By IANS
London : Edward Behr, the noted foreign correspondent who covered many conflicts from India to Vietnam and served as an intelligence officer in colonial India’s Garhwal Regiment, has died at the age of 81.
He was Newsweek magazine’s bureau chief in Delhi, Paris and Hong Kong before becoming the first editor of the international edition for Europe.
For nearly a half century, Behr reported on almost every conflict worth covering for American news magazines, notably Time and Newsweek. He also worked on acclaimed television documentaries for the BBC and French television.
A small, round, bespectacled man, Behr was a member of the so-called Maghreb Circus, a talented group of mainly French correspondents constantly on the move, following the latest developments in Algiers, Rabat and Tunis, according to his obituary in The Guardian.
“Anyone here been raped and speak English?” was the war reporter’s irreverent but eminently practical question, and became the title of his book. The question was shouted out to hundreds of just rescued European survivors of a siege at Stanleyville in eastern Congo in November 1964 as they disembarked from US Air Force C-130s landing.
Behr was born in Paris to a Russian-Jewish family and studied at the prestigious lycee Jeanson-de-Sailly. When German troops occupied Paris, the family was denounced by their concierge. They escaped to London where he was educated at St Paul’s school.
Called up for military service in 1944, Behr added Urdu to his fluent English, French and German, and served as an intelligence officer with the Indian army’s Garhwal Regiment, eventually rising to major.
In 1945 he was assigned to a British force overseeing the capitulation of Japanese occupation troops, first in Indonesia, then in Indochina, at the end of the second world war. He loved recounting how he liberated one Indonesian island, replacing the Japanese occupation yen with Monopoly money.
The obituary said: “Unlike many colleagues who became inured to the violence, Behr never forgot his horror in firing – and ordering his men to fire – on both Muslims and Hindus during the violent partition of British India in 1947”.
Demobilised and back in England, he read history at Magdalene College, Cambridge. His first steps in journalism were with Reuters in London, then in Paris under the notoriously overbearing bureau chief Harold King, who drove many a young correspondent to despair.
In 1957 he joined Time, covering the Algerian war and among other conflicts the border clash in 1962 between India and China. He later did a brief stint with the Saturday Evening Post, America’s oldest magazine, and in 1965 joined Newsweek, where he remained for 20 years.
The obituary said that in one of his favourite scoops, Behr inveigled his way into an official French delegation in Beijing which met Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s.