|~||~||~|His new book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East is something of a depressing read, but that is an unavoidable result of Robert Fisk’s experiences in his 30 years as a Middle East correspondent for London’s Independent newspaper. Fisk is as a bubbly character, but at times, when he stares into the great wide open, there is a sense of emptiness in his eyes. This is, perhaps, a result of his experiences in Lebanon, where he witnessed 15 years of civil war; the Iran-Iraq war which killed two million people; and Afghanistan, where he met Osama bin Laden. Like in his first book, Pity the Nation ? which catalogued his time in Lebanon ? Fisk tells it as it is, transporting readers into the locations from which he narrates events on the ground.
Arabian Business: Why did you pick that headline and put the words war and civilisation in the same sentence?
Robert Fisk:
That is my father’s medal on the side of the book from the First World War. When my father died in 1992, at 93, I inherited that medal and I thought ‘that’s got to be the title’. In a period of 17 months that followed the First World War, my father’s war, the victors, the British and the French, drew the borders of Northern Ireland, Europe and most of the Middle East. I spent my entire professional life in Belfast, Belgrade, Bosnia, Beirut, and Baghdad reporting in the aftermath.
My father did at the time believe it was a war for civilisation and that a new world would come [because] of [US] president Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen points. The Americans, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War; the non profit organisations in the Middle Eastern region, who were of course missionary; and the American diplomats who were consuls to the dying Ottoman Empire ? they all urged Washington to create one modern Arab state from the southern Turkish frontier right across to Morocco.
Wilson became ill, America sunk into isolationism, Congress and the Senate weren’t interested? they were supposed to send a military force to protect Kurdistan and Armenia.
People in the first war, like my father, thought they were fighting a war for civilisation. Of course, it’s terribly ironic because not only did we get it wrong then, but also we are not fighting a war for civilisation now.
Part of the theme of this book is our need to refuse a narrative of history laid down by our presidents, prime ministers, generals and journalists. My father in the first war refused to carry out the execution of another soldier. So he too refused the narrative laid down by military laws.
In a sense it’s about the betrayals and the lies we have told people, from Lawrence of Arabia to the Balfour Declaration.
AB:
Why did you start in the early part of the book recalling your encounters with Osama Bin Laden?
RF:
First of all, he’s the figure that haunts all of our lives, isn’t he? That’s why he’s on the back page looking at you when you get to the end of the book.
Because it was one of the most dramatic interviews I have done in thirty years. Because I got to know him quite well.
He will live with me for all the days of my life, unfortunately. I never thought of him as anyone special. The first time I saw him was out in the desert. The second time I saw him he walked out of a hut in a field and the third time was in a tent. He’s tall, was always very polite, and full of self-conviction, which I found very frightening. He would be quite at ease. He didn’t look like a guy who was very clued into the rest of the world very much. He knew what he wanted to say and if you asked him a question he would sit and clean his teeth with a miswak.
The last words he said to me when I was in Afghanistan were: “From this mountain upon which you are sitting, Mr. Robert, we defeated the Soviet army and helped destroy the Soviet Union,” which was an exaggeration but it had some truth to it. Then he said: “I pray to God that he commits us to turn America into a shadow of itself.”
AB:
Do you think he has succeeded?
RF:
He succeeded in having two more Muslim countries occupied by the Americans. Afghanistan and Iraq were not beforehand. I think he thinks that the Americans have to be fought in the Middle East. It’s interesting that Bush thinks his enemies have to be fought in the Middle East. The Americans couldn’t be struck down in America the way they are in Iraq.
I met some of the Iraqi resistance leaders in Jordan. It was set up for me to meet them in Amman. I knew one of them quite well. They were all ex-army officers. One of them was a commander in Fallujah. He was an officer in the Iran-Iraq war.
AB:
Why do you think there is such a difference in reporting on the Middle East and the so-called third world in the US media vis-୶is other media?
RF:
There are a lot of reasons. One is the American school of journalism that we have to give 50% of each story to each side in a dispute, which I think is ridiculous.
There are victims and there are winners. You don’t have to chop up your story like a mathematical problem. When I covered the Hamas suicide bombing of a pizzeria in August of 2001, I didn’t give equal time to Hamas. I gave it to the victims, to the Israelis. When I was in the Sabra and Shatilla camps on September 18, 1982, I didn’t give equal time to an Israeli government spokesperson. I talked about the Palestinian victims. If we’re not going to cover the betrayals and injustice how are we to understand the Middle East?
There is also the fact that, grilled into American journalists, there is this idea that you can’t hold a single opinion, which is preposterous. Anybody can see an atrocity and be angered by it ? why can’t I be?
Why I am permitted to have no feelings? I have often had dinner with American journalists. They know quite a lot. But when I read the paper in the morning, its deadly dull, it’s ditch water. They’ve rung up some idiot in the Brookings Institute for a quote when they themselves know the story better than the guy sitting in Washington. It’s this old-style, crabby, out of date approach. When we have news agencies, the internet, CNN, what’s the point of just repeating this garbage all next day in newspaper form? I want to hear what the journalist on the scene thinks. He’s the nerve ending of the newspaper.
You’ll get it from me. A lot of people buy The Independent because they want to read that and they buy The Guardian for similar reasons and, of course, up comes our old friend the Israeli lobby. It is undoubtedly more powerful in the US than anywhere else and the pressures on journalists to conform to the most basic semantics ? when they talk about ‘disputed’ territory and not ‘occupied’ territory; a ‘barrier’ or a ‘fence’ not a ‘wall’; a ‘neighbourhood’ rather than a ‘settlement’ or a ‘colony’ ? because they don’t want to be controversial and have letters to the editor, and the usual problem of being called anti-Semitic and that raises moral issues.
AB:
Have you been a target yourself?
RF:
I have been through waves of hate mail saying I was anti-Semitic. If they have return addresses I write back and threaten legal action. I am not a racist. You have got to fight. You don’t cringe and say sorry. We’re perfectly entitled to criticise Israel just as I am entitled to criticise Blair, which I do all the time.
AB:
You’ve been in Beirut for 30 years. Has your experience in Lebanon been comparable to anything else you have experienced?
RF:
It framed a very artificial picture of the Arab world. It was all the Arabs in one tiny miniscule country. You had all the religious faiths and it gave a very false impression of the rest of the Middle East.
AB:
Do you believe the Arab world is where it is today largely as a consequence of 9/11? Do you see the stirrings of democracy that the US speaks of?
RF:
No. It’s been to the disadvantage of the Middle East. I remember Bush saying all the Middle East would want to be like Iraq. I doubt it.
There are various problems in the Middle East. I don’t think the West wants democracy here. We want leaders who will control everything. They always used to say, ‘can Yasser Arafat control his own people’ and now they are asking the same thing of Mahmoud Abbas. It was his job to represent them but we immediately use the word control. It was natural to us and that’s indeed what we wanted. That’s what we want Abbas to do, to control his own people. And as long as they do so without invading the wrong country or setting off bombs in discos in Berlin or nationalising the Suez Canal we will let them treat their people as they wish.
But if they nationalise the Suez Canal, we’ll have to bomb them. If they bomb discos in Berlin then we’ll bomb Tripoli. If they invade Kuwait rather than Iran then we’ll bomb Iraq. I don’t think the various local rulers here are terribly interested in having democracy.
To say that we have some form of democracy in Egypt, it is interesting that the Muslim Brotherhood have got so many seats because it shows that they would have won power if there had been a really fair election.
I think the Arabs would rather like some of our democracy. They would like a few packets of human rights from our Western supermarket shelves. But I think they would also like a different type of freedom, I think they’d like freedom from us, and that’s not quite the same thing, and we’re not offering them that. But they also like justice. You know Bush and Blair ? they have never talked about justice. They talked about Operation Infinite Justice, which was a military justice. They’ve never talked about justice ? only democracy, and you have got to build democracy on justice, not on sand.
AB:
What do you want people to walk away with when they finish reading?
RF:
I think they should be, as I was, amazed at how restrained most Middle Easterners have been with us Westerners, after decade after decade of betrayals and maltreatment. We’re not here because we love Islam. We’re here because of oil, primarily, and the institutions which the oil industry produces.
I don’t think that everything that has gone on here is a result of the West, but a lot of things are. Writing this book changed my feelings about the region; the lack of freedom, the lack of literature, the torture chambers ? oh God, isn’t it depressing. It was a very depressing book to write. I remember one day, my researcher came to my library and said ‘Robert we’re going for a walk on the beach, we’ve got to get you away from this’.
AB:
What’s the most vivid memory you have from the last 30 years?
RF:
The Hariri bomb. It’s very recent, so I have it on my mind a lot. Before that, Iranian soldiers coughing up blood after being gassed. Sabra and Shatilla, where I was climbing over corpses ? that’s always had an effect. I am 59 now and I was 29 when I went to Lebanon, and I can’t re-live those 30 years. And while I still think I would have done the same job ? I do think that those thirty years were spent as happily as they could have been.
AB:
Why do you think you developed what some might say is a cult following?
RF:
I think the people who want to criticise me pretend it’s a cult following. I have been very fortunate to have an editor that wanted me to write my heart out and never changed the words. If you read a report by me you are reading what I wrote, not the editor’s version of it. In a world where there is so much limp journalism, I think people are attracted to reporting that is straight from the street and doesn’t mix words. When you have so many governments lying I think people need journalists to tell the truth as they see it.
AB:
What is it that strikes you the most about war ? is it that history repeats itself?
RF:
War. It’s a very unnatural state of affairs ? it’s one which everyone involved in lies and betrays. War is about death and infliction of death and represents the total failure of the human spirit.
AB:
Why did you choose journalism as a profession or did it choose you?
RF:
I always wanted to be a journalist ever since I saw Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent. I saw it as a romantic profession that wouldn’t be like any other.
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