“If you don’t do anything, you also feel like a criminal,” Chernov told me. “Like you are helping the killers. You are helping the criminals to continue to do their crimes. And I can’t. After all we lived through, this is not something I can do. I am aware that my efforts are not as productive as I would want them to be. But still, at least, at least do something.”
As he spoke, I thought of another journalist I admire, working half a world away. Hiba Morgan, a journalist of Sudanese and South Sudanese origin, is one of the few reporters still working in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. She is the correspondent for Al Jazeera, and with her team she has documented at great peril the street-by-street fight between two rival generals and their troops to control the city and the country. The fighting has stretched on for more than three months, killing thousands of people. Her team had had many close calls — stray bullets and wayward artillery coming uncomfortably close. When I called her recently, she listened for incoming airstrikes or gun battles that ricocheted too close as we talked. I asked her what kept her here, when so many others had fled.
“A couple of weeks ago we went to a hospital, and the doctors were running out of medicines,” she told me. They needed to remove a bullet from a 7-year-old boy. They didn’t have enough anesthesia to put him under, so they used a local anesthetic.
“You could clearly hear the child was crying and in pain,“ she said. “We came out of that, we were all crying as well, and we had a chat afterward. We all wondered, what are we doing? And I think we know that it may not make a difference now, but we’re documenting history. We are creating a record. People will know what happened here.”
Her words made me realize that Chernov’s film left me feeling something that was quite the opposite of futility. Morgan, like Chernov, is a journalist committed to going to and staying in the hard places, the painful ones, and telling the stories of the people she finds there. These brave journalists do this work not because they think they can make an immediate difference, but because doing nothing in the face of such cruelty is intolerable. Their work is humbling, inspiring and necessary. It demands and requires our rapt attention.