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Man of war
He's been bombed, shot at and severely beaten. His re****ting over 30
years in the Middle East has earned him many awards - and as many
enemies. So, at 61, is Robert Fisk finally ready to leave Beirut? Not a
bit of it, says Rachel Cooke
Over the years, the balcony of Robert Fisk's flat in Beirut, which looks
out over the city's renowned Corniche, has taken on a legendary quality.
In his writing, he mentions it often, as a place of refuge: it is where
he wants to be as he tries to forget the quotidian horror of his working
day. Having survived countless shells in the more than 30 years he has
lived in the building, it has come to stand for Fisk's longevity as a
re****ter, his endurance and also, perhaps, his luck. In his book The
Great War for Civilisation, he describes the way that, in the years
since the American-led invasion of Iraq, he wakes to the sound of the
wind swi****ng through the branches of the palm trees outside his window
and thinks: 'Where will today's explosion be?' (Answer: on his doorstep.
Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon, was murdered on 14
February 2005, probably by the Syrians, only yards from Fisk's home, in
an explosion so fierce the aforementioned palm trees dipped towards him
as if 'in a tornado'.) It is, then - at least on the page - a place of
peace and tranquillity, of quiet before the permanent storm that is life
in the Middle East.
In reality, though, it is not quite like this. I've stood on more
relaxing traffic islands. It is early evening, and Fisk and I are
sitting on this famous balcony in the gloom of a Beirut power cut. We
are talking - or, rather, he is talking. Luckily he has a loud,
uncompromising kind of a voice and the balcony is tiny, so he is close
to me, both of which ensure that I can hear him above the roar of
cruising Mercedes below. It is the end of a long day - he picked me up
at nine this morning for a drive south to the border with Israel, and
I've been with him every minute since - but, if anything, Fisk's energy,
unlike my own, increases with every word he utters. On he goes:
unrelenting, furious, pernickety and labyrinthine in argument. Every
anecdote involves three dusty side alleys, every explanation three
historical examples. Worn down by these things, I ask - too casually, I
see now - if he thinks that, once the Americans exit Iraq (he believes
that they will do this soon; that the US media is already preparing the
ground by running articles bemoaning - I paraphrase - the fact that the
Iraqis simply don't deserve what the US has offered them), there will be
a civil war. 'Do you CARE?' he shouts. Perhaps I look startled, because
he now corrects himself. 'Do WE care? I don't think we do.'
It's at this point that I start to think longingly of my hotel room in
the Holiday Inn; not the old Holiday Inn, which stood close to the green
line during the Lebanese civil war and is a pockmarked, shelled-out
monument to terror to this day, but a new one, above a smart shopping
mall. But it's difficult to get away. For one thing, every time I open
my mouth to make my excuses, either he interrupts - Bin Laden this, Noam
Chomsky that - or he takes another mobile phone call (no call can be
missed, no matter that those coming in tonight are not from top contacts
but from groups wanting to book him for lectures). When I do finally
lift my bottom from my seat, he takes it as an op****tunity to show me
his desk - on it, a set of Russian dolls decorated with the faces of
Israeli prime ministers and a framed postcard of the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand in the moments before his assassination in 1914 (Fisk's father
fought in the trenches in the First World War, a fact that has had a
profound influence on his own life). At last he puts me in a taxi,
though not before he has reminded me that he'll pick me up at 5.30am so
that we can travel to the air****t together: he is off to Canada to
lecture; I'm going home to sleep like the dead. It's kind of him to take
such care of me, but I can't say I feel too grateful at this moment.
Will he still be like this in the morning? Fisk's long-suffering driver,
Abed, was right: one day with him is like a month with anyone else.
Robert Fisk is one of the most famous journalists in the world, and one
of the most divisive. Many revere him both for the muscular quality of
his re****ting - in a world numbed by 24/7 television, he makes news seem
gripping and im****tant and full of pity - and for his refusal to shy
away from saying that which few other writers dare to put down on the
page. No one escapes the heat of his ire: neither Bush nor Blair,
neither Israel nor the Arab dictator****ps. For him, journalism is about
'naming the guilty' and sod the consequences. In his more than 30 years
as a Middle East correspondent - during which time he has survived
bombs, bullets, two kidnap attempts and, perhaps most notoriously, a
thorough beating at the hands of a group of Afghan refugees in Pakistan
- he has won more awards than any other foreign news journalist and has
written two bestselling and acclaimed books: Pity the Nation, a
devastating history of the Lebanese civil war, and The Great War for
Civilisation, a 1,300 page history, with eyewitness accounts lifted
directly from his own notebooks, of the 'conquest' of the Middle East
(his latest book, The Age of the Warrior, a collection of his
journalism, has just been published). Fisk's lectures sell out across
the world; at his book signings, the queue extends out of the door.
For others, though, Fisk is a hate figure, especially since 9/11, when
he outraged many by asking what had motivated those who were responsible
for the attacks. As a result, he received extensive hate mail. 'My
father thinks he's the Antichrist,' said a friend of mine when I told
her that I was going to meet him. His enemies accuse Fisk of being
'biased'; he is anti-west and anti-Israel, they argue. Usually they stop
short of calling him anti-semitic, though this does happen sometimes.
Alan Dershowitz, the liberal Harvard law professor, has called Fisk
'pro-terrorist' and 'anti-American', which, he added at the time, 'is
the same as anti-semitic'. (Fisk's approach to this sort of thing is
robust: anyone who makes this accusation in print can expect to hear
from his lawyer.) His enemies also accuse him of getting his facts
wrong. In 2001, the word 'Fisking' passed into the language, meaning a
point-by-point refutation of a news story. The term was named after Fisk
because he is such a frequent and, his enemies would say, deserving
target of this kind of treatment.
For my own part, I admire his bravery - that, at least, is indisputable
- and his writing; he is a brilliant re****ter, and I feel this even when
I disagree with him. At the Israeli border, where Fisk wants to check
out the rumour that south Lebanon's villages are empty of their young
men, all of whom have gone to Iran to train as Hizbollah fighters in the
expectation that there will soon be another war, I am struck by his
charm, his refusal to accept his interviewees' answers at face value,
and his eye for the telling detail. His book Pity the Nation is without
peer. But it is worrying that he refers to himself repeatedly in the
third person. 'Have you read any Fisk?' he asks me on the telephone
before I land in Beirut, a question that is insulting on so many levels.
And now I'm here, he keeps calling himself 'Mr Bob'. Oh, well.
When we get back from our trip, we eat lunch in the heart of Rafik
Hariri's rebuilt Beirut, in streets so beautiful that it's almost
vertigo-inducing to consider the way that, two hours down the road, I
see how people are still trying to recover from the Israeli bombs of
2006. Does he ever get used to this, to landing in normality after a day
out in the field? He looks dismissive. 'I was talking to an Armenian
girl the other day,' he says. 'She said: "How has Lebanon changed you?"
It was the same week that Antoine Ghanem [the Lebanese anti-Syrian MP,
murdered in September 2007] was killed in his car. I saw him in his car,
dead, blood everywhere. I was totally unmoved by it. That's what Lebanon
has done to me, and it has done exactly the same to the Lebanese.'
Does it appal him, this numbness? 'No. If you do the job I do, you're
going to see a lot of dead people. My anger is still there. I name the
guilty party, and **** them if they don't like it. At Sabra-Shatila
[when, in 1982, Christian Phalangists murdered some 2,000 Palestinian
refugees while the Israeli army stood by], I'd never seen so many
bodies. I stopped counting at 100. I climbed over corpses. I remember
thinking: if these people have souls, they would want me to be there. I
thought they would treat me as a friend for that reason. So I wasn't
horrified. I was horrified that they had been murdered, but that
[manifested itself in] anger. I thought: the ****ing people who did
this. I knew some of them. I've met some of them since! Of course, this
may be very arrogant of me. Maybe they'd prefer not to have Mr Robert
wandering around. People are frightened of dead bodies because they're
frightened of dying. I'm very careful. I want to live a long time. But
I'm not afraid of the institution. I'm one of the few people who knows
he's going to die.'
But if he doesn't want to die, why has he done his job for such a long
time? He is 61; most men would have long since hung up their flak jacket
(not that Fisk deigns to wear one). 'There is nothing so satisfying as
to be shot at without effect.' So he is addicted to danger? 'William
Dalrymple called me a war junkie in his silly book. No, I don't have a
desire for it. I'm appalled and infuriated by it.' So what does he mean:
that it is exciting? 'When I came here, there was no doubt it was
exciting. I was 29. At that age, your experience is movies, in which the
hero always lives. So you think you'll live. I remember bullets whizzing
past me like bees, feeling the air pressure change as they did. Back in
Europe, you could dine out on your experiences for ages. But I was
frightened.' Being frightened is a necessary side-effect if you're to
tell readers what is happening. Fisk is dismissive of what he calls
'hotel journalism', a trend that has reached its nadir in Iraq, where
re****ters stay largely inside the Green Zone; they might as well, he
says, be re****ting from County Mayo.
But against such a background, does the rest of life - love, friend****p,
home - seem more or less im****tant? Fisk refuses to discuss his private
life (he is divorced from the journalist Lara Marlowe), but such an
existence must play havoc with relation****ps. 'If you don't use your
terror to think properly, you're dead,' he says. 'The thing that's bad
about that is you start making other decisions in life too quickly:
where to buy a house, where to go on holiday.' All he'll say about the
other stuff is: 'I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last
book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: you can't
rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East.
There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.
Was it the right thing to do? I could have been in Paris with a safe
job, watching children grow up. Then I remembered the letter in which
the foreign editor of the Times offered me the job [he left the Times
for the Independent in 1988]. It was like King Abdullah being offered
Jordan, or Faisal, Iraq. Sitting there, I realised that if I had my time
over, I still would have gone. I would have lived this life. I can't
imagine a more eventful, dramatic life.' So when is he happy? 'Oh, when
I'm bought lunch by The Observer.'
The trouble is that he has 'so many' friends. 'You don't know people as
well as you should. It's a bit like having four stories to write in a
day: you can't concentrate on any of them.' In The Great War for
Civilisation, he recalls that in 2001, after he was beaten up by
refugees on the Afghan border - they reduced him to tears and left him
with a problem with his balance, but he said afterwards that he didn't
blame them for their fury - the second person to call him as he lay
bleeding in bed was Rafik Hariri, then the Lebanese prime minister. He
tells this story somewhat proudly, but it makes me feel a little sad for
him.
Fisk was born in 1946 in Maidstone, Kent, an only child. His father, the
borough treasurer of Maidstone Council, seems to have been quite a
distant man: 'a man of his time', says Fisk, who was closer to his
mother. Bill Fisk had fought in the trenches and used to take his small
son round the battlefields of the Great War each year. By the time
Robert was 14, he could recite the names of all the offensives: Bapaume,
Hill 60, High Wood, Passchendaele. Fisk is adamant that he is not a
soldier manqué, that his career is not some kind of atonement for his
failure - his generation's failure - to have fought in a war. But still,
there is a link between his father's life and his work. After the Allied
victory in 1918, the victors divided up the lands of their former
enemies. As he notes in the preface to The Great War for Civilisation,
in the space of 17 months they created the borders of Northern Ireland,
Yugoslavia and the Middle East - the very places where Fisk has spent
the past 30 years watching people 'burn'. He decided when he was just 12
that he wanted to be a re****ter, after seeing Hitchcock's Foreign
Correspondent. He took a degree in linguistics and classics at Lancaster
University - his digs were on the front at Morecambe - and then joined
the Newcastle Evening Chronicle as a cub re****ter. From 1972, he was
Belfast correspondent for the Times. Then, in 1979, he was dispatched to
Beirut, from where he re****ted on the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq
war, the Gulf war, the Balkan conflict and, of course, on more than a
decade of Lebanon's 15-year civil war. During the hostage crisis, he was
the only western male journalist who stayed in Beirut. 'I thought: if
you leave, you'll never come back. There was the danger of
contamination, that people would think I was a spy. There are still
people who think I'm a spy because I am a foreigner, because I wasn't
kidnapped.'
It's a crazed exaggeration to say that his being offered the Middle East
was like Faisal being offered Iraq, but still, it was something of a
poisoned chalice: replete with stories and adventure, but also with a
ravenous kind of danger. When he arrived, the war was four years old.
Were his parents worried about him? 'My father became so as the years
went by, but at first he just told me: "Don't worry about shells, worry
about snipers." When he died, my landlord, Mustapha, said: "I don't
think you would have survived without him", and he was right.' When the
Israelis finally ordered all journalists to leave West Beirut, his
mother somehow got through on the telephone - a miracle, given the
shelling - and when he told her that he was staying put (he believed the
Israelis wanted journalists to leave so they could get on with killing
people), she said: 'Yes, we thought you should stay.' Even so, as their
only child, didn't he ever feel guilty? 'No, it didn't worry me at all.
I want to do what I want to do. I wanted to re****t the war. What else
would I do if I didn't do that? I would go mad.'
One of the striking things about Fisk is that he has never gone native -
or, as he puts it, 'become one of those mad loonies who go round wearing
kafias and empathising' - a fact he attributes to the fact that the Arab
world 'drives me up the wall', and to his father, 'who taught me to be
me: he was dismissive of people who tried to copy other people'. But how
does he feel about Lebanon? He has a house in Ireland, yet you cannot
imagine him ever leaving his flat on the Corniche. 'I don't like people
who say they love Lebanon,' he says. 'They come here, cream off the
stories they want, don't bother to learn the language [he speaks
Arabic], then go off and become Moscow correspondent. I love the life I
have here, but the Lebanese are dangerous people. They're hospitable,
gracious, cosmopolitan, learned, yet they can rip themselves to pieces
in a civil war and kill 150,000 people. Foreigners come here, they smile
and Lebanon smiles back, and they don't spot when she stops smiling.
Between "no problem" and haraam ["for shame"], there's about five
seconds. I treat the Lebanese with respect; most people don't. It's not
my country.' Does this statement include an element of fear? 'No. But I
think they live a great tragedy. Anyone living in an artificially
created country is living a tragedy. They risked their lives for me. [In
the hostage crisis] they used to put me in a Druze hat to take me to the
air****t.'
The phrase 'It's not my country' is one he uses several times, notably
when I bring up the subject of fundamentalism, about which he has
(unusually) little to say: 'It's not my country; I might [worry about
fundamentalism] if I were Lebanese.' When I worry aloud about women's
rights in the Muslim world - I've just been to Yemen to re****t on them -
he grows exasperated. 'Yes, and it's amazing that the great pastor
George W Bush, who cares so much about Christianity, is successfully
emptying Iraq of one of the oldest Christian communities in the Middle
East. You've got to take society as you find it, unless there is clear
evidence of torture or ***ual mutilation, and then education is the only
thing. Laws don't work. If we put as much money into computer science
and schools in the Middle East as we do into weapons, we would not have
the problems we have. But we don't do that. We want oil.' These
problems, he believes, are severe; the situation is more serious than at
any time since he came here. Those who say he is a doom-monger are just
wrong. 'I will not say there is any hope. I will not! We are in deep
****.'
When Fisk first arrived in Beirut, he believed that Israel would
survive. Now he is not so sure. The Israeli press is, he says,
self-delusional. The army is 'shabby, a rabble; they don't always obey
orders, and they don't always turn up'. In South Lebanon in 2006, they
got 'chucked out by Hizbollah, a third-rate militia'. He wonders
whether, if Israel's borders were really threatened - 'as opposed to
false threats; Ahmadinejad might as well work for the Israelis, and
maybe he does' - America would go to war for it. 'American power in the
Middle East is collapsing. It doesn't need much more than a shove, and
it will - and that's not going to be a good thing.' But I'm not exactly
sure why he thinks it will be a bad thing, because his next point is
that the west should leave the Middle East alone: 'We've got to stop
bombing them, either in a surrogate manner through Israel, or
directly... There are 22 times more western troops in the Muslim world
than there were at the time of the crusades... We come promising freedom
yet we always arrive with our horses and our swords, our Humvees and our
helicopter gun****ps.' When this collapse of US power does happen - he
won't give me a timescale - Israel's best bet will be to go back to its
international borders. Has Israel a right to exist? 'Yes, why not? I
think any group of people can have a homeland, but they've got to
remember that if they build it on other people's land, there will be a
problem with that, [especially if] they then treat the dispossessed as
animals.'
After I've paid our bill, Abed, Fisk's faithful driver, takes us to his
flat. Though my illusions about that peaceful balcony are somewhat
shattered, it's a lovely place: spare and cool and book-laden, with a
few handsome pieces of Syrian furniture. I switch my tape recorder on.
Off he goes again. We talk first about bias. 'We must pursue injustice.
This is not a football match where you re****t both sides. This is a
massive human tragedy. At Sabra-Shatila did I give equal time to the
Phalange? No, I did not. When I re****ted on a suicide bombing in an
Israeli pizzeria did I give equal time to Islamic Jihad? No. You talk to
the victims.' Then we talk about Osama Bin Laden, whom Fisk has
interviewed three times. 'Bin Laden is irrelevant. Killing him now is
like arresting the nuclear scientists after the atom bomb was invented.
The monster is born. Even when he does speak, we don't listen. He says
things [Arab] leaders will not say. He articulates injustice.' When,
finally, I can think of no more questions - or, at least, when I can go
on no longer - he seems surprised that my industry does not match his
own. I follow him downstairs to find a taxi and I think again what a
straight, almost military back he has. He is very proud. Perhaps I have
offended him with my exhaustion. Or does he just want for company?
So now let us cut to 5.30am, or thereabouts. The scene: the desk at the
executive lounge at Beirut International Air****t. Fisk is kindly asking
his friend, the woman who runs this executive lounge, if I might join
him, even though I'm travelling economy. She makes a joke. 'Maybe she
doesn't want to sit with you, Robert,' she says - or words to that
effect. Am I imagining it, or is there a knowing glint in her eye? I
walk in the direction of the nearest sofa, hoping the coffee will be
strong. He is, God love him, exactly the same in the morning: if this is
what he's like on four hours' sleep, I can only tremble at the thought
of him after eight.
· The Age of the Warrior, by Robert Fisk, is published by Fourth Estate,
priced £14.99. To order a copy for £13.99 with free UK p&p go to
observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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