McCullin Page #9

because I didn't go to the Falklands.

The Lebanon War was erupting at the same time.

Cos, you know, I can always go somewhere else.

If I couldn't go to this war, I could go to another war, you know.

Cos I was suffering from what you become, a war junkie, really.

I was suffering from that problem, you know.

The massacres were carried out by an elite special security formation

of the Lebanese Christian Phalange.

The operation was, at all stages,

under direct control of senior Phalange commanders.

During that early stage of the massacre at Shatila Camp,

the Israeli forces fired a constant barrage of flares

to light up the camp for the Phalange forces.

CLASSICAL MUSIC:

One morning in the hotel, very early,

I had a call from someone saying, "Are you Mr McCullin?" I said yes.

They said, "Will you come down to the lobby?

"We want to take you to the hospital at Sabra and Shatila."

They said, "About 21 people have been killed in this hospital,

"but we are not interested in that.

"We want to show you the worst aspect of what has happened here today."

They took me upstairs to the children's department

of the insane side of the hospital

and to my astonishment, there was one nurse who had stayed

for five days during this shelling and the others had fled the hospital.

And she showed me around and I couldn't believe

what I was looking at.

She said, "We've had to tie the children to the beds,"

she said, "because we couldn't cope.

"They would have got away and been injured."

And there were children tied to the beds,

covered in flies, in a heat you wouldn't understand.

So these children were lying in buckets of their own filth,

starving hungry, dying of thirst.

MUSIC:

And she said, "There is a room with more children.

"I've had to lock them in the room and they are blind and insane,"

and she said, "They're only two years old, some of them."

And she opened the door of this room

and the heat that came out of it, you could've roasted a chicken in it.

And out swam, in their own filth and mess,

they were like blind rats, these children.

I don't think I was ever more ashamed of humanity.

I thought, "If this is what people can do in the name of, you know,

"Christianity or whatever, you know..."

Because the war was being conducted against the Christians,

or the Christians were fighting back and the Jews were shelling,

I mean, the whole thing was about religious madness.

Who was paying the price?

I wandered away. I was in deep shock and I thought, "I'm confused, here.

"Why am I here? What has this got to do with my original concept of being a photographer?"

And I wandered into another room just to get away

from all this horrible, horrible stuff.

And I saw a child sitting,

playing with bits of debris as if he had Lego.

I think it was a day of reckoning for me,

because I don't think I could have ever touched on more tragedy,

all under one roof, than what I saw at that hospital that day.

I've never forgotten it.

The sad thing about these days that I never forget

is that they come back, on a regular basis,

as fresh as it was happening today, to haunt me.

There is nothing so powerful as reporting.

The government can't find out the things that reporters can.

Certainly, many governments wish to suppress

what can be found out, foreign governments and sometimes our own.

So this is a very,

very important quality of Don's impulses,

which is the passion to report what is happening

and insofar as that has diminished today,

we've lost a huge amount

and I think there is still a tremendous appetite

for really good photojournalism, really good reporting.

Mr Rupert Murdoch, on budget day,

asked me to resign as Editor of the Times. I refused.

At no time have the independent

national directors sought my resignation.

But in the circumstances, the differences between me

and Mr Murdoch should not be prolonged.

I am therefore resigning tonight as the Editor of the Times.

The reason I got pushed out of the Sunday Times was simple, actually.

They had brought a new editor in.

A man called Andrew Neil, who was very ambitious,

and quite, you know, he knew what he wanted.

Most new editors like to kick off with a new bunch of people

under them, but he did say that there would be no more

wars in the magazine and in fact, it would be a magazine

based on life and leisure, you know, to attract the ads.

So I was one of the first casualties,

because when I went and photographed wars and Africa

and dying and starving children,

I was going to make sure that I got the strongest images.

They didn't always sit well in a magazine

that was trying to sell you, you know, cars and luxury.

So I was definitely on the way out by that stage.

I asked him about the occasion he was invited to

an execution in Saigon and as I recall,

he went to the prison where the execution was going to take place

and turned back and refused to take the photograph.

It was because of his really powerful humanitarian impulses,

he didn't want to legitimise murder in any way.

Since, actually, his entire canon of photography

is to delegitimise violence and say,

"Look, these are the consequences of your political decision.

"These are the consequences of your greed.

"These are the consequences of your carelessness.

"Look on these and think again."

I think his entire impulse, a humanitarian photographer

with tremendous technical skill, amounting to genius, in my view.

MUSIC:

I'm nearly 75 years of age now.

I still have some energy left, not a lot,

but I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to eradicate,

you know, the things we've been talking about.

I'm just going to photograph the landscape,

and the English landscape, to me, is my heaven.

My form of heaven.

The one thing that upsets me about it is, like all other things,

there is always a threat surrounding the things you love.

When I hear a chainsaw in the distance, you know,

I think a tree is dying.

When I hear shooting, when there is pheasant shooting,

I think there's going to be some blood somewhere.

The sound of gunfire immediately switches on

another part of my nervous system.

So I feel, as much as you try to run away from these things,

someone always presses a button and says, you know,

"Here is a reminder of, you know, what you used to do."

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