Robert Fisk.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: British foreign correspondent - Interview - Cover Story

Robert Fisk is Britain's most highly decorated foreign correspondent. He has received the British International Journalist of the Year award seven times, most recently in 1995 and 1996. His specialty is the Middle East, where he has spent the last twenty-three years. Currently the Beirut correspondent for the London Independent, Fisk has covered the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Persian Gulf war, and the conflict in Algeria. He is the author of Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Atheneum, 1990), and his reporting from Lebanon has brought him international attention. He was the one who broke the story about the Israeli shelling of the U.N. compound in Qana, Lebanon, in 1996.

Fisk visited Madison, Wisconsin, in April to give two lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. He brought with him film footage of the Qana shelling, as well as footage of an Israel] bombing of a Lebanese ambulance carrying fourteen people. He showed a film he made about Palestinians who had lost their homes when Israel became a state. He also showed interviews with Jews who lost family members in Nazi concentration camps, and he went to Auschwitz to show where the Holocaust took place. In one of his lectures, he made a special point of taking on those who deny the truth of the Holocaust.

I spoke with Fisk on my radio show, Second Opinion, and later when I drove him to the airport and as we waited for his plane. He was off to meet his wife, Lara Marlowe, in Paris, before heading back to Beirut.

Q: How dangerous is it being a foreign correspondent in the Middle East?

Robert Fisk: You do see people die, and you realize how easy it is to be killed. You go through the risk and the danger. At the end of the day, either you get back to Beirut and file your story and go out to a French restaurant, or you end up in a fridge. I had two colleagues from CBS. They were Lebanese--Bahije Metni and Tafik Ghazawi. They were heading south to cover an Israeli raid in Lebanon in 1985. I was headed out to cover the same story. We saw each other, said "hi." I was in a village that overlooked where the Israelis had a tank positioned. They were being attacked by Hezbollah guys who were trying to do suicide attacks on them. And the Israelis were firing tank shells into the villages. I was in a village overlooking it, and a shell fell in a field opposite me and I got blown physically off my feet by the shell blast through a door of a house next to a mosque.

Q: Were you injured?

Fisk: No, not at all. I was bruised but nothing terrible. The tank kept on firing through the fields into the next village and the next village. Tafik and Bahije had gotten out of their car and were talking to villagers in the back of a yard. A car had been hit in the front, and they went out to film it. And as they were filming it, an Israeli tank round landed, and they were literally blasted into bits of flesh around the houses. I went back down the next day and people were scraping them off the houses with pen knives. When I got to the Hamoud hospital, they were unrecognizable, pieces of meat, nothing, horrible.

Q: And those incidents don't give you pause as to whether you should continue?

Fisk: It's an odd situation. When you go off to a dangerous place, you're full of foreboding. But if you decide you're going to cover it and it's worth doing, you must commit yourself to it and stop saying, "Should I do it?" You've got to turn the potential for panic into the concentration of the mind. But you never should be greedy. If you're after something, you talk to witnesses at the scene, you report it, and get out. Don't hang around. When I'm out of a dangerous situation and I'm back in Beirut, I go out with my beautiful wife to dinner and I sit down and I think, "Whew!" There's always a feeling afterwards--you've got the story--it was worth it. Because you got back. But if you don't get back, you won't be in a position to say that.

Q: The first time I heard your name was in connection with your report in 1996 at the Qana refugee camp in Lebanon, which was bombed by the Israelis. Tell me what you saw there and how you pieced together the story.

Fisk: Well, I was actually by chance coming on a U.N. convoy. You recall, of course, that at this stage Israel was carrying out what it called "Operation Grapes of Wrath," which was a bombardment of Lebanon with 22,000 shells and heaven knows how many thousand air raids.

Q: John Steinbeck must be rolling in his grave.

Fisk: John Steinbeck in one book of his which I have describes Arabs as "the dirtiest people in the world," I noticed.

Q: So maybe it was appropriate for that.

Fisk: Well, who knows. It might have come from the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" or the book of Deuteronomy. In any event, this operation was set off after Hezbollah men had fired rockets over the border into Israel. The Hezbollah were responding to the unexplained killing of a young teenager in a south Lebanese village by a booby-trap bomb, which the Hezbollah believed the Israelis set. The Hezbollah took revenge, as they said they would if there were any deaths of civilians. The Israelis said this was an unprovoked attack and launched its bombardment.

I was traveling in the U.N. convoy near Qana and we heard an Israeli gun battery inside southern Lebanon. It was part of the Israeli occupation force. Suddenly, fire rang over the top of our convoy into the village of Qana and we could hear this "boom, boom, whoosh," the whiffling of a shell--"wham!"--as it hit into Qana. And within a few seconds we could hear the headquarters of the Fijian battalion of the United Nations saying, "Shells are falling on our compound. Help us, help us." Shortly afterwards, we heard a Fijian very, very frightened come up on the radio again, "Help us, help us. The shells are falling." And a Lebanese army liaison officer was saying, "I hear the voice of death."

We had been by Qana that morning and had seen it crowded with 800 refugees. The people with their villages under fire had been taken by the U.N. armored vehicles into the U.N.'s own compound. This wasn't a refugee camp. This was a battalion headquarters of the U.N. in Qana, where they would be safe. And we could even see that they actually brought their cattle with them and tethered their cows and goats to the barbed wire around the camp. They were going to be safe there.

When we got to Qana, much of it was on fire. As these proximity shells burst, they killed in all 106 people, including fifty-five children. Proximity shells burst seven to nine meters above the ground. They're anti-personnel weapons; they're intended to give amputation wounds. When we got there, these poor people without arms and legs had crawled and smashed down the back gate of the compound, and we drove into it. It was literally a river of blood, and it was overflowing our shoes. And we got inside, and it was just butchery. Babies were without arms and heads. Women torn apart. People eviscerated. There was half a body at the top of a burning tree. There was a young girl to my right when I came in holding in her arms this middle-aged man with his eyes open, but he had an arm missing and he was dead. And she was rocking this body back and forth...