The Great War for Civilisation (178 page)

My head was struck by stones on both sides at the same time—not thrown stones but stones in the palms of stout men who were using them to try and break my skull. Then a fist punched me in the face, splintering my glasses on my nose, another hand grabbed at the spare pair of spectacles round my neck and ripped the leather container from the cord. And here I have to thank Lebanon. For twenty-five years, I had covered Lebanon's wars and the Lebanese used to teach me, over and over again, how to stay alive. Take a decision—any decision—but don't do nothing. So I wrenched the bag back from the hands of the young man who was holding it. He stepped back. Then I turned on the man on my right, the one holding the bloody stone in his hand, and I bashed my fist into his mouth. I couldn't see very much—my eyes were not only short-sighted without my glasses but were misting over with a red haze—but I saw the man cough and a tooth fall from his lip and then he fell back on the road. For a second, the crowd stopped. Then I went for the other man, clutching my bag under my arm and banging my fist into his nose. He roared in anger and it suddenly turned all red. I missed another man with a punch, hit more, and ran.

I was back in the middle of the road but could not see. I brought my hands to my eyes and with my fingers I tried to scrape the gooey stuff out. It made a kind of sucking sound but I began to see again and realised that I was crying and weeping and that the tears were cleaning my eyes of blood. What had I done? I kept asking myself. I had been hurting and punching and attacking Afghan refugees, the very people I had been writing about for so long, the very dispossessed, mutilated people whom my own country—among others—was killing, along with the Taliban, just across the border. God spare me, I thought. I think I actually said it. The men whose families our bombers were killing were now my enemies too.

Then something quite remarkable happened. A man walked up to me, very calmly, and took me by the arm. I couldn't see him too well for all the blood that was running into my eyes again, but he was dressed in a kind of robe and wore a turban and had a white-grey beard. And he led me away from the crowd. I looked over my shoulder. There were now a hundred men behind me and a few stones skittered along the road, but they were not aimed at me—presumably to avoid hitting the stranger. He was like an Old Testament figure or some Bible story, the Good Samaritan, a Muslim man—perhaps a mullah in the village—who was trying to save my life. He pushed me into the back of a police truck. But the policemen didn't move. They were terrifed. “Help me,” I kept shouting through the tiny window at the back of their cab, my hands leaving streams of blood down the glass. They drove a few metres and stopped until the tall man spoke to them again. Then they drove another 300 metres.

And there, beside the road, was a Red Cross–Red Crescent convoy. The crowd were still behind us, but two of the medical attendants pulled me behind one of their vehicles, poured water over my hands and face and began pushing bandages onto my head and face and the back of my head. “Lie down and we'll cover you with a blanket so they can't see you,” one of them said. They were both Muslims, Bangladeshis, and their names should be recorded because they were good men: Mohamed Abdul Halim and Sikder Mokaddes Ahmed. I lay on the floor, groaning, aware that I might live.

Within minutes, Justin arrived. He had been protected by a massive soldier from the Baluchistan Levies—a true ghost of the British empire who, with a single rifle, kept the crowds away from the car in which Justin was now sitting. I fumbled with my bag. They never got the bag, I kept saying to myself, as if my passport and credit cards were a kind of Holy Grail. But they had snatched my final pair of spare glasses—I was blind without all three—and my mobile telephone was missing and so was my leather-covered contacts book, containing twenty-five years of telephone numbers throughout the Middle East.
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God dammit, I said, and tried to bang my fist on my side until I realised it was bleeding from a big gash on the wrist—the mark of the tooth I had just knocked out of a man's jaw, a man who was truly innocent of any crime except that of being the victim of the world.

So why record my few minutes of terror and self-disgust near the Afghan border, bleeding and crying like an animal, when thousands of innocent civilians were dying under American air strikes in Afghanistan, when the War for Civilisation was burning and maiming the people of Kandahar and other cities because “good” must triumph over “evil”? I had spent more than a quarter of a century reporting the humiliation and misery of the Muslim world and now their anger had embraced me too. Or had it? There were the Red Crescent men, and Fayyez, who came panting back to the car incandescent at our treatment, and Amanullah, who invited us to his own home for medical treatment. And there was the Muslim saint who had taken me by the arm. And—I realised—there were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me, who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others, of us—of us 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.”

So I thought I should write about what happened to Justin and me in this fearful, silly, bloody, tiny incident. I feared other versions produce a different narrative, of how a British journalist was “beaten up by a mob of Afghan refugees.” The
Mail on Sunday
won the prize for just such a distortion. Fisk, it reported—apparently aged sixty-three, not fifty-five—was, yes, “beaten up by a mob of Afghan refugees.” And I was supposed to have said—but didn't—that “I'm going to bear the scars for the rest of my life.” All reference to my repeated assertion that the Afghans were justified in their anger—that I didn't blame them for what they had done—was omitted. The Afghans had become, like the Palestinians, generically violent. And of course, that was the point. The people who bore the scars were the Afghans, the scars being inflicted by us—by our B-52s—not by them. And I wrote in
The Independent
that “if I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdulla, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.”

Among a mass of letters that arrived from readers of my paper, most of them expressing their sympathy, came a few Christmas cards, all but one of them unsigned, expressing the writers' disappointment that the Afghans hadn't “finished the job.”
The Wall Street Journal
published an article that said more or less the same thing under the subhead “A self-loathing multiculturalist gets his due.” In it, columnist Mark Steyn wrote of my reaction that “you'd have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter.” The “Fisk doctrine,” he went on, “taken to its logical conclusion, absolves of responsibility not only the perpetrators of September 11 but also Taliban supporters who attacked several of Mr. Fisk's fellow journalists in Afghanistan all of whom, alas, died before being able to file a final column explaining why their murderers are blameless.”
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In Quetta, two Pakistani doctors washed and bandaged my face but missed a gash on my head, so that I woke in the night stuck to my pillow with blood and had to stand in the shower and drench myself with water to detach the material from the wound. Back in Islamabad, I was befriended—ironically, in view of Steyn's forthcoming abuse—by the
Journal
's new South-West Asia correspondent, Daniel Pearl, and his wife, Marianne. They made me bottomless cups of coffee, supplied me the contents of their own contacts books, assured me that I looked as full of energy as ever. I wasn't so sure. I asked Daniel if he was travelling to Afghanistan. “No,” he said. “My wife is pregnant and we're not going to take that kind of risk.”

Within two months, Daniel Pearl would be dead, beheaded by his Muslim captors after being kidnapped on assignment in Karachi, forced to speak of his Jewish family in the videotape of his vile execution. His murder was as horrifying as it was gruesome.
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It raised again not just the cruelty of al-Qaeda and its satellites but the degree to which we as journalists had lost our immunity. In Lebanon in the mid-1980s, in Algeria and then in Bosnia, our protection as neutral correspondents had disintegrated. We were abducted, murdered because we were Westerners or because we were regarded as combatants. Two months before I was beaten at Kila Abdulla, I had attempted to interview a Muslim cleric in a village mosque outside Peshawar. “Why are you taking this
kaffir
into our mosque?” a bearded man had shouted at the mullah. I conducted the interview outside the building. But I was a
kaffir
. So was Pearl. So, it seemed, were we all. Where did it go wrong?

I have always thought the rot started in Vietnam. For decades, reporters have identified themselves with armies. In the Crimean War, William Howard Russell of
The Times
wore his own self-designed uniform. In both twentieth-century world wars, journalists worked in uniform. Dropping behind enemy lines with U.S. commandos did not spare an AP reporter from a Nazi firing squad. But these were countries in open conflict, reporters whose nations had officially declared war. It was in Vietnam that journalists started wearing combat fatigues and carrying weapons—and sometimes shooting those weapons at America's enemies—even though their countries were not officially at war and when they could have carried out their duties without wearing a soldier's clothes. In Vietnam, reporters were murdered because they were reporters.

This tendency of journalists to be part of the story, to play their own theatrical role, took hold only slowly. When the Palestinians evacuated Beirut in 1982, I noticed that several French reporters wore Palestinian headscarves. Israeli reporters turned up in southern Lebanon carrying pistols. In the 1991 Gulf War, as we have seen, many correspondents dressed up in army costumes—complete with helmets—as if they were members of the 82nd Airborne. In Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2001, something similar happened. Reporters in Peshawar could be seen wearing soft Pashtun hats. Geraldo Rivera of Fox News claimed on television that while in Jalalabad he was carrying a gun. He fully intended to use it, he said on another occasion, to kill Osama bin Laden. “I'm feeling more patriotic than at any time in my life, itching for justice, or maybe just revenge,” he vouchsafed to the world. “And this cartharsis I've gone through has caused me to reassess what I do for a living.” It was the last straw. The reporter had become combatant.

Of course, I had held a gun in a Soviet convoy to Kabul in 1980.
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But I had little choice. And I avoided rhetoric of the kind that Rivera sought to employ, even the unfortunate and sinister phrases used by my CNN colleagues. Like several of my colleagues, I did not like hearing CNN's Walter Rodgers quoting a Marine major on 2 December 2001 that U.S. troops and “opposition groups” might be squeezing Kandahar “like a snake.” The moment that cities or people become snakes or vermin, they can be crushed, liquidated, eliminated like animals. And every journalist's integrity was placed at risk by the obnoxious remark of CNN boss Walter Isaacson, who instructed staff during the Afghan bombardment that “it seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan” because such reporting ran the risk of helping the Taliban. In the next stage of the “war on terror”—the invasion of Iraq—many more journalists would pay with their lives because their role as correspondents simply no longer guaranteed them protection.
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Yet there was another way in which our good faith was damaged, indeed fatally undermined: the unwillingness of major television channels to relay the reality of the Middle East and to support their reporters when confronted by powerful lobby groups. Back in 1993, I had worked on a three-part television series for Britain's Channel 4 and America's Discovery Channel called
From Beirut to
Bosnia
which attempted, in the words of our first episode, to show “how Muslims were coming to hate the West.” We were filming exactly eight years before the attacks of 11 September 2001, and, rewatching the series today—it was made on real film, not videotape, and cost more than a million dollars—I am ever more astonished at what it told viewers. For it turns out to have been a ghastly, unintended but all too accurate warning of September 11th. In one segment, I walk into a burned-out mosque in Bosnia and ask “what the Muslim world has in store for us,” adding that I should perhaps end each of my reports from the Middle East with the words “Watch out!” There are other similar premonitions of terrors to come, which were included in our coverage of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. We were trying to answer the question “why?”—before it needed to be asked.

It was not an easy series to make. We filmed in Lebanon, Gaza, Israel, Egypt, Bosnia and Croatia, questioning Hizballah guerrillas about their war against Israeli occupation troops, and filming women in Lebanese hospitals who were covered in burns from Israeli phosphorus shells. During curfews in Gaza we were repeatedly ordered off the streets by Israeli soldiers—several of whom put their hands over our camera lens to stop us working. We filmed an Israeli officer who told us that a pregnant Palestinian woman had been allowed to break the curfew to go to hospital—then found the woman still trapped in her home. Outside the walls of Jerusalem, we talked to a Jewish settler about why an elderly Palestinian was being evicted from his land—because Jews would be living there and because, in the settler's words, “he's an Arab. He's not Jewish.” In Israel we traced the home of a Palestinian refugee now living in Beirut, talked to the elderly Israeli who moved into the house after 1948—and took our cameras to the Polish town from which he fled and from which his parents and brother were taken by the Nazis to be murdered in the Jewish Holocaust. In Egypt we talked to armed opponents of Mubarak's regime and in Sarajevo to the Bosnian soldiers defending the city, and to the Muslim imam who believed his people were being persecuted “solely because we are Muslims.”