by Robert Fisk
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Praise
Acknowledgements
Maps
Preface
CHAPTER ONE - “One of Our Brothers Had a Dream . . . ”
CHAPTER TWO - “They Shoot Russians”
CHAPTER THREE - The Choirs of Kandahar
CHAPTER FOUR - The Carpet-Weavers
CHAPTER FIVE - The Path to War
CHAPTER SIX - “The Whirlwind War”
CHAPTER SEVEN - “War against War” and the Fast Train to Paradise
CHAPTER EIGHT - Drinking the Poisoned Chalice
CHAPTER NINE - “Sentenced to Suffer Death”
CHAPTER TEN - The First Holocaust
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Fifty Thousand Miles from Palestine
CHAPTER TWELVE - The Last Colonial War
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - The Girl and the Child and Love
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - “Anything to Wipe Out a Devil . . . ”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Planet Damnation
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Betrayal
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - The Land of Graves
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - The Plague
CHAPTER NINETEEN - Now Thrive the Armourers . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY - Even to Kings, He Comes . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Why?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - The Die Is Cast
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Atomic Dog, Annihilator, Arsonist, Anthrax, Anguish and Agamemnon
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Into the Wilderness
Notes
Select Bibliography
Chronology
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the Author
ALSO BY ROBERT FISK
Copyright Page
To Nelofer
and for Bill and Peggy,
who taught me to love books and history
ACCLAIM FOR ROBERT FISK’S The GREAT WAR for CIVILISATION
“An epic account . . . a rich tapestry of the contemporary Middle East [and an] engagingly thorough tour of the region’s turmoil.” — Newsweek International
“Essential. . . . Fisk is unapologetic, engaged—and so this is history as seen through the eyes of people he feels have been underrepresented rather than through various governments that attempt to shape it into public narrative.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Compelling . . . entertaining . . . extraordinarily ambitious. . . . A full-throttle account of the life of a war correspondent. . . . Fisk has a thousand amazing stories . . . [and his] eyewitness reports from the killing fields are more than just bang-bang: They are implacable and indispensable documents, grim reminders of what actually happens when nations go to war. And his devastating analysis of the reasons for those wars exposes the sins not just of the West, but of the Arab world as well. . . . His cold-blooded clarity is essential. In this blinkered and timorous age, we need more Robert Fisks.” —Salon
“[The Great War for Civilisation is] notable for [its] depth of observation and insight and for the vividness of [its] descriptions of particular events and people. [Fisk’s] extraordinarily readable book depicts a vast historical landscape. . . . For all his erudition and his passion for the subject, Fisk is primarily a journalist, and his book, among many other things, is an important account of what a dedicated journalist actually does or tries to do, especially during wars. . . . Shocking . . . deeply moving.” —The New York Review of Books
“Stories of great personal tragedy, tyranny, and few glimmers of hope. The Iran-Iraq war, the Algerian insurgency, Desert Storm . . . Fisk takes us through the battlefields from which he has reported. We hear the bullets, feel the desert heat.” —The Christian Science Monitor
“[Fisk] writes with a marvelous resource of image and language. His investigative reporting is lethally painstaking.” —The Independent (London)
Acknowledgements
IN A BOOK OF THIS SIZE—which includes so many years of reporting—the decision over who should be thanked is almost impossible to take. I have decided, however, that acknowledgements should be given both to those who helped me in the direct knowledge that this book was being written over the past fifteen years— these are the vast majority of names listed here, including, for example, Yassir Arafat, Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the world’s most popular automatic rifle—and a minority whose help in my past reporting shaped the text of this book before the final decision to write it.
I was also faced with the fact that those who did directly assist me in The Great War for Civilisation include the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Can I place a suicide bomber’s father alongside a Western humanitarian worker, or a heroic Iraqi who was tortured after resisting Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions in the same column as a man who handed his unsuspecting pregnant girlfriend a bomb to take onto an aircraft? Should the late Margaret Hassan, so cruelly murdered in Iraq, stand on the same page as Algeria’s “exterminator” interior minister?
The most extreme example of this problem is Osama bin Laden. In my last two conversations with him, he knew I was writing this book and clearly spoke in that knowledge. So should a man held responsible for the greatest international crime against humanity in the Western world be dignified with an entry? Since his comments and thoughts were crucial to parts of the text, I place this on record. But he does not appear below. Others do.
So, in alphabetical order, here are those who must be thanked for their help, enthusiasm and disclosures over the past fifteen years and more. For guidance to the reader, some are listed by their titles or the specific nature of their assistance. Others will realise that this is my specific thanks personally to them. Joan Ablett of the Armenian Assembly of America; Reem Abul Abbas; Astrid Aghaganian, survivor of the 1915 Armenian genocide; Shojae Ahmmadavnde, Iranian soldier in 1984; Robert A. Algarotti, communications manager at Boeing Autonetics and Missile Systems Division; to Dr. Jawad al-Ali, children’s doctor in Basra; Dorothy Anderson, for pointing out Lord Roberts’s 1905 remarks on Afghanistan; Nimr Aoun, wounded survivor of the 1948 Palestinian dispossession; the late Yassir Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Authority; Hanan Ashrawi of the Palestinian Authority; Tim Austin, former chief foreign sub-editor of The Times; the late Shapour Bakhtiar, the Shah of Iran’s last prime minister; Peter Balakian of Colgate University; Siddiq Barmak, Afghan film-maker; David Barsumian; Dr. Antony Barter for his father’s letters on Iraq and the Armenians in the 1914–18 war; Zouaoui Benamadi of Algerie Actualite; Zaka Berberian, Armenian Holocaust survivor; Shameem Bhatia; Mohamed Bouyali, brother of guerrilla leader Mustafa Bouyali; Lakhdar Brahimi; Ross Campbell for transcripts of The Scotsman reports on the end of the British Palestine Mandate; Pierre Caquet; Lieutenant “Sandy” Cavenagh, 3rd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment in 1956; Mustfa Cerić, the Imam of Bosnia; Ellen Sarkisian Chesnut for her memories of her Armenian father; Conor O’Clery of The Irish Times; Tony Clifton of Newsweek; Patrick Cockburn of The Independent; Warrant Officer Tim Corwin, Chinook pilot in Kurdistan in 1991; the late Fred Cuny, U.S. aid official; Jeannik Dami of the ICRC in Kuwait in 1991; Norman Davies for his analysis of Hitler’s references to the Armenian Holocaust; the late Dr. John de Courcy Ireland for his memory of Armenian orphans; Dr. Nadim Dimeshkieh, former Lebanese diplomat; Leonard Doyle, foreign editor of The Independent; Eamon Dunphy of Irish radio; Iain R. Edgar of Durham University; Judge David A. O. Edward for his copy of the 1922 James Bryce lecture on the Great War and Armenia; Isabel Ellsen; Saeb Erekat of the Palestinian Authority; Jeanne Farchath; Bill and Peggy Fisk, my late parents; U.S. Major General Jay Garner, commander of U.S. forces in Kurdistan in 1991; Samir Ghattas, current Associated Press bureau chief in B
eirut; Bassam and Saniya Ghossain, whose daughter was killed in the 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya; Dr. Stephen Goldby for Foreign Office correspondence on UN sanctions; Terry Gordy of Boeing Defence and Space Group (Autonetics and Missile Systems Division); Ben Greenberger, Jewish settler on the West Bank; Dr. Selma Haddad, children’s doctor in Baghdad; Dennis Halliday, head of the UN Oil-for-Food programme, 1997; Mullanah Sami el-Haq of the al-Haq madrassa in Pakistan; Amira Hass of Ha’aretz; the late Margaret Hassan of CARE in Iraq; Dr. Mercy Heatley; Philippe Heffinck of UNICEF, Baghdad in 1997; Mohamed Heikal, Egyptian journalist and author; Gavin Hewitt of the BBC; Sue Hickey, formerly of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), London; Nezar Hindawi, for his unconvincing attempt to explain why he gave his pregnant girlfriend a bomb to take on an El Al flight; Marjorie Housepian; Chafiq al-Hout and his wife, Bayan; Justin Huggler of The Independent; John Hurst, vice president of Lockheed Martin; the late King Hussein of Jordan; Alia al-Husseini, granddaughter of Haj al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem; Nadeen El Issa for his copy of the Paice and Martin Palestine Police report (also thanks to Peter Metcalfe); Abbas Jiha, who lost many of his family in the Israeli helicopter attack in Lebanon in 1996; Zeina Karam of the Associated Press; Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the Soviet AK-47 rifle; Mayreni Kaloustian, survivor of the 1915 Armenian massacres; the late Wassef Kamal, former assistant to Haj Amin in Nazi Germany; Al Kamhi, Lockheed’s director of communications in 1997; Marwan Kanafini of the Palestinian Authority; Kevork Karaboyadjian, director of the Beirut Armenian Old People’s Home; Viktoria Karakashian, survivor of the Armenian exodus from Alexandretta; Jamal Kashoggi, assistant to the Saudi ambassador in London; Zainab Kazim for her letter on Shiism; Haroutian Kebedjian, Armenian genocide survivor; Andrew Kevorkian for his unstinting help in tracing Armenian genocide information, and his late brother Aram for memories of his visit to his ancestral home in Turkey; Sheikh Jouwad Mehdi al-Khalasi for his historical help on British rule in Iraq; Helen Kinsella, former foreign manager of The Independent for her indefatigable research; Josef Kleinman, Auschwitz survivor; Gerry Labelle of AP; the late professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz; George Lewinski, formerly of CBC, London; Mikael Lindval, former UNIFIL officer in southern Lebanon; Dr. David Loewenstein of the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Mrs Hilda Maddock for details of her father Private Charles Dickens in 1917; Dr. Grace Magnier of the Department of Hispanic Studies, Trinity College, Dublin, for her work on Andalusia; the late Ali Mahmoud, Bahrain bureau chief of the Associated Press; General Mohamed Mansoura, former head of Syrian military intelligence in Kimishli, now promoted to Damascus; Lara Marlowe of The Irish Times; Nabila Megalli, formerly of the Associated Press in Bahrain; Alf Mendes; Gerhard Mertins, German arms dealer; Peter Metcalfe; Abderahman Meziane-Cherif, former Algerian minister of interior; Tewfiq and Philippa Mishlawi of Middle East Reporter in Beirut; the late General (Ret’d.) Mohamed Abdul Moneim of Al-Ahram; Judy Morgan of CARE in Iraq; Harvey Morris of Reuters, The Independent, and now the Financial Times; Fathi Daoud Mouffak, Iraqi military cameraman in the Iran-Iraq War; Major Mustafa Murad of the Egyptian army in 1956; Anis Naccache for his memories of the Iranian Revolution and his wife, Battoul, for her translations of Iranian war poetry; Haj Mohamed Nasr, father of a Palestinian suicide bomber from Jenin; Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, chairman of the Lebanese Hizballah; Suheil Natour of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Guillaume Nichols for drawing my attention to Lloyd George’s 1936 speech on Palestine; Nawaf Obaid whose Harvard thesis on the goals of Saudi Wahabists was so valuable; Mohmed Mahran Othman, blinded Egyptian guerrilla fighter in 1956; the late Srpouhi Papazian, Armenian genocide survivor; Robert Parry; film-maker Nelofer Pazira; the late Dr. Abdul-Aziz Rantissi of Hamas; my colleague Phil Reeves of The Independent and now of National Public Radio; Rabbi Walter Rothschild for his encyclopaedic knowledge of Lebanese railways; Martin Rubenstein, who sent me a reference on the Armenian genocide in The Road to En-Dor; Mujtaba Safavi, former Iranian POW; Haidar al-Safi in Baghdad; the late and brilliant Palestinian scholar Edward Said, and his authoress sister Jean Makdissi for their help and suggestions over many years; Mohamed Salam, former Associated Press bureau chief in Baghdad; Dr. Kamal Salibi, former director of the Institute of Interfaith Studies in Amman; Mohamed Salman, former Syrian minister of information; Farouk al-Sharaa, Syrian vice-president; Abdul-Hadi Sayah, the friend of Mustafa Bouyali; Martin Scannall for permission to quote from Kenneth Whitehead’s Iraq the Irremediable; Clive Semple; Dr. Hussain Sharistani, Saddam Hussain’s senior nuclear adviser; Don Sheridan; Private Andrew Shewmaker of the U.S. 24th Mechanized Infantry Division in the 1991 Gulf War; the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim; Amira el-Solh; Hans von Sponeck, Halliday’s UN successor in the humanitarian office in Baghdad, 1999; Eva Stern of New York for her indefatigable search for the truth about the Sabra and Chatila massacre; Verjine Svazlian for her copy of Armenian Holocaust survivors’ songs; Maitre Mohamed Tahri, Algerian human rights lawyer; Monsigneur Henri Teissier, Archbishop of Algiers; Alex Thomson of ITV; Dr. Hassan Tourabi in Khartoum; Derek Turnbull of Vickers; Karsten Tveit of Norwegian radio; Christopher J. Walker for his knowledge of all things Armenian; Jihad al-Wazzir; Garry Williamson of the Boeing Defence and Space Group; the late Christopher “Monty” Woodhouse, former SOE agent in Greece and British agent in Iran; and Dedi Zucker, Israeli Knesset MP.
My thanks must also go to Simon Kelner, the editor of The Independent , who encouraged me to write this book between assignments in Iraq and Lebanon and who turned an editor’s blind eye towards my prolonged absences from the paper, and for allowing me to quote from my own dispatches to the paper over sixteen years; and to The Times of London for whom I worked as Middle East correspondent from 1976 until 1988; to The Irish Times; to the London Review of Books and to The Nation in New York for allowing me to quote from articles of mine which appeared in their pages; to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto for my recordings from the 1980 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and from the Iran-Iraq War; to the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationary Office for British Government documents in the National Archives (Kew).
Especially, I must thank Louise Haines, my editor at Fourth Estate for her superhuman patience in nurturing this book for an astonishing sixteen years and Steve Cox, the most indefatigable copy-editor in the world. Lastly, my appreciation goes to Dr. Victoria Fontan, who wrote the chronology, formatted the bibliography and, with immense scholarly care, archived 328,000 of my documents, notes and dispatches.
Inevitably, there are many to whom I owe my thanks but who cannot be named for their own security—subject to potential threat both from their enemies and from their own governments. They include members—serving and retired—of the armed forces of Egypt, France, Iran, Iraq (including the former second-in-command of the air force and two of his pilots), Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, “Palestine,” Syria, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.
And, of course, I add the usual author’s caveat: none of the above is responsible for any errors or views expressed in The Great War for Civilisation.
Maps
Preface
WHEN I WAS A SMALL BOY, my father would take me each year around the battlefields of the First World War, the conflict that H. G. Wells called “the war to end all wars.” We would set off each summer in our Austin of England and bump along the potholed roads of the Somme, Ypres and Verdun. By the time I was fourteen, I could recite the names of all the offensives: Bapaume, Hill 60, High Wood, Passchendaele . . . I had seen all the graveyards and I had walked through all the overgrown trenches and touched the rusted helmets of British soldiers and the corroded German mortars in decaying museums. My father was a soldier of the Great War, fighting in the trenches of France because of a shot fired in a city he’d never heard of called Sarajevo. And when he died thirteen years ago at the age of ninety-three, I inherited his campaign medals. One of them depicts a winged victory and on the obverse side are engraved the words: “The Great War for Civilisati
on.”
To my father’s deep concern and my mother’s stoic acceptance, I have spent much of my life in wars. They, too, were fought “for civilisation.” In Afghanistan, I watched the Russians fighting for their “international duty” in a conflict against “international terror”; their Afghan opponents, of course, were fighting against “communist aggression” and for Allah. I reported from the front lines as the Iranians struggled through what they called the “Imposed War” against Saddam Hussein—who dubbed his 1980 invasion of Iran the “Whirlwind War.” I’ve seen the Israelis twice invading Lebanon and then reinvading the Palestinian West Bank in order, so they claimed, to “purge the land of terrorism.” I was present as the Algerian military went to war with Islamists for the same ostensible reason, torturing and executing their prisoners with as much abandon as their enemies. Then in 1990 Saddam invaded Kuwait and the Americans sent their armies to the Gulf to liberate the emirate and impose a “New World Order.” After the 1991 war, I always wrote down the words “new world order” in my notebook followed by a question mark. In Bosnia, I found Serbs fighting for what they called “Serb civilisation” while their Muslim enemies fought and died for a fading multicultural dream and to save their own lives.
On a mountaintop in Afghanistan, I sat opposite Osama bin Laden in his tent as he uttered his first direct threat against the United States, pausing as I scribbled his words into my notebook by paraffin lamp. “God” and “evil” were what he talked to me about. I was flying over the Atlantic on 11 September 2001—my plane turned round off Ireland following the attacks on the United States—and so less than three months later I was in Afghanistan, fleeing with the Taliban down a highway west of Kandahar as America bombed the ruins of a country already destroyed by war. I was in the United Nations General Assembly exactly a year after the attacks on America when George Bush talked about Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and prepared to invade Iraq. The first missiles of that invasion swept over my head in Baghdad.
