NYT journalist discusses foreign conflicts

Michael Slackman was covering street protests in Manaman, the Bahrani capital, when a helicopter shot at him.

Slackman and a colleague ran across a field and crouched behind a wall for cover.

“We looked up and there was this helicopter following us,” he said.

Suspecting they were being hunted, Slackman and his colleague flagged down a passing vehicle to find safety.

Slackman worked as a correspondent in the Middle East for eight years until 2011. In this work, he viewed world events from the ground up, a perspective different from that of many academics and policymakers.

Now the deputy editor of the New York Times, Slackman told several stories that highlighted the chaotic nature of world events when he spoke Monday night in the William Pitt Union at an event jointly sponsored by the Collegiate Readership Program and the Pitt Student Government Board. 

While Slackman was still a reporter, he worked in Cairo, the Egyptian capital. He used a story from his time there to illustrate the complicated dynamics between the country’s religious groups.

According to Slackman, Cairo had one of the best recycling systems in the world. Members of the Christian minority, not subject to the same religious laws as their Muslim compatriots, collected and sorted trash, selling metals and plastics back to manufacturers and feeding much of the remaining garbage to their pigs.

But when panic broke out in 2009 over a supposed swine flu epidemic, the system changed, and the government slaughtered the roughly 300,000 pigs in Cairo.

“Guess what happened,” he said. “Now they had huge mounds of rotting, fetid, disgusting waste.”

He said that since the Arab Spring revolution, the country has struggled to find its identity, with citizens seeing themselves as members of religious or ethnic groups rather than as Egyptian citizens.

But Egypt has changed in key ways, even if its ride to democracy has come in fits and starts — with the army ousting the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood last year — the country is no longer under authoritarian regimes.

Slackman stressed he did not offer prescriptions for specific foreign policies, but said President Barack Obama’s response to events in the Middle East has been unclear.

Obama has largely responded to events such as the military coup that ousted Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood-backed president last year, with ambivalence.

“We appreciate the complexity of the situation,” Obama said in a statement last year. “While Mohamed Morsi was elected president in a democratic election, his government was not inclusive and did not respect the views of all Egyptians. We know that many Egyptians, millions of Egyptians, perhaps even a majority of Egyptians were calling for a change in course.”

Slackman said he wanted to see more clarity from the Obama administration in its response to Egypt and other hot zones, such as Syria.

But he said Egypt has changed in key ways since the Arab Spring. A single leader no longer makes unilateral decisions without worrying about its people’s wishes.

“Egypt is not what is was before,” Slackman said. “Everything is different. The street is now a force.”

But in many other ways, much about current events feels familiar to Slackman.

Though U.S. Marines fought hard to “liberate” the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah during the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, fighters sympathetic to al-Qaeda have retaken the city since the coalition forces’ withdrawal. More than a decade after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan toppled the Taliban’s regime, NATO and Afghan-government forces are still struggling to stop attacks in the country.

In East Asia, events that took place more than 70 years ago while the Korean peninsula was part of the the Japanese Empire such as the existence of “comfort women” — Korean women who were forced into sex slavery for the Japanese army — continues to strain relations between South Korea and Japan.

“It seems in a lot of ways like we’re moving back in time,” Slackman said.

SGB President Mike Nites said this was not a new idea.

“Everyone throws the phrase, ‘History repeats itself,’ around all the time,” Nites said. “But he presented in a way that really made me think about what he was saying.”