Last Sunday, Robert Fisk, reporting the Afghan war for The Independent, London, was assaulted by a group of irate Afghan refugees in the Quetta area.
It was a close shave with death. But then this was not the first time that Fisk was close to it.
In Lebanon, he saw death and devastation as few war reporters have, and was himself never far from being killed. Often his editors had to warn him not to risk his life for a story.
Those who have read Fisk’s news reports and his monumental book, Pity the Nation, would know what a fearless and independent reporter he is.
In the current campaign in Afghanistan, Fisk is perhaps the only western journalist who found troops from his own country involved in the blatant violation of laws of war and of human rights in Qala-i-Jangi.
Irish by origin, Fisk has worked for some of Britain’s leading newspapers, including The Times and has probably won more awards than any other British journalist. The awards came despite the fact that Fisk is not very popular with the British establishment, specially its media moguls, because of his objective reporting which presents truths that are not palatable to all.
Because of his objective reporting on the Middle East, the Zionists staged a demonstration against him in front of his newspaper office, accusing him of bias. That was not the truth. Fisk merely reported objectively on the behaviour of the world’s last surviving racist state — Israel.
Fisk was in the Lebanon in 1982 when Israel invaded that country. The brains behind the invasion was that war criminal, Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s defence minister and now prime minister.
Fisk’s Pity the Nations chronicles the war and gives a graphic account of the Israeli brutalities he was witness to. Of course, he never fails to criticize the Palestinians, too, where criticism is due.
As “collateral damage” increased, Israel denied that it was responsible for civilian casualties and insisted that its bombing was not indiscriminate. Fisk agreed with Israel that its bombing was indeed discriminate with “surgical precision” — for it bombed Palestinian civilian targets as a matter of policy.
As he put it, “The Israeli bombardment...was, we realized later, discriminate. It targeted every civilian area in West Beirut — hospitals, schools, apartments, shops, newspaper offices...the parks.” The Israelis were “killing thousands of civilians, smashing families between the walls, floors and furniture of their homes with such total violence that their corpses often emerged from the rubble flattened into huge shadows, their bodies only an inch or two thick, their heads broken open like eggs.”
And when the Israelis dropped phosphorous bombs on civilians, Fisk quotes a doctor as saying, “I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames. When I took them out half an hour later, they were still burning. Even in the mortuary they smouldered for hours.”
He was among the few western journalists who visited the Sabra-Chatilla camp when the bodies were still there, rotting, on Sept 18, 1982.
He wrote, “It was the flies that told us. There were millions of them, their hum almost as eloquent as the smell.... If we stood still, writing in our notebooks, they would settle like an army — legions of them — on the white surface of our notebooks, hands, arms, faces, always congregating around our eyes and mouths, from body to body, from the many dead to the few living, from corpse to reporter....” This made him retch.
“When we had seen a hundred bodies,” he said, “we stopped counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses — women, young men, babies and grandparents — lying together...knifed or machine-gunned to death...Perhaps a thousand people were butchered; properly half that number again.”
Last Sunday near Quetta, Fisk fought back. It takes courage to fight Afghans — one hundred of them. If only the Afghans knew he was Afghan-friendly.
However, Fisk himself showed a measure of understanding. He wrote in his newspaper, “Why record my few minutes of terror and self-disgust...when hundreds — let us be frank and say thousands — of innocent civilians are dying under American air strikes, when the ‘war of civilization’ is burning and maiming the Pakhtoons of Kandahar and destroying their homes because ‘good’ must triumph over ‘evil’?”
He added, “If I was an Afghan refugee, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.”
Last Sunday, Robert Fisk, reporting the Afghan war for The Independent, London, was assaulted by a group of irate Afghan refugees in the Quetta area.
