Towards the end of 1990 Neil Godfrey and I pitched for Amnesty International's advertising account. We made our presentation to Diane, a pretty Frenchwoman in a fur coat who chain-smoked through the meeting.

‘Let me tell you what I don’t want,’ said Diane. ‘I am not interested in ego, cleverness and advertising shit. I want to get this through to people – that every minute while you are going about your daily life, someone is being tortured or killed and it’s your fucking responsibility to do something to stop it.’ (The Cybergypsies)

Our ideas can’t have been very clever because Diane gave us the account. One of my first tasks was to write about the human rights disaster in Iraq. It was just after the invasion of Kuwait. War was in the air, the papers were full of jingoism. Saddam apparently had chemical weapons, but no one was bothering to ask who had supplied them to him.

I went to see James Adams at the Sunday Times.He had written a book about the arms trade and one passage haunted me. It was a description quoted from the Washington Times of March 23, 1988, of what had happened a week earlier in the Kurdish town of Halabja.

‘Bodies lie in the dirt streets or sprawled in rooms and courtyards of the deserted villas, preserved at the moment of death in a modern version of the disaster that struck Pompeii. A father died in the dust trying to protect his child against the white clouds of cyanide vapour. A mother lies cradling her baby alongside a minibus that lies sideways across the road, hit while trying to flee. Yards away, a mother, father and daughter lie side by side. In a cellar a family crouches together. Shoes and clothes are scattered outside the houses.’

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In due course I met many Kurds, refugees in London, and heard first hand their terrible stories. One man had lost his son crossing a mountain torrent. Another, caught in a poison gas attack, had had to choose which two of his three small children he would carry to safety and which one he would leave behind. Tears ran down the poor man’s face as he recalled turning to see his child stumbling after him with imploring arms. He said, ‘I swear to God I never loved him more than in that moment.'

Listening to these stories ignited an anger in me which has never gone out. Neil and I did an appeal to launch the Kurdish Disaster Fund. One ad, it raised half a million pounds and showed me the enormous power a writer can have.