The correspondent who acted as watchdog in conflict zones

Shelley Walia

Professor, Dept of English and Cultural Studies, PU

AT Cambridge, back in the late 1980s, any lecture or seminar on war and the media would bring up the names of two war journalists, Robert Fisk and John Pilger. Fisk passed away in 2020, and Pilger a few weeks ago. Pilger was a daring reporter who channelled our fears and frustrations into a productive analysis and understanding of wartime manipulations in the context of subterranean state policies.

Fisk and Pilger were journalists with a vision and a sensibility to present not only the human cost of war but also compel us to rethink our attitude to conflict without prejudice and reveal the rampant media propaganda that big money can buy. Their dogged humanity, especially in times of global anxiety, is admirable, with the stakes higher than ever.

As readers of biased reporting by embedded journalists, we are grateful to Pilger, who gave us a three-dimensional perspective on war and the subtext that often goes unnoticed. I was a keen follower of his reports on the Vietnam War, the brutality of apartheid in South Africa and West Asia and the post-9/11 unleashing of violence by the US. Some of his outstanding documentaries were, to a great extent, responsible for changing public opinion across the world. His independent style of adversarial reporting of conflict showed his willingness to eschew ideological leanings of institutions.

Pilger was regarded by many as a strong dissenting voice, his sole enthusiasm being the pursuit of truth and going to great lengths, in his words, to “(report) from the ground up, from the point of view of both civilians and combatants because most wars now are against civilians directly or indirectly.”

He incisively explained the US government’s assault on constitutional freedom and due processes of law in the post-9/11 months, particularly the use of ‘patriotism’ to silence the opposition, and wielding, as Noam Chomsky writes, “unaccountable executive power to extinguish independent and critical thought.” An extraordinary journalist equipped with a combination of moral indignation, unyielding critical and investigative skills, he was of the opinion that the watchdog role of the media was to see how a war is represented. To him, the deep structural injustices of the war in Vietnam or apartheid in South Africa or the breakdown of democracy in Latin America became irritants that needed to be underscored, especially owing to the aftermath of such upheavals that impact political, cultural and professional contexts of news. To a great extent, he succeeded in sabotaging the military machinations of the US leadership. His prying eyes and investigative reports forced the governments to be more open in their justification of wars and conduct of military operations. He succeeded in bringing to the notice of the world the brutality of its invincible military power in Vietnam as well as the falling morale of young US soldiers in Vietnam. Uncensored portrayal of US casualties essentially undermined public support that finally lead to defeat and humiliation.

His famous documentary, Palestine Is Still the Issue, was released in 2002. As a number of scholars have written on West Asia, his visual production brought home the “historic injustice done to the Palestinians, and until Israel’s illegal and brutal occupation ends, there will be no peace for anyone, Israelis included.” He emphasised that the responses of his interviewees “put the lie to the standard Zionist cry that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.”

Pilger was conscious of the importance of reportage in this age of instant global communication, live reporting and the proliferation of news channels. Nothing could keep him away from the site of any upheaval and though he was banned from entering South Africa in the 1960s, he had the courage to parachute into the country and produce his documentary Apartheid Did Not Die. His left-wing critique of power and suffering of the masses led him to even examine Mandela’s relationship with corporate honchos. In his book Freedom Next Time, he provoked the South African leadership: “The African National Congress government has yet to free citizens from the fear of poverty.”

Pilger’s mix of bullying and luring the people he interviewed, disarming them to the point where they would inadvertently reveal the truth, earned him backlash from many he did not see eye to eye with, especially because he, “never allied myself with any political group. Indeed, I have always been intensely proud of my independence.”

His being an itinerant reporter was the result of his not being subservient to the editorial policy of the newspapers/news agencies he worked for, i.e. the Daily Telegraph, Reuters and the Daily Mirror. I have enjoyed reading his ‘refreshingly radical and original ideas’ in the New Statesman and in The Guardian and his TV production A Faraway Country (1977) in praise of dissidents’ courage and commitment to freedom in Czechoslovakia, thereby furthering his hostility towards communist totalitarianism and its “fascism disguised as socialism”.

Pilger’s Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy substantiated Chomsky’s ideas on the ruthless Indonesian occupation of East Timor in 1975. Pilger surreptitiously shot the film that kept up the international outcry, ultimately leading to the Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor and its eventual independence in 2000. No one, apart from Chomsky, deserves more credit for this liberation of a suffering humanity.

The documentary, The War on Democracy (2007), too, is a scathing broadside on the US foreign policy, exploring multiple interventions of its covert operations in engineering coups in Latin America. He had always backed the rise of anti-elitist governments across South America that attempted to end the brutal exploitation of the poor. Pilger went on to explain the film as “a struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery”, a struggle for freedom, justice and human rights.

Such was his commitment to an open society and to the merits of free speech, the raison d’être for his belief being a robust defiance to the power of the state and an unwavering commitment to the revelation of lies and deception. The search for truth, as argued by playwright Harold Pinter, “could never stop. It has to be faced, right there on the spot.”

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