2023-10-10 20:53:35
by Lorenzo Cremonesi
Afghanistan on foot with the mujahideen at war with the Russians, Iran after the Khomeini revolution: there are dozens of unforgettable war reports by the journalist-writer
He hated the subterfuge, the shortcuts, the crafty people who say they arrived at the location of the story first and instead invent it from scratch, adding imagination, copying from the agencies while sitting comfortably in hotel rooms. He wrote at his own pace, he hated the rush of the scoop, but then, when his article arrived, you understood that it was made up of things seen and experienced, peppered with unexpected, perhaps contradictory, details that were true, honest, undoubtedly verified in person. And he got angry when the management didn’t listen to his proposals, he protested in his own way, he burst into the editorial meeting room to underline the urgency of going, leaving, going to places to tell stories. He didn’t care about money, his expense reports were always late and lacking, he certainly didn’t make “expenses”, on the contrary, if anything he contributed his own, because for him journalism and above all the job of correspondent was not a profession like the others, but a sort of mission, of total and all-encompassing commitment to the service of the newspaper, but above all of the reader and of the mandatory need to bear witness.
We are writing these lines straight away, as soon as we received the news of the death at 91 of Ettore Mo, blatantly defined as one of the last “of the great correspondents” of Italian journalism and a prestigious writer for Corriere della Sera for decades. He loved to talk about himself, often accompanied by a glass of wine, which – he said – helped him to “melt down”, to set the wings of creativity in motion. One evening in Jerusalem, it was the time of the First Intifada between the end of 1987 and 1988, after having written the reportage from the burning Palestinian refugee camps, he dwelt on remembering his beginnings.
Ettore Mo, one of the greatest Italian journalists, a traveling companion, a friend and teacher, has passed away. The greatest lesson from him: learning to tell without adjectives. I tried. Tonight on your Lake Maggiore is it a little? darker..
— Milena Gabanelli (@M_gabanelli) October 9, 2023
He was born in Borgomanero in 1932, had finished classical high school and had enrolled in Foreign Languages and Literatures at Ca’Foscari, one of the most famous faculties of the University of Venice. But he soon realized that university life wasn’t for him. Penniless he had started travelling: Paris, Madrid, Hamburg, all the way to London. He supported himself with odd jobs: waiter, dishwasher, steward. That evening in Jerusalem she lingered with her memory of his experiences as a steward on a British merchant navy ship. They didn’t treat me badly, but there were long hours of tedium that I tried to fill by reading everything I could find, he said.
In 1962, at the age of 31, he introduced himself to the London correspondent for the Corriere, who was then Piero Ottone, to offer himself as a collaborator. His management immediately liked his direct style, his love for the story lived on the field. They called him back to Rome and Milan, then in 1979 he received his first assignment as foreign envoy. Director Franco Di Bella trusts him: the story is important, we are in the middle of the Iranian revolution and Ayatollah Khomeini has just returned to Tehran.
Ettore dives into major international politics. A few months later struck by the love for his work when he reaches Afghanistan. He begins to follow the war between the mujahideen brigades against the invading Soviet army. And here in 1981 he meets one of the characters who most fascinated him in his long career. He interviews Ahmad Shah Massud, the “lion of Panjshir”, the secular leader of the local Tajik militias who want to drive out the Russians and are against the radical Pashtun Islamic groups who will soon form the hard core of the Taliban military formations. The two see each other several times. In his last trips to Afghanistan, until a few years ago, Ettore always insisted on bringing a flower to the grave of Massud, murdered by Al Qaeda militants two days before the attacks of September 11, 2001.
He insisted on continuing to work into his eighties and his special services touch much of our planet: from the war in the former Yugoslavia, to Chechnya, to Pakistan, to India. He was among other things one of the few Western reporters who went to visit the leaders of the newly formed Hamas movement in Gaza when they were expelled to Lebanon by the Israeli government between 1992 and 1993. He stayed in their tents in no man’s land near the Israeli border for 48 hours. For him, the duty to go and tell the story surpassed any barrier or prejudice.
October 10, 2023 (modified October 10, 2023 | 12:23)
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