Robert Fisk Was a Reporter Who Brought the Wars Home and Shaped the Thinking
of a Generation
By Harry Browne, Jacobin
08 November 20
British journalist Robert Fisk, who died last week, produced decades of
outstanding work, from Ireland to the Middle East. His greatest impact on
public opinion came after 9/11, when he mounted a brave challenge to the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
When word got out last weekend that the veteran British journalist Robert
Fisk had died in a Dublin hospital, one of the strongest expressions of
sympathy came from the president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins.
I knew that his taking of Irish citizenship meant a great deal to him, and
his influence on young practitioners in journalism and political writing was
attested by the huge audiences which attended the occasions on which he
spoke in Ireland. Generations, not only of Irish people but all over the
world, relied on him for a critical and informed view of what was taking
place in the conflict zones of the world and, even more important, the
influences that were perhaps the source of the conflict.
Michael D (as this popular president is invariably called in Ireland), who
himself rose to fame as an excoriating critic of US imperialism, was always
bound to emphasize Fisks Irish connection. But this was not some
opportunistic one of our own blather: Fisks influence in Ireland was
profound.
The Other Side of the Story
As I reflect on that influence, my mind returns to September 11, 2001. That
afternoon in Ireland, the grief and immersion in the suffering of New York
City was palpable. (Boston and New York are both occasionally and
sometimes competitively referred to as the next parish over). Irish
Times journalist Conor OClery spent part of that day reporting live on RTÉ,
the Irish national radio station, from his Battery Park City apartment, with
a view of the towers.
As a transplanted New Yorker in Dublin, I was asked to appear on an evening
drive time show, to share my sadness but also, I promised myself, to tell
some hard truths about what lay behind the attacks.
I had to join the queue. On air the conversation was sad, but also informed
and penetrating. Off air, the host and guests talked of the chickens coming
home to roost. By the next morning, the same phrase was being used on RTÉ
with the microphones on. Here in the Republic of Ireland, where for decades
it had been virtually illegal to broadcast explanations and excuses for the
IRA, people were on air explaining, if not excusing, Al Qaeda.
Robert Fisks voice was everywhere, and his ideas were vital in both
creating and meeting that Irish urge for explanation. Irelands colonial and
anti-imperial history, its political sophistication, and its strong
Palestinian solidarity movement are significant factors in the opening of a
discursive space that is unusual in the English-speaking world. So it would
be wrong to exaggerate Fisks individual role but it would also be
blinkered to ignore it.
When liberal-centrist writer Kathy Sheridan of the Irish Times emerged on
September 15th to complain that it was too soon for the other side of the
story that had been ubiquitous in Irish media all week, she felt compelled
to concede a list of imperial sins that could have been ripped straight from
Fisks dispatches:
the million Iraqi children dead from US-led sanctions; the third of the
Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank which survives on £1 a day,
cheek by jowl with a US-subsidized, first-world Israel; the Afghans
condemned, not only to the barbarous rule of the Taliban (who began life as
the well-funded pets of the US), but also to be the victims of other
mass-murderous US hunts for Osama bin Laden; the swaggering, ignorant
disdain with which a neophyte US president has been trashing international
treaties
Yes, that passage is not Fisk himself but rather an incredible imitation,
coming from a reliable pillar of the Irish establishment a tribute to his
influence.
The Best Touchstone
Its not every posh-sounding English accent that emerges as such a trusted
and quotable voice across the political and media spectrum in Ireland. But
Fisk had earned the respect that made him the explanatory mainstay in
Ireland on 9/11 and beyond. As a young journalist, he covered the Troubles
in Northern Ireland for the London Times, then did a PhD at Trinity College
Dublin about Irish neutrality during World War II, later turned into a good
book, In Time Of War.
But it was in Lebanon during the 1980s, when he served as a correspondent
while thousands of Irish soldiers served as UN peacekeepers, that the
popular bond with an Irish audience was forged. His reporting of the
massacre at Sabra and the Shatila refugee camps in 1982 was the most
memorable moment, but Fisk was in it for the long haul.
Irish Army colonel E. D. Doyle wrote in January 1991 that Fisk was the best
touchstone for understanding the military situation in the Gulf War, partly
because Irish soldiers knew he was solid: We used to say [in Lebanon] that
when Fisk criticized us in a UN operation we should examine our
performance.
By that time, Fisk worked for the London Independent. The Irish Times
subscribed to the Independents wire service, and Fisks stories often
featured more prominently in the Dublin newspaper than in the London one. In
April 1991, Noam Chomsky told an audience at Harvards Kennedy School of
Government that the Irish Times had the best coverage of the Gulf War of any
newspaper in the English-speaking world.
That quality was by no means all about Fisk: Maggie OKane contributed
brilliant coverage from Baghdad and Michael Jansen in Cyprus used her
contacts across the Middle East to illuminate the crisis. But Fisks
unmistakable, bespectacled picture-byline, accompanying reporting and
analysis mostly from Saudi Arabia, was a large part of the package.
Big Pictures and Small
Five years later, when Israel shelled civilians sheltering at a UN compound
near Qana in southern Lebanon, the phones lit up on Irelands main radio
phone-in show, and Fisk was, again, the touchstone. As I wrote in the
Irish Times at the time, many callers
were citing Robert Fisks brilliant, heartbreaking reporting. Fisk could
not only be read most days last week in this newspaper, he was on the radio
around the clock . . . unafraid to provide context, history lessons,
straight good sense about proportionality and eyewitness evidence that
contradicted official versions of events
a Fisk strength is the ability to
move from the big picture strategy, geopolitics to the small a woman
carrying the body of her father.
A friend who produced TV and radio shows over those decades recalled this
week how readily Fisk would go out of his way to appear in Irish media,
where even conservative presenters mostly deferred to Bob. His influence
was evident when, in February 2003, Dublin hosted one of the worlds largest
demonstrations, per capita, against the impending Iraq war.
Fisk was, even then, controversial: in the early 2000s, the right-wing
columnists in Irelands Sunday Independent (then owned by the same company
as his home paper in London) made him something of a target. But he seemed
to like arguments and tended to swat opponents away with authoritative ease.
On one occasion in 2010, I was the moderator at a debate about the media and
the Middle East where Fisk was the major draw for a paying audience.
Backstage before the event, Fisk mischievously asked me and others whether a
particular opponent had ever been to Israel/Palestine. When we replied that
to the best of our knowledge, the man had not, Fisk prepared the inevitable
and entertaining ambush: I assume youve been to the Middle East
no?!
Over the years, Fisks public appearances in Ireland, for those huge
audiences to which Michael D referred, were generally at such widely
marketed events book festivals, summer schools, prestigious campus debates
rather than events within anti-war circles or the Left. His door-stopping
books, Pity the Nation and The Great War for Civilisation, still turn up in
the most surprising Irish households homes that carry no other hallmarks
of left-wing tendencies. Popular understanding here of the sins of empire
rests heavily on his shoulders.
Until a decade ago and probably to this day for that majority of people
who have not been caught up in arguments over the Syrian civil war a
reference to something said or written by Robert Fisk would be enough to
settle a debate in Ireland, insofar as such a thing can ever be said to be
settled.
A Role Model
For my journalism students in the early days of the Afghan and Iraq wars,
Fisk was an obvious if intimidating role model. For their family members, he
was likely to be the name that came to mind: Ah youre studying journalism
Robert Fisk! When a relation of one recent graduate encountered Fisk at
an Italian literary festival in 2007, the result was a signed festival
program brought home as a gift and bearing a command from the Great Man:
Monitor the centers of power!
Of course, among journalists, here as elsewhere, some of the esteem for Fisk
came through gritted teeth. He could be contemptuous of other reporters and
was the scourge of those war correspondents who were embedded during US
wars. There was some schadenfreude when, traveling without military
protection in December 2001, he was assaulted by Afghan refugees in
Pakistan.
He had learned his mistrust of the military and of the reporters who get
too close to it the hard way, here in Ireland. When, in 2010, the Saville
Inquiry published its long-awaited findings on Derrys Bloody Sunday
massacre, nearly four decades after the event, Fisk put his own profession
in the firing line:
[D]id we British journalists have something to answer for in our slavish
adherence to the notion of the British Armys integrity? I dont think we
cared about the Irish either the Catholic or the Protestant variety. I
dont think we cared about Ireland.
Fisk, self-evidently, cared about Ireland. His own historical touchstone
was the settlement of empires after World War I: in his telling, the world
of war that he covered across Eurasia for nearly fifty years was the rotten
fruit of that bloody soil, stretching from Ireland in the northwest to Iraq
in the southeast. He was scathing about peace processes that attempted to
pave over unjust history.
In his mostly warm-hearted recollections of the late John Hume in August
this year, Fisk recalled scolding the Irish politician, over dinner in Derry
two decades ago, for glib efforts to translate peace-making from Northern
Ireland to Israel/Palestine: The nearest Irish approximation to the
Israeli-Arab struggle, I suggested, would be an attempt to mediate an end to
violence after the 17th century dispossession of the Catholics.
It is difficult to imagine a more Fisky passage, in its stentorian tone,
its historical reach, its political acuity, its intellectual confidence, its
personal cockiness the shine was still on Humes Nobel Peace Prize, after
all, as Fisk lectured him about making peace and yet also its context of
affection and conviviality. In Ireland as elsewhere, such moments will be
missed.
