What I realized in 20 years of EUobserver interviews

In equity, it was over 40° Celsius outdoors. They had been elegant shorts (beneath the knee), with a sensible 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 after 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 facet 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 type of dangerous desires, the place you end up in public bare from the waist down.

And joking apart, I had missed an vital alternative.

I had visited the Zaatari refugee camp on the Jordan-Syria border a number of days in the past and met pretty individuals.

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

Be on time: Even outdated hacks lose their means within the labyrinths of the European Parliament’s 372,000 sq.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

However there is not any excuse for displaying up half an hour late to interview one in every of your heroes — former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko, who led the Orange Revolution in 2004.

Once I arrived, amid frantic cellphone calls, I might have cried with aid 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 cellphone calls, as my recorder went on for a full quarter-hour.

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

I might have spent an hour speaking to him, as a substitute of what I bought.

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

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 an alternative of getting my geese in a row on the most recent EU-Iran dossiers, I believed 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 international locations 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: might you broaden on that?

Cooper: silence

Rettman: will get coat, flees.

My high ideas had been impressed by Sure, Minister, a massively-popular British TV comedy of the Nineteen Eighties, during which politicians had been additionally suggested to ”look believable, keep sober, and say [their] strains in the precise order”.

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

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

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

From Chizhov to Panti Bliss

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

A couple 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 conflict crimes in Gaza.

Once I noticed Russia’s now former EU ambassador Vladimir Chizhov in December 2021 Russia was making 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 might add one thing unique to the broader press protection.

There are psychological research on get individuals to say or do greater than they supposed to.

One, by the US intelligence service, the CIA, is 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 knowledge from one other supply throughout the interview, placing him mildly in your debt.

You’d domesticate an air of ”authority” on your media (simpler should you’re the Monetary Instances) 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 have met.

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

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

As an alternative, be pragmatic: one of the best you’ll be able to hope for is that they aimed to present 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 laborious info in your story — readers aren’t silly.

It’s also possible to intention 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 excitement of clashing with bullies just like the Russian ambassador, my most rewarding interviews had been pleasant ones, with distinctive individuals whose values I might 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.

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

Fantastic individuals

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

I’ve had lumps in my throat in some cellphone interviews — for example, with Matviychuk, in regards to the Revolution of Dignity.

She cried herself when she recalled her husband’s cellphone 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 means of talking, however it was nonetheless completely different after I met Metin Balci, a well-known muezzin and imam in Istanbul, for example.

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 ambiance.

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

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.

Kids typically have disarming questions and my pal’s son as soon as requested me: ”What’s crucial story you have ever completed?”.

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

However it’s an interview that stands out as essentially the most fulfilling article I’ve completed.

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

She was one in every of 33 residing witnesses of the Armenian genocide and it felt like EUobserver was, in its tiny means, 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 bushes, with storks flying overhead.

And Gevorgyan, who had studied Armenian, English, and Russian literature, informed her story so superbly 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, however 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 Pink Military’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, when she was a younger girl.

Each side

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

However with individuals 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 attention-grabbing than you.

Many humble persons 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 lady 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 greatest interviews have formed me as a journalist and as an individual, quite than vice versa.

However no matter your values are, should you hearken to either side, you will get nearer to the center of the matter.

And there are two interviews on my thoughts as I write in regards to the Gaza conflict at the moment.

”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, and so they demolish your property, and so they throw stones at your kids — then how will you drink tea with them?”, he stated.