Christian Campiche on the war in Ukraine

Testimony regarding information on the war in Ukraine

PEC

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On the occasion of the publication of his historical novel

Christian Campiche is currently the honorary president of the PEC after having been a member of its committee for several years representing the Swiss union of journalists, Impressum, whose president he was from 2015 to 2019.

Now he is sharing with us his testimony regarding information on the war in Ukraine on the occasion of the publication of his historical novel situated in Hungary under communist control.

Blaise Lempen (PEC) :  Christian Campiche, you have just written a historical novel that resonates as a warning, Nous ne retournerons plus à Sashalom (We’ll Never Go Back to Sashalom, La Maraude, 221 pages). Through your family’s history, you recount the dark days of Hungary from 1940 and 1956. The country was first occupied by the Nazis then integrated by force into the Soviet camp. In 1956, repression by Soviet tanks caused 3,000 deaths. Has anything changed between 1956 Hungary and 2022 Ukraine, under assault by Russian army?

Christian Campiche. This story revives our worst memories. We thought this period erased from our memory, in particular the people of our generation, who spent the first 40 years of our lives under the regime of the Cold War. Military service, civil protection, trips to the East, economic exchanges – no activity was innocent owing to the permanent threat of an invasion by Warsaw Pact troops, like a sword of Damocles, in the scenarios of the governments’ military staff in any event. The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 had made us forget completely this climate of great and permanent tension between the two blocs.

PEC. You novel is a true story, for you speak of your family’s departure from Hungry, where you were born in 1948, for Switzerland. Can one draw a parallel between the thousands of Hungarian refugees of 1956 and the three millions Ukrainians who have already fled the war? Is the welcome the same?

C. C. – My parents left Hungary in 1949 at the time of the communist take over. My father was Swiss, but my Hungarian mother was directly concerned by the plight of both the refugees and the family members left in Hungary. She was deeply affected, which is what I recount in the book. Today, the parallel is striking, in any case at the level of the emotion in the host countries. The situation in the field is different. Hungary was an iron curtain country, and the revolution was a totally spontaneous people’s phenomenon. To defend themselves, the Hungarians had only a few rifles and Molotov cocktails. The Ukrainians have sophisticated arms accumulated during their 30 years of independence.

PEC- Your book is called: We will never go back to Sashalom, your mother’s place of origin in Hungary. Can we say today for the Ukrainians: we will not return to Mariupol, in view of the systematic destruction of the city by the Russian army?

C. C. - The destruction of his home is a terrible trauma. Sashalom suffered from a tank battle between Russians and Germans, which completely changed the topography, no one in my mother's family ever wanted to go back there. But at least there was no deliberate and Machiavellian  strategy to drive out a population, which is perhaps not the case in certain localities of Ukraine. The scorched earth policy has been practiced  since the dawn of time by many invaders.

PEC. You are also the author of Info pocorn, an investigation into Swiss media, criticizing the conformism of certain media in our country. The war in Ukraine has been under way for four weeks. What do you think of the way the information on the war is being handled in Switzerland.

C.C. – I am pleasantly disappointed, as people say here. All the more that I find that the media’s coverage of the covid crisis disastrous. Certain newspapers have sent special envoys to Kyiv. They are taking great risks to relay the life of the inhabitants. I find that remarkable. But I worry about what is to come, given the repressive climate that seems to be settling in there.

PEC. Is there brain washing in the West, not only in Russia? What do you think of the repression of the media in Russia?

C.C.-I have written columns for the online news outlet infomeduse.ch, which I created in 2003: nothing is all black nor all white. By virtue of its provocations, the West bears a great responsibility for this war. Russia being one of the belligerents, its media inevitably practice self-censorship if they don’t want to disappear in a country that has never been a champion of press freedom, far from it: journalists have paid with their lives for their passionate desire to inform. It’s a long time since truly independent Russian journalists have practiced their profession in Russia.

PEC. What can one do to help the Ukrainian media and the independent Russian media?

C.C– : We can support them by translating and diffusing their material on our online sites, paying both the authors and the translators. This involves an ad hoc sponsoring set-up. It’s not easy – Western journalists themselves are asking for support – but it’s not impossible either.

PEC: Thank you Christian.