Chris McGreal was formerly based in Africa and the Middle East for The Guardian. McGreal covered conflicts across Africa during the 1990s, including Angola, Liberia, Somalia, Rwanda and Zaire/Congo. He was based in Jerusalem during the second intifada, and later reported from the Egyptian and Libyan revolutions. In the 1980s, McGreal reported from Central America for the BBC and The Independent, covering the conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, the US invasion of Panama and the drug cartels in Colombia. McGreal has won a number of awards for his reporting including Amnesty International UK print reporter of the year for coverage of the Rwanda genocide, the James Cameron prize for reporting from Africa and the Martha Gellhorn award for writing from Gaza that “penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth”. McGreal was formerly a merchant seaman.
