Have some tea… and take my torture testimony

I volunteered to come down to the city of Kairawan for what I thought was cleaning up some documents that bloggers had collected… and found instead that I had three young men sitting in front of me expecting me to do something about the fact they were captured during the protests, taken to Tunis and tortured for two weeks… and revolution or no revolution, their captors, some of whose names and faces they know, are still walking free.

We are busy evolving a methodology of self-reporting as I write this. The idea is to interview each victim one by one, hopefully for less than an hour, recording on MP3. We go over it until we’ve got the story straight, gone back over it to figure out the missing bits and the bits that will remain unclear – because after all when you’re sleep deprived and naked, suspended by chains from a metal bar, and hordes of plain clothes policemen are beating you under bright lights you may not see and notice everything that’s going on.

Then we shoot it in video, the story from start to finish, in 10 minutes or less. We post both the hour long sound and the 10-minute videos on the Web but it is the video which becomes a kind of initial deposition. Tunis seems a long way away from here and people are naturally very pessimistic about whether the revolution is real. They think they’ve been forgotten already. But we hope to find someone in the Interior Ministry to send the video links to, and they use it as the first stage in an investigation when they’re ready for it.

The stories of these young men involve political police and intelligence both in Tunis, where most of the torture happened, and here in Kairawan, where they were singled out and arrested, then “softened up” on the night of January 9th to be driven 200k to the capital the next morning. We are now having a debate about if I should go to the local police station with the names of the officers I have and ask to interview them so they can give their side of the story. I am saying to the victims that this is the normal journalistic style. They are naturally hesitant… there is not yet enough guarantee of a new stable order. If the local flics realise the case is building against them – but not yet definitive – they may take pre-emptive action against the leading witnesses. In a town where everyone knows everyone these decisions are not to be taken lightly. I honestly don’t know what the best thing to do is.

Meanwhile, it’s a bright winter day which shows the profile of the battlements of the old town off spendidly through the window of this freezing bare Internet cafe. Kairawan was the first Islamic capital in North Africa, complete with an eighth century mosque and a walled casba. I’m staying in a hotel in a pedestrianised area – who knows, maybe the old regime persuaded UNESCO to give the city World Heritage status. There’s an old story that in the first days of Islamic rule here, 1200 years ago, the emir wanted to make one of the wisest and most religious men a qadi, or judge under Islamic law. But because the man refused, being modest enough to be afraid that judging other men would imperil his soul. The emir had him thrown from the roof of the mosque. Since then, it appears religious scholars have become more willing to pass judgement!

I will not tell the actual torture story here… just to say it is clear there was a well managed and instructed system of torture under the old regime, the torturers having their own nicknames and slang for different torture instruments, and enough commonality between the testimonies, taken separately, to show a standard methodology at work.

But the other thing to understand – particularly about Kairawan and the other towns of the interior such as Sidi Bou Zid where the revolt started – is just how many people were implicated in the security apparatus. Yassin, one of the victims, told me that while he was waiting in the reception area in the Interior Ministry headquarters in Tunis, 130 miles away from here, an old class mate of his passed him. They had just been beaten silly, a group of 13 of them huddled in the middle of the area, a free for all by all the police with sticks, beating them savagely and without mercy. Now it was pause and his old friend passed by. “He greeted me warmly, said hi, asked what I was doing there in a friendly way, not accusatory, and wished me well.”

The class mate, it was clear, was one of the plain clothes policemen who was on the other “team”. Then he went on his way and Yasin was taken off by four other plain clothes policemen for days of torture and starvation. It’s quite possible his class mate was “marking” one of Yassin’s other colleagues in the next cell.

There’s an intimacy about the police state in the Arab world because of the sheer size of the apparatus. Do the maths and it turns out that about 1 in 15 men of employable age is involved in the security forces in one way or another. But that figure is higher in the poorer parts of the country which feed the lower ranks of the security apparatus disproportionately. When I asked Yassin how many of his 30 classmates in high school went into the police, he made a sweeping gesture with his arm and said “Most of them”. That may or may not be poetic license… but there’s no doubting how damned close the oppression system was to the people.

The new Arab media… of the people, for the people

I’ve been around the Arabic media for 25 years but never heard anything like the problem Imad Ktata, the manager of Shams FM here in Tunis, explained to me yesterday. He is determined to eliminate all use of classical Arabic from his radio station and make it colloquial only. It’s a bit hard to explain to non-Arabic speakers but it’s a truly revolutionary cultural shift.

Maybe I can do it for Brits. Imagine that in the UK for example, the news was still delivered in full Reithian style, some kind of placeless posh from the back of the throat, like Peter O’Sullivan’s racing commentaries… “And they’re orff…”… or the old Cine news reels with plummy descriptions of Gandhi as “that plucky little Indian”. Recreationally, I have to confess I adore that accent for humour and affectionate nostalgia purposes… But imagine that was still a strait jacket conformity stifling all news and current affairs programming. That is roughly the hold that classical Arabic still has over the national level media in Arab countries. It’s as if you had to put on a mental dinner jacket every time you wanted to know what was going on in your country.

“When we first put out the news in Tunisian dialect, we got hundreds of complaints,” said Imad. “People think of the news bulletin as something sacred. But why should the ordinary citizen in the street have to strain to understand the news?”

He asked me whether I could help him find a specialist in colloquial Arabic who could police the scripts his reporters read out on air. In the authority-obssesed political cultures of the Arab World of the last few decades dialects have been something necessarily beneath proper study, so that’s a bit of a tall order. I met a DJ yesterday who is essentially a scholar of the new Tunisian rap which energised some of the more racous elements of the street protestors. But finding a colloquial expert able to pronounce on correct dialect for news events is a bit like looking for a scholar who can do instant interpretation of Shakespeare into skinhead Shakespeare… (side of the stage, voiceover).

Another truly revolutionary thing Imad said: “I’m not interested in bombs in Iraq. If something happens in any part of this city, it could be as trivial as a blocked drain affecting 100 people, to me that is more important than Iraq or the Middle East peace process. We need to become a media of proximity.”

For decades, the global issues affecting the Arab and Muslim world – Palestine, Iraq, the unholy alliance between the USA and Israel, and then again the House of Saud – have been used by Arab autocracies as the opium of the Arab peoples. You want to protest? Forget the fact your daughter’s school has no windows and you have to bribe the teacher with private lessons to give her any real attention… let’s get angry and upset about Bosnia, or Afghanistan instead. And the national level media abetted them in that happy-to-be-unhappy diversion.

But that’s all over now. Imad, and many more like him are going to make sure of that.

The first Facebook democracy…

This revolution was famously announced and run through Facebook, like the protests in Egypt. Now that Ben Ali has gone, the new politics is also being run through Facebook. Tunisia could be the world’s first digitally driven democracy.

On Sunday I attended a Facebook rally. A celebration “caravan” actually with something like 2,000 people from Tunis went down to the town of Sidi Bou Zid, where it all started, to thank the locals. A doctor who had been tending to demonstrators from the town organised it just by starting a page on Facebook. We turned up looking for places in a car at 6 in the morning. We found one with Ayman, a medical student who was among the car owners who had also sorted out what the going rate for petrol and motorway tolls should be. The presents we were bringing – you can’t have any kind of commemorative event in the Arab world without large amounts of sweets! – were also coordinated over the Facebook page. In other words, social networking can effortlessly go beyond just Turn Up Here at Dawn to… we have this shopping list and does anyone speak Spanish? It is easy to see how the protesters in Cairo have been able to resupply themselves.

A couple more examples:

Two days ago the new foreign minister in Tunisia went to France, where he held a press conference with his French counterpart Michelle Alliot Marie. She is famously now under pressure because she spent the first half of the Tunisian revolution… on holiday in Tunisia having been flown there in the private jet of a Tunisian businessman who is one of the old regime’s cronies – whoops! And then suggested, four days before Ben Ali fled, that France might usefully send some security advisers to help the regime figure things out. Everyone here watched the press conference eagerly, waiting for the satisfaction of seeing the former colonial power dressed down from a position of clear moral superiority. Instead, the minister, a lifelong diplomat in the Ben Ali apparatus, swooned at his first taste of international-level statesmanship, saying he had always dreamed of meeting Alliot Marie, talked for too long and… spoke in classical Arabic (which is fast becoming an explicit political issue here!)

A colleague of mine could barely contain himself.

“Did you see what the Foreign Minister did?” he said. “That press conference was outrageous. We were watching on TV at 8 o’clock and someone started a Facebook page. An hour later, there were 8,000 subscriptions to the page telling him to go!” The next day, the minister’s own staff – career diplomats not normally known for their belief in activism – staged a protest inside the ministry, saying the minister humiliated them. Every day more pages go up which are unhappy with this or that government decision – thousands of people sign, creating instant polls and plebiscites around individual issues. Governors were appointed for all the new provinces. Within hours, a Facebook page was protesting that 19 out of 23 of them had links to the old regime… and the cabinet said it would reconsider. As with the foreign minister, the protests were broken on Facebook and then hit “real life”. Habib Bourguiba Avenue, the main drag in Tunis leading down to the lake, had small groups of youngsters walking up and down the broad central avenue shouting “Degage, salauds”.

Or even considered debates. Hicham, whose father once worked as a press attache for the founding president Bourguiba, put up a page last year asking his friends to post Bourguiba’s photo for 24 hours just to honour his achievements. Bourguiba was as undemocratic as Ben Ali – he hung on for over 30 years and declared himself president for life before being ousted by Ben Ali. But at the same time he is an ambiguous figure because he presided over real development and the first two decades of Tunisia as an independent country… What resulted was a fierce debate with thousands putting the Bourguiba pic and many more fiercely contesting them.

The striking thing about this is men and women in their 50s and 60s are involved in these debates. Tunisia’s socially networked revolution is not confined to the young.

The first thing the new interior minister did in his first interview was to interrupt the first question to announce: “I want to tell everyone out there we have a team here at the ministry on Facebook. We have put our own page up and we will be looking for comments, reactions and trends across the Internet, so that we can respond to the people.”

What next? This is the first time that social networking and mobile phones – many-to-many communication involving the public – have created a new political dispensation, and are recognised as such. It’s hard to avoid the feeling that that means they will be integrated into Tunisia’s whole future political development in ways we can hardly even imagine.

What do the Tunisian bloggers do next?

She is a wisp of a young woman and mumbles a lot. But there is no doubting her determination. Lina and her group of blogger friends ran around the country in the last few weeks collecting evidence of what was going on, posting it on the Net, and joining in the demonstrations themselves.

“We all met each other through Facebook,” she says, pointing to her friends Hisham and Hanaa.

The idea that the Internet is something separate from “real life” has become a weird anachronism to these people. On Lina’s blog – a Tunisian Girl – you can find photos of them at demonstrations where they hold up signs in solidarity with this or that, always identifying themselves as “bloggers”. The bloggers of Tunisia demand real justice. The bloggers of Tunisia express their solidarity with the Egyptian people.

For them, the work is far from over. Lina talks quietly but her anger is quite palpable – over 100 people died in the Jasmine Revolution and they, the bloggers, feel they have considerable evidence in some cases against known policemen who are walking free in the streets. I ask why they have not published what they have – aren’t they bloggers? Hisham says that in many cases the families of the relatives, or those who are implicated as eye-witnesses, have asked them not to. There is no assurance of justice – and yet everyone would know that you had just put the finger on someone. That is not a safe place to be in Tunisia, revolution or no revolution.

The police seem to have been one of the main beneficiaries of recent events. As protests escalated, they formed their own demonstrations and demanded to form a union – so they are now formally a part of the country’s very well-established union movement. Among the protestors, there is a feeling that they moved smartly, at the last minute, to deflect the back lash they could see was coming as the Ben Ali regime faltered.

There’s a desperate need for someone to come and write a history of what happened here, open up gaps in the accounts before they sink under the waves of self-propagating revolutionary myths. Already stories abound. The outcome was still uncertain when the general of the praetorian guard, no democrat but keen for a place in history, placed snipers on the roof of the palace, stepped up to Ben Ali, put a gun to his head and frog marched him into a helicopter, the story goes. The funny thing is that almost all the international attention has already disappeared… and most Tunisians are too busy living the next stage to care about the last one.

For one example of the free flow of ideas, Lina reposted on her blog – as have other Tunisians – the “Chkoupiste Manifesto” by an Algerian journalist Mustafa Ben Fodil. Google it and you will find numerous reposts, YouTube videos etc. It is an “anartist” agenda, committed to trying to engage art in revolution.

The really interesting question is, where do the bloggers go next? It’s perfectly true what Al Jazeera has been saying about these protests, that they have been self-organising up until now – but that’s pretty easy when you are concentrated on doing one thing, removing a dictator. But now that Ben Ali is gone, there are hundreds of different directions to go in, all of them equally valid. The concepts of coordination and prioritisation presumably come into play.

Tunisia: revolution, what revolution?

I could be jumping the gun, of course. But at first sight it’s hard to see that Tunis has just been through an epoch-defining revolution. No graffiti, a 10 o’clock curfew – what revolution has a curfew after it’s won? No real signs of political life of any kind on the street… apart from one teenaged boy holding a felt-tipped cardboard sign outside the old state TV station. I only caught the words genocide and mensonge as we, like the rest of the traffic, whizzed past. And even he looked nervous. It had the feel of some family thing more than anything else…

The streets were pretty much empty by 8 and as we went to and from our host’s apartment overlooking the central square where the final protests had taken place… we passed along wide boulevards empty but for security units… large army trucks full of solders rumbling on their way to somewhere… small knots of men with semi-automatics slung casual.

“I feel as though the revolution has been snatched away from us,” said one of my hosts, a lawyer. “I haven’t had the chance to dance in the street.”

In fact the only real political imagery you could see on the street were posters for Jeune Afrique, a weekly political, which were plastered with the photo of General Rachid Ammar “l’homme qui a dit non”.

The prevalence is curious. Is Jeune Afrique that widely read? Did its distributors put up those posters, or someone else?

Is it just a coincidence that in the couple of weeks that tens of thousands of pictures of one wise old leader have been removed, after they hung there for decades… they seem to have been partially replaced by pictures of another wise old men… even if mediated through the front cover of a magazine?

In the hotel, a uniformed man sits on every floor watching you in and out of your room, a walkie talkie in front of him on the table. For our own protection, of course! I was actually relieved last night to see him staring morosely into a glass of red wine… if I’m going to be watched, I’ prefer it to be by someone who’s drinking on the job

The two papers I’ve seen so far also don’t give any sign of society in ferment. Sabah carries stories of the excesses of Ben Ali, which may have become a staple of the last couple of weeks… what one of his palaces contains and, ominously in my mind, the fact that prosecutors are now considering charging him for unlawful imprisonment of Habib Bourguiba, his predecessor as president for life… (up until two weeks ago, Tunisia had had only the two heads of state since independence in 1957). Bourguiba is referred to as الزعيم… za’im, or ‘the leader’ but the word of choice for movements which require charismatic dominating leaders, like the Baath or Nasserism… so it seems like it’s all this one guy’s fault.

Meanwhile the French Le Temps has a headline to a 600 word article which simply reads: “Security re-established”. Oh well that’s all right then! No sign at first glance of maneouverings in and around the government, he said this and she responded like that and then they tentatively offered that concession.

A police state employs tonnes of people, as we’er seeing in Egypt every day. I’d just love to know – and so would my Tunisian friends – where they’ve all gone. Of course a small handful of the very top and very nastiest fled the country. But where are the rank and file? Do they still turn up to work?

Sand and snow: the stash

McPherson ran down the narrow irrigation gully. The poplar trees were not thick enough to conceal him so he ducked his head. It was pure instinct, there was no way in fact he could bend low enough to be completely hidden from view. He could have crawled down the two hundred metres of the gully as fast as a civilian walks through a shopping mall, that’s what he was trained to do. But there was no time for that. He had to get round to the other side of the village to meet the other unit.

His ears twitched, waiting for the dull crack of Kalashnikovs from the Taliban on the other side of the field. They never held fire to get a good shot or lull a target into false complacency. These boys were all go once a contact started. He felt the adrenalin course through him and knew he had to take care with his footing. The gully was mostly dry mud caked, but here and there were puddles of rich chocolate mud, the odd small rock, and the general debris you saw everywhere around Afghan habitation. Plenty to twist an ankle on.

He looked back and saw three others following him – Smith, Fusiano and Booth, it seemed. As he did the first shots came from his left. Shots and shouts, telling him there were several of them. A bullet fizzed into the trunk of a poplar.

The gully was ending and a large house compound stood at the end of it. He could see the iron door to the outer wall ajar. Stop or run? He reasoned in a split second, one of the arts of war.

He could throw himself flat and wait for the others to catch up, then they all go in together – more support to deal with anyone waiting inside the house. But the Taliban had sighted him. To stop and wait, even for a few seconds, and then make a run for it would give them time to train their rifles on the ten short yards of open ground that separated the end of the gully and its row of poplars from the house. Five of them, three shots each – fifteen bullets targeted closely on him. Even the Taliban’s piss poor markmanship might begin to tell at that range. Anyone who was a committed adversary was likely already out in rank with the Taliban. Run through that door looking deadly and the chances were no one inside would bring a gun up at him.

He ran. Two bullets scuffed the dust round his feet. A third perforated the iron door ahead of him with a neat hole, a foot above head height, an instant before he ran past it into the compound.

There was no one in the courtyard. He ran to the well in the middle and peered down it – nothing. In through the front door of the house, he stopped stock still, trying to tune out his own panting. No sounds. The diwan was empty, but there were tea glasses scattered on the floor, their stains next to them. Men had been in this room minutes before. No one in the kitchen either. The house was silent, cool and dark. He kept straining to hear over the blood pounding in his ears. A corridor led round a corner to what appeared to be the back of the house.

Then there was a bang against the compound door outside and shouts which moved down the alleyway leading away from the gully. His lads were moving past. They must have thought he had gone on.

Then he heard a sound he knew from another life but had never heard, or expected to hear, on the battlefields of Helmand. From down the corridor came two small, simple clicks of a silencer on a hand gun, and a body thudding softly on the uneven earth floor. A split second later, footsteps away from him, to the back entrance. McPherson ran round the corner, his M82 leveled. An Afghan man, maybe 30, shalwar khamis, lay crumpled, blood seeping across the floor from two bullet wounds, one to the heart and the other a head shot. Alive five seconds before, his wide open eyes had instantly glassed over.

Behind the man was a door which was shut but not locked. McPherson burst through it, low, pivoting across the line of fire left to right. Nobody. Large glass jars stood on a long, wooden table. There was a faint whiff of burnt plastic, and also an indefinable sweet smell. The floor was strewn with straw. A battered suitcase lay flipped open on a bench at the other end of the table. McPherson went up to it.

Heroin. The dozens of small polythene bags inside it, each neatly sealed and filled with something that looked like dirty, slightly viscous toffee, told him he had just scored between one and two million dollars worth of genuine home made 999 Afghan brown.

The man lying dead in the corridor outside was a drugs hit. Whoever killed him had probably got away with as much as he could carry.

McPherson sat down on the bench, wiped the sweat off his brow, and laughed.

Dirty dissonance from here on in… Hilary Mantel’s stunning novel of the French Revolution

I just finished reading Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, all 900 pages of it – what a glory! Now I can’t understand how I could live three years in Paris and not really get the French Revolution.

I never knew that Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins were childhood friends, or that Camille was also friends with Danton. I guess I had the vague archetype of the revolution in my head… Louis called the Estates General in 1787, Bastille July 1789… but then it took two or three years before a Republic was declared, not until 1793 that Citoyen Capet was guillotined and then the Terror. I still don’t really know how the Terror ends and subsides into some status quo and then, not five years later, Bonaparte becomes consul…

Hilary’s research is extraordinary and it’s not surprising to learn later it was her first and unpublished novel, written in her 20s. There’s an energy and hunger for detail there that feel like youth… also the language. I’d like to think of an old writer having the gusto to make the at times uncouth Danton talk of Liberty being a “bitch who wants to be screwed on a bed of corpses”… but it seems natural in someone young.

What a character he is. And Camille and Robespierre and Lucile and Marat, each of them drawn so well that you feel it’s a convincing explanation of the dynamics of the revolution… how Danton and Robespierre could have accomplished so much between them by tacit alliance, yet personally dislike each other. How both of them were actually big enough not to let that get in the way… until events got out of hand and it was a challenge simply to stay alive for another day. Danton the hale and hearty, a merry revolutionary who can tell Sanson the executioner to make sure he holds his head up to the crowd at Place de la Revolution “it’s something worth seeing”. Max who is rescued from a mob by being pulled into a street on Rue Saint Honore and stays there for three years thereafter, guiltily sleeping with Eleonore the joyless daughter of the house while the worthy burghers pack the dining room with portraits of Robespierre. His prissiness, his ideological fervour and yet the strange parameters of permissiveness that went with it… like his early opposition to the death penalty and, later, to the excesses of the purge of the Church and freedom of belief. Danton six foot something, burly, ugly as sin but so much vitality that it seems to knock you over, Robespierre thin, precise, easy to imagine forgetting to eat.

And Camille, Camille, billed as the enfant terrible of the revolution, written into its lore from the earliest days due to the fact that he roused a rabble on July 12, 1789, jumping on the terrace of a cafe in the Tuileries. The hint of bisexuality, the total unpredictability, a mesmerising writer, a charismatic orator when he could get past his stutter. His flirtation with Annette and then married to Lucile and you feel like it makes sense, there’s a touch of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, two larger than life personalities whose antics and pathological mind games simply seem to confirm how madly in love with each other they really are. Gorgeous.

And little, grubby Marat, who Wikipedia says spent six years as a doctor in Newcastle in the 1770s.
Over time the nuance of a society in daily convulsions is teased out. Although our popular images of the revolution are of sans-culottes and tricoteuses, crowds baying for blood and an intense class consciousness,

Marat is the only figure who could be said to have derived his influence from the plebs – Camille, Danton and Robespierre were all lawyers from good provincial families, sent away to school, articled in Paris. Their ideas were certainly radical in terms of political order, but I think we have trouble looking back at radical movements in history without being caught in the ahistorical prism of class struggle in the Marxist sense.

There were debates for a short time on the fringes about whether there should be limits to private property – no feudal estates, for example, or commerce beyond the small enterprise… but they don’t seem to figure as central parts of any party’s platform… Arguably, the Putney Debates went further than that in England’s Civil War, 150 years earlier. As both Robespierre and Danton say at the end, the mob are fickle.

It’s a revolution led by lawyers, which explains its verbal exuberance. Hilary’s text is so rich it sent me scurrying to find the French quotes. Danton, when the army is one defeat away from foreign occupation of Paris: “il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace”. Robespierre condemning Louis: “Je prononce à regret cette fatale vérité… mais Louis doit mourir, parce qu’il faut que la patrie vive.” On the terror: “La terreur n’est autre chose que la justice prompte, sévère, inflexible”.

And, in terms of class consciousness, while it’s true that many aristos were guillotined, and “aristo” became a dangerous term of abuse about anything from shoes to breakfast preferences, many aristos were major players in the revolution. As well as Philippe Egalite, it was virtually defined in the first two years by a struggle between the Comte Mirabeau and Lafayette (of US fame). The top commanders of the army continue to be mainly aristos – Dumouriez & Arthur Dillon.

And I think its attractiveness is due to the fact that it’s a constant battle of ideas and words. Camille ends up becoming famous as a journalist – a pamphleteer – as was Marat, as were others, such as the Royalists in the early days and the Brissotins or Girondins afterwards. Camille in fact lives by the word and dies by the word. Such is the febrility of the times that although he had written La France Libre, his famous call for a republic, in early 1789, publishers had constantly rejected it…. and yet it took just four days after the storming of the Bastille for it to hit the streets on July 18. His last newspaper Le Vieux Cordelier, which he began in the middle of the Terror in December 1793, was what made Robespierre abandon him, leaving him to his many enemies, not least the scary Saint-Just. Let’s not forget Tom Paine was knocking around at this time too… in fact the feel of the kind of “journalism” it was seems very much like the post-newspaper Blogging universe of the Naughties… everyone is accustomed to the idea that a publication may go only several, maybe a dozen issues, before it folds into something else… as far as I am aware there weren’t any dailies as such during this time.

This makes it much more vibrant than the Russian Revolution. In many ways just as classic… the sense that even the people in at the start had no idea where it would finish, the endless complexities of factional fighting and so on… but Stalin and Trotsky weren’t busy slugging it out in a way of pamphlets against Kerensky and then against each other. You could talk of many overlapping dissonant political currents… not necessarily given voice to. Not driven by words in quite the same way.

The same with the Iranian Revolution… there’s really only Khomeini pronouncing and he doesn’t have a great many bon mots. Interviewed on the tarmac as he came back to Tehran airport from exile he was asked if he could tell the gaggle of reporters how he feels. “Nothing. I don’t feel anything.” he replied. Not that that was actually true, it probably says more about the sub-culture of that stage in the Islamic Revolution and where joy is in the pecking order of values… This is a man who, even though he writes mystical love poetry in Arabic, routinely looks at the floor when he is travelling by car so as not to have to see all the evil through the window. For a time there was Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who returned from the States (my old alma mater, the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown!) to run Iranian media after the revolution and knew how to give an Ivy League version of events to the press pack camped in Iran through 1980… he had affairs with several women correspondents and his cachet in posterity is slightly increased by the fact he was shot for treason in 1982… but I’m not sure he had flights of eloquence in the same style as the French revolutionaries. I think the bar was so low it may simply have been amazing to the press pack that the Revolution had a spokesman who could speak fluent colloquial American.

And yet the words in the French Revolution are so tied to action, that’s what makes them exciting. And there is a raging battle of ideas, whereas in the Iranian Revolution there’s a strong strain of general agreement from the time that the Shah’s plane takes off that we want an Islamic Republic… it just takes two years and a war to shake that out into triumph of the clerics and wilayat-e faqih, a fangled doctrine of theocracy, rather than the more modernist concept many of the early student leaders had imagined…

So a half-decent PR flack and Khalkali, the Hanging Judge with a friendly grin on his face most of the time (as indeed does Ahmedinejad)… who was eccentric enough at least to spend his spare time writing an inditement of Cyrus the Great for homosexuality… and that’s about it for outspoken characters in the Iranian Revolution…

The American Revolution of course has plenty of words and plenty of battles of ideas, a fact you wouldn’t guess from the overwhelming aura of harmony projected back on to it by politicians of modern times… Adams, Jefferson & Hamilton were in a right old ding dong for years, Franklin always a great character. But I’m not sure about its claim to actually be a revolution. The fact is the Brits were a pretty sparse occupying power. There was a court and a feudal class but they were five weeks treacherous voyage away… and although the constitutional republic is a fine idea, with its lucid separation of powers, gnarled out by thinkers who, like the French, were not afraid of classical learning… it’s difficult to really believe it was a revolution in the way we normally use that word simply because there was hardly any civil strife and very low bloodshed – what kind of revolution has a (Boston) “Massacre” in which five people were killed by the oppressors?

But back to Hilary… More characters and more! The Duke of Orleans, later Philippe Egalite, whom it took two years to see he couldn’t use the revolution to get the crown off his cousin Louis… A man who used his vast patronage network to support Desmoulins and Danton for a long time, who was elected to the Assembly for Paris and who voted to put Louis to death… and with all that intellectually mediocre, perhaps with a certain aristocratic resolve but not a great man.

Manon Robert, the archetype of the brilliant salon hostess, whose husband committed suicide by stabbing himself on a park bench in a small country town four days after she was executed. Saint-Just who exceeds even Robespierre in his search for purity – what is it about purity which is always so suspicious? Danton’s two wives Gabrielle and the girl Louise. Mirabeau, so enormously ambitious… you have to wonder if some kind of constitutional deal would have been worked out with Lafayette and the monarchy if he had not died (of natural causes) in 1791. Louis and Antoinette don’t figure so much, it’s true but I like the focus where it is, with the revolutionaries. David popping up here and there, and a nice loop closed because you feel you know the story now of Marat in the bath.

I was surprised it ended with the executions of Danton and Camille in April 1794, since we know (God bless Wikipedia) that Robespierre and Saint-Just only lasted until July, and it was their deaths which spelled the end of the Terror in some enormous fracas where the house they were in was stormed at night, Robespierre tried to shoot himself but only succeeded in shattering his jaw, and they were executed the next day without trial… Robespierre was guillotined face up and apparently someone ripped the bandaging off his face as he was on the scaffold which was so painful he screamed like an animal until the blade came down. In his last meeting at the Jacobins, as the mood started to turn against him, he was silenced for a moment in response to catcalling… “Look, he chokes on the blood of Danton” someone called out from the room.

And even though it’s 900 pages, which might actually be the longest book I’ve ever read since I’ve never done the Russian classics, it seems to move at a dizzying pace at the end. You really get that sense of day to day living, the utter certainty everyone has that this will not last… it’s not tenable.

Will there ever be another revolution in that classic sense? I think not. I think it relates to the friction on the passage of ideas, or rather the lack of it now. I’ve been trying to put my finger on what feels different here in the Middle East from when I was first here in the 80s… in terms of players and the state of play of various causes, we’re in remarkable stasis compared to the change in most of the rest of the world. Israel still occupies the Palestinians who do not have a state. Iran still fiercely believes in Iranian exceptionalism, and the fact it is a regional power. Half the region still has sclerotic, geriatric leadership with no sense of dignity, and there’s still the same uneasy alliance between Gulf oil and American military projection. Now in response to that we do have political Islam, which in recent years took a spectacular turn with the emergence of al-Qaeda and 911 – and political Islam is a universal idea, one of the prerequisites for a revolution…

But… even if there is Islamist takeover of this or that state or political system, it’s just impossible to believe it will mean the same as it would have even only 20 years ago… because of the zillion channel age and Jazeera and MBC and the Internet and rude jokes by SMS… yes I believe it’s down to that. Revolutions could be looked on, like revealed religions, from a technological point of view – they are mechanisms that propagate memes in a particular way and in particular contexts. The printing press lies between them, but the age for both of them is past. How would Robespierre maintain ideological purity in the age of 100 million blogs? No homogenous view is possible any more. Yes it’s dirty dissonance from here on in…

Some random cab rides in Jordan

Disgusted of Dabouk

Coming back from a short trip to Bahrain, I picked up a cab from the facility inside Alia airport. I’d just spent a couple of days in that rarefied atmosphere of the Gulf – cocooned in a business hotel which was all indoor fountains and shops selling souvenirs from a country the average business visitor never sees. Even going for a walk in the early evening was a struggle – it took 10 minutes to find anyone else on the street. So I was pretty full of the joys of Jordan being a normal country.

So when the leather jacketed, bryll-creamed driver, whose name was Muhannad, asked me what I thought about Jordan, I peddled my normal enthusiastic line… for sure there are many problems and a lot of poverty… but considering who the neighbours were they’d done OK. After all, it’s not an artificial environment like the Gulf…

“The Gulf is a cesspit, believe me,” said Muhannad. “Whenever they go to Bangkok they’re straight into the bars to find a little Thai girl.”

Unusually frank. But also I was intrigued as to how he could speak with so much confidence about Arab ex-pat behaviour in the Big Mango.

“I worked 13 years as a security guard for Royal Jordanian,” he said. Aha. You could picture him perfectly as one of those gruff guys sitting near the toilets practising their mean and penetrating look, far too stiff in their dress down to be anything other than what they are…

“We used to fly to the Far East a lot. The Saudis… they spend their days at home praying, or pretending to pray in between watching porno films. Then they go to Thailand to catch diseases.”

“They have no sense of humanity. They think the fact they sit on top of a pile of stinking tar means they are better than everyone else. They won’t work, they won’t learn, they cheat on their wives…”

This was turning into a pretty searing indictment of oil-rich manners – a prejudice I have to admit I share on the whole. I egged Muhannad on. He was working himself up a little, becoming more animated. His phone rang a couple of times but he didn’t answer. One oiled lock of hair popped out of the phalanx sitting on top of his head to droop down over his forehead but he made no attempt to brush it back… the Hashemites are stand-up guys, Jordan’s a fantastic combination of tradition and modernity, people here value family and education. We are religious without being fanatic etc etc.

And then came the kicker…

“And you know what else about the Saudis?” Al-Qaeda? Corruption? Total indifference to Palestine and social justice, I mused… but said nothing.

“They have no idea about foreplay,” said Muhannad, thumping the steering wheel.

Sorry?

“Foreplay! Women need foreplay to be properly stimulated. Do not fall upon your wives as beasts in the wild’, said the great Ghazzali‘,” shouted Muhannad.

I can’t say I have any direct knowledge of Gulfi male sexuality but let’s just say I wouldn’t be surprised. Muhannad was in full throttle now…

“They’ll screw anything that moves of course. Men, boys, camels. But not with love! They expect their wives to bear them dozens of children and take care of them… but they remain uncharted oceans as far as the men are concerned. They just stick it in, grunt a little, and then it’s over!”. He was shouting now even though there were only two of us in the car and no major noise distractions.

I worried that he was about to embark on a eulogy to Jordanian sexual tenderness, recount hoary old family stories of cousins who gave their wives multiple orgasms in the blink of an eye. But he contented himself with: “You can’t believe how many chances I had to go and work in those countries and make lots of money. But all the money in the world wouldn’t be enough to have to stay there…”

Marijuana fest

I got in a taxi early evening at Abdali, a large public square in Amman. In the darkness I clocked the driver was young but no more than that. It was a few seconds before, passing under a street light, we both turned to take each other in at the same moment.

“Wow!” he shouted with the kind of gusto my 1 ½ year old son normally uses. “Wooooow!” Then a giggle.

I looked at him again and recognised him as the driver from about three days before, when he’d told me about his day job earning 450 dinars a month as an accountant. It was also instantly obvious from his veiny, dilated eyes that he was stoned off his trolly.

“What are the chances of that?” he spluttered. “What are the chances?” and he collapsed in another fit of giggles. “It never happens! It never happens! Woooow!”

I had been at my desk all day, proposal writing, both bored and stressed – but was just on way to supper with friends. Nasser’s giggling was very infectious. Suddenly it was like smoking dope back in college…

“What if, right?”, I started..

“Yeah, yeah?” he said…

“What if… “ – snigger – “you dropped this guy off, outside a shop… like outside Safeways in Shmeissani?”

“Yeah?…”

“And then three years later – THREE YEARS LATER – you were driving past and stopped and picked up a passenger… and it was HIM! But you acted like nothing had happened. And just asked him… ‘got everything, then?’”

We both collapsed in a fit of giggles. Nasser weaved down Wadi Saqra at about ten miles an hour. And sitting in that old battered Toyota, I was intensely aware of how arbitrary mood can be, how many little bubbles float around us all the time. We stopped at the lights, next to us middle class family, three kids in the back, behind them lean, young man with his cigaretted hand lolling out the window, strong sound system cranking out some Arabic pop.

I got out and went to supper a lighter man. Drink and drive is a super bad idea, of course. But the odd marijuana cab fest? What a delight!

Tourette Syndrome

“Cor, look at her!” my chubby driver said about ten seconds after I’d got in the car here in Webdeh.

A gaggle of young women were walking up the street by the park.

I shifted in my seat. I’ve never really done “look at that!”. We turned the corner into the street with the government examination board headquarters. More young people, including women.

“What do you think of Jordanian women, then?” asked the driver.

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing, of course, perfectly well what he meant.

“Women – what do you think of them?” he insisted.

“I don’t really like talking about things like that,” I said.

“Why not?” he replied, and then before I could reply let rip with another “Coor!”

I guess I should have said ‘because it’s demeaning to them and to us and you should stop it too’. Instead, what I actually said was: “Because I’m married”, holding up my ring.

“Married?” he replied, “Well why didn’t you say? Did I offend you, then?”

“Well, err…”

“I offend people all the time with my big mouth. It’s just that I can’t keep it shut for some reason, never been able to. Sorry if I offended you,” he said.

And of course his candor was disarming. “Don’t worry, no problem,” I said.

Five seconds later: “Cor, look at her!” And so on, through the whole ride.

Viktor Frankl, a 150-mile race & the final sprint

Looking back, that last hour last Friday morning was total vindication of the philosophy one of my favourite books – Victor Frankel’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”. Not that we really clocked it at the time – sleepless by then for 30 hours, we had run 140 miles through the night, dawn, and early morning down the Jordan Valley in relays. We had “taken Aqaba” as the young Peter O’Toole said, pacing down into the town against an early spring shimmer rising in the late morning with a Red Sea backdrop, only to get lost in it and lose valuable time.

When we got back on track, we had just been overtaken by another team – a 100 meter lead after 220 km when we had just dropped perhaps 2 entire kilometres! Insupportable. There was clearly only one thing left to do – race them the last 10 miles to the finish. In sprints.

Such is the glorious insanity of “fun-runs”, particularly grotesque in this case. We were in the last stages of the Dead to Red, a relay race from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea, which started at four o’clock on Thursday afternoon by Wadi Mujib and snaked its way down the Jordan Valley, past Kerak, Tafila, Petra and Maan to the sea. We were one of 26 teams who had been running all evening, all night and most of the morning. There were no prizes. We’d already been beaten by teams including high school kids averaging twenty years younger than us, young fit Jordanians working for various companies, and, in one case, a team of young girls chaperoned by their teachers. And we were battling for 21st or maybe 22nd place (I still haven’t seen the formal results).

Viewed by external (what dissociatives might call ‘objective’) criteria, therefore, it could hardly matter less. And yet nothing mattered more. They were ahead of us when we should have been ahead of them. We knew we had to beat them or make ourselves ill trying. It was battle.

“Switch to 500s, switch to 500s,” we all yelled to Omar the driver in our car – drive in bursts of 500 metres and stop for the next runner to take the baton. Our two cars exchanged phone calls frantically every minute practically as we tried to figure out how far there was to go – no signs or landmarks we could gauge, we remained unaware of where the finish was until we saw it 300 metres away.

The other guys had two strong runners who they kept out for long distances. One, a tall, bald guy had the kind of lankiness that said maybe he could keep going like this for hours – we went one, two, three, four, five, six runners against him, swapping as we became more and more exhausted by our sprinting. First Taka, one of our two strongest runners, made in-roads on him, then a couple of others held him, or dropped a slight distance, then Tom, our ace in the hole, gained more until he passed him. As our car sped up ahead to be ready for the handover, we passed another team mate Aline as she struggled along a stretch between an industrial car park and some dubious hotels (“Bedouin Village”). Her face was as pure a look of pain as I can remember seeing in a long time.

Although it lasted an hour, it was so frantic that I can’t recall sequences. I remember two moments: one was getting out of the can half way down a hill that Elle had just had to struggle up the other side of, setting off so fast I vaguely wondered if it was good for me. The other was, at the other end of that long, long, 500 metres, trying to figure out as I hurled myself back into the van if that was blood I could taste in my throat as I dry-retched. It was that kind of race.

And then we were in the clear – somehow we had gained so much ground that the other team had dropped out of view. The only problem was, we still didn’t know if we had two or ten miles to go.

And then there was another team just in front of us. And, yes, we took them, to-oo-oo-ok them, danced all over their graves (got the mood, yet?) about 500 metres before the end did finally appear, an inflatable plastic victory arch with lots of balloons in front of the Radisson Hotel. As soon as we saw it we all got out of our two cars and ran together to the finish, Mark remembering to bring out the Spiderman doll which had somehow turned into our team mascot (and which is now sitting above the cupboard in the sitting room). I heard the race organizers say “20 hours six minutes”… and lost the seconds part.

The strangest thing about this race is not sleeping. I’ve come to a time in life when not sleeping for 24 hours would normally be an enormous effort. But it turns out if you run a fast mile every hour, it all changes. Your body is so confused it can no longer assert itself. So on and on we went, from dusk just by the Potash factory at the southern end of the Dead Sea, through Ghor al-Mazra’a and Ghor al-Safi, still tripping over ourselves because the teams were close enough together that occasionally the trailing cars would get tangled. Somehow we hadn’t sorted out music in our van so come midnight we were flicking the dial on the radio and came across Um Kalthoum singing ‘Anta Unmri’ – more perhaps to my taste than anyone else’s, but by then I could care less. I haven’t done karaoke in the Arab World so I don’t know if there are locally adapted tracks. All I can say is I think there’s a lot of mileage in it.

At two in the morning I formulated a haiku and asked the car if they wanted to hear it. Silence. ‘OK, you’re gonna hear it anyway, I said’.

A shy moon shines pale.
We thread our way toward the sea,
But dawn is still far

Silence. What did you think of my haiku, I asked, shamelessly. Your haiku, asked Tom? I thought you were quoting some old, important British guy. I am, I said.

As night turned into dawn and morning again, I found that my mind was deciding to dream anyway. I was still perfectly conscious but with my eyes closed I could register that rapid fire kaleidoscope of images, one morphing into the other, that I guess is REM – minus the narrative which I would guess was muted by the fact I was still awake. Out on the road, the cars had now switched to driving up to the end of each runner’s stretch, leaving them alone on the road with the twitter of birds and an early morning breeze, the late, fat, lazy moon having now plopped gently back into the blue sky behind it. I got weird imprints on my retinas — whenever I looked up and away from the road markings, I carried the lines onto what I was now looking at.

We had an amusing pit stop once when, our car finished its turn, we sped 5 k up the road to wait for our next turn. We stopped just next to a shack about 50 metres in from the road where some young men were busy doing something outside. They hailed us and invited us over. And so we had a 15 minute introduction to life as a migrant Egyptian agricultural labourer. They have come to Jordan to work on the watermelon fields, and were gutting a chicken they’d just bought live in the local suq for three dinars. They managed to make us sweet tea and we swapped a few jokes. A sad little footnote is that when I found out from the Saeed, I asked one of them what his name was – Hassanein? Mohammadein, typical names from the region and a matter of gentle teasing. There was a short intake of breath: “We are all Christian here,” he muttered and showed me the cross on the inside of his forearms which Copts like to place there. I explained what we were doing – they had seen all the people running past but not really understood it. One of them emitted a long, low whistle and then said, his head cocked in that kind of puzzled way: “But tell me, how old are you?”.

And the easy camaraderie which comes with common purpose and commitment. The team were just great and the normal badges of identity which we all wear and use to interchange with each other just blown away like the flotsam they are… there were six from Beirut and four from Amman, all expats of one stripe or another. I would reckon Jordanians were probably about a quarter to a third of the entrants… Tom, Eleanor, Katie, Taka, Mindy, Aline, Elle, Chris and Mark I salute you. The night before we had been one man down but Elle called Mark and he said he might as well come along “because he didn’t have anything else planned”. That Aussie thing, easy going, nonchalant, but also tough and up for it – dontcha just love it? Chris kept impeccable timing, Tom did impeccable times, Eleanor was the tactical brains, Mindy keeper of fair play (Twelve Terrific Teachers for Unicef, yay!), Taka who stayed relaxed even when we admitted we’d been sending him out on longer runs (he’s got the legs for it) for all kinds of specious reasons, Elle’s classy headstand in the middle of the highway, Aline’s face of pure grit (I so wish I’d had a camera at that point) and Katie for having the courage and common sense to jump blind into a ditch (which turned out to be seven foot deep) in order to avoid being mowed down by some drunken driver at dawn… and then carry on running. So classy.

The other teams? A young French team who dressed as bedouin (clearly not the same sensibilities about ‘going ethnic’ as the anguished Anglo-Saxon liberal) and then later turned out in pink undies to show how buff they were. You have to wonder what the Beni Hassan and Amareen in their tents just a couple of hundred yards away made of that. And of course the first third of the teams we only saw at the start line – not even at the finish when we spent all of our time in the bar. The race seems to be getting bigger – I would guess it grew by as much as 50% this year, and more serious athletes flying in. One of the fantastic things about distance athletics is that you still get to compete – not with but in the same race as – world class athletes. A few years back I joined a running club in a fit of enthusiasm and they sent me once to a club meet 5,000 metre race to make up the numbers… the entire field lapped me twice (it’s only 12 ½ laps) but that was nothing compared to the fact that there were less than 20 runners and one of them was the winner of the previous year’s London Marathon (and even he only came third). I can’t wait to see what the winning time was… as of before the race it stood at 14 hours 50 minutes or something like… for 151 miles!

As we came down to Aqaba, and could see Eilat separated by half a mile of no-mans-land, it was strange to think of what a role these tiny little straits had played in Middle East history – you could imagine where Nasser was placing his ships to blockade Aqaba, and for how many years before and after Marc Rich was running tankers from the Shah’s Iran, disguised as merchant vessels, to feed the Israeli pipeline running from Eilat to Ashkalon. Did Rich himself even ever visit this coastline, or was it all geopolitical business achieved with the flick of a pen and a couple of dry martinis in hotels in Geneva and Beirut? It’s all right there in front of you.

But I almost forgot – Frankel and Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankel was a prominent Austrian psychotherapist who survived Auschwitz and then formed a new school of therapy based on his own life experiences – Man’s Search for Meaning is his popular explanation of that school, the main ideas being… the modern quest for happiness is a total disaster (it should come as by product of fulfilment or not at all), experience should matter as much as achievement… and most important of all Frankl posits a will to meaning, in much the same way as Nietzsche posited a will to power. If you strive hard enough to find meaning in your life, any activity can become invested with meaning. This is the fundamental human freedom, which can never be taken away, even if you can only manifest it by choosing to die a good death, or as he put it, to sing Shma Israel as you enter the gas chamber.

So there we were, a bunch of knackered amateurs, near the back of the race, no fame, no money… nothing… except our own determination that we had to race our little hearts out that last hour, to try and beat those other guys or bust. We took it seriously because it mattered and it mattered because we took it seriously. It mattered because it mattered is all. And I have to say that last hour has to be the most exciting sporting event I’ve ever been a player in…

The last English radical has died

For me, Michael Foot was the genuine article, the genteel, eccentric English socialist who just did what he thought was right and managed to maintain both resolute disagreement and warm personal ties for decades with a range of adversaries. He was not afraid to be a man of ideas and a man of letters, and also a man who sought not to deny his privileged background in some painful and demeaning sham egalitarianism, but instead to use the gifts it brought him for what he saw as the common good.

Last and best, he was a leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, a day at the polls away from Number 10, who was a staunch republican – perhaps the last man in Britain to have held high office with proclaimed republican views (one of those inversions of progress, like the last Moon landing having been nearly four decades ago now… it feels like the past should be the future). These days the Left are too nervous about appearing mainstream to be republican, and too pragmatic to stand on any principle. I’m not actually a republican myself but I wish there were more of them around in public life, as I wish there were more atheists, particular in American public life (Richard Dawkin makes a very convincing case that the absolute necessity to appear to have religious faith there embeds hypocrisy among political elites and degrades the quality of public life about everything). More proponents of the death penalty too in England. It’s all so bland these days.

But also there’s this incredible sense of nostalgia – he was the first political leader of a party at a time when I developed views, becoming leader of Labour in 1980 after they had just been wiped out by Margaret Thatcher. Michael Foot seems to recall now a bygone Britain that was both scuzzier and more depressed in a kind of innocent way. When canteens served awful powdered coffee and milk mate and everyone smoked roll ups underneath strip lights overhead, trade unions meant something, Enoch Powell was more than a distant memory, an old banger meant a car with a running board on it. When there was actually an ideological debate of sorts in public life, and he was a speaker that took well to being heckled. Ugly was cool, punk was still around and the mood du jour for your average teenager was anger, engaged or disengaged. You could probably count the places in London where you could buy a cappucino, Romany were gypsies, and Fabians was a name to conjure with.

Foot’s one major failing as leader, apart from losing the 1983 election, is that he supported the Falklands War. But let’s not forget that that election, in which Labour had its most radical manifesto – abolish the House of Lords, raise personal taxation, unilateral nuclear disarmament, leave the EEC, and nationalise the banks – was the one that brought Tony Blair and Gordon Brown into parliament. That manifesto was 700 pages long – clearly a big reason in itself why a party would lose an election! But you can’t help liking a leader who doesn’t see how that’s awful tactics. Margaret Thatcher, as in many things a forerunner of the American right, mastered the medium of television while simultaneously claiming it was packed with snotty liberals (true) who were systematically biased against the Conservatives (untrue) – domination and self-righteousness all in one.

Foot was in the situation of many radicals in the Cold War – left enough to talk of capitalism and its ills, but sensible and freedom-loving enough that there could be no question of appeasement of the Soviet Union. A thin middle line.