Making the News

Kevin McKiernan—reporter, photographer, documentarian—goes underground and under fire for stories most journalists aren’t around to see


By Karen Feldscher

It was February 1973. Kevin McKiernan had just talked his way past a cigar-smoking federal official and some U.S. marshals in blue jumpsuits, to get into Wounded Knee.

An armed struggle was taking place at the village in South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) had seized Wounded Knee, site of a massacre of Native Americans by federal soldiers in 1890, to highlight grievances against the U.S. government: broken treaties, land swipes, the spoils system on reservations.

McKiernan was there to phone in a news report for the National Public Radio affiliate in St. Paul, Minnesota. Shortly after he got in, he found a pay phone and called the station. He heard the announcer say, “Well, we’ve got Kevin McKiernan, right on the scene at Wounded Knee. What’s going on down there, Kevin?”

To which McKiernan answered: “I don’t know—I can’t tell. Some people are saying one thing; other people are saying another thing. It’s just a lot of confusion.”

Silence on the other end of the line.

McKiernan figured out later what he did wrong. “As a newsperson, you never say you don’t know, because you’re supposed to know everything,” he says. “But that old report is probably one of the most honest I ever made. That’s how I began in the business.”

This inauspicious debut led to a solid career in photojournalism and documentary filmmaking for McKiernan, now 57, a tall, rangy man with a shock of silver-white hair, a full mustache, cowboy boots, and a touch of Tom Selleck about him.

McKiernan—who earned a law degree from Northeastern in 1979, after majoring in English at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul—originally intended, he says, to become an English professor “or something like that.”

Instead, he wound up working as a freelance writer and photographer—mainly a foreign correspondent—for such media outlets as the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, the CBS Evening News, the Los Angeles Times, U.S. News and World Report, and the Christian Science Monitor.

You’ll find him—when he’s not at home in Santa Barbara, California—on dusty buses navigating mountain roads in Turkey, chasing leads in decrepit police stations in Guatemala, or being detained in Ulster for photographing a policeman.

His most recent accomplishment is writing, producing, directing, and—along with renowned cinematographer Haskell Wexler—filming a documentary that details the plight of the Kurdish minority in Turkey, a group routinely persecuted by its own government.

At the center of Good Kurds, Bad Kurds: No Friends but the Mountains is the story of how the U.S. government has turned a blind eye to that persecution—to the point of supplying weapons used against the Kurds—because it views Turkey as an important strategic ally. The documentary, which has already won awards at film festivals from coast to coast, will air on PBS stations beginning this month.


The press pass that started a career

“I didn’t intend to be a newsperson,” says McKiernan. “I could never have predicted becoming one.”

The truth is, McKiernan really had no business being at Wounded Knee at all. He wasn’t a journalist at the time. The closest connection to journalism he could boast was an interest in film, cultivated at the University of Oklahoma, where he worked toward a PhD in English in the late 1960s.

But he wanted to know what was going on at the reservation, because he knew some of the AIM guys holed up in there. He’d met them when he worked as a community organizer in South Minneapolis; they’d played pool and drunk beer together. He was curious enough to strike a deal with NPR—a press pass in exchange for calling in a story.

“I went with ten thousand feet of sixteen-millimeter film,” says McKiernan, who was working for a small film company at the time. “I wanted to shoot footage of what was going on. I could see it on television every night because it was making the national news, but I wanted to find out what was really going on. Just out of curiosity. I went out there with one change of socks and ended up staying for ten weeks.”

It’s amazing McKiernan got into Wounded Knee at all. He appeared at the FBI roadblock with a tiny card that read “Radio,” yet his truck was full of cameras and film.

Still, he got waved past the cordon of federal troops. But not before the marshals searched McKiernan’s truck for anything that could possibly be of use to the protesters. They confiscated Clark bars and M&Ms. They also checked the truck’s fuel level, warning McKiernan not to “aid the enemy” by giving the Indians any gasoline.

McKiernan returned to Wounded Knee day after day. But three weeks into the occupation, the FBI sealed the village so supplies that might prolong the standoff couldn’t be brought in. Though the media were kept out, too, McKiernan hooked up with some Indians who helped him sneak back in.


In the thick of things

Over the next several weeks, McKiernan recorded everything he saw—such as people scrambling for cover to escape sniper fire from federal helicopters. “Bullets are dancing in the dirt around Florine Hollowhorn’s kids,” McKiernan wrote in an excerpt that appeared in the Minnesota Leader. “It’s like a saltshaker pouring around them. A miracle nobody’s hit.”

McKiernan wound up being the only journalist at Wounded Knee during the standoff’s final six weeks, feeding the wire services and television networks with reports smuggled out through the roadblocks.

Seventeen years later, McKiernan used what he had learned at the reservation, along with some of his original 1973 footage, as the basis for The Spirit of Crazy Horse, a documentary that aired in 1990 on the PBS series Frontline.

The Spirit of Crazy Horse tells the history of the Sioux in South Dakota—their strong relationship to the land, their mistreatment by the white Americans who came looking for gold on that land. The film also describes more current events and problems—harsh living conditions on reservations, for instance—which had prompted the Wounded Knee takeover.
McKiernan’s experience at Wounded Knee helped define his style of journalism. The way McKiernan reported the story—staying in the thick of it for weeks—is how he’s reported scores of others.
“My philosophy of reporting has always been that you get to what’s perceived as the lowest level,” McKiernan explains. “The primary responsibility of reporters is to be eyewitnesses. You go to the other side of the mountain, to the valley the reader or viewer can’t see, then come back and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got something to tell you.’”

That’s how McKiernan came across the story of the Kurds in Turkey. In the years following Wounded Knee, he worked as a correspondent for NPR’s All Things Considered and as a freelance writer and photographer for newspapers, magazines, and television news shows. In 1976, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his photographs of a gunfight that killed two FBI agents and a Native American. He traveled the world, covering the Contra war in Nicaragua, post-war Vietnam, El Salvador’s civil war, elections and war in Guatemala.

After the Gulf War ended in 1991, McKiernan turned his attention to the Kurds in Iraq. The largest ethnic population in the world without their own homeland, the Kurds had struggled for years under Saddam Hussein’s repression, enduring forced relocations, mass murder, and widespread disappearances. (In 1988, Saddam gassed an entire Kurdish village with cyanide, killing 5,000.) Prodded by the United States, the Iraqi Kurds mounted an insurrection against Saddam, but without aid from Washington, they were defeated.

About 1.5 million Kurds fled into the mountains of Iraq, Turkey, and Iran, where McKiernan found them living in tents and under plastic tarps. He was one of hundreds of reporters covering the story. Interest was high: Saddam was seen as the evil villain, the Iraqi Kurds as innocent victims.

“I was a guest on the Today Show, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and it always was ‘We want the story of big bad Saddam,’” McKiernan recalls. “And I had that story. I had great pictures because I’m a good shooter and a good reporter. So I became a little mini-expert on the network news shows.”


Misery in Turkey

But when McKiernan finished his work in Iraq and left for home, traveling through Turkey, he discovered the Kurds there were also being repressed. And no one was paying attention.

“What I was seeing in Turkey—the machine guns in the streets, the people up against the walls, the villages that had been burned—my first instinct was ‘Great story; maybe I can break it.’ But this time, it was a U.S. ally destroying Kurdish villages, not Saddam.” McKiernan learned the Kurds in Turkey were not allowed to speak their language, run their own schools or media, sing traditional songs, wear Kurdish clothes, or give their children Kurdish names. Even the names of Kurdish villages had been changed to Turkish ones.

All this despite the fact that the 15 million Kurds in Turkey represented 25 percent of the Turkish population (as well as the biggest chunk of the 25 to 30 million Kurds in the region as a whole). Turkey’s clampdown on the Kurds was the result of efforts dating back to the nation’s creation in 1923 to assimilate its multicultural populations by making them “Turks.”

It was a brutal effort. Beginning in 1984, when popular Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (known as the PKK) took up arms against the Turkish government, the Turks began destroying Kurdish villages.

“What the Turks do,” says McKiernan, “is go into a village and say, ‘Here’s the deal. We’ll destroy your village tomorrow, and your home, and everything you own in life—or take this rifle and two hundred fifty dollars a month, and work for us.’

“It was a horrible choice,” he says. “About eighty thousand Kurdish mercenaries started working and fighting. These men were considered by [the PKK] to be sellouts. They were attacked, and oftentimes their families got killed as well.”

Then there were the Kurds who refused to work with the Turks. Turkey destroyed their villages, creating roughly 2 million refugees. All in all, in fifteen years of conflict, at least 40,000 Kurds died.

McKiernan spent much of the 1990s hiking through Turkey’s mountains with PKK guerrillas, collecting eyewitness accounts of torture and helicopter attacks, getting the Turkish side from government spokesmen. He jotted down his day-to-day observations in the small notebooks he carried everywhere. But, he discovered, the major networks he usually worked for weren’t interested in the story. “I couldn’t give the story away,” he says.

Part of the reason why, McKiernan believes, is that the Kurdish population in the United States is small, between 20,000 and 25,000. “It’s just a drop in the bucket,” says McKiernan. “And without that constituency, without those pickets outside CNN, there’s no drumbeat to have the story told.” He adds, “There’s a lot of competition for horror.”

The other reason, he says, is that Turkey is a U.S. ally, not one of the “rogue” nations the American news media routinely feast on. But as McKiernan sees it, the story of the Kurds in Turkey represents a genuine American dilemma. “The United States supplies eighty percent of the Turkish arsenal,” he says. “The helicopters that bring the troops that burn the villages are made in Texas and Connecticut.”


A “brilliant” documentary

Frustrated by the media’s inattention, McKiernan made Good Kurds, Bad Kurds on his own, completing the 79-minute documentary last year.

The 60 Minutes–style report has already received awards for “best documentary” at film festivals in Atlanta; Providence, Rhode Island; Columbus, Ohio; Birmingham, Alabama; and Sedona, Arizona. Critics have called the film “hard-hitting,” “illuminating,” “skillful,” “the genuine article,” and “brilliant.” Amnesty International and the Congressional Human Rights Caucus organized a screening of the film for Congress in the summer of 2000. The U.S. State Department ordered a copy.

In the film, Bill Hartung—an analyst at the World Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank—explains the title. In the eyes of the U.S. administration, he says, Iraqi Kurds are “good” because they make Saddam look villainous. Turkish Kurds are “bad” because they are fighting an insurgent war against an important U.S. ally.

U.S. officials interviewed in the film say repeatedly that Turkey is a critical ally and insist that the American government is a firm proponent of human rights, that U.S. weapons are sent to Turkey for use against external foes.

“It’s one of the things [state department representatives] always say,” says McKiernan, “They say this is a very bad neighborhood: You’ve got Iran, you’ve got Iraq, you’ve got the developing nations in the former Soviet Union—this is a terrible place, and Turkey is a bulwark against terrorism, and therefore these helicopters are needed for external foes.”

But, he adds, “the helicopters have always been used against their own population. These exports are illegal according to the existing U.S. Arms Export Control Act, which says you cannot export American weapons to be used against civilian internal populations. But then it’s always done with a wink and a nod.”


Good rebels, bad rebels

McKiernan snagged for the film a rare one-on-one interview with Abdullah Öcalan, then hiding in a guerilla safehouse. (Öcalan was later apprehended by the Turks and is now on death row. Shortly after his capture, he called off the PKK soldiers, ending the fighting.)

Although Öcalan insists Turkey’s abuses far outweighed those of his soldiers, the film details the human-rights atrocities on both sides. “Killing [civilians] was done on Öcalan’s watch, and he has that to answer for,” says McKiernan.

“But,” McKiernan says, “Turkey’s human-rights violations—the aerial bombardment, the burning of some thirty-five hundred villages, the systematic pogroms—this is often overlooked by the State Department. It might be mentioned somewhere in some dusty human-rights report, but you don’t see official U.S. spokespeople getting up at a microphone and saying, ‘Our ally Turkey is perpetrating ethnic cleansing.’”

“The problem is,” McKiernan goes on, “the U.S. has a sliding scale of human rights. If you’re going to have a principled foreign policy, then you have to be against human-rights violations even if it hurts your policy. But there’s a hypocrisy in the [U.S.] foreign policy, which selects certain rebels as good rebels and other rebels as bad rebels, because they get in the way of foreign policy agendas.”

McKiernan’s film documents the efforts of Kani Xulam,
a mild-mannered Kurd from Turkey with family in Santa Barbara, as he lobbies Washington officials on his people’s behalf while struggling to avoid deportation back to his native country, where he fears for his life. Xulam says he didn’t know at first whether the film would help or hurt the Kurdish cause.
“But when it started playing around the country,” Xulam says, “I started getting letters, calls, e-mails. Never before had I had such a reaction; ninety-five percent of it was positive.”

Xulam suspects that McKiernan’s film will cast an even brighter spotlight on the Kurds’ struggle when it airs on PBS. “The movie has done so much good for the Kurdish cause,” he says. “Here’s a guy who really went above and beyond.”

Maureen Greenwood, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy director for Europe, concurs. “Kevin did an outstanding job of collecting firsthand evidence that shows the effects of U.S. policy on the Kurds,” she says. “He risked his personal safety. In my mind, he’s in the old school of true independent investigative war correspondents, who are very rare these days.”


Risky business

As a foreign correspondent, McKiernan spends about a third of every year away from home, sleeping on people’s floors, bumming rides to out-of-the-way locations, hoping to dissect and explain whatever problem he’s focused on. To get the good story, he’s put himself in harm’s way on countless occasions.

And yet, when he speaks of the danger, he seems calm, almost detached. “Foreign correspondents are probably the most careful travelers in the world,” he muses. “They do better research than you can get at the corner travel agency. I mean, there are risks. But you try to minimize them as much as possible.”

What about being shot at? “I’ve been in those situations,” he says. “At Wounded Knee, a lot of people were shot, and a couple died. That was a little bit scary.”

He adds, “When you’re pushing the envelope, when you’re twenty-two years old, losing your life for a Pulitzer Prize might be an acceptable goal, but it grows less acceptable as you grow older.”

Most of McKiernan’s run-ins occur when nervous soldiers see him filming things they don’t want seen. In Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Turkey, he’s been searched, sometimes detained, by authorities. If they found film, they confiscated it. He considers himself lucky he’s never had a camera smashed.
McKiernan says his kids—Cáitrín, 21, and Séamus, 17—were too young during the 1980s and 1990s to really understand the kinds of risks he was taking. But, he admits, “I think by the time [Good Kurds, Bad Kurds] came out, when they were teenagers, they must have wondered about it a little bit.”

And his wife, Catalina, he says, has been “real understanding” about his travels to dangerous places. “She knows this is what I chose to do for life,” he says, and adds, laughing, “I took her to Iraq once, in 1993—sort of a little holiday in hell.” She’s also gone with him to Africa and Guatemala. But for the most part, he’s traveled solo.

His cramped two-room office in a downtown Santa Barbara building bears witness to his adventures. A high bookshelf holds copies of each of his documentaries. The walls are plastered with blowups of black-and-white photos he’s taken in Turkey, Guatemala, Kuwait, China. Trails of developed film are draped over a thermostat. Dozens of old press passes hang from a hook jerry-built onto the edge of a bookcase.

He shows off some memorabilia. A chunk of Italian marble “liberated” from Saddam’s summer palace. A plastic bullet from Northern Ireland. A homemade dagger, a gift from a Kurdish guerrilla. Mortar casings picked up during the Nicaraguan Sandinista uprising. A posed photo of McKiernan with his son’s Little League team, which he helped coach.

And the tools of his trade: a 16mm Bell and Howell film projector, videocassette decks, a Betacam, a Hi-8 deck, a sound-mixing board, a switching machine, various monitors.


The lure of journalism

One wonders why McKiernan decided to go to Northeastern’s law school, since he’s spent most of his life outside the legal profession. He went, he says, because at one point he did want to be a lawyer.

“I’ve always been interested in the law,” he says. “I wanted to become a criminal defense lawyer, and Northeastern had a great law program.” A nine-month trial he covered in 1974 for All Things Considered, in which Wounded Knee occupation leaders fought felony charges, had sparked his interest in how the law can support minority struggles.

“I liked law school a lot,” McKiernan recalls. “It combined a lot of the elements of being an English major—needing to be able to write, needing to be able to speak.”

After graduation, thanks to a fellowship, he spent a year working in legal services on the sea islands off Beaufort, South Carolina, and another at Merrimack Legal Services, in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

McKiernan and his family left for California in 1981, after he struck a deal to write about Wounded Knee for a television movie. He worked on that for a couple of years, and—though the movie was never broadcast—the McKiernans decided to stay. “We were just waiting ’til the weather in Massachusetts got better,” he laughs. “We just got stuck here.”

And, although he had applied for a couple of public-defender jobs, he never went back to law. Other things came up that piqued his interest more. Writing for the New York Times about a murder near a Native American encampment in the Black Hills. Getting a grant from NPR for a one-hour documentary about the same story. Hearing about an army being set up with U.S. support in Honduras, called the Contras, and going to Central America to check it out.
“So that was a taste of journalism again,” McKiernan recalls. “It was just serendipity. I still had law in mind, but it was just overtaken by other events.”


Stories that matter

The part that most carried over from his legal years—the interest in minority struggles—ultimately led him to Wounded Knee, to the Gaza Strip, to Northern Ireland. He’s not one to go on and on, however, about the plight of underdogs around the world. Mostly, he just talks about finding the truth.

Like the fact that U.S. weapons are being used against Kurdish civilians. “You can see how this would be of concern on moral grounds. And also how a reporter might say, this is of concern to the American people on information grounds,” he says emphatically. “They ought to know how their money is being spent.”

To keep gathering information in Turkey, McKiernan found creative ways to finance his many trips there. He applied for grants. He piggybacked visits onto paying assignments.

“Some of those were kind of lean years,” he admits. “But I continued to do other freelance stories to provide income. I did lots of photo and written assignments for Time and Newsweek, wrote stories for the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers. I covered the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico. I covered the IRA. I covered the Gaza Strip. I went to Vietnam.

“Because the grant money just trickled in, I’d have to stop filming and go back to fund-raising,” he continues. “Stop fund-raising and go back to freelance work. I finally got the necessary funds to finish the film. That and my own money brought it home.” He adds, “I’m pretty stubborn.”

He’s also stubbornly convinced the quality of television news has declined. He remembers when the major networks had news bureaus all over the world, when their attitude toward foreign news was, as he describes it, “Take your medicine, viewer—this is something you need to know.”

But after communism’s collapse in 1989, the international bureaus began to close. “When you see a foreign story on TV now, if you watch closely, it’s probably coming out of London with some freelance teams on the scene,” he says. “There’s generally far less interest in what is going on in the rest of the world, now that the Cold War is over.”

“The American consciousness,” he continues, “is kind of gathered around its own table. Unless a story has a connection to U.S. foreign policy, there is no inherent interest in it. That’s a giant reason why the story of the Kurds in Turkey hasn’t been of interest.”


Waiting for the truth

The tabloidization of American news is the other problem, according to McKiernan. “You take a look at NBC,” he says. “The half-hour news at night runs maybe twenty-two minutes. It used to be that six or eight minutes were taken up with foreign news. Now, you get a sputtering of bulletins that takes only thirty or forty seconds, and then they do something about ‘your money’ or ‘your health.’”

Not to mention, he adds, the stories that have so captured public attention over the last decade, about Monica Lewinsky, O. J. Simpson, and other celebrities.

All this does not bode well for the work he does: the slow and steady gathering of information in far-flung locations, presenting uncomfortable truths about people in difficult situations.

Still, McKiernan remains convinced that the stories he tells are important, and that the best way to get at them is to wait patiently for the truth to reveal itself.

“Sometimes,” he says, “when I can spend a longer time someplace, when I’m not on deadline, I can stay and ride the little minibuses reporters never ride because they’re in a rental car. Spend time sleeping on the floor of someone’s house in a village. And just wait for the story to come to me, rather than try to force a square peg into a round hole to get the story fast. One of the blessings of freelancing, if there are any, is you can spend as much time on a story as you can stand. Which I’ve done.”

And which he’ll continue to do. This July, before devoting most of August to preparing Good Kurds, Bad Kurds for its PBS airing, McKiernan headed out to Minneapolis—partly to see his father, and partly to meet with a fellow filmmaker about plans for a new documentary on a 1915 Montana mining disaster. This fall, he’ll go back to the Middle East, to dig up more stories.
“I want to keep working as a photojournalist, as a writer, and to keep making documentary films,” says McKiernan. “And to try to continue to be a jack of a couple of trades as a freelancer.”

In McKiernan’s documentary, an old man in a Kurdish village in Turkey tells how even the children can distinguish between the helicopters flying overhead—the ones made by the Connecticut-based Sikorsky Company, which are used for transport, and the Cobras, made by Bell Textron in Texas, which do the shooting.

It’s exactly the kind of information McKiernan zeroes in on. “That’s not something handed out in a morning briefing,” he says. “There’s nobody saying, ‘How can we use this information best for our propaganda?’ This guy couldn’t spell ‘propaganda’ in any language. He was just a person, and he was telling the truth.”

Kevin McKiernan can be e-mailed at <kevinmck@silcom.com>. His website is at <www.kevinmckiernan.com>.