Robert Fisk: The heroic myth and the uncomfortable truth of war reporting
It took a lot of courage to get into Homs; Sky News, then the BBC, then a few brave men and women who went to tell the world of the city's anguish and, in at least two cases, suffered themselves. I could only reflect this week, however, how well we got to know the name of the indomitable and wounded British photographer Paul Conroy, and yet how little we know about the 13 Syrian volunteers who were apparently killed by snipers and shellfire while rescuing him. No fault of Conroy, of course. But I wonder if we know the names of these martyrs – or whether we intend to discover their names?
There's something faintly colonialist about all this. We have grown so used to the devil-may-care heroics of the movie version of "war" correspondents that they somehow become more important than the people about whom they report. Hemingway supposedly liberated Paris – or at least Harry's Bar – but does a single reader remember the name of any Frenchman who died liberating Paris? I do recall my dauntless television colleague, Terry Lloyd, who was killed by the Americans in Iraq in 2003 – but who can remember the name of one of the quarter or half a million Iraqis killed as a result of the invasion (apart, of course, from Saddam Hussein)? The Al Jazeera correspondent in Baghdad was killed in Baghdad by an American airstrike the same year. But hands up who remembers his name? Answer: Tareq Ayoub. He was a Palestinian. I was with him the day before he died.
The flak jacket has now become the symbol of almost every television reporter at war. I've nothing against flak jackets. I wore one in Bosnia. But I've been increasingly discomfited by all these reporters in their blue space-suits, standing among and interviewing the victims of war, who have no such protection. I know that insurers insist correspondents and crews wear this stuff. But on the streets, a different impression emerges: that the lives of Western reporters are somehow more precious, more deserving, more inherently valuable than those of the "foreign" civilians who suffer around them. Several years ago, during a Beirut gun battle, I was asked to put on a flak jacket for a television interview by a journalist wearing one of these 12lb steel wrap-arounds. I declined. So no interview.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-heroic-myth-and-the-uncomfortable-truth-of-war-reporting-7499735.html
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