Mariella Gattini

Marie Colvin was a war correspondent who lost her life covering the war in Homs, Syria, in 2012. Her life was depicted in the movie A Private War (2018).

Her main intention was that of speaking on behalf of the innocent men, women, and children directly affected by the carnage caused by Bashar al-Assad’s defense strategy, that, according to him, was focused on terrorists.

What Marie witnessed indicated something different, based on what she reported to Anderson Cooper on CNN, sometime before she were killed. She stated that those directly affected by al-Assad’s forces’ attacks were innocent people, who were killed or remained stranded with no food, no water, and no medical attention in completely destroyed buildings surrounded by rubble. Worst of all, they felt abandoned by the rest of the world.

Traditionally, the loss of innocent men, women, and children has been called “collateral damage”, a euphemism conveniently used by the ones who inflict such deep and irreversible loss of human life. What “collateral damage” really masks as a definition is massive crimes against humanity.

The cynicism of our days bases its premises on the same old same old. That is to say, according to cynics, when there is a conflict of that magnitude, there is an inevitable loss of innocent lives.

It’s very easy and comfortable to remain a cynic when faced with carnage caused by tyranny in countries we know very little about. There is also the attitude of “don’t know; don’t care” floating around all the time.

Well, Marie Colvin wanted you to pay attention and to be informed, and, especially, she wanted you to care. She thought that if you saw what she experienced overseas you would understand and, therefore, you would act to stop the massacre. In other words, she thought you would have empathy for human suffering.

The problem with that point of view, as respectable as it is, is that governments in general are not there for the benefit of their own people, let alone the people ruled by other governments.

In general, the ones in government, especially in autocratic governments, are there to profit from their position of power, and maintain it at all cost looking for alliances and strategies that would allow them to do so. Strategies like keeping their people misinformed, afraid, worried, in unstable economic conditions, and entertained to distraction by meaningless content in order to keep a tight rein on them. Resulting in a group of people too tired to function as effective citizens because they are sleep-deprived, overworked individuals who try to compensate for their woes with excessive eating, and drinking. Marie, herself, coped by smoking all the time and overdrinking after work.

War correspondents have been kidnapped and murdered, even by decapitation, because they have been too close to the truth, a truth no government and no interested party want you to know about.

We could analyze Marie Colvin’s entire life and would still not understand what compelled her to see the ugly truth with her own eyes, risking her life in every assignment that she, herself, sought. As a consequence, she lost her left eye first—maybe as a warning—and finally her life. She was 56 years old.

When her boss told her that nobody in their right mind would do what she did, she answered that she knew all too well that she witnessed all those terrible things so he didn’t have to. And I think it can be extended to the rest of us. She saw the most gruesome spectacles of human indignities, so we didn’t have to.

At this point, seven years after her death, we can see that everything, not just the war in Syria, have been deteriorating. Since her departure, there has been a massive displacement of people coming from Syria to countries like Turkey in their way to Europe. Nobody wants the Syrian people as refugees. Europeans are ready to criticize Bashar al-Assad, but they don’t want Syrians in their land. Like in Germany, for example. Chancellor Angela Merkel, born in East Germany, said that her people opened their arms to one million refugees, but she had to confess to Christiane Amanpour that, even today, Jewish institutions still need to be guarded by the police in her country.

This enormous displacement, coming mainly from Syria and Libya, caused the uprise of far-right movements that have managed to get into positions of power in the politics of European countries. This massive emigration is also one of the reasons of the so-called Brexit, because the British people don’t want them in their countries either. They have been groomed to believe that the immigration of refugees would cost them their jobs and other opportunities.

Marie Colvin would have liked you to care about the migrants and to speak up on their behalf. On behalf of the voiceless.

No matter who you are, if you see this movie you would realize how superfluous and even insignificant your life is compared to hers.

Marie gave her life for what she believed in. Most probably, she would have died way sooner as a suburban wife—brain dead, I mean—because she really wasn’t cut out for a normal life. Her desire to become a mother was frustrated twice by two different miscarriages.

Despite the way her life ended, I’m glad she lived it her way, because she was, and still is, someone to admire.

Orson Welles was right. In real life, no story has a happy ending. There is no way around it: Marie Colvin’s story ended in Homs, Syria, under a pile of rubble.