Baha Mousa – the ‘what if’ questions
Blame is the easy bit. You can look at the death of Baha Mousa and talk of how an entire nation has been shamed by the first member of the British armed forces ever to be convicted of a war crime. But there is a more interesting question.
It was framed by Garry Reader, the private with the 1st Battalion the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment who gave evidence against his fellows at the Gage inquiry into the conduct of British troops in Iraq. It does not look outward, like shame. It looks inward, like guilt. How do you live with having been part of an event like that?
The contrite soldier gave an interview in which he said: “There ain’t a day that goes by without I don’t think about it, or a night that goes by that he’s never on my mind. I’ve got to live with it for the rest of my life… that’s nothing in comparison to what his family, his kids, have gone through… but it affects me and my family. I feel like I can’t move on with my life.”
Reader is plagued by “what if” questions. “What if I’d walked in 5 mins before… What if I’d said something… What if I did something wrong in the CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation)…” This is the coinage of both guilt and grief. “History is not merely what happened,” the historian Hugh Trevor Roper once said, “it is what happened in the context of what might have happened”.
Historians have played this as a parlour game. What if the dinosaurs had survived? What if Socrates, the founder of Western thought, had died in the Peloponnesian War? What if the Muslim scholar who built a flying machine in 711AD had given it a tail and Islamic planes had conquered the world? What if the Chinese not the Europeans had discovered America? What if Charles I had beaten Cromwell? What if the British had defeated the Americans in their War of Independence? What if Lincoln had not freed the slaves? What if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo? What if the Nazis won World War II? What if Kennedy had not been assassinated in 1963 or Gorbachev been in charge in Russia in 1989?
FollowA Babylon in every repressed country
Somewhere in my cellar, in the collected treasures of my travels, is a shard of patterned clay pottery. “Where did you find that?” a diplomat at the British embassy in Baghdad, whose hobby was antiquities, asked me, adding: “It’s Seleucid, about 150 years BC.” I had picked it up several hours drive to the south from a pile of debris pushed aside by a bulldozer. I had gone there to see the work begun by Iraq’s then leader, Saddam Hussein, who had conceived a grandiose plan to rebuild the ancient city of Babylon.
Some 4,000 years earlier the city had been the capital of Hammurabi, emperor of Babylonia, and the man responsible for the world’s first legal code. Then, 1,500 years later, it held the throne Nebuchadnezzar II, one of the most ruthless conquerors in history who built what was the most powerful nation in the world. Now the megalomaniacal Saddam had declared himself to be the reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar (and probably of Hammurabi too) and would soon rule over the world’s next great empire.
Archaeologists were horrified. Saddam was reconstructing Nebuchadnezzar’s 600-room palace by building on the original bricks, which rose two or three feet from the ground, and squashing flat anything that got in the way. He was not preserving history but burying it. Some of the original bricks bore the embossed inscription “I am Nebuchadnezzar, the king of the world”. The modern dictator was matching these with 60-million light brown bricks inscribed: “In the era of Saddam Hussein, protector of Iraq, who rebuilt civilization and rebuilt Babylon.”
Throughout history tyrants have used architecture to awe and intimidate. Saddam was no different, even if his taste leant more towards Las Vegas or Disney. The Pharoah
Akhenaten, the first ruler to abolish the ancient world’s pantheon of many gods to them with a single God, felt he had to build a whole new capital on a virgin site to push through the change. Julius Caesar, to maintain his popularity in Rome during his long absences fighting wars, ordered major building projects and had big ideas like draining the Pontine marshes.
The great 20th century dictators employed the same psychology. Stalin, who was probably the biggest murderer in human history, with 40 million corpses to his debit, named a whole city after himself. Mao Tse Tung, who killed as many, but not all of them on purpose, came up with the biggest engineering project in human history, the massive Three Gorges Dam, which made a million people homeless.
But it was Hitler who most understood the nexus between architecture and power. His impressive Olympic Stadium for the 1936 Games was intended to signal to the world the potency of the Nazi government. He began another at Nuremberg, to hold 400,000 people, which would still be the biggest in the world, had war not broken out. But his greatest folie de grandeur was a vision to rebuild Berlin as Welthauptstadt Germania – the capital of the world – after World War II was won. It included a vast room, twice as long as the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, and a Great Hall so huge that the Eiffel Tower would have fitted inside its giant dome. The intention, Hitler said with his customary immodesty, was to outdo Rome.
A spectacle unworthy of the fallen
It is no disrespect to the dead to feel relief that the public spectacle of Wootton Bassett is over. The bodies of 345 soldiers have passed through the streets of the Wiltshire market town after landing at RAF Lyneham over the past five years. But what began as a spontaneous expression of respect by local people as the coffins passed through their high street has grown and then ossified into something altogether more ambivalent.
As the years passed, the media arrived in such huge numbers that quiet dignity turned to ghoulish circus. The sense of unease was confirmed when the leader of the BNP turned up and Islamist opponents of the war threatened to hold a counter-demonstration with 500 coffins to represent the Afghans who had died. All this was taking place around the raw grief of families within hours of the repatriation of the cold bodies of their loved ones. It was all too public for the mourning phase of bereavement. Of course, some families drew succour from it. But others seemed overburdened by the weight of public expectation on their already bent shoulders. One mother ran all the way up the street after her son’s hearse. Such private anguish should not be turned into a grisly spectator sport. Public commemoration is apt, but it should come later.
I once worked for a tabloid, in the days when that word told you more than just the physical size of a newspaper but conveyed something significant about its attitude to life and to journalism. It was by no means an uninformative experience. Tabloids taught me that people are more important than principles (though not of course than profits in the unarticulated proprietorial worldview), but the rightness of people before principles and profits was a lesson Jesus taught too. Like him tabloids also understand that story is the most potent vehicle for conveying truths about the world.
Tabloids taught me the importance of appearances. “You’re not going dressed like that are you?” a tabloid executive once said, glancing scornfully at the tweed jacket which had always been deemed adequate during my apprenticeship in the more staid environs of the Yorkshire Post. “Go and buy a new suit and put it on your expenses.”
And they also taught me how to harass people, and how to lie professionally. I was once sent to doorstep the widow of disgraced celebrity. She was a decent woman who politely but firmly told me to go away, which I of course immediately did. When I rang into the newsdesk to report this I was told to go back and ask again. Being a diligent chap I did; and she, having had experience of tabloids, promptly told me that she had said No and that I should go, adding, having had extensive experience of tabloids, that she would set the dogs on me if I returned. This seemed to me pretty emphatic, not to say definitive. I went and told the newsdesk.
For the next two hours a pattern was established with the desk in London repeatedly instructing me to return to her front door with new gambits, and me sitting in the photographer’s car for 15 minutes (the photographer had actually seen the dogs) before returning to the phone and announcing that our victim was still uncooperative. Each time my instructions were ratcheted up; I should entreat her, implore her, cajole her and threaten her with the fact that we would be printing something anyway and it would jolly well be better for her if she “put her side of the story”.
But tabloids also taught me you do not have to lie to tell a good tale. I was sent to Switzerland to interview the nurse who had cared for David Niven in his final days as he was dying of motor neurone disease and came back with a poignant tale of how the famous actor had taken the young woman to a favourite place in the Alps where the edelweiss would appear in the spring and asked her to return there to see them when he was dead. “Great, David Niven’s last lover,” the over-excited features editor responded, as ever anxious to fit external reality into the prescribed view of the world as conceived at a desk in London. No, I said. “Yes but you could write it like that. It’s what the Editor will want.” Tell him I won’t, I said; it’s a great story anyway. The features editor stormed off to see the Editor, and returned chastened: “The Editor says it’s alright, you don’t have to make anything up.”
There is a building in the Cayman Islands which is home to 12,000 corporations. It must be a very big building. Or a very big tax scam.
Tax havens are in the spotlight since the Chancellor, George Osborne, did a deal the other day with the Swiss authorities to slap a levy on secret bank accounts held there by British citizens. Opinions are divided on the move, which could net the Treasury £5bn, but which tacitly legitimises bank accounts kept secret from the Inland Revenue. It is a de facto amnesty for those guilty of tax evasion crimes. And they will pay less than they would if they declared their income to the British taxman.
Are there any legitimate reasons why anyone would want to have a secret bank account? And pay a premium to maintain their anonymity – or move their money to one of the pink dots on the map which are the final remnants of the British empire: the Caymans, Bermuda, the Turks and Caicos and the British Virgin Islands.
The moral case against is clear enough. Tax havens epitomise unfairness, cheating and injustice. They replace the old morality embodied in the Golden Rule of reciprocity – that we should do as we would be done by – with a new version which insists that those who have the gold make the rules.
The old view, the neo-con American Christopher Caldwell wrote recently, subscribes to a religious understanding of money that was universal in the Christian world before the rise of Protestantism which acknowledges that people are alive but money is not, which makes it wrong for the latter to take precedence over the former. It is a notion as outdated as usury he suggested tartly.
But what is the moral case for tax havens? We can dispense with the argument advanced by their administrators that if they didn’t take the money it would simply move to more distant offshore locations; that is the self-serving logic of a man who sells torture equipment to an oppressive regime. Apologists insist that tax havens protect individual liberty. They promote the accumulation of capital, fair competition between nations, and better tax law elsewhere in the world. They also foster economic growth. So much so, the Institute of Directors has said, that Britain should not curb tax havens but emulate them, promoting the growth of more hedge funds in the UK.
Things children still know that we grown-ups appear have forgotten
I have just been on holiday with a diligent reader. Faced with a book which is irritating her she will read onto the end to have her irritation confirmed. I am altogether less assiduous. If I am not enjoying a book I stop reading it. That might reveal a lack of application. But life is too short for duff books, and goodness knows there are enough of them around.
I have been lucky on holiday. Apart from a bit of grown-up reading (Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue which previously I have only read bits of) I have been reading children’s books, or rather we have been reading them aloud to one another, which is itself a great family activity, but don’t divert me onto that. We got through Skellig by David Almond, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe by Penelope Lively, Black Jack by Leon Garfield and The Owl Service by Alan Garner.
Our reading was punctuated by comments about the contemporary novels that the Diligent Reader was ploughing through. An interesting contrast emerged. So many modern novels, at least those which like to think of themselves as literary, feel it incumbent on them to reflect a world which is arbitrary, unfair and meaningless, or at any rate where meaning is striven after feebly by inadequate human beings. It is a worldview which is still largely existentialist in its underpinnings. And it is dominated by what Alasdair MacIntryre calls emotivism in which morality and purpose are about not much more than preference.
The children’s books we read, by contrast, are still happy to occupy a land shaped by story and where stories are carriers of significance. And they are freer in the kinds of significance they encounter for they lack the shuffling embarrassment that accompanies many adult novelists forays into such territory.
A remarkable video was posted on the internet the other day. It showed a group of Muslim and Sikh men in an impromptu debate on the spot where three Asian men were mown down by a car in Birmingham during the riots. In response 300 local men had gathered to decide how their community should respond.
A few had come anticipating violence. They masked their faces with scarves. There were calls for vengeance upon local blacks. There is a history of bad blood between Asians and blacks there; in 2006 there were two days of riots after wild rumours that a black teenager had been raped by British Pakistani men.They met, after the last prayers of the day at a candlelight vigil for the dead men. What was interesting was that the debate on the Dudley Road was uncontrolled by local politicians, community spokesmen or religious leaders. The men just took it in turns to express their views and gradually a consensus emerged. One man who had initially wanted to take to the streets announced: “I’ve changed my mind, bro. The way I see, the brothers we can’t control”. The fear was that a handful of individuals would turn a peaceful protest violent, and that this would dishonour the memory of the dead men who “had died nobly”. The vocabulary was striking: honour and nobility are not words which are often heard in modern British political discourse. But it was probably something that was said earlier which swayed the men to disperse and go to their homes. The father of one of the dead men, Tariq Jahan, had, within hours of his son’s death, made an extraordinary speech. After recounting how, with his hands and face covered in his son’s blood, he had performed CPR at the roadside without success, he expressed his bewilderment at what happened, repeatedly asking Why? A friend interrupted to say it was all the fault of the police but Mr Jahan turned that aside, saying: “I don’t blame the government, I don’t blame the police, I don’t blame nobody. It was his destiny and his fate, and now he’s gone”.
After he had appealed several times for calm, and called on the Muslim community to ignore calls for revenge, he concluded: “Step forward if you want to lose your sons”. His peroration was met with total silence. So he said: “Otherwise, calm down and go home – please.” It was the bereaved man’s calm acceptance which set the tone for his community’s response.
The wisdom of Tariq Jahan stood in stark contrast to the over-heated rhetoric of politicians and press which was geared to expressing outrage rather than to addressing the deeper problems of the culture from which the rioting sprang. The Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, ordered plans to be drawn up to remove benefits from rioters after 100,000 people signed a government e-petitions demanding the change. The Housing Minister, Grant Shapps, began consulting on how convicted rioters could automatically be evicted from their council houses. It was all of the same ilk as the earlier alarmed talk of water cannons and curfews.
True to the stereotype it rained in Manchester yesterday, all day. But the rain did not deter the thousand or so volunteers who poured into the city centre at 9.30am to begin the big clean-up after Tuesday night’s riots.
Wearing cagoules and plastic bags the volunteers arrived from all across Greater Manchester, many carrying their own domestic brushes and dustpans. Many of them had “I love Manchester” daubed in red and white make up on their cheeks.
Some had come in response to a @RiotCleanUpManc campaign launched the night before on Twitter at the height of the violence which produced 1,000 police incidents, 150 fires, 12 hospitalised injuries and saw 113 people arrested, the youngest of them aged just 15.
Others had been given time off by their workplace. Staff from Deloitte and Manchester Metropolitan University had given the whole day off to lend a hand. Other business donated in kind, with brooms and clothing from Wilkinson and Primark. Greggs the bakers donated doughnuts for the workers.
There was a self-consciousness about the event. Those who turned up wanted to offer themselves as a counter-example to the Mancunian rioters. “It’s our way of saying enough is enough,” one student said.
There was not that much to do. Piccadilly Gardens, where a thousand youths had confronted the police the night before, and where the volunteers now gathered, had been completely cleaned overnight by municipal staff who volunteered their time starting in the small hours as police regained control of the streets.
“This place is cleaner than it is most ordinary mornings, “ said one woman on her way to work at the Bank of New York.
Yesterday Greater Manchester Police, who admitted that they had been overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the rioters, were delighted at the turn-out of the volunteers. “We need crowds of people to say: ‘Not in our city’,” Assistant Chief Constable Garry Shewan told the broom-wielders.
Chaos in new urban battleground as violence erupts in North
Thick black choking smoke blew down Market Street, one of the main shopping thoroughfares in Manchester last night, as the city caught the contagion of rioting that is sweeping through Britain. The Miss Selfridge shop had been set alight, only one of around 100 of shops smashed and burned, as upwards of 2,000 rioters rampaged through the city centre streets.
Thugs wearing ski masks and hoods, armed with sticks and metal poles, moved in six or seven groups, each several hundred strong. They ran from hundreds of riot police in full gear, occasionally stopping to confront them, but mainly dodging down side-streets and alleyways wreaking havoc as they went.
Among the first targets were Marks and Spencer, Diesel clothing shop and a Bang & Olufsen store. Shop mannequins, which had been torn from the shattered windows, lay on the streets like bodies.
At one point an estimated thousand rioters confronted the police in the central Piccadilly Gardens, throwing stones, bricks and rocks they appeared to have brought with them. The rioters laughed and cheered as they went about their destruction.
Police, on horses and in white Tactical Aid Unit vans, with protective black grids over the windscreen, pushed the rioters down Market Street but the thugs broke into smaller groups and slipped away to reform elsewhere.
Across the river similar scenes took place in Salford where several hundred youths materialised and – by sheer force of numbers – pushed away police in full riot gear who were protecting the main shopping centre. With the police gone the centre was looted. More thieves appeared carting off produce from a smashed-up Lidl supermarket. Looters came in cars to fill their boots with plunder.
The supermarket was then set on fire. A community centre was also set ablaze, as was the BBC Manchester radio car which had been set upon by a mob. By the end of the night 11 separate fires were burning.
There was evidence everywhere that the riot had been organised and was being directed. Earlier in the day police had arrested a man in Wigan who had been inciting public disorder on Facebook. Later seven others were arrested by Cheshire Police on similar charges.
Eyewitnesses on the street reported leaders among the rioters issuing orders to different groups of marauders. Boys on fast BMX bikes were acting as spotters to report to the leaders where the police were moving. They appeared to be carrying messages between different groups.
One worker at the Arndale shopping centre, Rayhan Rezi, 27, told a reporter from the Manchester Evening News: “A small minority would go in one direction to divert police officers and the remaining ones were smashing windows. It was a small minority who were hooded up wearing hats and sunglasses and doing the damage, most were just watching and had come for the loot.” Large numbers of curious bystanders remained in the city all evening.
Shades of 1980s riots, but there have been big changes since then
The similarities between the rioting in Tottenham and the race riots which shocked Britain in the 1980s are striking. But they do not tell the whole story.
The trigger for civil discord has almost always been an action by the police which the black community has regarded as a particularly egregious example of a generally poor relationship between police and a local population.
In Brixton, London, in 1981 trouble was sparked when police stopped a young black man who been stabbed but who others assumed was a victim of police brutality. In Toxteth, Liverpool, the same year, it was the arrest of a student, Leroy Cooper, who intervened when police tried to detain an innocent man.
In Handsworth, Birmingham, in 1985, it another arrest set off two days and nights of looting and arson. That year Brixton erupted again when police shot and paralysed a woman while trying to arrest her son. A month later another mother had a heart attack and died when police raided her home setting off the Broadwater Farm riots. A peaceful protest outside a police station there too led to violence.
There is a familiarity too to the criticisms that police provoked trouble by heavy-handed tactics. Again critics said they were unprepared for trouble. Again they said that containment tactics, rather than aggressive snatch-squads, allowed rioting to continue longer than necessary. Yet in most cases inquiries later showed that the speed and scale of events had left them little choice, but to corral the worst troublemakers and deploy officers to protect firemen.
Again, most unrest took place against a background of inner-city deprivation, social alienation and high unemployment, particular among young people. In all cases there were recession and spending cuts. And good weather. A rainy night is no good for a riot.
And yet there have been big changes since the 80s riots. After Brixton the Scarman report was scathing about Metropolitan Police tactics. They had brought about a big fall in street crime, but at the cost of ramping up racial resentment. The riots, Scarman said, were “essentially an outburst of anger and resentment amongst young black people against the police” their hardline methods, lack of consultation and widespread racism.
After Scarman came new rules on stop and search procedures, better training for police and a call for more black officers. An independent Police Complaints Authority was set up. Large amounts of public money was put into urban regeneration. And generally race relations improved, with the Macpherson report intensifying self-scrutiny among the police whom it famously accused of “instructional racism”.
My greengrocer was selling “local” Victoria plums this week. How local is local I asked her. She named a road about half a mile away. We all like the idea of that kind of shopping. We trust the provenance of the goods. We know no fuel is being wasted transporting goods across vast useless miles. We feel good because local producers benefit and the local economy is stimulated. When pollsters ask us if we want more independent local shops 80 per cent of us say Yes. So why do we buy 97 per cent of our food from supermarkets?
Some 12,000 of the independent local shops we profess to love shut down in 2009 as the global financial crisis hit our high streets. Last year another 2,000 went. Today one in seven shops in town centres across the country stand empty like pulled teeth in the rotten mouth that is British high street shopping. Some areas have tried to counter the appearance of dereliction by plastering huge photographs in shop windows to give the impression they are still in use.
There are some who refuse to lament the change. Sally Bercow, the never-knowingly-underdressed wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons, last week announced cheerily that we have ceased to be a nation of shopkeepers and become one of online bargain hunters. The High Street is approaching its sell-by date, and a good thing too, she reckoned. Town centre retailers need to wake up, smell the coffee and accept that Starbucks will take over in the vacant shops.
Isn’t this just embracing the inevitable? No, it is letting slip something which we will rue. I do two kinds of shopping. Once a fortnight I go to a supermarket and pile baked beans and toilet rolls into a trolley. But the rest of the time I visit my local parade of shops which has two butchers, two chemists, two green-grocers and two bakers, as well as a post office, hardware store and a florist.
The supermarket I often negotiate in total silence; thanks to the self-service scanners there’s no need even to speak to the woman on the checkout. At the shops, by contrast, I meet all kinds of people, and talk to them in queues or across counters. It’s where I was recommended our plumber, get cooking tips, hear the latest Manchester United transfer rumours, read notices about concerts in the park, discover why parents think standards are falling at the local school, and pick up the prescription which the chemist has collected from the doctor for me. The shops are the nexus of the knowledge, respect, trust and mutuality which bind the community in which I live.
Can you have too much sleep? I’m sure there are medical researchers somewhere who will tell you the answer is Yes. But fat chance in the real world. I’ve been giving this some serious thought because I am just back from 10 days holiday in Italy and I am in that rare state of being all slept up.
It is easy to forget how pleasurable sleep can be. In normal life sleep, in our household at any rate, is just an exhausted punctuation as we stagger from one event-filled day to the next. It is only when we stop that we comprehend our sleep deficit. I once had to apologise to the Jesuit Fr Gerry Hughes, author of the wonderful God of Surprises, who ran Ignatian retreats for burned-out Justice & Peace workers, because I spent the first few days falling asleep before I could complete the spiritual exercises he set. Don’t worry, he said, everyone does that.
I have come home filled with a firm purpose of amendment about sleeping more which means doing less. Events have become the latterday equivalent of the facts which English empircals, most particularly the Victorians, collected as if they were so many butterfly specimens. Twitter is the epitome of this urge to fill our lives with clutter.
Holidays are times which pull us up short with such insights. They are, as the columnist Lucy Kellaway put it in a copy of the Financial Times I picked up on the plane on the way home, also times when we reconnect with our families and with our souls. It was a little unnerving then, to read that she was recommending scrapping holidays entirely in favour of “worlidays” which allow work and holiday to combine. To define a worliday she gives the example of her recent stay in Cornwall where the typical morning was: wake up, do a few e-mails, walk by the sea, write an article sitting under a window with a view of a stream, then go outside to light the lunchtime barbecue. This kind of thing is catching on, says Ms Kellaway who is a bit of a management guru. That explains why you are less likely to get an “out-of-office” automatic e-mail response than a few years back. Something tapped into a BlackBerry from a Tuscan poolside is the business norm nowadays apparently.
I have deep misgivings about all this. She has a point when she says that the first few days of a holiday are spent with a head jammed full of stuff we didn’t do in the mad dash to get everything done at work before we left. But I’m not sure the answer is what she describes as the “groovy” work culture which allows you to take as many holidays as you want so long as you take your work with you.
