People Like Us by Joris Luyendijk

other jokes in abundance: “Congratulations, Mr. President!” the advisor says. “99.98 percent voted for you at the referendum. That means that only
0.02 percent were against you. What more do you want?” The leader growls, “Their names.”
    Burglars break into the safe at the central bank. There’s a big panic until the governor comes out and says in relief, “False alarm. Nothing important was stolen—only the results of the 2015 election.”
     
     
    T he most surreal thing was my own job. Student riots broke out in Iran, and I had to cover them from Cairo because Tehran kept its gates closed. How many readers and listeners would know that I couldn’t even place a direct phone call to Iran from Egypt, and that Cairo was about the least-suitable place on earth from where to follow these disturbances? Not many, I hoped, and it really couldn’t come out that I knew precisely six words of Persian.
    Syria was closed off at that time, too; despite my barrage of faxes (“Your country deserves to be described from the inside, not by my colleague in Tel Aviv”), I never got a personal visa. Other journalists had the same problem, and the Cairo Foreign Press Association organized a very brief and tightly run group trip to Damascus. Part of this was a collective interview with the Syrian minister of economic affairs, for which our opening question was: “Each year, two hundred thousand young Syrians flood into the work market. How is Syria going to help them find a job?” The minister smiled sympathetically and said, “Thanks to the wise leadership of our president, we don’t have any unemployment. At the most, just a few lazy people.” It went on like this for half an hour; then, as I was leaving the ministry at the end, a pretty young woman grabbed hold of me. Did I belong to the group of Western journalists who’d been invited by the Ministry of Information
to come and look into the impressive progress of Syria under the leadership of President Hafez Al-Assad? She’d seen us on the news. Could I pass on this petition to the minister and have it signed? Her brother would pick it up later that evening from my hotel because, of course, a nice girl like her couldn’t come to me. Was this an appeal for a pardon for a group of political prisoners? A complaint against human rights crimes? A plea for democracy? Our entire group would be thrown out of the country and my name put at the top of the blackest of black lists if I handed a petition like that in. But then I took another look. It was an appeal for a job in television. “I want to be a presenter,” she smiled charmingly.
    I sometimes imagined I was taking part in a reality-TV show where participants were given impossible assignments. Mine was to play a journalist in a system where good journalism is a contradiction in terms. It produced some droll images, but the worse the dictatorship, the less funny it became.
    A little less than a year after I’d arrived, the Cairo Foreign Press Association arranged a group trip to Iraq via the Ministry of Information in Baghdad. It was complete madness. The secret-service minders practically sat on our laps. They’d regularly leave us waiting in lobbies for hours on end without any explanation, and then shove us into taxis for an excursion. Slipping away wasn’t possible because then you’d put people in danger. If an Iraqi saw his neighbor (whom he’d hated for years) chatting to a Westerner, he might make a call to his “friend” in the secret services: “My neighbor has been recruited by a spy.” Could the neighbor prove his innocence? And to which authorities? Perhaps that sly journalist from Hulanda was an informant or agent provocateur himself? You do hear such funny things; and if he was an agitator and you didn’t report him immediately, he might report you.

    Part of the trip was an excursion to the south, thirty or so of us in a bus, leading to unavoidable jokes about school trips. Soon, everybody was