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In this piece, first published at Open Democracy, Yassin al-Haj Saleh and Rime Allaf, two of Syria’s brightest intellectuals, discuss Robert Fisk’s moral and professional collapse.

The international media has not always been kind to Syria’s revolutionary people. For months on end, many of the latter turned themselves into instant citizen-journalists to document their uprising and the violent repression of the Syrian regime, loading clips and photos taken from their mobile-phones to various social networks; still, the established media, insinuating that only it could really be trusted, covered these events with an ever-present disclaimer that these images could not be independently verified. Since the Damascus regime was refusing to allow more than a trickle of foreign media personnel into the country, chaperoned by the infamous minders, what the Syrians themselves were reporting was deemed unreliable.

Nevertheless, an increasing number of brave journalists dared to sneak into Syria at great personal risk, reporting the same events which activists had attempted to spread to the world. For the most part, experienced journalists were perfectly capable of distinguishing between straight propaganda from a regime fighting for its survival and real information from a variety of other sources. Overwhelmingly, ensuing reports about Syria gave a voice to “the other side” or at least quoted opposing points of view, if only for balance. In some cases, journalists found no room to cater for the regime’s claims, especially when reporting from civilian areas under relentless attack by Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

It was from the wretched Homs district of Baba Amr, under siege and shelling for an entire month, that the late Marie Colvin, amongst others, testified on the eve of her death under the regime’s shells about the “sickening situation” and the “merciless disregard for the civilians who simply cannot escape.” Like her, most of those who managed to get into Syria have testified about the regime’s repression of a popular uprising, even after the latter evolved to include an armed rebellion.

The Daraya massacre

Robert Fisk, a seasoned war correspondent who has covered the region for decades, surprisingly broke a mould, gradually allowing himself to become a part, and not simply a witness, of the Syrian regime’s propaganda campaign.

On 30 October 2011, Fisk – who works for the Independent newspaper, and whose reports are widely republished – was a guest of Syrian state television for an extended interview during which his legendary directness seemed subdued, as he meekly advised his host that he feared the Syrian authorities were running out of time to turn the situation around. In an article entirely dedicated to Bouthaina Shaban, one of Assad’s advisors, he quoted some of her extraordinary tales without adding one of his trademark comments: thus, he didn’t challenge the claim that a Christian baker in Homs was accused (supposedly by the extremists the regime says are leading the uprising) of mixing whisky in the bread.

Over the last few months, Fisk’s pieces on Syria have consisted more of commentary than of reporting, with a growing emphasis on the conspiracy scenario as he reminds readers that the governments criticising the Assad regime were themselves hardly examples of freedom or democracy. This is indeed true in many cases, but is not directly relevant to the Syrian people’s uprising, which moreover he increasingly reports in the sectarian terminology he had previously criticised when covering the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

But even copious editorialising of this nature could not have heralded Fisk’s shocking decision to embed with the Syrian regime’s armed forces, when he had previously stated (on 22 January 2003) that “war reporters should not cosy up to the military”. In Syria, Fisk embedded first in Aleppo with the commander of operations in the embattled city, and then in Damascus and its suburbs under attack by the regime. In particular, his piece on Daraya’s gruesome massacre has shocked many Syrians.

In his article of 29 August 2012, Fisk relates that an alleged exchange of prisoners was being negotiated between the regime and rebels in Daraya; when talks failed, he explains, regime forces had no choice but to storm the town, an attack during which several hundred inhabitants were killed. In Fisk’s account, however, there is no room for even the possibility that they were killed by security forces; on the contrary, his narration consistently points to “rebel” snipers. Fisk even reveals that a mortar-round landed on a large military base in Damascus from which he set out, “possibly fired from Daraya itself” (from the rebels, the reader may assume); and that the rebels supposedly attacked the armoured vehicle in which Fisk had “cosied up” with officers of the elite Assad army while driving through Daraya. Likewise, he ascribes to rebels the stormed homes, broken utensils, burned carpets and confiscated computer parts, speculating that these were “to use as working parts for bombs, perhaps?”

All the firing he describes is never attributed to the regime’s armed forces which stormed the town, but to the Free Syrian Army which he implies is the only violent party; nor does the Free Syrian Army seem to have a cause or a logical reason, from its perspective at least, to carry out such violent actions.

Daraya’s Local Coordination Committee (LCC), commenting on this article, points out that Fisk met with neither opposition nor activists while there (nor, for that matter, at any other time). And after days of our liaising with Daraya friends, activists and inhabitants, it is clear that nobody has even heard of this prisoner-exchange story which Fisk attributes to people there.

Furthermore, what could the relation be between this alleged failed prisoner exchange and the massacre? And why would fighters in the opposition kill inhabitants of a town that is one of the centres of the Syrian revolution because of this supposed exchange? Fisk presents no explanation for that, limiting himself to showing that the Free Syrian Army fighters were responsible for this failure, in contrast to the regime’s forces which (according to the testimony of the officer in charge with whom Fisk was embedded) went out of their way to free hostages before storming the town. Claims that the Daraya victims were relatives of government employees – including a postman killed simply because he was such an employee – are equally quoted without sourcing.

This account closely resembles the regime’s tale about the Houla massacre in May 2012, whereby the victims of Houla were also said to be regime supporters killed because they were relatives of a member of parliament. It is known today that this is pure invention, and that the massacre – as confirmed by the United Nations human-rights inquiry – was carried out by the regime’s armed forces and shabbiha (armed gangs). Is it possible that this embedded journalist’s source about the new massacre is the same “temple of truth” who had revealed facts of the governmental enquiry committee on the Houla massacre?

As in Houla, the story that the massacre victims were somehow related to regime or government members is false. Furthermore, Fisk manages to say nothing about the five-day long shelling of Daraya, as is the regime’s norm before storming a town; nor does he even give the correct number of fully documented victims (which is nearly double the 245 he quotes).

It seems incredible that Fisk cannot imagine that Daraya’s inhabitants could be too afraid of the regime’s forces, infamous since decades for their exceptional criminal capacity, to tell him who actually killed those victims. Indeed, Daraya LCC’s trusted sources from the field-hospital confirmed that a regime sniper killed the parents of Hamdi Koreitem, named by Fisk, and that they also shot Khaled Yehia Zukari’s wife and daughter.

The prison visit

As if being embedded on the day of the Daraya massacre wasn’t enough, Fisk had no objection to being taken to a jail (more likely one of the regime’s intelligence centers) where he was presented with four detained “jihadists” – two Syrians, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, and a Turk – accused of various terrorism charges, including a bombing in March 2012. While they all sat in the bureau of the officer in charge, the prisoners proceeded to tell Fisk the kind of stories the regime had been spreading for months. At a certain point, Fisk asked the officer to leave, which after mild prompting he did, just like that. Alone with their interviewer, who was allowed to offer them chicken and chips, the terrorists answered his questions, shared their stories, and informed Fisk that they had only been subject to bad treatment (but not torture) on the first day of their imprisonment; one had even received family visitors. A situation which few other prisoners in Syria, let alone Islamists or terrorists, can dream of.

As each of the men explained his specific case to Fisk, it may be wondered if he marvelled at the incredible good fortune of meeting jihadists who fitted the exact profile the Syrian regime has painted of those sowing havoc in the country. Indeed, the terrorists explained they had turned to jihad because of indoctrination in Turkey or Afghanistan, because of Al-Jazeera’s incitement, because of some sectarian sheikh’s hate-mongering, and (last but not least) because the Emir of Qatar was stirring revolution in Syria.

It is notable that Fisk neglects to mention how the visit came about, who organised it for him, or even why he thinks he was the chosen one for this largesse from a regime known to ban, jail and kill journalists (sixty-two killed so far while covering the Syrian revolution, including citizen-journalists). Nor does he give much thought to the possibility that he was brought to these detainees (if they really were detainees and not acting on the intelligence service’s orders) because they would say precisely what suited the regime. But everything repeated by Fisk toes the regime’s propaganda line: Syrian revolutionaries are terrorists, foreign fighters are among them, many are thieves, rapists and murderers, all have been influenced by the conspirators. It is understandable that the regime would want to say this, but it is not understandable why Fisk would say it, or why he wouldn’t be suspicious of being taken for a ride.

One of the co-authors of this article [Yassin] spent many years in jail in Syria on charges much less serious than those of these terrorists, but no foreign or local journalist visited me or hundreds of my acquaintances and friends who have been detained for decades. From my personal experience of intelligence in jails, I assume that the director of the jail Fisk visited felt that the journalist was “one of us”, and would be impressed at the regime’s capacity to gain such support. What is also strange is that Fisk, whose requests seem to be heard in Damascus, did not ask to visit his peers, such as journalist and human-rights activist Mazen Darwish, who was allowed no visits from his young wife or any of his relatives after nearly seven months of detention; or his colleague Hussein Ghreir, who left behind him a young wife and two children; or Yehia Shurbaji, who could inform him about the realities of his home town of Daraya.

Perhaps Fisk’s good relations with the regime will allow him to visit other jails, overflowing with tens of thousands of detainees, prisoners of conscience, denied their freedom for having demanded the right to free expression and choice. This would certainly be a journalistic exclusive; they are no less in need of chicken and chips than the detained jihadists, and the stories they would tell would give him a much more reliable account of the Syrian revolution.

In Syria, Robert Fisk has done what he long admonished other reporters for doing. Is it because he has fallen under the spell of the regime, has become indoctrinated or has suddenly lost his instincts? Or has he become a willing accessory to the Assad regime’s propaganda, if only for the sake of being in a league of his own?

The first casualty of war isn’t truth, it’s helpless civilians, and Robert Fisk has forsaken both.

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1) Let’s suppose that impoverishment of the people and the suppression of their freedoms are marginal when placed in the context of a grander goal, such as defending the homeland. That would only make sense, however, during limited periods of time, such as during wars. Anyway, such claims do not justify the way in which the people have to share out the misery between them, while the rulers enjoy the riches. Nor does such sloganeering justify the institutionalized, systematic denial of the rights of their people. There is no justification for the tyranny and corruption of the rulers, and their appropriation of the fruits of the masses’ labour. Trying to exploit a cause held dearly by both the people and the regime to achieve this is the beginning of demagoguery, and it is a tool used solely to preserve the existence of the corrupt, tyrannical regime. None of this, of course, takes away from the righteousness of the cause being exploited, but it does serve to bestow legitimacy on an illegitimate regime. Rebellion against this tyranny will necessarily place the removal of that regime as its first target, but the sanctity of the just causes which the regime exploits must also be preserved. This applies when the question comes to US plans to dominate our region, seeking to design the policies of Arab states with Israeli interests at heart, as well as the question of Palestine and the duty to resist the occupation at every turn.

2) No people, anywhere in the world, would accept torture, false imprisonment, financial corruption and the muzzling of the media for generation after generation, regardless of the justification. Nor does anybody to have the right that those being persecuted remain quiet for the sake of grander concerns, without hopes for a change, all to placate commentators who seem to think that the suffering of the people is secondary to the “Central Question”, especially as all the evidence that no progress on that same “Central Question” in the first place.

3) Nobody has the right to just claim to have “understood” the people’s pain and the righteousness of their claims, and then ask those people to simply stay on the sidelines while the leaders undertake some reforms. No human likes being shot at and bombed, but you cannot expect that people who get shot at while protesting peacefully to take it sitting down. If you cannot compel the regime to deal peacefully with peaceful protests, then [any demands that the rebellion end] are demands that the people accept that they should be killed, that their losses for the revolution thus far have been in vain.

4) History will not be kind to the Syrian regime for the way it ordered soldiers to fire on peaceful protestors. Those peaceful protests had been the regime’s greatest fear, and so they worked to quell them in the cradle.

5) It seems inevitable that, if you are being bombed, driven from your home and your possessions looted, that you will reach out to anybody who stretches his hand out to you. Those who abandoned the revolutionaries at their time of need have no right to lecture them on who their sources of support are, especially if nobody is able to persuade the regime to carry out any kind of meaningful process of reform towards democracy, or even to hand over power gradually.

6) There is no fault in the people seeking their own dignity and freedom; there is no sin for those youth who have taken up arms in the face of the regime’s barbarity. The only culprit here is the regime. Writing off the earliest protests as a foreign conspiracy, and dismissing Arab diplomatic moves for a gradual transfer of power—such as the now seemingly fanciful August, 2011 plan for a National Unity Government which would usher in Presidential elections in 2014, and a January, 2012 plan for power to be handed over to the Vice-President –this regime refused them all. None of these proposals ever sought to undo Syria’s army, or to undermine the army’s morale.

7) The duty of the revolution’s leadership and the political opposition at this point is to remain vigilant with regards to those powers which are supporting their efforts, and the political ends for which they do this. It falls on this revolutionary leadership to preserve the sovereignty and identity of Syria, preventing foreign support for their revolution from turning into a bridgehead for those foreign powers’ ulterior plans.

8) In spite of all of the above, I can understand the confusion and anguish felt by a wide number of Arab patriots about the events presently unfolding in Syria. It is not only the anguish shared by those who are shocked by the fate of large swathes of this part of the Arab homeland, at the way the regime has chosen to go with the Samson option, but rather a more nuanced, political anguish. Looking at those states which presently support the Syrian revolution, or at least claim to, one can see countries which have never been democratic, and have in fact stood in the way of all of the other Arab revolutions. Doubtlessly, these states are doing so for an entirely different set of reasons: Syria’s foreign policy and the country’s long-standing support for the resistance movements in Palestine and Lebanon. The use of sectarianism to fan the flames of the revolution are also here, deeply troubling: in our part of the world, sectarianism is not only disgusting, it is deadly. Yet no matter how anguished and confused an outside observer feels on these issues, anguish and confusion cannot be the policy of the Syrian people, and the Syrian revolution. The Syrian people are not an outside observer, they must choose between either moving forward, or falling back and having to deal with an emboldened, despicable new set of thugs. The Syrian people cannot afford to fret over the identity of those supporting their revolution, their only worries are about the limited number of those supporters, and the limited, cautious nature of that support.

9) A truly patriotic intellectual committed to democratic values must never shirk from explaining the dangers of a potential sectarianism, making clear what the real components of a democratic state based on citizenship and social justice are, on the need to avoid replacing one form of tyranny with another. Nor must we forget the historic role played by Syria in the Palestinian cause and in the wider Arab sphere. Yet this enthusiasm must be based, first and foremost, on concern and support for the Syrian people, and a defense of their revolution against tyranny. Singing the praises of Assad’s regime is an unforgivable sin, and will only serve to discredit the causes for which, ostensibly, this support for the Syrian regime is built.

10) As far as the Syrian people are concerned, no cause can be more sacred than the defense of the life of their children; no cause, for them, can be more urgent than the need to topple the Assad regime and replace it with the democratic government which they deserve.

On May 25, when regime militias entered the town of Houla and carried out a gruesome massacre killing 108, including 49 children, something very strange happened. Despite the fact that Channel 4 had entered the town the very next day and collected on-camera testimonies from survivors, Stalinist outfits like MediaLens, media watchdogs like FAIR, and some left luminaries, including our friend Tariq Ali, started blaming the victims. There is no reason why official stories shouldn’t be doubted, but given the heinous nature of the crime, one would’ve thought they’d be careful with regard to their evidence.

As it happened, all of them were relying on a single article appearing in a German publication, written by an author who never visited Houla or met a survivor. This was no innocent mistake: it was pointed out to both Medialens and FAIR that their source was dubious and its claim highly questionable. The source was discredited soon afterwards, and Der Spiegel and the UN have since both confirmed the original reports. Neither Medialens nor FAIR has apologized. Here meanwhile is Al Jazeera’s investigation into the massacre.

[youtube http://youtu.be/dsZzhmaf7oc?]
On May 25, 2012, the once serene region of Houla in Syria became the scene of events that shocked the world – the massacre of around 100 civilians, almost half of them children. The Syrian regime blamed the massacre “terrorist” groups, but this investigation paints a different picture.

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As conspiracy theorists of the left and right muddy the waters with lies and half-truths, as they continue their exclusive focus on the peripheral and utter disregard for the actual, the voices of the Syrians themselves are drowned out. Jadaliyya deserves credit for giving space to these voices and shedding light on the human dimension of the conflict. Amal Hanano is the most compelling of these voices. Here’s from ‘One Year of Hope‘. (I’m borrowing the above title from my good friend Phil Weiss).

The enemy was not one man or even his regime. As questionable motives emerged regionally and internationally, it became very clear that there were no real friends of Syria. As we fought each other, we fought a world that insisted on telling us who we were. Suddenly, everyone was an expert on Syria. Opportunistic pundits sucked the Syrian narrative like leeches, dispensing complex conspiracies, warning of the regional and global political interests at stake while belittling the people’s struggle. Opportunism seeped into the Syrian opposition as well: they splintered into rivaling groups, each betraying the other to prove itself worthy of the Syrian street’s loyalty but in the end, their divisiveness rendered the groups unworthy and incapable of defending those blood-soaked streets. The truth of Syria was lost somewhere in the middle of an axis between east and west, right and left, Sunnis and minorities, along fault lines we had never asked to define us, but they did.

There were other Syrian stories hidden from the stark black-and-white sectarianism and sweeping generalizations repeated over and over in the media — not just of Christian and Alawite revolutionaries, not just of the silent betrayal of Sunni business men in Damascus and Aleppo. Stories from Baba Amr of opposition families who delivered pots of home-cooked meals to sympathetic soldiers at checkpoints and received the pots later, filled with bullets. Or stories of guards who promised prisoners that they would not follow their orders of torture. Or stories of Alawite youth driving through regime checkpoints with bottles of alcohol on the dashboard as decoys only to unload trunks filled with medical supplies to field clinics. These slices of daily interactions between the Syrian people never made it into the “news.” They didn’t fit the narrative of hate we were supposed to follow.

[…]

What I learned hardened and softened me. There were things I will never recover from, like knowing that certain words I had told citizen journalist Rami al-Sayed were the same words he asked never to hear again in the final message he wrote hours before he was killed in Homs. Things I will never forget, like the emails I used to receive from the irreplaceable voice of truth that was silenced forever. Things that I will never get used to, like the sounds of weeping men I have never met, who told me, Amal, I miss my brother, my friend, my father. I learned how to talk about death without cringing and how to say goodbye without crying, how to soothe an activist as he mourned his dead friends while in my heart I was selfishly relieved that death had not claimed him. Not this time.

I began with Hope. But the definition of hope itself had become narrower and smaller. Hope in Syria had become relative. Hope, was that the number of dead today would be smaller than yesterday’s. Hope, was that the knife’s blade was so sharp that the child felt only fear but not pain when it sliced her neck open. Hope, was that a falling mortar ripped apart only stone but spared human flesh. Hope was that the young men whose charred bodies haunted me in my sleep were already dead from torture before they were set aflame.

And as March 15, 2012 rolled by, it seemed every few days brought yet another anniversary, death days instead of birthdays. We relived what had happened one year before as the day brought its fresh casualties — names we would carefully record to celebrate next year. The revolution is now caught between past and present — its recorded memory is written, photographed, and videotaped as if we now fear forgetting as much as we used to fear speaking.

And we knit, together, Syria’s bloody destiny, every murder intertwined with injustice, every revenge a setback, every chant a victory. Our revolution began in a moment of indignity and humiliation too great to bear, like Dickens’ French peasant child crushed under the wheels of nobility. But it also revealed what we had concealed as a people for decades. Our ultimate fear was not the fear of the unknown, or even the fear of tyranny. It was the fear of exposing what we had tried to hide, the universal truth that everyone tries to hide, but this time in history, it was Syria’s lot to rip itself apart and have its secrets revealed to a silently observing, judgmental world: that the best and the worst, wisdom and foolishness, belief and incredulity, light and darkness, the spring of hope and the winter of despair, exist together. Within us all.

Anthony Shadid knew this very well. He knew it is impossible to mend what was left of our country until we found a way to become greater than the sum of our battling contradictions. He knew we had nothing left but our limitless imaginations that were still in chains though we struggled to break free. Our Syria hovers between heaven and earth, oscillates between dreams and nightmares, it moves from revolution to war, from a once promising spring to yet another cruel summer, but despite it all, we hope.

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