Strange Places, Questionable People by John Simpson

Author:John Simpson [John Simpson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780330508186
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Then one of his officials moved forward: they had heard that another air attack might start soon. He took my hand in his own. It was soft and slightly damp, and normally I would have found a touch like this distasteful. But there was something impressive about Arafat. By refusing to be defeated he was, in a sense, the winner.

He used the rhetoric of the habitual underdog, but you could see what he meant. The Palestinians had indeed fought well: not many troops could have stood up to the pounding the tanks at the race track had given their forward positions in the block of flats where I did my piece to camera.

Soon the Palestinian withdrawal from Beirut was negotiated. Their fighters would be taken off by ship and sent to Tunis and other places, and they would be allowed to keep their weapons. It wasn’t really a defeat after all.

The evening before the embarkation, I thought I would walk around the front-line positions of the Palestinians and their Lebanese allies and take some still photographs of the men there. It wasn’t necessarily foolhardy: a ceasefire had been declared, and seemed to be holding. The evening was golden, and at each position I came to the men seemed to be enjoying themselves, relishing the fact that they had survived and could be proud of the way they had fought.

I would climb up the outside bank of protective red earth where they could all see me, and announce in a loud voice what I wanted to do. The men would then come out and pose in front of their weapons: mostly anti-aircraft guns and Katyusha rocket launchers. They looked remarkably good in their piratical head-bands, especially the Lebanese far-left Mourabitoun, whom we called the Loony Toons because of their unpredictability and occasional moments of insane courage. Farther along I found groups of Malaysians and Indonesians, and there were occasional Nigerians. If, as had been reported, there were three black Americans, I failed to find them.

The pictures were beautiful, and I thought I would offer them to one of the big news magazines or colour supplements. There had been only one difficult moment, when a group of children who had got hold of an RPG-7 rocket launcher fired it up in the air high over my head, where it exploded spectacularly. By now I was thoroughly schooled in the ways of high explosives, and didn’t even flinch; which spoiled the children’s fun altogether. It is symptomatic of that extraordinarily violent time that I shouldn’t even have been surprised by the fact that children should be firing RPG-7s.

I came to one last Palestinian position. The Palestinians were always more suspicious of journalists than the foreign volunteers, but I felt that I had done so well that it was worth taking one last risk. I called out, and raised my camera in the air. Immediately someone grabbed my arms from behind, and wrenched the camera away from me. I felt a gun at the side of my head: someone else had come up.

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