CAIRO: As Egyptians begin to cast their vote on the referendum to amend 34 articles of the constitution, many will be swayed by President Hosni Mubarak’s speech in Assuit yesterday urging them to vote yes.
But for some who listened to recent lectures by acclaimed British journalist Robert Fisk in Cairo last week, political gambits and foreign influence in Egyptian affairs may well resonate like a Machiavellian clarion call.
“Arab rulers since World War I have been put in place because they [the West] want to control you. As long as they keep to the rules we lay down, they’re friends of the West, he warned of modern day Arab politics.
“They don’t represent you . Egyptians are purists in bureaucratic chaos . Locking up the Muslim Brotherhood is not a pathway to democracy, he told The Daily Star Egypt in Cairo last week, where he was invited by Diwan Bookstore as part of a book tour.
The award-winning Middle East correspondent for the British daily The Independent, Fisk has covered so many wars and witnessed so much horror that it becomes difficult to imagine how he maintained his poise for so long.
But he reserves the bulk of his anger for the superpowers that control the world. With painstaking effort, he delves into the history of this region’s wars, and more than any other Western journalist, has succeeded in contextualizing them.
“We betrayed the Arabs originally by promising them a new Arab independence, then we sneaked up behind their backs with the Balfour Declaration . What the Arab world wants is freedom from us. he said.
These are unpopular ideas in Western political circles, which have led to harsh criticism of Fisk’s work with his detractors often accusing him of bias.
As he writes in the preface to his latest book “The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East he believes that the best definition of journalism he has ever heard was that of Israeli Ha’aretz journalist Amira Hass: “Our job, she once told him, “is to monitor the centers of power.
And challenging authority through this unwavering resolve to be a witness to history is what has given Fisk a level of credibility unmatched by any Western scribe who has hitherto covered the region.
“In the book I wanted to tell people to refuse the narrative of history laid down by our presidents, our prime ministers, our generals and our journalists, he said.
Referring to his 1300+ page tome, he says that someone once called it a “tombstone of a book, crammed with death and suffering, pain and wounds of people who get nothing in return for their suffering.
At the end of the 17 months it took him to complete his fourth book, Fisk says he felt amazed at how restrained the Muslims have been towards the West.
“Particularly since 9/11, we propagated that extremism is a Muslim phenomenon. But when you see the history of betrayal, dictatorships, torture, underground prisons and secret policemen and our constant invasions always, of course, for ‘your benefit’ I don’t think I would have shown such restraint, he told The Daily Star Egypt, astounded at how most Westerners can travel safely in the Muslim world.
But he doesn’t believe that the West’s “foreign adventures and the superpowers’ “visceral need to project military power will continue to be free of charge.
“Now there’s a different dynamic, he says, “if you’re going to mess around in the world, you’re no longer safe in Gloucestershire or Leon.
Although critics often deride Fisk as a “conspiracy theorist , he continues to express his belief in what he terms the hypocrisy of the West, especially when it comes to reactions to 9/11.
“After 9/11 no one was allowed to ask why? You can ask who did it and how they did but the moment you asked why you were howled down, he says. “When we tried to look for a motive for this international crime against humanity, we were not allowed to look for a motive.
Despite his abhorrence to violence in all its forms, Fisk feels that this violence is derivative of a peoples who have had enough and asking why there are military forces in some form or another in Algeria, Egypt, Jordon, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Fisk makes the astounding claim that research for a magazine article revealed that there are 22 times more Western military forces in the Muslim world today than during the Crusades. It was only natural that the most violent opposition to such military hegemony would be Islamic because nationalism and socialism had failed.
He also attributes much of the bad blood between the West and the Islamists to the war in Bosnia in the early 90s, which he also covered and which he will address at length in his next book.
“Bin Laden [whom Fisk interviewed three times] still talks about Bosnia. It has had an extraordinary effect on Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East, but it was totally ignored in the West. When they finally stepped in, it was too late.
When it comes to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Fisk says that the problem is that “we went into Iraq without our history books highlighting how the invasion in all its stages was a fingerprint copy of the British occupation of the oil-rich country in 1917.
“The Americans must leave Iraq and they will leave Iraq and they can’t leave Iraq, says Fisk, adding that this is the equation in Iraq that turns sand into blood and that eventually “we are going to have to climb down our presidential throne and talk to the insurgents.
Talking about the coverage of the Middle East conflict in the Western media and the idea of objectivity in reporting, Fisk is indignant, decrying how the New York Times, for instance has “de-semanticized the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (now referring to it as a “dispute ) and how the more powerful party deliberately makes bland the victimhood of their enemies.
And in Iraq, for safety reasons, he’s forced to practice what he calls “mouse journalism only leaving his hotel room for 10 minutes at a time.
“Are we supposed to do what I call 50 percent journalism? You give 50 percent to this side and 50 percent to the other, he says, his face flushing with resentment.
“This is not a football match where you have to give equal time. It’s not a public inquiry into a new ring road that will cut through Heliopolis. This is a huge human tragedy of massive proportions and when I see an atrocity I have the right to be angry too. If we were present at the termination of a Nazi extermination camp, would we give equal time to the SS? No. We’d talk to the survivors and talk about the victims.
“People say I’m pro-Muslim; I’m not, I’m pro-human . when I say I’m ‘on the side’ of the victim, I don’t mean that I adopt the politics of the victim.
Indeed his coverage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre of over 1700 Palestinians in 1982 is testament to Fisk’s unequivocal bias towards the victim. His painfully detailed account of the butchered refugees was the subject of “Pity the Nation, in which he recounts his coverage of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.
Fisk believes there is no solution to the Palestine-Israeli conflict. “We should stop talking about solutions and talk about resolutions, he says, pointing out that UN resolution 242 of setting up a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is the only practical way out.
As for the American project in Iraq – which he describes as a ‘hell disaster’ – he feels that as early as August 2003 Dan Senor, spokesman for the occupation authority, was the first to talk about civil war. “Someone wants a civil war. Why? To frighten the Iraqis into obedience.
And what’s happening in Lebanon now, he says, is about America and Iran with the “American-supported government of Fouad Seniora backing the Sunnis, Christians and Druze and Iran behind the Shia and Hezbollah.
It’s a miracle, he says, how the Lebanese army, though poorly equipped, has succeeded in stemming the violence that flared between the Sunnis and Shia in January without firing a single shot.
And who is the most powerful figure in Arab poli
tics today?
“George W. Bush, Fisk instantly replies.
As I wind up the interview to allow the next journalist his 30 minutes, I regret I never got the chance to tell Fisk that I actually knew an Iraqi engineer-turned-fixer for The Independent who shut down his thriving business in Baghdad after the invasion to contribute to the “war effort in his own way.
“He’s irrepressibly energetic, Haidar once told me about Fisk. “He’d go to great lengths, even risk his life, to get the story he’s after.
As far as I was concerned, that wasn’t mouse journalism.
