There is a video online showing the bodies of Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik. They are covered in the dust and rubble of a destroyed house, its grey concrete set against a grey sky.
Marie Colvin of The Sunday Times Photo: GETTY
By Richard Spencer, Middle East Correspondent
8:29PM GMT 22 Feb 2012
It is shocking, though almost commonplace now, to see friends and relations like this, their agony beamed around the world before you have even been informed, still less taken in the news of their deaths. Instancy is more important than contemplation.
But what is more shocking is that for every Westerner caught in the firestorm, there are thousands of similar images, reflecting similar realities, of those who have no names and only simulacra of stories, and those often forgotten behind the potency of the visible. The man being whipped into unconsciousness in an Idlib police station, or beaten by a braying mob of soldiers bearing down in escalating waves in a Hama street – did anyone ever discover who they were, what they had done, or whether they survived?
Marie Colvin, in her last posting on the Facebook group with which she shared the traumas that she was witnessing, described the death of a baby, whose name will probably never now surface in any newspaper. “Shrapnel, doctors could do nothing,” she wrote. “His little tummy just heaved and heaved until he stopped.”
This is how it has been for three weeks now in the suburb of Baba Amr, a daily repeater gun of death. Siege is as old as war itself, of course; there is nothing new in that. Tyrants have bombarded even their own cities, notably President Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez in Hama 30 years ago.
Marie colvin in the Chechen Mountains, Chechnya, 1999 Photo: REX
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But this is no Stalingrad, or even Misurata, the other Arab city smashed like a Lego toy by a leader who said he loved his people.
There, artillery fire was a precursor to ground assault, where attacking troops also fought and died, bravely whatever the worth of their cause. Here, a defenceless population is being destroyed, house by house, alley by alley, without even the relief of conquest. The regime is killing because it can, and because it is the only argument it seems to know.
The effects were spelt out with clarity when The Daily Telegraph, a few days beforehand, attempted the same trip as Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik. Returning journalists described days spent sheltering in basements, crammed in with residents, never emerging to face the blasts and falling masonry outside: there were snipers to catch you if you did, even if the rockets missed.
To get in or out required scuttling down hills and back streets from nearby villages during lulls. The main route until the beginning of last week was discovered by the authorities, briefly stopping new arrivals – luckily for us, it would seem.
For the injured, there was a makeshift clinic in an ordinary house, powered by a generator, but with limited equipment. A similar clinic in nearby Qusayr, where we ended up, saw deaths that could have been prevented elsewhere, doctors shaking their heads silently at the impossibility of it all.
Most forbidding of all is the awareness that “they” know where you are. The authorities can lock on to satellite signals – the mark of the modern journalist – and home in accordingly.
Those with the ability to bear witness are an obvious target, when the tedium of killing housewives becomes too much. Homs became the epicentre of the uprising only after violent repression elsewhere had become regular. But it is now sucking in destruction, a bloodied whirlpool.
Rosemarie Colvin, mother of journalist Marie Photo:AP
Marie Colvin had reported from war zones for decades, but in one of her last calls out, she said she had never seen anything to compare.
“Sickening, cannot understand how the world can stand by and I should be hardened by now,” she wrote.
But then what is happening here is, perhaps, new.
As the Arab Spring unfolds, the regime is screaming a hideous death-cry not just for its own rule, but for an ideology of dictatorship.
Here is a species on the verge of extinction, lashing out as it sinks into prehistory.
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Marie Colvin: Syrian violence is the hideous death cry of a species sinking towards extinction
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