Robert Fisk tells all

[Reincarnated Am]

xxx

[Gavur]

'Infuriated bystander' Robert Fisk weighs in

Daily Yomiuri, Japan
Jan 15 2006


'Infuriated bystander' Robert Fisk weighs in
By James Hardy / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer


The Great War for Civilisation:
The Conquest of the Middle East
By Robert Fisk
Knopf, 1,107 pp, 40 dollars


"Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a
punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, a be-all and end-all
of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and
occupation and murder on a mass scale."

Pulling no punches, The Great War for Civilisation is a 1,000-page
tome that showcases Robert Fisk's brand of reportage with a
conscience.

A foreign correspondent, first for the The Times of London and then
The Independent, who has received more awards than any other
journalist, Fisk has 30 years of material to draw on and an archive
of clippings and pieces that would put the news sections of most
major newspapers to shame.

Unsurprisingly, the book opens with Fisk's three interviews with
Osama bin Laden--interviews that clearly explain the background to
bin Laden's war against the West.

Close up, bin Laden comes across as a more complex figure than the
Bush administration would like to admit, while Fisk identifies a
character trait that suggests the defeat of Al-Qaida is far from
assured. "He was alarming because he was possessed of that quality
which leads men to war: total self-conviction. In the years to come,
I would see others manifest this dangerous characteristic--[U.S.]
President George W. Bush and [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair come
to mind--but never the fatal self-resolve of Osama bin Laden."

Moving on to Fisk's own experiences of the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, the story becomes more cloak-and-dagger, as our intrepid
reporter takes on the local security apparatus and gets the scoop.
Throughout this Cold War drama, Fisk provides historical context,
whether it is the British Empire's 19th-century defeat in Afghanistan
or its early 20th-century failure in Iraq, to the latest failed
imperial adventures being played out before his eyes.

The main point of the book--that the West's imperial failures will
forever repeat themselves at the expense of the populations of the
countries they are trying to control--will resonate with a younger
audience who have no truck with realpolitik or regime change that is
brought about to keep the price of gasoline below 2 dollars a gallon.


Fisk notes from the start that the role of journalism is not--as he
has sometimes thought--to "write the first pages of history." It is
more important than that. "Our job," he quotes Israeli journalist
Amira Hass as saying, "is to monitor the centres of power."

Some of these "centres of power" are dotted around the Middle East,
whether they be Algiers, Damascus, Baghdad or Tehran. But inevitably,
it is the "centres of power" that are not in the region--but which
Fisk contends have decided its fate since the post-World War I
treaties--that come in for the most withering criticism.

Washington's unquestioning support for Israel in defiance of U.N.
resolutions and, Fisk argues, common humanity, comes in for
particularly savage treatment, most notably in a chapter on the use
of a U.S. Marine Corps Hellfire antiarmor missile, which had been
handed over to the Israelis, in the destruction of a Palestinian
ambulance, killing four women and two children who were traveling in
it.

Fisk has been pilloried in some reviews for being too shrill in his
criticism of Western policy in the Middle East--his status as a
self-described "ever more infuriated bystander" leaves some
commentators turned off by what they see as self-righteousness. What
he has over his detractors, and why this reviewer thinks he is being
unfairly criticized, is firsthand experience of the results of the
policies he condemns.

Indeed, the strongest parts of this book are the straightforward
reportage, whether it is from the front line of the Iran-Iraq War,
the occupied Palestinian territories or the civil war in Algeria.

There are many sections that are worth the cover price many times
over. Fisk devotes a particularly harrowing chapter to the 1915-20
Armenian Holocaust, in which 1.5 million Armenians were
systematically slaughtered by the Turkish government--an event it
continues to deny, even to the point of jailing those who dare to say
otherwise.

He does a similar job with an investigation into the effects of
depleted uranium on children in southern Iraq--a massive increase in
leukemia cases that doctors believe to be caused by shrapnel from
U.S. and British shells. Both chapters leave readers wanting to know
more, which is surely the point of good journalism.

But the weaker sections of The Great War for Civilisation make an
already long book unwieldy. Threading his father's minor role in
World War I into the history of the Middle East is an unconvincing
and unnecessary narrative device that does little to enlighten and
much to irritate, while the latter chapters of the book substitute
reporting for conjecture and finger wagging.

While asides at the incompetence of subeditors and the uselessness of
editors in general appear more than once, The Great War for
Civilisation could have done with an aggressive edit, partly to cut
it to a more manageable size, partly to cut out the portentousness
that sometimes afflicts the prose, and partly to cut out Fisk's
grandstanding, which mars the last chapters and weakens an otherwise
fine addition to the West's understanding of its role in the
continuing destruction and upheaval in the Middle East.

(Jan. 15, 2006)

[Gavur]

Writing history's first draft in the Middle East

Khaleej Times, United Arab Emirates
Jan 21 2006


BY MATEIN KHALID

21 January 2006



ALL MY adult life, I thought Count Leo Tolstoy's magnum opus 'War and
Peace' was the quintessential epic of modern history, a sublime work
of art that explored the beauty and horror of the human condition in
the battlefields and palaces of Tsarist Russia as Napoleon's armies
encircled Moscow in the fateful winter of 1812. But no more.


Robert Fisk's eyewitness testament of the horror, pain and injustice
of modern Middle East history combines Tolstoy's epic sweep with the
psychological insights and compassion of Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad,
and Gunter Grass. Fisk's recent book 'The Great War of Civilisations'
is a 1,300-page account of a British war correspondent's struggle to
make sense of all the blood, death and human suffering that has
convulsed the Middle East in our time.

Until I read Fisk, I never understood the meaning of Jean Paul
Satre's idea of the 'homme engage'. The American and Gulf media
deluge us with minutiae over the who, what, when and where of Middle
East politics, never the why. Robert Fisk digs deeper in the
blood-drenched carnivals of our recent past; he resurrects the dead
and forces us to relive the pain of their passing. He chronicles the
absurdity, deceit and cynicism of governments, the dictators who
turned sand into blood in the Middle East's killing fields.

Tolstoy never witnessed the slaughter of Borodin or Austerlitz with
his own eyes, never broke bread with Napoleon, Tsar Alexander or
Marshal Kutuzov. But Fisk possesses the most powerful credential
possible for any student of the mayhem and madness that is Middle
East politics. He was there. He was in Kabul when the Red Amy invaded
Afghanistan in December, 1979 and turned it into a client kingdom of
Brezhnev's USSR. He dodged the KGB and Khad to witness the Soviet
buildup in Kabul and the spontaneous cries of 'Allahu Akbar' that
presaged the tribal insurrection that would change the course of
Afghan and, after September 2001, world history.

Robert Fisk lived through the entire surreal nightmare of the
Lebanese civil war. He met all the protagonists in the war that
destroyed an entire generation of Lebanese - the warlords who led the
Druze, Maronite and Shia militias, Chairman Arafat and the chieftains
of Fatah, the lion of Damascus and his Alawite cubs in the Bekaa
Valley. Fisk witnessed Syria intervene to save the Phalangists in
Lebanon and doom the Palestinians of Tel Zataar, Arafat's self-styled
Stalingrad. He survived the phosphorus, cluster and napalm bombs that
Ariel Sharon, Bush's man of peace, used to slaughter 20,000 human
beings in West Beirut in Israel's Operation Peace for Galiee in
1982.He witnessed the Machiavellian intrigues between the
superpowers, Iran, Israel, Arab dictators and the confessional
warlords that doomed Lebanon to degenerate into a geopolitical
football of the Levant.

Fisk witnessed Khoemini's Islamic revolution and Saddam Hussein's
doomed invasions across the Shatt Al Arab and Kuwait. He evoked the
mobs that jostled to witness the guillotines of the French
revolution, to report on the trial and instant execution of the
Shah's generals and Savak henchmen. Fisk reported from Algeria during
the 'dirty war' between the regime and its Islamist enemies in the
1990s. He interviewed Osama Bin Laden in a Sudanese hideout and an
Afghan cave. He was in Baghdad when 'Pharaoh of the age - Osamapeak
for Dubya - Bush's Stealth bombers and Tomahawk missiles inaugurated
regime change in Saddam's Iraq. In an age of weasel 'embedded'
journalism and jingo doublespeak (Fox News!), I thank God that
journalists like Robert Fisk exist to expose the deceit and cynicism
of Western governments as well as the crimes and brutality of their
Middle Eastern stooges, friends and foes.

As George Orwell once wrote, in times of deceit, just telling the
truth is a revolutionary act. Who else will remember poor Fafo, the
18-year-old Palestinian college girl killed as 'collateral damage'
when Reagan's F-III's bombed Gaddafi's barracks in Libya? Who
remembers now the Iraqi women and girls slaughtered in the Amarya
bunker in the Gulf war, the Kurdish girls doomed to death in Saddam's
torture chambers, the Armenians slaughtered in a genocide still
denied by the Turkish Republic, the Jewish children gassed by Dr
Mengele, the 'Nazi angel of death' at Auschwitz, the Palestinian
victims of Deir Yessein, Tel Zataar, Sabra and Jenin ? Robert Fisk
deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for giving a voice to the powerless,
the victims, the naked and the dead.

I was horrified when General Schwarzkopf once dismissed any
discussion of Iraqi war casualties in the Gulf war with a brusque "we
do not do body counts." Another all-American hero, General Powell,
doomed the Bosnian Muslims of Sarajevo with his belief "we do not do
mountains."

Ever since the age of Julius Caesar and Alexander of Macedon, Western
statesmen have tried to remake the map of the Middle East with
predictably disastrous results. The blood, stench and absurdities of
a war of civilisations have seeped into the very soul, the cultural
DNA, of the Arab world. Yet human pain, the inconsolable grief of the
bereaved, cuts across all that divides the tribes of humankind. Iraq
is the Catch-22 'de jour'. The Americans will leave, but cannot
leave, as Fisk reports in this book. Saddam, faces death for war
crimes he committed while he was coddled by Reagan, Chirac, Mrs
Thatcher and Helmut Schmidt. Syria removed its troops from Lebanon
but journalists are still maimed and bombed in the streets of Beirut.
The war on terror has now reached Russell Square in London and Kota
Beach in Bali.

Fisk's own life story proves that Santayana and Lord Acton got it
right all too well. Those who refuse to heed the lessons of the past
are doomed to repeat them, and power corrupts, but absolute power
corrupts absolutely. Please read this book. It is an act of
rememberance because only memory can give some vestige of meaning to
the souls who perished in the obscene 'theatre of the absurd' called
war. The dead only die forever when anyone alive stops remembering
them. From God we come, to God we return.

[Gavur]

Robert Fisk: You're talking nonsense, Mr Ambassador

All the while, new diplomatic archives are opening to reveal the
smell of death - Armenian death

The Independent
Published: 20 May 2006

A letter from the Turkish Ambassador to the Court of Saint James
arrived for me a few days ago, one of those missives that send a
shudder through the human soul. "You allege that an 'Armenian
genocide' took place in Eastern Anatolia in 1915," His Excellency Mr
Akin Alptuna told me. "I believe you have some misconceptions about
those events ..."

Oh indeedy doody, I have. I am under the totally mistaken conception
that one and a half million Armenians were cruelly and deliberately
done to death by their Turkish Ottoman masters in 1915, that the men
were shot and knifed while their womenfolk were raped and eviscerated
and cremated and starved on death marches and their children
butchered. I have met a few of the survivors - liars to a man and
woman, if the Turkish ambassador to Britain is to be believed - and I
have seen the photographs taken of the victims by a brave German
photographer called Armen Wegner whose pictures must now, I suppose,
be consigned to the waste bins. So must the archives of all those
diplomats who courageously catalogued the mass murders inflicted upon
Turkey's Christian population on the orders of the gang of
nationalists who ran the Ottoman government in 1915.

What would have been our reaction if the ambassador of Germany had
written a note to the same effect? "You allege that a 'Jewish
genocide' took place in Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945 ... I
believe you have some misconceptions about those events ...' Of
course, the moment such a letter became public, the ambassador of
Germany would be condemned by the Foreign Office, our man in Berlin
would - even the pusillanimous Blair might rise to the occasion - be
withdrawn for consultations and the European Union would debate
whether sanctions should be placed upon Germany.

But Mr Alptuna need have no such worries. His country is not a member
of the European Union - it merely wishes to be - and it was Mr
Blair's craven administration that for many months tried to prevent
Armenian participation in Britain's Holocaust Day.

Amid this chicanery, there are a few shining bright lights and I
should say at once that Mr Alptuna's letter is a grotesque
representation of the views of a growing number of Turkish citizens,
a few of whom I have the honour to know, who are convinced that the
story of the great evil visited upon the Armenians must be told in
their country. So why, oh why, I ask myself, are Mr Alptuna and his
colleagues in Paris and Beirut and other cities still peddling this
nonsense?

In Lebanon, for example, the Turkish embassy has sent a "communiqué"
to the local French-language L'Orient Le Jour newspaper, referring to
the "soi-disant (so-called) Armenian genocide" and asking why the
modern state of Armenia will not respond to the Turkish call for a
joint historical study to "examine the events" of 1915.

In fact, the Armenian president, Robert Kotcharian, will not respond
to such an invitation for the same reason that the world's Jewish
community would not respond to the call for a similar examination of
the Jewish Holocaust from the Iranian president - because an
unprecedented international crime was committed, the mere questioning
of which would be an insult to the millions of victims who perished.

But the Turkish appeals are artfully concocted. In Beirut, they
recall the Allied catastrophe at Gallipoli in 1915 when British,
French, Australian and New Zealand troops suffered massive casualties
at the hands of the Turkish army. In all - including Turkish soldiers
- up to a quarter of a million men perished in the Dardanelles. The
Turkish embassy in Beirut rightly states that the belligerent nations
of Gallipoli have transformed these hostilities into gestures of
reconciliation, friendship and mutual respect. A good try. But the
bloodbath of Gallipoli did not involve the planned murder of hundreds
of thousands of British, French, Australian, New Zealand - and
Turkish - women and children.

But now for the bright lights. A group of "righteous Turks" are
challenging their government's dishonest account of the 1915
genocide: Ahmet Insel, Baskin Oran, Halil Berktay, Hrant Dink, Ragip
Zarakolu and others claim that the "democratic process" in Turkey
will "chip away at the darkness" and they seek help from Armenians in
doing so. Yet even they will refer only to the 1915 "disaster", the
"tragedy", and the "agony" of the Armenians. Dr Fatma Gocek of the
University of Michigan is among the bravest of those Turkish-born
academics who are fighting to confront the Ottoman Empire's terror
against the Armenians. Yet she, too, objects to the use of the word
genocide - though she acknowledges its accuracy - on the grounds that
it has become "politicised" and thus hinders research.

I have some sympathy with this argument. Why make the job of honest
Turks more difficult when these good men and women are taking on the
might of Turkish nationalism? The problem is that other, more
disreputable folk are demanding the same deletion. Mr Alputuna writes
to me - with awesome disingenuousness - that Armenians "have failed
to submit any irrefutable evidence to support their allegations of
genocide". And he goes on to say that "genocide, as you are well
aware, has a quite specific legal definition" in the UN's 1948
Convention. But Mr Alputuna is himself well aware - though he does
not say so, of course - that the definition of genocide was set out
by Raphael Lemkin, a Jew, in specific reference to the wholesale mass
slaughter of the Armenians.

And all the while, new diplomatic archives are opening in the West
which reveal the smell of death - Armenian death - in their pages. I
quote here, for example, from the newly discovered account of
Denmark's minister in Turkey during the First World War. "The Turks
are vigorously carrying through their cruel intention, to exterminate
the Armenian people," Carl Wandel wrote on 3 July 1915. The Bishop of
Harput was ordered to leave for Aleppo within 48 hours "and it has later
been learned that this Bishop and all the clergy that accompanied him
have been ... killed between Diyarbekir and Urfa at a place where
approximately 1,700 Armenian families have suffered the same fate ...
In Angora ... approximately 6,000 men ... have been shot on the
road ... even here in Constantinople (Istanbul), Armenians are being
abducted and sent to Asia ..."

There is much, much more. Yet now here is Mr Alptuna in his letter to
me: "In fact, the Armenians living outside Eastern Armenia including
Istanbul ... were excluded from deportation." Somebody here is not
telling the truth. The late Mr Wandel of Copenhagen? Or the Turkish
Ambassador to the Court of St James?