Inspired by a chance meeting with the Arabian explorer Wilfred Thesinger, Gardner went on to study Arabic and Islamic Studies at Exeter University. Always the intrepid traveller, he took every opportunity to discover the Middle East and indulge his newfound passion, travelling extensively across the region in his twenties. Gardner graduated in 1984 and then worked for Gulf Exports before joining Saudi International Bank in London in 1986.
Investment banking took him to the Gulf where he spent nine years working for Saudi International Bank and Robert Fleming. Never fully satisfied with his job in banking Gardner quit the world of finance and joined the BBC in 1995.
At first he worked for BBC World as a producer and reporter. He later became the corporation's first full-time Gulf correspondent. Based in Dubai, he reported across the region.
After being appointed to the position of Middle East correspondent in 2000, based in Cairo, Gardner was well placed to cover the stories that hit our screens in the wake of 9/11.
In 2004, his life changed dramatically when filming for the BBC in a suburb of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. A group of Al-Qaeda gunmen attacked his crew. His cameraman, Simon Cumbers was killed, Gardner was left for dead at the roadside after being shot six times at close range. After months of hospitalization, surgery and rehabilitation, Frank Gardner has had to adapt to life in a wheelchair, his legs partly paralysed by the bullets.
Not one for indulging in self-pity, Gardner has been determined to continue living life as he had done before the attack. He continues to work for the BBC as their security correspondent. When he’s not busy filming in Afghanistan he’s off travelling with his wife and two young daughters.
Gardner’s reporting has been praised for its objectivity and nuanced understanding of the complexities that characterize the region. His fluency in Arabic has allowed him to get under the skin of this often misunderstood and poorly represented part of the world.
The Majalla : You witnessed the before and after of 9/11. In your personal experience how do you feel journalism has changed since then, especially in respect to reporting in the Middle East?
At the time I was Middle East correspondent for the BBC, based in Cairo. Obviously the immediate reaction that everyone wanted was; go out into the streets of Cairo and ask ordinary Egyptians what they think of 9/11. It was fascinating. There was the whole spectrum of responses, with some people saying “the Israelis did it,” “the CIA did it,” some people saying “Arabs couldn’t possibly have done this,” other people saying “we feel very sorry for those people but America deserved it,” some people were quietly pleased, some people were appalled.
It definitely sent Middle East journalism amongst Western reporters off on a different tangent, one which has probably skewed a lot of our reporting, certainly in the years immediately after 9/11, because, as I say to people time and time again, yes the Middle East has been plagued by a lot of conflict, but everyday life in the Middle East is not violent, it’s ordinary. People want the same things as we do, they want to put a roof over their heads, have a reasonable standard of living, send their kids to a nice school, have a family and live in peace. There is no difference with what most people want here.
The trouble is, that 9/11 was such a shock to the system both in the Middle East and the rest of the world, that inevitably it sent people digging in areas they perhaps hadn’t dug before. In my case I went up to Buraydah in Al-Qasim province in Saudi Arabia and interviewed people there and tried to understand the phenomenon of Takfeerism, and what would motivate people to go off and join Al-Qaeda. I needed to understand it, to understand their grievances.
How has journalism changed since then? Well, I think for a start, from 9/11 onwards, I think a lot of Western journalism has focused too much on the negative, but that in a way is inevitable after a catastrophic thing like 9/11. And then of course after the Iraq invasion in 2003, most Western, certainly American reporters were really mostly interested in what US troops were doing in Iraq. There wasn’t much room in the news bulletins for somebody doing a nice soft feature about the Marsh Arabs.
It is most definitely doing news reporting in Iraq that changed not after 9/11 but after March 2003. I used to go to Iraq when it was under Saddam. Let’s make no mistake, it was not a nice place; it was a brutal, repressive, terrible regime, but for most people there was security, of a slightly East German way—as long as you didn’t cross the regime, you were okay. But that changed after 2003 of course, because catastrophic mistakes were made. I’m not going to take a stance either way on this, but obviously plenty of people in history will say that the invasion was a catastrophic mistake. What I would say is that the occupying forces made catastrophic mistakes that made Iraq’s situation far worse than it needed to be. Dismantling the entire backbone of central government in Iraq, allowing the ministries to be gutted and looted, banning any members of the Ba’ath party from any job in government, disbanding the military; it was a no brainer that there was going to be an insurrection after this. That said, Saddam was a monster. Many Arabs say to me, “yes he was a monster, but he was our monster.”
So to come back to journalism, I could travel quite safely, admittedly with a government minder, from Baghdad to Babylon to attend the Babylon festival in 2000, which was a lovely big cultural festival. Well, for years since 2003 it’s been too dangerous, certainly for Western journalists, and also for many Iraqi journalists to travel outside Baghdad without having to take a lot of precautions and that’s terribly sad. Some of the biggest victims in Iraq have been Iraqi journalists; they have paid a very heavy price. They have been fantastically brave, some of them are working for the Iraqi media, some of them have given their lives working for the international media and they have suffered terrible losses. I would pay tribute to them. Iraqi journalists are bold, brave, innovative and they are a beacon of light in what has been a dark world.
Q: Have there ever been times in your journalistic career that you have felt you don’t want to be part of an industry that thrives on sensationalism, especially anti-Islamic sentiment?
At the risk of sounding a little bit of a snob, I’ve always seen myself in a different box from the sort of sensationalist, tabloid journalism that would put a picture of Abu Hamza Al-Masri on the cover and say “Stop this bigot.” That is not what the BBC does. I hope we are as objective as we possibly can be, even to the extent of giving a platform to sometimes some very unsavoury views as long as we challenge them; we should always challenge views, whether they are good or bad. I never saw myself as a part of that, that kind of sensationalist thing. I recognized that there was a problem, but being sensationalist about it is not the way to resolve it. I think it’s terribly sad that when people throw the baby out of the bathwater, I mean I had to deal with this myself, Saudis wrote to me and said, “We would understand if you hated our whole country after what happened to you.” I said, “Well, no of course not.” I’m able to separate extremists from the mainstream.
Q: You said that you see yourself in a separate box. Is that partly because you’re fluent in Arabic and you have a deeper understanding of the culture in the Middle East?
I think it does set me apart; it’s not just the Arabic, although that helps, it’s having lived and spent so much time amongst Arabs in the Arab world that helped. Most of my experiences in the Arab world are not because somebody has sent me there to go and do a job; I was there because I liked being there. It’s an entirely selfish thing. I wasn’t doing it for the greater good of mankind, I was doing it purely self indulgently because I’d had a really good time in the Middle East. I loved living with the Jordanian Bedu in the South of the country, I had a wonderful time with them. I loved living in Cairo as a student. It was very different going back when I was head of our Cairo bureau because I had the responsibilities of managing an office, the Egyptian staff endlessly queuing up with complaints, my family was ill a lot of the time. I was always being sent away to Gaza, to Tripoli, to Kuwait, so there wasn’t a lot of the time. It wasn’t a very happy time then, but when I lived there as a student I had a great time. I made such good friends in Bahrain, living there in the early 90s, but when I go back now, I still see them, we email each other almost every week. These are friends I made 20 years ago, and they’re Bahrainis. A Kuwaiti friend of mine who I also met 20 years ago, we drove up together in 1991 to the blazing oil wells, we actually crossed over into Iraq, he emailed me this morning.
Where the Arab world absolutely excels is in the warmth of human contact and that is why I have enjoyed spending so much time in the Middle East. I don’t see it as a job, I don’t see it as a reporting assignment, it is a part of the world that is interesting in its own right, whether or not you’re a reporter, and I suppose I’m being slightly hypocritical because I’ve written a book about it, but when I was having all those experiences, living with the Bedu, living with an Egyptian family, living in Bahrain, living in Dubai, I didn’t think at the time I was going to write a book. I only did a book because I got shot.
Q: If you were to go back to the Gulf tomorrow and ask people how they felt towards the West, how do you think attitudes would have changed compared to seven years ago after the Iraq invasion?
I think the combined effect of the second Palestinian intifada which started in September 2000 followed by the operation to expel the Taliban and Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan in late 2001 followed by the Iraq invasion of 2003, the combined effect of those three long term events have definitely cooled attitudes of many Gulf people and in the wider Arab world towards the West. My experience is, prior to 9/11, that the default behavior of people in the Arab world towards a young Western visitor is one of friendliness and hospitality. If you talk to people who have gone as tourists to Egypt or Syria they’ll say that that still is the case. I’ve never met someone who has been to Syria and not had a good time. I’ve had some tricky times there just because a taxi driver has taken the wrong route or something like that! But the cumulative effect of those three events has definitely put a frost on the normal friendship that people would want to feel towards the West.
Some people will go back further and think of the Arab Revolt, the so-called betrayal of Lawrence, or even further to the Crusades. For extremists, the Takfeeris, the Crusades were yesterday. They see everything that the West does politically in the Middle East as an extension of the Crusades. Al-Qaeda’s word for all Westerners in the Arabian Peninsula is “Crusaders,” which is quite absurd. Mrs. Miggins in retirement goes for a nice little cultural tour of Oman and the idea that she is a Crusader is just completely absurd. But that is how some people see it.
Q: Again focusing on the Gulf, how invested do you think the locals feel in the wider region, for example the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Iraq war. Are they a bit bored of it, do they want to set themselves apart?
I think most definitely the Arab world is absolutely bored of violence. Let me explain that: They have had more than their fair share of conflict, there have been all the Arab-Israeli wars, the Lebanon war of 2006, the Iran-Iraq war which dragged on for eight long years and killed nearly a million people. We forget this, but for an entire decade in the 1980s, the Gulf was dominated by that conflict which was becoming increasingly dangerous with the two countries starting to pass scud missiles at each other and doing air raids on oil terminals way down in the south in the Gulf. At the time Saddam’s regime had a nuclear weapons program; he was working towards getting a nuclear bomb. Can you imagine how devastating that would have been? Almost the only saving grace from the 2003 Iraq invasion is that there was no longer any possibility of Saddam Hussein’s murderous and evasive regime ever getting their hands on the weapons. But, my goodness, they have had to pay a tough price for it.
I think most people in the Gulf feel that this is all an extension of a very unjust US policy, which is to the detriment of Muslims, Palestinians and Arabs, most of them do resent it.
Q: How do you think the Sultanate of Oman can be used as an example to improve the situation in neighboring Yemen, as both are traditionally tribal societies?
They are chalk and cheese those two countries, they are very different. Oman is an absurdly peaceful, happy country. Yemen for me journalistically is fascinating and I’ve never felt in danger there but the situation I’m afraid has changed. It is the new base for Al-Qaeda in the Middle East. It has all sorts of problems, not all of which are to do with terrorism. They have problems with oil running out, water running out and the population exploding.
I’m not sure that the Omani model would work in Yemen. A lot of Yemeni society is still quite isolated, there are too many guns in hands. Outside the cities everybody has got a Kalashnikov and it’s part of the culture to go and blaze this thing off. In the 1980s I went up to Sa’ada with Yemenis and they would just get out of the car and say, “let’s have some fun,” and shot at a load of rocks. Of course, the bullet has to come down and then a farmer runs out complaining that two of his sheep were shot. It’s a gun culture. Even in the cities people carry the jambiya, I would say it’s a ceremonial dagger, but they do stab each other with them in fights.
Also qat is an enormous problem there. It’s part of the culture and traditions of Yemeni society and it’s partly a way that they solve problems, by having qat chewing sessions in the afternoon if a tribe is in conflict with the government. They will sit down and chew over the qat together and come to some kind of resolution. As a national problem qat is pretty big; it’s expensive and wasteful. Yemen is a poor country and it can’t afford this, but take the qat away and a lot of Yemenis would say, “what else is there to live for?”
Q: When you visit dangerous places how do you draw the very fine line between a calculated risk and one that could potentially put your life in danger?
I’m all for being slightly adventurous but not taking crazy risks. I do know reporters who do take crazy risks. Somebody, for example, was embedded with US marines when they retook Fallujah, which was an incredibly violent, horrific and bloody battle a few years ago in Iraq. I would never want to do that, even before I was in a wheelchair.
The way you might calculate it may be, do I want to get on this helicopter to get from A to B in Afghanistan? What I need to know is: Has anyone ever shot at this helicopter on this route, is it known whether the insurgents have surface to air missiles in this area? What’s been the pattern of activity in this area? In exactly the same way as when you’re crossing a road, is this a dangerous crossing? It’s never going to be one hundred percent safe because someone could be coming 100 miles per hour, drunk on the wrong side of the road! But you take a calculated risk every time you get into a car, a plane or a train. Would you feel happy getting onto a mainstream airline like British Airways or Lufthansa to fly somewhere, yes. Would you be happy getting onto some really dodgy, Chinese provincial airline that is poorly maintained in the middle of a typhoon, no. It’s all about probabilities. Of course it’s down to chance in the end but you can to some extent shape your own destiny, I don’t believe you can shape it completely. I’m not particularly religious but ultimately that’s up to God. You can improve your chances or worsen them.
A lot of people say, “you’re insane going to Afghanistan, it’s so dangerous!” No, not really. When I report from Afghanistan I report from a big base that’s the size of Heathrow airport. Yes, there are rockets coming in pretty much every other day but they are small rockets, and the chances of getting hit by one of them is very, very small. That is an acceptable risk to take. What would be crazy for me to do would be to helicopter into some tiny fire base that’s being attacked the whole time in somewhere like Sangin, in Afghanistan. It would be stupid for me, in a wheelchair to do something like that. I don’t want to take that kind of risk. I’ve got a wife and family, why would I do that?
I’ve got to push the envelope a little bit to do my job. I’ve never wanted to be an armchair reporter, let alone a wheelchair reporter, but I am what I am and I’ve got to make the most of what I’ve got.
Q: Do you ever want to swap this life for a more quiet one back in the financial sector where you started out?
No, I’m not even going to let you finish that sentence! The people that I worked with in finance, I think they all believed that I’d come back to it very quickly and they were surprised when I didn’t, when they saw that I really, really enjoy what I do. I love journalism. I still get a real kick out of broadcast journalism, the thrill of being on air, broadcasting live, to millions of people on a moving story is unbeatable. It’s such a buzz.
Interview conducted by Grace Nicholls
