The first session of BKB took place in Elahuizen (Friesland) this Friday and Saturday. To get to know each other, friday night was all about talking with each other and giving an interview to Lennart Booij in front of everyone, so everyone could get an impression of you.

The first thing we did on Saturday, was discussing with Bas Heine, Bas Jacobs and Abeltje Hoogenkamp about our generation and the state of our society nowadays It was very interesting to philosophy with them about the current mentality of our generation, our goals in life and the certainties and uncertainties we know or we look for as a generation.

But the far most fascinating part of the introduction was the discussion with Yoeri Boom. He is a conflict journalist for ‘het Algemeen Dagblad’ and ‘De Groene Amsterdammer’ and currently he is dealing with the situation in Uruzgan, Afghanistan. He left there 10 days ago, after having been there in company of soldiers to give an impression of their situation.

He told he didn’t feel satisfied with reporting from Afghanistan by engaging with soldiers, because you don’t get in touch with normal people and you see the situation in Uruzgan only from the perspective of the soldiers, what causes you to be too subjective. However, other ways of journalism are not possible, because it is simply too dangerous.

Another aspect he mentioned, was the way the government is dealing with journalists. Everything that is written and being sent to the newspapers should first be checked by the government, to see if any ’secret’ information is provided. I don’t think this is fair to our society. In my opinion, one of the responsibilities of our government is to let their actions being justified and this way it is made very difficult.

As he is saying at the end of pieces he writes “This article is checked by Defense on operational information. The data could not be presented to independent or Afghanian informers.”

This journalistic environment is really inspiring.

(Yoeri will go back to back to Uruzgan to give our country more impressions and to get more information for his upcoming book. If you want to know more, please click here.)