A Private War (2018)

Michael Haydon: Newspaper Editor

Quotes 

• Newspaper Editor : Why is it important, do you think, to see this images? Why is it important for you to be there? Right now you may be one of the only Western journalists in Homs. Our team has just left.

  Marie Colvin : For an audience for which any conflict is very far away, this is the reality. There are 28,000 civilians, men, women and children, a city of the cold and hungry, starving, defenseless. There are no telephones. The electricity has been cut off. Families are sharing what they have with relatives and neighbors. I have sat with literally hundreds of women with infant children who are trapped in these cold, brutal conditions, unable to feed their children anything other than sugar and water for weeks on end. That little boy was one of the two children who died today. It's what happens every day. The Syrian regime is claiming that they're not hitting civilians, that they're just going after terrorist gangs. But every civilian house has been hit. The top floor of the building I'm in has been totally destroyed. There are no military targets here. It is a complete and utter lie.

  Newspaper Editor : Well, thank you for using the word " lie ". I think a lot of people wanna thank you, because it's a word we don't often hear, it's not often used, but it is the truth in this case. The Syrian regime, their representatives, have continually lied. They've lied on this program to us directly. Marie, I mean, you have covered a lot of conflicts over a long time. How does this compare?

  Marie Colvin : This is the worst conflict I've ever seen. It's the worst because it was a peaceful uprising that was crushed by violence. President Assad is sitting in his palace in Damascus in panic, the entire security apparatus his father built crumbling around him, and he is responding in the only way he's been taught how. When he was a child, he watched his father crush oppositions by shelling the city of Hama into ruins and killing 10,000 innocent civilians. He watched, as we're watching, a dictator killing with impunity. And the words on everybody's lips here are, " Why have we been abandoned? ". " Why? ". I don't know why.