Home > Keywords > Authors > Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk

  • Triumph and tragedy for Iraq
    2 February 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    Low level of Sunni participation tarnishes success of large poll turnout
    By Robert Fisk
    Baghdad - Even as the explosions thundered over Baghdad, they came in their hundreds, and then in their thousands. Entire families, crippled old men supported by their sons, children beside them, babies in the arms of their mothers.
    The Shi’ite Muslims of Baghdad yesterday walked quietly to polling stations, to the Martyr Mohamed Bakr Hakim School in Jadriya, without talking, through the car-less (…)

  • Iraq is Lost: Bush and Blair are Deluding Themselves
    5 January 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    36 comments

    "The American project for democracy or whatever its real purposes were, for oil, economic expansion, Middle East fit for Israel, whatever it may have been, that project is finished. It is hopeless. It cannot succeed. The insurgency in Iraq is so great now that American troops, however enormous their technology, cannot control it."
    "Not only do our leaders suffer from this mania of deluding themselves, but the press by their silence or by their complicity, assist in this process of (…)

  • Margaret Hassan’s suspected execution will be seen as ’proof’ of evil
    18 November 2004 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    By Robert Fisk
    Beirut - Who killed Margaret Hassan?
    After the grief, the astonishment, heartbreak, anger and fury over the apparent murder of such a good and saintly woman, that is the question her friends - and, quite possibly, the Iraqi insurgents - will be asking.
    This Anglo-Irish woman held an Iraqi passport. She had lived in Iraq for 30 years, she had dedicated her life to the welfare of Iraqis in need.
    She hated the United Nations sanctions and opposed the Anglo-American (…)

  • Death, Delusion and Democracy
    18 November 2004 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    by Robert Fisk
    So the death of Yasser Arafat is a great new opportunity for the Palestinians, is it? The man who personified the Palestinian struggle - "Mr Palestine" - is dead. So things can only get better for the Palestinians. Death means democracy. Death means statehood. That the final demise of the corrupt old guerrilla leader should be a sign of optimism demonstrates just how catastrophic the conflict in the Middle East has now become. It’s a bit like Fallujah. The more we destroy (…)

  • Arafat : the Dreamer Who Relied on Emotion and Failed to Protect His Own People
    15 November 2004 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    by Robert Fisk
    He was everything loyal and everything miserable about the Palestinian dream. I have a tape recording of Arafat, sitting with me on a cold, dark mountainside outside the Lebanese port of Tripoli in 1983 where the old man - he was always called the old man, long before he was elderly - was under siege by the Syrian army, another of the Arab "brothers" who wanted to lead the Palestinian cause and ended up fighting Palestinians rather than Israelis.
    Even worse, the Syrians (…)

  • The truth is that Yasser Arafat died years ago
    11 November 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    He married the Revolution. And in the end he became a little dictator, falsely promising democracy by Robert Fisk
    Yet again, Yasser Arafat is dying. We thought he’d been killed back in 1982 when the Israeli air force flew around Beirut attacking apartment blocks and homes they thought he was visiting. Their bombs tore to pieces hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians but Arafat was never there. Then we thought he’d died in a plane crash in the Libyan desert — but it was the pilot who (…)

  • Iraq Disaster Will Haunt Future Generations
    12 October 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    Unforgivable Betrayals and Broken Promises
    by ROBERT FISK
    I am writing a book about our need to escape from history—or rather about our inability to escape the effects of the decisions taken by our fathers and grandfathers. My father was a soldier in the First World War or, as it says on the back of his campaign medal, "The Great War for Civilisation’’—which is the title I’ve chosen for my book. In the space of just 17 months after my father’s war ended, the victors had drawn the borders (…)

  • Why Have We Suddenly Forgotten Abu Ghraib?
    1 October 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    "Children, Ardent for Some Desperate Glory"
    by ROBERT FISK
    We are now in the greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis. That’s how we run the Iraq war—or the Second Iraq War as Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would now have us believe. Hostages are paraded in orange tracksuits to remind us of Guantanamo Bay. Kidnappers demand the release of women held prisoner by the Americans. Abu Ghraib is what they are talking about. Abu Ghraib? Anyone remember Abu Ghraib? Remember those dirty little (…)

  • September 16, 1982: The Sabra and Chatila Massacres
    16 September 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    by Robert Fisk
    Robert Fisk is still probably the most outstanding journalist working in the Middle East. He was one of the first journalists to be present at the scene of the horrific murders in Lebanon, 1982. He has published a number of different books and writes columns for The Independant newspaper. He has received a number of prestigious awards for reporting and has produced a number of documentaries including the excellent "Beirut to Bosnia"
    What we found inside the Palestinian (…)

  • Saddam’s cameraman is still haunted by images of war
    6 August 2004 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    by Robert Fisk
    "I vomited," Mouffak Fathi Daoud says, and you have to understand why. Three young soldiers were brought to the trees on the hills outside Sulimaniyah. They had been retreating from the great battle against the Iranians on Jebel Maout. Saddam had ordered that all deserters should be shot. Daoud was one of the Iraqi army’s top newsreel cameramen. He didn’t have to watch. But he was a witness.
    "They were between 20 and 26 years old. All of them said the same thing, ’Our (…)