ARTICLES AND REPORTS BY ROBERT FISK FROM MARCH 2001 ONWARDS
Click Here for Articles dating from 2000 to 2004 (Archive No. 1)
Click Here for articles dating from 2005 to 2008 (Archive No. 2)
Traitors, martyrs or just brave men?
The leaders of the Easter Rising suffered Western Front punishment
15 April 2006
More than 15 years ago, I travelled to the Belgian city of Ypres with an Irish friend. She was from a good Fine Gael family which nursed a healthy disrespect for the amount of romantic green blossom draped around Padraig Pearse's neck for the militarily hopeless but politically explosive Dublin Easter Rising of 1916.
Silent for too long, the witnesses to evil
If you want to spill the beans while in office, you have to do it in 'a personal capacity'
08 April 2006
A quote from the cops. I was in Oslo when I received the SMS on my Lebanese mobile phone from the country’s Internal Security Forces, Lebanon’s paramilitary ISF. “Dear citizen,” it began – and I have to admit, I liked the assumption of Lebanese citizenship. “Starting March 15th, the Internal Security Forces will be dealing strictly with traffic contraventions. Be co-operative for your safety. The ISF.”
07 April 2006
If I were an Israeli I would have built a wall, but not as a way of stealing land
02 April 2006
We have been conned again. The Israeli elections, we are told, mean that the dream of "Greater Israel" has finally been abandoned. West Bank settlements will be closed down, just as the Jewish colonies were uprooted in Gaza last year.
A lesson from the Holocaust for us all
This account fills one with rage that anyone could deny the reality of the Jewish genocide
01 April 2006
At a second-hand book stall in the Rue Monsieur le Prince in Paris a few days ago, I came across the second volume of Victor Klemperer's diaries. The first volume, recounting his relentless, horrifying degradation as a German Jew in the first eight years of Hitler's rule--from 1933 to 1941--I had bought in Pakistan just before America's 2001 bombardment of Afghanistan.
Lessons from the ghosts of Gallipoli
Ataturk's words were the most compassionate ever uttered by a Muslim leader
25 March 2006
Wellington reminds me of Maidstone, Kent, when I was a little boy; the 1912 façades of so many New Zealand shops, the narrow streets, the trolley buses, the giant coins, the slightly old-fashioned English, the demand for doughnuts and hot-cross buns. Everyone in Maidstone used to call each other "mate" - yes, I know this is an Australian expression as well - and older men in Wellington wear ties, just as my Dad did back in the 1950s.
The Iraq War: Three Years On - The march of folly, that has led to a bloodbath
20 March 2006
It is the march of folly. In 1914, the British, French, and Germans though they would be home by Christmas. On the 9th of April 2003, corporal David Breeze of the 3rd Battalion, 4th US Marine Regiment - the very first American to enter Baghdad - borrowed my satellite phone to call his home in Michigan. "Hi you guys, I'm in Baghdad," he told his mother. "I'm ringing to say 'Hi, I love you. I'm doing fine. I love you guys.' The war will be over in a few days. I'll see you all soon."
The farcical end of the American dream
The US press is supposed to be challenging the lies of this war
18 March 2006
It is a bright winter morning and I am sipping my first coffee of the day in Los Angeles. My eye moves like a radar beam over the front page of the Los Angeles Times for the word that dominates the minds of all Middle East correspondents: Iraq. In post-invasion, post-Judith Miller mode, the American press is supposed to be challenging the lies of this war. So the story beneath the headline "In a Battle of Wits, Iraq's Insurgency Mastermind Stays a Step Ahead of US" deserves to be read. Or does it?
Algerian under a death sentence fights deportation
15 March 2006
Ahmed Zaoui, Algerian cleric and university professor, member of the Algerian Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), sits back opposite a cluster of statues of the Virgin, a painting of Christ's crucifixion and three Catholic priests. In St Benedict's Dominican Priory in Auckland, deportation hangs heavily over a man who has been condemned to death in absentia in his own country and merits a clutch of doubtful convictions in Europe, as well as an unpleasant and largely secret document from New Zealand's security services who are trying to over-rule the local refugee authorities' decision that he can remain in the country.
It was the wrong sort of courage and she was defending the freedom of the wrong people
11 March 2006
You've got to fight. It's the only conclusion I can draw as I see the renewed erosion of our freedom to discuss the Middle East. The most recent example - and the most shameful - is the cowardly decision of the New York Theatre Workshop to cancel the Royal Court's splendid production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie.
Fisk paints a Middle East in crisis - talking to abc.net.au
06 March 2006
Lebanese put pressure on pro-Syrian President
05 March 2006
Who will rid us of this troublesome President? That is what most of Lebanon's cabinet and MPs - and Saad Hariri, the son of murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri - have been asking these past months, for pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud is the last public vestige of Damascus' power in Beirut.
Dead heroes and living memories
Dumas's tomb is the same as that of Jean Moulin. And Zola. And André Malraux
04 March 2006
Let us now praise famous men. I'm talking about the dead variety, of course, because I suspect we are defined as a people by the way we honour our dead as much as the way we treat the living. My dad, old Bill Fisk, used to force me to walk round the aisles of All Saints Church in Maidstone to look at the inscriptions, pointing to the moth-eaten battle honours of the Royal West Kent Regiment over our heads.
Setback for inquiry into Hariri assassination
03 March 2006
Once upon a time it all looked so simple. UN investigators would find out who assassinated the former prime minister Rafik Hariri on 14 February last year, arrest the suspects and – with the help of the Lebanese judiciary – put them on trial.
Robert Fisk shares his Middle East knowledge - on abc.net.au - Lateline
02 March 2006
Yeah, I listened to Bush. It made me doubt myself when I heard him say that. I still go along and say what I said before - Iraq is not a sectarian society, but a tribal society.
Defeat is victory. Death is life
As torture in Iraq was being exposed, Rumsfeld grovelled before Saddam
26 February 2006
Everyone in the Middle East rewrites history, but never before have we had a US administration so wilfully, dishonestly and ruthlessly reinterpreting tragedy as success, defeat as victory, death as life - helped, I have to add, by the compliant American press. I'm reminded not so much of Vietnam as of the British and French commanders of the First World War who repeatedly lied about military victory over the Kaiser as they pushed hundreds of thousands of their men through the butchers' shops of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli. The only difference now is that we are pushing hundreds of thousands of Arabs though the butchers' shops - and don't even care.
Is the problem weather, or is it war?
Something more serious is happening to our planet which we are not being told about
25 February 2006
Back in the Sixties, a great movie was released called The Day the Earth Caught Fire. Leo McKern, I recall, played a Daily Express reporter along with the then real-life editor of the paper, Arthur Christiansen. What the Express discovered was that the British government was erecting showers in Hyde Park to keep people cool when in fact it was still winter. Investigative reporting eventually revealed - and this, remember, was fiction - that the US and Soviet powers had, without knowing of the other's activities, tested nuclear weapons at exactly the same moment at opposite sides of the earth.
By such little things is a man betrayed
On 14 February, the anniversary of his assassination, I remember Hariri and the promises we made
11 February 2006
A year ago, I watched an old friend burning on the pavement beside me. No, let us be true, many millions of Lebanese regarded Rafiq Hariri as an old friend. But he was a friend to me, calling me after I was badly beaten on the Afghan border in 2001, offering to fly me home to Beirut on his private jet -”Musharraf is my friend,” he had shouted, accurately if somewhat slyly – over the phone line to Quetta.
Religious fury threatens to wrest control from secular governments
06 February 2006
After Syria, the fires fanned by Denmark's anti-Prophet cartoons spread to Lebanon yesterday with sectarian intensity. Anger flashing through the Muslim world over the weekend saw protesters burn Danish flags and attack buildings from Lahore to Gaza. The Islamic Army in Iraq, one of the main insurgent groups, made a blood-curdling call yesterday for violence against citizens of countries where caricatures of the Prophet Mohamed have been published.
Don't be fooled, this isn't an issue of Islam versus secularism
'The Koran does not forbid images of the Prophet but millions of Muslims do'
04 February 2006
So now it's cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb-shaped turban. Ambassadors are withdrawn from Denmark, Gulf nations clear their shelves of Danish produce, Gaza gunmen threaten the European Union. In Denmark, Fleming Rose, the "culture" editor of the pip-squeak newspaper which published these silly cartoons - last September, for heaven's sake - announces that we are witnessing a "clash of civilisations" between secular Western democracies and Islamic societies. This does prove, I suppose, that Danish journalists follow in the tradition of Hans Christian Anderson. Oh lordy, lordy. What we're witnessing is the childishness of civilisations.
And now, horror of horrors, the Palestinians have elected the wrong party to power
28 January 2006
Oh no, not more democracy again! Didn't we award this to those Algerians in 1990? And didn't they reward us with that nice gift of an Islamist government - and then they so benevolently cancelled the second round of elections? Thank goodness for that!
My challenge for Steven Spielberg
'Munich' suggests for the first time on the big screen that Israel's policy is immoral
21 January 2006
Steven Spielberg's Munich is absolutely brilliant. I can hear readers groaning already. It won't open in Britain until next Friday. But in the United States, Arabs have condemned the movie about the Israeli assassination of Palestinians after the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics as an anti-Arab diatribe that dehumanizes an entire people suffering dispossession and occupation.
Osama bin Laden: Is it him? Almost certainly.
20 January 2006
So why only on audio? Why no video tape? Is he sick? Yes, say the usual American "intelligence sources". It's the same old story: Osama bin Laden talks to us from the mouth of a cave, from within a cave, from a basement perhaps, from a tape almost certainly recorded down a telephone line from far away. Yesterday's message, broadcast as ever by al-Jazeera television, was a reminder that security - not sickness - decides his method of communication.
06 January 2006
Israel's Prime Minister was a ruthless military commander responsible for one of the most shocking war crimes of the 20th century, argues Robert Fisk. President George Bush acclaims Ariel Sharon as 'a man of peace', yet the blood that was shed at Sabra and Chatila remains a stain on the conscience of the Zionist nation. As Sharon lies stricken in his hospital bed, his political career over, how will history judge him?
Only justice, not bombs, can make our dangerous world a safer place
30 December 2005
This was the year the "war on terror" - an obnoxious expression which we all parroted after 11 September 2001 - appeared to be almost as endless as George Bush once claimed it would be. And unsuccessful. For, after all the bombing of Afghanistan, the overthrow of the Taliban, the invasion of Iraq and its appallingly tragic aftermath, can anyone claim today that they feel safer than they did a year ago?
I first realized the enormous pressures on American journalists in the Middle East when I went some years ago to say goodbye to a colleague from the Boston Globe.
28 December 2005
I first realized the enormous pressures on American journalists in the Middle East when I went some years ago to say goodbye to a colleague from the Boston Globe. I expressed my sorrow that he was leaving a region where he had obviously enjoyed reporting. I could save my sorrows for someone else, he said. One of the joys of leaving was that he would no longer have to alter the truth to suit his paper's more vociferous readers.
Another truly brave man dies in Lebanon
I did not like Jibran Tueni, but he would have been my friend had we had the chance to be so
17 December 2005
There on the screen Jibran Tueni. "For ever and ever!" he shouts. He is talking about Lebanese freedom. And Katia Jahjoura's camera picks him up, throbbing with life. Only nine months later he will be dead. Not for ever and ever.
A fearfully light coffin is carried to a Beirut grave. Who will be next?
15 December 2005
How well the Lebanese do funerals. "Who's next?" one of the posters asked beside the cortege of Jibran Tueni, journalist, editor, opposition MP, man-about-town, another young life lost to Lebanon; and, of course, we were all asking the same question.
In Lebanon, the men do the dying, and the women do the mourning
14 December 2005
They will bury Jibran Tueni today. "You animals, you insects," the woman screamed in the Greek Orthodox church yesterday as his old father Ghassan leaned forward to shake our hands. "Jibran is still alive. He lives now."
Despite floods of soldiers, assassinations still continue. No one is safe in Lebanon
13 December 2005
No one is safe. The bits of bodies on the road, the blood - how dark it becomes an hour after it has lain upon the tarmac - and the incinerated cars, the broken railings through which Jibran Tueni's car was hurled into a pine-clustered ravine by the bomb; this is now the nature of Lebanon's war.
Some buried bones are best left undug
There are 17,000 Lebanese missing from the civil war. Are we to dig them all up?
10 December 2005
My late friend Juan Carlos Gumucio used to claim that we were "mass graves correspondents". So often were we driving to southern Lebanon to witness the exhumation of yet more murdered Lebanese that it seemed quite an accurate description of our lives. Druze tipped down wells, Maronites with their throats slit in the Chouf and - once- an entire charnel house of skeletons which turned out, after the usual claims of Israeli atrocities, to be the last resting place not of Palestinians but of Philistines; it was Juan Carlos who spotted that the dead wore no wrist watches.
America slowly confronts the truth
The old media dog sniffed the air, found power was moving away from the White House, and began to drool
03 December 2005
Watching the pathetic, old, lie-on-its-back frightened labrador of the American media changing overnight into a vicious rottweiler is one of the enduring pleasures of society in the United States. I have been experiencing this phenomenon over the past two weeks, as both victim and beneficiary.
No wonder al-Jazeera was a target
26 November 2005
On 4 April 2003, I was standing on the roof of al-Jazeera’s office in Baghdad. The horizon was a towering epic of oil fires and burning buildings. Anti-aircraft guns in a public park close to the bureau were pumping shells into the sky and the howl of jets echoed across the city. I was about to start a two-way interview with al-Jazeera’s head office in Qatar when an American rocket came racing up the Tigris river behind me. Its rail-train "swish" brought a cry from the Qatar technician who picked up the sound on his earphones.
The betrayed mothers of America
Vietnam comes to mind. They talk of their patriotism, though patriotism is not enough
19 November 2005
I sit in one of the dives on 44th Street, uncertain how to approach Sue Niederer and Celeste Zappala, afraid that their stories can be too easily turned into tears, their message lost after the Veterans’ Day march. They were put at the back of the New York parade, humiliated, with their little crowd of anti-war veterans and their memories of boys who left young wives for Iraq and came back in coffins.
Torture's out. Now they call it abuse
No screaming, no cries of agony, no shrieks of pain. Yes, it sounds much better, doesn't it?
12 November 2005
"Prevail" is the "in" word in America just now. We are not going to "win" in Iraq - because we did that in 2003, didn't we, when we stormed up to Baghdad and toppled Saddam? Then George Bush declared "Mission Accomplished". So now we must "prevail". That's what F J "Bing" West, ex-soldier and former assistant secretary for International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration said this week. Plugging his new book - No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah - he gave a frightening outline of what lies in store for the Sunni Muslims of Iraq.
King has more friends in West than at home
11 November 2005
It was a bloody, cruel message to the Plucky Little King Mark II. Help the Americans, train their Iraqi policemen, entertain their special forces officers and you will be a new target of al-Qa'ida. Not that new, of course. A US embassy employee, Laurence Foley, the softest of targets because he loved the Middle East and lived at home in Amman, was killed three years ago. But 56 dead, most of them Jordanians, is a devastating blow to the man who once ran the supposedly "elite" Jordanian special forces and who is King of that little sandpit Winston Churchill created and called "Jordan" .
A poet on the run in Fortress Europe
I can't help you, I say. I will write about you. I will try to pump some compassion out of the authorities
05 November 2005
Mohamed sits on the chair beside me in Amsterdam and opens his little book of poetry. His verse slopes down the page in delicate Persian script, the Dari language of his native Afghanistan. "God, why in the name of Islam is there all this killing, why all this anti-people killing ... the only chairs left in my country are chairs for the government, those who want to destroy Afghanistan." He reads his words of anger slowly, gently interrupted by an old chiming Dutch clock. Outside, the Herengracht canal slides gently beneath the rain. It would be difficult to find anywhere that least resembles Kabul.
31 October 2005
Self-deception is one of the characteristics of the Middle East narrative. Whenever wars and political upheavals tear the region apart, someone will claim that life is improving, that peace may yet be discovered. And so it is today. As Iraq collapses deeper into anarchy, the US has been trying to push the Arab Gulf states into opening relations with Israel.
All over the globe, our leaders seem to be suffering from a severe bout of infantilism
As someone who has to look at the eviscerated corpses , I can only shake my head in disbelief
29 October 2005
I wonder sometimes if we have not entered a new age of what the French call infantilisme. I admit I am writing these words on the lecture circuit in Paris where pretty much every political statement - including those of Messrs Chirac, Sarkozy, de Villepin et al - might fall under this same title. But the folk I am referring to, of course, are George W Bush, Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara and - a newcomer to the Fisk Hall of Childishness - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.
The real story behind those rumours that the Americans banned me from the US
I had simply travelled on an old passport that was no longer valid for the US
22 October 2005
This is the story of the internet, a passport and a chocolate mousse. The first told lies, the second was useless and the third never eaten.
On a whirlwind trip to promote his new book, Robert Fisk finds that the past - and present - come back to haunt him
16 October 2005
Launching a book should be a time to remember, a celebration, a moment to savour past adventures, in my case to remember how lucky I am to be alive.
The Ghazi Kenaan I knew was not the sort of man who would commit suicide
13 October 2005
"Just think," Ghazi Kenaan said to me with a mirthless smile. "Terry Waite came here to rescue hostages, and got kidnapped himself!"
'The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East'
01 October 2005
Knew it would be like this. On 19 March 1997, outside the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad with its manicured lawns and pink roses, an Afghan holding a Kalashnikov rifle invited me to travel in a car out of town. The highway to Kabul that evening was no longer a road but a mass of rocks and crevasses above the roaring waters of a great river.
When nature and man conspire to expose the lies of the powerful, the truth will out
What we were actually doing in Basra was to turn a blind eye on abuse, murder and anarchy
24 September 2005
"Water is your friend" was the advice regularly given to a truly good friend of mine here in the Middle East. The speaker was a member of the One-Thousand- Litres-a-Day-Keeps-Dehydration-at-Bay Brigade, although I have to say that the Arabs take a different view. After generations of sword-like desert heat, they take tea in the morning, endure an oven-like day without sustenance, and then sip another scalding tea at dusk. The less you drink, the less you perspire, the less you need to drink. In a land with few oases, it’s a craft worth learning.
We have long ago lost our moral compass, so how can we lecture the Islamic world?
Years of Western interference in the Middle East has left the region heavy with injustices
17 September 2005
In an age when Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara can identify "evil ideologies" and al-Qa’ida can call the suicide bombing of 156 Iraqi Shias "good news" for the "nation of Islam", thank heaven for our readers, in particular John Shepherd, principal lecturer in religious studies at St Martin’s College, Lancaster.
Why is it that we and America wish civil war on Iraq?
15 September 2005
There will not be a civil war in Iraq. There never has been a civil war in Iraq. In 1920, Lloyd George warned of civil war in Iraq if the British Army left. Just as the Americans now threaten the Iraqis with civil war if they leave. As early as 2003, American spokesmen warned that there would be civil war if US forces left.
They told Andrea that Chris had not suffered. Death seems to have followed me this year
I add him to the list of our 'martyrs', who die in road accidents and storms as well as from bombs and bullets
03 September 2005
Death is generic. But not for me. Yes, I see the photographs of the Iraqis who were crushed, squeezed, plunged, thrown to death in Baghdad. I see the old man dead in the chair in New Orleans. But it is always those we know - those we can identify with as ourselves - who make the impact. Death seems to have followed me this year.
One thousand feared dead after Shia pilgrims are caught in stampede
01 September 2005
Martyrdom has always been a foundation of the Shia Muslim faith. But yesterday's tragedy gave it new meaning: possibly as many as 1,000 men, women and children were killed when they fell from a bridge over the Tigris river in Baghdad, apparently fearful that a suicide bomber had been let loose among them.
How easily we have come to take the bombs and the deaths in Iraq for granted
If 'we' had not invaded Iraq, 43 Iraqis would not have been pulverised by three bombs last week
27 August 2005
Taking things for granted. Or, as a very dear friend of mine used to say to me, "There you go." I am sitting in Baghdad airport, waiting for my little Flying Carpet Airlines 20-seater prop aircraft to take me home to Beirut but the local Iraqi station manager, Mr Ghazwan, has not turned up like he used to. Without him, I can't enter departures or check in.
People torn to pieces, relatives scream - another week in the theme park of death
There are now two Baghdads. One is the Green Zone, where US and Iraqi officials live in a protected realm; the other is the danger zone, where everyone else lives.
21 August 2005
On Monday, George Bush was praising the greedy sectarian politicians here - who had totally failed to meet the new Iraqi constitution deadline - for their "heroic" efforts for "democracy".
What does democracy really mean in the Middle East?
Whatever the West decides Sometimes I wonder if there will be a moment when reality and myth, truth and lies, will collide
20 August 2005
It makes you want to scream. I have been driving the dingy, dangerous, oven-like streets of Baghdad all week, ever more infested with insurgents and their informers, the American troops driving terrified over the traffic islands, turning their guns on all of us if we approach within 50 metres.
The Shia shopkeeper growing rich on Saddam
19 August 2005
Ridha Abu Mohamed knows why I have come to his shop in Al-Salman Faiq Street. With a creditor's grin, he opens a box of watches, all blessed with the features of the Beast of Baghdad.
Shias are the targets as bombs bring carnage to bus station
18 August 2005
Most of them were Shia Muslims, and they were presumably the target. The Nahda bus station is for poor people, old women, mothers, the unemployed who want to return to their cities in the Shia south.
Secrets of the morgue: Baghdad's body count
Bodies of 1,100 civilians brought to mortuary in July Pre-invasion, July figure was typically less than 200 Last Sunday alone, the mortuary received 36 bodies Up to 20 per cent of the bodies are never identified Many of the dead have been tortured or disfigured
17 August 2005
The Baghdad morgue is a fearful place of heat and stench and mourning, the cries of relatives echoing down the narrow, foetid laneway behind the pale-yellow brick medical centre where the authorities keep their computerised records. So many corpses are being brought to the mortuary that human remains are stacked on top of each other. Unidentified bodies must be buried within days for lack of space - but the municipality is so overwhelmed by the number of killings that it can no longer provide the vehicles and personnel to take the remains to cemeteries.
Iraqis extend deadline for new constitution
16 August 2005
As usual in Iraq, a grotesque political failure was being dressed up as a semi-victory last night by an Iraqi government that controls little more than a few square miles of Baghdad. For inside the infamous Green Zone - the castellated, concrete-barricaded pseudo-castle in which most of Iraq's principal politicians are now forced to live - the almost equally infamous constitution, which was supposed to have completed its drafting yesterday, appeared to be falling to pieces.
No more bottles of Lebanese red for the diners of Baghdad
16 August 2005
In the good old days - when there were just roadside explosives and suicide car bombs to contend with - one of the few comforts of Baghdad was to go out for dinner. A bottle of wine, the traditionally cooked masgouf fish from the Tigris and a heap of fruit would end a potentially calamitous day in a civilised manner. Kidnapping and throat-cutting put an end to the good life.
A constitution that means nothing to ordinary Iraqis
15 August 2005
Behind ramparts of concrete and barbed wire, the framers of Iraq's new constitution wrestled yesterday to prevent - or bring about - the federalisation of Iraq while their compatriots in the hot and fetid streets outside showed no interest in their efforts.
How can the US ever win, when Iraqi children die like this?
13 August 2005
There’s the wreckage of a car bomb that killed seven Americans on the corner of a neighbouring street. Close by stands the shuttered shop of a phone supplier who put pictures of Saddam on a donkey on his mobiles. He was shot three days ago, along with two other men who had committed the same sin. In the al-Jamia neighbourhood, a US Humvee was purring up the road so we gingerly backed off and took a side street. In this part of Baghdad, you avoid both the insurgents and the Americans - if you are lucky.
Ten minutes on a trip to the supermarket can mean the difference between life and death
12 August 2005
It was the same lunatic corkscrew landing in the same little Lebanese plane, barrelling down into the sandstorm of Baghdad airport. Piloting his 20-passenger twin-prop aircraft - from Flying Carpet Airlines, no less - Captain Hussam has three things on his mind: American helicopters, pilotless reconnaissance drones and incoming missiles. So we all scan the dun-coloured runway and terminals and the grotty slums beside the airport road for the tell-tale pink flame surviving pilots have sometimes caught sight of.
The terrible legacy of the man who failed the world
02 August 2005
So the old man will be buried this afternoon on the edge of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in a desert graveyard of no memorials. The strict Wahhabi tradition - to which, of course, that far more famous Saudi, Osama bin Laden, belongs - demands no statues, no gravestones, no slabs. So Fahd will be laid in the desert sand, his head touching the earth, covered over and left for the after-life. Not a single stone will mark his place.
The dangerous dichotomy between some Muslims and the society around them
They want, I think, to destroy themselves for their feelings of guilt and others for 'corrupting' them
23 July 2005
That fine French historian of the 1914-18 world conflict, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, suggested not long ago that the West was the inheritor of a type of warfare of very great violence. "Then, after 1945," he wrote, "... the West externalised it, in Korea, in Algeria, in Vietnam, in Iraq... we stopped thinking about the experience of war and we do not understand its return (to us) in different forms like that of terrorism... We do not want to admit that there is now occurring a different type of confrontation..."
The Museum of Palestine: Keys to the past
In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes, never to return. One of them, Mahmoud Dakwar, has made it his mission to preserve a record of this vanished society for its descendants.
20 July 2005
There are pound notes printed in English, Arabic and Hebrew, piastre coins and Ottoman land deeds and British mandate tax returns, ploughs and hoes and even the lock to Acre prison, dated 1918 - a whole roomful of artefacts from a lost land called Palestine. Mahmoud Dakwar hovers over each photograph of old Jerusalem, each delicate blue necklace, bead and map, with a creditor’s concern. For this really is the lost credit of Palestine, the last trinkets of a vanished society. And he produces two sparkling, burnished pieces of metal and walks outside into the sunshine.
Farewell, Ane-Karine, adventurous envoy and friend to all the Middle East
Her love of life was superhuman. She served devastating gin and tonics in the garden of her Tehran residence
16 July 2005
Ane-Karine knew all about bombs. And she would have had strong views on the London atrocities. "There’s no point in banging on about security," she used to tell me in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. "You’ve got to find out why people do this - and what we might have done to prevent it. You’re not going to stop it by talking about ’terrorism.’"
Lebanon's deputy PM survives assassination attempt
13 July 2005
The plot thickens. Every three weeks, an assassination. But yesterday’s intended victim - for Elias Murr survived - was a pro-Syrian former defence minister, Lebanon’s outgoing deputy prime minister and son-in-law of the even more pro-Syrian Lebanese President, Emile Lahoud.
The reality of this barbaric bombing
If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us think insurgency won’t come to us?
08 July 2005
"If you bomb our cities," Osama bin Laden said in one of his recent video tapes, "we will bomb yours." There you go, as they say. It was crystal clear Britain would be a target ever since Tony Blair decided to join George Bush’s "war on terror" and his invasion of Iraq. We had, as they say, been warned. The G8 summit was obviously chosen, well in advance, as Attack Day.
We should have listened to Bin Laden
The American 'experts' waffled about whether he was alive - not what he said.
02 July 2005
I belong to that generation of undergraduates who cut their teeth on linguistics. Lancaster University in its second year of existence: Class of '67, if I'm not mistaken - was as innovative as it was a bit odd. "Digs" were on the Morecombe seafront, lectures in a converted chapel, and tutorials in an old linen factory. But the books we studied invariably included the immensely boring Zelig Harris and the stunningly brilliant Noam Chomsky.
Amid the horrors of the Middle East, it is strange to hear about this European 'crisis'
Why is it that we Europeans can no longer understand our own peace and contentment and safety and our extraordinary luxury and our futuristic living standards and our God-like good fortune and our long, wonderful lives?
25 June 2005
‘What on earth are you Europeans on about? What is this nonsense about Europe breaking apart?’ We were at lunch only a hundred metres from the crater of the bomb which killed Lebanon’s former prime minister last February. The restaurant was almost destroyed in the explosion and the staff bear the scars. The head waiter at La Paillote has a very painful, deep slit down his right cheek. My host was still amazed. ‘Do you people live on planet earth?’ he asked.
We shelter behind the myth that progress is being made
23 June 2005
So we are going to support the myth. As the headless bodies are found along the Tigris, as the mortuaries fill up, as the American dead grow far beyond 1,700 - and, let us remember, the Iraqi dead go into the tens of thousands - Europe and the rest of the world still support the American project.
Anti-Syrian politician latest to die as murder takes hold in Lebanon
22 June 2005
It was Georges Hawi. Former head of the Communist Party, mediator between Christians and Muslims, friend of the Palestinians during the civil war and - of course - bitter critic of Syria. "Help me, help me," he had cried as he was dragged by his driver and a neighbour from his bombed car. Covered in blood, he died in their arms. A "soft" target, a man who thought he had no need of protection. Just like his journalist friend and fellow critic of Syria, Samir Kassir, who was assassinated in his car - the explosives were set in an identical manner - earlier this month.
Lebanon wounded by personal ambition
21 June 2005
"Someone else is going to get killed soon," an old Lebanese friend said to me yesterday afternoon. And all the electoral victory of the Lebanese opposition was suddenly shadowed by the realities of this beautiful, dangerous country. Yes, why should Lebanon's enemies accept the reality of a parliament in which Syria has lost its power? First came ex-premier Rafik Hariri's assassination; then came journalist Samir Kassir's murder. Why should it stop now?
General's return casts doubt on Lebanon's future
20 June 2005
This small town in the north Lebanese mountains should be the fiefdom of Nayla Mouawad, widow of president Rene Mouawad who was assassinated in 1989, the wellspring of the Lebanese opposition. But yesterday, in her family home - a 19th century house of dressed stone - Mrs Mouawad was relying on the "shock" of ex-General Aoun's victory in last week's round of Lebanese elections to give the opponents of Syria the 21 extra seats it needs to dominate parliament. It did not look good .
UN team opens inquiry into Hariri murder
18 June 2005
It’s a white Mitsubishi Canter FH truck - 1995-96 model - a tarpaulin over the back to conceal the thousand kilograms of explosives that killed the Lebanese ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri and 20 others on 14 February.
We are all complicit in these vile acts of torture - but what can we do about it?
If our government uses information drained out of these creatures, it is we who are holding the whips
18 June 2005
I still have my notes from a man who knew all about torture, a Druze friend in the 1980s, during the Lebanese war, pleased with himself because he'd just caught two Christian militiamen trying to plant a car bomb on the Beirut seafront. "I saw two Phalangists over there. I knew who they were. They had a bomb in their car. I called the PSP [Walid Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party] and they took them off for questioning." What happened to them? "Well, they knew what would happen to them; they knew there was no hope. They were questioned here for a couple of days and then they were taken up to Beit Eddin."
Pro-Syrian general routs Lebanese opposition
14 June 2005
President Emile Lahoud appears to have won Lebanon's first free elections in 30 years. A pro-Syrian, Mr Lahoud, wasn't standing, of course - he's safe, for almost another three years.
Saddam interrogation screened - in silence. The question is: Why?
14 June 2005
There he was, just as his victims looked on his own television screens, his words censored, his arguments unknown, his case as undemocratic as the "judicial" courts in which Saddam destroyed his own enemies.
Syria: out the door, back through the window
The presence of Damascus's spies has cast a shadow over the first free elections in Lebanon for 30 years.
13 June 2005
The Lebanese went to the elections yesterday as if it was a festival, all music and flags and picnics on the grass opposite the polling booths. The Christian and the Muslim and the Druze of Lebanon lay down with their appropriate tigers. The first free elections in 30 years.
The thousands of bodies I've seen prove that death is just a heartbeat away
The old question asked by those of us in the trade is: just how much is a journalist's life worth?
11 June 2005
Early on Thursday evening, I watched the Lebanese laying roses and lighting candles on the Beirut street where "they" murdered Samir Kassir just over a week ago. Who "they" are we may never know - though we may suspect - because Samir’s widow Gisele has already said that she puts no trust in the Lebanese police investigators.
Business as usual in Assad's 'revived' Baathist cabinet
08 June 2005
The man who once handled Syria's affairs in Lebanon, the ex-foreign minister Abdul Halim Khaddam, 72, was reported to have resigned his vice-presidency last night at the ruling Baath party's annual congress in Damascus. But his departure will do nothing to obscure the fact that, rather than open Syria to new political freedoms, President Bashar al-Assad is intent on "reviving" the Baath to turn round the economy and stamp out "corruption".
Assad under fire as exiled uncle signals wish to return to Syria
05 June 2005
Uncle Rifaat wants to come home. So there's further grim news for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
Why Ridley Scott's story of the Crusades struck such a chord in a Lebanese cinema
Having lived in Lebanon 29 years, I too found tears of laughter running down my face
04 June 2005
Long live Ridley Scott. I never thought I'd say this. Gladiator had a screenplay that might have come from the Boy's Own Paper. Black Hawk Down showed the Arabs of Somalia as generically violent animals. But when I left the cinema after seeing Scott's extraordinary sand-and-sandals epic on the Crusades, Kingdom of Heaven, I was deeply moved - not so much by the film, but by the Muslim audience among whom I watched it in Beirut.
Syria's troops have gone. So who killed Samir, Lebanon's fearless journalist?
03 June 2005
The bloody hand has reached out to Lebanon once more, striking down one of its most prominent journalists and one of the most vociferous and bravest critics of the Syrian regime.
Son of murdered Hariri heads for poll win
30 May 2005
The man who may well be Lebanon's new prime minister had slept seven hours in the previous 72 and spoke in a monotone, but he was near to tears when he referred to his murdered father.
Civil war casts a sinister shadow on Lebanon's election
Michel Aoun has extended his persona to Alexander the Great. This is messianism gone mad
28 May 2005
Oh for the glorious days of the Lebanese opposition, when Christians and Muslims marched in Beirut together to demand the truth about Rafiq Hariri's murder and the withdrawal of the Syrian army and free elections. The UN is still investigating the assassination, the Syrians have left, but the elections are turning out to be as sectarian and as mean as they always were. They start tomorrow and will demonstrate just how divided the Lebanese are in their new "unity".
Protesters beaten as Egypt votes on electoral reform
26 May 2005
Egyptian plain-clothes police beat up demonstrators in central Cairo - in some cases groping women protesters - as Egyptians voted over constitutional changes that would theoretically allow more than one candidate to stand for president.
Saddam handed blame for Iraq's eight-year war with Iran
21 May 2005
Seventeen years after the eight-year conflict that killed one and a half million young men, it turns out that Iran won the war. Throughout that biblical struggle between Saddam Hussein's invading Iraqi forces - egged on by the United States - and the Iranian Revolution's desperate and suicidal attempts to defend its country, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini insisted that the world must acknowledge that Saddam was the aggressor. And now Iraq itself has at last done so.
A typically Lebanese story of betrayal at the hands of so-called civilised nations
Many believe the name Martyrs' Square refers to the victims of the 15-year civil war. Not so.
21 May 2005
In Beirut last week, they announced the winners of a competition to redevelop Martyrs’ Square, which had once been Lebanon’s civil war front line and on the edge of which the tomb of the murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri now stands.
Let us rebel against poisonous academics and their preposterous claptrap of exclusion
To enter this circle of brain-heavy men and women, all must learn its secret language
14 May 2005
That great anthropological sage Michael Gilsenan - whose Lords of the Lebanese Marshes once almost started a small civil war in northern Lebanon - turned up this week to lecture at that equally great bastion of learning, the American University of Beirut, founded, as it happens, by Quakers during the 19th-century Lebanese Christian-Druze conflict.
General who fled Lebanon in pyjamas returns to try to rally his supporters
08 May 2005
General Michel Aoun fled in his pyjamas to the French embassy as Syrian aircraft bombed his presidential palace 15 years ago. Yesterday, he flew back to Lebanon from self-imposed exile in Paris, dressed in a suit and tie, travelling in a specially chartered plane of the national airline.
America's shame, two years on from 'Mission Accomplished'
08 May 2005
Two years after "Mission Accomplished", whatever moral stature the United States could claim at the end of its invasion of Iraq has long ago been squandered in the torture and abuse and deaths at Abu Ghraib. That the symbol of Saddam Hussein’s brutality should have been turned by his own enemies into the symbol of their own brutality is a singularly ironic epitaph for the whole Iraq adventure. We have all been contaminated by the cruelty of the interrogators and the guards and prison commanders.
In Middle Eastern elections, no one bats an eyelid when the leader gets 110 per cent of the vote
Even the worst dictatorships - usually supported by us, the 'democrats' - want to play the game
30 April 2005
Democracy. Ah, how the Middle East would love to have some democracy! On the supermarket shelf - and I can assure you, there are plenty of supermarkets in the Middle East - a couple of boxes of democracy would be a good buy, along with three boxes of human rights and four boxes of justice.
As bands played and flags were waved, Syrian troops left Lebanon after 29 years of occupation
27 April 2005
They’ve gone. After 29 years in Lebanon, the very last Syrian soldiers - men who were not yet born when their army arrived - travelled through the border station, making victory signs and waving. What victory? What was there to wave about? Mission accomplished. That was what we were supposed to believe: this was an army of peace-keepers returning triumphantly home to Syria after decades of sacrifices. They even took their statues with them. Some Lebanese didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
How Arabic text of WMD dossier was massaged by Downing Street
24 April 2005
When Tony Blair published his notorious 2002 "dossier" which falsely claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, Downing Street also produced an Arabic version - which contained significant deletions and changes in text that substantially altered its meaning.
The 5-Minute Briefing: What next for Lebanon?
23 April 2005
I may not be sure about God or the Devil, but I still believe in the United Nations
What if Indian and Nepalese troops rather than Americans had been moving up the Tigris
23 April 2005
There were bagpipers in Scottish tartan, hundreds of soldiers coming to attention with all the snap of Sandhurst and a banner proclaiming "Duty Unto Death", which could have been a chapter title in the dreadful old G A Henty novels of empire that my parents once forced me to read. I had to pinch myself to remember yesterday that this corner of the British Empire was actually southern Lebanon. But there was nothing un-British about the Assam Regiment, whose battle honours go back to 1842 and whose regimental silver still bears the names of Victorian colonels of the Raj. It was Malcolm Muggeridge who once observed that the only Englishmen left were Indians.
Our presidents and prime ministers are poseurs. Where are the Great Men of today?
Bush may think he is Churchill, but he cannot really compare himself to his dad, let alone to our Winston
16 April 2005
Before Egyptian President Anwar Sadat set off for his journey to Jerusalem in 1977, he announced to the world that he did not intend to live "among the pygmies". This was tough on pygmies but there was no doubt what it revealed about Sadat. He thought he was a Great Man. History suggests he was wrong. His 1978 Camp David agreement with Menachem Begin of Israel brought the Sinai back under Egyptian control, but it locked Sadat’s country into a cold peace and near-bankrupt isolation. He was finally called "Pharaoh", a description Sadat might have appreciated had it not been shouted by his murderers as they stormed his military reviewing stand in 1981.
Lebanon delays its election despite US demands
14 April 2005
Beirut survived its "celebration" of the start of the 15-year Lebanese civil war but pro-Syrian members of the country’s government failed to form a new cabinet, meaning that the national elections scheduled for May will have to be postponed - despite the demand of Presidents George Bush and Jacques Chirac that they be held on time.
At last, it is time to commemorate the end of one Middle East conflict
09 April 2005
The vast sea of young Lebanese who were educated abroad during the conflict will not, I suspect, tolerate another civil war
How on earth do you celebrate a civil war? This is no idle question because in Beirut, the Lebanese - with remarkable candour but not a little trepidation - are preparing to remember that most terrible of conflicts in their lives, one which killed 150,000 and whose commemoration next week was originally in the hands of the former prime minister Rafiq Hariri - who was himself assassinated on 14 February. Is this something which should be contemplated? Is this the moment - when all Lebanon waits for a Syrian military withdrawal and when the Hizbollah militia, itself a creature of that war, is being ordered to disarm by the United Nations - to remember the tide of blood which drowned so many innocents between 1975 and 1990?
The US forces, like the Crusaders before them, are prisoners in their own fortresses
Sitting in Saddam Hussein's palace they can stare over the parapets but that is as much as most will ever see of Iraq
02 April 2005
I drove Pat and Alice Carey up the coast of Lebanon this week to look at some castles. Pat is a builder from County Wicklow, brave enough to take a holiday with his wife in Beirut when all others are thinking of running away. But I wanted to know what he thought of 12th-century construction work.
Further signs of Lebanon's political decay in wake of Hariri killing
31 March 2005
Even before the UN Security Council chooses an international commission to investigate the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, Syria’s best friends in the Lebanese security service are beginning to fall off their perches. Given the verdict of the UN’s original fact-finding mission into the killing - it accused Lebanese investigators of "gross negligence, possibly accompanied by criminal actions" - most Lebanese drew one conclusion: about time.
When weeping for religious martyrs leads to the crucifixion of innocents
Passion and redemption were part of our parents' religious experience. It would be wiser to reflect on the sins of our human gods
26 March 2005
"About suffering," Auden famously wrote in 1938, "they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters: how well they understood/ its human position; how it takes place/ While someone is eating or opening a window/Or just walking dully along." Yet the great crucifixion paintings of Caravaggio or Bellini, or Michelangelo’s Pieta in the Vatican - though they were not what Auden had in mind - have God on their side. We may feel the power of suffering in the context of religion but, outside this spiritual setting, I’m not sure how compassionate we really are.
The impact of the Iraq war is now being felt across Middle East
21 March 2005
So now they have struck in Qatar. Nice, friendly, liberal Doha, with its massive US air base and its spiky, argumentative al-Jazeera television, its modern shops and expatriate compounds and luxury hotels. Ever since al-Qa’ida urged its supporters to strike around the maritime Arab kingdoms of the Gulf, the princes and emirs have been waiting to find out who’s first. Saturday’s suicide bomber - and the killing of a Briton - gave them their answer.
Beirut car bomb fuels rumours of Syrian plot
20 March 2005
An explosion early yesterday wounded eight people and left a crater two metres deep in Jdeide, a Christian district of Beirut. Was it meant to kill far more?
Memories of war, fear and friendship in my home city, where time has stood still
Reality, normality, was back in Beirut, with its burning garbage tips and its matchstick crackle of gunfire
19 March 2005
My home in Beirut has been a timebox for almost 30 years, a place where time has stood still. I have sat on my balcony over the Mediterranean in the sticky, sweating summer heat and in the tornadoes of winter, watching the midnight horizon lit by a hellfire of forked lightning, the waves suddenly glistening gold as they slide menacingly below my apartment. I have woken in my bed to hear the blades of the palm trees outside slapping each other in the night, the rain smashing against the shutters until a tide of water moves beneath the French windows and into my room.
Security chief 'sues himself' to clear name over Hariri
18 March 2005
In Lebanon, tragedy and farce often go hand in hand. But tragedy turned to vaudeville yesterday when Syria’s top Lebanese intelligence officer called a press conference to announce that he and his colleagues would "sue themselves" to clear their names of negligence over the murder of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri on 14 February.
The mystery of Mr Lebanon's murder
After the assassination of Rafik Hariri, his vehicles were taken from the scene on the orders of a former aide. And now, reports Robert Fisk, many believe the missing cars may hold the key to the killing
17 March 2005
Now here’s a strange story from Beirut. Strange, because it is one of fear and suspicion about Rafik Hariri’s murder on 14 February; stranger still because - although almost everyone in Beirut knows the story -much of it has not been published in Lebanon.
Murder of Mr Lebanon continues to poison political air
16 March 2005
So now ’they’ have left Beirut. In the dark doorway of the Syrian mukhabarat office off Sadat Street, where for years armed men have guarded their little suburban headquarters, a middle-aged lady was washing the floors and sweeping rivers of black water into the road. "They’ve gone," an old Druze man shouted from the other side of the road. Their cheerful graffiti in praise of President Bashar Assad had already been spray-painted out in black paint.
The people make a stand over the lies of Lebanon
15 March 2005
Never before have we seen anything like it in Lebanon. Never before have we seen anything like it in the Arab world.
UN finds evidence of official cover-up in Hariri assassination
14 March 2005
As the United Nations’ Irish-led special investigation team here prepares to report that the Lebanese authorities have covered up evidence of the murder on 14 February of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri, his two sons have fled Lebanon after hearing that they too are in danger of assassination.
What the Lebanese fear most is not Syria's army but a power vacuum
Assad's troops are pulling back, but who will replace them in Lebanon?
13 March 2005
As the last Syrian troops moved through the storms and blizzards of Mount Lebanon into the Bekaa Valley yesterday morning, they passed beneath the glowering statue of Basil al-Assad, the man who would have been president of Syria had he not died in a Damascus road accident. Seated astride his favourite horse, dressed in military uniform, wearing a peaked cap and graced with three withered wreaths, he has been guarded this past decade by two equally glowering Syrian intelligence officers. "No photo," they growled at me when they saw my camera. But there’s a problem.
In the Middle East, those who are about to die believe profoundly in the afterlife
In a part of the world where a person's religion is part of their life, the end of life does not appear so terrible or so final
12 March 2005
Rafik Hariri’s table in the Etoile coffee shop in Beirut is on the right of the door, far back against the wall. Here it was that Mr Lebanon dropped by for his last coffee on 14 February, only three minutes before his convoy was bombed.
Syria reasserts power in Lebanon as its ally returns as prime minister
11 March 2005
He’s back. Omar Karami, the Ramsay MacDonald of Lebanese politics, has returned to power as Prime Minister - "power" being a word of limited definition here at the moment - only 10 days after he resigned from office during mass demonstrations against Syria’s presence in Lebanon.
Half a million gather for pro-Syrian rally to defy vision of US
09 March 2005
It was a warning. They came in their tens of thousands, Lebanese Shia Muslim families with babies in arms and children in front, walking past my Beirut home. They reminded me of the tens of thousands of Iraqi Shia Muslims who walked with their families to the polls in Iraq, despite the gunfire and the suicide bombers.
Beirut: An historic day in the life of my city
Robert Fisk has lived in the Lebanese capital for the past 30 years. Here, as Syria signs the agreement to withdraw its troops from Lebanon, he reflects on the events of the past few days
08 March 2005
Just below my local supermarket in Sadat Street - I have been buying my daily cheese croissant - a car pulls up with a man carrying thousands of pictures of President Bashar Assad of Syria. The man marches into the Syrian mukhabarat office, a run-down four-storey building still jewelled with the bullet scars of Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war.
Is Lebanon walking into another nightmare?
07 March 2005
Lebanon confronts a nightmare today. As the Syrian army begins its withdrawal from the country this morning, after mounting pressure from President George Bush - whose anger at the Syrians has been provoked by the insurgency against American troops in Iraq - there are growing signs that the Syrian retreat is reopening the sectarian divisions of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war.
US rebuffs Assad offer to pull out of Lebanon
06 March 2005
When he said the words, "We will withdraw," the Lebanese crowd in Martyr's Square shuffled and their flags moved and there was a hushed little chorus of approval. But that was all.
After what I've been through, it's no wonder I have a fear of flying
I have to employ my old friend, the suspension of disbelief, to avoid the question about why God never gave us wings
05 March 2005
I'm writing this in that strange hiatus known to all foreign correspondents. My plane never took off for Paris - en route to Beirut - because snow closed down Charles de Gaulle airport. It happens to all of us. When we should be heading to war or interviewing the participants of velvet, orange or cedar revolutions, we are queuing for the return of our checked baggage and taking the taxi home because that staple of our existence - the sine qua non of all travel, the most technologically sophisticated creature we will ever aspire to touch - can't land in ice. Or it doesn't have Cat-3 landing capacity. Or maybe the reverse thrust of the Airbus A-320-400 series can't cope with the weather.
Still Iraq's civil servants go to work, and still they go on dying
03 March 2005
They die now so often that their names - even their jobs - escape us. Judge Barwez Mohammed Mahmoud was shot dead on Tuesday along with his son - so often, the sons die with their fathers - a lawyer working on the special tribunal set up to try Saddam Hussein and his henchmen for crimes against humanity.
Lebanese are united under flag of the 'cedars revolution'
02 March 2005
They slept in tents. They slept on the pavements last night. Lebanon is cold in winter. Not as cold as Ukraine but the frost that has lain over Lebanon these past 29 years is without temperature. Never has the red, white and green Lebanese flag been used as so poignant a symbol of unity. Only a few hundred metres from the encampment, Rafik Hariri was killed. And so, the Lebanese are supposed to believe, the murder of the former prime minister has unleashed the "cedars revolution". The cedar tree stands at the centre of the Lebanese flag.
Grass always covers graves, but the seas reveal the secrets of human folly
Tryon was held entirely responsible for the greatest peacetime disaster in the history of the Royal Navy
19 February 2005
We journalists are students of human folly. Palestine, Iraq, the Gulf, Persia; for more than a hundred years, our Western meddling in the Middle East falls under that label "folly". A "foolish ... and expensive undertaking that ends in disaster" is how one dictionary defines this. I suspect it also contains an unhealthy mix of vanity and hubris.
In death, Hariri unites the Lebanese against Syria
17 February 2005
Never has a Lebanese government been so shunned by its people. Never have the Syrians faced such united opposition from the people they claim to "protect'' with their 15,000 troops and their intelligence services.
US recalls Damascus envoy as blame for Beirut assassination falls upon Syria
16 February 2005
They will bury Rafik Hariri today beside the city he rebuilt and next to the ruins of the Roman columns that made ancient Beirut famous.
The killing of 'Mr Lebanon': Rafik Hariri assassinated in Beirut bomb blast
15 February 2005
I saw the blast wave coming down the Corniche. My home is only a few hundred metres from the detonation and my first instinct was to look up, to search for the high-altitude Israeli planes that regularly break the sound barrier over Beirut. There were customers coming bloodied from their broken-windowed restaurants and the great cancerous stain of smoke rising from the road outside the St George Hotel.
Israeli spies, Syrian obsession and a peace that had to break
15 February 2005
We knew something was coming. I had met an old journalist colleague for coffee on Saturday and we both said we felt there was a new, menacing atmosphere about Beirut. We didn't mean the sky-high prices and the usual corruption stories, but the incendiary language in which Lebanese politics was now being conducted.
The irresistible romance of a steam train scarred with the bullet holes of battle
In the overgrown Beirut marshalling yards, the tracks are still visible, maintaining a ghostly continuum with the past
12 February 2005
With a spare hour on my hands before lunch in Lebanon this week, I revisited the joys of my childhood, crunched my way across the old Beirut marshalling yards and climbed aboard a wonderful 19th-century rack-and-pinion railway locomotive. Although scarred by bullets, the green paint on the wonderful old Swiss loco still reflects the glories of steam and of the Ottoman empire.
There will be no Middle East peace without justice
At no point yesterday did anyone mention occupation. Like sex, it had to be censored out
09 February 2005
So, the Palestinians will end their occupation of Israel. No more will Palestinian tanks smash their way into Haifa and Tel Aviv. No more will Palestinian F-18s bomb Israeli population centres. No more will Palestinian Apache helicopters carry out "targeted killings" - ie: murders - of Israeli military leaders.
The sins of our fathers, the folly of man and the art of documenting history
Today we use telephones - or e-mails - but my telexed messages to London in those terrible years of war tell their own tales
05 February 2005
The laptop has done bad things to us. I've spent the past year writing a history of the Middle East which has proved to me - quite apart from the folly of man - that the computer has not necessarily helped our writing or our research into the sins of our fathers.
Baghdad, the city that dreams of death
Suicide bombs are now daily occurences in Iraq. But what of those who escape death?
03 February 2005
The suicide bomber came in mid-afternoon. The few survivors who saw the pale-faced man described him as red-haired, with a long beard. "He asked some of the people at the gate if they would be kind enough to move their cars so he could park," Abu Ali says. "He was very polite. He was driving a Caprice. Then people noticed he was parking in a way that wouldn't let him drive away." The one memory all of them had was that the bearded man was playing music and Koranic recitations on his cassette player. "In one sense," Abu Ali remarks, "he was already dead."
'Freed' Iraqis still waiting for the wind of change
01 February 2005
The gale tore into Baghdad yesterday, stripping the walls of election posters, sending miniature whirlwinds between the shuttered shops of Rashid Street, giving new meaning to the black hoods and masks worn by the policemen at Tahrir Square.
Amid tragedy, defiance: suicide bombers kill up to 50, but fail to deter voters
31 January 2005
Even as the explosions thundered over Baghdad, the people came in their hundreds and then in their thousands. Entire families, crippled old men supported by their sons, children beside them, babies in the arms of their mothers, sisters and aunts and cousins.
We'll go on cheering 'democracy' - and the Iraqis will go on dying
They were supposed to be preparing for an election, but they are bracing themselves for rivers of blood.
30 January 2005
In Baghdad yesterday, they were supposed to be preparing for an election. But they were preparing for war.
This election will change the world. But not in the way the Americans imagined
29 January 2005
Shias are about to inherit Iraq, but the election tomorrow that will bring them to power is creating deep fears among the Arab kings and dictators of the Middle East that their Sunni leadership is under threat.
One man's belief in the triumph of good over evil should give us all hope
I listen to the voice of good and try to forget the throat cuttings and the shots in the head and tomorrow's violent elections
29 January 2005
George Bush believes in good and evil. So does his spiritual twin, Osama bin Laden. I've never been so sure about evil. But good I can believe in. The first book my mother gave me to read on my own was The Diary of Anne Frank, the German-Jewish girl whose life in hiding in occupied Amsterdam - until the family's betrayal to the Nazis - was such an inspiration to future generations. She believed that all people were basically good. Whether Anne still believed this as she lay dying of typhus in Belsen concentration camp we shall never know.
Hotel journalism gives American troops a free hand as the press shelters indoors
17 January 2005
"Hotel journalism" is the only phrase for it. More and more Western reporters in Baghdad are reporting from their hotels rather than the streets of Iraq's towns and cities. Some are accompanied everywhere by hired, heavily armed Western mercenaries. A few live in local offices from which their editors refuse them permission to leave. Most use Iraqi stringers, part-time correspondents who risk their lives to conduct interviews for American or British journalists, and none can contemplate a journey outside the capital without days of preparation unless they "embed" themselves with American or British forces.
Not even Saddam could achieve the divisions this election will bring
16 January 2005
Sunday 30 January will be the day when myth and reality come together with - I fear - an all too literal bang. The magic date upon which Iraq is supposed to transform itself into a democracy will no doubt be greeted as another milestone in America's adventure and, I suspect, another "great day for Iraq" by Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara. He, of course, doesn't have to be blown up in the polling stations or torn to pieces by suicide bombers on the way home. The "martyrs of democracy", as I am sure the dead will be feted, will be those Iraqis who have decided to go along with an election so physically dangerous that the international observers will be "observing" the poll from Amman.
How a flying carpet took me back in time - until I landed in Baghdad
The brush fires are already being lit but fear not, Bush and Blair will tell us they knew things would get violent on polling day
15 January 2005
I tried out the new Beirut-Baghdad air service this week. It's a sleek little 20-seater with two propellers, a Lebanese-Canadian pilot and a name to take you aback. It's called "Flying Carpet Airlines". As Commander Queeg said in The Caine Mutiny, I kid thee not. It says "Flying Carpet" on the little blue boarding cards, below the captain's cabin and on the passenger headrest covers where the aircraft can be seen gliding through the sky on a high-pile carpet.
'They put a hood on me, tied my hands and took me to Camp Fallujah'
14 January 2005
The General was a slim 58-year-old, his hair black, big hands, a suit that hung uneasily upon him, a bespoke tailor's work that could never equal his pea-green uniform with swords on the epaulettes.
We won't go home and we won't vote, say refugees of Fallujah
13 January 2005
They live beneath old fly-blown tents in the car-park of the Mustafa mosque and their canvas-roofed kitchen stands next to a pool of raw sewage, but the refugees from Fallujah will not return home.
Fear stalks city where the police hide behind masks
12 January 2005
Journalism yields a world of clichés but here, for once, the first cliché that comes to mind is true. Baghdad is a city of fear. Fearful Iraqis, fearful militiamen, fearful American soldiers, fearful journalists.
Deputy of Baghdad police assassinated in car with his son
11 January 2005
As usual, it was an inside job. Brigadier Amer Ali Nayef, the deputy head of the Baghdad police, and his son, Police Lieutenant Khaled Amer, were driving to work in an unmarked civilian car, hoping to move through the streets of Dora without being noticed.
A routine tale of our times: abuse, beatings, imprisonment and injustice
After two months, and 15 interrogations, Mustafa says one of his American questioners told him he believed he was innocent
08 January 2005
I travelled down to Zarqa on Christmas Eve - Zarqa as in "Zarqawi", for it is indeed the home town of the latest of America's bogeymen, a grey, dirt-poor, windy town south of Amman. The man I went to see was palpably innocent of any crime - indeed, he even has a document from the American military to prove it - but he spent almost two years of his life locked up in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay. Hussein Abdelkader Youssef Mustafa's story tells you a lot about the "war on terror" and about the abuses that go with it.
Suddenly, there is debate in Beirut: how can Syria keep Lebanon while condemning Israel? 07 January 2005
Never before has it happened in Lebanon. Since the Syrian army entered the country in 1976--just a year after the start of the 15-year civil war, at the request of Lebanese Christian Maronites--there has been no public debate about the presence of thousands of Syrian troops here, nor the suffocating political grip which Damascus has maintained over the Beirut government.
A Mire of Death, Lies and Atrocities
30 December 2004
Who said this and when? "The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient that the public knows... We are today not far from a disaster."
'The Army had not a word of compassion for the dead man, nor for his orphaned sons'
19 December 2004
It was the insouciance, the absolute indifference of the British military press office in Basra that shocked me. Here I had documents--one of them signed by a British officer--stating that Baha Mousa had died in British custody, another that Mousa's colleague had been "assaulted" when he too was a prisoner and suffered "acute renal failure", the statement of his father that the British army waited three days before admitting to the family that he was dead--and the British spokesman said he couldn't help.
15 December 2004
Baha Mousa, 26, was working as a hotel receptionist in Basra 14 months ago when British troops surrounded the building and arrested seven men. They were taken to a British base and were reportedly hooded and beaten. Two days later, Mousa was dead. His family was given $3,000 in compensation and rejected a further $5,000. What they wanted was justice. Yesterday, after more than a year of official stonewalling, his relatives won a 'historic' ruling to force the MoD to hold an independent inquiry. Will the truth now be known?
What price innocence in the anarchy of Iraq?
17 November 2004
Video shows murder of aid worker Margaret Hassan, says her family
After the grief, the astonishment, heartbreak, anger and fury over the apparent murder of such a good and saintly woman, that is the question that her friends - and, quite possibly, the Iraqi insurgents - will be asking. This Anglo-Irish lady held an Iraqi passport. She had lived in Iraq for 30 years, she had dedicated her life to the welfare of Iraqis in need. She hated the UN sanctions and opposed the Anglo-American invasion. So who killed Margaret Hassan?
14 November 2004
That Yasser Arafat's death is seen as sign of optimism shows how catastrophic the conflict in the Middle East has become
So the death of Yasser Arafat is a great new opportunity for the Palestinians, is it? The man who personified the Palestinian struggle - "Mr Palestine" - is dead. So things can only get better for the Palestinians.
In Egypt, it was as if Arafat was as dangerous in death as in life
13 November 2004
In Heliopolis, the Cairo airport road is lined by plane trees, villas and thick flowerbeds. Yesterday, it was also lined by almost the entire Egyptian police force, thousands on thousands of black-uniformed cops, standing in absolute and total silence.
The dreamer who relied on emotion and failed to protect his own people
12 November 2004
He was everything loyal and everything miserable about the Palestinian dream. I have a tape recording of Arafat, sitting with me on a cold, dark mountainside outside the Lebanese port of Tripoli in 1983 where the old man - he was always called the old man, long before he was elderly - was under siege by the Syrian army, another of the Arab "brothers" who wanted to lead the Palestinian cause and ended up fighting Palestinians rather than Israelis.
The truth is that Yasser Arafat died years ago
30 October 2004
He married the Revolution. And in the end he became a little dictator, falsely promising democracy.
Yet again, Yasser Arafat is dying. We thought he'd been killed back in 1982 when the Israeli air force flew around Beirut attacking apartment blocks and homes they thought he was visiting. Their bombs tore to pieces hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians but Arafat was never there.
The heroine who offered hope for Iraq
20 October 2004
Margaret? Margaret Hassan kidnapped? She who said to me that soon, very soon, "there will be more than one lost generation" in Iraq?
Future generations will struggle to escape the legacy of the disaster in Iraq
Our betrayals and broken promises have created a kind of irreversible disease that cannot be forgiven
11 October 2004
I am writing a book about our need to escape from history - or rather about our inability to escape the effects of the decisions taken by our fathers and grandfathers. My father was a soldier in the First World War or, as it says on the back of his campaign medal, "The Great War for Civilisation'' - which is the title I've chosen for my book. In the space of just 17 months after my father's war ended, the victors had drawn the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent all my professional life watching the people inside those borders burn.
Dramatic plea from al-Qa'ida suspect
25 September 2004
One of 11 men still detained without trial under anti-terrorism measures drawn up by the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, made a dramatic and unprecedented appeal last night to the Iraqi kidnappers of Ken Bigley to spare his life.
The worse the situation in Iraq, the bigger the lies that Tony Blair tells us.
25 September 2004
Iraq, remember, was going to be the role model. It would be the catalyst, 'crucible' even, of the new Middle East
We are now in the greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis. That's how we run the Iraq war - or the Second Iraq War as Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would now have us believe. Hostages are paraded in orange tracksuits to remind us of Guantanamo Bay. Kidnappers demand the release of women held prisoner by the Americans. Abu Ghraib is what they are talking about. Abu Ghraib? Anyone remember Abu Ghraib? Remember those dirty little snapshots? But don't worry. This wasn't the America George Bush recognised, and besides we're punishing the bad apples, aren't we? Women? Why, there are only a couple of dames left - and they are "Dr Germ" and "Dr Anthrax".
We should not have allowed 19 murderers to change our world
11 September 2004
So, three years after the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania we were bombing Fallujah. Come again? Hands up those who knew the name of Fallujah on 11 September 2001. Or Samarra. Or Ramadi. Or Anbar province. Or Amarah. Or Tel Afar, the latest target in our "war on terror'' although most of us would find it hard to locate on a map (look at northern Iraq, find Mosul and go one inch to the left). Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive.
Saddam's cameraman is still haunted by images of war
05 August 2004
"I vomited," Mouffak Fathi Daoud says, and you have to understand why. Three young soldiers were brought to the trees on the hills outside Sulimaniyah. They had been retreating from the great battle against the Iranians on Jebel Maout. Saddam had ordered that all deserters should be shot. Daoud was one of the Iraqi army's top newsreel cameramen. He didn't have to watch. But he was a witness.
'Can't Blair see that this country is about to explode? Can't Bush?'
01 August 2004
The Prime Minister has accused some journalists of almost wanting a disaster to happen in Iraq. Robert Fisk, who has spent the past five weeks reporting from the deteriorating and devastated country, says the disaster has already happened, over and over again.
The war is a fraud. I'm not talking about the weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist. Nor the links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida which didn't exist. Nor all the other lies upon which we went to war. I'm talking about the new lies.
Protection, not oppression: How the new mobile police patrols have discovered job satisfaction
30 July 2004
Their Kalashnikov automatic rifles regularly jam after firing two bullets, their flak jackets don't protect them, their promised £45 pay increase never arrived, their boss wants to take the air-conditioners from their vehicles and the hospitals can't cope with their wounded.
Iraqi police in the firing line as bombers massacre 70 people hoping to join force
29 July 2004
Yet again, the Iraqi police - and their hordes of impoverished would-be recruits - were massacred yesterday, up to a hundred of them in the Sunni Muslim city of Baquba as they lined up, unprotected, along a boulevard in the hope of finding work.
Unreported war: US document reveals scale of conflict
29 July 2004
Iraq, we are told by Mr Blair, is safer. It is not. US military reports clearly show much of the violence in Iraq is not revealed to journalists, and thus goes largely unreported. This account of the insurgency across Iraq over three days last week provides astonishing proof that Iraq under its new, American-appointed Prime Minister, has grown more dangerous and violent.
Baghdad is a city that reeks with the stench of the dead (Full Story)
28 July 2004
The smell of the dead pours into the street through the air-conditioning ducts. Hot, sweet, overwhelming. Inside the Baghdad morgue, there are so many corpses that the fridges are overflowing. The dead are on the floor. Dozens of them. Outside, in the 46C (114F) heat, Qadum Ganawi tells me how his brother Hassan was murdered.
Terror by video: How Iraq's kidnappers drew their inspiration from horrors of Chechnya (Full Story)
26 July 2004
The pictures are grainy, the voices sometimes unclear. But when Kim Sun-il shrieks "Don't kill me" over and over again, his fear is palpable. As the heads of Iraq's kidnap victims are sawn off, Koranic recitations - usually by a well-known Saudi imam - are played on the soundtrack. At the beheading of an American, the murderer ritually wipes his bloody knife twice on the shirt of his victim, just as Saudi officials clean their blades after public executions in the kingdom. Terror by video is now a well-established part of the Iraq war.
'America is not a charitable organisation - they came to steal from Iraq'
21 July 2004
Outside on Sayed Ayatollah Ahmed Hassani al-Baghdadi's little lawn, the temperature is touching 60C. But inside his spacious library with its shelves of leather-bound volumes of Islamic science and law, the political heat soars between 3,000 degrees and minus 20. The Shia marja [leading Shia scholars] are known for their outspokenness but Sayed Baghdadi more than speaks his mind. The Americans occupied Iraq as part of a Zionist project, he announces. They will not leave Iraq because they intend to steal Iraq's oil. The new US-appointed Iraqi government are "collaborators". And Sayed Baghdadi, remember, is a highly respected and very influential marja whose lectures draw students from all over Iraq.
'A better and safer place' (Full Story)
Tony Blair justifying the Iraq war in his response to the Butler report
20 July 2004
For mile after mile south of Baghdad yesterday, the story was the same: empty police posts, abandoned Iraqi army and police checkpoints and a litter of burnt-out American fuel tankers and rocket-smashed police vehicles down the main highway to Hillah and Najaf. It was Afghanistan Mk2.
Four missiles, 14 deaths and the crisis of information in Baghdad (Full Story)
19 July 2004
This is how they like it. An American helicopter fires four missiles at a house in Fallujah. Fourteen people are killed, including women and children. Or so say the hospital authorities.
Six die in blast targeted at Iraqi minister (Full Story)
18 July 2004
How did they know he was coming? Even the Justice Minister's bodyguards - those who survived the suicide bomber - agreed they had never taken this route before. Old Malik Dohan al-Hassan - for the minister is 80 years old - had left his home in the Hay al-Jamiaa district of Baghdad just after 8.30am yesterday and his convoy of guards had just turned beneath a motorway bridge when they saw a small car being parked on the other side of the road.
Why Iraq's booksellers want the freedom to censor their shelves (Full Story)
17 July 2004
In Al-Mutanabi Street, the bookseller of Baghdad knows all. He can even explain why Saddam Hussein's bodice-ripper, Zabiba and the King, has sold out yet again. Nabil Hayawi sold 1,500 copies - a real Iraqi bestseller - and is waiting for the third edition of Saddam's tome to be printed in Beirut.
Coffin bomb ends another macabre day in 'new' Iraq (Full Story)
16 July 2004
A few hours before Lord Butler of Brockwell was attesting to the "good faith" of Tony Blair over the invasion of Iraq, Sabr Karim paid the price for working for "new Iraq".
Bloodshed in Baghdad as insurgents try to isolate government (Full Story)
15 July 2004
Lord Butler told us yesterday that Tony Blair acted in good faith. So that's all right then. At the al-Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad yesterday morning, there was blood on the walls, blood on the floor, blood on the doctors, blood on the stretchers. In the dangerous oven of Baghdad, 10 more lives had just ended. So what was it Tony Blair said in the Commons yesterday afternoon? "We are not killing civilians in Iraq; terrorists are killing civilians in Iraq." So that's all right then. Question: Are Baghdad and London on the same planet?
Academics targeted as murder and mayhem hits Iraqi colleges (Full Story)
14 July 2004
The Mongols stained the Tigris black with the ink of the Iraqi books they destroyed. Today's Mongols prefer to destroy the Iraqi teachers of books. Since the Anglo-American invasion, they have murdered at least 13 academics at the University of Baghdad alone and countless others across Iraq. History professors, deans of college and Arabic tutors have all fallen victim to the war on learning. Only six weeks ago - virtually unreported, of course - the female dean of the college of law in Mosul was beheaded in her bed, along with her husband.
Defaced by Americans, restored by Iraqis: Saddam's greatest folly (Full Story)
13 July 2004
They are going to preserve the monument to Saddam's greatest folly and his greatest war crime. The vast blue, egg-shell monument to his invasion of Iran and the subsequent eight-year war - complete with the names of about 600,000 Iraqi soldiers who were killed - is to be restored by the new, American-appointed Iraqi ministry of culture. Iraqi police now guard the site, only days after US troops abandoned the memorial. It had been used as an