The Santa Fe New Mexican (New Mexico)
September 16, 2005 Friday
A BATTLE-TESTED PEN
by SOLEDAD SANTIAGO
In more than 30 years of covering the Middle East, journalist Robert
Fisk has become one of Britain’s most respected and vilified
journalists. His detractors call him an apologist for terrorists. His
admirers, including American journalist Amy Goodman, count on him to
tell the stories no one else is telling. Unlike many covering the
region, Fisk is fluent in Arabic; he is the Middle East correspondent
for The Independent newspaper in London and has won the British
International Journalist of the Year award seven times.
At 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 21, the Lannan Foundation Readings &
Conversations series begins with Fisk reading from and discussing his
upcoming book The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the
Middle East (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) with Amy Goodman, host of the
public-radio program Democracy Now!
>From the 1970s through the 1990s, Fisk covered the Israeli invasions
of Lebanon, the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq war in 1980-88, the 1991 Persian Gulf War,
the war in the former Yugoslavia, the 1999 Kosovo conflict, and the
ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of only two Western
journalists to remain in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, he
subsequently published Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon
(Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1990); he still has a home in Beirut. When
the United States launched its invasion of Afghanistan, Fisk covered
the conflict. Most recently, he has been covering the war in Iraq.
Fisk was in Baghdad when the “shock and awe” campaign began.
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East is a
vivid firsthand account of the civilian agony caused by war. Many
chapters are set in Afghanistan and Iraq in the years following the
U.S. invasions of those countries. The book begins in 1993, when Fisk
was the first Western journalist to interview Osama bin Laden. In a
subsequent interview in Afghanistan, Fisk writes, bin Laden uttered
his first direct threat against the United States. But bin Laden
ultimately represents a small part of a thousand-page tome that
blends investigative journalism, first-person narrative, and gut
reaction with historical analysis. Fisk emphasizes that most of the
civilians he writes about are the subjects of totalitarian regimes
and thus never had a say in the actions of their governments. He
portrays years of political failures and coercion leading to
conflagrations, both religious and territorial. “I used to argue,
hopelessly, I’m sure, that every reporter should carry a history book
in his back pocket,” he writes.
As a young boy, Fisk learned about World War I from his veteran
father, who had fought believing he was participating in the “war to
end all wars.” Robert grew up accompanying his father on yearly
summer treks to that war’s great battlefields. When his father died
at the age of 93, Fisk inherited his campaign medals, one of which
was engraved with the words The Great War for Civilisation. Fisk used
the phrase as the title for his latest book to draw attention to his
central contention that, far from solving problems, World War I
generated them. He writes, “After the Allied victory of 1918, at the
end of my father’s war, the victors divided up the lands of their
former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created
the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle
East. And I have spent my entire career – in Belfast and Sarajevo, in
Beirut and Baghdad – watching the peoples within those borders burn.
America invaded Iraq not for Saddam Hussein’s mythical “weapons of
mass destruction” – which had long ago been destroyed – but to change
the map of the Middle East, much as my father’s generation had done
more than eighty years earlier. Even as it took place, Bill Fisk’s
war was helping to produce the century’s first genocide – that of a
million and a half Armenians – and laying the foundations for a
second, that of the Jews of Europe.”
Fisk notes that, to his parents’ consternation, he has spent most of
his adult years writing about an endless series of wars, each of
which was also positioned as a battle between good and evil and
fought “for civilization.” He blames governments, including his and
ours, for war. “Governments like it that way,” he writes. “They want
their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil,
‘them’ and ‘us,’ victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about
victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It
represents the total failure of the human spirit. I know an editor
who has wearied of hearing me say this, but how many editors have
first-hand experience of war?”
Fisk’s book is written with the urgency of a Scheherazade who must
tell one more story to keep the forces of death at bay. Nevertheless,
Fisk is adamant that, as a journalist, he observes war from the
privileged position of one who can leave. “Which is why I cringe,” he
writes, “each time someone wants to psycho-babble about the ‘trauma’
of covering wars, the need to obtain ‘counselling’ for us well-paid
scribes that we may be able to ‘come to terms’ with what we have
seen. No counselling for the poor and huddled masses that were left
to Iraq’s gas, Iran’s rockets, the cruelty of Serbia’s militias, the
brutal Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the computerised death
suffered by Iraqis during America’s 2003 invasion of their country.”
Having witnessed the human price of more than a generation of wars,
Fisk’s compassion for civilian victims is mixed with a simmering rage
against “the arrogance of power” he attributes to Britain and the
United States. He wrote an article for The Independent headlined “My
Beating by Refugees Is a Symbol of the Hatred and Fury of this Filthy
War”: “I couldn’t see for the blood pouring down my forehead and
swamping my eyes. And even then, I understood. I couldn’t blame them
for what they were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of
Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done
just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.”
While many admire his courage, some have questioned his objectivity.
But Fisk, a frequent guest on Democracy Now!, accuses mainstream
media of biased and even censored coverage of the Middle East. His
book charges that Western reporters fail to cover the daily suffering
of Arab mothers and children. In particular, he alleges that the
carnage of Palestinian and Iraqi civilians remains hidden from
Western eyes. In an Independent editorial written earlier this year,
Fisk attacked a number of America’s most respected news organizations
in an editorial titled “‘Hotel Journalism’ Dictates Coverage of
Iraq.” He wrote: “Rarely, if ever, has a war been covered by
reporters in so distant and restricted a way. New York Times
correspondents live in Baghdad behind a massive stockade with four
watchtowers, protected by locally hired, rifle-toting security men,
complete with “NYT” T-shirts. Journalists with America’s NBC
television chain are holed up in a hotel with an iron grill over
their door, forbidden by their security advisors to visit the
swimming pool or the restaurant, ‘let alone the rest of Baghdad,’
lest they are attacked.”
Details:
Robert Fisk with Amy Goodman, Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom
event
Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St.
7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 21
$6, $3 for seniors and students; 988-1234
Rebroadcasts:
6 p.m. Sept. 25 on KUNM-FM 89.9
2 p.m. Sept. 26 on KSFR-FM 90.7