The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  And there, beside the road, was a Red Cross–Red Crescent convoy. The crowd were still behind us, but two of the medical attendants pulled me behind one of their vehicles, poured water over my hands and face and began pushing bandages onto my head and face and the back of my head. “Lie down and we’ll cover you with a blanket so they can’t see you,” one of them said. They were both Muslims, Bangladeshis, and their names should be recorded because they were good men: Mohamed Abdul Halim and Sikder Mokaddes Ahmed. I lay on the floor, groaning, aware that I might live.

  Within minutes, Justin arrived. He had been protected by a massive soldier from the Baluchistan Levies—a true ghost of the British empire who, with a single rifle, kept the crowds away from the car in which Justin was now sitting. I fumbled with my bag. They never got the bag, I kept saying to myself, as if my passport and credit cards were a kind of Holy Grail. But they had snatched my final pair of spare glasses—I was blind without all three—and my mobile telephone was missing and so was my leather-covered contacts book, containing twenty-five years of telephone numbers throughout the Middle East.185 God dammit, I said, and tried to bang my fist on my side until I realised it was bleeding from a big gash on the wrist—the mark of the tooth I had just knocked out of a man’s jaw, a man who was truly innocent of any crime except that of being the victim of the world.

  So why record my few minutes of terror and self-disgust near the Afghan border, bleeding and crying like an animal, when thousands of innocent civilians were dying under American air strikes in Afghanistan, when the War for Civilisation was burning and maiming the people of Kandahar and other cities because “good” must triumph over “evil”? I had spent more than a quarter of a century reporting the humiliation and misery of the Muslim world and now their anger had embraced me too. Or had it? There were the Red Crescent men, and Fayyez, who came panting back to the car incandescent at our treatment, and Amanullah, who invited us to his own home for medical treatment. And there was the Muslim saint who had taken me by the arm. And—I realised—there were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me, who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others, of us—of us who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the War for Civilisation just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them “collateral damage.”

  So I thought I should write about what happened to Justin and me in this fearful, silly, bloody, tiny incident. I feared other versions produce a different narrative, of how a British journalist was “beaten up by a mob of Afghan refugees.” The Mail on Sunday won the prize for just such a distortion. Fisk, it reported—apparently aged sixty-three, not fifty-five—was, yes, “beaten up by a mob of Afghan refugees.” And I was supposed to have said—but didn’t—that “I’m going to bear the scars for the rest of my life.” All reference to my repeated assertion that the Afghans were justified in their anger—that I didn’t blame them for what they had done—was omitted. The Afghans had become, like the Palestinians, generically violent. And of course, that was the point. The people who bore the scars were the Afghans, the scars being inflicted by us—by our B-52s—not by them. And I wrote in The Independent that “if I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdulla, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.”

  Among a mass of letters that arrived from readers of my paper, most of them expressing their sympathy, came a few Christmas cards, all but one of them unsigned, expressing the writers’ disappointment that the Afghans hadn’t “finished the job.” The Wall Street Journal published an article that said more or less the same thing under the subhead “A self-loathing multiculturalist gets his due.” In it, columnist Mark Steyn wrote of my reaction that “you’d have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter.” The “Fisk doctrine,” he went on, “taken to its logical conclusion, absolves of responsibility not only the perpetrators of September 11 but also Taliban supporters who attacked several of Mr. Fisk’s fellow journalists in Afghanistan all of whom, alas, died before being able to file a final column explaining why their murderers are blameless.”186

  In Quetta, two Pakistani doctors washed and bandaged my face but missed a gash on my head, so that I woke in the night stuck to my pillow with blood and had to stand in the shower and drench myself with water to detach the material from the wound. Back in Islamabad, I was befriended—ironically, in view of Steyn’s forthcoming abuse—by the Journal’s new South-West Asia correspondent, Daniel Pearl, and his wife, Marianne. They made me bottomless cups of coffee, supplied me the contents of their own contacts books, assured me that I looked as full of energy as ever. I wasn’t so sure. I asked Daniel if he was travelling to Afghanistan. “No,” he said. “My wife is pregnant and we’re not going to take that kind of risk.”

  Within two months, Daniel Pearl would be dead, beheaded by his Muslim captors after being kidnapped on assignment in Karachi, forced to speak of his Jewish family in the videotape of his vile execution. His murder was as horrifying as it was gruesome.187 It raised again not just the cruelty of al-Qaeda and its satellites but the degree to which we as journalists had lost our immunity. In Lebanon in the mid-1980s, in Algeria and then in Bosnia, our protection as neutral correspondents had disintegrated. We were abducted, murdered because we were Westerners or because we were regarded as combatants. Two months before I was beaten at Kila Abdulla, I had attempted to interview a Muslim cleric in a village mosque outside Peshawar. “Why are you taking this kaffir into our mosque?” a bearded man had shouted at the mullah. I conducted the interview outside the building. But I was a kaffir. So was Pearl. So, it seemed, were we all. Where did it go wrong?

  I have always thought the rot started in Vietnam. For decades, reporters have identified themselves with armies. In the Crimean War, William Howard Russell of The Times wore his own self-designed uniform. In both twentieth-century world wars, journalists worked in uniform. Dropping behind enemy lines with U.S. commandos did not spare an AP reporter from a Nazi firing squad. But these were countries in open conflict, reporters whose nations had officially declared war. It was in Vietnam that journalists started wearing combat fatigues and carrying weapons—and sometimes shooting those weapons at America’s enemies—even though their countries were not officially at war and when they could have carried out their duties without wearing a soldier’s clothes. In Vietnam, reporters were murdered because they were reporters.

  This tendency of journalists to be part of the story, to play their own theatrical role, took hold only slowly. When the Palestinians evacuated Beirut in 1982, I noticed that several French reporters wore Palestinian headscarves. Israeli reporters turned up in southern Lebanon carrying pistols. In the 1991 Gulf War, as we have seen, many correspondents dressed up in army costumes—complete with helmets—as if they were members of the 82nd Airborne. In Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2001, something similar happened. Reporters in Peshawar could be seen wearing soft Pashtun hats. Geraldo Rivera of Fox News claimed on television that while in Jalalabad he was carrying a gun. He fully intended to use it, he said on another occasion, to kill Osama bin Laden. “I’m feeling more patriotic than at any time in my life, itching for justice, or maybe just revenge,” he vouchsafed to the world. “And this cartharsis I’ve gone through has caused me to reassess what I do for a living.” It was the last straw. The reporter had become combatant.

  Of course, I had held a gun in a Soviet convoy to Kabul in 1980.188 But I had little choice. And I avoided rhetoric of the kind that Rivera sought to employ, even the unfortunate and sinister phrases used by my CNN colleagues. Like several of my colleagues, I did not like hearing CNN’s Walter Rodgers quoting a Marine major on 2 December 2001 that U.S. troops and “opposition groups” might be squeezing Kandahar “like a snake.” The moment that cities or people become snakes or vermin, they can be crushed, liquidated, eliminated like
animals. And every journalist’s integrity was placed at risk by the obnoxious remark of CNN boss Walter Isaacson, who instructed staff during the Afghan bombardment that “it seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan” because such reporting ran the risk of helping the Taliban. In the next stage of the “war on terror”—the invasion of Iraq—many more journalists would pay with their lives because their role as correspondents simply no longer guaranteed them protection.189

  Yet there was another way in which our good faith was damaged, indeed fatally undermined: the unwillingness of major television channels to relay the reality of the Middle East and to support their reporters when confronted by powerful lobby groups. Back in 1993, I had worked on a three-part television series for Britain’s Channel 4 and America’s Discovery Channel called From Beirut to Bosnia which attempted, in the words of our first episode, to show “how Muslims were coming to hate the West.” We were filming exactly eight years before the attacks of 11 September 2001, and, rewatching the series today—it was made on real film, not videotape, and cost more than a million dollars—I am ever more astonished at what it told viewers. For it turns out to have been a ghastly, unintended but all too accurate warning of September 11th. In one segment, I walk into a burned-out mosque in Bosnia and ask “what the Muslim world has in store for us,” adding that I should perhaps end each of my reports from the Middle East with the words “Watch out!” There are other similar premonitions of terrors to come, which were included in our coverage of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. We were trying to answer the question “why?”—before it needed to be asked.

  It was not an easy series to make. We filmed in Lebanon, Gaza, Israel, Egypt, Bosnia and Croatia, questioning Hizballah guerrillas about their war against Israeli occupation troops, and filming women in Lebanese hospitals who were covered in burns from Israeli phosphorus shells. During curfews in Gaza we were repeatedly ordered off the streets by Israeli soldiers—several of whom put their hands over our camera lens to stop us working. We filmed an Israeli officer who told us that a pregnant Palestinian woman had been allowed to break the curfew to go to hospital—then found the woman still trapped in her home. Outside the walls of Jerusalem, we talked to a Jewish settler about why an elderly Palestinian was being evicted from his land—because Jews would be living there and because, in the settler’s words, “he’s an Arab. He’s not Jewish.” In Israel we traced the home of a Palestinian refugee now living in Beirut, talked to the elderly Israeli who moved into the house after 1948—and took our cameras to the Polish town from which he fled and from which his parents and brother were taken by the Nazis to be murdered in the Jewish Holocaust. In Egypt we talked to armed opponents of Mubarak’s regime and in Sarajevo to the Bosnian soldiers defending the city, and to the Muslim imam who believed his people were being persecuted “solely because we are Muslims.”

  Michael Dutfield, the director, and I knew this would be easy for a British audience to watch. Europeans are used to free if sometimes bitter debates on the Middle East, where the old canard of “anti-Semitism” flung at anyone who dares to criticise Israel has largely lost its power. There are, as I always say, plenty of real anti-Semites in the world whom we must fight without inventing more in order to smother all serious discourse on Israel and the Arabs. But in the United States we knew things would be different. Our film would be a challenge not for American audiences—who were perfectly mature enough to understand our film if given the chance to watch it—but for the U.S. lobby groups which regularly set out to prevent the showing of any documentary that presents Americans with an alternative to the pro-Israeli “news” regularly served up on U.S. networks. Initial reports in the American media were faintly critical and often inaccurate.190

  Then, only days after Discovery showed the three films coast-to-coast, the letter-writing campaign began. Discovery first reported that some of its advertisers were being pestered with telephone calls from supposedly outraged viewers. American Express, one of the channel’s sponsors, received credit cards back from customers; the cards had been cut in half. An outfit calling itself “Promoting Responsibility in Middle East Reporting” (Primer) wrote to Discovery with a sinister warning. Robert Fisk had “impeccable English diction,” wrote Joseph I. Ungar, the group’s vice president, in June 1994. Fisk projected “the essence of refinement and respectability . . . He could easily play the stage role of Henry Higgins. But he could be a Higgins with fangs.” In journalism, you have to laugh at this sort of nonsense. But the campaign against Beirut to Bosnia was not funny at all. The president of the same lobby group, Sidney Laibson, wrote a letter to John Hendriks, chairman of Discovery, the same month. “By airing From Beirut to Bosnia,” he wrote, “the Discovery Channel has provided the purveyors of insidious propaganda an opportunity to spread their venom into the living-rooms of America.”

  Ungar’s letter claimed that for us to say that Israel “confiscates,” “occupies” and “builds huge Jewish settlements on Arab land”—all facts acknowledged by Israeli human rights groups, Israeli journalists and foreign correspondents as well as by the U.S. government for more than twenty years—was “twisted” history. A reference in my commentary to the “Christian gunmen” that the Israelis sent into the Sabra and Chatila camps—a course of action described in Israel’s own Kahan commission of inquiry—was condemned by Ungar as “an egregious falsehood.” Alex Safian of the “Camera Media Resource Center” wrote to Clark Bunting, senior vice president of Discovery, to claim that we had edited an interview with the Jewish settler Mickey Molad in such a way as to cut out a remark by him that Jews originally owned most of the land for the future settlement. We diligently searched back through all the rough-cuts—an hour of them—of the Molad interview only to find that he made no such comment in any of them. Safian’s claims, Dutfield wrote back, were “absurd and demonstrably wrong.” There were further meretricious statements: that the Palestinian woman refused permission to go to hospital was a fraud, that she was not even pregnant. She gave birth to her child three months after we filmed her.

  Then an Independent reader informed me that “American friends” had told her a scheduled re-airing of our series had been cancelled by Discovery because of the complaints. Dutfield wrote to the channel asking for an explanation. Bunting sent back the most preposterous denial I have ever heard from a television executive. “. . . given the reaction to the series upon its initial airing,” he wrote, “we never scheduled a subsequent airing, so there is not really an issue as to any re-airing being cancelled.” When I read those gutless words, I was ashamed to be a foreign correspondent.

  Here we were, trying to explain a grim reality of our age to an audience that deserved to hear another side to the Middle East conflict, that needed to hear the voices of those deeply aggrieved, increasingly angry people upon whom great injustice was being visited. Yet those who claimed to speak for truth—and for Israel—had effectively censored us off the air, with the cringing assistance of a major television channel. Here, long in advance of the international crimes against humanity of 2001, were answers to the “whys” that we would be told not to ask after the attacks on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. In advance, we were not supposed to explain the explosion to come—even if this warning might have helped us to prevent it. Afterwards, we would be ordered to remain silent. This, for me, remains one of the most frightening and distressing elements to the “war on terror”: the suppression of a truth without which no free judgement could be made, before or after the event.

  Is there, I ask myself, a key to all this, some incident, some lone truth that will illuminate all that we have done to the Middle East, the anger we have created, the terror we have inflicted upon those we now regard as our enemies? Is there some way in which to communicate this without reiterating the demands of the self-righteous, some way in which the death of innocence can be portrayed outside the framework of hatred? Osama bin Laden does not have to be the voice of those wh
o have suffered. He has no monopoly over their grief and pain. He was never appointed their representative on earth. So I am drawn to the story of a young woman who died needlessly and tragically, who could never have countenanced the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, but whose terrible end was ignored by the nation that killed her and whose reporters showed no interest in her fate.

  THE AMERICANS KILLED RAAFAT AL-GHOSSAIN just after two o’clock on the morning of 15 April 1986. In the days that followed her death, U.S. officials claimed that Libyan anti-aircraft fire might have hit her home not far from the French embassy in the suburbs of Tripoli. But three weeks later, the Pentagon admitted that three bombs dropped by an F-111 aircraft in the U.S. attack on Colonel Ghadafi had “impacted in the vicinity of the French embassy” and had caused—to use the usual callous euphemism—“collateral damage.” Raafat was eighteen years old, a graduate of an English school on holiday from London, a promising and beautiful artist whose individual death went unrecorded in the country that killed her nineteen years ago.

  She lives on only in the seventh-floor Beirut apartment of her parents and her younger sister where a half-hour videotape of Raafat’s 1985 graduation day at Marymount International college at Kingston-on-Thames brings her briefly back to this world. “Raafat Bassam Fawzi al-Ghossain from Palestine,” the English principal announces, and a tall, striking young woman in a white ball gown can be seen walking self-consciously to receive her graduation certificate to the tinkling of Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory” on a school piano. She listens attentively to a graduation speech from an American teacher who tells the girls that “with the gift of youth, nothing is too daunting.” On the left side of the stage on which she sits is the Stars and Stripes, on the right the Union flag of Britain.