He reported from over 80 countries and 14 wars between 1975 and 2012. With his distinctive voice, he always told ORF viewers the often sad truth. After his retirement, the award-winning journalist did not remain idle and wrote several more books. On Wednesday (July 10) he celebrates his 75th birthday.
“I always saw myself as a peace reporter, I always cared regarding people,” he said when he retired in 2012. As an objective observer, he always hated war. He took the side of the truth and the innocent civilian population. In the course of his work, he had many extreme experiences and fear was a constant companion and “vital defense mechanism.” “I see my visible scars in the mirror, but I hide the invisible ones from myself. That is the price you pay for telling cruel stories. Our business is death,” Orter said in 2014 at the presentation of his book “I don’t know why I’m still alive.”
“There I saw what a person can be capable of”
The reporter said his worst mission was during the Balkan wars in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. “Because they took place right on our doorstep, because it was personally affected, because there were families that I knew who died and that I lost. There I saw what a person can be capable of,” said Orter, who particularly thanked the “courageous cameramen” who accompanied him on his research. “Without them, none of this would have been possible.”
Orter repeatedly found himself in dangerous situations. In 1991, he had to be withdrawn from the civil war zone at short notice following the Yugoslavian Major General Milan Aksentijevic attacked and threatened Orter by name at a press conference, the only Western journalist to do so. A dramatic experience occurred in 1997 during the Albanian civil war. While filming, Orter and his team were attacked by masked bandits, their car, cameras and luggage were stolen, and the reporters were stripped “down to their underwear”. On the subsequent march towards Tirana, the group was attacked once more.
ORF Eastern Europe editorial team
At this point, Orter, born on July 10, 1949 in Sankt Georgen im Lavanttal, was already an experienced reporter. After various studies – including history and Slavic studies – the historian with a doctorate started working for ORF in 1975. Orter initially worked for shortwave and then joined the newly founded ORF Eastern Europe editorial team. There, Paul Lendvai and Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi were his “teachers”. Poland, Romania and other countries of the Eastern European transition around 1989 were among Orter’s stations. With the “war on terror”, crisis areas in Central Asia and the Near and Middle East were added. He sometimes spent up to eight months a year in war zones, always with plenty of books to read in his luggage.
His last foreign assignment was in Syria in 2012. After the death of his wife, some of his strength “broke away”. He now wanted to use his retirement to “find myself a little,” he explained at the time, but in 2013 he went back to the Syrian civil war as an independent reporter because he “wanted to know it once more”. He quickly realized, however, that the work of a crisis reporter had changed: speed and constant presence, preferably in multimedia form, were in demand. Young colleagues were being exploited as cheap labor.
Many awards
The Carinthian native has received numerous awards for his work. He has won the Karl Renner Journalism Prize, the Austrian Red Cross Prize, a Romy, the OSCE Prize for Journalism and Democracy, the Concordia Prize for Human Rights and the Axel Corti Prize. In 2012, he was awarded a lifetime achievement prize by the industry magazine “Austria’s Journalist:in”. Laudator Paul Lendvai paid tribute to him for his courage and called him a kind of “one-man CNN”.
Orter poured his expertise and experiences into several books such as “Crazy World. Eyewitness to World Politics” (2005), “Ascension to Heaven. Trips to Hell” (2008) and “I Don’t Know Why I’m Still Alive” (2014). His most recent work, “The Bird Seller of Kabul,” was published in 2017. In it, he paints a multifaceted picture of the battered country of Afghanistan, focusing on Kabul’s Bird Street, Ka Faroshi, as an island of peace.
Even though things have been a little quieter for Orter in recent years, it is hard to imagine that he will ever completely retire as a journalist. After all, “A journalist’s life only ends with the last sigh,” he once said.
