Born: July 12th, 1946
Died: October 30th, 2020
Robert Fisk who has died suddenly aged 74 devoted most of his life to reporting wars and revolutions in the Middle East. He made no apologies for his passionate descriptions of the sufferings of the victims and for criticising the roles played by the United States and Israel in these conflicts.
He was not afraid to make enemies of fellow journalists when he derided reporting which depended largely on official briefings and he coined the term "hotel journalism" for much coverage of the post-invasion period in Iraq. He often showed foolhardy courage in walking into dangerous areas with his ever-present notebook and pen. He was named International Reporter of the Year numerous times and universities around the world queued up to award him honorary doctorates.
Fisk often sought refuge from Middle East strife at his home in Dalkey, Co Dublin and had recently taken out Irish citizenship. He was born in Maidstone, Kent, in 1946. Both President Michael D Higgins and Taoiseach Micheál Martin paid tribute to his reporting and its influence.
His foreign reporting began in Northern Ireland where he was sent in 1972 by the London Times to cover the Troubles. His impartial reporting was not appreciated by the British security forces and he once had to take refuge in Dublin to escape arrest when secret documents were planted on him. His book, The Point of No Return, described the fall of the power-sharing executive in Stormont following the loyalist strike in 1974. He later wrote a study of Irish neutrality in the second World War, In Time of War, based on his PhD from Trinity College Dublin. His primary degree was from Lancaster University.
As a journalist you have got to be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who suffer
After a stint in Portugal covering the Carnation Revolution, the Times appointed him its Middle East correspondent in 1976. Over the next 44 years he was to cover a mounting series of wars, revolutions and uprisings some on his own doorstep where he lived in Beirut.
Bin Laden
His reporting of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was the first of numerous visits there resulting in him being one of the few western correspondents to interview Osama Bin Laden not once but three times in the 1990s in his hideout. After the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers in New York master-minded by Bin Laden, Fisk, while condemning the attack, was strongly criticised in the US for suggesting that the motivation of the attackers should also be investigated. But he was also frequently invited to give lectures to US universities.
Fisk's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian discord, the US-led invasions of Kuwait and Iraq, the US entry into Afghanistan after 9/11, US bombing under NATO auspices of Kosovo and other US involvement in the Middle East often resulted in accusations of him being biased against American policy in the region. It was a scoop of his identifying a US warship, the Vincennes, as shooting down an Iranian civil airliner in 1988 that led to his parting from the Times in 1989 after the paper had been taken over by Rupert Murdoch. The paper refused to use his scoop and advised him to concentrate on more "balanced" reporting. He then switched to the recently established London Independent and remained with it for the rest of his life.
In 2001, he was badly beaten by Afghan refugees in a village on the Pakistan border when his car stalled. He was lucky to escape with his life but he was magnanimous towards his attackers as they had recently been the victims of US bombing. He used to explain his rejection of conventional journalistic detachment by saying: "If you watch wars, the old ideas of journalism that you have to be neutral and take nobody's side is rubbish. As a journalist you have got to be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who suffer."
Fisk described his reporting as: “I try to write as if I am talking to a friend – you won’t believe what I have just seen.” He described himself as a “pacifist” and said he had never voted.
In recent years he was embroiled in controversy over his coverage of the civil war in Syria. His reporting was coming from accompanying the Syrian army as it fought to drive out Islamic State, also known as Isis, and Syrian independent militias. While he condemned earlier Syrian army atrocities, he was sceptical of claims from opponents of President Assad that in 2018 he was authorising chemical weapons in attacks on the town of Douma. Fisk, who was with a group of journalists escorted by the army, said he could not find evidence of use of chemical weapons.
In 2005 he tried to bring together his experiences and his views on the treatment of the Arab world by former colonial powers in a 1,000-page book called The Great War for Civilisation – the Conquest of the Middle East. In it he drew on his father William’s experience as a British officer fighting in France in the first World War. Incidentally, his father was sent to Ireland in 1916 to help put down the Rising.
In a follow-up book of even greater length – on which he was working when he died – Fisk covered his life from the US invasion of Iraq to the present. It may be published posthumously according to his second wife who as a photographer accompanied him on many of his reporting trips.
Fisk fell ill at his Dublin home and was admitted to St Vincent’s hospital where he died a short time later.