Living on the Frontline
Alistair Duncan meets award-winning journalist Robert Fisk, whose career of more than thirty years has taken him to the front line and to conversations with Osama bin Laden
Veteran foreign correspondent Robert Fisk is sitting opposite me, sporting a woolly green jumper, sipping from a glass of orange juice. He looks more university professor than a glamorous member of the jet-set foreign correspondent club, but then nothing would irk Robert Fisk more than to be associated with that dubious group of ‘freeloading’ individuals – more of which later.
It is 7am. This is a definite first for me, interviewing someone so early in the day. It is still dark outside, the air ringing with the sound of early morning birdsong, but such is the schedule of Fisk, Middle East correspondent for The Independent and best-selling author, that a bleary-eyed breakfast interview was the only option.
‘It’s 25-hour-day work these days,’ he says, smiling through the fatigue. ‘You know you’re tired when you wake up on aeroplanes and think: “God, I didn’t file on my story”. Then, you realise that your story was a dream. You have this idea when you’re younger that, as you get older, life will get quieter, that there’ll be the slippers and the fire. But, of course, that’s not the case. You get more work to do.’
Fisk is one of the most celebrated reporters of his generation. Famous for his fiery, fiercely anti-establishment rhetoric (a collection of his comment pieces for The Independent, entitled The Age of the Warrior, have just been published by HarperCollins), he has been crowned International Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards no less than seven times. With a PhD in Political Science to his name (from Trinity College, Dublin), Fisk has been an eyewitness to the troubles in Northern Ireland, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, plus wars in Bosnia and Iraq, and has made it his life’s work to document these turbulent chapters of human history with a mordant mix of brutal honesty and unapologetic indignation.
Fisk is now 61. It was widely reported on the internet that he had recently announced his retirement, but when I allude to this, Fisk quickly rubbishes this story as a Chinese whisper distributed and distorted by ‘blogopops’ on the web.
‘It’s so full of garbage, the internet,’ he says, cutting into a fried egg. ‘I don’t know how many letters I’ve sent to people in the last few months, saying: “I’m not retiring”. All I did was give an interview to somebody, in which I was talking about how I doubted if the work I had been doing really had had any effect. I mean maybe somewhere I helped save someone from the gallows in the last X number of years. But I don’t think my reporting has changed the world.’
Fisk has been reporting from the Middle East since the mid-1970s. He says that he ‘loves the life he leads’ in Lebanon and he also enjoys the company of the Lebanese, a ‘very cosmopolitan, brilliantly intellectual’ people of whom he counts many as close friends. But he stops short of declaring his love for the country itself.
‘I don’t like hearing reporters saying: “I love Lebanon or I love Egypt.” They go there for three or four years, they talk to the embassies, they don’t speak the language. Then, they go somewhere else and they love Moscow or they love Peking or they love Tokyo. I think it’s a bit dodgy.’
As he says this, the sound of bland R&B music fills the hotel dining area in which we are ensconced. Fisk’s brow darkens. ‘What awful music,’ he hisses. ‘I had to listen to this yesterday, when I was doing a manuscript.’ He storms off and the music duly stops.
As he returns to our table, I ask him about what he recalls about the early days of arriving in the Middle East (he was first posted to Beirut as Middle East correspondent for The Times in 1976).
‘When you arrive in the Middle East, you go to all these depressingly poor, hot, grey places,’ he says. ‘You get food poisoning and power dysentery. I mean I spent the first two years in the Middle East being ill the whole time.’
He learned Arabic while staying in South Lebanon for three months during the Israeli occupation in the early 1980s. He says that he still makes a lot of mistakes in Arabic – he’s not a patch on Jim Muir, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, for example, who is a very fluent speaker – but it has been a source of great solace to learn that ‘Arabs make a lot of mistakes in Arabic as well’, it being a fiendishly difficult language.‘The main thing is that Arabic-speakers have convinced themselves, correctly, that I am not a spy. If you write with a good heart, even if they disagree with you, they will accept it.’
One of Fisk’s ongoing themes is the lamentable state of modern journalism. He is unmistakeably scornful of journalists who seem to view the job as not much more than a license to quaff complimentary drinks, adding that ‘if you’re going to treat journalism as just another job, like working in a bank, then you’re not going to fulfill the possibilities – exposing corruption, challenging governments at home or revealing the reality of what war is really like’.
At the mention of American TV networks like CNN or newspapers like The New York Times, he shows utter contempt for the way they cow-tow to the mighty machinery of the White House press office.
‘There’s this parasitic relationship between journalists and those in power in the United States,’ he says. ‘Journalists want to be close to power, they want access, but if they write something contrary, then they’ll be cut off from that. But if journalism is just going to be quoting official sources, then why not let them write it and go home and retire?’
American journalists have, of course, bitten back at Fisk. In one review of his book, The Great War for Civilisation, a reviewer for the International Herald Tribune noted that ‘for all the awards he has garnered, and despite his rare combination of scholarly knowledge, experience and drive, Fisk has become something of a caricature of himself… seeking to expose the West’s self-satisfied hypocrisy nearly to the exclusion of the pursuit of straight journalism.’
Such criticisms don’t bother Fisk too much. And given the kind of people who knock at Fisk’s door hoping for him to speak to them, no wonder: Fisk has interviewed Osama Bin Laden three times (before 9/11) and says that he still receives messages from Bin Laden who wants to meet him, although he always now shuns these requests, not wanting to become Bin Laden’s lapdog.
‘He’s the only Arab figure I’ve ever met who didn’t immediately answer every question,’ he says about the great tormentor of the US and its allies. ‘He would pause and then think for up to a minute, clean his teeth with piece of wood, then give you a reply in perfect sentences in Arabic. Most people, including British politicians, faced with a TV camera and asked a question will say the first thing that comes into their head. They don’t want to look dumb. Bin Laden doesn’t care. He thinks what he wants to say and then he says it.’
For all his many glittering achievements in journalism, Fisk can seem rather wistful at times. As we get ready to part company, I ask him about the toll the role of Middle East correspondent has taken on him; he says that, while things have never seemed so bleak to him as they must have done to his friend, Juan Carlos Gumucio, a Bolivian reporter who, after a posting in the Middle East, shot himself dead at the age of 52, he realises that he could have opted for a happier life.
‘A couple of years ago, I was in Europe – you know, state-of-the-art society – and I got back to Beirut and I thought, “I’ve spent 30 years in the Middle East, watching all these wars. Was that really the right thing to do? Have I really had a happy life?” I mean I’m very work-satisfied but, Jesus, why did I waste all my time doing all this? Would I take the job of Middle East correspondent again, if we were back in 1976? Yes, I would. But I’d be foolish if I didn’t realise what I didn’t have by doing this.’
The Age of the Warrior is published by HarperCollins, £14.99.