by Don McCullin
‘You do know what they’re going to do. They’re going to kill them.’
We could both see a group of Falange putting fresh ammunition into their magazines in preparation. I said to the man, ‘Last night you and I spoke as human beings, and you spoke of your love for English people. Try and stop what is happening now. Try and stop it because the world’s press is here and it will look bad for you.’
He tried to say it was not his responsibility but we were attracting attention. Another fighter came over to me and said, ‘It is not your business. Leave this yard.’
I think they knew that I had photographed the situation, for a few minutes later the three captives were being booted out of the place. They had a temporary reprieve but their chances of surviving through the rest of that day were very slim.
Great hordes of people were surrendering now. As an area was cleared the torches went in. You could hear eucalyptus trees exploding as they also burst into flames. Everything that was burnable was burned. The whole scene was something out of the Dark Ages, like our image of what happened when the Goths and the Huns swarmed across Europe and Asia, pillaging and burning. It was more than frightening, it was catastrophically fearful, like the dawn of a new dark age. I photographed, and went on photographing.
Again I heard the injunction: ‘No photographs, leave the district.’ And this time I did as I was told.
That evening I met up with Martin Meredith in the Commodore and we agreed to go back into Quarantina the next day. As we came up to the Green Line we were stopped at a checkpoint, and I could hear a lot of screaming outside. Our driver said, ‘They want your pass. PASS.’
Thoughtlessly I produced the pass from my pocket and put Martin, myself and the Canadian journalist who was travelling with us in mortal danger. All hell broke loose. They came running around the car, and said, ‘Get out. We’re going to kill you.’
They hauled us out of the car and started bundling us towards a house. We had to pass through scores of weeping and wailing women, women who had just been widowed in Quarantina. We were pushed into a room, and a man came up to me and said, ‘We are going to cut your throat.’
I asked him what for, and he said, ‘You are a spy. You are an enemy. You are Fascist Falange.’
I knew then all too well what I had done wrong. I had tried to get through a left-wing Muslim checkpoint by flourishing a Christian Falange permit. With emotions running so high against the Falangists, this was a perilous mistake. Unfortunately, the throat-cutter did not seem to want to understand the mistake.
‘You are a Fascist Falange,’ he kept repeating, ‘you are a spy.’ He then lapsed into an ominous silence.
As we waited to see what our fate would be, people kept cracking open the door to cast an evil eye over the Fascist spies. I was in bad shape not only with my own fear but with guilt at having put my colleagues at risk. Eventually higher authority arrived in the form of a young man in a leather jacket with a fur collar. He was mercifully brisk.
‘Mr McCullin, you have made a big mistake,’ he said. ‘These people want to kill you. You have given these people a Christian Falange pass. I know you have to have this pass, but they don’t understand it. They are dealing with the survivors from Quarantina whose loved ones have been murdered, and they want to be revenged. I know you are only doing your job, and that you have to go from side to side, but my friend, be very careful, because you are very close to death.’
He asked if we would like some coffee. So shocked were we that we could hardly muster enough saliva between us to say we would. I had to resist an impulse to stoop down and kiss the man’s feet.
I took some photographs of the refugees outside, then Martin and I headed off into Quarantina. There was no mystery about what had happened to the men who had been led off on the previous day. As we made for the north of the district, where fighting was said still to be going on, we started passing heaps of charred dead bodies. The streets were strewn with scores of dead Palestinians.
I remember seeing an overweight man, wearing a cardigan, a cable-knit cardigan such as you can buy in Marks and Spencer, lying on his back with his eyes open. Next to him lay a woman, I think his wife, who was still holding a bunch of plastic flowers. A plea for mercy. One of the Falange came forward and set fire to their clothes.
I photographed very carefully and only when I thought I wouldn’t be seen. I was still shaky from the checkpoint incident and I didn’t want to push my luck so early in the day. We came upon Christian Falange looting homes that had escaped torching. They came up the road carrying their booty of television sets and cassette players. I marvelled at the capacity of people to covet the possessions of those they despised. The looters had very little time. We saw a fire truck go by and then stop to spray petrol over some abandoned shacks which were then set alight.
In an area of small factories I saw a fighter from the Holiday Inn with a shaking old man backed up against the wall, threatening to cut off his privates. On the other side of the road a captive group was being kicked systematically in the face and stabbed. Then I saw the girl fighter from the Holiday Inn looking shame-faced and alone. There was an argument going on between a Palestinian and his captor and I asked her to interpret.
‘One of these prisoners is claiming that he and his son are members of the Arafat family. So, you know, they will survive for the time being.’ She looked at me with embarrassment and walked away. Surreptitiously I started taking pictures.
One brutalised man summoned up the courage to run. As he ran the fighters started firing at him. Bullets struck the wall by Martin and me and fizzled like worn-out fireworks. The fighters ran after the man and we ran after the fighters, willing the man’s escape, but he ran into another bunch of Falange who kicked him to the ground. One of the fighters stepped up and emptied a whole magazine into the man’s head.
Again we got the message: ‘You two, leave this place now. And do not take any photographs, or you will be killed.’
As we moved on I saw a pile of dead bodies which had not yet been burned. I was shaking as I took a picture quickly.
Further down the same road we heard strumming. A young boy was playing a lute ransacked from a half-burned house. The boy was strumming it among his mates, as if they were at a picnic among almond groves in the sun. In front of them lay the body of a dead girl in puddles of winter rain.
My mind was seized by this picture of carnival rejoicing in the midst of carnage. It seemed to say so much about what Beirut had become. Yet to raise the camera could be one risk too many.
Then the boy called over to me. ‘Hey, Mistah! Mistah! Come take photo.’
I was still frightened but I shot off two frames quickly. This, when it’s published, will crucify this lot, I thought.
Young Christians beside the body of a teenage Palestinian girl, Beirut, 1976
As we picked our way over the rubble on the way out I could hold it down no longer. ‘The bastards. The BASTARDS,’ I yelled out loud. ‘I’m going to get you bastards!’
Martin looked startled, but I didn’t care. I had pictures that would tell the world something of the enormity of the crime that had taken place in Quarantina. The Christian Falange knew it too, for soon afterwards I heard that they had put out death warrants for two photographers. One was for the person who had taken the picture of a Christian soldier toasting victory in Quarantina with champagne, the other was for the photographer who had taken the picture of the boys with the mandolin.
It was my duty now to get myself and my pictures back to London as fast as possible. Martin advised against the airport. Conflict between the pilots, who were mainly Christian, and those who controlled the surrounding area, mainly Palestinian, had totally disrupted all flights. Lingering at the airport was never advisable. It was a prime site for kidnapping.
I left the Lebanon by a less predictable route. There were still a few drivers who would risk
the Bekáa valley, though it had been heavily infested with sectarian guns. Two innocuous Japanese typewriter salesmen who had found themselves marooned in the Commodore Hotel recruited one and I hitched a lift with them. It was a bone-shaking eight-hour drive through the valley and on into Syria. With my last reserves of energy I managed to organise a Pakistan Airways flight from Damascus to London. The film survived intact, but I was emotionally burned out.
30. PICNIC WITH ABU AMMAR
Hunting for, waiting for, watching, reacting to the disasters of the world had taken a grievous toll on my spirit. You cannot walk on the water of hunger, misery and death. You have to wade through to record them. I was chilled, numb and lonely. My head ached with the intensity of my experience, the intensity of my thinking. It had taken all the energy, all the self-discipline I had to keep myself working to survive, to not go home to a scalding bath, a warm fire, clean clothes. I felt I had seen so much horror that it was likely to destroy me.
I needed to be at home. I needed the peace of my own country, England. Yet when I go home and sleep in my own bed, I soon become restless. I am not shaped for a house. I grew up in harsh surroundings. I have slept under tables in battles for days on end. There is something about this that unfits you for sleeping in beds for the rest of your life. My contact with wars, the way I’ve lived, is like an incurable disease. It is like the promise of a tremendous high and the certainty of a bad dream. It is something I both fear and love, but it’s something I can’t do without. I cannot do without the head-on collision with life I have when I am working.
My violent experience in Quarantina led to further work in the Middle East. Naim Attallah, the publisher of Quartet, proposed that I should produce a book with Jonathan Dimbleby, whose journalism I much admired, exploring the identity of the Palestinians. This assignment, along with others for my paper, would see me returning regularly to the Middle East trouble spots, with only short pauses for exhaustion, through the late Seventies, when the war in Lebanon raged on bloodily and unabated.
I was drawn to the place less by the conflict than by my sympathy for the Palestinian people, whom I had first encountered in refugee shacks and shanties in Gaza before the Six Day War. Dispersed in the Arab world, they seemed to me surprisingly similar to the Jews—hard-working, highly motivated, an intellectual elite providing a professional class for many another country.
There was also a rougher edge to the Palestinian movement. In Jordan they had not confined themselves to regaining their own land but had created a revolutionary state within a state, and had become a threat to King Hussein. Fatah supporters had screamed round the city of Amman in Land Rovers bristling with sub-machine guns, a personal vigilante security force for Palestinian establishments, and not always above extorting contributions to the cause at gunpoint.
Ousted from Amman, they had regrouped in Lebanon and emerged behaving in a similar fashion in Beirut. By then the Black September extremists had taken measures like the Munich massacre, with which I could in no way go along. Like some of the Christian warlords of the Falange, some of the Palestinians reminded me of Chicago gangsters of the Thirties.
We would see the spokesmen of the different factions by turns in the Commodore Hotel—where they would come to give informal press conferences. They would like to mingle with journalists, but even more they liked the indulgence of the playboy life. It was like a curious and unnerving variety show.
Getting to see the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, was far more complicated. He was Public Enemy Number One of both the Christians and the Israelis, so his movements were highly unpredictable, perhaps even to himself. He had a number of dens around Beirut, but there was never any advance warning where he might be at a given time. After long negotiation Jonathan and I were told we would be allowed to see him. It was only after a hair-raising drive in a Mercedes, squashed between two garlic-breathing, heavily armed guards, that we realised exactly where—at a picnic for the Beirut University brigade of Fatah, held in the dappled shade of olive and cedar trees near a decaying yellow stucco villa in the hills above Tyre. The roads round about were blocked by Japanese jeeps and British Land Rovers filled with Fatah commandos pointing their 106mm recoilless rifles at the sky. Fear of the arrival of Israeli intelligence was as intense as ever.
Lebanese and Palestinian Fatah supporters brewed lamb and chicken in large cauldrons and drank tea and coffee, until at noon Arafat’s convoy swept up in a cloud of dust and a confusion of military, all shouting orders. The small, paunchy and unprepossessing figure of Arafat, in a well-pressed but not well-fitting uniform, was soon lost in a sea of followers trying to embrace him and kiss his hand.
It was not until he launched into a passionate oration on the evils of imperialism, the glory of the Palestine martyrs, the need to sacrifice one Palestinian for every mile of lost Palestine, that you could sense the demotic power of the man, the voice pitched on a rising tone, the gestures perfectly timed.
The gathered students, refugees, young fighters, were rapt. By this time my own brief encounter with Arafat had come and gone, and I had concluded that he was both charming and enormously wily.
Before the speeches we had eaten at trestle tables. My main concern was to photograph him. I noticed he had that knack common to world leaders of pausing just the right time for the motorwind of the camera. Though Arafat himself was relaxed, his bodyguards, like leopards about to spring, fixed their eyes on my lens in moment by moment alert, as if the camera might hold an assassin’s bullet.
He extricated himself from my focus with great skill. ‘Here,’ he said, hospitably, offering me a large piece of lamb from his plate. ‘Eat. Eat. Enjoy.’ By the time I had choked it back, and got the grease off my fingers enough to work the camera again, he had swept benignly away.
Now we were to meet even more alarming members of El Fatah’s revolutionary council, in the course of hearing the Palestinians’ story from their own lips.
We spent a week with the man under whose force’s fire Murray Sayle and I had been when we were holed up in the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman. He was a legendary figure among the Palestinians and later figured as a leading character in John le Carré’s book The Little Drummer Girl. His name was Salah Tamari.
Jonathan’s contact with him was through Salah’s wife, Dina Abdul Hamid. The story of Salah and Dina was an astonishing one. She was a Hashemite princess and the first wife of King Hussein of Jordan, whom she’d divorced because of his lady-killing propensities.
Salah and Dina had married in remarkable circumstances—during the actual siege of Amman, where Salah was commander of the Fatah forces, and therefore the leading foe of his love’s ex-husband, the King. During that time, we heard, Salah had kept constantly on the move—making only one pause. This was to hijack a priest and get him, at gunpoint, to perform a marriage ceremony between himself and Dina.
Now they lived in a fine but ancient villa, in an old garden, outside Sidon. He was a handsome, dominating man, made of equal parts of unpretentious warmth and, I would also think, anger. He was a man who had seen much action at close quarters. He had held the line against the Israelis at the battle of Karameh. We had much to talk about. Through him we also met other Fatah leaders, Abu Douad and Abu Moussa; and another legendary figure, who with Arafat had founded El Fatah on the West Bank of Jordan, Abu Jihad. His name meant Holy War. I remember seeing him with his daughter, and after he was killed years later by Mossad, I thought sadly of that little girl. But I couldn’t altogether yield to the charm and humanity of the Palestinian leaders.
Salah himself was a Bedouin born in Bethlehem. His uncle, a tribal judge, had ridden a horse carrying a sword by his side. That was in the days when the lands which later became Israel were 95 per cent owned by the Bedouin, and 70 per cent occupied by them. When the British needed American and Jewish financial support in World War One, they duplicitously ceded a Jewish homeland after it had been promised independently
to the Arabs. But in Salah’s uncle’s time this homeland had been a small unthreatening settlement. Abu Douad had grown up happily side by side with Jewish Palestinians. He still did not hate Jews at all. He hated only the militant Zionists.
Hitler changed everything. The flight from genocide made ordinary Jews, not just Zionists, heedless pressers of a path into lands that for 2,000 years had not been their own. Extremist Zionist organisations, the Stern gang and Irgun, had used all known violent means to destroy the British administration which had tried to stem the flow of new migrants. Aeroplanes were dynamited, banks were robbed, British officers were kidnapped, British sergeants were lynched and hanged from trees. Virtually all the tactics later deployed by the extreme Palestinians had been used by Irgun first.
This terror was used with popular support in the West. The American scriptwriter Ben Hecht had written, in the New York Herald Tribune, to the Irgun: ‘Every time you blow up a British arsenal, wreck a British jail, send a British railroad sky high, let go with your gun and bombs at the betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.’
As the British moved out, the wilder extremes of the Jewish movement began ‘cleansing operations’ in the Arab villages. Jacques le Reynier of the International Red Cross found bloodcurdling evidence of a My Lai–style massacre at Deir Yassin. Abu Douad, as a twelve-year-old, was present at another grim massacre of Arabs by Israelis at Ramlan. It had been called by the Palestinians, ever since, The Catastrophe. Douad says that it is right the West should never forget The Holocaust, but they should also remember The Catastrophe.
The Palestinians fled throughout the Middle East. From being judges in Palestine, Salah’s family became labourers in Kuwait. But exile, over two generations, changed the nature of the people again. Like the Jews in exile, they became intellectuals, lawyers, powerful businessmen and, as in the case of Arafat’s twin brother, respected physicians—and also militant revolutionaries.