Marie Colvin: A life full of journalistic coups till the very end

Marie Colvin recognised the significant story unfolding in the rebellious Syrian city of Homs.

The problem was how to get at it. She had been hoping for an official visa to visit Syria’s capital, Damascus, but with none forthcoming, she decided to sneak over the border despite misgivings about her safety in Homs, which is suffering a battering from government tanks and heavy artillery.

“I cannot remember any story where the security situation was potentially this bad, except maybe Chechnya,” Colvin told me over a dinner of traditional Lebanese fare on her last night in Beirut a week before she was killed in Homs on Wednesday.In her first dispatch from that besieged city, printed in the latest Sunday Times of London, she detailed the dangers in merely reaching her destination, which lies just across the Lebanese border but now exists in a grim, deadly world apart.

Her welcoming party in Homs was ecstatic that a foreign reporter had braved the odds to reach them.

“So desperate were they that they bundled me into an open truck and drove at speed with the headlights on, everyone standing in the back shouting, ‘Allahu akbar’ – God is the greatest,” she wrote. “Inevitably, the Syrian army opened fire.” She then transferred into a small car which was again fired upon, speeding into a row of abandoned buildings for cover. But she found her story. She described the “widows’ basement” crammed with women cowering in the only shelter they could find in a city where there is only sugar and water to feed a newborn baby. “Among the 300 huddling in this wood factory cellar in the besieged district of Baba Amr is 20-year-old Noor, who lost her husband and her home to the shells and rockets,” Colvin wrote, etching in stark detail how the woman’s husband and brother died when they went out into the streets to forage for food.

“It is a city of the cold and hungry, echoing to exploding shells and bursts of gunfire,” she wrote, her overall description evoking some of the worst sieges of World War II. “There are no telephones and the electricity has been cut off.”
“Few homes have diesel for the tin stoves they rely on for heat in the coldest winter that anyone can remember,” the article said. “Freezing rain fills potholes and snow drifts in through windows empty of glass. No shops are open, so families are sharing what they have with relatives and neighbors. Many of the dead and injured are those who risked foraging for food.

“Fearing the snipers’ merciless eyes, families resorted last week to throwing bread across rooftops, or breaking through communal walls to pass unseen.”
Escape was nearly impossible.“The Syrians have dug a huge trench around most of the district, and let virtually nobody in or out,” Colvin wrote.

She left for Syria on February 14. On her final night in Beirut, she had been waiting around for a telephone call from the smugglers telling her where and when they would meet her and her Irish photographer, Paul Conroy. At first, the rendezvous with the smugglers had been set for Monday night, February 13, outside the great mosque in Beirut’s main square, and then switched to later at her hotel. Then silence.

When I called her around 9:30, she said she was sitting in her hotel room in black long johns borrowed from a male colleague – joking about how the Y-front would not do her much good. “If I take off the long johns and go out to dinner with you, they will definitely call,” she told me.

Sure enough, as soon as she changed clothes, the smugglers taking her across the border called to postpone the trip until the next morning.

Overnight reporter

Colvin, 56, was intimately familiar with risk, wearing a distinctive black eye patch since she lost an eye while crossing battle lines in Sri Lanka in 2001. She was raised in the Long Island, N.Y., town of Oyster Bay, graduated from Yale in 1978 with a degree in anthropology and began her journalism career as a overnight reporter covering the police beat in New York for the UPI news agency. At 30, she was recruited by The Sunday Times to report from the Middle East. One always bumped into her angling to get into places whose residents and almost anybody else were desperate to escape. The list of wars she had covered over about 25 years ringed the globe – the Balkans, the Middle East, Somalia, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia and East Timor.

“Nothing seemed to deter her,” John Witherow, editor of The Sunday Times, said in a note to the newspaper’s staff.

Jon Swain, an experienced foreign correspondent at the paper when Colvin started work there, said that early on she showed gutsy determination, a sense of humour and “the bravery that would mark her career.”

In her commitment to document conflict, especially the horrors visited on civilians, the Arab world inspired a particular sense of purpose. She delved into the uprisings with zeal, and her last journalistic coups included being one of three reporters granted an audience with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who avowed that his people loved him even as the country erupted in flames.

“We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians,” she said in a speech last year in London honouring correspondents killed in the line of work. “Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice,” she said. “We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado?”

The difficult choices made while covering a war, she noted then, sometimes resulted in the ultimate sacrifice. Remi Ochlik, 28, a French photojournalist, died alongside Colvin when bombs pulverised the building in the Homs neighbourhood where they had been working.

During our Beirut dinner, Colvin reminisced about the time when we were stuck in the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman, Jordan, under similar circumstances in September 1996, waiting for visas to get into Iraq.

While waiting, Colvin had interviewed some Iraqi refugees who went into gory detail about how the sons of President Saddam Hussein had killed their two brothers-in-law when the two men unexpectedly returned to Baghdad after seeking asylum in Jordan. When official visas for the media came through to Baghdad several days later, Colvin was one of the few reporters denied one.

“I remember people griping that the story was much too bloody, but it turned out that was barely the half of it,” Colvin remembered last week.

The photographer she was to travel with, Conroy, showed up late for the dinner. They talked briefly about their plans and about the coming danger. They recalled living under shellfire for some six weeks last year in the besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Conroy had just received a Facebook message from one of the Libyan doctors who had helped them find a place to shelter in the hospital – the doctor grousing that it had taken him forever to work through all the Irish Paul Conroys on Facebook before finding the right one.

But Colvin told me that she had an new appointment with the smugglers in the morning, and this time she had a telephone number to call, giving her the sense that the trip to Homs on Feb. 14 would happen.

“Before I was apprehensive, but now I’m restless,” she said, as we walked up the stairs back into the hotel for the night. “I just want to get in there and get it over with and get out.”