tried to get outside the Green Zone bubble as much as he could. I note, though, that unlike most US reporters today he never gave any byline credit at all — even under a nom-de-plume– to his translator, Nouraya Itais Wadi (also known as Nour al-Khal).
In his blog he did sometimes write about her, in a fairly patronizing way and under the name “Layla”. But in his writings published elsewhere he kept in place the paradigm of the fearless, all-knowing Western male who goes “out” to some third-world adventure and through his own amazing omniscience and sensibility is able to capture the essence of the story. No professional recognition at all given to the “native informant” without whom literally none of his work would have been possible.
Nouraya Itais Wadi was badly injured in the attack that killed Vincent. My greatest hope now is that she can get the medical help, rehab help, and professional advancement and recognition that I hvae no doubt that she deserves. Deep sympathies, too, to Vincent’s widow, Lisa.

20 thoughts on “Steven Vincent, RIP”

  1. Jeepers, the guy’s just been murdered trying to get information to the outside world that is badly needed. I admire Nouraya Itais Wadi’s courage just as much, and, yeah, it sounds like he wasn’t giving credit where credit was due. But people are complex. Maybe we should wait a couple of days before we start dumping on this brave man’s sexism.

  3. I agree with Helena and Shirin.
    John Yates, there is no second opportunity to say this. The opportunity is now.

  6. On a completely unrelated topic – Democratic candidates running for election in 2006 should read and memorize Jim Wallis’ op-ed piece in the NYT today:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/04/opinion/04wallis.html?
    It’s a simple choice – either be willing to stand up for what you know is right, even though it will cost you some corporate sponsorship, or bow down before the permanent Republican majority.
    Now back to your regularly scheduled programming . . .

  7. Salah is right, not only the Iranians are actively disrupting Iraq, but watching the European trio first take off their pants and now their underwear to please the Iranians is a sorry spectacle. A likely result of Europe’s military impotence and total reliance on US muscle for any significant projection of power.
    Will Rumsfeld step in to save the day, or will the Mullahs get away with nuclear blackmail?
    Quest

  8. Rumsfeld saving the day – now there’s an impossible dream. The best chance anyone has is if Rumsfeld stays out of it completely

  9. It seems hard to square the assessment of him as some sort of journalistic neanderthal after reading these missives (click on name) in the Guardian.
    He seems to me to be the sort of chap who tried to divine a mysterious culture and “Layla” (instead of her harder to pronounce Arabic roll) was his intermediary.
    Many of the publications for whom he wrote don’t give bylines to stringers, much less their translators, so perhaps we can cut the dead man some slack?

  11. I do not know if the content of Helenas critique of Steven Vincent is correct, but I think it was right to write it.
    I think if more obituaries were frank about how the writer feels about the dead while still showing grief about their demise, we would have a more honest world were the living were more appreciated. The phony love of every aspect of the newly dead is a sort of death-cult in which you through death is transformed into a person everybody loved. In the end it is not that seperated from other death-cults like the celebration of suicide bombers.

  13. I agree completely with John. Isn’t it a bit churlish to attack someone whose just been brutally assassinated for doing what reporters are supposed to do: uncovering the truth & printing it no matter what the danger to your own person?
    Wouldn’t it have been a bit more appropriate and timely to criticize him while he was alive & could still correct his mistake?
    I hope I don’t die a similar death (I’m not a reporter so no chance of that). No telling what Helena’s going to criticize in my blog writing after I go.

  14. Let’s give Helen some slack. She honored the reporter with her words. So what if she took the chance to add some more of her thoughts. It’s OK to criticize. It’s necessary to criticize – thougthfully. Look what’s happened to our country now that so many people are afraid to criticize, and/or criticisms are punished by our leader.

  15. Let’s give Helen some slack. She honored the reporter with her words. So what if she took the chance to add some more of her thoughts. It’s OK to criticize. It’s necessary to criticize – thougthfully. Look what’s happened to our country now that so many people are afraid to criticize, and/or criticisms are punished by our leader.

  17. Helena’s criticism would be more palatable if she had taken the risk of reporting from Iraq like the victim did.
    Q.

  18. It seems as if “Layla” was his bride to be. Click on my name for the full scoop.
    Now, one might be “patronizing” to one’s wife, but it seems their relationship was a bit deeper than reporter/translator.
    Whereas some would quibble over the “great white father” and his inability to jot down his translator’s name on a byline, perhaps we can acknowledge that he also loved her, promised to marry her, and died while she watched.
    Given these salient facts, was it so “right” to write about it?

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