Edward Mortimer reviews two new books by Robert Fisk and Jan Egeland

Edward Mortimer, now Senior Vice President and Chief Program Officer of the Salzburg Global Seminar, reviews books by two people whom he worked with in different phases of his earlier career: the journalist Robert Fisk and the international humanitarian official Jan Egeland.

More in common than one might think

At first sight, Jan Egeland and Robert Fisk seem completely different kinds of people. Egeland has spent most of his life working in, and for, organizations: the Norwegian government, the Red Cross, the United Nations. He is a doer – an activist by temperament but one always prepared for the “long march through the institutions”, with the patience and willingness to compromise, as well as to take risks, that are essential ingredients of successful political action. He also retains a belief that “the world is, in spite of all the setbacks, moving slowly in the right direction”.

Fisk gives no hint of ever having believed that – and if he did, he clearly shed such illusions long ago. Nor does he seem likely to endorse the quote from Ibsen which Egeland prefixes to his book: “A community is like a ship. Everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.” – though he did once incur criticism by agreeing to hold a rifle while travelling into Kabul beside the driver of a Soviet vehicle and (characteristically) reporting that he had done so. Indeed, Fisk is a lifelong reporter, with an ingrained contempt for all organizations – the only partial exception being the newspaper he works for: until the late 1980s The Times ; since then The Independent . He dishes out criticism, not to say vitriol, in large helpings, and describes in lurid detail the appalling things that human beings do to each other. But if he aspires to improve the human condition in any way, it is clear that he thinks his own role must be confined to journalism as he understands it: investigation, description, denunciation. Even giving evidence to a war crimes tribunal would be, for him, going too far – although “if we ever have an international court to try all the villains, I might change my mind.” (Presumably the International Criminal Court, whose Statute had come into force the month before he wrote that, does not measure up to his standards.)

And yet, the two have more in common than one might think. Both are white males who grew up in the relative security and prosperity of northern Europe after World War Two, but have chosen to spend much of their lives in hot and dangerous countries, in the midst of conflict. Fisk is a British journalist, but one of the finer pieces in his book is an elegy for a Norwegian diplomat. Egeland is a Norwegian diplomat, but writes better English than many British journalists. Neither is disposed to extenuate the crimes committed by third world leaders, whether in or out of government, but both are concerned to remind us of the blame attaching to western governments (and also the western media). Fisk’s book is full of anathemas cast at Bush and Blair, but it is Egeland who tells us that “in no other place one earth, Darfur and the Congo included, have so many lives been lost to violence as in Iraq after 2004.”

Both describe themselves as witnesses, and in both cases the overtone of martyrdom is no doubt unconscious, but none the less present. Neither indeed, is shy about reporting his own actions, or quoting his own words. Which is perhaps my cue to add that oddly enough both, at different times, have had to endure me as a colleague. Fisk and I worked together on The Times from the early 70s – and quite closely from 1976 when he became Middle East correspondent, while I was the laughably named “specialist” following events in that region from London – until I left the paper, a couple of years ahead of him, in 1985. And Egeland was the UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator from 2003 to 2006, when I was Chief Speechwriter and Director of Communications to the Secretary-General.

They were both colleagues I admired, knowing that they constantly took risks “in the field” while I spent my life in the relative safety of Headquarters. And I also considered them both as allies – Fisk in the struggle to give what we both considered a fair account of the Arab- Israel conflict, under a series of editors (Rees-Mogg, Evans, Douglas-Home) whom we thought too sensitive to Israeli or pro-Israeli pressures; Egeland in the struggle to prevent the UN becoming complicit in the genocide in Darfur, as it had been in those in Bosnia and Rwanda. In both cases, they were “in the front line” – in the sense of being often at the scene of action, but also in the sense of speaking out in their own name and drawing the barrage of criticism directly on themselves – while I operated mainly behind the scenes, in editorial conferences or “task force” meetings, and drafted texts (leading articles, speeches) for which others (editor, secretary-general) would have to take the ultimate rap.

Here, however, I am supposed to be judging two books, not two people. And on the whole it is Egeland’s book I would recommend. Is that because my present self is closer to Egeland’s UN colleague than to the callow leader-writer who worked with Fisk all those years ago? Partly perhaps, but I think not wholly. Paradoxically, Egeland’s book comes out better by journalistic standards precisely because it was written as a book, while Fisk’s is a collection of journalistic pieces. These would have benefited from much more rigorous editing – in many cases even at the time, but certainly before being reproduced in a single volume. There are just too many of them, and inevitably the great man repeats himself. It was perhaps quite funny when he first referred to Tony Blair as “Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara”, but by the eighth or ninth repetition, it palls.

One’s sympathy with the argument is gradually blunted, and one’s tolerance for Fisk’s stylistic quirks – such as “indeedy-doody”, or the use of “we” when recounting sins of the western media which are clearly not his – diminishes. It is also very irritating that the date of each piece is given at the end, not the beginning, since the pieces are arranged in would-be thematic rather than chronological, and the context of such ephemera is all-important. Above all, too many of the judgements are simply too glib – for example the reference, as a comment on a famous news photograph from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to “an old man dead in a chair because his president did not care about global warming”. A pity, because the book does also some contain some fine pieces of journalism, such as the account of Fisk’s return to the local Tyneside paper on which he cut his journalistic teeth, or the neat, four-page hatchet job he does on one of Britain’s top diplomats, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles.

Egeland as a writer is not without faults – a propensity to quote his own reports and speeches is certainly one. But on the whole he has a good story to tell – from his youthful excursion to the Colombian rain forest in 1976-7 to his no less daring tryst with Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda , in 2006. Body for body, he must have witnessed almost as much carnage as Fisk in (so far) a slightly shorter life, and is probably almost as pleased with himself. But in the end, whereas Fisk’s rage, rage against the powerful, even if often justified, becomes monotonous, Egeland’s willingness to go on trying to do something about it is more inspiring.
 
Edward Mortimer is senior vice-president and chief programme officer of the Salzburg Global Seminar ( www.salzburgseminar.org ).