Unreasonable Behavior

by Don McCullin

  At a madhouse after the guards had deserted, Phnom Penh, 1975

  When the Red Cross started to withdraw their medical teams, I knew that the writing was on the wall. Phnom Penh and every person in it would soon be at the untender mercy of Pol Pot, the fanatical leader of the Khmer Rouge. For correspondents it was big decision time—whether to stay or go. The Khmers had already bumped off more than twenty correspondents; disposing of a few more would give them little trouble. Yet to people like Jon Swain the idea of leaving the city seemed like a betrayal, like walking out of a theatre before the last act.

  I was very much of the cut and run party. Not through cowardice but as a matter of common sense, though eventually the moral authority for the decision was taken out of my hands. Harry Evans sent me a cable requesting me to move on to Saigon. I remember Martin Woollacott drawing me to one side and saying, ‘I’d be careful in Saigon if I were you, as I do believe your name is on a blacklist.’ To be honest, I didn’t think much of the warning because I didn’t see how a government on the verge of collapse could be much concerned about who was taking the photographs. I also thought it would be a lot healthier in Saigon than in Phnom Penh when the Communists came marching in.

  Indeed, everyone thought that the Khmers would prove to be much crueller than the North Vietnamese in victory, though nobody anticipated the genocidal nightmare that was to come under Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia.

  I flew into Bangkok on the day after receiving Harry’s message and shipped my Cambodia film back to London. For security reasons, I usually carry my film back, but I had no idea how long I would be in Vietnam or what communications would survive the crunch. As I boarded the aeroplane for Saigon, I received a curious amplification of Woollacott’s warning from John Pilger of the Daily Mirror.

  ‘I don’t want you to think I’m being funny,’ he said, ‘but would you do me a favour. When we arrive in Saigon, would you totally detach yourself and not have anything to do with me. Because if you are on the blacklist, I don’t want to draw attention to myself by being with you. So if you don’t mind—nothing against you meant by it, of course.’

  I didn’t hold anything against John either, because I knew he was only protecting his ability to operate and do his work. All the same I couldn’t help feeling a bit leprous as we touched down and I watched John disappear through passport control. No hold-up on his part. Then I presented my own passport. The official disappeared with it for five minutes and then came back with a squad of ‘white mice’, as the Saigon police were called, determination written on their faces.

  ‘You very bad man,’ they told me, ‘you no stay in Vietnam. You go, you go, you go now, back to Bangkok.’

  There was a rush as they tried to overpower me, a lot of pushing and shoving and a bit of a scuffle. I crashed back on a desk, breaking an airport telephone. An officer told me I was on a special list of people who were not friends of Vietnam, and there was no way I could enter the country. I was locked in a little room to cool off. At no stage was I told why I was on this special blacklist, though I could only imagine it was because of my coverage in 1972 when I had photographed a demoralised South Vietnamese army in flight from Quang Tri.

  From a window in the room I could see a number of English journalists drifting about, among whom I spotted my friend Mike Nicholson from ITN (Independent Television News) and quite a few others. I shouted through the grille to attract attention, and to find out what was going on. It turned out that David English of the Daily Mail had chartered a whole aeroplane to take Vietnamese war orphans back to England. I knew there was little chance now of my entering Vietnam, but I might at least avoid being sent back to Bangkok.

  I managed to get out a request for a seat on the refugee plane. And the message from David English came back, ‘You’re welcome absolutely to join us, but would you do one thing? Would you mind caring for one of the children on the flight?’ I got word back that I’d be delighted, and I was on.

  Once the Vietnamese realised that I was prepared to go quietly, any further objections dissolved. I got back my passport and joined David on the runway. My long experience of Vietnam ended with a flight home cradling a nine-year-old spastic boy and a pretty three-year-old girl with a gigantic abscess on the side of her face.

  29. A CHRISTIAN MASSACRE

  I first visited Beirut in 1965 when its decadence had style. While staying at the Palm Beach Hotel, I decided to cross the road one day for lunch in the St George, the last known watering hole of superspy Kim Philby before he surfaced in Moscow. Philby was evidently more of an English gentleman than me—I was turned away for not wearing a tie.

  Below that surface correctness, Beirut was a raffish place. The city excelled in the provision of drugs, brothels and financial services. It was like one great big racket that worked for everybody—or everybody with money. It was also known as the safest place in the Middle East. The greatest danger in Beirut when I first went there was of being knocked down by a whole Lebanese family parading on Hamra Street in high Gucci fashion.

  Journalists were drawn to the place, partly for its quality as a ­listening-post in the Arab world, but chiefly because its communications were so good. I must have passed through Beirut half a dozen times without actually working in the Lebanon. The last such stopover was in 1974, when James Fox and I had completed our portrait of the new king of Saudi Arabia in an opulent apartment owned by the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. I was offered a lift back to Beirut in Mrs Khashoggi’s private aircraft, which was equipped with a cinema and a good supply of expensive chocolates that Soraya Khashoggi’s entourage consumed in great quantity when they weren’t playfully throwing them around. Finsbury Park never seemed so far away.

  When we landed in Beirut, Soraya said, ‘I expect you to take me to dinner tonight,’ and that sent a shiver of fear down my spine. We ate Lebanese in a small restaurant near the harbour, and then she expected me to go dancing, which produced another stab of fear for I was well out of practice. I was relieved finally to make my escape from the high life of the rich in Beirut. That style had only a few more months to run, and even as I played the tongue-tied escort I detected that something strange was in the air.

  For years the whole structure of Lebanese society had been biased to protect the economic and political privileges of the elite, which was mainly Christian. The Christians had the politics tied up with their hold on the Presidency and a system of representation that ensured the Muslims, no matter how numerous, could never achieve power. It was a Levantine version of Northern Ireland, yet with guns even more freely available. The social divide was also important. As the rich Lebanese got richer, so the poor became destitute. To this explosive mixture were added the Palestinians, who had descended on Lebanon in huge numbers after the sacking of their bases in Jordan in 1970.

  As the slum areas and Muslim ghettos of Beirut expanded they overlapped the Palestinian refugee camps. Pressure on the city increased further with the arrival of more refugees from the Israeli bombing in the south. Alliances between the Left and the Palestinians began to form and the predominantly right-wing Christians became more and more paranoid about keeping a grip on what they had come to regard as their country. Their most concentrated venom was reserved for the Palestinians.

  One morning a bus full of Palestinian schoolchildren was riddled with fire and all the enmities erupted at once. The serious fighting began in April 1975 and the business and banking district in central Beirut was soon a battlefield. The kidnappings were worse than the shelling, for these were the expression of long pent-up hatreds. The bodies of the unfortunate victims—some with their private parts cut off—would usually be found in the rubbish dump a day or two later. There’s nothing worse than vengeance in the Middle East.

  When I climbed aboard my flight from Heathrow to Beirut in November 1975 I could tell that the rich had already made good their escape. There was not a soul in the first-class compartment. Despera
te for company and conversation, the pilot summoned me up to the flight-deck and plied me with rather more drink than I could normally handle. I sobered at the sight of the Beirut skyline. I could clearly see the Hotel St George and nearby the Holiday Inn and the Phoenicia lit up by gunfire.

  The airport buildings were lit by candles, which gave a sinister slant to formalities like passport control and getting a taxi, and when a policeman took my taxi driver to one side for a quiet talk I became unreasonably nervous. I knew that I would have to keep my imagination in order.

  We drove through the darkened city, eerie without lights. There had been many cases of people being killed in their baths by snipers at night, or while just watching television. The snipers were still there on the Moor Tower, a large unfurnished building, and in the abandoned hotels which looked down on West Beirut. But the population had learned how to make their ugly job more difficult after dark.

  I checked in at the Commodore Hotel within earshot of sporadic firing. Several thousand rounds would go out before the night was through. The Commodore itself enjoyed some limited immunity from the conflict due to its reputation as the overseas journalists’ main hangout. Two local newspapermen had been tortured and killed, and had their tongues cut out and their eyes gouged, but the Western press escaped the worst. Even the most murderous factions were keen to impress the justness of their cause upon the world.

  My problem was deciding which faction to follow. Colleagues I spoke to in the hotel thought I would have a hard time with the Left or the Palestinians. They would not let you see any action first-hand and their propaganda machine was too sophisticated—you were taken to see only what they wanted you to see.

  I went off to get myself attached to the Christian Falange. I crossed the Green Line, an imaginary dividing line between the factions in the Muslim area, and made my way to Ashrafiyah district, a Christian stronghold. I found the Falange headquarters there and experienced no difficulty over accreditation.

  They gave me a pass stamped with some indecipherable script and I moved straight in with a group of fighters holed up behind the Holiday Inn. I found myself in a warren. People had made tunnels between the houses so that they could run from one to another without being seen. It was like a Tube network. One night I slept under a magnificent chandelier, but the normal conditions were squalid and rat-infested. The Falange fighters existed in a litter of half-eaten kebab sandwiches and soft-core pornography in which the faces and pubes of the contorted women would be blacked out. The stench of the unburied dead was something to be endured.

  I gained the fighters’ trust by staying with them under fire, and after a few days I was taken to the Holiday Inn, which was occupied round-the-clock by the Falange to pour fire into West Beirut. Bizarrely, the lifts were still working and I was taken to one of the upper floors to meet the resting troops who were lying around cleaning their Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles. Other fighters were on the top floor getting theirs dirty again.

  They weren’t very excited to see me, but neither were they totally hostile. One of them, who I thought had an extraordinary amount of hair for a fighter, turned out to be a strikingly beautiful woman. She reminded me of the character played by Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris, and I could feel my depression, induced by the days and nights in the warren, beginning to lift. She was the first woman I had ever seen in war combat. Two days later she was hurling hand grenades and tied-up dynamite into the nearby Phoenicia Hotel.

  Christian woman with grenade, Holiday Inn, Beirut, 1976

  The Holiday Inn billet had its disadvantages. The cellar had survived almost intact. Beer, brandy and champagne were among the easiest commodities to come by. I stayed there for three days, but always went back at night to the rat-holes, where I slept with one eye open and one ear cocked for the tread of the man coming to mutilate me. At dusk, the Holiday Inn made me nervous, because the military advantages of the day became vulnerabilities by night. There was no seeing the enemy from afar, and the danger of being trapped was considerable. Some time after I left, the Holiday Inn was overrun by leftist factions, including one popularly known as ‘The Looney Tunes’. They cornered some members of the Christian Falange on the top floor and cut off their penises before throwing them alive off the roof.

  One morning I was told by a fighter, ‘You are going to see something good today, my friend.’ He smiled and told me to get into a jeep. We took off, with a man standing, legs astride, in the back with a 30-calibre machine gun. We screeched to a halt at a gathering of some 200 or 300 fighters.

  A woman came over to me with some blue ribbon and safety pins. As she put the blue ribbon round my neck, I asked her, ‘What’s this for?’ She couldn’t understand English, but the man beside her told me, ‘It’s for identification. Look, all the fighters have one. In case we shoot each other.’

  Staccato orders were shouted and there seemed a lot of confusion. In times of confusion I’ve often found it a good idea to play the dumb fool. There’s time enough to be smart when you’re actually doing the job, but a little false naïveté in the lead-up can be very beneficial in terms of information.

  I heard the name ‘Quarantina’ mentioned several times, which didn’t mean much to me other than the fact that it was one of the many districts in the city. But gradually I learned that it was a Muslim ghetto that had somehow planted itself in Christian East Beirut, in a poor area near the docks. It also contained many Palestinians, and these Falange fighters were going in there.

  ‘We’re going to clear out this place, get all the rats,’ a fighter told me.

  More fighters arrived, and the day was wearing on. Suddenly one of the fighters approached me with a big grin and said, ‘Look, photograph that.’ He pointed to something I hadn’t noticed on a telegraph post. Someone had arranged in the form of a collage the dismembered pieces of a cat. It was a sight which clarified my view of the people I was with and made me nervous for Quarantina.

  I went running in with the first wave. It was evening and raining hard. They all wore hoods. We stopped behind a low wall and watched people being shepherded out of a hospital for the insane. People came to the windows of one wing. One of the Falange fighters shouted and when he didn’t get a proper answer he shot a burst of automatic fire into the window.

  A Falangist followed me into the main building and looked out of the same window as I had. There wasn’t much to be seen but he took a sniper’s bullet across the bridge of his nose. The first drop of Christian blood incensed the Falange.

  When darkness fell, the shooting quietened down and the hospital became a Falange dormitory for the night. I bivouacked in a windowless corridor with an Arabic obstetric diagram at one end and a morgue at the other. Next along was a Falange who spoke good English, as a result of working for a British airline. He was a great Anglophile, and we talked ourselves to sleep, though it was hardly sleep—more an unconscious wrestling with bad thoughts.

  There was the same snip-snap of sniper bullets in the morning. Everyone seemed to have shrunk into the centre of Quarantina. An old American truck, like a Dodge pick-up, was brought up with a huge 50mm machine gun mounted on it. The Falangist on top was pouring out fire indiscriminately.

  I spotted an old man lying dead in the street, a pitiful sight, and went over to take a picture. The Falange fighter accompanying me said, ‘Take no photos, my friend. Otherwise I kill you.’

  For the moment, I did as he said. The Falange had taken casualties from snipers that morning and were in no mood for an argument with me. Although my papers allowed for photographs, when the killing started they amounted to nothing. I was trying to take pictures of things they did not want to be seen, and that made life difficult.

  I heard screaming and shouting and saw women and children being herded from a stairwell. Two men were standing with their hands up, looking very disturbed. The women were giving them furtive glances. They were obviously husbands or brothers and they w
ere being followed by a gang of Falange. I photographed them. A Falange fighter came over to me and cocked his rifle. It was the same man who had threatened me before.

  ‘I told you no photographs; I’m going to kill you,’ he said.

  ‘No, no, I didn’t photograph you, I photographed only the women,’ I said. Of course it was not true. I had got him as well. He tried to wrench the camera out of my hand. I ducked away and said, ‘Look, I’ve got a pass. Look.’

  He calmed down and I backed towards the stairwell where the two men were still being held. The Falange had an old M-1 carbine trained on these two men and they shot them down at point-blank range. As he was falling, one of the men used what air was left in his lungs to say ‘Allah’.

  I held one of the banisters, tight. Hang on to yourself, I thought. You’re going to see a lot of this today, so hang on. Don’t give the game away now.

  A lot of people were surrendering, crying, begging and pleading, and some were being put aside, segregated. Women and children went one way, men and older boys were led off another. The very old seemed harder to categorise. I saw one captured old man being forced at knifepoint to take down his trousers in the middle of the road. They wanted to find his sons, but when he said he had no sons, they turned the whole episode into a taunt against his manhood. Another old man I saw did not live long enough to be humiliated. He shouted defiantly at a Falange fighter and was instantly shot in the belly.

  I saw three young men being pushed into a factory yard. Then I spotted the English-speaking fighter I had slept beside the previous night.

  ‘What are they going to do with these young men?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, my friend,’ he said.