The Great War for Civilisation (217 page)

105
In Korea, a country with its own vault of sadness and betrayal, this feeling is translated as
han.
A writer on Korea has concluded that “it is likely the misfortune of all small countries to experience injustice at the hands of larger, more powerful neighbours. The Irish cultivate their version of
han
towards the English; Polish
han
is directed at the Russian and German neighbours that have long wrestled for control of the land that lay between them.”

106
Like the American and British armies, the Israelis often announce a “media” title for their operations which bears no relation to the actual military codename. Thus Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon was officially called “Operation Peace for Galilee”—a propaganda legend that gullible journalists happily disseminated—while its real codename was “Operation Snowball.” Unlike “peace,” snowballs increase in size and power as they roll downhill.

107
Amnesty International's statistics showed that between 27 February and June 2002, which included two major Israeli offensives and the reoccupation of the West Bank, nearly 500 Palestinians were killed, many during armed confrontations, although 16 per cent of the victims— more than 70—were children. From the first Israeli incursions in March until June 2002, more than 250 Israelis were killed, including 164 civilians of whom 32 were children. More than 8,000 Palestinians detained during this period, according to Amnesty, were “routinely subjected to ill-treatment” and 3,000 Palestinian homes were demolished.

108
Though not so formidable that the old Palestinian guerrilla hands who had endured the six weeks' siege of Beirut in 1982 showed any admiration for them. “Why didn't they
fight
?” one of them asked me in Lebanon a month later.

109
The Israelis said the Red Cross were allowed to enter but that they chose not to do so. The Red Cross said this was untrue. The Israelis then claimed they had a video of Red Cross officials declining the Israeli offer. But when we demanded to see this video, the Israeli authorities failed to produce it. Few journalists believed that it existed.

110
The Bethlehem siege provided another “first” when BBC Television World News, unable to cover the fighting round the church with its own cameras, repeatedly used Israeli army video footage—without announcing its provenance.

111
Again, to no avail. In January 2003, Yaron was in Washington, presenting Israel's defence “needs” to justify a request for $4 billion in “special defence aid.”

112
And woe betide the diplomat or journalist who points this out. In 2001, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris accused the Swedish president of the European Union of “encouraging anti-Jewish violence.” For her to condemn Israel for “eliminating terrorists,” the centre wrote in a letter to the Swedish prime minister, “recalls the Allied argument during the Second World War, according to which bombing the railways leading to Auschwitz would encourage anti-Semitism among the Germans.” Sweden was making “a unilateral attack against the state of the survivors of the Holocaust.” And the Swedish EU president's crime? She had dared to say that “the practice of eliminations constitutes an obstacle to peace and could provoke new violence.” She had not even called the Israeli murder units “death squads.” The Swedes did not apologise. But nor did they correct the misuse of historical facts. The principal Allied excuses for not bombing the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps included “technical difficulties,” the belief that the task should fall to the Soviet air force, and the contention that all means should be directed to the overthrow of Nazi Germany—which would be “the positive solution to this problem.” The latter reasons— inadequate and shameful in the light of history though they are—would not, of course, have made the Wiesenthal Centre's note to Stockholm as unpleasant as it was clearly intended to be.

113
Variations on the Sharon theme were to emerge in the Israeli press. Although Israel furnished humanitarian aid to Kosovo Albanians—an act which Sharon said he supported—the fear that NATO's campaign could be transposed to the Middle East persisted. “. . . there is something to the question raised by Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon about a future Israeli response to the possibility that Arabs in the Galilee will demand their own separatist framework,” Dan Margalit wrote. “ . . . One can assume that Israel would never behave like the Serbs and engage in massacres while forcibly evicting the population across the border. But what exactly is the level of evil that allows NATO to attack a sovereign state that is protecting its sovereignty?” As a journalist in Serbia at the time, I asked the same question about Serbia's “sovereignty,” not least because NATO inserted a mischievous clause in its prewar peace proposals to MiloÅ¡ević that would force him to accept NATO troops across all of Serbia. But Margalit's description of Serbia's massacres “while forcibly evicting the population” was a word-perfect description of Israel's own behaviour in 1948. There was also a Kinzer-like diminution of history in Margalit's throwaway remark that “the massacres of Albanians undertaken by Slobodan Milosevic” were “somewhat reminiscent of the Turkish massacres of Armenians . . . terrible crimes but not a Holocaust.”

114
In a Palestinian document detailing the case of Mahmoud Freih, a seventeen-year-old who set a bomb for an Israeli tank in Gaza, the Israeli “translation” stated that he had been protected by the Palestinian Authority. In fact, the original Arabic document stated clearly that the Palestinian Authority had prevented the bombing of the tank by cutting the wire to the detonator before finally inducing Freih to join Arafat's men.

115
Reality did not always win over propaganda. Amnesty's 2002 report said that despite repeated claims to the contrary, “no judicial investigation is known to have been carried out into any of the killings of children by members of the Israeli Defence Force in the occupied territories, even in cases where Israeli government officials have stated publicly that investigations would be carried out.” Yet just over two years later, Michael Williams, an editor of
The Independenton Sunday
, felt able to “applaud the rigour with which it [Israel] applies the rule of law to the actions of its military . . .”

116
Theories abound on the origin of the term
pied noir
. In his history of the Algerian war of independence, Alistair Horne says the expression may have come from the black polished shoes worn by the French military, or from the metropolitan French idea that the African sun burned the feet of the
colons
black. More recently, an Algerian told me that the name was given to poor Spanish immigrants who lived in a quarter of the Moroccan capital of Rabat but who allegedly never washed their feet. When French citizens moved into the same area, they inherited the name and then brought it with them to Algeria.

117
The Harkis were the loyal Algerian auxiliaries of the French army who were to be betrayed by their masters in 1962—left behind to be butchered by their fellow countrymen or dumped in misery in the south of France.

118
No language protects politicians from flights of fancy about democracy and Islam. I leave it to readers to spot the non sequiturs in the following extracts from Boudiaf's Algiers press conference on 16 February 1992—which he gave in Arabic and French—as well as his self-delusionary optimism and incomprehension of what drove so many Algerians to support the FIS. “The halting of the electoral process was made necessary in order to safeguard democracy,” he said. “The electoral process was stopped because it had come to represent a danger to Algeria. But the state of emergency had nothing to do with any restriction of fundamental freedoms . . . The situation is improving day by day. Algeria has become fed up with Fridays of terror and doubt . . . In Islam, tolerance, understanding and modesty can go together with democracy. A ‘closed' Islam, which harks back to thirteen or fourteen centuries ago, cannot work with democracy. In Iran, is there or is there not democracy? I leave it to you to decide . . . people are not being hanged here. If we had followed the election principle, we would have had hanging in Algeria . . . Islam should not accept extremism. Mosques should be a place of preaching, of rest and moderation. Religion has its place, but democracy is a march towards a modern society which includes political pluralism.”

119
By 1995, the Algerian government would officially admit that 15,000 of its citizens had been murdered, that there had been 6,000 wounded and 2,143 acts of sabotage. In fact, the true figure of deaths was thought to be closer to 75,000.

120
Massu was only giving advice—the French government was supplying much more serious help to the Algerian military. Throughout much of 1994, France was sending helicopters, night-sight technology for aerial surveillance of mountain hide-outs, and other equipment, much of it aboard French military flights into Algiers airport. The son of a French government minister was said to run a private security company outside Paris which legally sold millions of francs' worth of equipment to the Algerian security police. Just as the Americans sold helicopters to Saddam during the Iran–Iraq War on the grounds that they would be used for “civilian” purposes, so the French, ten years later, sold nine Ecureuil helicopters to Algeria for “civil” use—thus avoiding statutory investigation by the French inter-ministerial commission for the inspection of military exports (Cieemg); the machines, of course, had only to be fitted with rockets and night-sights to become front-line weapons. The French were also listening in to all Algerian military radio traffic from a former cargo vessel, sailing along the Algerian coastline and crewed by members of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE, the French secret service). Code-numbered A646 Berry, the white-painted vessel monitored Algerian forces in the Lakhdaria Mountains. Its work was augmented by radio intercepts from French air force planes, and intelligence officers inside the French embassy in Algiers. On Christmas Eve 1994, “Islamist” gunmen seized an Air France airliner at Algiers airport and, after executing three passengers, flew it to Marseille for refuelling, threatening to crash the aircraft into the Eiffel Tower. French troops stormed the plane at Marseille, killed the hijackers and rescued the passengers. The surprising thing about the hijack was not that it took place, but that the French national airline was still operating scheduled flights into a country where law and order had virtually disintegrated and where the very name of France had become a death sentence to those of its citizens who remained in Algeria. No one, of course, asked whether the gunmen seriously intended to fly into the Eiffel Tower—or whether their plan might in the future inspire other, more ambitious projects involving passenger airliners and tall buildings.

121
Ramadan in 1994 had been an especially doleful one for Algerian intellectuals. The dramatist Abdelkader Alloula, director of the Oran national theatre, was shot dead on his way to give a drama lecture. Four days later, Aziz Smati, a television producer, had been seriously wounded— he was now a paraplegic—and in September of the same year, gunmen shot dead Cheb Hasni, the best-known performer of
rai
music. Only a threat by the Kabyle people to “declare war on Islam” temporarily saved the life of their own kidnapped singer Lounes Matoub; he was released after fifteen days of captivity. Accusing intellectuals of “frivolity” and of insulting the Muslim religion, the armed goups had come to regard the artistic community—not without reason—as the forefront of the intellectual battle against an Islamic republic. One of Rachid Mimouni's best-known books was
Of Barbarity in General and Fundamentalism in Particular
; the only surprising thing about his own death in February 1995 was that he died of natural causes. In Egypt, authors were also being targeted. The writer Farag Fhoda was murdered; the Gema'a Islamiya— the “Islamic Group”—knifed the Nobel prize–winning author Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo but failed to kill him. Karim Alrawi, the Egyptian writer who had done so much for the human rights movement in Cairo, explained that the “Islamic struggle” was specifically cultural in nature. “Because Islam is the religion of the Book, the Koran is the very word of God uttered in the Arabic language. Arabic is therefore both the language of everyday discourse and the Sacred Language . . . Yet to be a writer is to be a creator of texts and to claim for them a truth that does not necessarily partake of the sole truth of the one sacred text. For that reason, the target is writers, not merely their words.”

122
The British were not alone in sending Algerians back to their homeland for execution. The Belgian authorities deported a junior FIS leader, Ben Othman Bousria, to Algeria on 15 July 1996, on the fraudulent grounds that he would not be in danger if he was returned. After again trying to flee Algeria, he was arrested while trying to cross the Libyan border and died in police custody at Mostaganem. A police report said he had “committed suicide” by throwing himself out of a security forces office while awaiting trial.

123
In its highly mendacious “evidence,” the U.S. government quoted an article from The Inde
pendent—
filed by me from Algiers on 8 March 1995—in which I wrote that photographs of murdered Algerian intellectuals were “enough to make you hate them [Islamists], despise them, deprive them of any human attribute, let alone human rights—which was, of course, the intention, provided you could forget how many people voted for the FIS in the elections which the government annulled.” The U.S. Justice Department failed to see the irony in the last line—nor the clear implication that the pictures had been published as part of an Algerian government propaganda campaign. The American documentation was also very sloppy. The titles of at least two Algerian newspapers were misspelled—and no reference made to the Algerian
pouvoir
's insistence that the Algerian press must print news of “terrorism” according to the regime's instructions. Many of the articles reported massacres that the FIS had condemned. After I wrote about the American administration's misuse of my articles in
The Independent
, all reference to them mysteriously disappeared from the U.S. Justice Department's list of “exhibits” against Haddam.