Distant Voices (2 page)

Written originally as essays for the
New Statesman and Society
, and the
Guardian
and the
Independent
, the collection draws on my previous books, notably
Heroes
,
¹
Indeed, in some respects it is an extension of
Heroes.
I have rewritten and combined many of the pieces, adding new material as the dates at the end of each chapter indicate. This is especially true of the four long Cambodia chapters, which grew out of work published over a dozen years. Indeed, in this completely revised edition there is a great deal that is new, notably the chapters on East Timor, which formed the basis for my documentary film,
Death of a Nation
, broadcast in 1994.

I have used a range of styles, which I hope readers will regard as a strength. There are pieces written in response to unfolding events, as in the Gulf War, which have a contemporary feel rather than a linear narrative, and more reflective chapters such as those on East Timor, Cambodia and Australia. And there are pieces simply about people, which I enjoy writing, as in the opening chapters of ‘Invisible Britain' and later, in ‘Terminator in Bifocals'. There is also a
shamelessly sentimental tribute to my typewriter, ‘Baby Hermes', still going after 30 years and numerous close calls.

The title
Distant Voices
is taken from an essay I wrote in the wake of the disintegration of communist power in Eastern Europe and which argued that Western triumphalism and the ‘new world order' had brought a renewed threat to many freedoms, such as diversity of expression.
²
The media, the arena in which I work, has been both a major victim of and a collaborator in the narrowing of information and ideas, although it is misrepresented as the very opposite. That's why the majority of these essays are about or touch upon the role of the media in controlling the way we see and in confining and isolating us in the present. This new power is perhaps best demonstrated in the section ‘Mythmakers of the Gulf War'.

Long after the Gulf War, I remember vividly two surreal moments from television. The first was on the BBC's arts programme
The Late Show
, which devoted an edition to foreign correspondents talking about their adventures in the Gulf.
³
As each one spoke, the background filled with images from the war itself, mostly tanks and artillery and missiles flashing in the night. Then suddenly the scene changed to bulldozers at work; and the reporter's monologue was overwhelmed by shocking pictures behind him. Driven by Allied soldiers, the bulldozers were pushing thousands of bodies into mass graves. Many of the bodies were crushed, as if they had been run over. The memory reached back to similar scenes at Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz where newsreel cameras recorded bulldozers pushing thousands of bodies into open pits.

To my knowledge the BBC's subversive blink was the only time the British public was allowed to see the
extent
of the slaughter in the Gulf. Certainly there were news reports of the ‘turkey shoot' on the Basra road; and the famous
Observer
photograph of a man burnt to a skeletal monster, upright in the cabin of his truck.
⁴
But the dead generally were represented as looters, and the pathetic objects they had taken from Kuwait – toys, electric fans – were highlighted as
evidence of their guilt. The crime of slaughtering people who were fleeing was passed off as an ‘unfortunate' and ‘tragic' postscript to a necessary war – a war in which precious few Allied lives were lost and Western technology had entertained the viewers at home. It had been both a good war and a clean war. That was the official truth.

The second memorable moment was Clive James reviewing 1991, again on BBC Television. In awarding Saddam Hussein the ‘BBC's
Gardener's World
Award' as ‘the person who's done most to transform the appearance of our planet in 1991', James made the war the joke of the year.
⁵
No bulldozers were shown, no bodies piled in open pits.

When these events next entered public consciousness, the process was complete: the unthinkable had been normalised. In May 1992 a coroner in Oxford handed down an ‘unlawful killing' verdict on the deaths of nine British soldiers killed by American ‘friendly fire'. Newspapers which had supported sending the troops to the Gulf and had colluded with the Ministry of Defence in obscuring the true nature of the war now attacked the government for ‘covering up the truth' about the soldiers' deaths.

No irony was noted. Not a single reference was made to what the American writer Michael Albert has called ‘one of the more wanton, cowardly massacres in modern military history', and which resulted in the deaths of as many as 200,000 men, women and children, none of them the subject of a British inquest or an international enquiry convened by the United Nations in whose name the slaughter was initiated. Most were almost certainly killed unlawfully: either by ‘anti-personnel' weapons and ‘weapons of mass destruction', whose legality has yet to be tested under the Geneva Convention; or by attacks on civilian centres, such as the RAF attack on the town of al-Nasiriyah; or while retreating and surrendering. Countless defenceless men were buried alive in the night beneath advancing American bulldozers, the same machines which were later used unlawfully to dump the dead in pits without respect for human identity
and for the rights of their families to know the truth and to mourn.

The fact that the war continues today against the children of Iraq is of no interest to the Western media. Iraq is no longer ‘a story'. There are more dramatic, more ‘relevant' pictures to be had elsewhere. Thanks to a few – the voluntary aid agencies, the Harvard medical teams, Dr Eric Hoskins of the Gulf Peace Team, Victoria Brittain of the
Guardian
– careful readers will know that, as a direct result of American and British-led sanctions against Iraq, more than a million Iraqi children are seriously malnourished and more than 100,000 are seriously ill, and many of those are likely to die.
⁶
Iraqi doctors are struggling with a disease not seen for many years,
pica
, which babies contract by eating dirt.
⁷
In its latest study, the Harvard team describes Iraqi infants as ‘the most traumatised children of war ever described'.
⁸
Like the slaughter that preceded it, the ‘unthinkable has been normalised', as Edward S. Herman wrote in his fine essay, ‘The Banality of Evil'.

Understanding this concept, in war and peace, is one of the aims of this book. As Herman pointed out: ‘Doing terrible things in an organised and systematic way rests on “normalisation” . . . There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals . . . others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive Napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public.'
⁹

Of course, ‘normalising' can only be successful once ‘distance' has been established. General Schwarzkopf's video game show during the Gulf War, which television dutifully transmitted at peak viewing times, was an outstanding example of this. Like the pilots who dropped the ‘smart' bombs, politicians, journalists, bureaucrats and the public, all of us, were kept at a distance. In East Timor, the Suharto regime's murder of two television crews, its sealing of the
country, and the collusive silence of Western governments, kept us all at a distance. What we could not see did not happen.

My own experience as a journalist, much of it spent in wartime and at places of upheaval, has taught me rudely about this process. The first time I saw and touched a victim of Napalm – her smouldering skin came away and stuck to my hand – I also saw the aircraft that had dropped the Napalm bomb on a village path. When, a few days later, I stood up at a press conference and asked an American briefer, a pleasant man just doing his job, if
he
had ever seen a victim of Napalm, he stared blankly at me, a beacon of incredulity. Earlier he had used the term ‘collateral damage'. I asked him what this meant. He stared some more. Surely, I knew my ‘ABC'. He finally asked me to ‘rephrase' the question. I repeated it, twice, until he said the word ‘people'. When I asked him if this meant ‘civilian people', his affirmation was barely audible.

No doubt because I was young, this and other encounters of striking similarity left an impression upon me. I formed the view that journalism ought not to be a process that separated people from their actions, or itself an act of complicity. I became especially interested in the decision-making of those of apparently impeccable respectability, whose measured demeanour and ‘greyness' contained not a hint of totalitarianism and yet who, at great remove in physical and cultural distance, executed and maimed people, destroying and dislocating their communities on a scale comparable with the accredited monsters of our time.

In the Cambodia and East Timor chapters I have described this synthesis – in Cambodia, between Nixon and Kissinger on the one hand and Pol Pot and his gang on the other. What the former began from afar, the latter completed. Only the method varied. To understand that is to begin to understand the true nature of the crime perpetrated in Cambodia and where the responsibility for it lies. And it helps to explain why every conceivable moral and intellectual contortion is currently being attempted to protect those who, in the
‘division of labour', share the culpability either as accessories or apologists.

In the East Timor section I have drawn together my own experience as a reporter going undercover, with interviews conducted around the world with those who played a part in the cataclysmic events that have consumed that country beyond the reach of the TV camera and the satellite dish. In this way, with hillsides of crosses and faces of unsmiling, courageous people fresh in our memory, David Munro and I were able to reconstruct a largely forgotten history and lay before its culpable participants the enduring evidence of their work. For me, the brutal death of 200,000 East Timorese, a third of the population, says much about how the modern world is ordered and how most of us are pressed to believe otherwise.

The long ‘silence' over the genocide in East Timor is indicative of how much of the modern media is ordered. In recent years a new version of an old ethos has arisen in the so-called ‘free' media in the west. It was expressed succinctly in May 1992 by the director of programmes of the new British network television company, Carlton, which replaced Thames following the infamous auction of commercial franchises instigated by former prime minister Thatcher. Current affairs programmes ‘that don't deliver', he said, ‘will not survive in the new ITV'. To ‘earn their way', they have to attract viewing audiences of at least six to eight million people, regardless of the subject matter. ‘We have to be hard-headed and realistic,' he said.
¹⁰

The departing editor of Thames's
This Week
series – which died with Thames – analysed this ‘hard-headedness' and apparent failure to ‘deliver'. He pointed out that the two ITV current affairs flag carriers,
This Week
and
World in Action
, represented ‘the only area in commercial television that had not only maintained its popular audience, but improved it'; that current affairs audiences had increased by 60 per cent; and that
World in Action
with its thirty-five-year tradition of controversial, award-winning broadcast journalism, was set to
average
eight million viewers per programme.
Moreover, current affairs drew larger audiences than even some ‘light entertainment'.
¹¹
Following the late-night screening of
Death of a Nation
, my film on East Timor, British Telecom reported calls to the advertised ITV ‘helpline' number running at 4,000 a minute.

None of this ought to be surprising. What the public wants is so often not what the editor of the
Daily Beast
says they want. Year after year surveys of television trends demonstrate people's preference for strong, hard-hitting factual programmes. This and quality drama remain the strengths of British television while its listings show more and more anodyne sitcoms, the worst of Hollywood and soaps. In April 1994 Granada Television announced that it was dropping
World in Action
for two months to make way for a ‘bumper episode' of
Coronation Street.
This will be the series' longest absence from the screen in its history.

Official truths are often powerful illusions, such as that of ‘choice' in the media society. One of the principal arbiters of this is Rupert Murdoch. Having swallowed Times Newspapers and British Satellite Broadcasting with the help of his friend, Margaret Thatcher, Murdoch in 1992 added the television coverage of Britain's most popular game, football. In secret collusion with the BBC, Murdoch's BSkyB bought the rights to live coverage of all premier league games. As its cut of the deal, the BBC shows the highlights. Even those who already own a Murdoch satellite dish will almost certainly have to pay a monthly football charge, or be excluded from what millions regard as the high point of their week.

This is ‘choice' at its most Orwellian, denying people not only programmes that are politically unpalatable but also their time-honoured pleasures. Murdoch's next ‘buys' are reported to be the television coverage of the Grand National and the rugby union final. One wonders what the purpose is of such voracity. Profit, of course; and power of an explicit kind.

In an article entitled ‘Britain's class war in a satellite dish', the London correspondent of Murdoch's
Australian
, Nicholas Rothwell, described Murdoch as a free-market Karl
Marx. ‘Murdoch's empire has always shared one thing with the Marxist enterprise,' he wrote, ‘it turns ideas into social and economic experiments . . . If BSkyB's swoop to seize control of televised soccer marks the climax of News Corporation's long-term plan for a self-reinforcing media system, it is also the culminating event in a social . . . and even ideological . . . transformation of Britain in the image of a radical philosophy: one which places the media corporation, as a promoter of information to the ordinary consumer, in direct opposition to the established elites'.
¹²