In his office at the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Jerusalem, Chris Gunness is thousands of miles away from San Fernando, south Trinidad, where he was born at the General Hospital in 1959. He’s also a world away from the Sunday Punch offices where he began his career at 18. But even though he left Trinidad to be educated in England at nine, he’s happily finishing off a lunch of chicken stew and sweet potato at his desk when he receives my call on a busy Monday afternoon.
Gunness has been the UNRWA director for Advocacy and Communications and spokesman for Palestinian Refugees for almost a decade. Before that he spent two decades at the BBC as a reporter, correspondent and producer on flagship radio stations and television programmes like the World Service and Newsnight. Most recently his name and image went viral when he broke down in tears on camera after an interview with Al-Jazeera in the midst of the brutal 51-day conflict in Gaza in July. The video was seen all over the world. “It was the day the Israelis hit our school in Jabaliya and 20 people were killed, and I was completely and utterly churned up about it,” he says.
The Israeli army had told people to leave their homes, so men, women and children came to the schools to shelter, believing they would be safe havens from shelling and missiles, but they weren’t. “After the interview was over I broke down and the camera just kept rolling,” says Gunness. “I didn’t know it was rolling. “They then sent the pictures back without asking me and it was broadcast every hour at the top of the hour for goodness knows how long. It went viral on the Internet and I got literally thousands of e-mails from all around the world, including people in Ban Ki-Moon’s office, saying that was the most eloquent thing anyone’s ever said about conflict.”
On the day of our interview, he has just come back from Ramallah—a city in the West Bank, north of Jerusalem—where he was appearing on a BBC news panel programme. Polishing off his lunch, he explains how getting around in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories involves constant stops and searches at military checkpoints, manned by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers. He’s only about half an hour late in the end. “Some days are worse than others and it takes ages to get anywhere,” he explains.
Who made the stewed chicken, then? “I did!” He responds defiantly, “I’m a Trini!” You can take the boy out of Trinidad, but some things can never be unlearnt. With an East Indian father and a British mother who had migrated from Basingstoke to what was still the British West Indies, Gunness was born into what he describes as a classic Trinidad Indian family, with “a grandma (we all called her Ma) who was a classic Indian matriarch, who heroically held it all together and pulled herself and her family out of poverty—from colonial enslavement to middle-class prosperity in a generation.”
His great-grandparents arrived in Trinidad as indentured labourers. Within two generations they had produced an island scholar in his father, Robert Gunness, and within three generations Chris had won a scholarship at Oxford, from where he launched his prominent international career.
His father, a doctor, had been pushed hard and achieved academic and professional success, returning to T&T with a British wife he had met at university. Chris was born into a life of prosperity, three years before independence. “I was acutely aware that my childhood was one of privilege—driver, cook, maids, gardener, being driven to school, going down the islands—by contrast to much of what I saw around me,” says Gunness. But he is quick to explain that this hard-won privilege was not taken for granted and his father was “a man of indefatigable, true social conscience,” who co-founded and funded the Audrey Jeffers School for the Deaf in Gopaul Lands, Marabella, opened in 1967. He also helped establish the T&T Society for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled and helped to build the Canaan Presbyterian Church in Duncan Village. He used his position as senior doctor at Tesoro to help the poor, and wanted to repay the faith his family had put in him in investing their scarce resources in his education. “My father is where my sense of justice and working for oppressed people comes from,” Gunness says. “and my T&T passport is my proudest possession.”
He remembers as a child going into impoverished rural communities in deep south while his father handed out free pharmaceuticals and treated people. There was tragedy for the family too. “Trinidad was a violent place, and my father’s brother and his son were both murdered.” He speaks highly and fondly of his cousins in Trinidad, though he admits, with some shame, that he has not visited in decades. “They’re pretty amazing folks in various ways, really creative, and they’ve done interesting things with their lives. My uncle George was a brilliant food technician and a former opposition senator, and his children are all very talented. My aunt Myrtle was a great organist and a dedicated, devoted musician. Another uncle, Roy, was a leading light in the Scouts.”
His cousin Kitty, a teacher, he describes as a Mother Goose figure who keeps him in the loop with what’s happening in Trinidad.
Gunness first left aged nine, after attending Vistabella Private School, close to the family home in Cross Crossing. He was sent to boarding school in England, then went on to study philosophy and theology at New College, Oxford, as a choral scholar. He deferred Oxford for a year and returned to Trinidad when his father died as he was finishing school in 1977. He came home to help his mother pack up and return to Britain, and it was during that year that his passion for journalism took root. “I worked at the Sunday Punch as a reporter under Trevor ‘Burnt-Boots’ Smith,” he explains. “I defy anyone to mock. If you want to get a sense of the society you’re in, work for a tabloid newspaper. In its day it served a purpose, exposing dishonesty, corruption and hypocrisy amongst the ruling classes. “That said, it was at the Sunday Punch that I first heard the expression, ‘That’s too good a story to check’!”
At Oxford he went on tour with the choir and edited a satirical magazine called Passing Wind before joining the BBC as a trainee in 1982. “I rose through the ranks of producer, reporter, foreign correspondent and news anchor, but, for me, news was about oppressed people in hot countries. So I found the BBC’s navel-gazing, neo-colonial, Eurocentric agenda stifling.” In 1988 he covered the Burmese uprising in Rangoon. In 1991 he was the UN correspondent in New York just before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. There he met Kofi Annan (later UN Secretary General, but then in charge of administration and peacekeeping) and in 1994 he took a year out to work for the UN in the former Yugoslavia.
He finally left the BBC in 2005 and admits to a kind of love/hate relationship with it. “I had a good innings at the Beeb and won my share of journalism awards. But ultimately I found it unsatisfying…Little surprise that I worked on five BBC programmes that were axed by the men in grey suits,” he says. “I always say the two happiest days of my life were the day I joined the BBC and the day I left. The BBC is like a member of my family: I’m allowed to bitch about them, but no one else is.” He rejoined the UN in 2005, moving to the Middle East to work for UNWRA, whose remit is human development work and emergency interventions.
In some ways, being a Trini has helped in his career, even if subconsciously. “I love the fact that whereas so many people in the UN come from Britain or America or the Permanent Five (members of the UN Security Council), I was born in a small island state. Admittedly I left, but a lot of people leave Trinidad, because that’s what happens. It remains a place with a huge draw for me.” Palestine’s refugees are now his life work. “My passion has perhaps marked me out from the usual image of the UN bureaucrat. I did cry on camera. I spoke out and cracked. People were at last convinced that the outrage and indignation of the UN against these injustices was visceral and genuine. I make no apologies for my humanity.”
Five hundred children were killed in the latest conflict—an average of ten a day. That horrifies Gunness and he is relentless in his determination to improve the conditions and ease the pressures on children in Gaza, where even basic human rights like going to school are a battle frequently lost because so many schools are damaged or destroyed. In an article he wrote for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last week, Gunness made an impassioned plea for the removal of the blockade on Gaza which impedes UNWRA from doing its job. “UNWRA has a plan to rebuild Gaza in two years. We need to get in 900 trucks a day. We can do it, but we need simple things like the Karni Crossing to be reopened. They built a 30-lane crossing for traffic in both directions, but it was closed.”
Describing the blockade, Gunness says, “Imagine a place which has seven times the (daytime) population of Port-of-Spain (and its environs). That’s 1.8 million people in a strip 40 km long.”
That’s equivalent to the distance from Chaguaramas to Arima containing the entire population of T&T plus another half a million people crammed in. “And then imagine you built a fence around it and you had one crossing for human beings and another crossing for goods. “Then imagine you had an army patrolling the perimeter fence controlling everything that goes in and out, including exports, which have trickled to a virtual minimum, and imports, which are a few hundred trucks a day—sometimes cement, sometimes food.” Jerusalem is caught in an eternal struggle with the violence around it. He describes it as: “A clearly divided city, with the west side being privileged and the east with garbage in the streets and the settlements, which mean you feel the sense of hatred quite palpably, especially on Fridays when the Palestinians go to the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Jews go off to the Wailing Wall to pray.”
He doesn’t socialise a lot, he says, adding that he mostly hangs out with and talks to “internationalist, leftward-leaning, campaigning journalists.” But even in a divided city he’s found contentment.
“I’m very happy in my private life. I live with my partner very happily. We have no children, but being an uncle is the best occupation in the world. I run every day. I love music, particularly baroque opera. I play the violin—my therapy. And my partner and I are making a film about the Burmese 88 revolution.”
FACT BOX
Gaza under siege:
In the July 2014 conflict:
• 65 UNRWA schools were hit directly or indirectly.
• 60,000 houses were damaged of which 20,000 are uninhabitable (71,000 homes already needed repair or rebuilding before the latest conflict.)
• The majority of Gaza’s 110,000 homeless people are children.
• Almost every child in Gaza has a sibling, parent, family member or friend who was killed, injured or maimed for life.
• Out of 3,000 children wounded, 1,000 will have physical disabilities for life.
• Every child over six in Gaza has lived through three such wars.