I was a little taken aback meeting Tara SUTTON ’88 for the first time. In breezed this tall, extremely attractive young woman with a movie star smile, and the first thing she said was, “I love your shoes!” She went on to lament that she can’t wear nice shoes given her line of work. No kidding. Picking through the rubble of war-torn Iraq in a pair of high-heeled clogs is not likely your best bet.

That’s the contradiction—and the delight—of Tara Sutton. I suppose I expected a war correspondent to be (a) hard-boiled and cynical; (b) earnest and somewhat smug; or (c) insane. Ms. Sutton is none of the above. She is a thoughtful, intelligent woman with a strong sense of adventure and a passion for telling stories. On the flipside, while she has won awards for her brave and sensitive approach to reporting on the plight of real people living a nightmare in a war zone, she, like women everywhere, maintains a healthy respect for shoes. She’s disarmingly, and refreshingly, light-hearted, with a belly laugh that punctuates hair-raising anecdotes of her time as a war correspondent in Iraq. It is clear from the start, she is a born story-teller.

And that is essentially what Ms. Sutton does for a living. Unlike assigned war correspondents from the various media outlets covering the war, Ms. Sutton hopped on a plane and went solo, hoping to tell the stories of the people this conflict is affecting most—the Iraqis themselves. As she put it, rather than interviewing soldiers playing football at base camp, (as appealing she admits, as that was for a young, single woman), or getting embedded with a unit, she wanted to get into the street and meet families—fathers, mothers, children—the people trying to make sense of a world turned upside down. So, while the other journalists embedded and otherwise stayed with the armed forces, she stayed in town, mostly in Baghdad and Falluja, exploring everyday life in the ravages of war.

A brief glimpse at Ms. Sutton’s childhood provides the backdrop for what she would later become. The 37-year-old graduated in 1988 from BSS, where she spent her final two years of high school. Born in Antwerp, Belgium, Ms. Sutton and her two brothers enjoyed a peripatetic lifestyle due to her father’s work as an international banker. She had lived in Belgium, London, Dublin, and Saudi Arabia before, reluctantly, moving to Canada in 1986. Most of her friends at BSS were boarders because she says she felt like a foreigner herself and was more at home in the boarding community.

After graduating from BSS, Ms. Sutton earned her Masters of Journalism from Columbia University in New York. She began working in television as one of the first wave of video journalists in the US. She was part of the CBS documentary series I-Witness, and her work has appeared on The Learning Channel, A&E, and MTV. She’s co-hosted and produced her own travel show for the Discovery Channel and has written for GQ, the Globe and Mail, Flare and New York Magazine.

She was working in New York on 9/11—a day that proved to be seminal in her life. “It really hit me that day. These people left their houses for work in the morning, just like any other day. But they never came home. I thought about my own life and if fate were to strike a sudden blow, would I be satisfied that I had done what I wanted to do? That’s when I decided to go to Cambodia. I always wanted to be a foreign correspondent so I just figured out how to get myself there and went.”

After securing an unpaid position reporting for the English-language Cambodia Daily, she packed her bags, grabbed a camera and headed for the unknown. She got her sea legs in Cambodia and, with that experience under her belt, struck out to report from some of the remotest and most shattered places in the world. She was drawn to Iraq because of an assignment for Flare magazine, no less. They wanted a profile of dynamo Samantha Nutt, co-founder of War Child Canada, who was establishing a presence in Iraq to help children displaced by the war. With her, Ms. Sutton headed off to Baghdad where she stayed for the next two years.

“I fell in love with the people and their culture,” she explains. “There is such a sense of history and of family. They are incredibly warm, funny, and hospitable. Visitors were welcomed into their homes, no matter how modest, and treated like royalty. Even taxi drivers wouldn’t take my money. They said, ‘You are our guest.’ It sounds clichéd but it’s actually true.”

The results of her stay in and around Baghdad were award-winning documentaries and shorter pieces for major media outlets in Canada and Britain. “I was able to sell my work to places like CBC and BBC because they were looking for a different side of the war, not always the American ‘we’ and ‘us’ point of view,” she pauses and laughs. “I guess I essentially invented my job.”

There are many advantages to the life of a freelance journalist. According to Ms. Sutton, you are less constrained by a network’s demands and have the flexibility to pursue different kinds of stories. Her freelance status was one of the reasons she became among the first Westerners, let alone journalists, to enter the besieged city of Falluja after a two-week offensive by coalition troops to, in their words, quash a growing insurgency.

Ms. Sutton’s report, which aired on England’s Channel Four News in June 2004, was introduced by anchor John Snow saying, “The importance of the battle of Falluja was recognized by President Bush in his keynote speech earlier this week, praising US troops for their handling of the revolt by avoiding the use of ‘massive strikes’ that would alienate the local population. But that account is not supported by what we found on the ground.”

What followed was Ms. Sutton’s report showing the utter devastation of coalition forces’ routing of the insurgents. Her images conflicted in many ways with the messages we were getting from the American media. Ms. Sutton’s camera captured the bodies strewn about the streets, either dead or severely injured, including women and children. Makeshift graves and scattered headstones polluted the town and the local football field had been converted into a haphazard graveyard where Ms. Sutton counted 248 graves.

The siege began with the public hanging from a bridge of four US contractors. Television coverage of the horror was broadcast widely in the west sparking outrage and demands for retaliation. According to Ms. Sutton, the lynchings were the Iraqis’ way of avenging what they saw as the occupation of their city and the abuse of their people.

Falluja, an ancient and deeply religious city just outside of Baghdad, is very close to the notorious prison, Abu Ghraib, and the rumours of torture swirled around the town. It also has a lengthy history as the hub of recruits for the Iraqi army. According to Ms. Sutton, there were no terrorists in Falluja, but instead ordinary local people enraged by what they saw happening around them and pushed over the edge when shots were fired by coalition forces killing civilians, including three children. In their world, it is still an eye for an eye and revenge is part of tribal law. The people expected the Americans to apologize and make recompense for their misdeed. Instead, they received silence and a build-up of troops. Ironically, says Ms. Sutton, most of these men had been employed by the Iraqi army which was disbanded by the US leaving them without purpose, without work and with a surfeit of deadly skills.

All of that history in the making was captured and reported back to the west in an award-winning documentary. Ms. Sutton revealed that the city, having been virtually cut off from the rest of the world by troops occupying the bridges in and out, had no access to hospitals or medical care. Those who had left in the morning to go to work in Baghdad could not return home; those who were stuck behind lines could not leave. This, Ms. Sutton points out, is a complete violation of the Geneva Conventions. With Iraqi fighters and civilians caught in the same streets, bombing and shelling hit countless non-combatants. With nowhere to go for medical care, the casualties mounted. Meanwhile, US military spokespeople continued to deny the scale of civilian casualties. According to Ms. Sutton, “Far from pacifying the town, the Americans had inflamed the entire country.”

Ms. Sutton was honoured with the 2005 Amnesty International Media Award for TV News for her piece, “Falluja Forensics” focusing on the civilian stories from the 2004 battle. She was also a finalist for two of the three Rory Peck Trust Awards for Hard News honouring the bravery of camera people in war zones.

She finally left Iraq as the environment simply became too dangerous. “What’s different about this conflict is that journalists are now targets. That’s a very scary situation and I’m not interested in being foolish about my safety,” she says. However, her reporting continued in the form of a partnership she struck with one Iraqi family who took a camera and continued to film their own story resulting in the documentary for CBC, A War in Words: An Iraqi Family Diary. That film went on to win the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association’s Rolls-Royce Award for Exceptional News Feature and the Gold Chris Award at the Columbus International Film Festival.

So what’s next for our intrepid journalist? She’s off to Liberia, Darfur and Congo on contract with the International Red Cross to do a series of documentaries about women and the displacement caused by war. She will be staying in the harshest refugee camps, interviewing women and telling their stories. The series will help the Red Cross tailor its humanitarian response to women caught in these circumstances. Ms. Sutton will also do a series from these places for the English-language Al Jazeera.

“It’s a lot of work, but it’s great. I hate the preparation—the paperwork, packing equipment, flying. But as soon as I’m in a strange environment with new people, I’m like, ‘Yay!’”

With such a level of comfort, in fact an apparent preference for her own brand of displacement, one wonders if Ms. Sutton will ever settle down. She says her work is not something you can do for the long haul and imagines a time when she will choose a country, at least for a while. “I’m a rare bird, but I know I’ll have to tone it down eventually. This suits when you’re young, but not something you want to keep doing forever.”

Her courage to be true to herself, to pursue her dreams and goals, and to take a stand for the voiceless in the world, make her the very embodiment of BSS values and a perfect choice to receive the 2006 Distinguished Old Girl Award.

In an email from Columbia, Ms. Sutton described her reaction to receiving the award: “I am over the moon at receiving the DOGA! Really it was so great to be back at school after so many years and realize how far I had come. It was wonderful to see old friends and teachers. Also, I really loved being acknowledged by so many women—their questions made me feel that what I do IS important. Often one has the sense that you make these reports and they go out and don’t make a difference. I felt very nurtured and loved on that night. I have the silver tray in my flat in London and often admire it in wonder that I was given such an honour. Thanks BSS.”

The girls, the teachers, the staff—everyone was inspired by her stories when she addressed BSS in Chapel this April. Partly because of the incredible stories, but also because of the extraordinary woman who delivered them. Indeed, Tara Sutton has made a difference in the world, but she has also made a difference in the lives of the girls who heard her speak and whose futures she may well have helped shape. She calls herself a rare bird. Rare indeed.

Posted January 25, 2008 at 10:41am

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