Remembering my fallen colleagues
On November 11, 2001, I survived an ambush that killed three of my colleagues. Johanne Sutton, Pierre Billaud and Volker Handloik were killed when the group of Northern Alliance soldiers we were traveling with was ambushed by Taliban fighters on a barren plateau near Dasht-e-Qala in Takhar Province, in northeastern Afghanistan. Jo, Pierre and Volker were the first journalists to be killed in that war. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, since September 2001 13 foreign journalists and six Afghan reporters have been killed in Afghanistan. This is the dispatch I filed to the Montreal Gazette on the following day, on November 12 (on my birthday) 2001. CHAGHATAY, Afghanistan – Johanne’s bullet-riddled body lay…
Sealskins on ice
In February 2010, my colleagues and I traveled to the Canadian Arctic to document the impact of the European Union ban on seal products on the lives of Canadian Inuit. Seals are tremendously important for the Inuit way of life. Their meat is the staple diet for the Inuit, and their skins are used to make traditional clothing and to earn some much-needed cash.
Winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan
In 2005, I returned to Afghanistan as a freelance correspondent embedded with U.S. and Canadian troops and as an independent reporter. I spent time with U.S. soldiers in Eastern Afghanistan, along the border with Pakistan, as well as Canadian soldiers then stationed in Kabul.
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I’m a Webby Award Honoree
My short documentary Seal Ban: Inuit Impact has been named Official Honoree in the News & Politics: Individual Episode category of the 15th Annual Webby Awards.
About the author: Levon Sevunts
Levon Sevunts is a journalist, writer, producer and translator. Levon lives in Montreal, Canada and covers international politics, business and culture in the Arctic, Africa, Central Asia and the former Soviet Union. Read his reports from the frontlines of Afghanistan in The National Post and The Montreal Gazette, from refugee camps in Chad and in rebel-held Darfur in The Toronto Star and The Washington Times.
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Newspaper and Online Articles Portfolio
Quebec Inuit brace for higher food prices
Montreal – Residents of Quebec’s northernmost communities are bracing for a steep increase in their grocery bill as a new federal food subsidy program kicks in on April 1. Gerard Duhaime, a sociologist and the head of Canada Research Chair on Comparative Aboriginal Condition at University of Laval in Quebec City, said the expected price increase in Nunavik and other Arctic regions of Canada is no April Fool’s joke. “We’re expecting about 60 per cent increase in consumer prices,” Duhaime said. “And this is considering that prices in Nunavik are already 60 per cent higher than in southern Quebec.”
Sealskins on ice: a by-product that was once a form of income for the Inuit now lies scattered as waste on the frozen tundra
CLYDE RIVER – Joelie Sanguya raised his axe, paused for a moment, then with a swift blow swung it at the frozen seal carcass. Behind him a chorus of hungry sled dogs filled the arctic air with a cacophony of excited howling and barking in anticipation of a well-deserved dinner. Sanguya, an Inuit hunter, artist, filmmaker and an expert musher, continued to work his axe on the frozen carcass, removing the head. Then, bracing the seal body with a hook, he used a butcher’s knife to cut through the skin and into the blubber. He was methodical, cutting chunks that looked like oversized cubes, and tossing them aside. “Don’t step in that. It’ll stick to…
Canadians return minority Conservative government to power
Montreal – Prime Minister Stephen Harper came within a stone’s throw of a majority government Tuesday as Canadians re-elected a minority Conservative government. Early returns showed Conservatives elected or leading in 143 ridings, which would be a gain of 16 seats. The opposition Liberals were elected or leading in 75 ridings. The separatist Bloc Quebecois, which runs candidates only in the French-speaking province of Quebec, was leading in 49 ridings, and the socialist New Democratic Party was leading in 38 ridings. The Green Party, which got 6.4 per cent of the popular vote, once again failed to elect a single parliamentarian in Canada’s first-past-the-post system, in which single winners are elected in each constituency. There…
Haunting images of pain and loss; Canadian Reporter-Photographer Paul Watson has written a breathtakingly compelling and candid account of his experiences as a foreign correspondent
Montreal Gazette Saturday, August 18, 2007 LEVON SEVUNTS There are moments in every reporter’s life when a story brings you to a moral conundrum. It can be something as simple as making that dreaded call to a grieving mother to get a quote about her dead child, or shoving a microphone into the face of a man who has just lost everything in a house fire. But sometimes, the circumstances are so extreme, so outside the norm, that nothing in your previous life can prepare you for what you’re about to do. Surrounded by an angry mob, Canadian foreign correspondent Paul Watson, then working for the Toronto Star, had only a split second to decide…
Two deaths, two very different cases
Two deaths, two very different cases; A Russian diary, by murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya, is a ringing indictment of the course charted by president Vladimir Putin; death of a dissident, which reads like a spy thriller, looks at the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko Montreal Gazette Saturday, August 11, 2007 LEVON SEVUNTS A RUSSIAN DIARY By Anna Politkovskaya Harvill Secker, 323 pages, $45.95 DEATH OF A DISSIDENT: THE POISONING OF ALEXANDER LITVINENKO AND THE RETURN OF THE KGB By Alex Goldfarb with Marina Litvinenko Free Press, 369 pages, $34 What do a rogue Russian spy, poisoned by a rare radioactive substance in a London sushi shop, and a muckraking journalist, gunned down in the elevator of…
Drama and 'democracy'; Mark MacKinnon's incisive look at Post-soviet politics
Montreal Gazette Saturday, June 23, 2007 LEVON SEVUNTS The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet Union Mark MacKinnon Random House Canada, 313 pages, $34.95 If you’ve never read a book about the politics in the former Soviet Union, make an exception for this one. And if you’re interested in post-Soviet politics, then Mark MacKinnon’s The New Cold War is a must. It’s a real-life political drama, a non-fiction page-turner that will keep you up at night and provoke some very big questions about Western policy vis-a-vis Russia and its former satellites. The New Cold War features a vast array of characters, from young and idealistic student leaders in…
Witness to suffering; A foreign correspondent writes home
Montreal Gazette Saturday, May 19, 2007 LEVON SEVUNTS ECHOES OF VIOLENCE: LETTERS FROM A WAR REPORTER By Carolin Emcke Princeton University Press, 340 pages, $29.50 – – – What did you really see? What do you really think? Friends ask me these questions every time I come back from some faraway assignment. They want to know what I – the person they know, not the supposedly unbiased reporter I try to be in the field – have witnessed and felt. These questions seem straightforward enough, but answering them is never easy, not least because I’m often not sure myself. Then there is the challenge of describing something that most people in the West, especially the…
Afghanistan: A long-term project; Author Peter Pigott explains why Canadian soldiers have been sent to Afghanistan, and provides a multi-faceted account of what they are doing there
Montreal Gazette Saturday, March 31, 2007 LEVON SEVUNTS CANADA IN AFGHANISTAN: THE WAR SO FAR By Peter Pigott Dundurn Press, 240 pages, $35 It’s a rare newscast or newspaper edition in Canada that doesn’t have a story from Afghanistan these days. Yet almost five years after Canada sent its soldiers there, many Canadians remain surprisingly ignorant about the history of that country and the reasons for Canada’s involvement. That ignorance also permeates the upper echelons of Canadian politics, academia, media and government agencies. Peter Pigott’s Canada in Afghanistan: The War So Far is an attempt to fill that huge void of knowledge. And it’s a telling sign in itself that explaining the war in Afghanistan…