Conny Mus was born in the Dutch capital of
Amsterdam. After elementary school, he worked at an import/export company. At the age of 17, he traveled for the firm through countries like the former
Yugoslavia and
Romania. He wrote down all his experiences and sent them to regional newspapers in the
Randstad. In 1981 he moved to
Jerusalem to start a company to import houseplants from the Netherlands. The company never got off the ground, but his stories became quite popular. He worked as a freelance journalist for Dutch television broadcast organisation
EO, Flemish broadcast organisation
BRTN, and Dutch newspaper
Nederlands Dagblad. In 1989 he became
correspondent for
RTL Nieuws on the Dutch commercial network station
RTL Véronique (later
RTL 4), stationed in
Israel. For the news program, he made more than 1,300 reports. Mus mainly covered stories from the
Middle East, including
Palestine,
Iraq,
Jordan, and
Egypt, but also from such countries as
Cambodia,
Cyprus,
Kosovo, and
South Africa. He also visited war zones for his reports, including the
Gulf War, the
Iraq War, and the
2006 War in Lebanon. In the Lebanon war, he escaped death three times. He also made reports for the news program
Het Nieuws on the Flemish commercial station
vtm and for international news stations including the
BBC and
CNN. In 1991, Mus was involved in the production of the song
Shalom from Holland (written by
Simon Hammelburg and Ron Klipstein) as a token of solidarity to the Israeli people, threatened by missiles from Iraq, during the first Gulf War. Conny Mus died on 20 August 2010 of a
cardiac arrest. At the time of death, he was visiting the Dutch city of
Utrecht for a holiday. ==References==