- Robert Fisk RSS Feed

Robert Fisk: John McCarthy knows the value of history

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

How come people like historical memory holes?

Robert Fisk: Could there be some bad guys among the rebels too?

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

John McCain backed the good guys in Libya, who are now keenly torturing their opponents to death.

Robert Fisk: From Washington this looks like Syria's 'Benghazi moment'. But not from here

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

President Bashar al-Assad is not about to go. Not yet. Not, maybe, for quite a long time. Newspapers in the Middle East are filled with stories about whether or not this is Assad's "Benghazi moment" – these reports are almost invariably written from Washington or London or Paris – but few in the region understand how we Westerners can get it so wrong. The old saw has to be repeated and repeated: Egypt was not Tunisia; Bahrain was not Egypt; Yemen was not Bahrain; Libya was not Yemen. And Syria is very definitely not Libya.

Robert Fisk: History keeps repeating itself – as do clichés

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Same Old Story. Journalists shouldn't use the phrase, but what else can I say when I prowl through press reports? Take the following. "It is slowly dawning... that the Americans are really going home, that there will be a ceasefire in this country soon, and then a march to the US... planes." Iraq? Nope. Afghanistan? You'd be so lucky.

Robert Fisk: An attack on Tehran would be madness. So don't rule it out

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

If Israel really attacks Iran this year, it – and the Americans – will be more dotty than their enemies think. True, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a crackpot, but then so is Avigdor Lieberman, who is apparently the Israeli Foreign Minister. Maybe the two want to do each other a favour. But why on earth would the Israelis want to bomb Iran and thus bring down on their heads the fury of both the Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas at the very same moment? Along with Syria, no doubt. Not to mention sucking the West – Europe and the US – into the same shooting match.

Robert Fisk: Syria is used to the slings and arrows of friends and enemies

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

The violence grows worse. The Arab League throws up its hands in despair. Madame Clinton may huff and puff at the United Nations. But the Syrian regime and the stalwarts of the old Baath party don't budge. Only the Arabs are unsurprised. For Syria – the "Um al-Arabia wahida", the Mother of One Arab People, as the Baathists would have it – is a tough creature, its rulers among the most tenacious in the Middle East, used to the slings and arrows of their friends as well as their enemies. Syria's "No" to anything but total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in return for peace is almost as famous as De Gaulle's "No" to British entry to the European Union.

Robert Fisk: The present stands no chance against the past

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

The Palestinians are not only, it seems, an "invented people" – courtesy of Newt Gingrich – but the only Arabs on the Mediterranean not to enjoy a Spring or an Awakening or even a Winter.

Robert Fisk: We've been here before – and it suits Israel that we never forget 'Nuclear Iran'

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Turning round a story is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism – and rarely more so than in the case of Iran. Iran, the dark revolutionary Islamist menace. Shia Iran, protector and manipulator of World Terror, of Syria and Lebanon and Hamas and Hezbollah. Ahmadinejad, the Mad Caliph. And, of course, Nuclear Iran, preparing to destroy Israel in a mushroom cloud of anti-Semitic hatred, ready to close the Strait of Hormuz – the moment the West's (or Israel's) forces attack.

In the line of fire: Tom Hurndall

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

I don't know if I met Tom Hurndall. He was one of a bunch of 'human shields' who turned up in Baghdad just before the Anglo-American invasion in 2003, the kind of folk we professional reporters make fun of. Tree huggers, that kind of thing. Now I wish I had met him because – looking back over the history of that terrible war – Hurndall's journals show a remarkable man of remarkable principle. "I may not be a human shield," he wrote on 17 March from his Amman hotel. "And I may not adhere to the beliefs of those I have travelled with, but the way Britain and America plan to take Iraq is unnecessary and puts soldiers' lives above those of civilians. For that I hope that Bush and Blair stand trial for war crimes."

Robert Fisk: Fragments of history rescued from oblivion

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

"As I watch, an RAF pilot tries to take off. He roars down the crazy runway. His wings lift him pathetically, then he dives into the water. There is a sickening explosion and the plane bursts into flames ... must have known ... have one chance in..." That is all. The tiny, broken rectangle of brown paper – about 70 years old now, almost too fragile to survive in my hand – has snapped off from the newspaper clipping to which it belonged, the words "He" and "he would" missing, presumed lost. In a vast pile of articles from the Second World War in the Mediterranean, I can find no "parent" story. Probably it was an aircraft-carrier take-off, almost certainly in the war against the Italian navy, 1943, if it belongs among the other fading reports in the envelope.

Poverty is main culprit as 19 die in slum tragedy

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Usually it's Cairo, this time it was Beirut, but it was a familiar story.

Robert Fisk: The 'invented people' stand little chance

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Thank goodness we don't have to hear Newt Gingrich for a while.

Robert Fisk: This is not about 'bad apples'. This is the horror of war

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

So now it's snapshots of US Marines pissing on the Afghan dead. Better, I suppose, than the US soldiers pictured beside the innocent Afghan teenager they fragged back in March of last year. Or the female guard posing with the dead Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib. Not to mention Haditha or the murder videos taken by US troops in the field – the grenading of an old shepherd by an Iraqi highway comes to mind – or My Lai or the massacre of refugees by US forces in Korea or the murder of Malayan villagers by British troops. Or the Bloody Sunday massacre of 14 Catholics by British troops in Derry in 1972. And please note, I have not even mentioned the name of Baha Mousa.

Robert Fisk: Assad faces his people's hatred – but as their anger grows, his excuses are still just the same

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

It was the Assad Speech of the Year. There was an international conspiracy against Syria. True. Arab states opposed to Syria were under "outside pressure". True, up to a point. Nobody could deny the seriousness of these plots. True. After all, the Syrian government itself registers 2,000 dead soldiers, while the UN estimates civilian dead at 5,000. And when Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan warned that the violence in Syria was "heading towards a sectarian, religious war", there were few supporters of President Assad who would disagree with him.

Robert Fisk: The shocking truth that killing can be so casual

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

More horror arrives in the mail.

Bonfire of the dictators

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 00:00:01 +0000

How come they lasted so long?

Robert Fisk: France's shamefully forgotten allies

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 00:00:01 +0000

It took Indigènes to remind the French that they owed their liberation not only to De Gaulle's largely white Free French troops but also to 134,000 Algerian soldiers, 73,000 Moroccans, 26,000 Tunisians and 92,000 "others" from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Robert Fisk: Turkey's long road to reconciliation

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:00:01 +0000

Just for a moment, put aside the current Franco-Turkish war over the 20th century's first Holocaust – of the Armenians – and remember that Nicolas Sarkozy's electoral venality (500,000 French-Armenian voters want to hear him tell the truth) and Turkish nationalism (which feeds on holocaust denial) make a bad cocktail.

Robert Fisk: The adventures of Tintin in Beirut

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 00:00:01 +0000

We are all haunted by war.

Alaa al-Aswany: 'Overthrowing Mubarak was too good to be true'

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:00:01 +0000

So here's the real news. Alaa al-Aswany, dentist, revolutionary (he'd like that bit) and author of the astonishing The Yacoubian Building, is producing a new novel. He writes in the morning when he's not fixing, cleaning or yanking out teeth. It will be called The Automobile Club of Egypt and will be set in the 1940s, yet just the faintest whiff of tear gas may penetrate its pages. "At the end of the novel, I had to imagine how it was to be a rebel and to say 'No'," he tells me in his dentist's surgery. "And, by coincidence, we had the revolution here!" His book on the overthrow of Mubarak is already selling well. On the State of Egypt: What Made the Revolution Inevitable. Disclosure: his English publisher is also mine. But enough puffery for the Dentist of Cairo.

Robert Fisk: Bankers are the dictators of the West

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 00:00:01 +0000

Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.

Robert Fisk: Phoenician footprints all over Beirut

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 00:00:01 +0000

I walked down a Phoenician street the other day, built under Persian rule.

Robert Fisk: Back to Tahrir Square

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:01 +0000

You can get almost anything you want in Tahrir Square these days. Corn-on-the-cob, tea, coffee, suitcases, a cheap holiday in Sharm el-Sheikh, feta cheese, firecrackers, garbage, eggs, empty tear-gas cartridges and lots and lots of arguments and heaps of banners extolling the courage of martyrs and the evils of policemen. There are still a few thousand there every day – today, the revolutionaries are calling for another million – but the many more millions who queued to vote on Monday and Tuesday have put Tahrir Square's integrity in doubt. Who represents Egypt now?

Robert Fisk: 'The real fight for democracy in Egypt has yet to begin'

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:01 +0000

When it comes to economics, you don't mess with Wael Gamal. Before becoming a managing editor of Shrouq – Sunrise, to you and me – he was economics editor of the Egyptian daily, and he casts a cold eye on soldiers who don't understand money. "Not a single one of the 20 generals on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces understands the economy," he says, with a certain laugh infecting his voice, "and at their press conference the other day, all their numbers and conclusions were wrong. They wanted to scare the people off the streets by saying that Egypt will go bankrupt. The ministers were all trying to correct the statistics afterwards."

Robert Fisk: Sanctions are only a small part of the history that makes Iranians hate the UK

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:01 +0000

It's a weird irony that Iranians know the history of Anglo-Persian relations better than the Brits. When the newly installed Ministry of Islamic Guidance asked Harvey Morris, Reuters' man in post-revolutionary Iran, for a history of his news agency, he asked his London office to send him a biography of Baron von Reuter – and was appalled to discover the founder of the world's greatest news agency had built Persia's railways at an immense profit. "How can I show this to the ministry?" he shouted. "It turns out that the Baron was worse than the fucking Shah!" Of which, of course, the ministry was well aware.

Robert Fisk: A glimpse of real democracy – but it may prove too good to be true

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:01 +0000

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive? It had rained overnight, but with Egypt's pale and wintry sun came the crowds, lining up outside the polling stations with a patience and an enthusiasm that would put any European nation to shame.

Robert Fisk: Why torturers film their handiwork

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 00:00:01 +0000

When prisoners were brought to Saddam Hussein's intelligence service for interrogation, their torturers often videotaped the torment.

Robert Fisk: Exile dreams of a bloodless return after a life spent opposing Assad regime

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 00:00:01 +0000

"If Bashar al-Assad is caught in Damascus, he will not be treated like Gaddafi. But what if he was caught in Homs? We don't want Mr Bashar al-Assad to face this end. But, as Mr Erdogan says, he has to think what happened to Gaddafi and to Saddam Hussein. The youth now are crazy. All revolutions are created by crazy men, not by wise men."

Robert Fisk: Egyptian crisis gives Syria time to talk about democracy

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:01 +0000

Egypt is the best thing to happen to Syria for a long time. Just when Western leaders – and Qatar – were hounding President Bashar al-Assad for his brutal suppression of opposition demonstrations, along comes the latest crisis in Egyptian cities where security men brutally suppress opposition demonstrators who want the army to obey the orders of a real democratic parliament and to stop posing as the "guardians" of a new constitution.

Robert Fisk: Ukraine, 1942. What are we seeing?

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 00:00:01 +0000

In 1942, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, a Polish postal official working for the resistance opened a letter sent by a German soldier to his family.

Robert Fisk: The Arab Spring has given Turkey a voice. Don't mess with it

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:00:01 +0000

The French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé was here "to talk about Syria". Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, pontificated that "perhaps because Syria has not enough petroleum, there has been less interest in the West in the killing of Syrian civilians" – probably true – while every Turkish newspaper has been speculating about the Turks' future plans for action in Syria. A Turkish military cordon sanitaire inside the border with Syria seems to be the favourite.

Robert Fisk: Assad will only go if his own tanks turn against him

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:00:01 +0000

In Damascus earlier this month, Syrian state television asked me for an interview on events in Syria. With much trepidation, I accepted, promising the presenter he would not like all I said, but warning – a bit of Fisk blackmail, this – that any censored words would be relayed to readers of The Independent. The interview went ahead and I said that President Bashar al-Assad was "running out of time – fast". The Arab people, I added, could no longer be infantilised; there was clearly an armed insurgency under way in Syria to overthrow the regime – foreign correspondents must be allowed to visit Homs and other areas where a host of YouTube pictures show protesters being shot down. When I was told later that the translation had not been finished in time, I smiled with my usual cynicism.

Robert Fisk: Arab League's 'roar' at Syria shows how tiny Qatar is starting to flex its muscle

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:00:01 +0000

So did the "Arab Spring" infect the Arab League this weekend – or was it leaned on by the British Empire-style ambitions of tiny, rich Qatar?

Robert Fisk: Will computers make extinct the last of Islam's proud and honourable calligraphers?

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 00:00:01 +0000

Dr Jamal Naja meets me in a coffee shop just down the road from his home in Alamuddin Street, a quiet almost mischievous face, greying hair, and he lays – with great care – a black packet on the table in front of him.

Robert Fisk: Do those who flaunt the poppy on their lapels know that they mock the war dead?

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:00:01 +0000

I turned on the television in my Damascus hotel room to witness a dreary sight: all the boys and girls of BBC World wearing their little poppies again.

Robert Fisk: Al Jazeera - 15 years in the headlines

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:00:01 +0000

The Mubarak family still believe it was Al Jazeera wot did it. Without the Qatari satellite channel's constant live coverage of Tahrir Square last January and February, so the story goes, the Emperor Hosni would still be on Egypt's throne, his hair as dyed as his pronouncements, his satraps still slobbering over his wisdom, his regime still producing fake news and fake ministries and fake elections for his people. It was when the aircrew of Tunisian Emperor Ben Ali's flight to Saudi Arabia – glancing at Al Jazeera Arabic's news reports in the VIP suite at Riyadh airport – suddenly realised what was going on and filed a flight plan home and left the old man behind. It was George W Bush who wanted to bomb Al Jazeera's headquarters in Doha – scarcely 20 miles from America's largest airbase in the Middle East.

Robert Fisk: What the killing of Gaddafi means to Syria

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:00:01 +0100

Two days before Gaddafi was murdered, I was reading the morning newspapers in Beirut and discovered a remarkable story on most front pages.

Robert Fisk: 'The army was told not to fire at protesters'

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:01 +0100

Bouthaina Shaaban is one of only six Syrians on America's personal sanction list against the Assad regime. She is political adviser to the President. A middle-aged mother and author who speaks perfect English, as much at home in Paris as in Cairo. And all those assets of hers, frozen in America. Wow.

Robert Fisk: Syria slips towards sectarian war

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:01 +0100

So there was the reporter from Syrian television asking what I thought of the situation in Syria, and there was I saying that you can no longer infantilise Arabs, that the uprisings/revolts/revolutions/unrest in the Arab world were all different; but that dictatorship didn't work, that if there were – if – a serious new constitution, pluralist political parties and real and genuine free elections, Syria might just climb out of its tragedy but that the government was running out of time, fast.

Robert Fisk: Assad's army remains defiant as it buries its dead

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 03:00:01 +0100

Sergeant Jassem Abdul-Raheem Shehadi and Private Ahmed Khalaf Adalli of the Syrian Army were sent to their graves yesterday with the send-off their families would have wished for; coffins draped with the Syrian flag, trumpets and drums and wreaths held by their comrades, and the presence of their commanding officer.

Robert Fisk: Lessons in humanity from a Libyan family, a tale of Dickens from Cairo - and the wrong shark

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:00:01 +0100

It's an ill wind, etc. Today my thoughts are not with the Gaddafi family but with Bassam and Saniya al-Ghossain, whose daughter Raafat was killed in Libya on 15 April 1986.

Robert Fisk: You can't blame Gaddafi for thinking he was one of the good guys

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:00:01 +0100

We loved him. We hated him. Then we loved him again. Blair slobbered over him. Then we hated him again. Then La Clinton slobbered over her BlackBerry and we really hated him even more again. Let us all pray that he wasn't murdered. "Died of wounds suffered during capture." What did that mean?