by Robert Fisk
The direct physical results of all these conflicts will remain—and should remain—in my memory until I die. I don’t need to read through my mountain of reporters’ notebooks to remember the Iranian soldiers on the troop train north to Tehran, holding towels and coughing up Saddam’s gas in gobs of blood and mucus as they read the Koran. I need none of my newspaper clippings to recall the father—after an American cluster-bomb attack on Iraq in 2003—who held out to me what looked like half a crushed loaf of bread but which turned out to be half a crushed baby. Or the mass grave outside Nasiriyah in which I came across the remains of a leg with a steel tube inside and a plastic medical disc still attached to a stump of bone; Saddam’s murderers had taken their victim straight from the hospital where he had his hip replacement to his place of execution in the desert.
I don’t have nightmares about these things. But I remember. The head blasted off the body of a Kosovo Albanian refugee in an American air raid four years earlier, bearded and upright in a bright green field as if a medieval axeman has just cut him down. The corpse of a Kosovo farmer murdered by Serbs, his grave opened by the UN so that he re-emerges from the darkness, bloating in front of us, his belt tightening viciously round his stomach, twice the size of a normal man. The Iraqi soldier at Fao during the Iran–Iraq War who lay curled up like a child in the gun-pit beside me, black with death, a single gold wedding ring glittering on the third finger of his left hand, bright with sunlight and love for a woman who did not know she was a widow. Soldier and civilian, they died in their tens of thousands because death had been concocted for them, morality hitched like a halter round the warhorse so that we could talk about “target-rich environments” and “collateral damage”—that most infantile of attempts to shake off the crime of killing—and report the victory parades, the tearing down of statues and the importance of peace.
Governments like it that way. 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?
Ironically, it was a movie that propelled me into journalism. I was twelve years old when I saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent , a black and white 1940 creaky of patriotism and equally black humour in which Joel McCrea played an American reporter called John Jones—renamed Huntley Haverstock by his New York editor—who is sent in 1939 to cover the approaching war in Europe. He witnesses an assassination, chases Nazi spies in Holland, uncovers Germany’s top agent in London, is shot down in an airliner by a German pocket battleship and survives to scoop the world. He also wins the most gorgeous woman in the movie, clearly an added bonus for such an exciting profession. The film ends in the London Blitz with a radio announcer introducing Haverstock on the air. “We have as a guest tonight one of the soldiers of the press,” he says, “. . . one of the little army of historians who are writing history from beside the cannon’s mouth . . .”
I never looked back. I read my father’s conservative Daily Telegraph from cover to cover, always the foreign reports, lying on the floor beside the fire as my mother pleaded with me to drink my cocoa and go to bed. At school I studied The Times each afternoon. I ploughed through Khrushchev’s entire speech denouncing Stalin’s reign of terror. I won the school Current Affairs prize and never—ever— could anyone shake me from my determination to be a foreign correspondent. When my father suggested I should study law or medicine, I walked from the room. When he asked a family friend what I should do, the friend asked me to imagine I was in a courtroom. Would I want to be the lawyer or the reporter on the press bench, he asked me. I said I would be the reporter and he told my father: “Robert is going to be a journalist.” I wanted to be one of the “soldiers of the press.”
I joined the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, then the Sunday Express diary column, where I chased vicars who had run off with starlets. After three years, I begged The Times to hire me and they sent me to Northern Ireland to cover the vicious little conflict that had broken out in that legacy of British colonial rule. Five years later, I became one of those “soldiers” of journalism, a foreign correspondent. I was on a beach at Porto Covo in Portugal in April of 1976—on holiday from Lisbon where I was covering the aftermath of the Portuguese revolution— when the local postmistress shouted down the cliff that I had a letter to collect. It was from the paper’s deputy editor, Louis Heren. “I have some good news for you,” he wrote. “Paul Martin has requested to be moved from the Middle East. His wife has had more than enough, and I don’t blame her. I am offering him the number two job in Paris, Richard Wigg Lisbon—and to you I offer the Middle East. Let me know if you want it . . . It would be a splendid opportunity for you, with good stories, lots of travel and sunshine . . .” In Hitchcock’s thriller, Haverstock’s editor calls him to his office before sending him to the European war and asks him: “How would you like to cover the biggest story in the world today?” Heren’s letter was less dramatic but it meant the same thing.
I was twenty-nine and I was being offered the Middle East—I wondered how King Feisal felt when he was “offered” Iraq or how his brother Abdullah reacted to Winston Churchill’s “offer” of Transjordan. Louis Heren was in the Churchillian mode himself, stubborn, eloquent, and an enjoyer of fine wines as well as himself a former Middle East correspondent. If the stories were “good” in journalistic terms, however, they would also prove to be horrific, the travel dizzying, the “sunshine” as cruel as a sword. And we journalists did not have the protection—or the claims to perfection—of kings. But now I could be one of “the little army of historians who are writing history from beside the cannon’s mouth.” How innocent, how naive I was. Yet innocence, if we can keep it, protects a journalist’s integrity. You have to fight to believe in it.
Unlike my father, I went to war as a witness rather than a combatant, an ever more infuriated bystander to be true, but at least I was not one of the impassioned, angry, sometimes demented men who made war. I worshipped the older reporters who had covered the Second World War and its aftermath: Howard K. Smith, who fled Nazi Germany on the last train from Berlin before Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941; James Cameron, whose iconic 1946 report from the Bikini atom tests was perhaps the most literary and philosophical article ever published in a newspaper.
Being a Middle East correspondent is a slightly obscene profession to follow in such circumstances. If the soldiers I watched decided to leave the battlefield, they would—many of them—be shot for desertion, at least court-martialled. The civilians among whom I was to live and work were forced to stay on under bombardments, their families decimated by shellfire and air raids. As citizens of pariah countries, there would be no visas for them. But if I wanted to quit, if I grew sick of the horrors I saw, I could pack my bag and fly home business class, a glass of champagne in my hand, always supposing—unlike too many of my colleagues— that I hadn’t been killed. Which is why I cringe 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.
I don’t like the definition “war correspondent.” It is history, not journalism, that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think “war correspondent” smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism; it has too much of the whiff of Victorian reporters who would view battles from hilltops in the company of ladies, immune to suffering, only occasionally glancing towards the distant pop-pop of cannon fire. Yet war is, paradoxically, a very powerful, unique experience for a journ
alist, an opportunity to indulge in the only vicarious excitement still free of charge. If you’ve seen the movies, why not experience the real thing? I fear that some of my colleagues have died this way, heading to war on the assumption that it’s still Hollywood, that the heroes don’t die, that you can’t get killed like the others, that they’ll all be Huntley Haverstocks with a scoop and the best girl. But you can get killed. In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died. There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.
When I first set out to write this book, I intended it to be a reporter’s chronicle of the Middle East over almost three decades. That is how I wrote my previous book Pity the Nation, a first-person account of Lebanon’s civil war and two Israeli invasions.1 But as I prowled through the shelves of papers in my library, more than 350,000 documents and notebooks and files, some written under fire in my own hand, some punched onto telegram paper by tired Arab telecommunications operators, many pounded out on the clacking telex machines we used before the Internet was invented, I realised that this was going to be more than a chronology of eyewitness reports.
My father, the old soldier of 1918, read my account of the Lebanon war but would not live to see this book. Yet he would always look into the past to understand the present. If only the world had not gone to war in 1914; if only we had not been so selfish in concluding the peace. We victors promised independence to the Arabs and support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Promises are meant to be kept. And so those promises—the Jews naturally thought that their homeland would be in all of Palestine—were betrayed, and the millions of Arabs and Jews of the Middle East are now condemned to live with the results.
In the Middle East, it sometimes feels as if no event in history has a finite end, a crossing point, a moment when we can say: “Stop—enough—this is where we will break free.” I think I understand that time-warp. My father was born in the century before last. I was born in the first half of the last century. Here I am, I tell myself in 1980, watching the Soviet army invade Afghanistan, in 1982 cowering in the Iranian front line opposite Saddam’s legions, in 2003 observing the first American soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division cross the great bridge over the Tigris River. And yet the Battle of the Somme opened just thirty years before I was born. Bill Fisk was in the trenches of France three years after the Armenian genocide but only twenty-eight years before my birth. I would be born within six years of the Battle of Britain, just over a year after Hitler’s suicide. I saw the planes returning to Britain from Korea and remember my mother telling me in 1956 that I was lucky, that had I been older I would have been a British conscript invading Suez.
If I feel this personally, it is because I have witnessed events that, over the years, can only be defined as an arrogance of power. The Iranians used to call the United States the “centre of world arrogance,” and I would laugh at this, but I have begun to understand what it means. 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.
This book is also about torture and executions. Perhaps our work as journalists does open the door of the occasional cell. Perhaps we do sometimes save a soul from the hangman’s noose. But over the years there has been a steadily growing deluge of letters—both to myself and to the editor of The Independent—in which readers, more thoughtful and more despairing than ever before, plead to know how they can make their voices heard when democratic governments seem no longer inclined to represent those who elected them. How, these readers ask, can they prevent a cruel world from poisoning the lives of their children? “How can I help them?” a British woman living in Germany wrote to me after The Independent published a long article of mine about the raped Muslim women of Gacko in Bosnia—women who had received no international medical aid, no psychological help, no kindness two years after their violation.
I suppose, in the end, we journalists try—or should try—to be the first impartial witnesses to history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: “We didn’t know—no one told us.” Amira Hass, the brilliant Israeli journalist on Ha’aretz newspaper whose reports on the occupied Palestinian territories have outshone anything written by non-Israeli reporters, discussed this with me more than two years ago. I was insisting that we had a vocation to write the first pages of history but she interrupted me. “No, Robert, you’re wrong,” she said. “Our job is to monitor the centres of power.” And I think, in the end, that is the best definition of journalism I have heard: to challenge authority—all authority—especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.
But can we perform that task? This book will not provide an answer. My life as a journalist has been a great adventure. It still is. Yet looking through these pages after months of writing, I find they are filled with accounts of pain and injustice and horror, the sins of fathers visited upon their children. They are also about genocide. I used to argue, hopelessly I’m sure, that every reporter should carry a history book in his back pocket. In 1992, I was in Sarajevo and once, as Serb shells whiffled over my head, I stood upon the very paving stone upon which Gavrilo Princip stood as he fired the fatal shot that sent my father to the trenches of the First World War. And of course the shots were still being fired in Sarajevo in 1992. It was as if history were a gigantic echo chamber. That was the year in which my father died. This is therefore the story of his generation. And of mine.
Beirut, June 2005
CHAPTER ONE
“One of Our Brothers Had a Dream . . . ”
They combine a mad love of country with an equally mad indifference to life, their own as well as others. They are cunning, unscrupulous, and inspired.
—“Stephen Fisher” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940)
I KNEW IT WOULD BE LIKE THIS. On 19 March 1997, outside the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad with its manicured lawns and pink roses, an Afghan holding a Kalashnikov rifle invited me to travel in a car out of town. The highway to Kabul that evening was no longer a road but a mass of rocks and crevasses above the roaring waters of a great river. A vast mountain chain towered above us. The Afghan smiled at me occasionally but did not talk. I knew what his smile was supposed to say. Trust me. But I didn’t. I smiled back the rictus of false friendship. Unless I saw a man I recognised—an Arab rather than an Afghan—I would watch this road for traps, checkpoints, gunmen who were there to no apparent purpose. Even inside the car, I could hear the river as it sloshed through gulleys and across wide shoals of grey stones and poured over the edge of cliffs. Trust Me steered the car carefully around the boulders and I admired the way his bare left foot eased the clutch of the vehicle up and down as a man might gently urge a horse to clamber over a rock.
A benevolent white dust covered the windscreen, and when the wipers cleared it the desolation took on a hard, unforgiving, dun-coloured uniformity. The track must have looked like this, I thought to myself, when Major-General William Elphinstone led his British army to disaster more than 150 years ago. The Afghans had annihilated one of the greatest armies of the British empire on this very stretch of road, and high above me were villages where old men still remembered the stories of great-grandfathers who had seen the English die in their thousands
. The stones of Gandamak, they claim, were made black by the blood of the English dead. The year 1842 marked one of the greatest defeats of British arms. No wonder we preferred to forget the First Afghan War. But Afghans don’t forget. “Farangiano,” the driver shouted and pointed down into the gorge and grinned at me. “Foreigners.” “Angrezi.” “English.” “Jang.” “War.” Yes, I got the point. “Irlanda,” I replied in Arabic. “Ana min Irlanda.” I am from Ireland. Even if he understood me, it was a lie. Educated in Ireland I was, but in my pocket was a small black British passport in which His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs required in the name of Her Majesty that I should be allowed “to pass freely without let or hindrance” on this perilous journey. A teenage Taliban had looked at my passport at Jalalabad airport two days earlier, a boy soldier of maybe fourteen who held the document upside down, stared at it and clucked his tongue and shook his head in disapproval.
It had grown dark and we were climbing, overtaking trucks and rows of camels, the beasts turning their heads towards our lights in the gloom. We careered past them and I could see the condensation of their breath floating over the road. Their huge feet were picking out the rocks with infinite care and their eyes, when they caught the light, looked like dolls’ eyes. Two hours later, we stopped on a stony hillside and, after a few minutes, a pick-up truck came bouncing down the rough shale of the mountain.
An Arab in Afghan clothes came towards the car. I recognised him at once from our last meeting in a ruined village. “I am sorry, Mr. Robert, but I must give you the first search,” he said, prowling through my camera bag and newspapers. And so we set off up the track that Osama bin Laden built during his jihad against the Russian army in the early 1980s, a terrifying, slithering, two-hour odyssey along fearful ravines in rain and sleet, the windscreen misting as we climbed the cold mountain. “When you believe in jihad, it is easy,” he said, fighting with the steering wheel as stones scuttered from the tyres, tumbling down the precipice into the clouds below. From time to time, lights winked at us from far away in the darkness. “Our brothers are letting us know they see us,” he said.
