David S. Rohde

David Stephenson Rohde (born 1967) is an American investigative journalist for The New York Times. From July 2002 to December 2004, he was co-chief of the Times 's South Asia bureau, based in New Delhi. While a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre.

He was kidnapped by the Taliban in November 2008 with his driver and interpreter. They managed to escape in June 2009 after eight months in captivity. [1]

Reporting on Srebrenica

His work exposed the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the region of Srebrenica, and was hailed as some of the finest reporting on human rights abuses ever. His reporting was used in programs to teach international reporting skills to young journalists at Columbia University, where officials said of his work: "We felt that Rohde's work was ideal for a case study in reporting on gross human rights violations, presenting opportunities to study both the professional techniques and the moral issues that pertain to such work."

David has been praised as a fair and compassionate reporter who is willing to endure personal hardship in doing his work. While documenting the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia, he was detained by Serbian authorities, who interrogated him for 10 days and accused him of being a spy for the Bosnian Muslims. An international campaign involving reporters and non-governmental experts throughout the world led to his release.

Middle east reporting

At The New York Times, he has written about peacekeeping efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he reported on the hardships endured by men who had been detained and released from the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In 2002, David appeared on the NPR show, All Things Considered, to discuss his reporting on men from Afghanistan who had been detained in Guantanamo Bay. He told the host, Jacki Lyden:

Mr. ROHDE: Their biggest complaint was being kept in small cells that were about 8 foot-by-8 foot in size and never let out of the cells except for two 15-minute periods a week, where they were allowed to walk around briefly outside. Otherwise, they were in that cell for 24 hours a day. They said there was sweltering heat. They were repeatedly interrogated. They did not complain about the interrogations. They did not say they were beaten or threatened. But essentially being kept in the cells and the isolation--all of them complained about not getting letters from their families, and the fact that they just never knew how long they would be there, would they ever be tried, just sort of wore away at them."

LYDEN: And so how did they feel about the fact that they had been detained for as long as they were, 11 months, and now were being released? Were they angry?

Mr. ROHDE: They were. I mean, particularly, these two older men who were both picked up in American raids pretty much after most of the fighting in Afghanistan was over. And they couldn't see how they could be considered combatants in the war given their age. One of them had a cane and has difficulty walking, but they still were sent to Guantanamo Bay for at least six months.

Personal

Rohde earned his B.A. at Brown University in 1990. He is a native of Maine.

Bibliography

• Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997. ISBN 0374253420 ISBN 978-0374253424

External links

• Personal Homepage