What I realized in 20 years of EUobserver interviews

In equity, it was over 40° Celsius exterior. They have been stylish shorts (under the knee), with a wise shirt and sneakers, and Amman is a liberal metropolis with many foreigners.

However safety males already checked out me as if I may be mentally handicapped once they checked my credentials on the door.

And once 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. That they had despatched somebody out to purchase me trousers, he mentioned, however the store was closed and I had missed my slot within the minister’s agenda.

My lengthy stroll again by means of the foyer to the exit felt like a type of unhealthy desires, the place you end up in public bare from the waist down.

And joking apart, I had missed an necessary alternative.

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

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

Be on time: Even outdated hacks lose their manner within the labyrinths of the European Parliament’s 372,000 sq.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

However there is no excuse for exhibiting 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 telephone calls, I might have cried with reduction 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 telephone calls, as my recorder went on for a full quarter-hour.

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

I might have spent an hour speaking to him, as an alternative of what I acquired.

Plan questions: The burgundy maze contained in the Justus Lipsius constructing of the EU Council, down the street 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 would 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 by way of nostrils*

Rettman: so, do you …

Cooper: there are variations

Rettman: might you broaden on that?

Cooper: silence

Rettman: will get coat, flees.

My prime suggestions have been impressed by Sure, Minister, a massively-popular British TV comedy of the Nineteen Eighties, through which politicians have been additionally suggested to “look believable, keep sober, and say [their] strains in the correct order”.

And with Jordan in thoughts, male journalists may nicely 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 nicely 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 nearly 20 years in the past.

Just a few fails apart, most went nicely, however some have been confrontational and in addition 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 warfare crimes in Gaza.

Once I noticed Russia’s now former EU ambassador Vladimir Chizhov in December 2021 Russia was getting ready to invade Ukraine in plain sight.

Each of them had well-rehearsed ‘lines-to-take’, however I wished them to go additional, in order that EUobserver might add one thing authentic to the broader press protection.

There are psychological research on methods to get individuals to say or do greater than they meant 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 in the course of the interview, placing him mildly in your debt.

You’d domesticate an air of “authority” to your media (simpler in case you’re the Monetary Occasions) 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’ve got met.

And all this might be meant to lubricate “consistency”, through 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: the very best you possibly can hope for is that they aimed to present you some small scoop when it comes to information anyway.

It is OK to cite their propaganda, refusals to remark, even lies, as long as you juxtapose them with onerous information in your story — readers aren’t silly.

It’s also possible to goal for a human-interest angle, asking a VIP for private anecdotes, to lend your article a pulse — Chizhov, for one, liked making unhealthy jokes.

However for all the excitement of clashing with bullies just like the Russian ambassador, my most rewarding interviews have 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.

Additionally 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 nearly with out saying.

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

She cried herself when she recalled her husband’s telephone 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 advised me he liked me then mentioned: ‘Goodbye’,” she advised me (he was unharmed, dozens died).

Matviychuk has an intimate and evocative manner of talking, but it surely was nonetheless completely different once I met Metin Balci, a well-known muezzin and imam in Istanbul, as an 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 environment.

Balci embodied the gentlest form of Islam, and he did it with a joke that despatched ripples of laughter by means of the room, in a second that you simply could not replicate on the telephone.

Once I requested how he felt earlier than he sang the daybreak name to prayer, I held my breath for a transcendental reply:

“Largely, I really feel sleepy,” Balci replied.

Youngsters usually have disarming questions and my pal’s son as soon as requested me: “What’s an important story you’ve got ever executed?”.

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

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

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

She was one in every of 33 dwelling witnesses of the Armenian genocide and it felt like EUobserver was, in its tiny manner, serving to set the historic document straight by publishing her testimony on the centenary of occasions in 2015.

We spoke in her residence close to Yerevan, amid apricot bushes, with storks flying overhead.

And Gevorgyan, who had studied Armenian, English, and Russian literature, advised her story so superbly that she took me on a journey by means of historical past.

It is one factor to learn in regards to the Ottoman Empire, WW1, Hitler, Stalin, or the Chilly Warfare, but it surely’s distinctive to see a century of reminiscences shine in Gevorgyan’s uncommon blue eyes.

“We have been fortunate as a result of we had wild herbs and grass. We ate them to outlive,” she mentioned, talking of her escape from Turkey in 1915, aged seven.

“We danced within the streets of Berlin!”, she mentioned of the Purple 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 can be to close up, pay attention, 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, advised 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, advised 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, reasonably than vice versa.

However no matter your values are, in case you take heed to either side, you may get nearer to the guts of the matter.

And there are two interviews on my thoughts as I write in regards to the Gaza warfare at this time.

“It is written in The Bible. Jacob mentioned: ‘Our place is right here: Israel, and the centre level is Hebron.’ These usually are not my phrases. Jacob mentioned them,” Levi Shlomo, a Jewish settler, advised me in his residence 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, mentioned: “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 house, and so they throw stones at your youngsters — then how will you drink tea with them?”, he mentioned.