Aluminium foil, soap save Aussie’s life in foreign prison
It was a mundane evening, and Peter was getting ready to go out with a friend. When the knock on the door came, he had no idea his life was in peril.
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When a colleague died in his arms on a packed Somalian street, anyone would have forgiven award-winning journalist Peter Greste for deciding that the job of foreign correspondent – the role he’d dedicated his career to – was no longer for him.
“It actually made me more bloody-minded about it,” he told Gary Jubelin’s I Catch Killers podcast this week.
“I questioned our own decision-making. I questioned the processes that we went through. But I never really questioned the value or the importance of what we were doing.”
Greste and his team – including producer Kate Payton – had been covering the story of 2005 Somalia, a country that, like Afghanistan before it – was being torn apart from rival clan militias.
“We knew it was dangerous. We went in with eight armed bodyguards and a technical with a 50 caliber machine gun mounted on the back. We had battlefield first aid kits. We had battlefield body armour.”
“But at the same time, we knew that Westerners and aid workers had not been targeted for almost 10 years,” Greste continues.
Greste explains that after having a few meetings inside a compound where some other journalists had been staying in Mogadishu, his team had decided to leave.
“And as we walked out, I stood on the curb of the car and Kate walked around to the street,” he recalls.
“There was a single crack. Everyone dropped to the deck.”
What happened next – a blur of shouting, some gunning of engines – still didn’t reveal where the shot had come from, but as there was no additional gunfire, Greste stood back up.
“I saw Kate slumped across the back of the vehicle, and I went round to her, and as I did, she put her head against my chest and I rubbed her back – just to say, ‘look, it’s okay, I know you’ve got a fright.’ I didn’t realise she’d been hit until my hand came up with blood.”
Kate Payton was rushed to hospital and into surgery, but she never made it out.
And in spite of the horrific experience and the tragic loss of his colleague Kate, Greste became even more determined to keep covering the news the world needed to hear.
“And that’s the fundamental point here, Gary,” he explains, “It’s the way in which both governments and extremists have come to regard journalism as the enemy.
“They’ve come to regard in this battle of ideas, the people that interrogate ideas, that transmit ideas, to try to understand ideas, those are the people that they need to get rid of.”
In comments that feel particularly timely given global events, Greste reiterates that the war on media is happening all over the world.
“And as I said, it’s not just those extremists – governments the world over have come to use [this as a tactic].”
It was a lesson Greste would relearn in the most horrific of circumstances less than a decade later.
In late 2013, having been working for Al Jazeera English for two years, Greste was sent to Cairo for Christmas.
His assignment – covering the unfolding political crisis in Egypt following the military’s ousting of President Mohamed Morsi and the subsequent crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Just weeks after arriving, on December 28, 2013, Greste heard a knock at the door.
“I was about to go out for dinner with a friend of mine, a BBC correspondent who was also in town over that period, who I hadn’t seen for a while and I was looking forward to catching up,” he explains.
“I was getting dressed and there was a knock on the door. I didn’t think too much of it. If anyone ever wanted to speak to me, they’d use the phone, but, you know, there was a … Rather more urgent knock. Soon after that, a lot more forceful. I remember cracking the door open and as I did, it was flung open as if there was a powerful spring behind it.
“The room was filled with 10 guys, who moved with a professionalism that suggested that these guys weren’t just a bunch of thugs that were raiding the room.”
Greste and two Al Jazeera colleagues, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, were arrested. They were charged with terrorism-related offences, including “broadcasting false news to undermine national security” and “aiding a terrorist group”.
The Egyptian authorities linked Al Jazeera’s reporting to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, effectively criminalising their journalism.
And while he awaited trial, Greste kept thinking one thing: this has to be a mistake.
“It was pretty scary,” he says.
“Fahmy and I were together in the first cell, and we had the night there in that box,” continues Greste.
“It was very, very tight. We were literally like sardines. If you’re lying down, you all have to roll over together. You had to lie on the same side. You had to co-ordinate movements.
“The following night was even worse. Fahmy was taken to a different prison. I was taken into this police cell. It was about eight feet square. No reading, no furniture. You know, just a leaky tap and leaky sink in one corner with a tap and a rather stinky squat toilet in the other and a door and that was it. And in that concrete box there were 16 guys.
“Some of the guys had been in that cell for the better part of six months and they were quite literally losing their minds. The kind of psychological pressure of confinement, of that type of confinement is immense. And I realised then that this was getting pretty serious.”
Greste was soon moved to solitary confinement, where he was housed alongside “several leaders of the Arab Spring uprising, the pro-democracy activists, writers, poets, activists, lawyers, trade unionists, all sorts of civil society actors,” as he describes them.
“There’s no reading material. You’ve got to look after your own mind,” he explains. “In the absence of anything else to do with your mind, you start to play the movie of your life on the walls of the cell.
“I remember previous relationships, previous exes that I’d let down, Kate’s murder, all of that stuff was going through my mind,” he continues.
And then, the impossible reality Greste feared was realised in June 2014, when he and his colleagues were convicted of charges including “falsifying news” and “having a negative impact on overseas perceptions of Egypt” and sentenced to seven years in prison.
In the face of despair, Greste explains that there were moments of beauty as well – moments that may well have saved him.
“Sometimes the food would come wrapped in aluminium foil,” he explains.
“And I don’t know if you know it, but aluminium foil has a shiny side and a matte side, and I discovered that foil actually sticks quite well to the prison walls if you smear it with soap. And so we made these big murals on the wall, which reflected the light better than we anticipated.”
“It was beautiful,” Greste continues, “It was actually quite beautiful.”
Greste would spend another seven months in jail before an intense, prolonged international campaign forced a retrial, during which Egypt’s Court of Cassation overturned the initial convictions.
This legal development, coupled with a new Egyptian law allowing for the deportation of foreign nationals, paved the way.
Finally, on February 1, 2015, after 400 days, Greste was released via presidential decree and deported to Australia, a moment widely celebrated but tempered by the continued imprisonment of his colleagues, who were finally released in September of the same year.
Originally published as Aluminium foil, soap save Aussie’s life in foreign prison
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