DISCUSSION
Increasing dangers should not deter journalists from 'naming the bad
guys'
TOPIC:
"Frontlines and Deadlines: A View from the War Zones"
SPEAKER
Robert Fisk, correspondent, The Independent
When John Owen first called me in Beirut and asked me to talk to you
this
morning about journalists under fire, several names immediately came to
mind because they are colleagues and friends who proved how easy it is
for
a journalist to die in the Middle East: Bob Pfeffer, Larry Buchman, Sean
Toolin, Clark Todd, Tewfig Ghazali and Bahij Metni.
Bob Pfeffer worked for Stern and was investigating Palestinian
gun-running
when four members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
murdered him with automatic rifle fire outside the door of his home.
Sean filed for The London Observer and was killed when two men, probably
Palestinians, stabbed him to death by hitting him in the face with an
ice
pick on Abdul-Aziz Street, not far from my home.
Clark stayed in the Druze village as the Phalange militia closed in on
it,
took a piece of shrapnel in the chest, wrote a last message to his wife
on
the pillowcase, and -- if one of the villagers I spoke to is to be
believed -- was finished off by a Phalangist militiaman who shot him to
death as he lay wounded on a sofa.
Tewfig and Bahij were CBS cameramen blown, quite literally, to pieces by
an Israeli tank shell which was fired, so the Israelis claimed, at what
they called "terrorists."
But I never imagined, when I originally wrote these first words for this
talk, that I would find myself offering the name of another reporter who
should have been sitting with us here this morning -- that of Veronica
Guerin -- savagely murdered by hit men for a Dublin mafia boss. I worked
in Ireland for five years and no man or woman there, back in the '70s,
would ever kill a journalist. As one of Veronica's Irish colleagues said
to me last night, "Everything has changed now. If it can happen once, it
can happen again." A journalist, a mother, a great writer -- murdered
because she had the guts to tell the truth. And the journalists who
gather
for Veronica's funeral tomorrow morning will feel anger and rage and
pity
and -- let us forgive them, for it applies to all of us when our
colleagues die -- a little fear as well.
In Algeria, almost 50 journalists have been killed, almost all of them
working in the local press -- deliberately, grotesquely, their heads
often
severed from their backbones by men who call themselves Islamists, and
who
claimed the journalists worked for the military-backed government, even
though some of those journalists had been imprisoned by that same
government. My French colleague, Olivier Quemener, gave me a cheerful
farewell in the Al Djezair hotel in Algiers a couple of years ago. He
was
off to the Casbah to film, he said. I was going to the Kouba district of
the city. When I returned to our hotel, Quemener was dead -- shot in
the
chest and killed by a man who claimed he was an Islamist. His reporter,
gravely wounded, was found lying, weeping beside his friend's body.
In Bosnia, the cull of reporters and photographers and cameramen reached
such proportions that we started armoring ourselves -- strapping 14
kilos
of steel to our chests and backs and then curling ourselves into the
bosoms of armored cars. A few weeks in Sarajevo and I realized why
medieval knights had to be winched onto their horses by cranes. Running
was so exhausting that I scarcely had the energy to file a report; the
danger, so awful, that I was almost too frightened to perform the
physical
act of writing.
We ask ourselves, of course, why we do it. Those of us who do not die
find
our own reasons. In a world of deceit, I believe we are among the few
independent witnesses to history and to its wickedness. And although the
risks are increasing as the old traditional protection bestowed upon
journalists decays, I still believe we should be out there, naming the
bad
guys. In other words, I still think the risks are worth taking. But I
use
the word "think," and let me tell you why:
Because weaponry is growing more sophisticated in the science of
killing.
Because we are not always supported by those who should wish to protect
us
but (who) instead ignore our requests for help or curse us for our
attempt
to tell the truth.
Because journalists are being verbally targeted ever more assiduously by
governments and pressure groups who wish to demean our work and prove
that
the risks we take are worthless.
This may not be the message you expected to hear from me this morning,
so
let me, from my own experience, be more precise. Let's start with the
weaponry. This is a tiny steel arrow. It was one of hundreds of equally
tiny steel arrows packed into an Israeli tank shell that killed five
civilians near the Lebanese town of Nabatea a couple of years ago. The
shell is proximity-fused, timed to explode above the ground and turn any
human beneath it to meat. These shells have been fired frequently over
southern Lebanon. Since the danger of kidnapping by the Hezbollah (has
subsided), these are my greatest fear and my greatest nightmare. And
here
is part of an aerial bomb dropped close to a U.N. convoy in which I was
traveling in April, just a tiny bit of shrapnel that hissed over us,
red-hot enough to sever a head or two.
During that same Israeli offensive last April, set off when Hezbollah
guerrillas fired Katyusha rockets into Israel after the killing of a
Lebanese village boy by a bomb -- for which the Hezbollah claimed the
Israelis were responsible and the Israelis said they were not -- Israeli
gunboats shelled the coast road on which all of us journalists have to
travel between Beirut and southern Lebanon. They were shooting, they
said,
at terrorists. Two American reporters and a British journalist asked
their
editors to make a demarche to the Israeli embassies in London and in
Washington to protest the risk of death that their reporters were
running
at the hands of the Israelis in order to get the story. The British
editor, not, I should add, my editor, declined to approach the Israelis
because he said he didn't see the point. Both American editors refused
to
complain on their reporters' behalf because they said it would make no
difference. In the end, it was we journalists in the field who had to
discover that the Israeli gunboats cannot penetrate rain or fog with
their
radar. Thus, it was the pre-dawn mist off the sea and the decision to
drive in rain squalls -- not editors -- which helped to save us.
Now, I'll refer briefly to my paper, The Independent, which has loyally
defended me and stood by my stories over many years. On the day of the
Qana massacre, I spent seven hours under Israeli fire, had air strikes
250
meters from my location on three occasions and ended the day walking in
the blood of a hundred dead refugees. Most of the letters from
Independent
readers thanked me for trying to tell how it was. Others did not. Let me
quote from one of these. "I do not like or admire anti-Semites. Hitler
was
one of the most famous in recent history. You are a disgrace to a
profession that should report the news."
Nor should you believe that this kind of slander comes from those who
support Israel, right or wrong. When I reported on Egypt's deeply flawed
elections last year and investigated systematic torture and human rights
abuses by the Egyptian State Security Police, I was attacked in Egypt's
most prestigious newspaper, Al Ahram, by the columnist Abdul Aziz
Ramadan.
I was guilty, he said, of "spreading lies and deceit." I was
"discredited," a "spiteful liar," a "fake," a "black crow pecking at the
corpse of Egypt."
And, after I investigated torture in the state security police
headquarters in Bahrain -- a headquarters run, by the way, by a British
former Special Branch officer called Ian Henderson -- the Bahrain
newspaper, Akbar al-Khaleej, portrayed me in a cartoon, along with two
colleagues -- Simon Ingram of the BBC and Christopher Walker of The
Times
-- as a rabid dog, straining on what was labeled a Murdoch/Maxwell
leash,
in my attempt to get my teeth into a bag of cash.
Humorous enough, you might think. Certainly nothing to worry a
hard-skinned reporter. True, but in the Arab world, a dog -- a kelb --
is
something dirty. There is a word, najis in Arabic, dirty like a dog. A
dog
is an animal scarcely worthy of life, certainly not one whose life
should
be protected. And rabid dogs should be put down, exterminated.
Lastly, a more disturbing example of the reason why I say I "think,"
rather than I "believe," about the risks we take. In 1993, I made three
films with director Michael Dutfield called "Beirut to Bosnia" -- in
Lebanon, Gaza, Israel, Egypt and Bosnia itself. They were made for
Channel
4 in Britain and The Discovery Channel in the United States. They were
an
attempt to show why so much hatred and mistrust was building up against
the West in the Muslim world. We filmed the Hezbollah, Hamas, the
Israeli
army during curfews, Israeli settlers, the family of a Holocaust victim
whose tragic family history we retraced in Poland, and the forced
evacuation of Muslims from their homes in Northern Bosnia. We were
threatened with government censorship in Egypt, sniped at and shelled in
Sarajevo, ordered to stop filming three times by Israeli troops in Gaza.
Yet, after the film first aired in the States, Israeli lobby groups
brought commercial pressure to bear on Discovery. Credit cards were
returned to American Express, one of the U.S. sponsors, cut in half.
One
letter claimed that we should have called the occupied West Bank
"disputed" rather than "occupied." To say, as we did, that Israel
builds
huge Jewish settlements on Arab land -- all facts acknowledged by
Israeli
human rights groups, as well as by foreign correspondents and diplomats
--
was, according to the letter, twisted history. To say that Israeli
troops
sent the Phalangists into the Sabra and Chatila camp at the time of the
1982 Palestinian massacre -- an incontrovertible damning fact, agreed by
Israel's own commission of inquiry -- was "an egregious falsehood."
Another letter from a lobby group described me as "spreading venom into
the living rooms of America." I was, and I quote, "Henry Higgins with
fangs."
Less funny, however, was Discovery's decision after receiving these
extraordinary letters not to give the film a second showing. Asked if he
had canceled the second showing because of pressures from these
lobbyists,
Clark Bunting, the channel's senior vice president, replied, "Given the
reaction to the series upon its initial airing, we never scheduled a
subsequent airing, so there is not really an issue as to any scheduled
re-airing being canceled." When I read these gutless words, ladies and
gentlemen, I was ashamed to be a foreign correspondent.
Now, this, as the title of my talk says, is a view from the war zones --
a
jaundiced view perhaps, certainly a personal one. But as one of those
who
has to drive into the smoke and fire from time to time, far too often,
and
I expect ever more frequently, I draw several conclusions:
We are killed because of ill fortune and because the technology of death
has improved.
We are killed because of the evil of those who murder us to keep us
quiet.
We are, in effect, killed too because we are attacked by those who wish
to
take away our identity as honest witnesses, who wish to demean us, call
us
liars or racists, and thus, in effect, make us unworthy of the
protection
we so often need.
Why, after all, should anyone care about a journalist whose work can be
discarded for commercial reasons, or whose peers simply fail at the
lowest
hurdle to plead their reporters' cause? This last category, the lobby
groups, the abusive journalists on government newspapers, are not
killers
in themselves, of course. But they seek to make our lives less worthy,
and
thus provide an environment in which our deaths are a small matter. So
the message I find in my particular front line is a simple one: Defend
our
work and you protect our lives.
DISCUSSION
Jerry Lewis (Israel Radio): Why is it you seem to believe that
everything
that seems to go wrong has an Israel bias? I refer specifically to your
television documentaries, except for the one on Bosnia itself. But [in]
the ones concerning the Middle East, you seem to imply throughout that
Israel's hidden hand is the cause of all the ills in the region.
Robert Fisk: That's your interpretation. It's certainly not mine.
Peter Hunter (manager of safety services for BBC News): One of the
problems we have is that most journalists are not trained to protect
themselves. What we have been trying to do for the BBC is to provide
lightweight, high-quality body armor, which in fact enables you to do
your
job.
Fisk: I don't know how to get around the body-armor problem. We never
used
it in Lebanon under shell fire in the siege of Beirut in '82, which was
just as bad as Sarajevo. The reason is it was too hot. In southern
Lebanon, when I am on U.N. convoys and they are under fire, I wear a
U.N.
flack jacket, which is very light. Otherwise, I'm in my ordinary
clothes.
It goes up to 110 degrees.
If [journalists] haven't been to war before, [they should] forget
everything they ever saw in Hollywood and realize that war is not about
victory or defeat -- it's about death. The learning process comes in
learning what roads to go down instead of rushing into the story,
slowing
down and asking the local people, "Have you seen anything? Has anyone
come
up this road in the other direction? If a car flashes its lights at you,
why is it doing so?" These things I was told before I covered the war in
Lebanon. But I didn't learn it until I was there, because you don't. If
journalists spend as much time thinking about war as they do fitting on
body armor and working out what their blood group is, it would do a lot
of
good. Journalists should read about what war is really like, over and
over, before they go.
Phil Hammond (London International Research Exchange): Why now is it
such
a topic of discussion, the risks that journalists take? Is it that the
profession has become more dangerous? Or is it that conflicts are seen
nowadays as something which threaten Western countries? Also I wonder
whether you think it's still a danger, or more of a danger, nowadays
that
journalists identify closely with the military.
Fisk: We've been talking about it for years, and I've been thinking
about
[the risks] every day for 20 years in the Middle East. I think the
reason
why we speak more about it publicly now is there are many more
journalists. Television and radio has just blossomed with more and more
correspondents, and with more journalists there are more deaths.
I don't think it is healthy for journalists to meld into the military or
into the government. There are countries, not the United States, not
largely Britain, that do constantly challenge military assumptions.
France
is one. Mr. Lewis will tell you that Israeli journalists are constantly
challenging the military assumptions and criticizing them most harshly,
in
a way that in Britain we do not do. If you look at the Israeli press's
treatment of Israeli generals when they have made mistakes, they are
very
savage, and that's democracy. When you look at what the British and
American press do, it's pathetic. We don't challenge these people,
especially at a time of war when we need to, because there is,
particularly in the United States, this dictatorship of consensus -- the
feeling to criticize or suggest that your allies may be wrong is somehow
unpatriotic. And that's enough to keep you off the networks.
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