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."