In the late summer of 1993, when Mark Huband heard shots being fired in the centre of Mogadishu, he drove to a nearby hospital to find out what was going on. There, amid a confused mass of injured Somalis, he learnt that American troops had launched a raid on the city’s Olympic Hotel.
The next morning, he drove to the hotel and found the remains of a Black Hawk helicopter, which a group of men were attacking with axes. Children were climbing the rotor blades, riding them high into the air. The owner of a nearby house told him the helicopter had been hit by a rocket and that its four American soldiers had fought off Somali fighters from all sides. Three of them were killed and one captured.
Huband, a foreign correspondent for The Guardian, later learnt that the soldiers had been on a mission to capture two lieutenants of Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the leader of the Somali rebels who UN forces were fighting in an attempt to re-establish the rule of law in the country. The incident would inspire Ridley Scott’s 2001 film Black Hawk Down, starring Ewan McGregor.
Four days later Huband and his American friend Stephen Smith, a correspondent for the French paper Libération, were having lunch in a restaurant when they were approached by one of Aidid’s aides. He asked whether they would like to be the first journalists to interview the captured American soldier, Mike Durant.
Smith and Huband had reason to be wary of the offer. Three months earlier, a Somali mob had killed four journalists while they were trying to report on an American attack. But Huband accepted the invitation with brio. First, he added, they would have lunch.
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“That was very English of him,” Smith recalled. After lunch, Smith and Huband got into a car. A gunman covered them in blankets then drove them to the house where Durant was being held hostage. Durant was initially suspicious of them but softened when he realised that the interview was probably a prelude to his release. “My biggest fear is that the people living around this part of town will find out that I’m here and try to kill me,” he told them.
The bravery Huband showed in Somalia was tested again the following year when he spent nearly the entire 100 days of the Rwandan genocide reporting from the country. While some foreign correspondents would become hot-headed in such a fraught setting, his fellow foreign correspondent Catherine Bond recalled that Huband was “persevering, but not cavalier”.
He was also, she said, “indignant, but in the right sort of way”. He loathed Theoneste Bagosora, one of the principal architects of the genocide, but did not let his righteous anger get in the way of asking him for a pass to travel around the country. Going behind rebel lines, he visited churches where Tutsis had been rounded up and massacred. He may have saved the lives of one Tutsi family by enlisting the help of his fellow reporters to find them some petrol with which to drive to the Burundi border. He never found out if they made it.
Feeling frustrated that his editor on The Guardian was not giving enough space to his coverage of the genocide, he resigned from the paper in 1995, remained in Rwanda as a freelance and two years later rejoined the Financial Times, a paper he had worked for previously, as Cairo correspondent.
One word that was often used to describe Huband was “intense”. He was not the kind of reporter who could forget about a story once he had filed it, and he continued to ruminate on his experiences in Rwanda for the rest of his life, spending the coronavirus lockdowns writing an epic poem called Agony about genocides through the centuries.
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The poem was the clearest distillation of what he had been trying to do his whole adult life: look past the coddled, parochial horizons of his English middle-class upbringing, to see the world through the eyes of those less fortunate than he. “He wanted to understand how people could be so ghastly to each other,” his friend Jonathan Clayton said. “It was almost like he was torturing himself.”
His experiences abroad gave him a dim view of British politics. He felt that much of what passed for British patriotism was self-satisfied, petty and inward-looking. He loathed Brexit and its political architects with a vitriol that could be tub-thumping, describing the Johnson government in one tweet as a “junta”. In the 2019 general election he stood for Labour in North East Somerset against Jacob Rees-Mogg. He lost but did manage to keep Labour in second place.
Mark Huband was born in Low Bentham in North Yorkshire, the son of David and Ann (née Greening). He grew up in the Essex town of Harlow and was educated at Burnt Mill Comprehensive School, where his father was head of English. His mother was a secretary. Huband’s urge to embed himself in more perilous environs cropped up early on: he joined a gang of working-class boys, an experience he described in his memoir Skinny White Kids (2020). He went to the University of Manchester to study history, then to University College, Cardiff, to study journalism. In 1989 he moved to Abidjan, economic capital of the Ivory Coast, to report for the FT. There he met his wife, Marceline Guidy. They had two children, Olivier, an actor, and Zara, a film student.
Although his job required that he spend long periods away from his children, he was an affectionate and attentive father, and went to see every one of Olivier’s plays. A Bob Dylan fan, on a road trip around America he took his family to Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan’s home town. The Dylan museum there was shut but Huband successfully pleaded with its owners to open it.
When Liberia’s civil war broke out he was the first journalist behind rebel lines, although that had not been his intention. While all the other journalists had gone one way to look for Charles Taylor’s rebel forces, he had gone the other to investigate an iron ore project, only to be captured by them. This was typical of Huband. He would often break from the pack to pursue stories he felt his colleagues had missed — even if that sometimes meant missing the stories everyone else was chasing.
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A fastidious man, when Stephen Smith told him that the French pronunciation of his answer machine message was a bit off, he listened to Smith’s own, copying it until he had it exactly right.
Having written a book about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, Warriors of the Prophet, after 9/11 he went on to become the FT’s security correspondent, reporting on the machinations of al-Qaeda and following the fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He left the paper in 2005 and went to work for the business intelligence firm Hakluyt & Company, then co-founded his own, Livingstone & Company, through which he wrote reports on the politics of unstable regions for firms looking to invest in them.
“My impression,” said Smith, “was that he would have liked to live in a medieval tower in France and live on his writing. I think he longed for a more contemplative life.” He did indeed have a house in France, in the Pyrenees, and another in the Cotswolds where he tended a rose garden.
Last summer he set off on his own to walk 400 miles along the Pyrenees. He completed 180 miles, and a further 220 this summer. Sleeping for three weeks in a small tent, he described the expedition as “the ultimate social-distancing experience.”
Although the subject of his poetry might suggest otherwise, he was not a dour man, nor were all his passions deeply serious: in his mid-forties he formed a rock band called the Osama Sisters. None of its members were professional musicians, but that didn’t stop them arranging a European tour in 2008 that ended in a sellout gig in Italy.
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Mark Huband, journalist, was born on August 30, 1963. He died after complications during an operation on November 6, 2021, aged 58