Marie Colvin killed in Homs

February 22, 2012 at 5:28 pm (good people, Jim D, media, Middle East, Syria, war)

“We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado?

…”Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilities and face difficult choices. Sometimes they pay the ultimate price” - Marie Colvin speaking at the 2010 Fleet Street service for fallen journalists.

A fine reporter, courageous individual and consistent humanitarian. Friend of the oppressed, from the Tamils to the Syrian rebels. Dedicated to telling the world the facts about situations that a lot of powerful people would have preferred to have ignored.

Here she talks about the job of being a foreign correspondent / war reporter, and answers questions on the ethical issues involved:

“Aged in her mid-50s, her intrepidness invited comparisons with the pioneering war reporter and fellow American Martha Gellhorn, whom she befriended later in life.

“Born in Long Island, she was educated at Yale University and started her career as a police reporter for a news agency in New York before moving to Paris and then London.

“She joined the Sunday Times in 1986 as a Middle East correspondent, covering the strife in Beirut, the intifada in Israel, the Iran-Iraq war, and Yemen,  where she smuggled herself in from Djibouti by boat. By the time the first Gulf War came around in 1991 she was already battle-hardened.

“She was decorated for her reporting from Chechnya, where she was pinned down by fire from Russian aircraft and troops. Finding her last relatively sensible line of retreat cut off by paratroopers, she escaped over an icy mountain path into Georgia, but after four perilous days’ journey found herself stranded…”

- Read the rest of  Alex Spillius’s eulogy in the Telegraph here.

NB: (1) I’m aware that she was a Murdoch employee: that doesn’t strike me as being the crucial issue for now. (2) I’m also aware that hundreds of people have been killed  by the al-Assad regime in Homs: by noting the death of Marie Colvin (and Remi Ochlik, the French photographer who died in the same attack), no disrespect is intended to the unknown victims.

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‘THE SCALE OF HUMAN TRAGEDY IN THE CITY IS IMMENSE’

In her final dispatches, Ms Colvin sought to alert the world to the human tragedy unfolding in the Syrian city Homs, which has been subjected to repeated heavy bombardments by Assad’s forces.

She told the BBC yesterday: ‘I watched a little baby die today – absolutely horrific, just a two-year-old been hit, they stripped it and found the shrapnel had gone into the left chest.

‘The doctor just said “I can’t do anything”. His little tummy just kept heaving until he died. That is happening over and over and over.

‘No one here can understand how the international community can let this happen, particularly when we have an example of Srebrenica – shelling of a city, lots of investigations by the United Nations after that massacre, lots of vows to never let it happen again.’

Describing the situation in Homs as ‘absolutely sickening’, she said: ‘There’s just shells, rockets and tank fire pouring into civilian areas of this city, and it’s just unrelenting.’

In a front-page article published in the Sunday Times at the weekend, Ms Colvin reported that wounded civilians in the Baba Amr area of Homs were being treated by a vet because no doctors were available.

She wrote: ‘The scale of human tragedy in the city is immense. The inhabitants are living in terror. Almost every family seems to have suffered the death or injury of a loved one.’