MICHAEL KARAM
With Gareth Smyth’s death, the Middle East has lost one of its most penetrating foreign journalists.
The sun blazed off the Atlantic Ocean, radiating the fern- brown hills of County Mayo and the almost perfectly conical peak of Croagh Patrick, the “Holy Mountain” that dominates the landscape for miles around. In the cramped front room of a small cottage in the village of Emlagh, not a hundred meters from the beach, was the ordered clutter of a life spent in places a world away from the wild and beautiful west coast of Ireland.
There were the books. Shelf after shelf; books on the Irish—histories, poetry, and biographies. But mostly they were books on the Middle East, the spines offering a tantalizing snapshot of the region: Saudi Arabia and Iran; Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Israel; Hezbollah, the Shia, and the Kurds, as well as titles on everything from the Phoenicians to the Islamic State group, via the Crusades and the Ottomans.
On one wall was a map of the tribes of Arabia, on another a faded poster from a Fairuz concert at the 1998 Baalbek Festival. There was a framed Financial Times article on Lebanese wine next to photos of tough, turbaned, and mustachioed men cradling AK-47s, often with a pale and awkward European man by their side.
The music collection was no less exotic and esoteric. Overwhelmingly jazz, with hints that the owner was something of an obsessive: A six-CD box set of outtakes from Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew recordings is, after all, only for the completist. There were also albums by Anouar Brahem, Rabih Abou Khalil, Nassim Maalouf, and Fairuz and the Rahbanis.
Their owner, Gareth Smyth, who died suddenly on January 15 at the age of 64 while on a Sunday walk, was one of the most sensitive and evocative Middle East reporters of his generation. He wasn’t a household name, but he wrote about Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Kurdistan in a way that offered readers of the Financial Times, the Guardian, and a host of other publications, as well as BBC radio, a voice outside the oven-ready Western narrative, and above all, one defined by unstinting integrity, decency and fairness.
Smyth eschewed the lifestyle of the hard-bitten, hard-drinking foreign correspondent from central casting. He was cut from more considered cloth, closer to David Hirst than Robert Fisk. An Irishman born and raised in the drab environs of the London suburb of Slough, the youngest of four brothers whose mother died when he was eleven, Smyth went to Oxford where he read philosophy, politics, and economics, before working for the Labor Camden Council, and eventually drifting into journalism.
In 1996, his coverage of the Kurdistan Workers Party’s struggle with the Turkish army in the mountainous region between Turkey and Iraq—an area that would define his professional stomping ground for the next 20 years—caught the eye of the Lebanese newspaper owner Jamil Mroue, who hired him as features editor of the English-language newspaper that he was reopening in Beirut, the Daily Star.
It was a curious but fascinating time to arrive in the Lebanese capital, where there was cautious optimism after fifteen years of civil war, even if roughly 10 percent of the country was occupied by Israel, while the rest of Lebanon was run from Damascus. There was a rich vein of stories to be mined and Smyth proved himself to be a versatile writer, even after leaving the Daily Star to join the Financial Times. Apart from being a shrewd political journalist, he was a capable and dogged business reporter as well as a talented features writer and music critic.
In 2003, he was appointed the Financial Times’ Iran correspondent. During that period, he also covered the invasion and occupation of Iraq, before returning to Ireland and living in dramatic but beautiful isolation.
What made Smyth a voice that deserves to be remembered was his tenacity and refusal to bend to an increasingly binary world. He was the master of the gray zone but to his detractors he often allowed his humanity and sympathy for the downtrodden to justify the unjustifiable. But to accept this is to miss a compelling paradox: In a region where frequently nothing is as it seems, Smyth’s perceived lacuna in his reading of certain situations was in fact a nuance born of an innate, if sometimes misguided, appreciation of human complexity.
While he was aware that the Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, whom he first met in 1992 in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, had not only thrown in his lot with, but also played, the Bush administration in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, he also admired his patriotism. Writing in the Guardian in 2015, he observed of Chalabi, who had recently died of a heart attack, “He saw no contradiction between being a proud Iraqi nationalist … and a Shia with close links to Iran and Lebanon. This made him hard, if not impossible, to understand for those who wanted to simplify the world into black and white.” Smyth could have been writing about himself.
Similarly, Smyth was sympathetic to Lebanon’s Shia, a position that often blurred his opinion of Hezbollah, a party he accepted both as the natural expression of an underclass finding its voice, and a ruthless and powerful militia.
It was, as his long-time friend, the Lebanese lawyer and erstwhile presidential candidate Chibli Mallat, pointed out, Smyth’s reluctance to privately condemn anyone as “out and out bastards” (the exception was Israel) that often led to fallouts with colleagues. Before his death, his views on the Iranian intervention in Syria and other Arab countries led to a bitter disagreement with his close friend the Jordanian journalist Khaled Yacoub Oweis. And yet it is a measure of the esteem in which he was held that Oweis wrote a glowing tribute to Smyth in the National and rued the fact that they had never reconciled before he died.
Many unfairly cited his soft spot for the Shia as being influenced by his long-term relationship with Shia journalist and writer Zeinab Charafeddine. The accusation is wide of the mark. Charafeddine was never a Hezbollah cheerleader and such a claim belittles Smyth’s acute and natural predisposition toward a people with whom he felt an instinctive connection.
Then there was the ugly colonial canard that he had “gone native,” but this ignored the power of his impish curiosity. Lebanese, Iranians, Kurds, or Iraqis, it was ordinary people who influenced and underpinned much of his writing. While many foreign journalists were happy to be courted by politicians, businessmen, and senior officials, Smyth’s journey into the DNA of a country was more through café owners, moonshiners, taxi drivers, musicians, writers, artists, and academics.
Not that he found politicians boring. He enjoyed interviewing the Irish Republican Army’s Martin McGuinness (“We went fishing”) and the former British prime minister Ted Heath (“very bright”), while he got on famously with the late Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, despite being a fierce critic of Solidere, the controversial company that Hariri dominated, which was tasked with rebuilding the Beirut Central District after the war. On hearing the news of Hariri’s assassination in 2005, Smyth told me he “nearly vomited.”
Most importantly, he ran a mile from clichés and had a visceral hatred of lazy reporting. He believed that the word “terrorist” should be banned, “because ultimately it means very little.” On a personal level he could be inspiring and maddening in equal measure: warm, generous and loving, but also at times insensitive and waspish, even misanthropic. And yet there was always the childish enthusiasm and innate kindness that eventually made everything okay.
It was his wish that his ashes be scattered in the ancient south Lebanese port city of Tyre, the home of his partner Zeinab. Arabs, Iranians, and Kurds have lost a friend and I, for one, will miss him.[1]