Remembering Robert Fisk

When I went to Beirut and Aleppo in 2005 on a lecture tour, I had my official hosts and guides, but Bob was my unofficial guide. I arrived at his apartment on a late May afternoon to find him sitting at his writing desk at the cusp of his terrace that looked out at the Mediterranean and the corniche; there were piles of pages of his new book spread out, and he handed a chapter to me, declaring: “Please read this and let me know if you find any errors.”

I said, “Bob, I’m jet lagged and have to give two lectures tomorrow.” “Peter, it’s my chapter on the Armenian Genocide. Let me know if you find any errors.” He was drinking gin and tonic and poured me one. We sat on his balcony and I felt sun, gazed at blue sky, teal water, palm trees, people milling in the streets, sitting at cafes. What a relief from the late cold spring of central New York. That evening Bob took me on a tour of his downtown Beirut, to a mosque, to an elegant restaurant, and to the center city where a huge community-made memorial to the recently assassinated President Rafic Hariri was assembled. A massive installation that marked the nation’s grief for the unclaimed assassination of the Lebanese president, it was shaped by banks and piles of flowers, a coffin, photographs, sacred artifacts, and candles that lit the site as people milled around into the early morning hours of night.

When Fisk dropped me off at the Geffinor Rotana Hotel sometime past midnight, he reminded me that he would pick me up in a cab at 9 to take me to the Palestinian refugees settlements of Sabra and Shatila. He was angry that the State Department was prohibiting me from going anywhere deemed dangerous including to the Bekka Valley where I was supposed to spend a day. “What the hell do they think, a poet and professor is going strapped with bombs?”

By mid-morning we were walking through the dusty shanty towns of Sabra and Shatila where the massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites took place at the hands of the Lebanese right-wing Christian militia with Israeli army collusion in September of 1982. Bob swore me to secrecy about our excursion because, “if the State Department learns you’ve been there, they’ll send you home.” It was a powerful and profound walk through the impoverished settlement villages of these marooned people. Fisk took me to a couple of his friends’ homes where we were invited in for tea and I listened to stories of grief and loss. Bob told me he had interviewed many of the survivors here and was writing about their tragedy.

The next day I handed Bob back the draft of his Armenian Genocide chapter with as many edits and suggestion as I was able to make. It would appear as Chapter 10 “The First Holocaust” in his eleven hundred page opus The Great War for Civilization. The chapter, somewhat like the book, is a unique blend of journalism, history, non-fictional prose, muckraking, and interviews with genocide survivors. Fisk’s passion for the histories of the victims of crimes of mass violence defined a large part of his career during which he wrote about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Lebanese civil war, both Gulf Wars, the wars in Afghanistan and the plight of the Palestinians. He brought an ethical edge to his work without betraying depth and intellect. He understood that crimes of mass violence emanated from the wanton abuses of power by states and ethnic groups.

In “The First Holocaust,” he takes on the history of the Turkish government denial of the Armenian Genocide as no journalist ever has. He wrote relentlessly about the lengths to which the Turkish state would go to rewrite history and to exert political pressure and stop other democratic nations from exercising their own freedom of speech regarding the narrative and representation of the Armenian Genocide. He shined a moral flashlight on those who colluded with or caved in to Turkish denial: Tony Blair, George W. Bush, the Israeli government. He told me how appalled he was by the cowardly, unethical reporting of Stephen Kinzer at the New York Times; he wrote about the Lowry case at Princeton, Turkey’s suppression of Armenian Genocide representation at the British Imperial War Museum and the cancelling of an academic conference in Israel, among other Turkey scandals. In the 1990s when some historians were still wary of using survivor testimony to write history (that seems no longer the case), Fisk was demonstrating how important survivor testimony was to history and historiography. In “The First Holocaust,” voices of Armenian survivors — Boghos Dakessian, Zakar Berberian, Nevart Sourian, Mayreni Kaloustian, Serpouhi Papazian and Astrid Aghajanian — take the reader into the granular realities of deportation and massacre.