Photo that evoked anger wins 1994 Pulitzer Prize

NEW YORK (Reuter): He had just risked his life taking six pictures of the body of a near-naked U.S. soldier being dragged through jeering crowds in Mogadishu when he realized no paper would use them.

"It was a full body shot and showed his genitals. I knew when my bodyguards forced me back into the car that my paper and others wouldn't use them," said Toronto Star South Africa Bureau Chief Paul Watson of how he came to shoot the photo that won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography.

So he ordered his driver to catch up with the mob and got into a heated argument with his two Somali bodyguards, each carrying an AK-47. But he prevailed and was able to take six more photos -- partial body shots this time, as a hostile crowd jeered and threatened him.

The Associated Press carried that second photo and it appeared in hundreds of U.S. papers fueling a demand that the United States pull its troops out of Somalia, which it has now done.

Paul Warnick, the foreign editor of the Toronto Star, compared Watson's photo, to "one of those classic pictures of war that changes the way people think -- like the shot of the little naked Vietnamese girl running from the napalm attack."

But Watson said he has long wondered whether taking the picture was the right thing to do.

"I took a lot of heat from soldiers in Somalia who didn't understand why I did it. People thought it was done for sensationalist reasons: to sell papers. To have a committee like the Pulitzer tell me it was the right thing to do is a great moment," he said.

"It sure as hell was not done to sell papers. You want to see the brutality on both sides and want the whole thing to stop," he said.

The crowd yelled angrily at him when he took his pictures and he said he realized that he could have been shot dead "at any moment" as other journalists have been in Somalia, including several of his friends.

An amateur videotape taken by a Somali of the incident had provoked cries that the incident was staged but Watson said there was never any question that it was.

"I saw enough brutality there to know that you don't have to pump people up."

Watson is the first Canadian working for a Canadian paper to win a Pulitzer. That is because the photo was published in the United States.