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. ---