On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin

"She’s the only one of the writers we are talking about today who actually died in conflict. She died in the Syrian town of Homs at 57 years old. She, more than most, was prone to take huge risks to get to the front—much more than, perhaps, she should have done. Indeed, I and many of her friends urged her to be more careful. Here’s a little paragraph from the collection of her reporting, entitled ‘Jenin: The Bloody Truth.’ Jenin was and remains a refugee camp in the north of Israel on the border with Lebanon. The year was 2002 and there had just been a horrific suicide bomb attack, which had killed 28 Israelis in a Mediterranean resort town. The IDF went into the Jenin refugee camp, and pretty much what is happening now in Gaza happened then. So it’s sad to see that not much has changed since 2002. Here’s her opening paragraph. The first medical teams allowed into the Jenin refugee camp last week followed the chickens. Human senses were overwhelmed by the devastation and the stench of death, but the birds were not distracted. They were hungry. Two rusty-coloured fowl pecking away at a bundle in the street drew a Red Cross team to the remains of Jamal Sabagh. He was being eaten by the chickens. You could almost stop the story there. It tells you everything: the horror of chickens eaten corpses, the stench of death, the Red Cross… extraordinary reporting. One of the themes of this particular episode is that she finds nothing to console or give comfort to the propogandists of either side, as she establishes that within the Jenin refugee camp, suicide bombers had been trained and armed and told where to go. In other words, Hamas was then using the refugees as a sort of shield, a cover for their activities. And the IDF was certainly vicious and brutal in the way it smashed through buildings and all the rest. Many people died. But with 28 of their own having been killed in a suicide attack, you see the reason for their revenge—their savagery, if you like. And that’s why Marie Colvin finds the balance between the two. And it’s a very difficult balance to make. Good point. She was always being told, all the time, by her friends and indeed her editors, to be more careful. She had lost an eye in Sri Lanka during conflict, when she got far too close to the shooting. And she did so time and time again in the Middle East; it was a particularly violent time in Syria. She was murdered there; one should be clear about that. A New York judge made that point. The Syrian artillery deliberately targeted the building she was in, knowing that she was there, and knowing that her reports would be highly critical of what they were doing in Homs. But that doesn’t mean to say that a correspondent taking slightly more care would have gone into that building, which she did. It’s an almost impossible situation for a foreign editor. Telling a war correspondent to be careful? It’s just not part of the job. You can’t be too careful if you are covering a war. Obviously the risks that Marie Colvin took went beyond what most correspondents would do, that’s fair to say. And of course she shouldn’t have done it—because we’ve lost an amazing writer, an amazing colleague, and an amazing woman."