The epitome of the intrepid foreign correspondent, Sue Lloyd-Roberts, who has died aged 64, reported on human rights abuses in some of the most forbidden and brutal parts of the world. Determined and courageous, poised and practical, she travelled alone and often undercover — but always with a camcorder.
Working largely for the BBC, she reported on tyrannous regimes from North Korea to Zimbabwe and, finally, Syria, where she was the first western video journalist into Homs. She had a talent for slipping undetected across borders. “I once jokingly thought about writing the Good Jail Guide to Eastern Europe,” she wrote in a piece for The Sunday Times this year.
Armed only with a small rucksack, she was often mistaken for a tourist while working on assignment. A mother of two who lived in north London, she said: “I’m quite happy to flirt, burst into tears and bring out photographs of my children to get out of tricky situations because I often find that it works.”
For an interview in 1998 with Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader in Burma who had then been held under house arrest for more than a decade, Lloyd-Roberts used her new married name to sneak into the country. She threw off her official minders by leaving her hotel at 5am dressed as a servant.
In 2011, she arrived on the border of Syria in a flowery skirt, declaring that she wanted to research the Byzantine empire. Or, as she later disclosed in an interview, she pretended “to be this sort of daffy 60-year-old university don who had no idea there was a war going on”. She was let in. “Who would take notice of an old woman? You become a Miss Marple figure.”
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In dangerous situations, when most people “scream or pray”, she said that she was programmed to pick up her camera: “When I’ve had to film piles of bodies, I’ve only been able to do so by concentrating on the best shot.”
A few months before her death, she returned to report on Yazidi girls who had been held prisoner by Isis. “Romanian orphanages, Kurdish protests, Jordanian honour killings,” said her colleague Lyse Doucet. “Her CV is a catalogue of the human rights abuses of our time.”
— The Times