To be a war reporter is a dream common to many journalists and non-journalists. Because of the distance from the known, experimentable reality, it can resemble wanting to be an astronaut. A leap into the dark. This is because little is known about the many unknowns that you will have to face and because there are so many ways to do that job: you can stay in luxury hotels with escort armed guards and show off a keffiyeh or something similar on your return, or you can live , maybe in hovels but in the middle of the clubs, wearing that "something similar" to blend or blend better in the environment that you want to tell.
The first interview of Online Defense I ask Fausto Biloslavo from a war journalist. In the history of our country's journalism, there are dozens of great reporters who have informed - not only Italy but often the whole world - about what really happened in very high-risk areas, but they are few those "true" still "in service". Biloslavo is among these.
He began to risk his skin at twenty with a camera around his neck with two friends, Gian Micalessin and Almerigo Grilz, and he arrived more or less unharmed in our day.
In 1988, for a reportage, he was a guest in the Afghan prisons for seven months. Times in which "certain" reporters did not go out into the streets and banners were not unrolled from the town halls. Thanks also to the intervention of the then president Cossiga, he managed to return home.
The same luck did not have Almerigo Grilz, shot dead in the 1987 while documenting the ongoing war in Mozambique.
Good vision!
(In the photo above a very young Fausto Biloslavo together with Almerigo Grilz in the Philippines in the midst of anti-guerrilla units at the time of the dictator Marcos. Opening with a Taliban prisoner in Afghanistan in 2009 and below the video, again in the same year, on board a Italian helicopter)
