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British journalist Robert Fisk in Dubai in December 2005

January 27, 2006
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British journalist Robert Fisk in Dubai in December 2005

BRITISH JOURNALIST ROBERT FISKGreat encounters


 


By Nusrat Ibrahim


 


Acclaimed British journalist Robert Fisk was in Dubai earlier this month to launch his latest book. Nusrat Ibrahim recounts the experience of meeting an extraordinary individual.


 


For someone whose life reads like a Hollywood movie, it's ironic that acclaimed journalist Robert Fisk first found inspiration on the big screen.


 


“It was a movie that propelled me into journalism: Foreign Correspondent by Alfred Hitchcock,” Fisk says.


 


“Joel McCrea, played an American reporter called John Jones, who is sent to Europe to cover the approaching war. He witnesses an assassination, pursues Nazi spies in Holland, uncovers Germany's top agent in London, is shot down in an airliner and survives to scoop the world.


 


He also gains the love of the most beautiful woman in the movie, like a much-deserved perk for such an exciting career.


 


“The movie ends with a radio announcer introducing the heroic reporter on the air, “We have as a guest tonight one of the soldiers of the press, one of the little army of historians who are writing history from beside the cannon's mouth. I knew what I wanted to be and never looked back at my decision.”


 


Based in the Middle East for three decades, Fisk's life story is as enthralling as a first-class movie. He has reported on conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran, among many others, and his interviewees, including Osama Bin Laden, read like a “Who's Who” of the Middle East.


 


And it's these experiences that have culminated in his latest book, “The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East“, which is part personal memoir and part history book.


 


A daunting assignment


 


I knew I would be dealing with no ordinary journalist when I was told that Fisk was coming to Dubai to promote his book at the Jashanmal bookshop at Mall of the Emirates.


 


Nervous and eager to meet him, I prepared for the event a month in advance. I tried to get as many details as possible from his publisher about the man and his book.


 


At 2 am, I wait at the Dubai International Airport's departure lounge, my eyes searching for a man with silver hair and glasses. We have agreed that as soon as he passed the passport control, he will call me on my mobile. An hour into my wait, I haven't heard from him. I dial his number several times, but there is no answer. I am not sure what to do. Suddenly the phone rings and I almost drop it. It is Fisk informing me that he used the airport transport and has reached his hotel. He is comfortable. His first meeting is scheduled at 9 am tomorrow, after which he is free to meet with me.


 


At home in the Middle East


 


After decades as a Middle East correspondent, Fisk says he feels at home in the region. “I don't feel as a foreigner in the Middle East. I know I am one but I don't feel it,” he says.


 


His first media interview was scheduled for 10.30 am, followed by two more and then a radio show. He speaks with confidence; there is enthusiasm in his voice and he has a sharp wit. Fisk is forthright about his thoughts about the present state of the world, yet deftly sidesteps any personal questions. Indeed, the man who has interviewed Yasser Arafat, Hosni Mubarak, Colonel Gaddafi and Osama bin Laden is a thorough professional when it comes to being interviewed. The fact that he has won many awards does not seem to affect him and he rejects any claims of celebrity status.


 


“I don't think about my achievements, whatever they may have been. I don't really care,” he says.


 


Fisk would rather concentrate on more pressing matters: namely, the state of the world. “I do not have an ideal picture of the world. I am always thinking about events that are happening around the world.”


 


War memories


 


Robert Fisk was born in 1946 in Maidstone, Kent. Ever since he can remember, he was surrounded by remnants of the First World War. His father, Bill, was a soldier in the First World War and served in the trenches of France in 1918. Every year, he would take his son to the battlefields in France.


 


By the time [Robert] was 14 he could recite the names of all the offensives, In The Great War for Civilization, he writes that he had seen “all the graveyards, had walked through overgrown trenches and touched the rusted helmets of British soldiers and the corroded German mortars in decaying museums.”


 


Fisk's father died 13 years ago at the age of 93 and his son inherited all his campaign medals.


 


Fisk received a bachelor of arts in English and classics at Lancaster University, in the UK, and a PhD in political science, awarded by Trinity College, Dublin, in 1985. He says he has always felt that his career was too bizarre to support a marital life and a family. His parents were deeply concerned with his choice of profession.


 


His career as a journalist started with the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, then the Sunday Express diary, after which he begged The Times for a job. In the 1970s he was sent to Northern Ireland, where he witnessed and wrote about the conflict there.


 


In 1974, he covered the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. The opportunity to cover the Middle East came about when the correspondent there at the time requested a transfer, saying his wife had had enough. Fisk was 29 when the Middle East position was offered to him. In 1989 he moved to The Independent. In 1979, he covered the Iranian Revolution; in 1980, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; between 1980 and 1988, the Iran-Iraq war; in 1991, the Gulf War; in 2001, the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan and hunt for Bin Laden; and in 2003, the invasion of Iraq. He interviewed Bin Laden three times between 1993 and 1997.


 


He lived in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. A consummate professional, Fisk is fluent in Arabic, French and almost fluent in Persian.


 


Challenging authority


 


Fisk's articles often criticise the foreign policies of the British and US governments. His reporting style has set a precedent for fellow journalists. There is even a term coined for it “fisking”: the point-by-point refutation of a story.


 


Fisk says he believes journalism must “challenge authority – all authority – especially so when governments and politicians take us to war”. Among his laurels are the Amnesty International UK Press Award in 1998 for his reports from Algeria and again in 2000 for his articles on the Nato bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He has also been awarded the British Press Awards' International Journalist of the Year seven times and twice won its Reporter of the Year award.


 


Fisk is admired across the globe. Bin Laden, in his video message prior to the 2004 presidential election in the US, praised Fisk's reporting and considered him to be “neutral”.


 


Fisk believes good journalism relies on breaking news, not rehashing it. “Good journalism is a story or a report in a newspaper that I want to read because it tells me something that I don't know, as opposed to old clich?s.”


 


A memoir of 30 years


 


Fisk says his latest book is partly a personal memoir and partly setting the facts straight about the Middle East's history.


 


“… My book is very much based on facts. A lot of research has gone into the book. It took me 18 months to complete it.


 


“The book was first meant to be a reporter's chronicle of the Middle East over 30 years. That is how I wrote my earlier book, Pity the Nation, about Lebanon's civil war and two Israeli invasions. But as I went through my archives and the loads of documents that I had collected over the decades, I realized that it was going to be more than a chronology of eyewitness reports. It is my personal memoir.”


 


Fisk is no newcomer to writing books. “I wrote a book about Northern Ireland and the failure of the British army to take on the Protestants of Northern Ireland in 1974 [The Point of No Return: the strike which broke the British in Ulster] and from then onwards I like the idea of writing a book because it taught me about what I had seen.


 


“I also did an academic book [In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality, 1939-1945].”


 


The launch


 


Fisk arrives 15 minutes early for the launch. The crowds have already started to assemble inside and outside the shop. He is suffering from a bad toothache and one of the bookshop's staff goes running to the nearest pharmacy to look for clove paste to ease the pain.


 


Despite all this, Fisk's smile and joyous disposition remain sincere. He shakes hands and falls into a comfortable t?te-?-t?te with bystanders. As soon as the microphone is handed over to Fisk, people in the crowd start shooting questions at him.


 


People ask him about his meetings with Bin Laden, his views of Tony Blair, George Bush and Saddam Hussain, the Iran-Iraq war, the future of the Middle East and the sufferings of the Palestinian people. Fisk talks about Afghanistan and how he is attacked by Afghan refugees when he is stationed there. Looking around, I see tears in the eyes of some people in the crowd. “War is a disgusting, cruel, vicious affair. You know, I say to people over and over again: war is not about victory or defeat, it's primarily about human suffering and death,” says Fisk.


 


“The reason why I started my book with my interviews with Bin Laden and ended the book with a picture of him is I wanted to remind the world that he is still out there and amongst us.”


 


The session goes on for almost two hours. Eventually it winds up and Fisk stations himself at the signing table at the front of the bookshop. Most people have more than two books to be signed. Fisk signs every copy by writing “Dubai, 10-12-05″.


He sometimes includes personal messages, as requested by readers.


 


Fisk chats with everyone, sometimes recognizing fellow journalists or people he has met during his travels. He freely hands out his card. One person points out the lack of an e-mail address on his card, to which Fisk replies, “The internet, for me, is a waste of time and I prefer not sitting in front of the computer answering to e-mails for hours at a stretch.”


 


In under two hours he signs more than 300 copies of his book. In fact, the bookstore runs out of copies. That evening at dinner, Fisk lets down his guard a little. When asked about his next book, he replies, “I am too exhausted and overwhelmed by the tiredness of it all [the worldwide tour].”


 


But what overwhelmed me was meeting Robert Fisk. His experiences leave me feeling very small. There is so much suffering in the countries close to us but we are all so preoccupied with our own trivial problems. People like Fisk keep us from getting too complacent about issues surrounding us.


 


(- Nusrat Ibrahim is marketing executive Jashanmal Books & Publication Division.)


 


Inside the masterpiece


 


The Great War for Civilisation: Conquest of the Middle East was originally meant to be a book about modern Egyptian history for British tourists. It was an appeal to them to not just go see the Pyramids, but also to go to the Suez Canal and see where the British invaded in 1956.


 


The original contract for this book was signed with publishers Michael Joseph 16 years ago. But when Fisk's editor, Louisa Haynes, moved to Fourth Estate, so did he. Over 10 years ago he told Haynes that, instead, he was going to write the story of the Middle East as he witnessed it and at the same time go back into history to the First World War, the connection being that it was the First World War and the subsequent Treaty of Versailles that gave rise to the modern Middle East.


 


Fisk wanted to write a non-chronological account of Middle Eastern history. The book starts with his meeting Bin Laden in Afghanistan and then moves back and forth in time, covering the Iran-Iraq war, the Sykes-Picot agreement, the Armenian genocide, the Israel and Palestinian conflict as well as problems in Algeria and the Gulf Wars. Fisk's book is an attempt to find themes in history. He wants to bring together all that he has experienced to try to make sense of it all. The book is a masterpiece of adventure and tragedy, softened by both humour and compassion. It is the story of the forces that are shaping our lives and our future.


 


Name of the Book: The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk


 


Source: Gulf News Dubai daily, 31 December 2005


URL: http://archive.gulfnews.com/friday/People/10008161.html


 


END OF THE GULF NEWS ARTICLE


 


——


 


ROBERT FISK AND THE ARMENIAN GONOCIDE


 


On 5 August 2000, Robert Fisk, one of the best known journalists in the World, wrote the following words in “The Independent”


(http://www.independent.co.uk/) British daily, describing his experience in Syria while tracing the remnants of the Armenian Genocide:


 


“In the spring of 1993, with my car keys, I slowly unearthed a set of skulls from the clay wall of a hill in northern Syria. I had been looking for the evidence of a mass murder – the world's first genocide – for the previous two days but it took a 101-year-old Armenian woman to locate the river bed where her family were murdered in the First World War. The more I dug into the hillside next to the Habur river, the more skulls slid from the earth, bright white at first then, gradually, collapsing into paste as the cold, wet air reached the calcium for the first time since their mass murder. The teeth were unblemished – these were mostly young people – and the bones I later found stretched behind them were strong. Backbones, femurs, joints, a few of them laced with the remains of some kind of cord. There were dozens of skeletons here. The more I dug away with my car keys, the more eye sockets peered at me out of the clay. It was a place of horror”.


 


Robert Fisk has always maintained that all acts of genocide deserve equal recognition. This is why when the first official United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Days commemoration which was planned to take place in 27 January 2001 announced that it will not include the Armenian Genocide, he wrote a condemning article in the 27 November 2000 issue of “The Independent” titled “Why the Armenian Holocaust must not be airbrushed from history”. The article is concluded by the following thoughts:


 


“The Armenians have long commemorated their Holocaust on 24 April each year – the date in 1915 when the first Armenian intellectuals were rounded up and liquidated by Turks in Constantinople. The Armenians wished to be included in the 27 January commemoration. They have been turned away. Which is why 27 January will represent a truth – the facts of the Jewish genocide. But why it will also represent a lie – because, for cheap economic, political and military reasons, it will fail to address the genesis of Jewish suffering: the deliberate destruction of one and a half million Armenian men, women and children”.

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