Man of the Third World
By “this one” Mullen meant his latest immersion in the third world. Mullen was nine months on the road reporting “Caught in the Middle,” his series on the world’s political refugees that ran last week in the Tribune’s Sunday magazine and Tempo section. “The refugee thing was always done piecemeal,” Mullen explained. “Somebody would do a thing on the Palestinians, or something on the Eritreans, or the boat people, and to me it was a worldwide phenomenon and what everybody was ignoring was the sheer longevity of these camps and populations.”
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“I went into Uganda, and while I was there a couple of people from the Nairobi press corps showed up to do a couple of stories, and they couldn’t believe that I was going to spend three weeks in Uganda by myself. Because nobody likes to go in there. Not that it’s dangerous or anything. I mean, there were gunfights and that sort of thing going on, but you get used to it–I’ve been doing that most of my career. But so long as they don’t come into your hotel–” and Mullen chuckled. “You lay low at night when they’re wandering around.
“In the Sudan I would spend like seven working days just getting credentials to get to a place, and finally I would get to a camp and it was like ten in the morning, and the camp commandant wanted to talk to me so I spent an hour just talking to him, and he says OK, go ahead, so I went over to the center of camp and these people had put up their own kind of market, so I started taking photos and this Sudanese policeman comes running after me telling me I couldn’t do any work because I didn’t have any papers. I just blew my stack. I only had–after seven days of doing this–effectively five hours in this camp, and I bodily [Mullen chuckled] threw him into the car to take him back to the camp commandant–who’d disappeared.
The expose won the Pulitzer Prize.
“I just like the stories more,” said Mullen. “They’re just–I don’t know–it kind of cuts through the bullshit and gets down to the real human elements of the world. I can understand what’s happening in Rwanda more than what’s happening in a NATO disarmament conference–something about throw weights and missiles and stuff like that. And in the end, Rwanda probably has more significance as to where the world’s going anyway. This might sound silly, I suppose, but there were a few reporters hanging around Vietnam in 1959 who would probably say the same thing.”
