By David Walmsley

Our job is to bring the news home to you. Over the years, the Toronto Star's newsroom has sent reporters and photographers to outrageously dangerous places, for the sake of getting an independent view of history in the making. In Afghanistan, there are dramatic stories that few in Canada had much reason to read about or be concerned about before 9/11. But now we find Canadians, in particular soldiers with families in southwest Ontario, putting their lives on the line. Reporting these stories is dangerous, important work.

On occasion, the Star has embedded with those young soldiers and reported from the front line on their work and sacrifices. We have also gone "unilateral," moving around without any military presence. It's the right thing to do, but in international reporting, the dangers lurk everywhere. Of course the dangers are clear in both Afghanistan and Iraq. While these countries have already proven to be the graveyard for too many journalists, one other country, not so well reported, is generally lumped in with these two when it comes to descriptions of general and often random danger: Somalia.

The word conjures up, perhaps, an image of a dead U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets of the capital city, Mogadishu. The iconic 1993 photograph was taken by a former Star staffer, Paul Watson, and for his bravery, he was honored with a Pulitzer Prize. But like Afghanistan pre-9/11, Somalia today is a country few pay much attention to. But ignoring the story, dismissing Somalia with a convenient, if myopic, label of it as just another failing African state, is to declare the troubles affecting people far away as having no consequence on life here at home. Recent history does not allow this. Canadian soldiers were deployed there in the early 1990s and tens of thousands of people living in Toronto belong to the Somali population.

Few journalists have managed to enter the country and the lack of narrative emanating from Somalia made this assignment most dangerous. Those who gain entry do so at maximum personal risk, in part because of the unknown. Star reporter Michelle Shephard and photographer Peter Power went in because they knew the story had to be told. It required months of quiet preparation and a level of bravery remarkable even for this business.

More than 100,000 refugees have flooded across the Somali-Kenyan border as they try to avoid the turmoil in the cities. This is an underreported human story you can read tomorrow. The textured sense of life on the streets of Mogadishu is captured today, in a special National Report section, which gives the space to display Power's pictures and Shephard's words. Some may ask why a story about Africa is in a designated National section. The answer is because it is not an African story; it's Canadian, and one that either already is, or has the potential to become, deeply significant to the people of Greater Toronto. It truly is foreign news made local and was possible only because of the bravery of Shephard and Power, two of the finest journalists. On this occasion, the story was worth the risk.

David Walmsley is the Star's Assistant Managing Editor, National/Foreign News

Source: Toronto Star