Gaby Rado - Colleague and Friend

Last Modified: 01 Apr 2003
By: Channel 4 News

Tributes to Gaby Rado, who died in Northern Iraq and was a rare kind of foreign correspondent.

From Bosnia to Afghanistan, from Bucharest to Jericho, he brought a dependable, engaged and humane quality to his reports that eschewed the flash or the immodest.

Despite witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of Cauecescu, and the liberation of Kosovo, he never played the conquering hero.

His reports from Northern Iraq, his last as recently as last Friday, were informative, strong on context, and interspersed with revealing interviews with those who were preparing to people Iraq's developing Northern war front.

Gaby Rado was born in the Hungarian capital Budapest a year before the uprising. By the time he was eight his parents had fled with him to Britain.

Perhaps those troubled beginnings in a country repressed by its Soviet masters, informed his later fascination with the emerging eastern bloc.

His life as a journalist started after Cambridge University, on the Kentish Times in 1976. His carear as a television correspondent was to bring his immigrant parents great pride, his mother used to take photos of his reports to camera off the TV screen and put them up around her kitchen.

Gaby joined Channel 4 News as a writer in 1985 having learnt his TV news trade at the BBC. Within three years he'd become a reporter with the programme, and found himself almost immediately charged with covering the disintegration of the Berlin Wall.

Russia, Yugloslavia, Israel, Afghanistan, and ultimately Iraq followed. Gaby's reporting life tracked the evolving new world disorder that chased so hard behind the collapse of Communism.

It was whilst covering emerging post cold war Russia, as Channel 4 News's Moscow Correspondent that he and his first wife Carol suffered the terrible loss of their four year old son Nicky who died in a swimming accident. That loss informed his journalism with ever greater intensity.

For most of the nineties he reported the break-up of Yugoslavia. He brought a particular humanity and sensitivity to his reports, so many of which centred on the suffering of refugees in huge numbers, and the inter-ethnic slaughter which none of our generation had ever seen the like of in Europe before.

Gaby had an extraordinary track record of exclusives. In the critical month of March 1993 he was alone in uncovering how all the mosques in the Bosnian town of Bijelina had been dynamited in one night by a Serb paramilitary group.

In March 1997 he was the only foreign reporter present at the Albanian uprising in the south of the country which led to the overthrow of the government a few weeks later. And he was among the first correspondents to report the outbreak of war on Afghanistan in 2001.

But Gaby was not just a serious and sensitive foreign correspondent. He was also blessed with a wonderful sense of humour. Amid the dog days of the Muscovite autumn he came up with the idea of reporting on a day in the life of that vital Russian staple, the potato. Being television, his news desk wanted it that very day.

He and his crew set out from Moscow without a clue as to where they would be able to start their tale. On the way out of the city he glimpsed a Babushka and her husband digging up spuds at the roadside. After they had filmed the scene, the old woman informed the crew that the potatoes were destined for a nearby school. The school turned out to be a private English language establishment. Thus rare english interviews were rapidly available on tap.

Then one of the kids announced she had an uncle with a potato farm. So off them went to film rows of Russian women pulling up their potatoes, and then because the region was so poor, being paid in them.

The final touch was some dance music lifted from one of Boris Yeltsin's recent crazy Presidential market dance routines. Inside five hours Gaby had constructed both an informative and amusing insight into the lives of impoverished rural folks in the emerging Russian Federation. The story when it aired that night was a classic example of Gaby's luck and intuition.

Gaby Rado won three prestigious Amnesty International Awards, one of which, in 1998, was about the oppression of the Muslim minority Uighurs in North-Western China.

The solidity of his journalism and his insights into the world he reported contributed to many others that the programme itself collected.

But he would regard one of his greatest awards the chance last year, as a life-long Stones fan, to interview the great Charlie Watts - the cutaways of Gaby's enraptured self said rather more than Charlie did.

The anti-social hours and pressures of a newsroom bind its occupants into an almost familial grouping. Gaby was ultimate family. He was the absolute essence of the ideals we who worked with him believe in.

Gaby Rado will be desperately missed both by us, and by his loving family - his former wife Carol, his surviving sons Tom and Louis, and his second wife Dessa.

Obituary published in The Guardian, 31 March 2003