INTERVIEW
Journalist Fisk gives insight on ISIL and refugees
Robert Fisk has covered the Middle East for close to 40 years, from the Lebanese Civil War to the emergence of ISIL and beyond, and has won more British and international journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent.
With British newspaper The Independent since 1988, Fisk is probably the only journalist to have interviewed Osama bin Laden not once but three times, and the only one to have a term named after him by his detractors in the blogosphere, who sought to counter his views and assertions: “Fisking,” defined by Wikipedia as “a point-by-point criticism that highlights perceived errors, or disputes the analysis in a statement, article, or essay.”
On a seven-city speaking tour of Canada this week with Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, his talk, entitled ‘Goodbye, Mr. Sykes! Adieu, M. Picot!’ How the ISIL ‘caliphate’ frightens the Middle East — and us’, focuses on how the Syrian Civil War has destabilized the existing order in the Middle East. Fisk, who has also penned five books, will speak in Montreal Saturday at 7 p.m. at St. James United Church, 463 Ste-Catherine St. W.
The Montreal Gazette spoke to him about being an eye witness to history in the time of “hotel journalism,” and how a three-year-old changed the way Europeans and Canadians have reacted to the Syrian refugee crisis. The interview has been edited for length.
Q: Most Canadians only became aware of the Syrian refugee crisis when the body of threeyear-old Alan Kurdi washed up on the shores of Turkey, and his photo was posted on front pages around the world. How typical was Alan’s story among Syrian refugees?
A: I think he is very typical. I was on the Greece/Macedonia border in January and it was already happening. There were thousands of people in the fields around me, and two from Aleppo were getting beaten by Macedonian police. No one cared. Many of them had relatives and sought to get visas for them but a lot of them just sank to the bottom of the Mediterranean. With Alan Kurdi it was the photograph that made him stand out.
Q: But why was that particular photo so shocking, when there are so many others portraying just how desperate the situation in Syria has become, as well as all those trying to get into Europe from Africa?
Before Alan Kurdi (British Prime Minister David) Cameron talked of “swarms” of people coming, but Alan Kurdi reminded us of every Canadian or European child. He was white and he looked like us. Perhaps we could say he was Old Stock. And so we asked, is this what you mean by swarms?
There’s always a row about what is the right thing to do with photographs.
I see dead babies but you can’t put them on the front page. What about a young woman killed by an Israeli shell or an old woman blasted to pieces by ISIL? We clean up war and we allow our politicians to persuade us to go to war because we don’t see it.
In 2003 when Americans were invading Iraq, Al Jazeera got a crew down and came back with terrible pictures of women with hands missing and dead children. They pleaded with Reuters and said we’ve risked our lives and this is really happening. But they were told we can’t possibly show this at tea time — we have to respect the dead.
Q: You don’t shy away from reporting the details of the horror in Syria and elsewhere, including a piece you wrote on so-called honour crimes against women, which catalogued the victims who had been killed by stoning, or buried alive. They are difficult to read. Do you think other journalists and editors are not doing their duty when they shield readers from the details?
A: My theory has always been in journalism to give them a name and give them a face. They deserve it. They must have the honour of having an identity. A dead body lying in the desert is a dead body lying in the desert. But 32-year-old Maya so-and-so who was cut in half by a bomb is something you have to read about. You have to pay attention and ask yourself why she’s dead.
Why can we see blood-curdling violence in cinema but not in real life? In Gaza a man was carrying his dead daughter to her funeral. Her face was serene — it was untouched. (Editors) blobbed (blurred) out her face and dishonoured her. We didn’t blob anyone in the Second World War. What do you do with ISIL which is showing the most technologically well-made pictures of evil?
ISIL has thought about the power of the pictures. Is the image of the 21st century Alan Kurdi or one of the many men awaiting execution? I’m not sure.
Q: You’ve criticized journalists in the past for engaging in what you call “hotel journalism” — covering a story from one’s hotel room instead of talking to real people on the ground. But with the situation in Iraq and Syria, journalists are not even going to the hotels. How does that affect the coverage?
A: In Baghdad, news agencies like AP would get reporters to come in from Europe and they were escorted to the Palestine hotel. They would not go out. I understand that — you don’t want your journalists kidnapped and killed. The problem was they carried the dateline Baghdad which gave the impression they had been to the scene, spoken to the police, etc. They could have been in County Mayo (Ireland) and learned the same.
Now we have a whole new situation in Syria and Iraq. Never has a war been so badly covered but it’s important to explain why. I can’t go to Syria — I don’t want to die a gruesome death and no other journalist would. So there are vast regions we can’t cover. We cover some propaganda clips, like the killing of the Jordanian pilot (burned alive in a cage) because we can’t do anything else. This is one of the first times we can’t cover both sides of a war.
Q: For 39 years you’ve been covering the Middle East — a region plagued by civil wars, sectarian violence and brutal dictatorships. Did you ever imagine the rise of something like ISIL?
A: I’m still trying to figure out what ISIL is and what it represents — the fact you use words like “plague” and “brutal” suggests that we could foresee it.
Back in 2004, we started getting these headless bodies in the mortuary in Baghdad. Once a nurse told me a dog’s head had been sewn onto a body. Then in Fallujah I noticed people selling videotapes outside of mosques. They were men in striped jumpers in front of a video camera. The man would pull the head back and start sawing away at his neck, with the man trying to cope with the pain. They were obviously Russian soldiers being taken for execution in Chechnya. They were practice films — to show how to butcher a person.
So there’s no point thinking ISIL came out of the desert like a genie. But once you set off on this dark trail to Hell, it carries on, and it did.
Q: But what accounts for the ability of these young men, including many from the West, to perpetrate such acts without flinching?
A. Groups of people became totally desensitized. Normally you associate religion with emotion. And yet ISIL has never shown any emotion. The execution of the Jordanian pilot was filmed with seven different camera angles. Hollywood uses four. These people showed no anger. Nothing. Last year I went to Yabroud after the Syrian government army had managed to retake it. I went to the church — the oldest Christian church in Syria — to see if (it) had been destroyed. Around the church someone had specifically drilled out all the eyes of the Saints in the Orthodox mosaics, including St. George and the dragon. They even drilled out the eyes of the dragon! In one corner there were piles and piles of ripped up oil paintings. Beautiful, gold paintings. But they didn’t use a knife to cut them. They brought a machine — the paintings were mathematically, precisely cut by a machine. It’s the lack of emotion. They are absolutely cold.
Q: Why do you think ISIL is so appealing to Western youths, including a few dozen from North America but thousands from Europe who have joined their ranks? A. ISIL is an army of lost souls. Three years ago a young woman in Avignon went to Syria. The police found she had two Facebook pages, one about boys and school and music, and the other about Islam and her hopes to go to Aleppo to rescue women and children of God. And the question was which was the right one? I said both.
In Bin Laden’s last days, I wrote a piece saying al Qaeda had become the most sectarian group. He asked for a translation of my article, which was one of the last documents he received.
Clearly Bin Laden was grappling with what this organization was becoming. It was out of control and had moved in a direction that was incomprehensible to him.
My question is, is it incomprehensible to ISIL too? Do they debate it? I don’t think so. We know who they are, but people are saying why don’t they support the Palestinians? They want the Caliphate — which includes Palestine.
I asked a Syrian general. He said, “I have been trying to find out what ISIL is. And one day I think ISIL will have broken into a thousand pieces and you will be trying to figure out who the moderates are.”
Q: You are familiar with Canada’s role in fighting ISIL as well as the current government’s concern with security issues, cited as a reason for not opening our doors to more Syrian refugees more quickly. What do you make of that?
A. You’re doing rather the thirdrate version of what (British Prime Minister) Cameron is doing — finding a way to stop them coming here.
There probably are some ISIL people among those 800,000 refugees — what’s lacking here is common sense and politicians get away with the crap they talk. It’s all part of a racist narrative. You’ve already got the storyline in Canada about the wonderful old Anglos and Scots — and whether it’s a good idea to be multicultural. But the unwritten question is could it be reversed?
Canada has come through the multicultural test. It has problems but it’s pretty good.
Canadians were peacekeepers that came to your aid when you suffered. I was with the Canadian UN forces in Bosnia. And I thought they did everything they could for innocent people. They didn’t question how many future terrorists would be among the Bosnians.
Now what strikes me is the smallness of Canadian politicians. Jason Kenney said “I do not mean to suggest for a moment that all or most of the people in camps are a security risk.” But what’s implicit is that it could be 50 per cent. So he’s contaminating every refugee down to the smallest child. With Vietnamese boat people it was the fear of communist infiltrators. Now it’s the fear of terrorist infiltrators.
Is this the best Canada can do? I don’t want to be Bob from England pontificating. But what happened to the great people, the Churchills and Roosevelts? There’s Angela Merkel. She’s done the best any German has done to redeem Germany’s dark history. Harper is more interested in messing about with a case with a niqab than in stepping forward with this country.