Melissa Block is host of National Public Radio’s (NPR) All Things Considered. She has worked for NPR since 1985 and held various positions including director, producer, editor, and reporter. In addition to covering such notable domestic stories as the 2000 US presidential election and the World Trade Center attacks, she has also done pieces focusing on aspects of New York City life, including trips through Manhattan, rides on the subway, and strike calls in major league baseball. Ms. Block has also reported on international events such as the crash of TWA flight 800, UN peacekeeping in Angola, and the conflict in Kosovo. Her work on rape as a weapon of war won NPR’s Overseas Press Club Award.

Harvard International Review: There was a lot of media attention given to the conflict in Kosovo, some of which focused on military strategy, some on leaders and prominent figures in the Balkans, and some on human interest stories in the region. What was your role in Kosovo?

I was part of an NPR team that was sent to Macedonia in June 1999. The original story assignment was to cover the refugee crisis—there were hundreds of thousands of refugees who had fled from Kosovo into Macedonia earlier that spring and later that winter. They had been there for months, and reporters were being cycled in and out to cover the story.

As luck would have it, almost immediately after I arrived, the Serbian parliament signed a peace agreement, and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic agreed to it. What had been a refugee story was turning into something very different. The agreement meant that eventually the bombing campaign would end, troops would go in, and the refugees would be returning home. The refugees in the camps were warned not to go home because it was not yet safe, but they began packing their tents on their own. There was a massive exodus back into Kosovo. My stories started in the camps talking to refugees about their reaction to this peace agreement and listening to stories about the abuse that they suffered at the hands of Serbian police and soldiers. The stories became Kosovo stories. I followed a young man and his uncle to their village as they surveyed what was left of their home and were reunited with family members. I ultimately went to Pristina, Kosovo, and spent the rest of my stay doing stories about the regeneration of the capital and the use of rape as a devastating weapon of war.

How well do you feel the situation in Kosovo was reported by the US media? Was there a disconnect between the situation on the ground and how it was perceived in the United States?

Obviously there was far less reporting before the troops went in; there was a bit of a vacuum during the whole crisis inside the country. There were some reporters who stayed at the onset of the conflict, but many who did not. I think for some readers there was a lack of information until refugees started pouring out and telling their stories, and then the stories were coming from the camps. I think those stories were reported extremely well, and a lot was learned in a short amount of time. Once NATO forces entered the country and reporters went with them, much more information was gleaned. There was a huge opening up, and the full extent of what had happened there became widely known.

Was there any observable agenda behind the way stories were reported in Kosovo, or was there any particular goal on the part of the media?

This was a fairly one-sided conflict. The aggression was by Serbs predominantly, directed at ethnic Albanians, so that fact was reported accurately. I do not think it reflects a bias—it reflects an accurate understanding of what was happening on the ground. It was not a conventional war; this was a tremendous aggression by one party against a minority within Yugoslavia. That, I think, was accurately reported.

Were there any particular stories from the conflict that made a strong impression on you?

The story about rape as a weapon of war was something that I spent a lot of time reporting, and it was a very difficult story to get people to talk about. Rape there, as in most parts of the world, carries a tremendous stigma, perhaps more than in many other places. Most people did not want to admit that it had happened, that girls in their family and village had been raped. But it became clear by talking and talking and talking to people that it had happened. In talking to some of the survivors of those attacks, it was clear how difficult it would be for them to live their lives in that society. Because they were so stigmatized and ostracized by what had happened to them and because the shame of rape is so extreme in that culture, it was a very painful story to report.

I also want to mention the reporting trip that I did in Angola, which focused on UN peacekeeping and its failure in that country, which has endured decades of civil war. There was one story that we recorded about orphan boys who were learning to read and write through an Irish non-governmental organization. Their classroom was an abandoned parking lot. They were meeting at night, hunkered down under rusted-out shanties of cars with the most rudimentary of supplies. They would come every night and try to learn to read and write, and when we asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up, they had the same answers that you might get if you went to a suburban high school in Massachusetts. The sight of them, in pitch black, struggling with their ABC’s was incredibly poignant.

When there is such a disparity between what goes on in the United States and what goes on in some of the regions you covered, is there a difficult transition when you return home?

There is. When you are exposed to dire poverty and extremely tragic events in other parts of the world—or anywhere for that matter—and you come home to your comfortable life, the problems that you think you have pale by comparison. It is an adjustment, and it takes time. Certainly it helps to talk about what you have seen, and the reporting helps too. You are conveying information that you hope moves people and that maybe will change things in the end.