Steven Vincent

Disambiguation: 'Stephen Vincent' redirects here. For the fictional character with this spelling see Stephen Vincent Strange.

Steven Charles Vincent (December 31, 1955 – August 2, 2005) was an American author and journalist. In 2005 he was working as a freelance journalist in Basra, Iraq, reporting for the The Christian Science Monitor, National Review, Mother Jones, Reason, Front Page and American Enterprise, among other publications, when he was abducted and murdered in southern Iraq after investigating corruption by Shia militias.

Early life

Vincent was born in Washington, DC and his family would soon move to northern California. He grew up in Palo Alto and later Sunnyvale. He graduated from Homestead High School in 1974, went to the University of California at Santa Barbara, then to Berkeley, from which he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English and Philosophy. He moved to New York in 1980 to pursue a writing career, supporting himself by taking a series of jobs in the restaurant industry, driving a cab and doing temp work.

Writing career

His first professional experience came when he was offered the editorship of a local newspaper, the East Villager. From 1984 to 1991 he wrote, edited, laid out and oversaw the publication of each month's edition; during his tenure he also became deeply involved in local issues, and successfully used the paper as a forum to influence neighborhood politics. In the late 1980s he began his career as a writer of fiction and essays, being published in various literary magazines and booklets. He self-published two issues of a poetry magazine, The Plowman. In 1990 he was hired by Art+Auction magazine, where he quickly became the senior writer, specializing in investigative stories of art theft, fraud, counterfeiting and malfeasance. After an abortive six-month stint at The Wall Street Journal, he returned to Art+Auction.

After watching watching United Flight 175 crash into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent collapse of the Twin Towers, Vincent gave up his art critic job to become a freelance writer about what he considered more timely and pressing issues. In 2003, after learning that his friend, the artist Steve Mumford, had gone to Baghdad following the start of the Iraq War, Vincent went as well, first in 2003, then again in 2004, operating freely as a journalist, traveling through the country, interviewing the local populace, observing the reality of life on the ground. In 2004, he would publish In the Red Zone: A Journey Into the Soul of Iraq, as well as a blog, about his travels.

Vincent returned to Iraq in 2005, this time to the south. He based himself in Basra, and spent three months there, covering the reconstruction of the marshlands that had been drained by Saddam Hussein, and investigating reports of growing Iranian movement over the border, drug dealing to support local insurgencies, and increasing corruption and violence in the local police force.

Death

On August 2 2005 he and his translator, Nouriya Itais Wadi, were kidnapped off the street in Basra by men in police uniforms driving a white police truck. They were bound, gagged, taken to an undisclosed location where for five hours they were beaten and interrogated, then taken to the outskirts of town and shot. They were found by legitimate Iraqi policemen but Vincent was dead, shot in the back at close range. Wadi survived. It is generally accepted that Vincent was executed because of his criticism of religious extremism in that country, expressed three days before his murder in "Switched Off in Basra", a July 31 op-ed essay for The New York Times, in which he noted the increasing infiltration of the Basra police force by Islamic extremists loyal to Muqtada al Sadr.

Vincent is buried in Brooklyn's historic Green-Wood cemetery; his widow Lisa Ramaci-Vincent still lives in Manhattan. In 2007, after 18 months of effort, she was successful in bringing Vincent's translator Nouriya to safety in New York.

In November 2006, Vincent was posthumously awarded the Kurt Schork Award for International Journalism for his article uncovering police death squads, which the press release called, "...‘the most sensitive story possible.’"

References

• Steven Vincent, In the Red Zone: A Journey Into the Soul of Iraq (Spence Publishing, 2004) ISBN 1-890626-57-0
• Steven Vincent, "Switched Off in Basra", The New York Times, July 31 2005.

External links

• BBC – US journalist shot dead in Iraq
• National Review – Freedom’s Reporter
• New York Times – American Journalist Is Shot to Death in Iraq (subscription required)
• Steven Vincent, RIP
• Epic-USA.org – Who Killed Steven Vincent?
• radioopensource.org – Audio interview with Lisa Ramaci-Vincent, Steven Vincent's wife
• CPJ– Journalists Killed in Iraq
• Murdoc Online - "It's called courage" Comments from Vincent's wife regarding remarks by Juan Cole