The world needs women like you

Marie Colvin, war journalist

Forget Towie and Desperate Scousewives and Made in Chelsea and every vacuous female in these inane TV shows and in the press. The world needs women like Marie Colvin to act as guiding lights for our daughters.

Women driven by a higher power than Birkin bags and Mac make-up and marrying footballers. Women who stand up for what they believe in and in doing so make the world a better place. 

Marie Colvin was just such a women.

Her religion was the importance of telling people what really happens and about "humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable". She said: "My job is to bear witness." 

Looking back to East Timor in 1999, she saved the lives of 1,500 women and children who were besieged in a compound by Indonesian-backed forces. She refused to leave them, waving goodbye to 22 journalist colleagues as she stayed on with an unarmed UN force in order to help highlight their plight by reporting to the world, in her paper and on global television. The publicity was rewarded when they were evacuated to safety after four tense days.

She was not interested in the politics, strategy or weaponry; only the effects on the people she regarded as innocents. "These are people who have no voice," she said. "I feel I have a moral responsibility towards them, that it would be cowardly to ignore them. If journalists have a chance to save their lives, they should do so."

The people of East Timor did not forget her. 

At the end of her Sunday Times report about her Sri Lankan experience, she wrote: "What I want most, as soon as I get out of hospital, is a vodka martini and a cigarette." Later that week, having moved briefly to a New York hotel, she was woken by a room-service waiter bearing a tray with a huge bottle of vodka and all the ingredients for her drink of choice. She discovered it had been "fixed, God knows how, by the East Timor crowd, the people in the compound".

Marie Colvin journalist, born 12 January 1956, died 22 February 2012 – you were an incredible force for good and I'm sure the people of Homs won't ever forget your bravery either.