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The
Passion of Robert Fisk
December
19, 2001
by Jack Rabbit
Robert Fisk, the distinguished correspondent for the London
Independent, was beaten last week within an inch of
his life by a mob in Kila Abdullah, an Afghan refugee camp
located in Pakistan. This story is remarkable both for the
way in which Fisk coolly continued to report horrific events
of which he was the focal point and the greater meaning of
the event itself in light of the triumphalism of the Bush
administration and its supporters in the press and public.
Fisk tells his story
in the Independent. His problem started on the late
afternoon of December 8 when the jeep in which he was riding
with his driver, Amanullah, his translator, Fayyez Ahmed,
and his fellow British journalist, Justin Huggler, broke down
on a crowded street in the refugee camp. As the driver went
to find another car, Fisk and his companions remained amid
a crowd of refugees. Feeling uncomfortable in the situation,
Fisk and Huggler moved towards the open road while Fayyez
remained by the jeep.
As Fisk and Huggler walked away from their jeep, a small
rock flew past Fisk's head and a child attempted to take Fisk's
bag away from him. Fisk was punched in the back and the mob
descended on him and Huggler. Fisk writes of having stones
cracked over his head and kicked and punched. Fisk, bleeding
from his head, fought back with his fists and escaped back
to the middle of the road. There, a man in advanced middle
age, whom Fisk believes to be a mullah, came to Fisk's aid
and guided him to the back of a police truck that took Fisk
to the hospital.
It is ironic that this should happen to Robert Fisk, the
Western correspondent who, more than any other, has brought
home to the West the point of view of the common people caught
in this war between petty tyrants with Kalashnikovs and small
rocket launchers and another tyrant wielding cluster bombs
dropped from B-52's.
In one article
by Fisk, we learn the point of view of an Afghan village mullah,
a parochial man suspicious of all foreigners. In another gripping
story,
Fisk writes of his encounter with a lone woman fleeing the
remnants of her village, telling Fisk of each of her children
who were crushed in their hut under a American bomb. This
is the war about which Donald Rumsfeld does not want us to
know. For those who feel they have a right to know and have
sought on the internet the facts given by the foreign press,
Robert Fisk, more than anyone else, has been the witness of
the true victims of this war. How ironic that they should
have turned on him.
And what was Fisk's reaction to being in a position where
he had a choice between using physical violence against Afghan
refugees or dying at their hands? As he stood in the middle
of the road, unable to see because of the blood in his eyes,
he began to collect his thoughts:
"I began to see again and realised that I was crying and
weeping and that the tears were cleaning my eyes of blood.
What have I done, I kept asking myself? I had been punching
and attacking Afghan refugees, the very people I have 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."
Fisk's story is drowned out in the American press by the
triumphalism of a great success of American air power. Writing
in the December 17 issue of The Nation, Christopher
Hitchens chortled:
"The United States of America has just succeeding in bombing
a country back out of the Stone Age. This deserves to be recognized
as an achievement, even by those who want to hasten past the
moment and resume their customary tasks (worrying about the
spotty human rights record of the Northern Alliance is the
latest thing) . . . . We are rid of one of the foulest regimes
on earth, while one of the most vicious crime families has
been crippled and scattered. It remains to help the Afghan
exiles to return, the save the starving and to consolidate
the tentative emancipation of Afghan women."
Early on, Hitchens took it upon himself to be the administration's
spokesman on the Left. In a piece
appearing in The Nation shortly after the September
11 attacks, Hitchens rightly called the Taliban and al-Qaida
the representatives of "fascism with an Islamic face." Hitchens
also explained why progressives should support the opportunity
to overthrow the Taliban and their foreign supporters:
"What [the terrorists] abominate about the West . . . is
not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend but
what they do like and must defend: its emancipated women,
its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the
state."
Hitchens had a good point about this, too, even if there
was nothing new about it; the Left had long decried the Taliban
and other radical Islamic fundamentalists groups for those
reasons, among others. However, Hitchens jumped on the bandwagon
with the Bush administration and couldn't understand why the
rest of the Left didn't follow him. The ensuing debate on
the Left was bitter, with Hitchens at times taunting his opposition,
notably Noam Chomsky with phrases like "Wazzup, Noam?"
Hitchens erred in supporting the administration because he
failed to see, as many others did, that there were alternatives
to immediately taking military action against Afghanistan.
This would have involved preparing for action in a manner
consistent with international law, a process that would have
forced the administration to take more time before commencing
action and use it do what is necessary to avoid war.
We on the Left should admit that such diplomatic efforts
might have proven futile and resulted in the violence we have
seen in any event, but such efforts would have drawn more
international support and less suspicion concerning the administration's
ulterior motives. No one would then have cause to believe,
as should now be apparent, that the administration's approach
in Afghanistan is to undermine the very structure of international
law, fragile as it is at this juncture of history, to give
a tyrannical, unilateralist US administration free rein to
conduct military strikes to achieve narrow economic ends without
regard to prior treaties, international agreements or world
public opinion.
That is what has been posited by the action taken by the
Bush administration and supported by Hitchens. That is a state
of affairs that no progressive can tolerate and still call
himself a progressive. (Wazzup, Chris? Do you want to chime
in with something?)
Hitchens also said in his December 17 piece of the fall of
the Taliban:
"It deserves to be said, also, that the feat was accomplished
with no serious loss of civilian life, and with an almost
pedantic policy of avoiding 'collateral damage.'"
Perhaps Mr. Hitchens is unaware that civilian deaths are
estimated at 3500. Perhaps Mr. Hitchens will discount the
humanitarian disaster facing Afghanistan as something exacerbated
by US bombing. Perhaps Hitchens believes Secretary Rumsfeld
that nothing happened in Kama Ado, in which case he should
read Richard Lloyd Perry's account
of how there was nothing left of the village where nothing
happened.
Perhaps someone should tell Mr. Hitchens that given a war,
collateral damage is inevitable and that the fact that great
pains were taken to minimize it is small comfort to the survivors
of the collateral damage. Perhaps Mr. Hitchens and other supporters
of the administration's action in Afghanistan believe that
the refugees who attacked Robert Fisk after they had American
bombs destroy their villages and kill their children are just
ungrateful to the West for the wonderful thing the Bush administration
did for them.
What motivated the refugees in Kila Abdullah to attack Robert
Fisk? As it turned out, many of the refugees had been watching
television earlier and had seen coverage of the massacre of
prisons of war from Mazar-i-Sharif at the hands of Northern
Alliance troops under the command of General Dostum supported
by American bombing. They had seen how POW's died with their
hands bound. They had also seen videotape of the two CIA interrogators
threatening a POW with death.
Fisk also reports one more interesting fact leading up to
his beating:
"A one point a screaming teenager had turned to my driver
and asked, in all sincerity, 'Is that Mr. Bush?'"
Make no mistake about it: Robert Fisk nearly died for George
W. Bush's sins - and ours.
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