Almost a legend: Interview With Robert Fisk

The Sun Daily
136
April 28 2010
Malaysia

The Independent’s Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk has most
probably seen it all – from gory bodies to Osama bin Laden. After 34
years in the trade and covering the wars in the region, he describes
journalism as he practises it and what he has seen. ZAKIAH KOYA and
MEENA L. RAMADAS find out what makes this man tick.

WHEN did you start writing as a journalist?

At 12, I saw an Alfred Hitchcock movie, The Foreign Correspondent. In
the movie, the character gets sent to Europe to cover the outbreak
of WWII, he sees the assassination of a diplomat in Amsterdam, he’s
chased by Gestapo agents, uncovers a German spy in London, survives
an air crash in the Atlantic and wins the most beautiful woman in the
movie. At 12, I thought this is what I wanted (to do). So, I never
deviated from that.

After I left school, I did not go straight to university. I joined
The Evening Chronicle published in Newcastle. So, I started like all
journalists, covering magistrate’s courts, mothers’ union meetings,
shipping stories; so I started off like that and then I got a part-time
job at The Sunday Express on the gossip column.

On the gossip column?

Yes. I would chase after vicars who had run off with their
daughters-in-laws, things like that. It was good practice for covering
Northern Ireland and the Middle East. Then I wanted to go to Northern
Ireland so I joined The Times. I sat through 29 interviews. Then
in 1974, The Times sent me to cover the aftermath of the Portuguese
Revolution. In 1975, I got a letter from the foreign editor that our
correspondent in Beirut had just married and asked if I would like
to go to Lebanon. I was 29, and the idea of being The Times Middle
East correspondent, before Murdoch of course, was quite something.

Because of my father I always had this tremendous interest in history.

My father would take me around the sites that were used as battlefields
of WWI in France and of course, teach about WW II. So, I grew up
knowing a lot about history.

Are you a Muslim?

I’m a journalist. Journalism is my religion.

How is it that you feel so strongly about the Middle East?

If it was the other way, and most of the Middle East was Jewish land
and a Muslim state was taking the lands away and bombing them, I would
say exactly the same about the Jewish inhabitants. It does not matter.

I do not take sides. If there is a side, it is the ethical issue of
who is suffering here. If I see a massacre, I am very angry about it.

If you see people being murdered, you get angry. I am allowed to be
angry too. Being a journalist does not mean I am injected with some
force of neutrality.

Do you sleep after seeing all these corpses?

Oh yes. I do not report these things to weep over them. I get angry
but I report them so that people know the truth of what is happening,
that is my job. If you are a journalist in a war and you feel it is
affecting you, well, you fly home, business class, and do not come
back. Do another job. Become a theatre critic. The people you should
worry about are not the journalists, but the people who cannot get out
of the country, who spend day and night trying to keep their families
alive and protected and who have pariah passports and no visas.

Being in the Middle East

When you were sent there as a correspondent, did you know what you
were supposed to do?

What I knew about Middle East history was what I learned in current
affairs books. I did not speak Arabic, I could not read Arabic but I
can now. So I started with a considerable disadvantage. I learnt two
things very quickly; first, rely, talk and listen to Arab reporters who
spoke French, Arab and other languages. I never go near the embassies.

When I was travelling to Beirut, I decided to not spend all my time
mixing with other Western journalists because all you are going to do
is produce the same material. There are a few Western journalists who
I like. I have a good friend Ed Cody. He was the number two of the
AP Bureau in Beirut, he was a brilliant Arabist, he started teaching
me Arabic from day one in battles.

There was a Polish journalist who was in the Warsaw uprising in 1943
against the Germans. He was very experienced in war. When it came to
survival, I relied on these few people. But when it came to learning
about what was going on in the Middle East, one of the first people
I went to see in Egypt was Mohamad Hasanein Heikal (leading Egyptian
journalist) who has been a friend ever since. I lived in a Hezbollah
village in southern Lebanon where no one spoke English. So I had to
learn Arabic the old, hard, tough way. Sometimes, the schoolchildren
would take me to their school and teach me.

Would you say that Middle East correspondents now have it easier?

Well, we do have mobile phones now. And email. In the war especially,
we had to use a Telex machine. To get a call out of a major hotel in
Egypt; and there were only two hotels, the Meridien and the Hilton;
would take a day. So, there were enormous communication problems. Just
getting money transferred was impossible. I remember once when my
money was sent to an Egyptian bank, it took me three weeks to get it
out and they kept losing documents.

What do you think about the perception that western media seem to
have an agenda when reporting Middle East issues?

The western media start making sure the words they use do not offend
anyone. I mean in the case of Middle East, they are always worried
the Israelis would complain or the embassies would complain or lobby
groups will complain. In other words they would call a war not a war
but an offence. Then they call occupied territory a disputed territory,
something you can solve in court over a cup of tea. So when the
Palestinians use violence to reject the war and the occupation, they
are generically violent because it is a dispute, it is only an offence.

You were criticised a lot when you wrote about your beating by Afghan
refugees in 2001.

Yes, and I told in my story, the reason they beat me was because all
their families had just been killed by an American B52 in Kandahar.

All the people who criticised my article left that bit out. They
neutered the reasons and made it into a mad Afghan mob and well,
Robert, who is supposed to be so keen on Islam, forgave them. Well,
I did not forgive them, I said I would have done the same if my family
had been killed by an American bomber. I knew that these were the
most crushed people in the world, the Afghan world. It was a fair
comment and I stand by it.

What about other difficulties?

The only country where I found antagonism was Turkey where my writing
about the Armenian genocide is much resented, not by ordinary people
who know it was true, but by political people.

On journalism

Who do you write for?

When I write an article, I’m writing a letter to a friend, the reader.

When you write to a good friend, you tell them the truth. It also saves
you from explaining the whole history of what you are writing about. I
work on the principle that people know what is going on in the Middle
East. They do not need to be told the same set of material each time;
one point of view, a different point of view of the matter; they know
what is going on, otherwise, they would not be reading the article.

What is journalism to you?

If you work for a paper that does not print what you write unless it
accords with the editorial line, that is not journalism for me but a
lot of people put up with it. I always believe that the journalists
have to be good friends and colleagues with the editor, not moan and
whine if the editor does not like the story, but know that the guy
trusts you to get it right.

When I was at the The Times, that was the case and now with The
Independent, all of my editors have stood by me all the time,
without exception. They have defended me. I have been attacked by
Arab governments but the Israelis now do not even raise my name to
my editors. They know there is no point.

Do you believe in covering as an armchair journalist?

No, I do not. If I cannot go to wars, I do not cover them.

Was there any time when your story got axed for political reasons?

When I was with The Times in Northern Ireland, I was bitterly attacked
by the British army because I revealed in the paper correctly that they
had death squads who were crossing the border into the Irish republic.

My editor, who was a part-time soldier in a historic British cavalry
regiment, stood by me and told the Defence Ministry to go to hell
basically; he would not tolerate me being attacked. He was a model
editor for me. I try to make sure all my editors are like him (laughs).

I can remember two incidents. When Murdoch took over, I stayed with
the paper a little while and then I moved to The Independent along
with many of my colleagues.

Why did you leave?

In 1988 just before the end of the Iraq-Iran war, an American warship
called The Vincennes shot down an Iranian airline carrying more than
200 passengers. I went straight to Dubai because the airline was en
route to Dubai from Bandar-e-Abbas in southern Iran. The next day
I went to Iran and saw all the corpses including the children with
wedding costumes. I then went straight to my friends who worked in air
traffic control in Dubai who were Brits and they told me this warship
has been challenging British Airways aircraft, it has been challenging,
aggressively, all commercial airliners – we all knew something like
this would happen. It was clear from the radio traffic that the
crew and the captain were panicking. All subsequent enquiries proved
that it was accurate. When the captain gave the decision to fire the
missiles, they still had the seamen trying to look up the commercial
flights from Iran. They said the transponder was not working on the
aircraft but it was. When I filed my first story on the panicking of
the Americans and how they had been challenging commercial flights,
all that material was taken out of the copy and the editorial said,
which I did not write, it was probably a suicide pilot. I had already
spoken to the editor about the danger of suggesting that because
I did not believe it was but the editor said it was possible. In
fact, the article ran in the second edition not the first. That was
the reason I decided to leave The Times. I had found out what had
happened, I got it right and all the subsequent enquiries proved I
was correct. I sent the same story to an Irish daily whose editor is
a friend of mine and we printed it in Ireland.

In those days, what you could read in Ireland you could not read
in London.

Subsequently when I left The Times, the chief foreign night subeditor
wrote to me telling me the editor had been frightened of Murdoch and
who described my report as a load of rubbish because it did was not
what Murdoch would have liked. So I left the paper. I do not work
for papers that are political.

Did Independent ever interfere with any of your articles?

In 1989, I wrote a story about how the Israelis had bombed a house in
southern Lebanon which they believed belonged to a Hezbollah leader
who ran a TV station. The man was not in Hezbollah, the information
was wrong and they killed the man’s two daughters who were waiting
in front of the house for their school bus. I went to the mortuary
and saw the bodies.

I knew one of our subeditors was pro-Israeli but I never paid attention
because he can have his own personal views. In fact, what happened, he
took out the description of the dead girls which is important to the
reader and the headline for the story was "School girls fall victim
to border war" when in fact they were killed by Israeli aircraft. I
found out the foreign sub in London had deleted all of my copy from
the screen, we did not use computers back then. I do not know why he
did that. Fortunately, I had kept a copy and I had sent it to all the
editors and italicised all the bits that were edited with the headline
and I made a complaint. The next result I heard from the foreign desk,
this guy went to the foreign desk and said I was anti-Semitic, which
was also my complaint. I told a lawyer friend of mine, who also knew
the sub, to tell the sub that I will sue him if he ever says anything
like that again. I am not a racist, I am not an anti-Semitic. And a
few weeks later, he left the paper. I do not know why. But that was
not the newspaper. It was an individual who took it upon himself to
pulvarise my copy. I work on the principle that people’s personal
opinion do not interfere with editing

Journalists are supposed to be objective – you seem very subjective
in your writings.

I think you should be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who
suffer. When you start off in journalism, you have a 50-50 sort of
journalism, half from one side and half from the other. That is all
right when you are writing about a football match or public inquiry
into a new motorway where protesters will lose their lands.

But the Middle East is not a football match, it is a bloody tragedy and
you have got to have some idea of the morality of what is happening
there. If people are being dispossessed of their land, if it is
being taken from them against all international law then these are
the people you should be concentrating on. If you’re reporting the
slave trade, do you spend half your story interviewing the slave
ship captain? Excuse me. If you’re reporting the liberation of an
extermination camp in WW II, you talk to the survivors and write
about the Jewish dead. You do not go and interview the SS commander,
excuse me. I mean you can but give the person one paragraph.

When I was in Jerusalem in August 2001, an Islamic Jihad Palestinian
blew himself up in an Israeli restaurant full of kids. I was just down
the road. I saw everything; a child without eyes, a woman with a table
leg through her. I did not write half the story about Islamic Jihad’s
reasons. About the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, I was in the
camps before the murderers left. I did not give the Israeli army half
my story to make excuses to why they did not do anything. I wrote
about the survivors and the dead who I had to literally climb over.

So, my answer is yes, neutral and unbiased on the side of those
who suffer.

When we read your articles, you seem to get most of your stories from
the locals.

Most people tell the truth most of the time. That applies to Northern
Ireland when I was reporting in Belfast.

What is it about you, you think, people open up to you and tell you
their secrets?

Because I take them seriously. They don’t tell me their secrets. I
think they take me seriously. And they are right to do so. I am a
serious person. By the way a lot of people do lie. Governments are
keen on doing so.

How do you deal with facts that you are not so sure about?

If I’m suspicious of someone I make it very clear in my report that I
am suspicious so this is a way of saying to the reader watch out. I do
not just use words like claimed or alleged. I sometimes say it sounds
like a tall story to me which is what you say in a letter. So I make it
pretty clear if I do not trust someone no one who read my article can
pin me down for the fact that I do not trust them. But that does not
mean they should not be given a voice. They might be telling the truth.

Do you think your writings have made a difference?

I cannot think of a single story that has saved anyone’s life. It
might have.

What about people in power who are looking at it?

No, I do not think it changes. They know what is going on anyway,
people in power. You do not need to reveal to them something you do
not know. What you need to do is to reveal things to other people
who do not know so that they will have to admit it. I do not think
we have changed anything.

Many journalists are afraid of having suits against them.

In England particularly, the law is biased against newspapers. And it
is very, very easy to get a writ. I have gotten a lot of writs but they
have either been withdrawn or I have won them all. I have never lost
a case, which means I work hard to get my facts correct when I write.

Covering Palestine

Which incident stuck in your mind?

Oh, definitely Sabra and Shatila. I have never seen so many people
murdered in one place. I literally, at one point, to get to a
neighbouring street, had to climb over what I thought was a bank of
earth but, in fact, when I was on top of it, it was bouncing beneath me
with corpses lightly covered with earth. I could see a woman’s head,
a shoulder upon someone’s stomach underneath it. Of course the place
stank terribly, it was hot.

I had never seen so many dead women and children and babies shot next
to their mothers. I had never seen anything on this scale. This was
a war crime; Sabra and Shatila is a war crime.

When Israelis banned journalists from Gaza, what did you think?

One of the best things of the banning of western reporters in Gaza,
you had Palestinians, for the first time, telling their own stories. I
have actually got here our guy’s coverage. His father was killed in
an air raid in the first days of the war. That was our front page:
"The death and life of my father", 5 January 2009. If you look at it,
it is a moving story. Written brilliantly.

Is there any vivid memory of anyone – child or woman – which has
touched you?

Last December, in Northern Lebanon near Hermel, I discovered a Shi’ite
village. What happened was this guy went on the Haj in 2008 or 2009.

Now he is a truck driver – a poor guy – five children. Parents are
both alive, mother very ill, and several years ago in Lebanon he
worked at a now defunct television station called Shehrazad TV out of
Beirut. It was a satellite TV, a junk programme, and he used to answer
viewers queries on whether they should get married, how should they
make up their arguments with their boyfriends. He went on the Haj. A
day before he was supposed to leave the religious police arrests
him for witchcraft. His name is Sabat (as reported). It is wrong
in the papers. The transliteration would be Bsat. I went to see his
family. I was sitting and talking there and at this time he was about
to be executed within a week and I wanted to get a page in the paper
so that the Saudis knew they were being watched. While I was sitting
there, his second youngest child, little girl, aged about five – in
her school uniform – and she came and sat beside me on the sofa and she
put her school bag down and looked at me and said have you come to get
my dad out of prison? And I thought Christ, how do you reply to that?

And she asked it with innocence. I was foreign, I could help. I could
help. I wrote the story. There was nothing eloquent about it, it was
the total innocence.

What did you reply?

I said I did not know.

What is your opinion of the Arab women in the wars?

My first contact with Palestinians in Beirut was with Fatah and they
were involved in the civil war. A few women were involved in the
civil war. Once I had time, and this included during the war as well,
I spent a lot of time talking to families about their experiences of
leaving Palestine in ’47, ’48. You know there were several exoduses
over a period of months. And I was talking to Palestinian women who
because, in some cases, their husbands had died or were killed, so
they were in charge of the family narrative. I think the women were
more certain they would go home; which of course they will not do;
than the men. The men had become disillusioned as the years went by.

What about the women suicide bombers?

Not that many. There were a few in Lebanon and some of them were not
even Muslim. The Syrian Social National Party had a female suicide
bomber. She managed to kill Fijian soldiers. It would be pleasant
for you to hear that women are playing a more prominent role in the
struggle for justice in the Arab world. They certainly do play a role
but they have an awful lot of hindrances to get around and their role
in society, in the patriarchal society, makes it very difficult

On Osama bin Laden

You interviewed Osama?

Yes. Three times and he was interested with me doing it for the fourth
time but I could not reach him during the war. I first met him in 1993.

Did you ever doubt his existence?

No, I did not. I saw pictures of him. The revolving door of the
western mindset, they are always searching for somebody who could be
Hitler or Mussolini during WWII like Gaddafi, then you had Khomeini,
Abu Nidal and Nasser at one point, who was described as the Mussolini
of the Nile.

Osama came out of the wheel of fate like everybody else did. Here’s
another one, bearded as well, mad.

There were pictures of him. I knew a bit about him. I met him in
Sudan for the first time. So, I did not doubt his existence. In fact,
it was a Saudi who had been fighting with him against the Russians,
who was attending an Islamic conference in Khartoum, who told me
he wanted to take me on a long journey into the desert one Sunday
because he thought I would like to meet someone. He said it was for
my own amusement because he had never met a foreign journalist. So
he gave me his first interview.

I knew he was in Sudan but I never tried to see him.

What was he like?

He thought I was going to ask him about "terrorism, terrorism,
terrorism" but what I wanted to ask him was about what it was like
to fight the Russians because, Afghanistan was one of the reasons
why the Soviet Union collapsed, and he was a very prominent fighter
in bringing the Soviet army down. So I asked him about what it was
like to fight the Russians. Well he told me a lot; about where the
mass graves of his fighters were. They were not called al-Qaeda then.

What were they called?

Mujahidin fighters being supplied with weapons by the Americans. He
denied that.

They did not coin the word al-Qaeda did they?

He used the word al-Qaeda when he announced the existence of the
organisation before I saw him for the third time so I knew that
then I mean I was with al-Qaeda people hours on end and I knew who
they were but back then they weren’t. His fighters were with him in
Sudan. I met them, along with an awful lot of Sudanese intelligence
whom they did not like very much.

Then he told me during the course of this narrative that there was an
attack on a Russian firebase, artillery position in this province and
he described how during the battle a mortise shell fell at his feet
and he said, which was quite important for me, was that he was quite
prepared to accept death. The Arabic word he used was Sakinah which
means calmness, tranquillity I suppose. And I asked did that moment
play an important part in your life and he said "yes it did." It was
very interesting. I found out how his mind worked and how fighting
the Russians changed him.

So that was the first time you met him?

Yes. The second time I met him in Afghanistan.

Was he different?

No, he was pretty much the same. He asked to see me. I got a phone
call from Switzerland, later on I got a call from London saying he
wanted to see me. I was very worried because I did not know the guy
who called me from Switzerland. I was very worried I would get set
up by the Egytian secret service or worse the ISI or the bits of ISI
that were not supporting the Talibans might be setting me up to be
murdered so that they can blame it on Osama. I went to London from
Beirut and asked to see a man who knew him in my hotel which was the
Sheraton Belgrade in London.

(Laughs) I remember, I was in my room. It is a very chic hotel. The
receptionist called my room to tell me that there was a man to see me.

I walk downstairs and as usual, the place is full of wealthy
businessmen, women in chic clothes and standing by the reception was
this Saudi with a huge beard in a dishdash and plastic sandals and no
socks. And I say I bet this is the guy that wants to see me (chuckles)
and it was of course. He said "I assure you, it is genuine." So I
went back from Beirut to Jalalabad through Sharjah. I checked into
the Spinghar hotel and waited and waited and waited day after day and
I made a call to London and said hey, I am in Jalalabad. I have been
sitting here on my bottom for … and he said be patient. And the next
night, I was reading in bed and there was a sound like someone with a
car key (taps the table five times) did this on the window. I was on
the ground floor. And the guy, with a whole load of armed men at the
gate, took me hundreds of miles across the desert to see him which
was where he was waiting for me. He obviously came from somewhere else.

Every time he wanted to see you, what was it for?

He thought I was fair in reporting what he said. I know that, well,
first of all, he would not ask for me. I knew that because, first of
all, he made a broadcast long after 9/11, long after we knew he was
horrible in which he said Robert Fisk is a neutral journalist and then,
unfortunately, he said if the White House wants to know what al-Qaeda
thinks they need only speak to Robert Fisk which I could have lived
without. So, Omar, Osama’s son, described my meeting in Afghanistan
in a book written about Osama’s first wife and he said I had asked
him whether if he was happy.

He (Omar) was very moved, he was almost overwhelmed because no one had
asked him that before. His father was domineering. He said he was very
sorry not to find himself in the story. He was in the captions. I took
a picture of him with his dad. And afterwards he asked Osama – aren’t
you worried that Mr Fisk would write bad things about you? Osama’s
reply was, "No, he will be fair."

Do you think there is a group called "terrorists" or "suicide bombers"?

I do not use the word "terrorists" in my articles. Do I think that
they did the 9/11? George Bush is not capable of 9/11, believe me,
it was not the American government.