The War Correspondent's War Correspondent

In a Western media cesspool polluted for the most part by distressing propaganda of the most noxious kind, it is scarcely an exaggeration to describe the reporting of Robert Fisk – Middle East correspondent for the London Independent since 1989 – as a beacon of truth and light.
No doubt the 59-year-old Kent native would find such praise embarrassing, but few sane observers would seriously dispute his status as one of the most influential minds of the age. Fisk’s passionate yet cool-headed critiques of the prevailing geopolitical landscape are as consistently cogent and intellectually powerful as anything put forward by Noam Chomsky or Edward Said. As a war correspondent, the only figures from the last 70 years to bear comparison would be John Pilger and the late Martha Gellhorn.
If there’s truth in the statement that you can measure a man by his enemies, the most eloquent testimony to the value of Fisk’s work is how widely despised it is. An unwavering critic of US and Israeli policy in the Middle East (and indeed, of the despotic regimes that rule almost all Arab countries), Fisk has repeatedly been the subject of hate-mail and death threats. The actor John Malkovich is on record as saying he would like to shoot Fisk, Michael Moore and British MP George Galloway, while right-wing apologists such as Andrew Sullivan and Eoghan Harris have attacked him almost as venomously.
Not that such hatred has been the sole preserve of lickspittle conservative hacks. Fisk is lucky to be alive, having been kicked and beaten almost to death by (he estimates) 50 or 60 angry Afghan refugees on December 8th, 2001. For 15 minutes, they smashed stones into his face and skull, trying to kill him. Almost incredibly, he wrote two days later: “Even then, I understood. I couldn’t blame them for what they were doing. If I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find. So why record my few minutes of terror, bleeding and crying like an animal, when thousands of innocent civilians are dying under American air strikes in Afghanistan?”
The fact is, several of Fisk’s attackers apparently thought he was George Bush. hotpress has been sadly unable to track down Bush for interview, but we’re honoured to bring you Fisk.
CF: Can you remember what went through your mind as the Afghan crowd battered you?
RF: Very vividly. I remember asking myself how long it would take to die. Then I saw my face, and my body, in the side of a bus that was standing beside the road, and from the top of my head to my shoes, I was covered in gore. I remember thinking of the line from Lady Macbeth:- "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" Then I also remembered what the Lebanese used to say to me during their war: "Whatever you do, don’t do nothing.’" And then I turned around and started beating on the faces of the Afghans near to me with my fists. I’ve still got the scars from one of the guys' teeth that I broke, on the back of my hand. And the crowd moved back briefly, obviously through shock. I must have hit three guys. My glasses had been smashed into my face, I had blood in my eyes. I kept having to put my fingers in my eyes and push the blood out of them. And then some sort of religious guy, an imam in a long robe, came up and took me by the arm and slowly walked me away, after which the crowd skittered stones along the road surface, but not at me any more. And he handed me over to the Red Cross. Effectively, he saved my life.
CF: During or after such an ordeal, does it cross your mind that "this isn’t worth it"?
RF: Quite the opposite. I went back to the same village the next day, covered in bandages, to try and find the people who did it. I went back because although they didn’t steal my bag, my passport, my money or my resident’s card, they stole my contacts book. I went back and offered a hundred dollars for it, which is more than a lot of money there, and no-one had the book. I’ve never got it back since. Though when I wrote about the event, I put a line in the story saying it had been taken, and a lot of people who knew I knew them then wrote to me with their phone numbers again, so I could start a new contacts book. But where is the original contacts book now, I often wonder?
CF: One assumes a certain fearlessness is required for this line of work. Are you ever terrified?
RF: Of course. Every war is terrifying, and if you don’t feel terrified, you’ll get killed. But you have to use the energy that you would otherwise use on panicking to think. The other thing you learn is that when you commit yourself to a decision, whether it be to drive across a bridge or run across a road, you don’t have a second chance. You’re absolutely committed to it and you’ve got to keep going, you can’t stop in the middle and change your mind. And that means also, of course, that you end up doing the same in your private life. You start making decisions about your work or your life in the same way – very quickly, and you never change your mind.
CF: You’ve made plain your personal opposition to the occupation of Iraq.
RF: I wouldn’t think of it like that. I hope I’ve made plain the Iraqi people’s opposition to it. Don’t worry about me!
CF: That said, your reportage provides a startling contrast to the journalists who just cheerlead the American military from the safety of their luxury hotel rooms. Do you argue the case with them?
RF: I tend to work alone as a journalist, so I don’t really have very frequent conversations with my colleagues. You can come to London, Washington, Dublin or wherever and pretend to yourself that democracy is going to break out, that the country is getting better. But it’s clearly not; it’s getting worse by the day. So anyone who says, in these circumstances, that the Americans and British must stay is completely out of touch with reality. It’s not a question of personally wanting them out. The equation is simple: the Americans should go, the Americans must go, and the Americans can’t go. That’s the equation that turns sand into blood.
CF: You think it’s now impossible for them to extricate themselves?
RF: Theoretically, they can. They can drive their vehicles out tomorrow. But as a major superpower, there is no way they could now abandon their mission and pretend victory has been achieved. And still Blair and Bush insist that the place is getting better, in defiance of all the evidence. At some point, myth and reality are bound to collide with a huge detonation. There is a very serious problem here, in that people around the world believe – or want to believe – that Iraq is a fledgling democracy on the road to recovery. If you’re in Iraq, whether as a journalist, an Iraqi or an American soldier, you know that it’s falling to bits and deteriorating daily, and that it can’t now be repaired along the lines we supposedly wanted it to, with freedom and democracy and so forth. We, outside Iraq, might look at the television and see wall-to-wall coverage of the referendum on the Iraqi constitution. But if you’re an Iraqi in Baghdad, you’re forcing your womenfolk to stay at home in case they get kidnapped and sold into prostitution, you’re forcing your kids to stay at home in case they’re kidnapped for money. There were over a thousand civilian dead in Baghdad alone in July. You’ve greater concerns: you’re trying to get money to buy gasoline to fuel a generator, to keep the house air-conditioned, to keep the fridge running. They’re not sitting in their living rooms discussing the referendum on the constitution. We are; they’re not. These two levels of unreality and reality collide.
CF: How do you feel about journalists who file reports from inside their hotel rooms rather than the street?
RF: I don’t mind journalists who stay in their hotels; they’ve got families, they don’t want to take the risk, that’s fine and understandable. My problem is that they don’t tell their viewers, their readers or their listeners that they don’t leave the hotel. They write with a pseudo-authority, giving everybody the impression that they’re going on the streets and are checking out the stories. That’s my problem with them.
CF: Would you concur that most of the reportage is now straightforward war propaganda?
RF: Most reporting of Iraq has become that way. If these guys want to move around Iraq, they go with the military – they embed themselves, to use that horrible phrase. Or they sit in the hotel room. The AP (Associated Press), for example, lives behind two armoured walls in Baghdad, and the American staffers do not leave, ever. The New York Times lives in a stockade with four watchtowers, guarded by Iraqis with rifles wearing New York Times T-shirts. But their readers are unaware of this. I don’t stay in luxury hotels. I usually stay with families. In any event, the idea that the hotels could be described as luxurious is a bit of a myth. The Hamara hotel in Iraq, where I often stay, is a fleapit, it’s got cockroaches in the bedrooms.
CF: Your writing on the subject is outspoken, and undoubtedly the opposite of what the Allied powers would like you to write. Are you subject to surveillance?
RF; No, I don’t think so. In Baghdad, that would be impossible. The powers that be can’t go on the streets. So how could they survey me when I’m actually on them? They don’t want to and I don’t think they care: they can read what I write. They don’t like it, but they can live with it. I should add that lots of the Westerners in Baghdad actually ring me to say, "Keep it up", including Western troops. Because the soldiers know exactly what’s going on, they’re not under any illusions.
CF; With reference to the Lockerbie bombing, are you still convinced that Libya was uninvolved?
RF: No, I’m not convinced Libya was uninvolved, but I have grave doubts about the official storyline. Immediately after Lockerbie, the various government sources and intelligence services that like to spin the press were all telling journalists in London and Washington that this was a Syrian hand. And I remember one day when Ahmed Jibril, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine leader, suddenly blurted out at a press conference, "They’re trying to give me a kangaroo court, they want to lock me up for Lockerbie, I didn’t do it." The PFLP headquarters was in Damascus, not in Libya. And if you read the official report, the judgement on the two Libyan agents who were locked up for it, far too much is made of a dubious connection to Malta, which it’s accepted is where the suitcases originated. The actual ‘proof’ connecting Libya with the events in Malta is very hazy and very nebulous.
CF: Relations between Washington and Tripoli, which were glacial for years, seem to have thawed.
RF; First of all, the idea that Gaddafi was trying to build a nuclear bomb is ridiculous. When I stay in Libya, they can’t even repair the lavatories in their hotels. I think there was a cook-up, I think the Blairs of this world needed further proof that the Iraqi adventure had done some good. "Look, we went into Iraq, and now Gaddafi has surrendered his nuclear weapons!" Although there was equipment found, there was no attempt at testing. It defies credibility.
CF; In your judgment, would the ‘War On Terror’ have been possible without the events of 9/11?
RF; I don’t know the answer. The real problem started when Bush pronounced after that day that "they have changed the world for ever." This was rubbish. My personal reaction was that I’m not going to let 19 Arab murderers change my world, but Bush apparently wants us to believe that we should let them. 9/11 opened the way for the ideological project which had been sitting around in Washington for a long time, which was to reshape the map of the Middle East, as the British and French had after the First World War. Only it was dreamed up for ideological reasons, rather than matters of national interest or military necessity. And so it turned into folly, as any clear-sighted person could have foreseen, because it was built on a pack of lies. As we now know, weapons of mass destruction, links between Saddam and 9/11, the 45-minute release, these are now accepted as blatant lies. But they were desperate for any excuse, and it was quite clear even before 9/11 that something was going to happen. I used to think about the Middle East and wonder, "How long will the Muslims put up with this?" Several times, on television shows and in print, I had said, "There is an explosion about to come." Others thought I was being sensationalist, that people didn’t hate us that much. But those of us who spent time there could tell that something was coming. To answer your question, the timing of the ‘War On Terror’ might have been different, but something was going to happen, even if it wasn’t aeroplanes crashing into tall buildings.
CF; Were you recently refused entry to the United States?
RF: I was not. I must clear this up. This story comes from a newspaper called The New Mexican. I went to Canada en route to the US, and I took the wrong passport from Beirut ‘cause I was very tired when I left. And United Airlines pointed out to me that I wouldn’t get in. Nobody has banned me from the United States.
CF: How did you feel when it was widely reported that you had been?
RF; That’s what happens on the internet, which fortunately I don’t use. The internet is an institution of bullshit.
CF; Through Shannon, is Ireland leaving itself exposed to the risk of terrorist target?
RF: If al-Qa’ida are looking for targets, they’ll look for much bigger ones than that. There are so many countries giving assistance of some kind to the United States, they can’t all be targets. El Salvador still has troops there, and no-one suggests it’s about to be bombed. I think if you read what Bin Laden says, it’s quite clear that he’s specifically stated that the countries in danger are America and Britain. He’s certainly never mentioned Ireland, and I’d be surprised if he knows much about the place. I’ve never heard a whisper in the Middle East to the effect that Shannon has caused enmity to Ireland.
CF: You met Bin Laden, didn’t you?
RF: Yes, I had that pleasure.
CF: What was he like?
RF: I haven’t seen him since 1997, although he wanted to see me after the 11th of September 2001, but I couldn’t. In some ways he’s a very worldly-ignorant man. He kept saying he thought there’d be a civil war in America between the US states, which is ridiculous. And clearly, his chief obsession is to try and get rid of the House of Saud, in Saudi Arabia. If he devotes his time to doing that, he won’t have time to worry about Washington and London. But Bin Laden himself is not especially important. This idea we have that "if we catch the leadership, the institutions will collapse" is a peculiarly Western idea. It really doesn’t work out that way in the Middle East. Saddam has been captured, and the insurgency is more venomous than before.
CF: Did Bin Laden seem primarily motivated by religion?
RF: I think there’s several things. I think he sees himself as a historical personality because of his struggle against the Russians between 1980 and 1988 in Afghanistan. He was a fighter, he was wounded five times. He was one of us then, he was working for the Americans, much as Saddam was when he invaded Iran. Obviously, he takes religion very seriously. But I also think he’s becoming a rather vain man. I’ve noticed that each time I met him, his clothes seemed to have become a little finer. The last videotape I saw of him, he was wearing an embroidered gown I’d never seen him in before. Remember, he sees himself too as this lonely Islamist who has visions in caves, and of course the Prophet Muhammad was a lonely man who had visions in caves. He’s never said to me that he seems himself as following a direct line from the Prophet Muhammad, but obviously it’s crossed my mind, and certainly his followers would not miss the connection.
CF: When London was bombed, the response seemed very calm and measured in comparison with the 9/11 hysteria.
RF: Well, the casualties were somewhat less. If we’d lost 3,000 people, it would have been somewhat different. I was in London that day. I was two trains in front of that Tube on the Piccadilly Line going to Heathrow, on my way to Istanbul. You must realise that the British have been here before – forget World War Two, it was a long time ago and few people here remember it now. But the IRA bombed England repeatedly, so I think the English people are fairly inured to this kind of bomb. If the casualties had been greater, public opinion would have differed accordingly.
CF: What’s your response to the attacks on you by Eoghan Harris?
RF: I yawn. I know he says bad things about me, but I don’t read him and I have no interest in anything he has to say. Let him go to Baghdad and tell us what he thinks about what’s going on in Iraq. Then I might read his reporting.
CF: Do you have time to pursue an interest in music or cinema?
RF: Yes, I love classical music. I used to play the violin, and I frequently go to concerts in Beirut. And I’m very interested in cinema. This year, I’ve been especially impressed with Untergang (Downfall), the Hitler biopic, and Kingdom Of Heaven which was a very powerful film made by Ridley Scott about the Crusades. It’s hugely relevant at the minute, and in fact, many Muslims thought it was an excellent film, though some made fools of themselves by condemning it before they’d seen it, as usual.
CF: Did you read Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses?
RF: I didn’t. I’m aware of the Rushdie situation, but I never saw any reason to meet him. For me at the time, there were many innocent people being killed and wounded in the Middle East, and the concentration on the dangers to this one man seemed to me to be totally disproportionate. However much in danger he was, it was difficult to see him as a martyr when I was seeing so many people in their hundreds lying dead – for the person on the ground in the Middle East, it wasn’t of great interest. I noted it – it was fascinating in terms of Anglo-Iranian relations. It was far from a triviality. If you threaten someone’s life, and you kill his translators, that is an important matter. But I was seeing worse things on a daily basis.