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Meeting Yassir Arafat i
Tunis, 1985.
Photo: Susanne Sandström |
The
Middle East
As an adventurous young traveller, I wound up in
Israel, in1972, and stayed there for almost a
year. I had both Jewish and Arab friends, which,
as it turned out, was an excellent
starting-point for an understanding of the
conflict. I have visited all the Arab countries
in the region, working for Swedish newspapers,
magazines and television. As a TV-reporter for
SVT, during the Kuwait war, I was in Iraq,
Jordan, Saudi-Arabia and Israel. My knowledge
and experiences generate material for lectures
and books.
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Rioting Palestinian children in Nablus, West
Bank.
Photo: Bengt Nilsson |
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Gravedigger at Sarajevo cemetery |
The
Former Yugoslavia
In the early and mid-1990s I made several trips
to the war zones of Bosnia and Croatia. I
produced a number of films for the Swedish Red
Cross, and a couple of news features for
SVT. I travelled to places that few other
journalists were able to reach, such as Bihac,
and the Serb-occupied enclave of Krajina, both
before and after the Croatian conquest. It has
always been essential to me, as a journalist, to
distance myself from the media crowd and to go
my own way. The fratricide in the Balkans
affected me profoundly and provided the
starting-point for one of my novels - “A
Stranger Came Knocking” - which was
published in 1994.
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Svensk version