Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk (12 July 194630 October 2020) was an English writer and journalist. He was critical of United States foreign policy in the Middle East, and the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians.
As an international correspondent, he covered the civil wars in Lebanon, Algeria, and Syria, the Iran–Iraq conflict, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamic revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and the U.S. invasion, and occupation of Iraq. An Arabic speaker, he was among the few Western journalists to interview Osama bin Laden, which he did three times between 1993 and 1997.
He began his journalistic career at the Newcastle Chronicle and then the Sunday Express. From there, he went to work for The Times as a correspondent in Northern Ireland, Portugal and the Middle East; in the last role, he based himself in Beirut intermittently from 1976. After 1989, he worked for The Independent. Fisk received many British and international journalism awards, including the Press Awards Foreign Reporter of the Year seven times.
Books by Fisk include The Point of No Return (1975), In Time of War (1985), Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (1990), The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005), and Syria: Descent Into the Abyss (2015).
Early life and education
Fisk was an only child, born in Maidstone, Kent, to William and Peggy Fisk. His father William ('Bill') Fisk (1899–1992) was Borough Treasurer at Maidstone Corporation and had fought in the First World War. His mother, Peggy (Rose) Fisk, was an amateur painter who in later years became a Maidstone magistrate. At the end of the war Bill Fisk was punished for disobeying an order to execute another soldier; his son said, "My father's refusal to kill another man was the only thing he did in his life which I would also have done." Though his father said little about his part in the war, it held a fascination for his son. After his father's death, he discovered that he had been the scribe of his battalion's war diaries from August 1918.
Fisk was educated at Yardley Court, a preparatory school, then at Sutton Valence School and Lancaster University, where he undertook his B.A. in Latin and Linguistics and contributed to the student magazine John O'Gauntlet. He gained a PhD in political science from Trinity College Dublin in 1983; the title of his doctoral thesis was "A Condition of Limited Warfare: Éire's Neutrality and the Relationship between Dublin, Belfast and London, 1939–1945". It was published as In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939-1945 (London: André Deutsch, 1983; reprinted in Dublin by Gill & MacMillan, 1996). Reviewer F. I. Magee in 1984 stated: "This book presents a detailed and definitive account of Anglo-Irish relations during the Second World War....Fisk's excellent book highlights the ambivalence in relations between Britain, the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland and goes a long way towards explaining why the current situation is so intractable."
Career
Newspaper correspondent
Fisk worked on the Sunday Express diary column before a disagreement with the editor, John Junor, prompted a move to The Times. From 1972 to 1975, at the height of the Troubles, Fisk was The Times Belfast correspondent, before being posted to Portugal following the Carnation Revolution in 1974. He then was appointed Middle East correspondent (1976–1987). In addition to the Troubles and Portugal, he reported the Iranian revolution in 1979. When a story of his on Iran Air Flight 655 was spiked shortly after the paper's takeover by Rupert Murdoch, Fisk moved to The Independent in 1989. The New York Times described Fisk as "probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain". The Economist referred to him as "one of the most influential correspondents in the Middle East since the second world war."
War reporting
Fisk lived in Beirut from 1976, remaining throughout the Lebanese Civil War. He was one of the first Western journalists to report on the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, as well as the Hama Massacre in Syria. His book on the Lebanese conflict, Pity the Nation, was published in 1990.
Fisk also reported on the Soviet–Afghan War, the Iran–Iraq War, the Arab–Israeli conflict, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the Algerian Civil War, the Bosnian War, the 2001 international intervention in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Arab Spring in 2011 and the ongoing Syrian Civil War. During the Iran–Iraq War, he suffered partial but permanent hearing loss as a result of being close to Iraqi heavy artillery in the Shatt-al-Arab when covering the early stages of the conflict.
After the United States and allies launched their intervention in Afghanistan, Fisk was for a time transferred to Pakistan to cover the conflict. While reporting from there, he was attacked and beaten by a group of Afghan refugees fleeing heavy bombing by the United States Air Force. In his graphic account of his almost being beaten to death until a local Muslim leader intervened, Fisk absolved the attackers of responsibility and pointed out that their "brutality was entirely the product of others, of us—of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the 'War for Civilisation' just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them 'collateral damage'." According to Richard Falk, Fisk said of his attacker: "There is every reason to be angry. I’ve been an outspoken critic of the US actions myself. If I had been them, I would have attacked me."
During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Fisk was based in Baghdad and filed many eyewitness reports. He criticised other journalists based in Iraq for what he calls their "hotel journalism": reporting from one's hotel room without interviews or first-hand experience of events. Fisk's criticism of the invasion was rejected by some other journalists. Fisk criticised the Coalition's handling of the sectarian violence in post-invasion Iraq and argued that the official narrative of sectarian conflict is not possible: "The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it's Al Qaeda, it's the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militiamen who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. ... We need to look at this story in a different light."
Osama bin Laden
Fisk interviewed Osama bin Laden on three occasions. The interviews appeared in articles published by The Independent on 6 December 1993, 10 July 1996, and 22 March 1997. In Fisk's first interview, "Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace", he wrote of Osama bin Laden, then overseeing the construction of a highway in Sudan: "With his high cheekbones, narrow eyes and long brown robe, Mr Bin Laden looks every inch the mountain warrior of mujahedin legend. Chadored children danced in front of him, preachers acknowledged his wisdom" while observing that he was accused of "training for further jihad wars".
During one of Fisk's interviews with bin Laden, Fisk noted an attempt by bin Laden to convert him. Bin Laden said: "Mr Robert, one of our brothers had a dream ... that you were a spiritual person ... this means you are a true Muslim". Fisk replied: "Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim. ... I am a journalist [whose] task is to tell the truth." Bin Laden replied: "If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim." During the 1996 interview, bin Laden said the Saudi royal family was corrupt. During the final interview in 1997, bin Laden said he sought God's help "to turn America into a shadow of itself".
Fisk strongly condemned the September 11 attacks, describing them as a "hideous crime against humanity". He also denounced the Bush administration's response to the attacks, arguing that "a score of nations" were being identified and positioned as "haters of democracy" or "kernels of evil", and urged a more honest debate on U.S. policy in the Middle East. He argued that such a debate had hitherto been avoided "because, of course, to look too closely at the Middle East would raise disturbing questions about the region, about our Western policies in those tragic lands, and about America's relationship with Israel".
In 2007, Fisk expressed personal doubts about the official historical record of the attacks. In an article for The Independent, he wrote that, while the Bush administration was incapable of successfully carrying out such attacks due to its organisational incompetence, he was "increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11" and added that he did not condone the "crazed 'research' of David Icke", but was "talking about scientific issues". Fisk had earlier addressed similar concerns in a speech at Sydney University in 2006. During the speech, Fisk said: "Partly I think because of the culture of secrecy of the White House, never have we had a White House so secret as this one. Partly because of this culture, I think suspicions are growing in the United States, not just among Berkeley guys with flowers in their hair. ... But there are a lot of things we don't know, a lot of things we're not going to be told. ... Perhaps the [fourth] plane was hit by a missile, we still don't know".
Bill Durodié noted that at one point Osama bin Laden had advised the White House to "read Robert Fisk, rather than, as one might have supposed, the Koran."
Syrian Civil War
Reporting from Douma, in April 2018 on the Douma chemical attack, Fisk quoted a Syrian doctor who attributed the victims' breathing problems not to gas but to dust and lack of oxygen after heavy shelling by government forces. Other people he spoke to doubted a gas attack, and Fisk queried the incident. Fisk's reporting drew criticism for having relied on government supplied contacts, with Asser Khattab writing in Raseef22 that the doctor quoted by Fisk "had been introduced to him by officials in the Syrian government and army". Richard Spencer and Catherine Philp in The Times wrote that journalists had been taken to Douma on a government-organised trip while international investigators were forced to remain in Damascus, and that the doctor interviewed by Fisk admitted to not having been to the hospital where the victims were taken. The Snopes website said other reporters on the same trip as Fisk had interviewed locals who said they had inhaled toxic gas.
Fisk returned to the subject of the Douma attacks in early January 2020, in an article concerning internal disagreements within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) recorded in documents released by WikiLeaks.
Media appearances
He was interviewed by Kirsty Young for Desert Island Discs in 2006. His final selections were Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber, Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory, and a violin.
Fisk featured in the 2016 documentary film notes to eternity by New Zealand filmmaker Sarah Cordery, along with Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Sara Roy. The film explores their lives and work in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Fisk was profiled in Yung Chang's 2019 documentary film This Is Not a Movie. In reviewing the film, Slant Magazine stated: "The two things that give this documentary its power and provocativeness are intellectual rather than dramatic: Fisk’s work, and his ideas." Cath Clarke, writing for The Guardian, said the film asks its audience about war: "Is there something deep in our souls that permits it because it feels natural? His painful, deeply serious question about the inevitability of war sets the tone of this documentary about his career, directed by Yung Chang."
Views
Stances and reception
Fisk was known for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United States, particularly the country's involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East. He was consistently critical of Israel, labelling some of the country's actions against Palestinians as "war crimes". One of his beliefs was that he should report events from the point of view of the victim rather than those in authority. The Times newspaper, in its November 2020 obituary of Fisk, said that he had developed a "visceral dislike of the Israeli government and its allies" following his coverage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, alleging that this had made Fisk biased and "unable to provide a dispassionate account of events and their context". David Pryce-Jones, writing in The Spectator in 2003, said that Fisk was guilty of "hysteria and distortion" in his coverage of Middle Eastern topics. The Independent, for whom he wrote from 1989, praised him as being "renowned for his courage in questioning official narratives from governments".
The BBC's Jeremy Bowen also praised him following his death and noted the controversy Fisk drew for his "sharp criticism of the US and Israel, and of Western foreign policy". Bowen described himself as an admirer who would miss Fisk's "guts and his appetite for the fight". Fisk dismissed the controversy related to his reporting in Syria, saying that he was "writing only what he saw and heard". His ex-wife Lara Marlowe took exception to the frequent use of the adjective 'controversial' in obituaries: he was a prolific non-conformist in the world of journalism, whose judgments avoided jumping on the bandwagon and, in her experience, had been "intuitive, rapid, ... and invariably right".
Similarly, the foreign correspondent for The Independent Patrick Cockburn, responding to criticisms raised in obituaries, said "Derring-do in times of war usually gets good notices from the press and from public opinion, but moral endurance is a much rarer commodity, when the plaudits are replaced by abuse, often from people who see a world divided between devils and angels and denounce anybody reporting less than angelic behaviour on the part of the latter for being secret sympathisers with the devil." Cockburn wrote that Fisk was better than anyone at "find[ing] out significant news as fast as possible, disregard[ing] all efforts by governments, armies and media to suppress it, and pass[ing] that information on to the public so they can better judge what is happening in the world around them".
On journalism and politics
Fisk described himself as a pacifist and non-voter. He said that journalism must "challenge authority, all authority, especially so when governments and politicians take us to war". He quoted, with approval, the words of Israeli journalist Amira Hass: "There is a misconception that journalists can be objective. ... What journalism is really about is to monitor power and the centres of power." In light of his earlier training as a journalist on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, he said "I had a suspicion that the language we were forced to write as trainee reporters all those years ago had somehow imprisoned us, that we had been schooled to mould the world and ourselves in clichés, that for the most part this would define our lives, destroy our anger and imagination, make us loyal to our betters, to governments, to authority. For some reason, I had become possessed of the belief that the blame for our failure as journalists to report the Middle East with any sense of moral passion or indignation lay in the way that we as journalists were trained." In an interview with the BBC in 2005, he articulated this position further: "If you believe that victims should have more of a say than people who commit atrocities, then yes, I take a definite position. If reporters don't do that then they are out of their minds."
On coverage of foreign reporting, he observed in an interview with Harry Kreisler at the Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley in 2006: "the French are very good at getting to the scene and reporting the reality. I know France doesn't have a very clean reputation in American politics at the moment but my goodness, they've got good journalists. You read a translation of Liberacion , Figero , Le Monde – they've got it. I work a lot with French – I normally work on my own, but if I work with other reporters, I tend to report with Italians or the French because, my goodness, they get to the war front."
When he spoke on "Lies, Misreporting, and Catastrophe in the Middle East" at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley on 22 September 2010, he stated: "I think it is the duty of a foreign correspondent to be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who suffer, whoever they may be." He wrote at length on how many contemporary conflicts had their origins, in his view, in lines drawn on maps: "After the Allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career—in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad—watching the people within those borders burn."
Armenian genocide
Fisk wrote extensively about the Armenian genocide of 1915 and supported moves to persuade the Turkish Government to acknowledge it.
Remembrance Day
For Remembrance Day in 2011, Fisk wrote that his father "old Bill Fisk became very ruminative about the Great War. He learned that Haig had lied, that he himself had fought for a world that betrayed him, that 20,000 British dead on the first day of the Somme – which he mercifully avoided because his first regiment, the Cheshires, sent him to Dublin and Cork to deal with another 1916 "problem" – was a trashing of human life. In hospital and recovering from cancer, I asked him once why the Great War was fought. 'All I can tell you, fellah,' he said, 'was that it was a great waste.' And he swept his hand from left to right. Then he stopped wearing his poppy. I asked him why, and he said that he didn't want to see 'so many damn fools' wearing it." He returned to the subject in 2014, the standfirst summarised his experience "My family was haunted by my father's experience on the Somme and the loss of his friends. Why do we pay homage to the dead but ignore the lessons of their war?" and in 2016 where he said "His example was one of great courage. He fought for his country and then, unafraid, he threw his poppy away. Television celebrities do not have to fight for their country – yet they do not even have the guts to break this fake conformity and toss their sordid poppies in the office waste paper bin."
Personal life
Fisk married American-born journalist Lara Marlowe in 1994. The couple did not have any children and divorced in 2006. At the time of his death, he was married to Nelofer Pazira, an Afghan-Canadian journalist, author and human rights activist.
On settling down, he wrote in 2005: "I told the journalism students there [at City, University of London] that when I saw families walking happily in London or Paris, I wondered whether I had not missed out on life, that perhaps comparative safety and security with nothing more than the mortgage to worry about was preferable to the existence I had chosen for myself. A friend of my father's once said I had enjoyed the privilege of seeing things that no other man had seen. But after a flood of questions from students in Sydney about suffering in the Middle East, I began to wonder if my privilege had not also been my curse."
Death
On 30 October 2020, Fisk died aged 74 at St. Vincent's University Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, after a suspected stroke. Due to the Irish Government COVID-19 restrictions, his funeral was held privately.
The president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins reacted by saying "with his passing the world of journalism and informed commentary on the Middle East has lost one of its finest commentators" and the Taoiseach Micheál Martin stated that "he was fearless and independent in his reporting, with a deeply researched understanding of the complexities of the Middle East, eastern history and politics".
The Australian anti-war journalist John Pilger declared upon hearing of his death that "Robert Fisk has died. I pay warmest tribute to one of the last great reporters. The weasel word 'controversial' appears in even his own paper, The Independent, whose pages he honoured. He went against the grain and told the truth, spectacularly. Journalism has lost the bravest." Former Leader of the UK Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn eulogised him on Twitter, finding it "[s]o sad to hear of the death of Robert Fisk. A huge loss of a brilliant man with unparalleled knowledge of history, politics and people of Middle East." The Greek politician and economic theorist Yanis Varoufakis also posted a eulogy on Twitter, declaring that "[w]ith Robert Fisk's passing we have lost a journalistic eye without which we shall be partially blind, a pen without which our capacity to express the truth is diminished, a soul without which our own empathy for victims of imperialism will be lacking."
Christian Broughton, the managing director of The Independent, said "Fearless, uncompromising, determined and utterly committed to uncovering the truth and reality at all costs, Robert Fisk was the greatest journalist of his generation. The fire he lit at The Independent will burn on." For Harry Browne in Jacobin: "Robert Fisk's voice was everywhere, and his ideas were vital in both creating and meeting that Irish urge for explanation." The Irish Times obituary read: "He used to explain his rejection of conventional journalistic detachment by saying: 'If you watch wars, the old ideas of journalism that you have to be neutral and take nobody's side is rubbish. As a journalist, you have got to be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who suffer." Former Chartered Institute of Journalists president Liz Justice wrote: "I knew him as a very detailed and knowledgeable journalist. My friend had to edit his work from 2,000 words to 400 and we have very different views involving eggshells and walking carefully. We both agree he will be missed." Richard Falk, in an interview with CounterPunch, said: "Fisk's departure from the region left a journalistic gap that has not been filled. It is important to appreciate that there are few war correspondents in the world that combine Fisk's reporting fearlessness with his interpretative depth, engaging writing style, and candid exposures of the foibles of the high and mighty."
Memoir
Love in a Time of War, a memoir by Fisk's first wife, Lara Marlowe, was published in 2021. It covers the period from 1988 to 2003, the period Fisk and Marlowe worked together.
Awards, honours and degrees
Fisk received the British Press Awards' International Journalist of the Year seven times, and twice won its "Reporter of the Year" award. He also received Amnesty International UK Media Awards in 1992 for his report "The Other Side of the Hostage Saga", in 1998 for his reports from Algeria and again in 2000 for his articles on the NATO air campaign against the FRY in 1999.
1984 Lancaster University honorary degree
1991 Jacob's Award for coverage of the Gulf War on RTÉ Radio 1
1994 Foreign Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards for coverage on Algeria, the Hebron massacre, and Bosnia
1995 Foreign Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards
1999 Orwell Prize for journalism
2001 David Watt Prize for an investigation of the 1915 Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire
2002 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism
2003 Open University honorary doctorate
2004 University of St Andrews honorary degree
2004 Carleton University honorary degree
2005 Adelaide University Edward Said Memorial lecture
2006 Ghent University honorary degree Political and Social Sciences
2006 American University of Beirut honorary degree
2006 Queen's University Belfast honorary degree
2006 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize worth $350,000
2008 University of Kent honorary degree
2008 Trinity College Dublin honorary doctorate
2009 College Historical Society's Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse
2009 Liverpool Hope University honorary degree
2011 International Prize at the Amalfi Coast Media Awards, Italy
Works
Books
His 2005 work, The Great War for Civilisation, was critical of Western and Israeli approaches to the Middle East. Neal Ascherson, for The Independent on Sunday commented: "This is a very long book, allowing Fisk to interleave political analysis, recent history and his own adventures with the real stories which concern him. These are the sufferings of ordinary people under monstrous tyrannies or in criminal, avoidable wars". In The Guardian, a former British Ambassador to Libya, Oliver Miles, complained of "a deplorable number of mistakes" in the book's 1,366 pages which "undermine the reader's confidence", and that "vigilant editing and ruthless pruning could perhaps have made two or three good short books out of this one". Richard Beeston, a longtime foreign correspondent and then foreign editor for The Times, wrote in a review of the book that Fisk's "central argument is lost in a verbal avalanche, as Fisk empties 30 years of notebooks onto the page" and that while there are what he calls "passages of descriptive brilliance" he regarded some of his arguments "ridiculous" and "utter nonsense".
Other books
The Point of No Return: The Strike Which Broke the British in Ulster (1975). London: Times Books/Deutsch.
In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality, 1939–1945 (2001). London: Gill & Macmillan. (1st ed. 1983).
Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (3rd ed. 2001). London: Oxford University Press; xxi, 727 pages. (1st ed. was 1990).
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (October 2005) London. Fourth Estate; xxvi, 1366 pages.
The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings (2008) London, Fourth Estate
Robert Fisk on Algeria: Why Algeria's Tragedy Matters (2013) Independent Print Limited
Video documentary
Fisk produced a three-part series titled From Beirut To Bosnia in 1993 which Fisk said was an attempt "to find out why an increasing number of Muslims had come to hate the West". Fisk said that the Discovery Channel did not show a repeat of the films, after initially showing them in full, due to a letter campaign launched by pro-Israel groups such as CAMERA.
References
Further reading
(address to the fifth Al Jazeera annual forum on 23 May 2010)
External links
Column archive at The Independent
Z Network articles
1946 births
2020 deaths
Alumni of Trinity College Dublin
Alumni of Lancaster University
Alumni of Lonsdale College, Lancaster
British people of the Iraq War
British reporters and correspondents
British war correspondents
English expatriates in Lebanon
Irish Independent people
Jacob's Award winners
People educated at Sutton Valence School
People from Maidstone
The Independent people
I (newspaper) journalists
The Times people
War correspondents of the Iraq War
War correspondents of the War in Afghanistan (2001–2021)
Writers on the Middle East
British newspaper journalists