Robert Fisk’s World: Scenes from a busy Beirut correspondent’s notebook

The Israeli police turn up to see what we are doing prowling on the
Jewish Sabbath

Saturday, 27 February 2010

Independent/uk

It’s back-of-the-book time again, those little funny, sad stories that
don’t quite make it from the reporter’s notebook into a fully fledged
dispatch but which shouldn’t be thrown away.

So…

*I am in Hebron, on Macintyre Tours (see last week’s column) and —
noticing our Palestinian West Bank correspondent – the Israeli police
turn up to see what we are doing, prowling this supposedly sacred city
on the Jewish Sabbath. I try to cool the cops down by asking the
uniformed guy at the window of the police car where he lives in
Israel. "Sderot," he says at once. Sderot, city of Hamas rockets,
marginally the most dangerous place in Israel. So which do you prefer,
I ask? The dangers of Sderot or the stone-throwing of the Jews and
Arabs of Hebron? The cop bursts into laughter. "Good question," he
says.

*I am back in Beirut. A Sunday, and Missak Keleshian, an Armenian
researcher – actually, he’s in love with film and photographs and is a
technician by trade – is showing an original archive movie on the
Armenian genocide. It was made by German cameramen in 1918 and 1920.
Never before shown. I sit at the back of the big Armenian hall in the
Beirut suburb of Dbayeh and the camera tracks across a terrible
wasteland of dry hills. Southern Turkey – or western Armenia,
depending on your point of view – just after the 1915 genocide of one
and a half million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. And a
woman comes into focus. She is sitting in the muck and holding her
child – alive or dead, I cannot tell. She is weeping and wailing and
there before our eyes is the 20th-century’s First Holocaust – which
our precious US President Barack Obama dare not even call a genocide
lest he offends Turkey. Literally moving proof. Later footage shows
20,000 Armenian orphans in Beirut, 30,000 in Aleppo. Where are their
parents? Ask not Obama. In one extraordinary scene, the orphans of the
First Holocaust are sitting at a breakfast table two miles in length.
I am both mesmerised and appalled. They smile and they laugh at the
camera. Dr Lepsius, a German working for Near East Relief – how
swiftly the good Germans who cared for the Armenians turned into more
dangerous creatures – holds the children in his arms. Outside an
orphanage, other children plead for help. Then there is a picture of
an orphanage run by the Turks in Beirut in 1915, in which the
children, Nazi-style, were "Turkified", given Muslim names to
eradicate their identity. Enough. This will be a big report in The
Independent. But there is a long, panning shot across Beirut. It is
Lebanon, 1920; there are tents for the Armenians but the sweep of film
shows the port. There are steam ships and sailing ships and the long
coast which I see each morning from my balcony.

*To my Beirut balcony, today, beyond which a modern ship, Odyssey
Explorer, is passing. It is pale blue and attractive and real – "real"
ships for me have a smokestack in the middle of the vessel, not at the
back – but its gloomy role this past month has been to find the 54
corpses still on board the Ethiopian Airlines flight which took off
from Beirut international airport on 25 January and crashed into the
sea just over four minutes later. I took off a few hours earlier en
route to Amman. The weather was awful, tornado-wind and rain. We
bumped around the sky. When Macintyre called me later to tell me the
flight was lost, I just told him I wasn’t surprised. But the rumours
soon started. The plane was blown up. It was sabotaged. The wife of
the French ambassador was on board. Alas, she was. But the terrible
truth soon came out. The black box flight recorder was presented to
the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri (son of the man assassinated
just over five years ago). You can hear the crew as they fly their
aircraft – inexplicably – straight up to 9,000 feet and then fall
backwards out of the sky. In Amharic – the language of Ethiopia – the
pilot blurts out: "We are finished. May God save our souls." It is
heartrending. The word is that he had not completed his full year’s
flight training for his Boeing aircraft. And what did the Odyssey
Explorer find? First of all, it found another aircraft at the bottom
of the sea – not the Ethiopian plane. I think it was probably the hull
of the Hungarian Malev aircraft accidentally hit by a shell in 1975 at
the start of the civil war. No one survived. But incredibly, ever
since the first word came in of the Ethiopian crash – ironically, from
a gunman of Abu Nidal’s repulsive old militia, who thought he was
under attack by Israel when the aircraft hit the Mediterranean – the
Lebanese have found every body of those flying on the plane. I called
by a member of the security forces this week to ask what it was like.
"Robert, it’s the fish. That’s the problem. The last sack of remains
came up with six backbones inside." Yes. God spare us.

*But let us end gently. I have called up Andrew Buncombe – Our Man in
Delhi – to warn him that I may shortly be arriving in the Raj and
expected him to provide me with peacock-strewn and manicured lawns
whereon cummerbunded waiters will serve me gin and tonic at sundown.
Buncombe said he’d have to hire the lawns, waiters and peacocks.
Readers will be kept informed.