PASSPORT OF A WAR CORRESPONDENT
The Passport to Prove It: A Stamped History of Marie Colvin’s Career
Outstanding story about her work and life as war correspondent. Her passport is just reflecting this!
Mickey Stanley, VanityFair, July 6, 2012
Through the blurred ink of immigration stamps and festooned Middle Eastern visas, Marie Colvin’s passport reads like an illustrated time line for her coverage of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election, the rise of the Taliban, the Arab Spring, Muammar Qaddafi’s capture and death, and the conflict in Syria. After becoming a foreign-affairs correspondent for London’s Sunday Times in 1985, Colvin entered nearly every war zone on the planet right up to her death, in Homs, Syria, in February. With more than 150 stamps, this document confirms Colvin as the tireless reporter, always ready to board a plane headed for nowhere nice.
Colvin’s last passport was issued on December 20, 2005, four years after she lost her left eye to shrapnel in Sri Lanka. Here Colvin wears her signature eye patch.
In May 2006, Marie Colvin visited (right) Pakistan to report on a criminal named Gul Khan, who was selling young Pakistani boys into slavery. Clients would buy the enslaved children and force them to work as panhandlers (think Slumdog Millionaire); Khan would use the profits to fund the Islamic terrorist group Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD).
Left, Colvin wears a hijab (headscarf) and her signature eye patch for the picture on her 10-day visa to Iran. There, Colvin reported on the demonstrations immediately following the 2009 Iranian election. In her piece “Anger at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Election” (June 14, 2009), Colvin wrote, “The motorcycle police came from behind. They fired stun grenades that exploded as I was walking among thousands of demonstrators on Tehran’s central boulevard, talking to two young women about their anger at what they called the ‘theft’ of the Iranian election.”
In 2001, U.S. allied forces overtook the city of Marjah, a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan. On assignment in April 2010, Colvin visited Marjah and reported on the Taliban’s attempt to retake the city in her article “Swift and Bloody: the Taliban’s Revenge” for The Sunday Times. The large blue stamp (right) is Colvin’s visa used to enter Afghanistan to cover this conflict.
The rectangular sticker containing the crescent-moon-and-star graphic (left) is Turkish. There are a number of Turkish stamps in her passport, for the country likely served Colvin as a safe entry point into the bordering, volatile countries of Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
This visa (left) coincides with Colvin’s reportage on the democratic progress and abating violence in Iraq as American soldiers prepared to withdraw in early 2010. Upon her return to Fallujah in August (right), Colvin found the city under siege by al-Qaeda, which had taken a renewed interest in the Iraqi stronghold since being driven out in 2006 by U.S. forces.
The insert (left) reads, “This passport was amended on 12-APR-2011 to add visa pages to passport number 141901226.” The preceding pages are so covered with markings that Colvin had to add more before traveling to Cairo to report on the Arab Spring (right) last year.
The black, faded, cylindrical marking (left) is the Libyan immigration stamp and is dated October 21, 2011, just two days before Marie Colvin’s article “Brutal Retribution” was published by The Sunday Times. The article discusses the aftermath of Colonel Qaddafi’s capture and death in Sirte, which occurred one day before Colvin’s arrival to Libya.
Only a handful of Colvin’s passport stamps are from countries outside the Middle East. In her final years, Colvin met Richard Flaye, a wealthy businessman who often provided Colvin with her only respite from the front. This lonely blue imprint for the British Virgin Islands indicates that Colvin spent New Year’s of 2012 abroad, away from war, on vacation.
This page, with its two postage stamps (left and right) and myriad 2006 and 2007 Libyan marks, is suggestive of Colvin’s frantic pace.
On her final assignment, Colvin entered Syria through Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. The seemingly innocuous red rectangle (right) in the top corner is the February 2012 immigration stamp that Colvin used to enter Beirut before crossing the border into the besieged city of Homs, Syria, where she was killed. The handwriting on the right of the stamp reads, “One month.”
Remembering War Correspondent Marie Colvin: 1957-2012
I often talked to her about that decision, and she said there had been absolutely no question in her mind about what she should do. It didn’t occur to her to leave with all her colleagues, though she felt a little sick in the stomach as she watched the trucks disappear.
A few years earlier, I sat next to her at lecture given by the New York Times journalist David Rohde, who, when working for The Christian Science Monitor in 1995, discovered incontestable evidence of the massacres in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serbs murdered 9,000 men and boys. There was only one other journalist I knew who was capable of Rohde’s courage and persistence, and I was sitting next to her.
But she paid for this dedication with the loss of an eye in Sri Lanka to a hand-grenade explosion, an injury that was followed by a serious bout of post-traumatic stress disorder. It is worth mentioning that she received the unstinting support of the head of News International, Rupert Murdoch, through both. He flew her to New York to see if her eye could be saved, and during what was essentially a nervous breakdown, The Sunday Times paid for all her treatment.
What was striking about that period was her complete absence of self-pity. I never heard Marie complain about the hardships she endured or the effects of witnessing so much pain. When she was suffering from PTSD, she used to be let out of the clinic and would come round to dinner with her friend Jane Wellesley. My teenage daughters were open-mouthed at the sight of this astonishing woman with an eye patch, listening to her describe what she had done in the previous 20 years. The point, she emphasized with a tipsy flourish of cigarette and wine glass, was that women could do anything they chose. She had no children of her own, but she was wonderful at talking to kids because she treated them as equals.
Colvin was born in East Norwich, New York, near the swishy Gold Coast of Long Island (where the book The Great Gatsby is set). She carried with her, even into war zones, a little bit of that glamour. Somehow the eye patch only added to her graceful poise. But no matter how much time she spent abroad, she always remained honestly and sensibly an American.
I first met her in the mid-80s when we sat opposite each other at The Sunday Times. With a tangle of brown hair and a ready smile, she looked like a college student, but she had already covered the massacres at the Shatila and Sabra camps in Lebanon and she was by then one of the few journalists that Yasser Arafat and Colonel Gaddafi would talk to.
She lived in a flat that was let to her by our colleague David Blundy, who was later killed by a sniper’s bullet in El Salvador. They shared integrity but also a rare form of glamour that stayed with Marie until she died. At parties she was always among the most dramatically dressed, and she shone with good humor and the love of her friends, of which there were hundreds.
But she was no Amazon warrior: she could love and be hurt as easily as the next person. She made me cry with laughter with the story of her late arrival to cover Kosovo and being billeted with two journalists, whose possessions she recognized in the room. Suddenly the dangers of Kosovo receded as she considered how to handle an ex-boyfriend and former husband in the same bedroom.
This evening the news from Homs has been silenced. We don’t know how many people have been killed or what areas of the town are under bombardment—and that is because one of the bravest people ever to file a story is dead, and can no longer be there to bear witness.
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