| No Images? Click here   Democrats and the White House don't agree on much these days. The Russia investigation, which President Donald Trump calls a "witch hunt," is rushing ahead; the midterm elections are just a few months away. But amid the feuding, a select group of Democratic and Republican lawmakers, along with some Trump administration officials, have found common ground: working to help the victims of the genocide in Myanmar. HuffPost's Akbar Ahmed has the scoop, which just went live today; we asked him about it.How did this story come about? How did you come across it? Every couple of months, I see a long-time source on Capitol Hill for a mediocre coffee and a long, long chat at one of the coffee shops there. That source brought this idea up quite unprompted. The plight of the Rohingya was on my radar. I grew up in Pakistan, one of many majority-Muslim countries where there's a decent amount of coverage of the issue. But it wasn't an issue I'd heard much about from this person before, and it quickly became clear how animated it made this source and apparently many others in Washington. That got me thinking about the appeal of a story on the U.S. response — how it's one of those potentially hugely significant but kind of slow-moving developments that gets ignored because of our increasingly short attention spans and news cycles. That struck me again and again as I started mapping out the things the U.S. has already done and could be doing further. The Rohingya community has, tragically, been through this before for years: They'll get 4-5 days tops of sustained international attention because of especially shocking violence, then apartheid-like conditions will continue. My source prioritizing the issue — even above other very flashy things this person works on — made me curious about a long-term solution. What did you find that most surprised you? Reporting this out made me realize how cagey Trump aides are about giving journalists basic information (how many meetings they have had with lawmakers, for instance), even for stories that show a surprising and publicly praised level of action by the administration. It was clear that the teams trying to help the Rohingya — those of USAID chief Mark Green or Ambassador Haley at the UN — didn't want to be seen as being out ahead of the president, who, as I note in the piece, has been shockingly silent on thousands of executions, rapes and home demolitions. There's been a lot of ink spilled about how administration officials are careful about policy on areas Trump seems to personally fixate on like Russia. This piece helped me see how the folks doing the real work on even relatively non-controversial policies like urgent help for a clearly persecuted group are trying to stay behind the scenes, in part, I sensed, because they don't want a sudden Trumpy mood swing to destroy their progress. What was the hardest part about reporting, writing or editing the piece? With huge mass atrocities, sometimes words just fall flat, particularly in stories (like this one) that are more straight news than feature. I was keen to give readers a sense of what exactly happened to prompt all these Washington machinations: how big the numbers were, how historically marginalized the Rohingya have been, how there are now effectively two very distinct dilemmas (one in Bangladesh and one in Myanmar). Balancing that with the actual focus of the story — not on-the-ground reporting from the camps but an accounting of what's being done — was hard, especially because this is not a situation like, say, Syria, whose scale general interest readers do at this point broadly understand. I was able to balance that by interspersing details about the various facets of the crisis in between my reporting on the policy work. What's the best way to get U.S. readers to care about foreign policy stories? I'm not American. Being a foreigner in this country helps you understand why and in what ways Americans really feel exhausted about a lot of the rest of the world after 17 years of huge external interventions, starting in Afghanistan. What I find helps readers is chronicling foreign policy in digestible ways, showing that it's not just about what seems intractable — can you really solve centuries-old prejudices or insurgencies? — but about particular steps, whether that's even just officially calling something "ethnic cleansing," that have important and often outsize impact. Part of humanizing emergency situations for people U.S. readers are unlikely to have even heard about is doing your best to avoid this very unfortunate tendency to think folks abroad, particularly in the Global South, are passive victims just doomed to deprivation and violence. It's something I keep in mind all the time and get helpful little reminders for often in the most innocuous contexts — a well-meaning American friend going, "Well, I hope you and your family can just move over here and get away! You've gotta do it!" or politicians in both parties complaining about countries, governments and sometimes massive groups of people as fundamentally problematic. What do you want readers to take away? It's become fashionable to call for empathy with those different from you and at the same time pretend there's nothing you can do about their suffering. I hope this story helps people understand that for all its issues and valid concerns about whether it should be so, the U.S. government today still has huge influence over world events. There are levers public officials can use for good — and their doing so or not doing so is something the American public should be aware of and concerned about. It's also a way for folks to understand the scores of little pieces that go into an effective humanitarian response, from government and NGO reports to efforts by persecuted communities to share their stories because they want those of us with privilege to remember that we can change things. No one's more attuned to the value of huge amassed wealth and power than those who have it wielded against them. Love, |
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