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The BBC's Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet talks to Vikram Khanna about her experience of reporting on life and war in the Islamic worldIF you watch BBC TV, you would probably have seen her.迷你倉最平 Chances are, she was wearing a flak jacket and a helmet and reporting from a war zone - Syria perhaps, or Afghanistan, or a part of Pakistan. Lyse Doucet is the BBC's Chief International Correspondent, and these countries have been part of her "beat". It just turns out, they have all been ravaged by conflict.Ms Doucet, in person, is vivacious, funny, full of anecdotes, and speaks much faster than she does on TV. She also has a distinctive accent that makes you wonder about her origins. "People in Britain keep asking me, where are you from?" she says. "I tell them I'm from Canada. Then they go, is that where you are originally from? I say yes, I'm Canadian, wrong accent and everything."But identity can be complicated for someone like her, who has spent the better part of the last 30 years in or near the Middle East. "So now, I feel I am a little bit Pakistani, a little bit Afghan, a little bit Middle Eastern. But quintessentially I am still Canadian. Sometimes I say, I live in a country called the world and London is the capital. You have to live somewhere, and I do live in London."Her professional journey from Canada to the Middle East was via Africa. After she finished graduate school in Canada where she majored in International Relations and African studies, she took a job teaching in Cote d'Ivoire. Then came a stroke of luck. "Right after I finished teaching in the village, the BBC arrived in the capital to set up a west Africa office. That was 1982-83. So there I was, right place, right time, but wrong accent, wrong everything else - I had no journalism experience. I still think to this day that it was an act of God that I was taken on."After spending five years in West Africa, she spent the next five covering Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran and then moved to the Middle east."It's not that I chose hot-spots," she says. "These were just places I was drawn to. I got taken by that region. When I go to Kabul or Islamabad or Tehran, I feel at home, and I have friends there, from all walks of life."And even though much of her work has involved covering conflict and even full-scale wars, she does not see herself as a 'war correspondent'. "I am a story teller," she explains. "For me, my work is about telling stories. Even when I go to a war - I spend a lot of time in Syria now, which I think is the war of our time - I also look for human stories. The last time I went to Syria, I went to a battlefield, but I also went to ice-cream parlours. Because I also want to tell people a different story, tell them that this is not a place where people are so different from you and I; here too, kids want to go to school, families want to be safe, people want jobs. Different place, different story but the same fundamentals. I also always look for humour, and you know, it's always there."And I want to show people the richness of life. Sometimes, when they watch the news or the headlines, they get a rather flat perspective about a place, that it's boring or that people are always killing each other - and it's not. Our job, as story tellers, is to go through the layers and give the richness, the depth and the understanding - and hopefully some affection too."So that people will care about what happens in Syria and about its humanitarian crisis, will care about Afghanistan if the war is not over and will care about the fact that we intervened in these countries and left them in a better place, but not in a great place. I don't see it as a job, it's a life."But she risks her life too. Why is that worth it? She gives an almost fatalistic answer. "It doesn't matter what job you do. I had a colleague who worked for the New York Times and spent five years in the Middle East and nothing happened to him. Then he went back to New York and got run over by a bus. So it can happen anywhere. All of us, when we get up in the morning, take risks."But as we say in our business, no story is worth dying for, absolutely not. But we still do believe there are stories worth taking risks for. The dilemma now is sometimes, you don't know how great the risks are until it's too late. Syria and Pakistan are the countries that are the most dangerous for journalists right now. These are places where journalists are not only caught in the cross fire, but are targeted."Storytelling aside, she also asks questions - difficult ones, sometimes, of difficult people. "Part of what we do is holding people to account," she says. "We have to ask them: why did you bomb the centre of Kabul? Why did you attack three mosques in the north west? Why are you killing children and families and destroying neighbourhoods? In what name are you doing this? We have to ask them to justify such actions."I ask her about being a woman covering the Islamic world and its advantages or otherwise."I believe to this day that being a woman is an advantage," she says. "There is, in Islam, this idea about the need for women to be protected and honoured. Also, almost every country I've worked in has a tradition of hospitality and how to treat a guest. And I am a guest, and I am a foreign guest and I am a woman."And so, for example in Afghanistan with the Mujahideen, I get the front seat in the helicopter or in the bus. At bus stops, people come up and say, are you okay? I have been taken care of. And most places I have worked, hospitality always comes before ideology.""Having said that, there has in recent years been a rise in Islamic groups with such a strict interpretation of Islam that they do not want to see women at all, and certainly not western women. I have not come across that yet; I have not encountered a situation where someone says, 'I will not see you because you are a woman.' Some people don't want to shake my hand, but that's fine - I respect their traditions and customs."She has some funny stories about what being a female journalist can entail. In 1992, she wanted to cover a battle in Khost in Afghanistan. "So I called (the Mujahideen commander, later a Taliban leader) Jalaluddin Haqqani and said, I really want to go there. And the Haqqani people said, well we want the BBC, but no women are allowed. I said okay then, I'll dress like a man. And immediately, they said fine. And I remember when we were driving, my colleague said to me: 'Lyse, in the truck in front of us, they are discussing whether you are a woman or a man.' And that day, I had to dress like a man to fit in, but I was still given all the privileges of a woman."Sometimes, she says, being female has also helped her get stories out of women, who feel more at ease talking to another woman than to a man. But getting access to women in parts of the Islamic world often requires the consent of the men, who then offer to translate. "This can lead to some hilarious situations," she recalls. "Like when the woman's answer to your question is two sentences long but the man's translat迷你倉on is 20 sentences long. You don't need to know the language to figure out that he's adding something.''Even though they are sheltered, women invariably add richness to a story, she points out."There was this place in Northern Afghanistan where we had to actually go to the head of the village to get permission to talk to the women. It was very hard, but we got it. And when we got to speak to the women, they were overjoyed. They couldn't stop talking and they had so many stories. And then you laugh and say ok, now we know why the men don't want us to talk directly to the women: they don't want the women to tell us what is really happening!""Time and again after we have gone through the hoops and finally got access to the women, you open such a rich scene. I always like to talk to the children too. They have a raw, unedited view of life, they speak with a directness that I sometimes find really illuminating. In recent years, some of the stories involving children have been the most powerful ones we've done.''Radicalisation of IslamHaving started covering the Islamic world in the 1980s, when it was not so radicalised, with the exception of Iran, how does Ms Doucet explain the radicalisation of the region since?"We could give very superficial answers, and we could write PhDs about it," she says. One reason for the radicalisation was the prolonged spell of authoritarian rule that some of these countries endured, which prevented the development of a political culture, or diversity. "The only way people could identify or express themselves was through the mosque" - which helped radical Islamists build a following.But radicalisation had other causes too, she explains. "There have been shifts in cultures, but also shifts in relationships between cultures, because often people define themselves vis-?j-vis another culture. So, the way people feel about themselves in Pakistan and Afghanistan cannot be separated from the way they feel Americans think about them, post 9/11. Some of the factors that make our identity sometimes come from within and sometimes they are provoked from outside. And they are also a function of circumstances on the ground."The facts on the ground matter, but as much, sometimes even more, perceptions of the facts matter, because people act on perceptions and in doing so, they change the facts on the ground. So it's not just what happened that is important, but what people believe happened, or believe will happen."For her, the terrorist attacks on the United States of Sept 11, 2001 have been a cautionary tale in terms of what followed. "It was a defining moment in terms of how we see the United States and how we see Islamic groups, but it was also a defining moment in terms of America's relationship with the Islamic world - the setting up of Guantanamo Bay (a prison camp where suspected Islamic terrorists were incarcerated), the Homeland Defence in the US, the treatment of individuals - all of that changed people's thinking about America. And we're still going through this."One of the key lessons she has learnt from her reporting, she says, is that there is always more than one point of view - which makes communication essential, especially between cultures.On the rise of radicalisation -- "The facts on the ground matter, but as much, sometimes even more, perceptions of the facts matter, because people act on perceptions and in doing so, they change the facts on the ground.""That is why I am a great believer in dialogue and interaction between cultures, to get cultures to understand each other. Because when people feel isolated and don't talk, they develop distorted views of each other. Different religions and cultures can work together. We've seen, in some places how hostilities can set in when they don't - that's how wars happen."Another key learning for her has been the power of institutions, the rule of law and history. One of the biggest problems in Egypt, for example (among other countries in the Islamic world), is that after 30 years of strongman rule, there is no culture of compromise or tolerance - no institutions to manage the politics. She draws a contrast with Australia, where she had witnessed the last days of election campaigning. "It was clear that Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott despise each other. But there is a political system to contain that - there is a rule of law, and there is a historical legitimacy to it. But in Egypt, you have the liberals who can't stand the Muslim Brotherhood, who can't stand the liberals. And then you have the army. And there is no institution that can get them all together around the table, there is no acceptance of each other. So you have a deadlock. And I don't know how it's going to be resolved."Before we part, I want to know, as a viewer of television, how it feels to be on the other side of the box, especially when something big is happening behind her."It can be a funny feeling," she says. "When you present from the field, you're standing maybe on a rooftop or a hilltop, or some place where there is no electricity. You're in the darkness. And there is this camera light on you. And you have to remind yourself that out there, millions are watching you."There are times when things don't go quite according to plan. That's when I have a silent prayer that nobody's watching, which is of course unlikely."But then there are other moments when you really feel you may be making people sit up. Like when I was in Kabul and announced that the Taliban has fallen and Hamid Karzai has become the Prime Minister of Afghanistan. Or when I was in Gaza reporting on Hamas winning the Palestinian elections. Those are moments when you know people at the other end are going, 'oh my God, really?'"That's when you feel a sense of history, a sense of responsibility and the excitement, that somehow, at this great historic moment, you have this little place in it, that you're telling the story to the world. It's an extraordinary privilege."vikram@sph.com.sg?LYSE DOUCETChief International Correspondent, British Broadcasting Service (BBC)Presenter, BBC Radio and Television1958 Born Dec 24 in Bathhurst, Canada1980 BA, Queen's University, Canada 1982 MA in International Relations, University of TorontoCAREER HIGHLIGHTS1983-88 Freelancer, BBC, West Africa1989-93 Correspondent, Islamabad, also covering Afghanistan and Iran1994 Correspondent, Jordan1995-99 Correspondent,JersualemCovered all major wars in the Middle East since 19951999 Joined BBC's team of presenters2011-13 Covered Arab Spring from Tunisia, Egypt & Libya2012-13 Covered the war in SyriaCouncil Member, Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House)Council Member, International Council for Human Rights (ICHR) GenevaAWARDS2003 Silver Sony Award for News Broadcaster of the Year2007 Intenational Television Personality of the Year (Association for International Broadcasting)2010 Best News Journalist, Sony Radio Academy Awards2010 Peabody and David Bloom award for film on maternal mortality in Afghanistan, with producer Melanie Marshall, Shoaib Sharifi, and cameraman Tony Joliffe儲存