Two Western journalists killed in Syria

[tabatha]

6. POSTSCRIPT: MARIE COLVIN, 1957-2012 The New Yorker

Last night, after a long day and before a late dinner, I sat down with my wife to watch the news on CNN. Anderson Cooper was broadcasting from a studio in New York, but his tape was from Syria. He rightly demanded that we watch a two-year-old child in the besieged city of Homs die of shrapnel wounds inflicted by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The camera stayed on the child until the last breath was out of him. His father cradled him and kept asking what his poor son had ever done to anyone to deserve it.

Then Cooper spoke with a reporter—a very great and experienced reporter—who was on the scene, Marie Colvin, of the Sunday Times of London. The image of Colvin on the screen was instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent time reporting, as she had for a generation, from the Middle East, Africa, Chechnya, the Balkans, or South Asia; after losing an eye in the civil war in Sri Lanka, in 2001, she wore an eye patch. For decades, she has been a ubiquitous presence in the war zones of the world and her reports in the Times were admired in the close-knit world of foreign correspondents for their scrupulous and straightforward eloquence.

On the telephone from Homs, Colvin told Anderson that the death of the child was an emblem of the overall “reality” of what was happening in Homs:

These are twenty-eight thousand civilians, men, women and children, hiding, being shelled, defenseless. That little baby is one of two children who died today, one of the children being injured every day. That baby probably will move more people to think, “What is going on, and why is no one stopping this murder in Homs that is happening every day?”

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