Veteran journalist Kate Webb calls it quits, maybe

Veteran journalist Kate Webb calls it quits, maybe

By Ivy Susanti

JAKARTA (JP): Thirty-seven years have flown by, leaving New
Zealand-born journalist Kate Webb with first-hand memories of
many momentous events.

Her work has also given her a deep understanding of life and
people. She was witness to much political turmoil, including the
political transition in Jakarta in the mid-1960s, the fall of
Saigon in the 1970s, the rise of the Khmer Rouge, the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan, the People Power movement in the
Philippines that ousted Marcos in the 1980s, the assassination of
Rajiv Gandhi in the early 1990s and the Gulf War.

She came back to Jakarta for another political crisis in the
late 1990s, saw the Hong Kong handover and reported the self-
determination vote in East Timor.

Webb has lived through many difficult and tense situations,
but this has not diminished her wit or her sharp analytical
skills. Though the years are beginning to show in the lines
around her piercing brown eyes and the flecks of gray in her long
brown hair, these years have left Webb with a wealth of
knowledge.

"It's strange to see the same things happening again,
sometimes under another name. That is the most interesting thing
about catching history," she told The Jakarta Post in a recent
interview at the Agence France Presse office in Menteng, Central
Jakarta.

Being a journalist is not just a career for Webb, who was born
58 years ago in Christchurch. "I'm recording history," she says
in her distinctive deep, whispery voice.

She credits her family background with helping her understand
the significance of events. "My mother was a historian and my
father was a political scientist. I was brought up in an academic
atmosphere."

She earned her bachelor's degree in symbolic logic from the
School of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne in 1964,
graduating with honors. Her career as a journalist, she says,
began by chance, recalling her start as a reporter for the local
News Limited newspaper in Sydney.

"It was in 1964. I was making a stained glass window for a
church and I broke one. I didn't have the money to reimburse the
church. At first I looked for a job as a secretary at a newspaper
company. But I couldn't do shorthand and they said they couldn't
hire me as secretary. So they put me to work as a reporter cadet.

"You know when you start as a cadet, in the old day's cadet
system, the first thing you do is go with the journalists on
their assignments. It's horrible ... you know, shit work ... like
getting the ashtray for the people who smoke," she says with a
laugh.

"When you're a cadet, you spend about six months learning
shorthand and the job and then you become a junior reporter."

But it was from her early work as a gopher that Webb learned
how to suss out a breaking story.

"When you're still a cadet, you have to see all the breaking
news from the news agencies, like Reuters, and when you get it
you have to tell your editor immediately. I think that's how I
developed the ability," she says.

She praised the system which allowed young journalists to
learn in real-life situations rather than in the classroom. "I am
very skeptical of any journalism course. When you have earned a
degree, you automatically 'become' a journalist. In fact, it
takes experience and practice to be a journalist."

From 1965 to 1967, Webb worked for the Sydney Daily Mirror and
The Australian, starting as a reporter covering education and
religion.

Her life changed when she was hired by United Press
International in 1967. She was sent on various assignments in
Saigon from 1967 to 1969 as a political reporter, then went back
to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as a general reporter from 1969 to
1970. She was promoted to UPI's Cambodia bureau chief, where she
worked from 1970 to 1973, with one year at the Hong Kong desk.

Then she was the Jakarta bureau chief from 1974 to 1975,
Manila's bureau chief from 1975 to 1977 and the regional chief
based in Singapore in 1977.

Unforgettable

Webb's posting in Phnom Penh was unforgettable, not only for
her but also for her family and the press community as well.

It was at the height of the Vietnam War in 1971 when Webb,
just 28, was captured by North Vietnamese forces along with six
other people during a battle for the strategic Highway Four.

A woman's corpse was found a few days later, and Webb was
feared to have become another casualty of a conflict which had
already claimed many lives, including those of several friends
and colleagues.

UPI announced her death and the New York Times ran her
obituary. Webb recalls that Time and Newsweek magazines also
published her obituary.

But on the day a memorial service was to be held in Australia,
where most of Webb's family had moved from New Zealand, Webb and
five fellow captives walked out of the jungle, freed by their
captors after 23 terrifying and exhausting days.

AFP said the group was met by an amazed Cambodian officer who
stared and said: "Miss Webb, you're supposed to be dead."

When she recalls these moments, she only says: "It's very
interesting (silence). You always wonder what people think of
you."

She lost two of her colleagues and she was left alone covering
the grueling war which ended four years later. All she says of
this time is, "I felt what other people would feel ... terrible."

It was not her only near escape. AFP, in a tribute to Webb at
the end of her career, said she was almost scalped by a drug-
crazed mujahedeen in Kabul, hiding on a hotel window ledge for
hours while he hunted for her, still clutching a handful of her
hair.

And she once emerged unscathed from the rubble of a rocket
attack in Vietnam, dusted herself off and went straight back to
work.

During the 1975 scramble out of Saigon, Webb continued to file
stories (in the days before mobile phones and laptops) as
helicopter after helicopter carrying hundreds of panicked
refugees landed on the deck of the USS Blue Ridge.

"I was incredibly lucky," is all she says about these
experiences.

Similarly, when she is asked about what it was like to be a
woman reporting on war in a traditionally male-dominated field,
she says simply: "I didn't take notice, I didn't see anything
strange."

Webb started working at AFP in 1983. She was posted in Jakarta
until 1987, with roving assignments in Sri Lanka, Manila, South
Pacific, Noumea and Pakistan. She then worked as the South Asian
deputy bureau chief based in New Delhi and the bureau chief in
Kabul from 1987 to 1992.

After ending her assignment covering the Gulf War, she was
appointed as temporary deputy bureau chief in Bangkok, then moved
to the Hong Kong desk. From 1993 to 1998 she was the bureau chief
in Seoul before moving to Jakarta as a deputy bureau chief.

She says that during more than 10 years in Indonesia, she was
deported three times during president Soeharto's rule, with the
standard explanation: her reports posed a threat to national
stability.

Human nature

Such experiences taught Webb a lot about human nature. She
says "the government is made up of people" and not all of them
think the same way.

"In my case, there are always some people in the government,
only some of them, not all. I could not return to Jakarta, and
also to some other countries, because of some people."

She recalls when she was covering the famous 1974 meeting
between Soeharto and then Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam
about East Timor.

She says that one night the meeting participants went to the
Dieng plateau in Central Java to see a traditional dance where
the dancers went into a trance and walked on glass shards.

"I was quite near Soeharto. He came over to me and asked me,
'Do you know the history of Dieng?' I said 'No, Sir.' So he told
me a story about it. After the dance stopped, a group of military
(personnel) jumped all over me and told me to never to speak to
the president."

"I did not speak to him, it was the president who spoke to
me."

She says she has a postulate about reporting. "If you get the
facts right, other people have less room to lie." That's why, she
says, she would term her work as documentation of history rather
than just reporting.

"It takes a lot of work to document ... I always stick to the
facts."

In early August, Webb decided to retire. "I am totally burned
out. I have spent nearly 40 years for my career, covering
financial crises, nuclear crises, crisis after crisis."

But she is typically modest about her achievements, saying her
work is not finished yet, though what she will do next is still
unclear. "I won't settle down. I don't really have a home."

A post teaching at a school of journalism is definitely out of
the question. "I would ask the students to go and work for a
paper."