EXTRACT:'To be there, see and report . . . journalism has given me many lives.' In a new book, 'Irish Times' Washington Correspondent Lara Marlowe looks back at 30 years of reporting from all over the world
ON A SPRING morning in 1981, I handed over a coin at the kiosk on the avenue Hoche, picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribuneand turned to the back page. There was a photograph of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the "father of the nouveau roman", whom I had just interviewed. I didn't know then that sub-editors, not reporters, write headlines. The title on the article was different from the one I had thought up before posting my copy to Neuilly. The bastards, I thought; they ran an article by somebody else.
Then my eyes fell to the byline, where I read, for the first time ever in a daily newspaper: “by Lara Marlowe”. I yelped for joy, leapt in the air and ran around in circles. My life as a journalist had started.
I wrote another article, another and another. Some were rejected. There were setbacks. Nearly three decades and several thousand articles later, I am still pleased to see my byline.
I turned 30, then 40, then 50. Middle age did not creep up on me; it jumped out and said “boo”. But two filing-cabinet drawers full of articles were proof of the passage of time. They confirmed the breadth of my French experience, chronicled eight years in Beirut, recounted nearly a decade of blood letting in Algeria. From the siege of Sarajevo to Nato’s punishing bombardment of Serbia, I had seen the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Without my realising it, my life fell into neat, historic segments. France and Ireland were my home base and refuge, and I often found their footprints in the regions where I travelled. But Lebanon, Algeria and Yugoslavia dominated the 1990s; Afghanistan, Iraq and the US the first decade of the new century. I watched the Americans bomb Kabul, then Baghdad. “Vietraqistan”, as the American journalist Mort Rosenblum calls it, was the recurring theme of the noughties.
Much of my work was done from the safety of Paris. But without ever intending to be a war correspondent, I reported from frontlines in Central America, the Horn of Africa, the Caucasus and, especially, the Middle East and Iraq. The wars I covered, big and small, short and long, added up to some 15 conflicts, depending on how you counted.
Among the images that swarm through my mind is a narrow, monastic room in a retirement home in Bourj Hammoud, the Armenian quarter of Beirut. An icon of the Virgin hangs between two beds, in which lie a husband and wife, aged 105 and 97 respectively. Both are blind. They listen to Radio Yerevan in their waking hours. The old man bears a scar on one cheek, etched by a sabre at the Battle of Tannenberg, where he fought on the side of the Tsar’s army in 1914. The following year, when the Turks began the first genocide of the 20th century, he made the long march to what was then Mesopotamia, and across the desert to Lebanon, where he met his wife.
Had his life been happy, I asked him? “I hate my circumstances now,” he said. “But the things I have seen, no one has seen.”
I once asked my dear friend the French academician Michel Déon whether I should write fiction or non-fiction. “Anyone can write a novel,” Michel replied. “You have seen things no one else has.” Writing novels remains the mirage that tantalises one through the slog of daily journalism. Yet I have loved this profession as one loves a place or a person. No adventure matches that paring down of belongings to a single suitcase and heading for the airport. Journalism, I realise now, has given me a far more pungent taste of life than any ivory tower.
Indeed, journalism has given me many lives. Each time I have moved on to a different country or conflict, the world has seemed new. And every time I have escaped a close call, I’ve wondered whether, like the cats who have been my companions, I am exhausting my nine lives.
In my reporting, I strive for authenticity: to freeze the fleetingness of time, to preserve people and situations in all their intensity. It is a paradox, for ours is a transient medium. As a French colleague liked to remind me, newspapers are meant to wrap fish the next day.
Like the proverbial fisherman, some of my best stories "got away". I searched fruitlessly through archives and old diskettes for three articles that fell victim to last-minute confusion, rivalry among editors, and the dictates of political correctness at Timemagazine, which employed me for eight years.
I loved the story of the Kuwaiti newspaper editor Faisal al-Marzouk, because it had a happy ending. On the day Iraqi forces fled Kuwait City in February 1991, a wealthy Kuwaiti woman pleaded with me to find her brother, who had been taken to Basra by the Iraqis, along with hundreds of Kuwaiti civilians. Eventually, in the middle of a cold night on the Iraq-Kuwait frontier, I stuck my head into a dozen coaches filled with newly released prisoners. In each one I shouted: “Is Faisal al-Marzouk here?” From the photographs I had seen, I would not have recognised the grimy, dishevelled man who fell into my arms, weeping, when I told him: “Faisal, I am a friend of Salwa, Jassem and Siham. They asked me to look for you. They are waiting for you.”
In 1994, I worked for weeks on a story slugged “Tale of Two Cities”, about Beirut recovering from civil war, just as Algiers plunged into darkness. I wrote thousands of words on the Arab capitals, but a dream recounted by Aliya Saïd, an upper-middle-class Beirut matron, taught me that wars never end for those who lose loved ones. Aliya’s late husband, Rafik, had come to her in her sleep a few nights before, and said: “Hurry up, Aliya. Get ready. We are going to see Fouad.”
The Saïds’ son had been killed years earlier, in crossfire between Kurdish factions near Beirut’s “green line”. Rafik died of grief. Aliya lived like a zombie, playing bridge and holding dinner parties, trying to fill the void where her family had been. Eventually her liver gave out, destroyed by the amphetamines and tranquillisers she took to get up in the morning and sleep at night.
Another story, the text of which I have also lost, was titled "Family Saga". It recounted the history of a Palestinian family who had been scattered by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Some clung to their native Galilee; others fled to Lebanon and Jordan. My editors at Timethought that the problems of this Palestinian family should be solved by the 1993 Oslo Accords. When that turned out not to be the case, they lost interest. But I shall never forget Abu Ahmad, the patriarch of the Amman branch of the family, seated at a table in his prosperous restaurant, burying his head in his hands when he spoke of his childhood village, saying: "Mirun, Mirun, I cannot forget you."
I visited Mirun with Abu Ahmad’s Arab-Israeli cousins. Their family’s graceful stone houses had been transformed into a Yeshiva, for the study of Jewish sacred texts. I spoke in French with one of the inhabitants, a Talmudic scholar who had emigrated from Morocco. As the Palestinians hung back, fearing confrontation, I asked the Jewish man from Morocco what had happened to Mirun’s Arab inhabitants. “There were never any Arabs here,” he said curtly, ending our conversation.
Suffering is the lot of mankind; if my reporting sometimes strikes a chord in readers, I believe it is because I feel tied to the people whose pain I describe. As T S Eliot wrote: “I am moved by . . . The notion of some infinitely gentle/Infinitely suffering thing.” Some, like the parents of children who died violently in Ireland and France, became friends. Most have been swallowed up by distance and time. But I do not forget them.
There is Leila Behbehani, the three-year-old Iranian girl whose body I saw in a cold storage warehouse in Bandar Abbas, one of 290 civilians killed when the USS Vincennesguided-missile cruiser shot down an Iranian airliner in 1988. Leila was on her way to a wedding, and was wearing a turquoise party dress. She died with the contorted face of a child who is crying. Captain Will Rogers III, the commander of the Vincennes, was given a medal.
There is the woman in the smouldering, blood spattered ruins of Unifil’s Fidjian Battalion headquarters in Qana, southern Lebanon, on 18 April 1996, less than an hour after Israel had bombarded the post, killing 106 Lebanese civilians. She squats on the ground, her arms laced around her father’s torso, rocking on her ankles and sobbing “Abi, abi” (“My father, my father”). He cannot hear her, for his body has been cleaved diagonally by a proximity shell.
Nothing happens in isolation. Sometimes the link is obvious. The cancellation of elections won by Islamists in Algeria precipitated years of bloodshed. I still believe that the Lockerbie bombing was retaliation for the downing of the Iran Air flight six months earlier. And although it is heresy to say so, when al-Qaeda murdered close to 3,000 people in the atrocities of September 11, 2001, I sensed immediately that it was connected to the slaughter of Muslims in Lebanon and Bosnia, to the festering wound of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
When I covered the Haitian earthquake in January 2010, I was surprised at the worry expressed by friends and colleagues. They seemed to think I would be traumatised by so much death and destruction. It was far easier than a war, I told them. No one was trying to kidnap or kill me. But most of all, one did not feel the rage that comes from seeing innocents die under bombardment.
In all the wars I covered, the Geneva Conventions were regarded as a quaint museum piece, at best. In 1999, the US and Nato blurred the line between civilian and military targets by bombing a passenger train, power plants, telephone exchanges, the Serb radio-television building – even the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Time and again, the US military has killed civilians: when they shot down the Iranian airbus, bombed Albanian refugees in Kosovo, shelled journalists in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, and carried out drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As long as it’s an “accident”, the Americans seem to think it’s okay.
The Israelis learned the lesson well, testing the “Dahiya doctrine” (named after the Shia Muslim southern suburbs of Beirut) in Lebanon, where they killed 1,287 people in the summer of 2006. Under this doctrine, no distinction is made between civilian and military targets – as demonstrated horrifically in Israel’s January 2009 assault on Gaza, in which 1,434 Palestinians were slaughtered.
The words “international community” make me nauseous, for they have come to embody inaction, indifference and hypocrisy. It was the “international community” that allowed the siege of Sarajevo to continue for almost four years, during which Serb gunners picked off 10,000 people like ducks. The same “international community” makes empty promises about lifting the siege of Gaza, about rebuilding Gaza and Haiti. If Barack Obama has a shred of idealism left in him, he must forge an international community that respects the lives of civilians and keeps its word.
I have learned simple things: that governments lie; that, as Benjamin Franklin wrote, “there never was a good war or a bad peace”. I have learned to appreciate my own good fortune, having seen how little stability, security or well-being exists outside the fortresses of our developed countries.
At the Féile an Phobail in west Belfast in the summer of 2010, I was asked if I despaired of what the American poet e.e. cummings called “manunkind”. I didn’t want to sound negative, and strained to find examples of heroism. On occasion, I have encountered humour, generosity, altruism, even beauty. But for the most part, I have found the world to be as Matthew Arnold described it: without joy, love, light, certitude, peace, or help for pain. The instruments of suffering are usually remote: fighter bombers at altitudes of tens of thousands of feet; the secret minutes of politicians’ meetings. Only occasionally does one glimpse the face of cruelty: in a Serb prison-camp commander or, more recently, in an Arizona sheriff who glories in chain gangs of hungry prisoners and the deportation of Mexican migrants.
Despite the sadness and anger, I remain endlessly fascinated by the human condition. I still want to know what will happen. Looking back at this juncture, this mezzo camino, I have found something approaching a meaning and a purpose: to be there, to see, and to record.
August 2010
The Things I’ve Seen: Nine Lives of a Foreign Correspondent
, by Lara Marlowe, is published by Liberties Press (€17.99)
