If there's a line that embedded journalists cannot cross, Dutch documentary maker Victor Franka has crossed it - picking up a gun and firing back alongside Dutch troops when ambushed by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. He described how he had been "eating, sleeping, pissing and shitting five metres" with these troops for five weeks, part of two-and-a-half years developing his film. "I trusted them and they trusted me," he said. When his camera battery ran out, he'd lost his film camera and more than 100 Taliban fighters began shooting at the group, he picked up the gun of a Dutch soldier and started shooting back.
Did that betray a journalistic principle? "There's a distinct difference here between a news journalist and a filmmaker who produces a documentary. There was nothing else to do for me it was very clear my job was over. When you're a sitting duck with more than 100 Taliban trying to unlawfully kill you, what do you do?"
Few of us are ever likely to have to make that choice, but as Gerard van den Broek, foreign editor of NOS, observed, the Taliban doesn't make that distinction between news reporters of documentary makers: "They just see someone putting down a camera and picking up a gun."
