Marie was an essential witness to terrible events

 
10 April 2012

Marie Colvin was one of the toughest, bravest and most accomplished foreign correspondents of our time. She would go many, many extra miles to get the story, and almost invariably did.

I knew her for nearly 30 years, our paths crossing in the Balkans, in the Middle East and at the Frontline Club in Paddington. Despite her growing fame, she wore her celebrity lightly. As a colleague and friend she was great fun.

She was great at the irony and the weird angles. She would have to be as she spent so much time following the eccentric entourage of PLO leader Yasser Arafat - whose corruption she exposed in a string of scoops and a remarkable television documentary.

For Marie it was always the story that mattered. My friend, Armenian George in Jerusalem, called her "Scoops Marie".

"I could imagine if she was going up the aisle on her wedding day," he used to say. "If someone said I've got a scoop, she'd be out of the door in a flash."

I met her in the early Eighties. Civil war was roaring away in Lebanon and the first Palestinian Intifada uprising was on its way. She was well established as a Middle East correspondent and analyst, her name ranking alongside Tim Llewellyn and Jim Muir of the BBC and David Hurst of the Guardian.

Her training as a news agency reporter working out of Paris enabled her to grasp the immediacy and significance of breaking news, as it happened, and sometimes as it was about to happen. Her formidable courage meant that she would test restrictions and censorship to breaking point.

She infuriated the Israeli authorities by getting round their roadblocks when they tried to seal off the West Bank during the first Intifada. No matter that she would often come back with a shattered windscreen and cuts and bruises from the stone-throwing Palestinians she'd gone to interview.

She was always interested in the human angle. Typically, just a few hours before she was killed, she reported for the BBC from Homs about the plight of some injured children in a makeshift clinic. I recall once going into Hebron with her just as things were getting tough for the Palestinians in the old city, and many of the shopkeepers had decided to go on strike.

I showed her the story I filed beginning with an old shopkeeper saying: "This is just like 1936 when we were against the British. This time it'll be worse."

"Sure," Marie grinned, "that's how I'd begin - keep it local, keep it human."

Even in the roughest circumstances, she was always a slightly elegant figure. Latterly her strong handsome Irish features were enhanced by the eye-patch she wore after she lost her eye in a mortar attack in Sri Lanka in 2001. It made her look like one of the better-looking cast of Johnny Depp's Pirates of the Caribbean films.

She seemed to be to our generation what Martha Gellhorn, the intrepid war and travel reporter and part-time other half of Ernest Hemingway, was to hers - only Marie was more interested in the raw journalism than Martha.

And, by golly, she diced with death. She lost her eye investigating Sri Lankan government oppression of Tamil civilians - so it may have been an assassination attempt. Earlier she made an epic trek through the mountains with Chechen rebels and was left for dead on a rocky outcrop.

She was rescued by her then-husband, the correspondent and historian Patrick Bishop.
Courage, chutzpah, warmth and brains - she had them by the bucketful. But she died as she had lived and worked, the essential witness to ghastly, terrible and important events.

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