| | ROBERT FISK
CARLETON UNIVERSITY CONVOCATION ADDRESS
JUNE 11, 2004
When I was a small boy, my father would take me each year around the battlefields of the First World War, the conflict which H.G. Wells called “the war to end all wars”. We would set off each summer in our Austin Mayflower car and bump along the potholed roads of the Somme, Ypres and Verdun. By the time I was 14, I could recite the names of all the offensives: Bapaume, Hill 60, High Wood, Passchendaele, Vimy Ridge .... I had seen all the graveyards and I had walked through all the overgrown trenches and touched the rusted helmets of British soldiers and the corroded German mortars in decaying museums. My father was a soldier of the great War, fighting in the trenches of France because of a shot fired in a city he’d never heard of called Sarajevo. And when he died twelve years ago at the age of 93, I inherited his campaign medals. One of them depicts a winged victory and on the obverse side are engraved the words: “The Great War for Civilization.”
To my father’s deep concern and my mother’s stoic acceptance, I have spent much of my life in wars. They, too, were fought ‘for civilization’. In Afghanistan, I watched the Russians fighting for their ‘international duty’ in a conflict against ‘international terror’; their Afghan opponents, of course, were fighting against ‘communist aggression’ and for Allah. I reported from the front lines as the Iranians struggled through what they called the ‘Imposed War’ against Saddam Hussein — who dubbed his 1980 invasion of Iran the ‘Whirlwind War’. I’ve seen the Israelis twice invading Lebanon and then re-invading the Palestinian West Bank in order, so they claimed, to “purge the land of terrorism”. I was present as the Algerian paramilitary police went to war with Islamists for the same ostensible reason, torturing and executing their prisoners with as much abandon as their enemies. Then in 1990 Saddam invaded Kuwait and the Americans sent their armies to the Gulf to liberate the emirate and impose a ‘New World Order’. In the desert, I always wrote down the words ‘new world order’ in my notebook followed by a question mark. In Bosnia, I found Serbs fighting for what they called ‘Serb civilization’ while their Muslim enemies fought and died for a fading multicultural dream and to save their own lives.
On a mountaintop in Afghanistan, I sat opposite Osama bin Laden in his tent as he uttered his first direct threat against the United States, pausing as I scribbled his words into my notebook by paraffin lamp. ‘God’ and ‘evil’ were what he talked to me about. I was flying over the Atlantic on September 11th — my plane turned round off Ireland following the attacks on the United States — and so less than three months later I was in Afghanistan, fleeing with the Taliban down a highway west of Kandahar as America bombed the ruins of a country already destroyed by war. I was in the United Nations General Assembly exactly a year later when George Bush talked about ‘God’ and ‘evil’ and weapons of mass destruction, and prepared to invade Iraq. The first missiles of that invasion swept over my head in Baghdad. Thus was President Bush’s calamitous ‘war on terror’ given in advance its own supposedly moral foundations.
The direct physical results of all these conflicts will remain — and should remain — in my memory until I die. I don’t need to read through my mountain of reporters’ notebooks to remember the Iranian soldiers on the troop train north to Tehran, holding towels to their faces and coughing up Saddam’s gas as they read the Koran. I need none of my newspaper clippings to recall the father — after an American cluster bomb attack on Iraq in 2003 — who held out to me what looked like half a crushed loaf of bread but which turned out to be half a crushed baby.
I don’t have nightmares about these things, but I remember. The Iraqi soldier at Fao during the Iran-Iraq war who lay curled up like a child in the gun-pit beside me, black with death, a single gold wedding ring glittering on the third finger of his left hand, bright with sunlight and love for a woman who did not know she was a widow. Soldier and civilian, they died in their tens of thousands because death had been concocted for them, morality hitched like a halter round the warhorse so that we could talk about ‘target rich environments’ and ‘collateral damage’ — that most infantile of attempts to shake off the crime of killing — and report the victory parades, the tearing down of statues and the importance of peace.
Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, ‘them’ and ‘us’, victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit. I know an editor who has wearied of hearing me say this: but how many editors have first hand experience of war?
Ironically, it was a movie that propelled me into journalism. I was 12 years old when I saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, a black and white 1940 creaky of patriotism and equally black humour in which Joel McCrea played an American reporter called John Jones — renamed Huntley Haverstock by his New York editor — who is sent in 1939 to cover the approaching war in Europe. He witnesses an assassination, chases Nazi spies in Holland, uncovers Germany’s top agent in London, is shot down in an airliner by a German pocket battleship and survives to scoop the world. He also wins the most gorgeous woman in the movie, clearly an added bonus for such a exciting profession.
But I can never get away from my father’s medal and its false assurance that he was fighting for civilization. Nor can I forget that in the space of just 18 months after that war was over, the victors drew the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career as a journalist — in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad — watching the people inside those borders burn. Why? Because we made contradictory promises in the First World War? Because the British government of my father’s time promised support for a homeland in Palestine for the Jews and independence for the Arabs? Because we wanted a unified Balkans that would stop upsetting the balance of power in Europe? Because we would not stand up to the Protestants of Ireland and honour our promise of Home Rule to the Irish? President Bush invaded Iraq not for the mythical weapons of mass destruction but because the United States had decided to change the map of the Middle East, much as my father’s generation had done eighty years earlier.
I used to think our job as journalists was to be the first witnesses to history. But the brilliant Israeli journalist Amira Haas told me that I was wrong. Our job, she said, was “to monitor the centres of power”. And I must admit that I have never heard a better definition of our job. To monitor the centres of power, especially when our countries go to war or are persuaded to help occupy someone else’s country.
So what conclusions should we draw from the world we see burning today? Certainly we journalists must start carrying history books in our back pockets. We must stop treating the tragedies of Arab and Jew as if they are isolated events, untouched by our historical meddling in the Middle East. We should always ask the question why. After September 11th , 2001, we were allowed to ask who committed these international crimes against humanity and how they did it. But we were abused if we asked the question why. The moment we looked for a motive — something we do after every crime, no matter how insignificant — we were told that merely to ask the question was to support terrorism. Rubbish. The men who flew those planes were Arabs. They came from the Middle East. Is there a problem out there?
So the job of journalism, it seems to me, is to go on ‘telling it as it is’ but to set the narrative of history, to make sure we do not forget what happened before yesterday, before last week, before last year. September 11th did not “change the world”. It allowed a president to manipulate grief so that people should believe it changed the world. I refuse to let 19 men in aircraft change my world. But if we let them, then we better remember those battlefields in which my father fought. That war did change the world forever and that, alas, is our inheritance.
carleton.ca
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More from Robert Fisk at robert-fisk.com
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P.S. I posted the above for information purposes only. I have zero intention of discussing it with anyone on this thread. Ergo, comment to your heart's content but do not expect me to respond - I will not. |
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