Robert Fisk

Fisk worked on the Sunday Express diary column before a disagreement with the editor, John Junor, prompted a move to The Times.[18] From 1972 to 1975, at the height of the Troubles, Fisk was The Times' Belfast correspondent,[19] before being posted to Portugal following the Carnation Revolution in 1974.[20] He then was appointed Middle East correspondent (1976–1987).[21] In addition to the Troubles and Portugal, he reported the Iranian revolution in 1979.[2] 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[22] in 1989.[2] The New York Times described Fisk as "probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain".[23] The Economist referred to him as "one of the most influential correspondents in the Middle East since the second world war."[24]

Robert Fisk in 2008

Fisk lived in Beirut from 1976,[25] remaining throughout the Lebanese Civil War. He was one of the first Western journalists to report on the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon,[26] as well as the Hama Massacre in Syria.[27] His book on the Lebanese conflict, Pity the Nation, was published in 1990.[28]

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.[29]

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,[30] 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'."[31] 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."[32]

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.[33][34] Fisk's criticism of the invasion was rejected by some other journalists.[35][36] 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."[37]

Fisk interviewed Osama bin Laden on three occasions.[34] 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".[38]

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."[39][40] 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".[41]

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".[42]

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".[43] Fisk had earlier addressed similar concerns in a speech at Sydney University in 2006.[44] 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".[45]

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."[46]

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.[47] 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".[48] 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.[49] The Snopes website said other reporters on the same trip as Fisk had interviewed locals who said they had inhaled toxic gas.[50]

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.[51]

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.[52]

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.[53] 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.[54] 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."[55] 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."[56]

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.[2] He was consistently critical of Israel, labelling some of the country's actions against Palestinians as "war crimes".[57] One of his beliefs was that he should report events from the point of view of the victim rather than those in authority.[58][59] 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".[58] 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".[60]

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".[57] Fisk dismissed the controversy related to his reporting in Syria, saying that he was "writing only what he saw and heard".[61] 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".[62]

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".[63]

Fisk described himself as a pacifist and non-voter.[64] 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."[65] 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."[66] 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."[67]

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 [sic], Figero [sic], 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."[68]

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."[69] 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."[70]

Fisk wrote extensively about the Armenian genocide of 1915 and supported moves to persuade the Turkish Government to acknowledge it.[71]

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."[72] 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?"[73] 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."[74]

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".[114] 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".[65] 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".[115]

• The Point of No Return: The Strike Which Broke the British in Ulster (1975). London: Times Books/Deutsch. ISBN 0-233-96682-X
• In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality, 1939–1945 (2001). London: Gill & Macmillan. ISBN 0-7171-2411-8 (1st ed. 1983).
• Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (3rd ed. 2001). London: Oxford University Press; xxi, 727 pages. ISBN 0-19-280130-9 (1st ed. was 1990).
• The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (October 2005) London. Fourth Estate; xxvi, 1366 pages. ISBN 1-84115-007-X
• The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings (2008) London, Fourth Estate ISBN 978-0-00-727073-6
• Robert Fisk on Algeria: Why Algeria's Tragedy Matters (2013) Independent Print Limited ISBN 9781633533677

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".[116] 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.[116][117]