Republican News · Thursday 8 August 2002

Pioneers of truth and territory

BY JIM GIBNEY

Intrepid, courageous, fearless, truthful, challenging were just some of the words that struck me as I listened to two thrilling lectures poles apart in terms of content but linked in terms of interest at the West Belfast Féile on Monday afternoon in St. Mary's College on Belfast's Falls Road.

The first lecture was given by Johnathan Shackleton and the second by journalist Bob Fisk. Shackleton spoke about his cousin, Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, while Bob Fisk asked the dangerous and unpopular question: "September 11: Ask who did it but don't ask why."

John McKenna, who accompanied Johnathan Shackleton, set the scene for the lecture by outlining the history of the Shackleton family's Irish roots. They lived in a small village in Kildare called Ballytor.

McKenna emphasised their 'separateness', which was due in large measure to the fact that the family were members of the 'Religious Society of Friends', more popularly known as 'Quakers', given their propensity to 'quake' at prayer meetings, a little gem of information unknown to me before. Ballytor, we were also told, is a Quaker village relatively untouched by the passage of time since the Quakers arrived in Ireland from England in the 1600s.

The Shackletons lived their lives as Quakers. They followed a religious doctrine whose teachings instil a desire to compromise rather than quarrel with others, to motivate people to discover and then use their best qualities.

These were the principles that governed Ernest Shackleton's life, and according to his cousin Johnathan, they were the reason why he was a great leader of men and a great explorer.

Ernest Shackleton was born in 1874, the eldest in a family of eight sisters and one brother. He attended a local boarding school, which was started by the Quakers and had educated notables such as Napper Tandy, Cardinal Cullen and the philosopher Edmund Burke.

The school took boarders in from all over the world. It was common for boys to arrive there at four or five years old and remain there until they left at age 18, rarely seeing their parents. It was also sadly common for boys to die at the school from one of the many diseases prevalent at the time.

As an adult, Shackleton tried on three separate occasions to conquer Antarctica. Each time the ice cold, biting weather conquered him and his expedition. His first attempt was in 1897. He landed on the ice-covered continent but blinding blizzards and permafrost conditions forced them home. He accompanied the other famous explorer, Captain Scott, on a similar journey with a similar outcome with another Irishman from Kerry, Tom Creane.

Shackleton took the first aerial photograph of Antarctica from an air balloon hovering precariously 500 feet above the continent. He took a motorcar to the South Pole to pull provision-laden sledges only to have the motorcar pulled across the ice by real 'horse power'. This strange sight we saw on the slideshow.

On 9 January 1909, he was 97 miles away from achieving his lifelong ambition but turned back in the face of a 60-hour blizzard to save the lives of his men, who were more important to him. On another occasion, he traversed over ice packed land and mountains for a hundred hours in appalling weather to save another batch of his explorers.

His ship Endurance, himself and his crew were trapped by ice for eleven months off the Antarctica coast before the ship was finally crushed. They had no contact with the outside world. Shackleton led them to safety. Those with him through all these ordeals regaled him for his irrepressible spirit and his sense of humour, which he used to entertain his crew and keep up their morale.

Two Irishmen, Tom Creane and a McCarthy from Kinsale, accompanied him on his last expedition, in January 1922. He died of a heart attack and is buried on the small Atlantic island called South Georgia, one of the Malvinas, which featured prominently in the war between Britain and Argentina in 1982.

Ernest Shackleton's cousin described him as neither Irish nor British, although he stood as a unionist candidate in Scotland.

Whatever about his nationality, he has rightly earned himself a place in the annals of pioneering explorers and his cousin has helped put the spotlight on a relatively unknown part of our history. Danny Morrison wittily concluded the lecture by saying that Ireland will now be known as a land of 'Saints, Scholars and Explorers'.

Pioneering of a different kind was offered up to several hundred people by Bob Fisk, Middle-East expert and journalist with London's Independent newspaper.

Shackleton tried on three separate occasions to conquer Antarctica. Each time the ice cold, biting weather conquered him and his expedition

If Johnathan Shackleton took us on a journey across the frozen landscape of the Antarctica, then Bob Fisk took us across the frozen mindscape of some of the key players in Middle East politics.

He has been writing about the Middle East for nearly 30 years and spent most of that time living in Beirut in Lebanon. He lived there during the decade long civil war when most other journalists and foreign diplomats had left. He stayed on when 'westerners' like Belfast man Brian Keenan and English journalist John McCarthy were kidnapped in Beirut.

He quoted a female Israeli journalist who told him that a journalist's job was to "monitor the centres of power". Fisk does that and more. He searches for the truth and shines a powerful light on those dark recesses where politicians on all sides and media moguls hide or distort reality.

In pursuit of the truth, he displays fearless, some might say reckless, qualities. Last December, in the middle of America bombing Afghanistan, a group of Afghans whose relatives were killed in the raids turned on him and severely beat him. A man "wearing a turban" rescued him, he said. He could easily have been killed.

He is one of the few journalists writing in English who have made sense out of the political turmoil in the Middle East. He offers up an analysis broadly based on why those living in that region of the world view western powers and in particular America, with extreme hostility.

He repeated what he wrote shortly after the attacks on the Twin Towers about Bin Laden's popularity across an Arab world that has been humiliated by the West and successive American governments since the Israeli state was set up in 1948.

Bin Laden is revered, not reviled, because he opposes the Israeli occupation of Palestine, because he is opposed to US 'puppet' regimes like Saudia Arabia and because he challenges western cultural influences in the Arab world.

Fisk is a man of integrity who uses his formidable intellectual powers and writing skills to tell the story as it is and not as governments or powerful individuals would like it told

Fisk reminded us all that those suicide bombers who piloted the planes, which were driven into the Twin Towers, didn't come from Palestine, nor the refugee camps dotted across the region nor from Afghanistan. They were from Saudia Arabia and from middle class families. Yet Saudia Arabia is one of America's closest allies.

He also reminded us that 20 years ago, Bin Laden was an American ally when he was fighting the communist occupation of Afghanistan.

This came home to Fisk very forcefully during one of three meetings he had with Bin Laden in the mid-'90s. The meetings took place in a cave in a camp in the Torra-Torra Mountains of Afghanistan. The camp was built and paid for by the CIA.

He said Bin Laden had a 'chilling self-conviction' and talked about 'turning the US into a shadow of its former self'.

Fisk said he was and still is pilloried by the American and English press for suggesting that the American government's foreign policy in the Middle East might have been behind the September 11 attacks.

This policy, he said, led to journalists ignoring the 'Why' violence happened and concentrating on the 'Who' did it.

A "poverty of expression" is how he referred that brand of journalism which "de-contextualised" Israel's occupation of Palestine. It led to new language, shaping new concepts in the popular mind. So Palestinian land 'occupied' is now land 'disputed' or in the words of the Associated Press, land 'war won'. The word 'neighbourhood' is frequently being used to describe Jewish 'settlements' in Palestine.

The BBC use the sympathetic term 'targeted killings' to describe the Israeli government's policy of state sanctioned killings.

History old and recent was, he said, being 'twisted' to fit powerful political interests. He referred to the Armenian Holocaust carried out by the Turkish regime in 1915. One and a half million Armenians were annihilated. Today, journalists are describing this massacre as "disputed" history.

Listening to Fisk, the phrase about the 'pen being mightier than the sword' comes to mind. He is a man of integrity who uses his formidable intellectual powers and writing skills to tell the story as it is and not as governments or powerful individuals would like it told.

Those journalists in Ireland and Britain who have and still are covering the conflict here could learn quite a lot from the Fisk school of journalism.