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IN EXTREMIS: MARIE COLVIN | BIOGRAPHY JOURNALISM
Lindsey Hilsum, a friend and fellow war reporter, details Colvin's hard-drinking, hard-living decades and her impressive career covering one humanitarian disaster after another.
During the Lebanese civil war in 1987, Marie Colvin was the first journalist on the scene at a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. The camp was under siege by Shia militia, backed by Syria's President Hafez al-Assad, which made it hazardous for journalists to enter the campound and for inmates to go out to buy food.
Colvin risked her life by entering. Once there, she watched as a group of women ran across the 'Path of Death' to buy provisions. One young woman was shot by a sniper in the head and abdomen.
Colvin's story on the front page of the Sunday Times had the headline War on Women: "She lay where she had fallen, face down on the dirt path leading out of Bourj al-Barajneh."
Three days later Syrian authorities ordered the militia to stop sniping. The 163-day siege was over.
This event was pivotal in Colvin's career: she was on the scene for close up reporting, witnessed a civilian falling victim to warfare, was able to contradict cover up stories by an agressor state and (perhaps) make a difference in the senselless violence (to civilians).
This was Colvin's breakthrough, aged 31.
It was also the validation for her tendency towards recklessness, emboldening her to go further into war zones than other reporters would. Her brazenness was there when she was a teenager, sailing into the rough seas, relishing a storm. She experimented with drugs, became a heavy drinker (manly?) and went through various partners.
Her bravery, commitment and recklessness eventually led to her death in Syria in 2012.
She never managed to settle down with a partner, a craving she cultivated but the challenges of upcoming assignments (and later on her insecurities towards the growing competition in reporting from war torn areas) always took precedence over personal relations (being either family, friends or lovers).
Colvin's friend and fellow war correspondent Lindsey Hilsum has written a compelling biography, taking Colvin from her suburban American childhood into her awe inspiring career as a reporter covering one humanitarian disaster after another in Iraq, Kosovo, East Timor, Chechnya, Sri Lanka and Libya.
Along the way there are love affairs (during assignments as well as off assignments), friendships and endless parties.
In her personal life she was erratic and frantic, forgetful (she also forgot or ignored her deadlines to supply material), had terrible moodswings, was taken to buying expensive clothes and gifts (also when she could ill afford it) but during her assignments she was more focussed and composed. Until she was diagnosed with PTSD.
Colvin's energy and passion are well portrayed and everyone who encountered was taken in by her, including Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi.
Her heroine and role model was Martha Gellhorn and the two women had a lot in common, from their backgrounds to their desire to change the world.
Gellhorn (b.08Nov1908 - d.15Feb1998) was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist who is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. She was married to Ernest Hemingway from 1940 to 1945.
Colvin shared Gellhorn's distrust of "all that objectivity shit". After getting trapped in Kosovo, she declared that: "When you're physically uncovering graves in Kosovo, I don't think there are two sides to the story. To me there is a right and a wrong, a morality, and if I don't report that, I don't see the reason for being there."
She also shared Gellhorn's difficulties with sexual relationships. Both tended to flee the men who made them feel safe and to make themselves dangerously vulnerable with the men who didn't.
When relations became unsettling or complicated Colvin escaped to a war zone, fleeing the most recent chaos she had left behind at home...
War reporters are employed by the newspaper or broadcaster that has sent them, so the first necessity is to get the story. During Colvin's 27 years at the Sunday Times, its culture changed so that the correspondents were competing to bring back the best stories and to take the greatest risks. Colvin said in 2010: "We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, what is bravado?" She seems to have struggled to distinguish between them, partly because her editors encouraged her to pursue greater feats and partly because of a complicated personal combination of competitiveness, self-destructiveness and passionate sympathy with the underdog.
These factors came together painfully in the days leading to her death. She'd been injured before, losing sight in one eye in Sri Lanka in 2001. Since then, Colvin had been treated for PTSD and was often more anxious than she was prepared to admit.
Hilsum tells the story of her final week masterfully in a way that makes the end seem both inevitable and unnecessary.
She was hopeless with technology, lacking the interest and patience, and underestimated the agressor's ability to track her traceable satellite phone. The press camp in the most dangerous part of Homs took a direct hit, killing Colvin and French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik, seriously wounding her companion, photographer Paul Conroy (who had tried convincing her it was too dangerous to stay) as well as others. The Syrian authorities celebrated the death of Marie Colvin, silencing her voice forever.
Superbly written and highly informative!
www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/03/in-extremis-...correspondent-marie-colvin
mariecolvin.org
www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/22/marie-colvin
en.wikipedia.org:_Marie_Colvin
en.wikipedia.org:_Martha_Gellhorn
[20APR2019]
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