John Pilger (1939-2023): A voice for the voiceless falls silent

In 1971, when John Pilger arrived in Bangladesh to cover the Liberation War, he met Sheikh Fazilatunnesa Mujib, wife of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Bangabandhu had already been detained by the Pakistani military on the night of 25 March, and Begum Mujib was rather taken aback seeing a foreign journalist visiting their house. "Why have you come when even crows are afraid to fly over our house?" she asked him. 

Pilger never revealed what his exact response to this query was, and probably there is no chance of it coming to light any longer, as the Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker breathed his last in London on 30 December 2023 due to pulmonary fibrosis, at age 84.  

Nevertheless, a brief look back at his illustrious life may give us some hints. 

Pilger, Britain's Journalist of the Year Award recipient in 1967 and 1979, will forever be remembered not only as the great journalist that he was, but also as a person who showed immense passion in letting the rest of the world know of Bangladesh's real scenario before, during and after the 1971 war. 

In 1970, Pilger reported from Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) for the Daily Mirror on the Great Bhola Cyclone, which claimed the lives of nearly 500,000 people. While covering the aftermath of the devastating tidal wave, what struck him the most was the lack of real concern by the government in Islamabad. 

So, the following year when the fight for independence erupted, Pilger came back to the war-torn country. He produced a world exclusive for the Mirror as the first Western reporter in Bangladesh to report on mass starvation and atrocities. 

The piece appeared on the front page of the Mirror with the headline "Death of a Nation," giving a horrifying account of the killing and torture of innocent Bangalis in Bangladesh. This provided substantial evidence that the Islamabad government was waging a genocidal war in Bangladesh. 

Additionally, Pilger spent much of 1971 based in Kolkata reporting on the one crore Bangladeshi refugees.

In 1974, he came back to Bangladesh once again, as the country was hit by famine. This time he made "An Unfashionable Tragedy," the first documentary to highlight his theme of expendability, whereby countries with no oil, strategic value or military power are considered unimportant to the superpowers.

Besides portraying the harrowing scenes of starving children, he contextualised the horrors within a geopolitical framework in this documentary, as he believed it could be "the greatest famine in recorded history." 

And just like that, working as a journalist across half a century, Pilger made a name for himself as someone unafraid to speak the unspeakable, a voice for the voiceless and a constant irritant to those in power.

Even at a time when Israel is indiscriminately committing atrocities in the Gaza Strip, and the Western media is busy rallying support behind them in one form or another, Pilger remained a steadfast supporter of the Palestinian cause, criticising Israel's occupation of the country. 

As recently as 8 October 2023, a day after the beginning of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, Pilger took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to voice his support for the Palestinians. "The Palestinians are again fighting for their lives, refusing to live in the prison known as Gaza, controlled and policed by Israel with Palestinians killed and maimed, unreported, day after day," Pilger wrote. 

"Now their resistance, to which they have a right, is called 'unprovoked'," he further added. 

In 1977, he created a documentary titled "Palestine Is Still the Issue" and in 2002 produced another film with the same title, which was nominated for a Bafta award. 

In a 2017 article, also titled "Palestine Is Still the Issue," he wrote: "When the Palestinians rise again, as they will, they may not succeed at first - but they will eventually if we understand that they are us, and we are them."

Pilger produced impactful coverage of the conflicts in Biafra, Cambodia and Vietnam as well. 

In 1979, he reported from Cambodia after the Vietnamese ousted Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime. Through his report, he disclosed that over two million people, out of a population of seven million, had died due to genocide or starvation, while another two million were at risk of death from food shortages or disease.

His documentary "Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia" garnered an audience of 150 million viewers in 50 countries and earned over 30 international awards. More importantly, his extensive reporting played a crucial role in raising $45 million in relief efforts.

For his 1998 documentary "Apartheid Did Not Die," Pilger interviewed Nelson Mandela, which stirred unease among both white and black South Africans. He highlighted a new "economic apartheid" that perpetuated poverty among many black individuals.

He also investigated UN sanctions on Iraq in the decade preceding the US-led invasion in his 2000 documentary titled "Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq."  

He left the Mirror in 1986 but was brought back in 2001 by then-editor Piers Morgan and attacked the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11. "The war against terrorism is a fraud. After three weeks' bombing, not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan," he wrote in his first piece back.

In a nutshell, Pilger led a life exposing human rights abuses, even sometimes at great personal risks, and along the way becoming one of the greatest investigative journalists in the history of the profession.