Since 2013, Robin Ramaekers has been the war journalist who appears all over the world for VTMNieuws and HLN on the front lines that control the news. His career as a journalist began - there is no such thing as a coincidence - in the week of September 11, 2001 at the VRT news service. The attacks on the Twin Towers in New York are the beginning of an era, for the world but also for Ramaekers as a starting journalist. Years later, he himself travels to all the places where the shifting power relations, like abrasive tectonic plates, cause friction and violence. In his new book "Front", Ramaekers looks back on the more than twenty years in which he moved from one trouble spot to another. All the major conflicts that dominate the world today are discussed: the war(s) in Ukraine and Gaza, the rise and fall of IS in Syria and Iraq, the radicalization of our own Belgian Muslim youth, the attacks in Brussels, the fiasco of twenty years of Western military intervention in Afghanistan, ... This is just a selection of what has dominated the news, and thus our hearts and minds, in the more than twenty years since 9/11. The common thread in Ramaekers' work is invariably the story of the "little" people behind the major conflicts and upheavals. In his book he also writes candidly about his own search for meaning and nonsense, the challenges inherent in his profession and the successes and failures that come with it.
