British-Afghan writer Saira Shah's book is dedicated to James Miller, whose death she is determined to explain, she tells Lara Marlowe.
I could imagine how traumatic it would be to see your close friend and business partner shot dead in front of you, so I planned to ask the journalist and writer, Saira Shah, more general questions about reporting, Afghanistan and Islam before I brought up James Miller's death in the Gaza Strip.
"There's just one thing, before we start," she says straight away. "My really good friend James Miller was killed recently. The family and I are trying to get an independent investigation. Any chance to get publicity, I'm just grabbing."
From our encounter in Algeria in the treacherous 1990s, from reading her marvellous book, I should have realised that Shah is not one to shrink from difficult subjects. When an Afghan Mujahideen leader was angry with her for reporting that he'd sold US-provided Stinger missiles to Iran, Shah confronted him and ignored his death threats. Later, at great risk, with Miller, she filmed the award-winning documentary, Beneath the Veil, in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Now she is showing the same single-minded courage in demanding an independent enquiry into Miller's killing by the Israeli army on May 2nd.
Shah and Miller, a cameraman and director, began working together three years ago and formed a partnership called Frostbite Films, because they both nearly froze to death crossing the Hindu Kush mountains on their first Afghan adventure.
"One of the horrible ironies of James's death is that he and I had talked so much about working in war zones and he said: 'I'm tired of going to places where I get shot at.' We wanted to carry on doing hard-edged films, but we didn't want to cover wars," Shah says.
For a Home Box Office documentary on children in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, Shah and Miller spent the evening of May 2nd chatting on the veranda of a home in the Rafah refugee camp. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had been bulldozing Palestinian homes, a collective punishment often used by the IDF in violation of international law. It was about 11 p.m. and all had been quiet for at least an hour. The journalists thought it was a good time to go, so they borrowed the white flag which their Palestinian hosts used when they wanted to talk to the Israelis.
"The IDF said there was a gun battle going on. There had been no gun battle," Shah recounts. "It was completely quiet, as video evidence shows."
The journalists and their translator walked towards an Israeli armoured personnel carrier (APC) that had been parked for an hour, 100 metres from the house where they'd been sitting talking.
"We went out with helmets with 'TV' written on them," she says. "James was carrying a torch, which he shone on the white flag. We walked a few paces, stopped, shouted: 'Hello, hello. We are journalists. Can we talk to you?' My hands were up. The other two were carrying the white flag and the torch."
About 20 metres outside the house, a single shot was fired from the Israeli APC.
"We didn't move a muscle, so they could have a good look at us," Shah says. "There's actually video, which is why I know the number of seconds. We would have had time to run away, but we assumed this meant 'don't make a move'. Thirteen seconds later there was another shot, which hit James in the front of the neck. He was wearing body armour and a helmet. That was it really. I carried on trying to do first aid . . ."
Shah says she has "absolutely no clue" why the Israelis shot Miller. "And that's why there has to be an independent investigation. It could have been the most horrendous accident in the world. It could have been a panicky 19 year-old. It didn't seem like that, but it could have been. Or it could have been someone who thought: 'Fuck, I'll blow away a journalist."
The IDF is doing its own internal inquiry, which will not be made public.
"They have not taken evidence from me or other eye-witnesses except their own soldiers," Shah says. "Whatever army in the world, armies are not good people to monitor themselves. There has to be an independent, outside investigation. It's by no means certain that will happen. I'm crusading and helping his family crusade to make sure it does. He's left a widow, Sophy; a three year-old boy, Alexander; Charlotte, who was six months old when he was killed, and his parents."
Miller was 34. In conversation with Shah, he once listed 22 wars he had covered. "He was not a gung-ho kid," she says. "He was an incredibly, immensely experienced war director who had been everywhere, done everything. Because of his children, he didn't take risks. He was an absolutely devoted father and husband, and he was really careful."
HBO decided that Shah should not return to Gaza to complete the documentary, so it will be an hour long, instead of 90 minutes, "with James's story woven into it". At the moment, Shah is busy promoting The Storyteller's Daughter, which is dedicated to Miller. After the book launch and the Gaza film are completed, she doesn't know what to do.
"I would absolutely love to be a writer," she says. "I'm being forced to a crisis in my journalistic career that I never thought would happen, because James and I were such a great team. At the moment I just can't bear the thought of doing TV with anyone else. It would be too awful. Maybe I'll try to write novels; maybe I'll explore other things."
Shah's marriage to a Swiss journalist (who features prominently in her book) ended years ago in an amicable divorce. "That one didn't work," she laughs. "It survived Pakistan, but it didn't survive Switzerland. I suddenly found myself being a suburban housewife in Switzerland."
One of many poignant moments in her book tells how a colleague at the Swiss radio station where Shah worked handed her a wire agency report on the death of Zahir Shah, the minor Mujahideen leader who led her on her first foray into Afghanistan at the age of 21. Zahir Shah had often infuriated her, and in a hilariously recounted episode once tried to climb into her bed. But years later, learning of his death, Saira Shah realised that her Swiss colleague had confused him with the Afghan king of the same name. "No, he's not important. It's the wrong Zahir Shah," she answered.
"I remember so vividly wanting to tell someone about it," she laughs now. "I looked around this newsroom full of Swiss, and realised I wasn't even going to be able to start."
Shah speaks Persian, Arabic, English, French and German. She was a reporter for Channel 4 News for seven years before going free-lance. She has probably seen more combat than most military officers, but despite extensive experience in the Middle East and Afghanistan says she never thought of herself as a war correspondent. "As the book explains, I went to Afghanistan [for the first time, 17 years ago] to work out a lot of things for myself. Being a journalist was incidental to that," she says.
Later, at Channel 4, Shah liked reporting foreign stories where she had time to delve into a subject. "It's never been war that motivated me. It's always been people. When you see people in extreme situations - and war comes under that category, but it doesn't have to be war - you learn so much about human beings and yourself, about human potential for good and evil, for dignity and horror," she says.
The indifference of the West, and western media, to suffering of immense proportions is a recurring theme in Shah's book. "I like going to areas of the world where editors will say, 'viewers are not interested' or 'readers are not interested', because I passionately believe that is a complete misjudgement," she says. "Human beings become interested in other human beings when their stories are made interesting. If you say, 'there are 25,000 refugees staggering over the mountain', people say, 'so what?' It doesn't mean anything to them. But when you get close enough, people are interested, and I think that's one of the most valuable things we've got as human beings. That is definitely my motivation."
Shah is an astute analyst of fear; her own and others'. Anyone who has survived a bombardment will understand her description in The Storyteller's Daughter:
When the shelling got close, some primitive mechanism would click into place, and for a while I was utterly absorbed in the task of survival. But for the remainder of the time, my brain shut down into a resting mode of anaesthetized boredom.
While filming Beneath the Veil, she learned that there is another, more insidious kind of fear.
"No one was shooting at me," she says. "It was just my imagination of what might happen. I knew the secret police were out there, and that if they got me it would be terrible. I found that fear much harder to bear."
Shah's British childhood and education did not dent her faith in Islam. "Through its history, Islam has been interpreted in different ways," she says. "There have been times when Islam was the most moderate, liberal, tolerant religion in the world, during the Persian Empire, in Andalucia . . . Unfortunately, we are in a phase where the dominant stream of Islam is very different" to those past periods of metaphysical mysticism.
"Moderate Muslims are in a very difficult position in that it's quite dangerous and frightening to speak up. To be a moderate means you don't start frothing at the mouth and jumping up and down and screaming: 'I'm right. I'm right.' "
Shah's view of Islam is far removed from the vision of a village mullah in Kandahar, she concedes. "I think Islam stresses respect for society and for other people. It stresses generosity - not just with money, but inner generosity. It stresses having a personal relationship with God or the Supreme Being or however you want to define it. And Islam is by no means incompatible with the major religions. The Prophet said: 'This is the continuation of the religion of Abraham, of the religion of Jesus.' I love that all-inclusive and tolerant outlook."
Saira Shah will appear at the Kilkenny Arts Festival at the Ormonde Hotel at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, August 13th