Marlowe - Love in a Time of War: My Years with Robert Fisk

Love in a

Time of War

The Things Ive Seen:
Nine Lives Of A Foreign Correspondent (2010)

Painted With Words (2011)

Love in a

Time of War

My Years with

Robert Fist

Lara Marlowe

AN APOLLO BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

An Apollo book
First published in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright Lara Marlowe, 2021

The moral right of Lara Marlowe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Patrick Phillips Heaven is reprinted by permission from University of Georgia Press. Fadhil Al-Azzawis Every Morning the War Gets Up from Sleep is quoted with his permission. Samuel Becketts Cascando is quoted by permission from Faber and Grove Atlantic. Louis Aragons Il ny a pas damour heureux is quoted by permission from ditions Robert Laffont. Siham Jabbars In Baghdad is printed with her permission.

Front cover photograph by Pascal Beaudenon.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781801102513

ISBN (E): 9781801102537

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In Memoriam
R. W. F.
19462020

It will be the past

and well live there together.

Not as it was to live

but as it is remembered.

It will be the past.

Well all go back together.

Everyone we ever loved,

and lost, and must remember.

It will be the past

And it will last forever.

Patrick Phillips, Heaven

I am sitting at my desk in Paris on a Sunday evening, hoping to catch up on email before the new week starts.

The phone rings, which is unusual in our era of digital communication. It is the Irish Times foreign affairs editor Paddy Smyth. Paddy and I rarely talk, though we have been friends and colleagues for a quarter-century.

Whats happened? I ask Paddy, fearing I have missed a story on my patch, perhaps a terrorist attack or an assassination in France. I am not eager to write an article that evening, or set off on a story the following morning. It is infinitely worse than that.

We werent sure if you heard that Robert Fisk died, Paddy begins as gently as he knows how. At first I am incredulous. This must be some kind of bad joke. My former husband is only seventy-four years old and is fit as a fiddle. I recently saw This Is Not a Movie , a documentary about him, co-written by his wife. Robert was still tearing around the Middle East, dodging shellfire and denouncing those he called the bad guys. Just a year before, when I ran into Robert at Dublin airport, he appeared the very picture of good health and contentment.

We will publish a piece in tomorrows paper, Paddy continues. Details are scant, he says. I misunderstand him to mean biographical details, rather than facts about Roberts death. I begin to spout information, asking Paddy to share it with whomever is writing the article for The Irish Times .

The chronology of Roberts life, which I know by heart, pours out in haphazard fashion. I recall Roberts mock chagrin that his birthday fell on 12 July, the day when Orangemen celebrate the Battle of the Boyne. Attuned to the ironies of history, he recounted that his father, William, whom he referred to as King Billy, was deployed to Ireland on the wrong side during the 1916 Rising. Bill Fisk became the borough treasurer of Maidstone, Kent, for which he was awarded the Order of the British Empire. Roberts mother, Peggy, ne Rose, was a housewife and amateur painter who was thrilled to be appointed as a magistrate in her middle years.

I blather on to Paddy.

Robert loved revisiting his own life. His paternal grandfather, Edward, was first mate on the celebrated Cutty Sark , so we travelled to Greenwich to see the restored clipper ship. Robert was delighted to find Edward Fisk named in a black-and-white photograph of the crew. He took me to Yardley Court, the minor British public school in Tonbridge to which he was sent as a boarder at the age of nine, and which he hated.

Roberts ineptitude at maths made him ineligible for Oxbridge, but he graduated with a first-class honours degree in Classics from the University of Lancaster. His alma mater later gave him the first of his half-dozen honorary doctorates. He recalled his glee as a schoolboy upon discovering the dirty bits in the erotic poetry of Catullus. His favourite joke about ageing television correspondents was that they were still waiting for their laundry to come back after they covered the Battle of Thermopylae.

Though he was in some ways a quintessential British public-school boy, Robert was also a pacifist in perpetual revolt against authority. He got himself expelled from cadet training by destroying his rifle. I love the wily rebel who threw his rifle in the river / And the little boy in you who wanted to drive steam trains, were the first lines of the first poem I wrote to him, in 1987.

Robert had a following in Ireland, a country he came to love with his first serious journalistic assignment, covering the Troubles in Belfast for The Times . Though he was lucid about the excesses of the IRA, he saw Northern Catholics as underdogs and victims. He would later compare their status to that of Shia Muslims in Lebanon and Iraq.

Roberts doctoral thesis at Trinity College Dublin became In Time of War , the definitive book on Irish neutrality during the Emergency, as World War II is known in Ireland. He bought the cottage opposite Finnegans Pub and Maeve Binchys house in Sorrento Road, Dalkey, before I met him. We later built our dream home, imitating the style of the Ottoman mansions that adorn Beirut, overlooking the sea in Dalkey.

When, in 1976, the foreign editor of The Times asked Robert if he wanted to go to Beirut to cover the Lebanese Civil War, Robert said he felt like an Arab king being offered a country by Winston Churchill. The assignment changed the course of his life. For the next forty-five years fifteen of them with me Robert interviewed generals and guerrillas, wounded civilians and their tormentors. He knew more about the regions history than many of its inhabitants did. He accurately predicted its future.

When Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David accords with Israel, Robert wondered in print if the Egyptian autocrat had signed his own death warrant. He saw how Israels 1982 invasion of Lebanon radicalised and Islamicised the region. He warned that the evacuation of Palestinian fighters after the siege of West Beirut left women and children defenceless, a premonition of the Sabra and Chatila massacres which he covered with award-winning eloquence.

When Yasser Arafat concluded his ill-fated Oslo peace accords with Israel in 1993, Robert explained to my nave bosses at Time magazine why it could not work. He knew that Israel would not give East Jerusalem back to the Palestinians or stop seizing Arab land in the West Bank, and that the Palestinians right of return, as consecrated in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, was an existential and irreconcilable issue for both parties. Under the Oslo accords, he said, Israel would turn the PLO into its policemen. He predicted that the 2003 US and British invasion of Iraq would destroy Iraq and hand it on a platter to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Roberts message never varied. He regarded war as the total failure of the human spirit. He railed against the double standards that led journalists and politicians to regard violence by Muslims as terrorism, while Israel, the US and NATO were never labelled terrorists for the civilians they slaughtered. He protested endlessly that the Palestinians were not responsible for the Holocaust, but that Arabs needed to admit that the genocide had happened. He denounced those who equated criticism of Israeli actions with anti-Semitism. He said every war contained the seeds of the next one.