Robert Fisk Remembered

I met Robert Fisk on a cool autumn morning in Clonmel in 2003. There were small scars visible on his face and behind his glasses he had what a friend of mine would call ‘honest eyes’. There was a kind of effervesence around him as he spoke passionately but with humour and wisdom on his beloved subject of the Middle East.

We sat sipping hot tea in the lounge of a country house hotel. Outside, the birds were singing and people were waking up to go about their normal Saturday business. He had just come from Iraq and was looking forward to a breakfast of bacon and eggs. In Baghdad his mornings were very different, often spent in city mortuaries counting the fatalities from the night before.

At the time Robert Fisk was the Middle East correspondent for the London Independent newspaper and he held more journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent for his coverage of wars in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq, the Gulf and the Iranian Revolution. An outspoken critique of Israeli and US policy, he was not without his enemies. He received numerous death threats over the years and Hollywood actor John Malkovich once publicly named him as the person he would most like to kill. The word “fisking” was even coined to describe how conservative minded people challenge the facts, and conclusions, of his articles.

On a popular level Fisk is probably best known as the only western journalist to have interviewed Osama Bin Laden three times. His name also made international headlines in December 2001 when he was almost beaten to death on the Afghan Pakistan border after his car broke down. His response to the beating also caused widespread controversy when he said: “I don’t want this to be seen as a Muslim mob attacking a Westerner for no reason. They had every reason to be angry. I’ve been an outspoken critic of the U.S. actions myself. If I had been them, I would have attacked me.” The outraged crowd had just lost their families in a B-52 American air raid.

The morning I met Fisk, the 101st American soldier was killed in Iraq. Officially, the war in Iraq had ended, but Fisk was quick to point out that the war was far from over as random attacks were increasing at the time. A side effect of the increasing attacks is that the safety of the journalist often becomes the deciding factor on whether or not a story will make the news. In general more attacks means less coverage.

Fisk explained that many journalists refused to travel outside Baghdad, or even very far from their offices. “Television companies hire security teams that decide whether they should or should not go to places,” he said. “One of the slightly dodgy moments that comes up more and more with me is that I rush out on a story and I get there and there’s an enraged crowd of Iraqis and no other journalists. One becomes more and more lonely on the scene. I go to Najaf and Karbala and Mosul and Tikrit. I travel all over Iraq. There’s nowhere I won’t go because I don’t let there be anywhere I can’t go, because at that moment you go on the run.”

Although Fisk was often dismissed as simply ‘anti-American’, one of the things that struck me most about his writings is the way he tirelessly attempted to understand both sides of any conflict he was covering. In his book Pity The Nation: Lebanon at War, for example, he travels to Auschwitz in Poland and talks to survivors of the Holocaust and Israeli settlers as well as talking to Palestinians who have lost their lands and homes and been forced into exile. He’s slow to make judgements but astute in his assessments, based as they are on meticulous research. Having lived in the Middle East for decades, he understood better than most the complexities of the region where proud ancient histories combine with colonialism, tribal loyalties, diverse geographical landscapes, rich natural resources and sectarian rivalry.

He said if you’re living in the Middle East it’s not difficult to realise what’s going to happen next. “It’s easy to tell when public opinion is moving. You feel instinctively something is coming. Long before September 11 I felt something was going to burst. I remember little things happened. Someone threw a pebble at my balcony in the summer of 2001 when I was sitting reading my newspaper in Beirut. A Lebanese friend of mine has an English wife and she got spat at in the street. That would never happen normally. And journalists would write in much more brutal ways in Arabic in the newspaper and you think ‘Oh what’s he heard that’s made him so angry?’ You notice from these little things that something’s coming.”

The night before I met Robert Fisk he gave a lecture to a packed auditorium in Clonmel. Tickets were sold out for the event. He showed a number of video clips, including one from a documentary he made which was set in the former Yugoslavia. In the clip he walked into a burned out mosque in Bosnia and said to the camera “When I see things like this I wonder what the Muslim world has in store for us. Maybe I should end each of my reports with the words ‘watch out.’” The following day he told me: “that sequence was derided and denounced in the American press when the film series was shown in the United States.”

He also showed us a clip from one of hundreds of films that were found in Baghdad after Saddam Hussein had fled the Iraqi capital. It was a shocking sequence showing the prisoners of Saddam Hussein being brutally whipped by wire cables. I felt almost physically ill while watching it. But he believed that people should see what he saw. His theory was that “if television actually showed the things we saw, no-one would ever again support a war. The television cameras will not show you the horrors that we see. And thus war is portrayed as something that is primarily about victory or defeat when war is primarily about death and the infliction of death and pain. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.”

Sometimes he warned his readers that if they were of a nervous disposition they should read no further. I asked him how much of what we see and hear in the media is representative of what it was really like in the places he reports from. He replied sombrely, “I don’t see what you see. I see the real thing. On the very last day of the war, or the day before, I got into the biggest medical centre in Baghdad and wounded were being trucked in, in lorries. One man came in still alive but cut in half, there was only half a person there. He was going to die, obviously. I went into the emergency section and there were lakes of blood. I was walking in it. It was coming over my shoes. There was a man lying on a stretcher and his right eye had just been blown out. He had a piece of rag in the socket and it was dripping blood onto the floor. There was a soldier sitting up. He had been hit by some kind of phosphorous round. He had all these little holes in him. He was on fire. There were flames coming off him and he was shrieking ‘Omah, Omah, Omah’ — mummy, mummy, mummy. Horrific scenes. Once I was with a cameraman when a man came in with a truckload of corpses after an American air strike, a cluster bomb strike. He picked up a baby that had been cut lengthways in half. He picked it up like a piece of bread. It was stiff and clearly a baby. He held it out and said “look, that’s my daughter.” Of course it never got on television. It went on the paper though, I wrote about it.”

I asked him how these things affected him emotionally. He sighed. “I keep getting asked this same question. Look, most people never see people who’ve been killed deliberately, or collateral damage — that obscene disgusting expression which television reporters still use for people killed in air-raids by chance. They don’t see the severed corpses and they don’t see the way in which people who are dying vomit and choke on their own blood. At the Sabra Chatila massacre of Palestinians in 1982 there were up to 1,700 civilians dead when the Israelis sent the Lebanese militia into the Palestinian camps. I was climbing on corpses. Obviously it’s extremely unpleasant. I mean corpses swell, they burst, they stink horrifically. There’s nothing like the stench of dead bodies. But the way I look at it is that the relatives of these people want journalists to tell what happened. If we don’t, no one else is going to. I get angry when I see innocent people killed, but the people one should worry about the emotional effect are the people who are suffering there, the people who can’t get visas to anywhere else, who have pariah country passports, who risk every minute of their day losing their families or their own lives.

“We journalists, if we don’t like it we can pull out, fly home club class and have a glass of champagne. So I don’t go along with these people who ask ‘How do you cope? The stress? How do you come to terms? Do you need counselling?’ and all this bullshit. I’m sorry but we can go home if we want. We don’t have to cover these appalling scenes. Sure, I see journalists who obviously have been very upset and have left. And they should leave if they are upset. But you do, I’m afraid, get used to seeing dead bodies just as soldiers do and just as hospital people do as well, I’m sorry to say.”

At the time I interviewed Robert Fisk there had been a recent story on the news about a European wide survey on trust. Politicians were bottom of the table, next up were managers and then journalists. Yet journalists like Robert Fisk put their own lives at risk in order to follow through a story and give people a voice. He said journalism is, or should be, a vocation. “I think we have a duty to record exactly what happens to these people and who did it. Who were the bad guys? Who did the massacre at Sabra Chatila? Who was the suicide bomber? I think that it’s a bit like a doctor. I’m not comparing journalism to medicine. It’s not the same kind of vocation, but a doctor in a hospital who’s carrying out a very difficult operation doesn’t go home and get drunk or weep over the operation, he gets on with his job. And actually that’s what we’ve to do. But I put a lot of emotion into it. Journalism should be a vocation. Journalism should not just be a job to pay for the kids’ education, pay for the mortgage, it should be more than that.”

In Lebanon in the 80s, Fisk was only one of two western journalists to stay to cover the conflict. One of his closest friends, journalist Terry Anderson, was taken hostage there in 1985 and was kept in captivity for seven years. In his book Pity The Nation, Fisk says that in 1986 he was so terrified of being kidnapped he would drive to work at 90 miles an hour or else stay indoors. And yet he did stay in Lebanon. He wrote about it. He covered the stories that no one else could cover because no one else was there to cover them. He did the same in Iraq. He said part of the reason he stayed in these places is because he felt he was “witnessing history”. Another reason he said he travelled to remote outposts where there was a strong possibility of getting killed was because “unless you discover it yourself, the occupation authorities will not tell you what’s going on — save for the deaths of American soldiers, that’s the only thing they can talk about apart from their own good deeds and how they’re opening new hospitals and health clinics and so on.”

Robert Fisk went to meet his editor in August 2002, nine months before the invasion of Iraq. “When a war begins all the best laid plans turn into water, but at least at the beginning you can have a situation where you know how to meet a certain crisis that comes up.” He told his editor that there would be pressure from the Ministry of Defence to get journalists out of Baghdad as their lives would be in danger. “Their concern is to get us out and if they can’t, to malign us. You see all armies want one side reported and that’s their side and nobody else’s.” Fisk wrote a mock letter and said to his editor that this would be the letter he would soon receive from the Ministry.

“Once the war, the invasion began, sure enough all the editors received these letters from the Ministry of Defence in London. The first reaction of both the Times and Telegraph was to take it seriously and withdraw their correspondents. The Guardian stayed and the Daily Mail stayed of all papers. My editor came on to me and said: “You know Robert, not only have we received the letter but it’s almost word perfect to the one you gave me” — the spoof letter I had written the previous August. He said “there’s about three words wrong in it.” Within three or four days British Government officials started to smear those of us who stayed. Geoffrey Hoon attacked me as being dishonest and on the enemy side and the usual garbage that you hear from Ministries of Defence. I wrote from Baghdad and did a big attack on him about how he had lied about the war. Apparently he was outraged. I was actually sitting in Baghdad with air strikes and aeroplanes whizzing over me, writing this livid piece about Geoffrey Hoon. I enjoyed that very much.”

Fisk described his daily life at that time as being a bit like “Alice in Wonderland where one moment you can be at the scene of the most terrible tragedy or very violent scene, and the next moment you can be having a discussion about books or movies in a nice restaurant drinking Lebanese red wine. It’s a very strange world in which you never know where the wheel of fortune will end you up at the end of the day.”

Fisk had said it’s easy to predict what will happen next when you live in the Middle East. He said you get a sense when something is coming. I ask him what’s next. “Oh, every morning I wake up in Beirut when I’m fortunate enough to be on my home base, and I hear the sea outside the apartment and I hear the wind in the palm trees and I lie in bed thinking “My God, what’s going to happen today, what today?” It’s like everyday now I expect something extraordinary. In Baghdad you wake up literally and you hear ‘whooom’ and the air pressure changes and you think ‘God, it’s a suicide bomber, where was that?’

R.I.P. Robert Fisk 1946–2020