The Finicky Woman

"At the office they call me the "maddening woman," says Doha Chams. "As soon as the chief editor wants to cut one of my articles, I shout until he gives up. "If you give up just once, you will always give up." Doha Chams works in the publishing company of the newspaper Assafir ("messenger" in Arabic), a Lebanese daily claiming to be the "voice of people who have no voice." Founded when pan-Arabism was at its peak, this newspaper employs 160 persons and has a circulation of 35,000. Doha joined the publishing company after the end of the Lebanon war and her return from exile, after a brief television experience. "I was the chief of investigation and reports, and my shows were very famous... Until the day, in a report, I challenged two ministers, and they fired me!"... Doha Chams acquired reporting techniques in France and her ironic style has seduced widely. Nowadays she is a journalist whose talent is highly appreciated, and her articles are eagerly awaited by the readers. "I understood that readers were the only ones who could protect me." Congratulations I got through e-mail and phone calls allowed me to impose a new style. At first, I had to struggle to establish my position, but little by little I managed to do so."

Doha Chams presents herself as a "child of the war" who grew up during the bombing that tore down her country. A Fine Arts student in Tripoli, she drove everyday to the university with a friend. "We would listen to a tape of Ravel's "Boléro." Then we would put up the car windows and drive with the noise of bombs exploding around us and the volume of the music as high as possible!" Then the young woman went into exile in Paris. In 1990, when the war ended, Doha decided to go back to her country. "The first time I came back to Lebanon, I stayed for four months then left again. It was too difficult. Everything was disorganized, I was always angry: cars driving in every direction, phones not working, everything made me angry." When Doha went back to Paris, she says, "I left with illusions. So I said to myself: get rid of your illusions and go back. You have things to do there. The second time, things seemed easier for me. For peace and quiet when I walked in the streets of Beyrouth I bought a Walkman. Music allowed me to put distance between me and the scene: the street agitation then became a show!" Doha does not regret having left her Parisian comfort, nor does she regret having a job with less wages than she had in France: her articles have gotten things moving. Among her several journalistic successes, one investigation has touched her particularly: "The association of mothers and parents of kidnapped persons in Lebanon organized demonstrations and sit-ins. But people no longer went to these demonstrations. Their fliers were very demanding but did not reach people. So I decided to do something."
During the war, kidnapping became a kind of national game played by militia. Kidnapped in the streets or taken from their homes, kidnapped people were exchanged with kidnapped people of the other side. But many of them simply disappeared. (According to official figures, there have been 17,000 disappearances, but this information is difficult to check.)

Once in the publishing company, Doha Chams proposed to her chief editor a series of descriptions of all the kidnapped people, choosing among the most extreme cases. "I wanted these disappearances to be more than anonymous cases, I wanted each disappeared person to become a real person in the mind of each reader. The series lasted one year, and the sensitiveness of the public opinion was efficient. More and more people started to take part in the demonstrations. My articles managed to summon the readers. This investigation was followed by a lobbying operation to make the government set up a committee to take into account all the disappearances. But this committee was not very motivated and the parents of kidnapped people had to face useless administrative red tape, since testimonies reporting all the kidnappings did not provide enough elements. The parents were asked to provide evidence concerning the disappearance of their children. Is not disappearance in itself the most striking evidence of a disappearance?"asks Doha.

The newspaper related the parents' protests and the limits of the committee's action. Finally a law was voted. This law officially recognized disappearance and was followed by a new series of debates. "This law asked the parents to declare their children as dead. But parents said that it was the state which had to do it. And too many women could not accept the death of their children. Doha relates with some emotion the meetings she had with mothers who refused the truth. "The major part of these women had lost all they had during the war, their house... They had therefore kept a photo, the last photo where they could see their children smiling. 'Give me my child back,' they said to me. And I cried! At that time my colleagues called me the 'weeping woman': I was always crying!" adds Doha, smiling. Despite all her nicknames, Doha Chams won her colleagues' respect, thanks to her reports with "human face," her investigations, and her strong will when she worked. In addition to her activities she is also a journalist for "Reporters without Borders" for Lebanon (an international organization that denounces the non-respect of the freedom of press throughout the world, including arbitrary arrests of journalists and sometimes their being killed). Nowadays, Doha Chams and her colleagues are trying to find a solution to the financial difficulties of Assafir: publishing a daily newspaper costs a lot of money, the independence of journalists is not respected.