MARIE COLVIN: MARIE COLVIN, who was killed this week during Syrian army shelling of the city of Homs, was a fearless but never foolhardy war correspondent who believed passionately in the need to report on conflicts from the front line. In a career spanning 30 years, she covered wars from around the world for the Sunday Timesand was renowned for her compassionate, clear writing. She was 56.
She was committed to reporting on the realities of war, especially the effects on civilians. That was what she was doing in the beleaguered city of Homs at the time of her death. She had broadcast the day before and written movingly in her newspaper a few days earlier of the slaughter she observed as Syrian government forces continued to bombard the city.
In Sri Lanka in 2001, while covering the conflict between government forces and the rebel Tamil Tigers, she was struck by shrapnel. Undaunted by the loss of her left eye, she wore a black eye-patch from then on, which became something of a trademark.
It was after the loss of her eye that she spelled out her reason for covering wars. She wrote of the importance of telling people what really happens and about “humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable”. She continued: “My job is to bear witness. I have never been interested in knowing what make of plane had just bombed a village or whether the artillery that fired at it was 120mm or 155mm.” She wrote about people so that others might understand the truth.
She sometimes did more than write. In 1999, in East Timor, she was credited with saving the lives of 1,500 women and children who were besieged in a compound by Indonesian-backed forces.
She refused to leave them, waving goodbye to 22 journalist colleagues as she stayed on with an unarmed UN force in order to help highlight their plight by reporting to the world, in her paper and on global television. The publicity was rewarded when they were evacuated to safety after four tense days.
This was the essence of Colvin’s approach to reporting. She was not interested in the politics, strategy or weaponry; only the effects on the people she regarded as innocents.
She covered conflicts wherever they broke out – in the Balkans, notably, and in Chechnya and Zimbabwe – but she was particularly knowledgable about the Arab countries. She was therefore on hand to witness the 2011 revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. In fact, the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gadafy, had taken something of a shine to Colvin during her first visit to Tripoli in the 1980s and she was obliged to shake off his unwelcome attention.
Marie Colvin was from an Irish background, born and raised in Oyster Bay, New York. She studied marine biology at Yale before switching to major in English literature while working on the university’s paper. From that moment on, she was hooked on journalism.
After a year on a trade paper, she was hired by the international news agency UPI, working in New York and Washington before being transferred to France to become the Paris bureau chief.
"It was a grand name for a one-woman band," she later recalled. But it provided her with the opportunity to cover the Middle East, and she soon became fascinated by the region's culture, politics and conflicts. While there, she acted as a stringer for the Sunday Timesand, in 1986, when the paper lost its renowned Middle East correspondent David Blundy to the Sunday Telegraph, she took his job. Blundy was to die two years later when caught in crossfire in San Salvador. Colvin worked for the Sunday Timesever after, becoming the paper's foreign affairs correspondent in 1995, an acknowledgment of her wider role.
She was twice named foreign reporter of the year (2001 and 2010) in the British Press Awards, and won several other awards for her journalism. Marie was married twice to the writer and journalist Patrick Bishop. Both marriages ended in divorce. She was also married to the Bolivian journalist and writer Juan Carlos Gumucio, who killed himself in 2002.
Marie Catherine Colvin: born January 12th, 1956; died February 22nd, 2012