Herald correspondent a scourge of US foreign policy

John Malkovich wants to shoot him, fans have set up a website in his honour and he's been described in the British House of Commons as "the doyen of Middle East correspondents".

In left-wing circles his name is spoken with a reverence reserved for a favoured few, such as Pilger and Chomsky. On the right, it's often spat with disgust.

After a quarter of a century reporting on the Middle East, Robert Fisk has won a name for himself - and enough significant journalism awards to fill a room in his Beirut home. Fisk, Britain's most awarded foreign correspondent, is a winner of the Pulitzer prize and the United Nations Press Award, and has seven times been named British International Journalist of the Year.

Respected foreign editor Victoria Brittain last year described him as one of the last great staff correspondents, people who have "struggled with lost jobs, no funding, exaggerated reputations for fractiousness, to continue working at the standard they set themselves two or three decades ago".

He has a PhD in political science from Dublin's Trinity College and is married to former Time reporter Lara Marlowe.

As the Middle East correspondent for Britain's Independent, our sister paper, he frequently appears in the Herald and has been prominent in the past week writing from Baghdad.

Fisk began his career as a reporter of conflict as the Belfast-based Irish correspondent for the Times between 1971 and 1975. Sent to the sunnier, but no less troubled, shores of Portugal to cover the Portuguese revolution of 1975-76, he was at the beach when his foreign editor called and offered him a new posting.

"[He] said, 'The civil war seems to have taken hold in Lebanon, the newspaper's correspondent has just got married, his wife wants to leave, would you like to be the Middle East correspondent?'," he told The Progressive magazine in 1998. "I was 29 and that seemed to me like a very dramatic story to cover, so I flew to Beirut."

While he's since travelled the world, he's never left the Middle East. He covered the Israeli invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and '82, the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Iran-Iraq war 1980-88, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, the Gulf War in 1991 and the war in Bosnia 1992-96. He's one of the few journalists to have met Osama bin Laden more than once.

He says he's constantly moved by the innocent people he sees dying - often in ugly agony - but is more prosaic about the dangers he faces.

"At the end of the day, either you get back to Beirut and file your story and go out to a French restaurant, or you end up in the fridge."

He has garnered flak over the years for his critical analysis of US foreign policy and, in particular, of Israel and its oppression of the Palestinians. He has written about the "avalanche of vicious threatening letters" he's received, especially since September 11 terrorist attacks.

Most notably, actor John Malkovich during an address at Cambridge University named Fisk and Scottish Labour MP George Galloway, when asked who he would most like to "fight to the death". He added: "I'd rather just shoot them".

Fisk also turned from news-gatherer to newsmaker during the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when he was beaten by scared and angry Afghanis.

"I couldn't blame them for what they were doing," he wrote. "In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Killa Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find."

Often critical of less fiercely independent journalists, he never uses "unnamed diplomatic sources" and seldom attends military briefings.

He says the journalist's job is to monitor power and be a witness to what his readers cannot see.

"Journalism is about ... watching and witnessing history and then, despite the dangers and constraints and our human imperfections, recording it as honestly as we can."

* Robert Fisk appears in our Dialogue section.

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