The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
‘John Pilger was an apologist for genocide’
I am sorry for his family’s loss but his career showed a disregard for human rights, says Oliver Kamm
Iadmired the force of his writing, even when I often didn’t support what he wrote, and he was always warm when we met.” So wrote John Simpson, the veteran BBC foreign affairs correspondent, on news of the death of the campaigning journalist John Pilger on December 30 at the age of 84.
Those who know of Pilger’s work only in recent years and from the obscure far-Left websites that published it may struggle to imagine that he was once a big figure in print and broadcast media, when newspapers sold in the millions and there was only terrestrial television with three channels. But he was, and generous sentiments such as Simpson’s have abounded in the past few days. Pundits, politicians and others have typically praised Pilger for his journalistic integrity while making clear that they did not necessarily share his politics.
There’s a more sceptical variant of the same message, which I’ve noted especially among people of my generation, born in the 1960s and 1970s, who were impressed by Pilger’s reports when we were young and he was at the height of his fame. It runs like this: though Pilger descended in later years into apologetics for repressive regimes, he was once a principled and vital foe of oppression and human rights abuses, and it is this side of his work that deserves to be remembered.
The dichotomy was unfortunately not raised at all in an obsequious and evasive obituary by Anthony Hayward, let alone this question, posed by more thoughtful admirers of Pilger: what made the famed voice of radical conscience go from his celebrated series of films on the plight of Cambodia to his defence of Slobodan Milošević, Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin and his furious denial of their amply documented war crimes?
I immodestly believe to have the answer to this conundrum. There is an essential continuity in Pilger’s work. It is not, as many believe, that his judgment dramatically deteriorated as he got older: he was always that way, and his reputation has progressively adjusted downwards to match reality.
Pilger was not really an investigative journalist at all. As a reporter who once worked closely with him explained it to me, Pilger was a polemicist who went out looking for what he wanted to find.
Therein lies the essential transience of Pilger’s life’s work, for while there is much suffering and evil in the international order, a journalist’s first duty, allowing for personal biases and partial information, is to describe the world as it is and not as they might wish it to be. Pilger, by contrast, sought his conclusions in order to accord with his premises. This was always his method – it was, after all, easier than the arduous and unglamorous tasks of fact-finding and fact-checking, for which Pilger was temperamentally unsuited – and I will give examples of his methods from his output on two particular issues.
The first is his celebrated reporting from Cambodia, and the second concerns the wars in the former Yugoslavia, a region he neither knew nor understood.
There is no diplomatic way of saying it but, in his journalism, Pilger was a charlatan and a fraudster. And I use those terms in the strict sense that he said things he knew to be untrue, and withheld things he knew to be true and material, and did it for decades, for ideological reasons.
His Cambodia reports, which made up the single best-known body of work Pilger did, began with Cambodia: Year Zero (1979). The film elicited a huge public reaction (it made a big impression on me as a teenager) and had two undeniable benefits, though one was more alloyed than the other. First, it raised a lot of money from the public to alleviate the desperate plight of Cambodians after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Second, it dramatically raised public awareness of the issue.
The problem was that public awareness was not necessarily equivalent to public understanding, and Pilger’s work didn’t serve the latter. Pilger’s message in this first film and still more so in its several successors was essentially propaganda on behalf of the Vietnamese puppet regime that had supplanted the Khmer Rouge and that was itself guilty of extensive human rights abuses. It was misleading and dishonest, and it involved defaming decent people trying to do their best for a ravaged nation.
Let me first give a bit of background. Pilger is often thought (and he did nothing to dissuade people from believing it) to have been responsible for exposing the sufferings of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979. He wasn’t.
Journalists who broke this story, whose horrors were almost impossible to conceive of, as early as the summer of 1975 included Tony Paul of Reader’s
Digest, Bruce Palling and Elizabeth Becker of and Henry Kamm (no relation to this author) of They were the first writers to publicise refugee accounts, yet – for their pains – their reports were rubbished by some on the radical Left as media distortions.
Noam Chomsky, the famed theoretical linguist, and his co-author Edward Herman, a grotesque fabulist who went on to deny the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, wrote an infamous article in 1977 in which they complained that American newspapers were presenting a “seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasising alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial US role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered”.
But the refugee accounts of Khmer Rouge atrocities, under which about 1.7 million out of a total Cambodian population of eight million perished, were, in all essentials, accurate. Western journalists, in impossibly difficult conditions, had alerted the world to depravities that almost defied the imagination. Pilger was late to the story. This was due not to oversight on his part but to politics. He was antiAmerican, convinced that any regime opposed by the US was automatically innocent, and therefore a cheerleader for Vietnam, which had only just turned against the Khmer Rouge and invaded Cambodia.
Pilger’s consistent theme was that Western governments and the United Nations were giving tacit support, including military aid, to the Khmer Rouge in order to undermine the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh. And to muddy the truth that the Khmer Rouge had itself been supported by radical Left-wing pundits in the West, and that its leaders were all former members of the French Communist Party, he slyly and repeatedly compared the movement to the Nazis.
In, especially, his second film in this series, Cambodia Year One (1980), and thereafter Pilger developed the theme that the West was denying development aid to Cambodia while providing assistance to the resurgent Khmer Rouge. These were shocking fabrications with direct and baneful humanitarian consequences. The truth was that Vietnam was deliberately preventing food aid from reaching the starving people of Cambodia: it was using international aid as a political tool, choosing who would be fed and who would not. UN agencies and NGOs told Pilger this, so he accused them of lying.
The aid agencies were correct and Pilger was the one telling untruths, which he never retracted. In fact, the regime in Phnom Penh, along with the occupying Vietnamese forces, required every UN agency or NGO operating in Cambodia to pledge not to provide aid to starving Cambodians languishing at the border with Thailand. A real campaigning journalist would have exposed this scandal and inhumanity, but it was not Pilger’s cause. His documentary Cambodia: The Betrayal (1990), in which he alleged that SAS members had trained the Khmer Rouge, provoked a libel writ that Central Television settled at substantial cost.
Pilger went on to engage in reckless and extravagant reporting in the case of Kosovo, a province (and since 2008 an independent country) that he showed no sign of having visited. Nato forces engaged in a military campaign, beginning in March 1999, to stop the Milošević regime in Belgrade from assaulting the Albanian population of Kosovo. It was a desperate, last resort when diplomacy had failed. Though Pilger later depicted it as the forerunner of the Iraq war, the cases were nothing like each other.
The campaign against Milošević was fought not for regime change or even for the independence of Kosovo, but for the single and specific reason of protecting a Muslim population from genocide. It was the right thing to do. Milošević’s forces had already expelled some 300,000 Kosovans from their homes, killed almost 2,000 and destroyed dozens of villages. And they threatened to do much worse. After 78 days, and nearly 40,000 combat sorties, Nato forced Milošević to back down.
This limited, just and necessary campaign was described by Pilger in apocalyptic terms (“the truth is that the US and Britain are engaged in a form of nuclear warfare in the Balkans”, he wrote in
May 4 1999) that had absolutely no purchase on reality. But the reason I cite it in this context is that it elicited a series of demonstrable falsehoods by Pilger, all crafted to convey the message that Western governments were lying about the threat to Kosovo and the numbers of Milošević;s victims. He later wrote: “There was no genocide. The Nato attack was both a fraud and a war crime.”
In the wake of the war itself, Pilger wrote in The New Statesman in November 1999: “Figures were supplied. The US defence secretary, William Cohen, said: ‘We’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing . . . They may have been murdered.’”
But Pilger deliberately elided the context from this remark. This was an interview that Cohen gave on CBS television, and he was not suggesting that the Serbs might have murdered 100,000 military-age men. As Michael
Pilger was unsuited to the arduous task of factfinding and factchecking
He went on to engage in reckless reporting in the case of Kosovo
on
Ignatieff correctly pointed out in The
“In Mr. Cohen’s appearance on Face the Nation, his statements were actually much more complicated. While he said that 100,000 were missing, he also clearly stated that his reports showed that 4,600 Kosovars had been executed, a claim that has been confirmed by the forensic trail of evidence uncovered by war crimes investigators since June.”
Ever after, Pilger claimed that the Nato allies had deliberately and vastly exaggerated the number of victims in Kosovo at the hands of Milošević’s forces and always referred to a final body count of 2,788 victims. Again, he was lying by misdirection. The accepted number of those who were killed or went missing during the war is a little more than 13,500. These included just under 1,800 Serb civilians, as well as more than 8,600 Kosovan Albanians.
Thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, more would have perished under Milošević’s orders had Nato not intervened. Pilger adopted the bizarrely literalistic view that someone could only be counted as dead if their body had physically been found. That is not the reality of war. In particular – as my family, friends and colleagues who reported Milošević’s depravities observed directly – it was the aim of Serb forces to bury and hide their victims’ body parts far from any theatre of war, trusting these would never be found.
I am sorry for Pilger’s family that he is now dead but sympathy does not necessitate sentimentality. Pilger’s career, at least till his more recent brutish outbursts, was replete with glamour and awards but it was in the service of deceit, and it exemplified indifference to human suffering and disregard for human rights.