Touchstones: Essays In Literature, Art And Politics

Nationalism and Utopia

A recurring theme in a book of essays that Sir Isaiah Berlin has just published — The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas⁴¹ is very topical: the question of nationalism. With its awareness of history, its passion for region and landscape, its defence of local tradition, language and customs, and the way that it offers an ideological mask for chauvinism, xenophobia, racism and religious dogmatism, nationalism will doubtless, in the next few years, be the great political force that will resist the internationalisation of our social and economic lives brought about by the development of industrial civilisation and democratic culture.

How and where was this ideology born that vies with religious intolerance and revolutionary extremism in causing the worst wars and social cataclysms in history? According to the old and wise professor, it came into the world, initially in a benign form, as a response to the utopian dreams of the perfect society — which once existed in a former Golden Age or which will be constructed in the future in accordance with reason and science — that is one of the most constant motifs of Western thought.

In the eighteenth century, a Neapolitan philosopher and historian revolutionised the belief that Rome and Greece offered a sort of static paradigm of human evolution, which all societies should aspire to. In his Scienza nuova, Giambattista Vico argues that this is simply not true. He states that history is movement and that every age has its unique form of society, thought, beliefs and customs, religion and morality, that can only be understood properly on its own terms by true historians who can combine documentary and archaeological investigation with sympathy and imagination, which he called fantasy. In this way, Vico dealt a severe blow to the ethnocentric view of human evolution and laid the foundations for a relativist and plural conception of evolution in which all cultures, races and societies had the right to the same consideration.

But the real cradle of nationalism is Germany, and its earliest exponent is Johann Gottfried Herder. The utopia that he was reacting against was not located in a remote past but rather in an overwhelming present: the French Revolution, daughter of the philosophes and the guillotine, whose armies were advancing throughout the entire continent, levelling and integrating the continent under the weight of the same laws, ideas and values, which were proclaimed as superior and universal, standard bearers of a civilisation that would soon encompass the entire planet. Against this threat of a uniform world that would speak French and be organised according to the cold and abstract principles of rationalism, Herder erected his own little citadel that was formed by blood, earth and language: das Volk. His defence of the particular, of local costumes and traditions, of the right of all peoples to have their identity recognised and respected, has a positive aspect. It is not racist or discriminatory — as these same ideas would become in the writings of Fichte, for example — and can be interpreted as a very human and progressive vindication of small and weak societies when faced by powerful societies with imperial designs. Furthermore, Herder’s nationalism is ecumenical; his ideal is a diverse society in which all the linguistic, folk and ethnic expressions of humanity can coexist, without hierarchies or prejudice, in a kind of cultural mosaic.

But these dispassionate, beneficent ideas can become charged with violence when they fall on a terrain that has been fertilised by resentment and wounded national pride and, above all, by Romantic irrationalism. According to Berlin, Romanticism was a delayed rebellion against the humiliations inflicted on the German people by the armies of Richelieu and Louis XIV, which held back a Protestant renaissance in the north. And the modernising designs of Frederick the Great in Prussia, who imported French staff, also contributed to the pent-up hostility against this disparaging and haughty French nation, which saw itself as the arbiter of intelligence and taste, and it made people reject everything that came from France, in particular the ideas of the Enlightenment.

With its exaltation of the individual, of history and of local issues as opposed to the universal, timeless philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Romantic movement gave nationalism a major boost. It swathed it in multicoloured, strident images, supplied it with a heated rhetoric and put it within reach of a general public, through plays and novels and poems that focused on picturesque and emotive local traditions. A positive affirmation of local values later turned into contempt for outsiders. The defence of German singularity soon became an affirmation of the superiority of the German people — and for German, read Russian, or French or Anglo Saxon — which had a historical mission that, for racial, religious or political reasons, it had to carry out on the world stage. Other nations would have to comply or else be punished for their non-compliance. This is the road that led to the great disasters of 1914 and 1939. And also the road that caused Latin America to maintain the absurd balkanisation of the colonial period and fight bloody wars to preserve or alter boundaries which, in any event, were pure inventions, without any ethnic, geographic or traditional basis.

The thesis of Sir Isaiah Berlin, which is magnificently argued throughout the eight essays brought together in this book (and we must thank Henry Hardy for this: he has made sure that the vast work of the Latvian professor has not remained scattered in myriad academic journals), is that nationalism is a doctrine or a state of mind, or both, that comes about as a reaction to the utopia of a universal and perfect society. We might add that nationalism is also a utopia, no less real or artificial than other utopias that argue for a classless society, the republic of the just, the republic of racial purity or of preordained truth.

The very idea of nation is fallacious, if we conceive it as an expression of something homogeneous and perennial, in which language, tradition, habits, customs, beliefs and shared values go to make up a collective personality that is clearly differentiated from other groups. In this sense, there are no nations, nor have there ever been nations, in the world. The societies that are closest to this fantasy model are archaic and barbarous societies, which have been kept out of modernity, and almost out of history, by despots and isolation. All other societies offer a sort of framework, in which different ways of being, speaking, believing and thinking can coexist. How we decide to live has more to do with individual choice than with tradition or family or the language we were brought up in. Not even language, perhaps the most genuine marker of social identity, can be said to be synonymous with nation. Because almost all nations speak different languages — even if one is official — and because, with very few exceptions, almost all languages escape national borders and find their own way in the world.

No nation has evolved from the natural and spontaneous development of a single ethnic group, religion or cultural tradition. They all came about as a result of political arbitrariness, dispossession or imperial intrigue, crude economic interests, brute force combined with good fortune, and they all, even the oldest and most distinguished of them, have erected their borders on a devastated terrain of destroyed or repressed or fragmented cultures, incorporating people who have been thrown together through wars, religious strife or out of a simple survival instinct. Every nation is a lie that time and history have given — as in old myths or classical legends — an appearance of truth.

But it is the case that the great modern utopias — Marxism and Nazism, that looked to abolish borders and reorder the world — proved to be even more fragile and transitory. We can see this in particular today, with the rapid collapse of Soviet totalitarianism, as nationalism is reborn from the ashes in countries formerly under Soviet rule and threatens to become the great ideological rallying cry for people looking to reclaim their sovereignty.

It is important, therefore, at the threshold of this new historical period, to remember that nationalism is no more compatible with democratic culture than is totalitarianism. If proof is needed, read the splendid essay that Isaiah Berlin dedicates to Joseph de Maistre, a reactionary par excellence and the father of all nationalisms. Berlin sees him not as he is usually depicted, as a retrograde, a thinker who turned his back on the present, but rather as a terrible visionary and prophet of the obscurantist apocalyptic events that Europe would suffer in the twentieth century.

Nationalism is the culture of the uncultured, the religion of the demagogue, and a smokescreen behind which prejudice, violence and often racism can be found lurking. Because at the root of all nationalism is the conviction that being part of a specific nation is an attribute, something distinctive, an essence shared by similarly privileged people, a condition that inevitably establishes a difference — a hierarchy — with respect to other people. It is the easiest thing in the world to play the nationalist card to whip up a crowd, especially if that crowd is made up of poor and ignorant people who are looking to vent their bitterness and frustration on something or someone. Nothing better than the pyrotechnics of nationalism to distract these people from their real problems, to prevent them from seeing who are their real exploiters, by creating a false illusion of unity. It is not by chance that nationalism is the most solid and widespread ideology in the so-called Third World.

Despite this, it is true to say that along with the crumbling of the collective utopia, we are also witnessing today the slow decline of the nation, the discreet removal of borders. Not as a result of an ideological offensive, another utopian assault, but rather as a consequence of the growth of trade and commerce that has brought down national barriers. The flexibility of democratic societies has allowed the internationalisation of markets, capital and technology, and the development of the great industrial and financial conglomerates that have spread across countries and continents. And as a result of all this, there have been moves towards economic and political integration, in Europe, Asia and the Americas, which are beginning to transform the face of the planet.

This widespread internationalisation of our lives is perhaps the best thing that has happened in the world to date. Or, to be more precise, because the progress towards this goal is not irreversible — nationalists could interrupt it — the best thing that could happen. Through this process, poor countries will become less poor, since they will fit into markets where they can use their comparative advantages to good effect, and prosperous countries will achieve new levels of scientific and technological development. And more important still, democratic culture — the culture of the sovereign individual and civil and pluralist society, the culture of human rights and the free market, of private enterprise and the right to criticise, the culture of decentralised power — will grow stronger where it already exists and will extend to countries where now it is a mere caricature or a simple aspiration.

Is there a certain utopian ring to all this? Of course. And, even in the best of cases, all this is all a distant possibility, which will not be achieved without setbacks. But, for the first time it is there, within our grasp. And it is up to us whether it becomes a reality or it disappears like a will-o’-the-wisp.

Cambridge, November 1992

The Man Who Knew Too Much

If in addition to his brilliance, Isaiah Berlin (1909–97) had not been so well liked and held in such high regard, then it is quite possible that he would never have been the universally recognised intellectual figure that he had become by the time of his death, and that most of his work would remain unknown to the majority of his readers outside a handful of academic colleagues and students in Oxford and in American universities where he taught. Throughout his life he showed an Olympian lack of interest in whether or not his essays were read or published — he sincerely believed that they were not important enough to merit that honour — and he also decided not to write his autobiography or write a diary, as if he were not remotely concerned about the image that he might leave for posterity (‘Après moi le déluge’, he liked to say).

Those of us who did not attend his classes and yet still feel ourselves to be his students will never be able to thank enough Henry Hardy, the philosophy postgraduate at Wolfson College (that Isaiah Berlin founded and ran in Oxford between 1966 and 1975), who, in 1974, proposed to his supervisor that he should collect, edit or reedit his writings. However incredible it might seem, up until that date, he had published only three books, on Marx, Vico and Herder, and his four essays on freedom. The rest of his vast written work was unpublished, packed in dusty boxes in his office, or buried in scholarly journals, Festschriften, in folders containing testimonials, speeches, reports, reviews, obituaries — or in archives of official institutions, feeding the worms. Thanks to the persuasive gifts of Hardy, who managed to overcome Isaiah Berlin’s tenacious reticence to excavate his own bibliography, which he did not think was justified, and to Hardy’s titanic research and rigorous editing, between 1978 and 1999 there appeared Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Magus of the North, The Sense of Reality and The Roots of Romanticism, the books that really cemented the prestige of Isaiah Berlin inside and outside the university. In the near future, his voluminous correspondence will also be published. Without the devotion and tenacity of Henry Hardy, this master of liberal thought that we know today would not exist. And without Michael Ignatieff, another friend and persistent follower of the professor from Latvia, he would still be a mere ghost, without flesh or blood, shielded behind a scattered bibliography.

Just as the volumes compiled by Hardy proved to the world that the insinuations of his rivals were absolutely false, when they put around the idea that Isaiah Berlin was merely a brilliant conversationalist, a salon philosopher, without the patience or the energy to undertake work of great intellectual scope, so, thanks to Ignatieff — a journalist and historian, born in Canada, a graduate of Toronto and Harvard, now resident in England — we now know⁴² that the author of The Hedgehog and the Fox had an interesting and, at times, dramatic and adventurous life. His life was not just spent, as might first appear, submerged in the rituals and the peaceful cloisters of the elegant unreality of Oxford, for he was involved, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, in the great events of the century, like the Russian Revolution, the persecution and extermination of Jews in Europe, the creation of Israel, the Cold War and the great ideological conflicts between Communism and democracy in the post-Second World War period. The character that emerges from Ignatieff’s book — an affectionate and loyal book, but also an independent work because, true to Berlin’s ethical principle par excellence, that of fair play, he does not hesitate in pointing out his errors and defects along with his virtues and excellent qualities — is still very attractive, a modest, cordial, amenable and sociable man, around which the legend that followed him throughout his life was built. But the picture is also more complex and contradictory, more human and more profound, of an intellectual who, despite having received major honours in his county of adoption, Great Britain — President of the Royal Academy, Rector of an Oxford college, recipient of a knighthood from the Queen and of the Order of Merit — always felt deep within himself that he was an expatriate and a Jew, supporting a tradition and a community that had been, since time immemorial, the object of discrimination, unease and prejudice, a condition that contributed decisively to the insecurity that shadowed him through every period of his life and also, doubtless, shaped his prudent outlook, his desire to integrate into society and to go unnoticed, away from the glare of power and success, and also shaped his systematic defence of tolerance, pluralism and political diversity and his hatred of fanaticism of any form. Behind the inexhaustible conversationalist who, it seemed, bewitched guests at dinners and parties with the quality of his stories, his fluency and his extraordinary memory, there hid a man torn by the moral conflicts that he described before, and better than, anyone else: freedom and equality, justice and order, the atheist Jew and the practising Jew, and a liberal fearful that unrestricted freedom might lead to ‘the wolf eating the lambs’. The clear, serene and luminous thinker suggested by his writings comes out in the portrait painted by Michael Ignatieff. But beneath the shining clarity of his ideas and his style there appears a man overwhelmed by doubt, who made mistakes and was tortured by these mistakes, who lived in a state of discreet but constant tension that prevented him feeling totally integrated into any society, despite all appearances to the contrary.

Although he never considered writing his autobiography, Isaiah Berlin agreed to talk to his friend Michael Ignatieff, in front of a tape recorder, about all the events in his life, on condition that Ignatieff would only publish the results of his research after Berlin’s death. The conversation lasted ten years and ended in the final week of October 1997, a few days before his death, when Sir Isaiah, very fragile and racked by illness, invited his biographer to Headington House, his country house in Oxford, to correct some facts that his memory had clarified, and to remind Ignatieff, insistently, that his wife, Aline, had been the centre of his life, and that he was for ever in her debt. Ignatieff rounded off these personal memoirs with very detailed research in Russia, the United States, Israel and England, interviewing hundreds of people associated with Berlin, and combing newspapers, books and archives, so his biography, without being definitive, is certainly a very complete account of the life of the great thinker, linking it to the development of his interests, convictions, ideas and intellectual work. It is a literary biography, in which the life and the work are melded.

Although Isaiah Berlin spent only his first twelve years in Russia (he was born into a well-off Jewish family in 1909 in Riga, at a time when Latvia belonged to the Russian Empire), the experiences of those early years of his childhood, affected by tremendous social convulsions and family upheavals, left an indelible impression and shaped two aspects of his personality: his horror of totalitarianism and dictatorships, and his Judaism. The main event of this childhood was, without doubt, the Bolshevik revolution which he saw close up in Petrograd, where his family had taken up residence after fleeing from the insecurity and the threats that the Jewish community was subject to in Riga. In Petrograd he witnessed, at the age of seven and a half, scenes of street violence that made him immune for ever to revolutionary enthusiasm and ‘political experiments’. In this period, his hostile attitude towards Communism was born, and he remained faithful to it throughout his life, even at the time of the Cold War, when the great majority of the intellectual community of which he was part was Marxist or close to Marxism. He never yielded to this temptation; and his anti-Communism led him to extreme positions that were rare in him, like defending the United States during the unpopular Vietnam War and refusing to sign a protest against Washington in response to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (Castro ‘may not be a Communist’, he wrote to Kenneth Tynan, ‘but I think that he cares as little for civil liberties as Lenin or Trotsky’⁴³). This attitude led him to commit an act that was not very consistent with his pluralist ethic: he used his academic influence to block the appointment to a Chair in Politics at the University of Sussex of Isaac Deutscher, an exiled Jew like himself, but an anti-Zionist and a left-wing intellectual, the author of the most famous biography of Trotsky. His somewhat dubious response to those who accused him of behaving in this affair like ‘the anti-Communist witch hunters’ was that he could not support for a Chair anyone who subordinated scholarship to ideology.

Fleeing once again, this time not only from fear but also from hunger, the Berlin family returned to Riga for a short time in 1920, and on the train they were subjected to insults and attacks from anti-Semitic passengers and officials, which, according to Berlin, made him realise for the first time — and for ever — that he was not Russian or Latvian, but Jewish, and would always be so. Although he was an atheist and was educated in England in a secular environment, he was always committed to the community and the culture of his ancestors, even to the extreme of strictly observing Jewish religious rituals at home. He was a curious practising non-believer. And, as a Zionist, he collaborated closely with one of the founders of the State of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, although, unlike a number of his relatives, he never thought of emigrating and becoming an Israeli citizen. A lot of this work was done during the Second World War, when Isaiah Berlin was serving as an analyst and political adviser to the British government, in New York and in Washington, which must have caused him much anguish and many moral dilemmas, given the tense and sometimes antagonistic relationship that existed between the Foreign Office, that was pro-Arab, and the Zionist leaders. Knowing in detail these contradictions in Isaiah Berlin’s personal life helps us to understand the secret root of one of his most famous theories: that of ‘contradictory truths’.

The Latvian Jewish community into which Isaiah was born spoke Russian, Latvian and German, and although the child learned these three languages, he identified most with Russian culture, a language and a literature that he studied all his life. In England, while he was educated at a most distinguished Christian public school, St Paul’s in London, and then, thanks to his outstanding grades, at Oxford, he continued studying Russian alongside philosophy, so that although the umbilical cord that bound him to Russia was cut at twelve years of age, when he became a British citizen and was assimilated into the life of his second country, his intellectual sympathy and love for Russian language and literature remained. We can see this in the remarkable assurance and knowledge that he brought to his many essays on Russian writers and thinkers (Russian Thinkers is, for me, his best book), like those dedicated to Tolstoy, Turgenev, or his admired model, the liberal Alexander Herzen. On his return to Russia for a few months in 1945 as a British diplomat — a journey that would have an incalculable effect on his emotional and political life — the two great writers that he met, Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, were literally astonished at the fluent elegance with which this professor from another world spoke the cultured Russian of former times, and also that he was so well acquainted with a literature and authors that were beginning to become ever more invisible or remote in this society that was subject to the iron censorship of Stalin.

The Second World War radically changed the private world of Isaiah Berlin. Without it, it is very likely that his life would have been spent, like those of other dons in Oxford, among the halls where he first gave classes on philosophy and later on political and social ideas, in libraries and in his rooms in the most prestigious and traditional of all the colleges in the university, All Souls, where he had been elected as a Fellow at the incredible age of twenty-three (the first Jew to be given a place at that college). But when the war broke out, this ‘asexual and erudite’ life underwent an abrupt transformation: the young don, whose fame as a polyglot and specialist in European cultures — Russian and German in particular — was already widespread in academic circles, was sent to the United States by the British government, to New York and Washington, to act as an adviser to the Foreign Office and the Embassy in its dealings with the White House. Between 1941 and 1945, Sir Isaiah did extraordinary work for his country of adoption, not just through his analyses of the international situation and the delicate diplomatic relations between the Allies, which are perhaps the most read among all the Foreign Office briefing papers (in 1944 Churchill himself was so impressed by them that he wanted to know who had written them. The Foreign Office response described him as ‘Mr Berlin, of Baltic Jewish extraction, a philosopher’. Churchill wrote to Eden, ‘The summaries are certainly well written’, and Eden replied in his own hand that he thought the papers had ‘perhaps a too generous Oriental flavour’.⁴⁴ He also established a network of contacts in the highest social, academic and political circles in the United States, thanks to his personal charm and ease in society: a pyrotechnic conversationalist, he was the toast of diplomatic dinners and meetings, and, apart from hypnotising and amusing people with his anecdotes and his knowledge, he left his interlocutors with the rather gratifying impression that, by spending time with him, they were immersing themselves in high culture. This snobbish aspect of his life — which was always full of social engagements, dinners, galas and receptions in the highest echelons of society — curiously did not affect in any way his intellectual work, in which he never made concessions or lapsed into banality. It is not out of the question to see this somewhat frivolous aspect of his personality as a compensation, a substitute, for sex, of which it appears he had little or no experience until his later years. All his friends in Oxford were sure that he was a confirmed bachelor.

Perhaps this is the reason why he was so affected by an entire night that he spent in 1945, in a soulless flat in Leningrad, with the greatest living Russian poet, the unfortunate Anna Akhmatova. Isaiah Berlin had been sent for a few months to the British Embassy in Moscow and he took a nostalgic trip to Leningrad, in search of books and memories of his childhood. In a bookshop, someone overheard him asking after the poet and offered to take him to her flat, which was close by. Anna Akhmatova was fifty-six years old, twenty years older than Berlin. She had been a great beauty and a very famous poet before the Revolution. She was now in disgrace, and, since 1925, Stalin had not allowed her to publish a single line or give readings. Her tragic life was one of the saddest stories of those terrible years: the Soviet regime shot her first husband and imprisoned her third husband in a Siberian labour camp. Her son Lev, a talented young man with whom Isaiah Berlin spoke briefly on that night, would be sent to the Gulag for thirteen years, and the Soviet commissars blackmailed Akhmatova, offering to keep him alive if she wrote abject odes in adulation of the dictator who was tormenting her. Because the suffering of the poet greatly increased after that night, Isaiah Berlin would always feel remorse that he had been involuntarily responsible for this. (In the archives of the KGB, there is memorandum on the conversation, in which Stalin remarks to the cultural commissar Zhadanov, ‘So now our nun is consorting with British spies, is she?’⁴⁵)

He always emphatically claimed that the eleven or twelve hours that he spent with Akhmatova, were chaste, full of intense and sparkling conversation, and that in the course of the night she recited to him a number of the celebrated poems from the book Requiem that — in defiance of persecution — she was writing from memory, a book that would come to represent one of the highest testimonies of spiritual and poetic resistance against the Stalinist tyranny. The talk was of literature, of the great pre-Revolution authors, many of them dead or in exile, about whom Berlin could give her information, and, discreetly, they touched on Anna’s very difficult situation, her life always in the balance, seeing repression all around her and waiting for it to fall on her at any moment. But it is a fact that, although there was not the slightest physical contact between them, at noon the next day the austere Isaiah Berlin returned to the Hotel Astoria jumping with joy and proclaiming, ‘I am in love, I am in love!’ From that moment right up to his death, he would always state that this had been the most important event in his life. And Akhmatova’s reflections on that visit can be found in the beautiful love poems in Cinque. A story of impossible love, of course, because, from then on, the regime cut all communication and contact between the poet and the outside world, and in the following seven years, Berlin could not find out where she was living. (When he asked the British Embassy in Moscow to make enquiries for him, he was told that it would better for Akhmatova if he did not even try to contact her.) Many years later, in 1965, at the beginning of the thaw in the Soviet Union, Isaiah Berlin and other dons proposed the great Russian poet for an honorary doctorate in Oxford, and the Soviet authorities allowed her to travel to England to be awarded the doctorate. She was by now an old woman, but her prolonged ordeal had not broken her. Their meeting was cold, and when she looked around the sumptuous residence, Headington House, where Berlin lived with his wife Aline, she remarked caustically: ‘So the bird is now in its golden cage’.⁴⁶

The fact that the confirmed bachelor Sir Isaiah would, in 1956, come to marry Aline Halban, who belonged to an aristocratic and very wealthy French Jewish family, was not just a surprise to his innumerable friends; it was the culmination of a bizarre sentimental adventure that could provide rich material for a delightful picaresque comedy. When his diplomatic mission ended in 1945, Isaiah Berlin returned to Oxford, to his classes, his lectures, his intellectual work. He was beginning to be known on both sides of the Atlantic, and from that time on began to spend terms or semesters at North American universities, above all Harvard, as well as making periodic journeys to Jerusalem. He was showered with distinctions, and the British establishment opened their doors to him. And then, well into his forties, sex seems to have erupted in his life, in a manner that one could only describe as tortuous and academic: through adulterous liaisons with wives of his university colleagues. An irresistible humour fills the pages in which Ignatieff — with great affection and indulgence — describes a first affair, lasting several years, with meetings in churchyards, libraries, corridors and even in his parents’ house. Overcome one day with remorse, Berlin went to the husband and told him the truth: ‘I’m in love with your wife.’ The aggrieved husband dismissed the matter with an emphatic ‘That’s not possible,’ and changed the subject.⁴⁷

The second adventure was the serious one. Aline was married to an eminent physicist, Hans Halban, an Austrian by birth, who had worked on French nuclear programmes before coming to Oxford. She was attractive, cultured, rich and passionate about music and social life, like Isaiah himself. The close friendship forged as a result of these shared interests began to evolve in a ‘guilty’ manner. The physicist found out what was happening and tried to put an end to Aline’s outings. Isaiah Berlin paid him a visit. While (I am sure) they had tea, they discussed the problem that had arisen. Aline waited in the garden to hear the outcome of the conversation. The philosopher’s logic was persuasive, and the physicist recognised this. They both went out to the garden to walk among the rose bushes and the hydrangeas and inform Aline of their agreement: she could see her lover once a week, with the approval of her husband. And so it seems that friendly triangular harmony persisted until Hans Halban had to return to Paris. The couple decided to divorce, and Isaiah and Aline were free to marry. The marriage was a happy one. In Aline, Sir Isaiah found more than a tender wife: she was his accomplice, who shared his tastes and interests and helped him with his work, a woman capable of organising life with the confidence that comes with wealth and experience, and creating an agreeable, well-ordered existence in which social life — summers spent in Parragi in Italy, the music festivals at Salzburg, Pesaro and Glyndebourne, the dinners and outings with distinguished people — coexisted with the mornings and afternoons spent reading and editing his essays.

His intellectual work, which was rich, dense and extraordinarily acute, was concentrated in essays and articles, lectures and reviews, not in great syntheses, organic works or ambitious long-term projects. This was not due, as Ignatieff convincingly argues, to the dispersed life, full of many different obligations, that Berlin always led: brevity and small scale were his unmistakable hallmark. In the eighties, as if to prove those critics wrong who reproached him for not bringing out a major work on a wide-ranging theme, he decided to expand the 1965 lectures he had given in Washington on the origins of Romanticism (published posthumously as The Roots of Romanticism) and worked for many months in the British Library, filling hundreds of file cards. In the end, he gave it up: big projects were not his style. He lacked the ambition, the enormous faith in himself, that touch of obsession and fanaticism that produce masterpieces. The essay was more conducive to his modesty, his sceptical view of himself, his complete disregard for being, or appearing to be, a genius or a sage, his conviction — that was not a pose but something he felt very deeply — that what he had done, or was capable of doing, counted in the end for very little in the dazzling ferment of universal thought and literary creation.

That was not true, of course. Because in these relatively short texts that interpreted and reread the great thinkers, historians and writers of modern Europe, this born essayist — he is similar in this respect to another great liberal thinker, José Ortega y Gasset — has left a work that is seminal to the culture of our time. A work that ranks among the finest in the liberal tradition, a tradition that he brought up to date in a way that few other contemporary thinkers could match. Probably only Popper and Hayek have done as much as him, in our times, for the culture of freedom. Of the three, the most artistic, the best writer, was Isaiah Berlin. His prose is as transparent and readable as that of Stendhal, another polygraph who did not write but rather dictated his texts, and, quite frequently, the richness and animation of his ideas, his quotations and his examples, the liveliness and elegance with which he organised his thought, give his essays a novelistic quality, full of throbbing life and infectious humanity.

I saw him twice in my life. The first time, in the eighties, at a dinner at the house of the historian Hugh Thomas, at which the star guest was the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. They sat Sir Isaiah next to her, and, throughout the whole evening, the only one of the intellectuals present to whom she made a real attempt to show respect and affection was Berlin. He seemed rather overwhelmed and happy. At the end of the dinner, when Mrs Thatcher left, after a couple of hours of subtle cross-examination from the dinner guests, Isaiah Berlin declared, ‘Nothing to be ashamed of’. The second time was in Seville, in 1992, at a congress devoted to the fifth centenary of the discovery of America. People showered him with compliments, which he accepted blushingly but gratefully. I had written a series of articles on him, which would later become the prologue to the Spanish edition of the Hedgehog and the Fox, in which I committed the gaffe of stating that he had been born in Lithuania instead of Latvia. ‘Well, it’s not serious,’ he said, giving me some good-natured support, ‘because, when I was born, all that was Russia.’ Thank you, Sir Isaiah.

Paris, March 2000

The Thief in the Empty House

All Jean-François Revel’s books are interesting and polemical, but his memoirs, which have just been published under the enigmatic title The Thief in the Empty House, are also good-humoured, an uninhibited confession of sins, passions, ambitions and frustrations, written in a light and sometimes hilarious tone by a Marseillais who found himself, due to the vagaries of life, having to give up the university career he had dreamed of in his youth and become an essayist and political journalist.

He seems saddened, as he looks back, by this change of career. However, as far as his readers are concerned, it was not a misfortune but rather a stroke of luck that, because of Sartre and a beautiful journalist whom he made pregnant when he was very young, he had to give up his academic plans and head to Mexico and then to Italy to teach French language and culture. Dozens of philosophy teachers of his generation languished in university lecture halls teaching a discipline that, with very few exceptions (one of which is the work of Raymond Aron, whom Revel describes in this memoir with affectionate perversity), has become so specialised that it now seems to have little to do with life. In his books and articles, written in news-rooms or at home, spurred on by history in the making, Revel has never stopped writing about philosophy, but, in the style of Diderot or Voltaire, he bases it on a current problem. His brave and lucid contributions to contemporary debates have shown — like Unamuno in Spain — that journalism can be highly creative, a genre that can combine intellectual originality with stylistic elegance.

In its depiction of key events and characters, the book shows us an intense and varied life, where important moments — the resistance to the Nazis during the Second World War, the vicissitudes of French journalism in the second half of the twentieth century — mix with rather more bizarre ones, like the joyful description that Revel gives of a famous guru, Gurdjieff, whose circle he frequented in his early years. Sketched with the broad brushstrokes of a deft caricaturist, the celebrated visionary, who dazzled a great number of gullible people and snobs in his Paris exile, appears in these pages as an irresistible drunken bloodsucker, draining the pockets and the souls of his followers. These followers included — however surprising this might seem — not just gullible people who could easily be duped, but also a number of intellectuals and well-read people who saw Gurdjieff’s confusing verbiage as a doctrine that could lead them to rational knowledge and spiritual peace.

It is a devastating portrait, but, as with several other people described in the book, the severity of the criticism is softened by the good-humoured, understanding attitude of the narrator, whose benevolent smile rescues, at the last moment, characters who are about to be crushed under the weight of their own cunning, vileness, cynicism or stupidity. Some of the portraits of friends, teachers, enemies, or other people, are affectionate and unexpected, like his depiction of Louis Althusser, Revel’s teacher at the École Normale, who appears as a much more human and attractive person than one might expect from the Talmudic and asphyxiating commentator of Capital, or of Raymond Aron who, despite occasional disputes and misunderstandings with the author when they were both star contributors to L’Express, is always treated with respect, even when Revel became exasperated at his inability to maintain a coherent position in conflicts that he often caused.

On other occasions, the portraits are ferocious and the humour cannot counterbalance the vitriol. Take the brief appearance of the French socialist minister during the Gulf War, Jean-Pierre Chevènement (‘A provincial and devout Lenin, belonging to the category of idiots who look intelligent, that are more lethal and dangerous than intelligent people who look like idiots’), or the portrait of François Mitterrand himself, who Revel was very close to before Mitterrand’s rise to power, and who vies with Jimmy Goldsmith for the title of the most unusual and deplorable person in the great parade of characters in this book.

Revel depicts Mitterrand as a man fatally uninterested in politics (and also in morality and in ideas), who resigned himself to politics because it was a prerequisite for the only thing that mattered to him: to get to power and keep hold of it. It is a memorable portrait, like an identikit picture of a certain type of successful politician: outwardly friendly, professionally charming, superficially cultured, relying on actions and phrases learned off by heart, a glacial mind and a capacity for lying bordering on genius, together with an uncommon ability to manipulate human beings, values, words, theories and programmes as the situation demanded. It is not just the leading figures of the left who are treated with jocular irreverence in the memoir. Many right-wing dignitaries, beginning with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, also appear as models of demagogy and irresponsibility, capable of endangering democratic institutions or the future of their country out of petty vanity and a small-minded, short-term vision of politics.

The most exquisite (and also the most cruel) portrait of all, a small masterpiece within the book, is that of the Anglo-French Jimmy Goldsmith, the owner of L’Express at the time when Revel was the editor of the magazine, a time when, incidentally, the magazine achieved a quality that it did not have before and has not had since. Scott Fitzgerald thought that ‘rich people were different’, and the brilliant, handsome and successful Jimmy (who now keeps boredom at bay by squandering twenty million pounds, in the upcoming elections in Britain, on a Referendum Party that will defend British sovereignty against the colonial aspirations of Brussels and Chancellor Kohl) seems to prove him right. But it might be difficult in this case to share the admiration that the author of The Great Gatsby had for millionaires. A human being can have an exceptional talent for finance and be, at the same time, a pathetic megalomaniac, self-destructive and awkward in every other respect. The account that Revel gives of the delirious political, social and newspaper projects that Goldsmith dreamed up and then forgot almost at the same moment, the intrigues that he stirred up against himself, in a constant sabotage of a company that, despite this, kept providing him with benefits and prestige, is hilarious, something out of a Balzac novel.

Of all the facets of Revel’s life — he was a teacher, an art critic, a philosopher, an editor, a gourmet, a political analyst, a writer and a journalist — it was as a writer and a journalist that he found the greatest fulfilment and in which he made his most lasting contributions. Every journalist should read his account of the highs and lows of this vocation, to realise how passionate it can be and, also, how beneficial and harmful. Revel refers to some key moments in which French journalism has uncovered a truth hidden until that moment by ‘the deceptive fog of conformity and complicity’. For example, when a gimlet-eyed journalist made an incredible find, among the rubbish piled up outside a bank during a dustmen’s strike in Paris: evidence of a financial racket by the USSR in France to bribe the Communist Party.

Another important story was the clarification of the mysterious comings and goings of Georges Marchais, the secretary-general of the Communist Party during the Second World War (he was a voluntary worker in German factories). This second scoop did not, however, have the repercussions that might have been expected because, at that political moment, it was not just the left that was anxious to keep the revelation quiet. The right-wing press also kept it secret, because they were afraid that the presidential candidature of Marchais would be damaged by the revelation of the Nazi sympathies of the Communist leader in his youth, and that his potential votes would switch to Mitterrand, which would have damaged Giscard. In this way, rejected by the left and the right, the truth about Marchais’s past was thus minimised and denied until the matter faded away, and Marchais could continue his political career without hindrance, right up to his comfortable retirement.

These memoirs show Revel on top form: ardent, troublesome and dynamic, passionate about ideas and pleasure, insatiably curious and condemned, because of his unhealthy intellectual integrity and his polemical stance, to live in perpetual conflict with almost everyone around him. The lucid way he detects the deceit and self-justification of his colleagues, the courageous manner in which he denounces the opportunism and cowardice of intellectuals who serve the powerful out of fanaticism or for personal gain, have made him a modern maudit, heir to the great tradition of French non-conformists, the tradition that caused revolutions and incited free spirits to question everything, from laws, systems, institutions, ethical and aesthetic principles, to style and cookery recipes. This tradition is in its death throes today, and, however much I scan the horizon, I cannot see who might continue it among the new batch of scribes. I fear, therefore, that it will disappear with Revel. But it will disappear with the finest honours.

London, April 1997

Culture and the New International Order

It might be a good moment, in the extraordinary times we now live in, in a world deeply affected by the advances of globalisation in every sphere of life, to reflect on the ways in which cultural life will be affected by the increasing interdependence between nations that has come about as a result of the internationalisation of communications, the economy, ideas and technology. There is a great deal of confusion around this issue and a number of prejudices that need to be addressed.

But we must first clarify what we mean by the word culture. For an anthropologist, this word, with its agricultural resonance, signifies quite simply the whole gamut of customs and beliefs that are most representative of a society, from the language which its inhabitants use to communicate, to the meals they eat and the sports that they play, including their customs, gods, devils and ghosts of every shape and hue. But this conception of culture is so vast that, by including so many things, it becomes rather imprecise. It is better to restrict the term and just refer to the spiritual dimension of human life in which knowledge and beliefs — ideas and myths — meld together, giving us a perspective which allows us to understand the world in a certain way, with a degree of confidence and safety, and to form a relationship, in a precise way, with things around us and with our fellow men and women.

As we go back further in time, we find that cultures share fewer and fewer things: they tend to be more separate and in conflict. That is why, in antiquity, in that archipelago of culturally self-engrossed and isolated islands, mistrust, hatred and warfare dominated relations between cultures. Trade had a civilising and pacifying influence over time, building bridges between warring cultures and opening up routes through which adventurers, explorers, wise people and artists (along with conquistadors and plunderers) would gradually make contact with each other and start to mix, so that, after a time, their shared values would gradually replace former differences.

This brings me to the situation today, which is both terrifying and wonderful. For we are now living in a world which, thanks to internationalisation, is ever more interdependent, a world in which a common outlook seems to be rapidly reducing and removing what before had seemed like strong and impregnable barriers between cultures.

Is this a positive thing or a tragedy for humanity? The debate on this issue is just beginning, and it is sure to become more widespread and heated in years to come as antagonism intensifies between those for and against so-called globalisation. It is a wide-ranging debate in which it is not easy to differentiate cultural matters from political and economic issues, because they are so inextricably linked. In some areas, like communications, the opening of borders has had an enormously beneficial effect, because now it is much more difficult than before — and soon it will be impossible — for governments to impose censorship in the way they did in the past, by keeping people in the dark and thus manipulating public opinion. The development of audiovisual media and new technologies means that today, with a minimum of effort, citizens of any country can access diverse and contrasting information, and that authoritarian regimes, which are anxious to turn information into propaganda, find it more and more difficult to stop the free circulation of independent news and opinions that are not subject to their control. This is a great advance in terms of freedom, and gives a great democratic impulse to societies that have not yet managed to shake off dictatorships.

This opening up of information is very important in cultural as well as political terms. The technological revolution in the field of communications also opens up enormous possibilities, without historical precedent, for the diffusion of ideas, literature, science and arts, that is, for the democratisation of culture, putting it within reach of large sectors of humanity who, until relatively recently, due to their isolation, marginalisation and poverty were culturally excluded.

It is true that the large media organisations do not always use the hypnotic power that they have over their vast audiences with sufficient creativity and rigour, and that the majority of the most popular programmes could not be called cultural. But let us not confuse the effect with the cause. If television and the Internet do not enrich our sensibilities, imagination and knowledge, choosing instead to pander to the most vulgar and tasteless common denominator, it is because the audiences that they are aimed at lack the basic spiritual and aesthetic refinement to spurn these offerings and demand instead more worthwhile and better-made programmes. In any event, the means are there, and it is up to us to make sure that the content improves and enhances us intellectually and as citizens, instead of dulling our minds, drowning us in what Flaubert called ‘received ideas’, in stereotypes and prejudices.

It is necessary to democratise culture, but that also has its risks, if that means that we make ideas banal in order to make them accessible to everyone. That is not democratising culture, but rather corrupting it and replacing it with a caricature. The democratisation of culture can only be understood as the creation of conditions that facilitate and promote access to culture for those who are prepared to make the necessary intellectual effort to enjoy and enhance their lives through culture. And democratisation must ensure that everyone should have this opportunity.

Let me offer a brief illustration. In the sixties, for almost seven years, I lived in France, earning my living as a journalist, first in the France-Presse Agency and later in French Radio-Television. One of the stories that I had to cover, and I always remember it because it was so innovatory and stimulating, was a series of public readings that a group of writers were giving in different locations which appeared at first sight to have little to do with literature: mining centres, factories, offices, sports clubs, army barracks. I don’t remember what institution sponsored this initiative; but I do remember that it wanted to find out whether it was possible to present successfully the best of literature to relatively uninformed audiences. The writers did not read their own works, but rather the works of their favourite authors. And they were asked to make no concessions with regard the difficulty of the pieces. I went to two of these sessions and I have a vivid and splendid memory of what happened when a well-known critic and novelist — Michel Butor, if my memory serves — read some stories by Borges (a difficult and highbrow writer if ever there was one) in a factory. Helped by his very clear explanations, a clever selection of texts and the engaging way he read them, his audience was fascinated by the baroque stories of the author of El Aleph, and I am sure that they had a very good time. That initiative, to my knowledge, was a one-off, never repeated. But it showed me, at least, that good literature is, in addition to many other things, a source of incomparable pleasure; and that, however complex it might be, it can soon captivate large audiences. The same can be said of culture in general.

It should not be seen as strange that these finely wrought, unusual stories dreamed up on the other side of the world by an Argentine writer should excite for a few hours the imagination of those French workers (who were doubtless not used to reading literature). If literature is good, it knows no borders; or rather, it is one of best ways to bring down the barriers between people and allow them to communicate and feel part of a single community. Don Quixote began his adventures riding through La Mancha, but now he rides throughout the world and in almost all the languages of the earth, just as the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet brings a tear to the eyes of most of humanity, and the voices of Tolstoy, Dante, Homer and Molière are a heritage that everyone who has heard, read or reread their characters’ adventures and misfortunes, and has embraced them, can claim for themselves. Many centuries before we heard the word globalisation, the great artistic and literary creations had already begun systematically to break down the borders that kept people apart, establishing a common denominator between cultures.

The worst disasters that humanity has suffered have always been the result of a lack of communication between countries or societies, which used confrontation and violence instead of dialogue. If you want to confront enemies with the utmost conviction and force, then it is essential to dehumanise and demonise them. This is an eminently cultural task: to replace an objective perception of reality with mirages that reflect our fears and hatred, replacing human beings with phantoms, depriving them first of their true nature and then of their lives themselves. Religion, ideologies and nationalism have traditionally supplied arguments and pretexts for dehumanising adversaries, a first stage that can lead to the genocides and holocausts that have stained world history with horror and blood.

Culture is the most effective antidote we have to this behaviour, allowing us to recognise the humanity of the other, of others above and beyond the differences that exist between the different ethnicities, creeds and languages that give the world its rich and stimulating diversity. It allows us to discover beneath the differences in clothes, customs, beliefs or geography an underlying community of interests between people. This should create a sense of community that would make wars and killings impossible. But we know that this is not the case, and that, instead, despite the prodigious development of knowledge and technology, in many parts of the globe religious or political antagonisms (or the two mixed together) continue to wreak havoc, as in the Middle East, while in other places, like the border between India and Pakistan, the old territorial disputes keep millions of people on tenterhooks, threatened with a nuclear apocalypse.

If it continues spreading to, and including, all the countries of the world in a web of exchanges and common interests and responsibilities, globalisation is likely to be the most effective method that humanity has to end armed conflict, begin disarmament and work towards peace in the world.

This ideal is possible as long as this process of integration that we call globalisation is not primarily economic, as a narrow definition of the process might have us believe. Of course, if it is confined to trade, to opening up world markets for all products, then the most pessimistic predictions about the consequences of globalisation could become a reality. Purely economic globalisation would be sterile and indeed impossible. Open and competitive markets are not those that are left to the whims of buyers and sellers, investors and consumers. They are clearly and fairly regulated, by efficient and honest courts, that make sure contracts are in place and sanction those who violate other people’s rights. And the only political system that guarantees the existence of independent judges is democracy. For that reason, it is not a coincidence that the most strident opponents of globalisation are also opposed to democracy. These are the people who feel nostalgic for the vertical, totalitarian systems of the extreme right and the extreme left. For globalisation to be beneficial to the world, it is fundamental that, alongside markets, it should look to globalise political democracy.

There are some tenacious prejudices in the cultural sphere that are opposed to globalisation. The argument goes that, if globalisation becomes a reality, then all the cultures of the world will disappear, flattened by Anglo-Saxon culture which, in the hands of the superpower, the United States, will impose conformity on all the countries of the planet, in a new form of cultural colonialism.

I would like to explore in some detail this cultural argument against globalisation, which goes along these lines:

The disappearance of national frontiers and the establishment of a world connected by international markets will deal a death blow to regional and national cultures, to the traditions, customs, mythologies and modes of behaviour that determine the cultural identity of every community or country. Unable to resist the invasion of cultural products from developed countries — or rather from the superpower, the United States — which inevitably come in the wake of the big multinationals, US culture will end up taking over, making the entire world uniform, destroying the rich variety of cultures that are still thriving. In this way, all the other communities, not just those that are small and weak, will lose their identity — their soul — and become the colonised people of the twenty-first century, slavish followers, zombies or caricatures modelled by the cultural values of the new imperialism that will rule the world not just through its capital, technology, military power and scientific knowledge, but also by imposing on others its language, its ways of thinking, its beliefs, pastimes and dreams.

This nightmare or negative utopia of a world which, through globalisation, has lost its linguistic and cultural diversity, and become instead a uniform Americanised culture is not, as some people think, an idea developed just by political minorities of the extreme left who feel nostalgic for Marxism, Maoism and Third World Guevarism, a sort of persecution mania allied to a hatred and bitterness towards the American giant. It can also be found in developed countries, culturally highly developed countries, and is shared by people on the left, on the right and in the centre. Perhaps the most striking example is France, where governments of different political orientation periodically start up campaigns in defence of French ‘cultural identity’, that is supposedly threatened by globalisation. A great swath of intellectuals and politicians become concerned that the land that produced Montaigne, Descartes, Racine and Baudelaire and set the standards for fashion, philosophy, painting and cooking, and in all matters of the intellect, might find itself invaded by McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, rock and rap, Hollywood movies, blue jeans, sneakers and polo shirts. This fear has meant, for example, that France has massively subsidised its local film industry, and there have been numerous campaigns demanding a system of quotas limiting the screening of US films and guaranteeing that of a certain percentage of local films. That is also the reason why there have been strict municipal regulations (although, if you walk round Paris, they do not seem to be strictly observed) imposing heavy fines on advertising that denationalises the language of Molière by using Anglicisms. And let’s not forget that José Bové, the farmer turned crusader against malbouffe (bad eating), who smashed up a McDonald’s, has become something of a popular hero in France.

Although I think that the cultural argument against globalisation is not acceptable, one has to recognise that at its heart there is an unquestionable truth. The world that we are going to inhabit in the century that is just beginning will be much less picturesque, much less full of local colour than the century that we are leaving. Fiestas, clothing, ceremonies, rituals and beliefs that in the past offered a great folkloric and ethnological variety will start to disappear, or be confined to very small groups, while the bulk of society will give up these forms and take on others that are more appropriate to the times we are living in. This is a process that all the countries of the globe are going through, some more quickly, others more slowly. But this is not due to globalisation, but to modernisation, and is an effect, not a cause. We can, of course, regret that this is happening and feel nostalgia for the passing of forms of life from the past which, especially if seen from the comfortable perspective of the present, seem to us graceful, original and colourful. But I think that what we cannot do is avoid this happening. Not even countries like Cuba or North Korea, which are fearful that openness will destroy the totalitarian regimes that govern them, and thus close in on themselves and look to keep modernity at bay with sanctions and censorship, can halt this process, keep it from undermining their so-called ‘cultural identity’. In theory, a country could perhaps preserve this identity were it to live, as happens with certain remote tribes in Africa or the Amazon, in total isolation, cutting off any form of exchange with other nations and being totally self-sufficient. A cultural identity preserved in this sway would take that society back to the times of prehistoric man.

If it is true that modernisation causes many forms of traditional life to disappear, it is also true that it opens up opportunities and offers, in broad terms, a great stride forward for humanity. This is why when people can choose freely, they choose modernisation, without hesitation, often against the wishes of their leaders or of traditional intellectuals.

The argument in favour of ‘cultural identity’ and against globalisation is based on a conception of culture that is resistant to change and which has no basis in history. What cultures have remained identical over time? We would need to find them among primitive magical-religious communities, beings living in caves, adoring thunder and wild beasts, beings that because of their primitive nature are more and more vulnerable to exploitation and extinction. All other cultures, above all those that have the right to be called modern, living cultures, have been evolving to such an extent that they are now merely a remote reflection of what they were even two or three generations ago. This is precisely the case of countries like France, Spain and Great Britain, where, in the last fifty years, the changes have been so profound and spectacular that today a Proust, a García Lorca or a Virginia Woolf — whose works of literature did so much to bring about these changes — would scarcely recognise the societies in which they were born.

The idea of ‘cultural identity’ is dangerous because, from a social point of view, the term is conceptually weak, and from a political point of view, it might jeopardise that most precious of all human achievements, which is freedom. Of course, I am not denying that a group of people that speak the same language, have been born and live in the same area, confront the same problems and have the same religion and the same customs, share common characteristics. But this collective denominator cannot define what is specific to each member of the group, the attributes and distinctive traits that differentiate them from others. The concept of identity, when it is not used to define individuals, but rather to represent a group, is reductive and dehumanising. It is a magical-religious sleight of hand that makes abstract everything that is creative and original in men and women, everything that has resisted inherited values or geography or social pressure, in the name of individual freedom.

In fact the notion of collective identity, the breeding ground of nationalism, is an ideological fiction. It is a concept that many ethnographers and anthropologists argue cannot be applied to the most archaic communities. For, however important shared customs and beliefs are for the defence of the group, there is always a great margin for initiative and creation among its members, outside the group, and individual differences are more important than collective features when we examine individuals on their own terms and not as mere secondary to the collective. And one of the great advantages of globalisation is that it greatly extends the possibilities that each citizen on this interconnected planet — the motherland of everyone — has to construct their own cultural identity, in accordance with their own preferences and inner motivation, and through their own voluntary action. Because now they are no longer forced, as in the past, and still in many places in the present, to comply with an identity that, like a straitjacket, obliges them to take on the language, the religion and the customs of the place where they were born. In this sense, globalisation should be welcomed because it greatly increases the scope of individual freedom.

Perhaps Latin America is the best example of how artificial and unreal, if not downright absurd, it is to try to establish collective identities. What would a Latin American cultural identity be? Could we identify a unique and coherent set of beliefs, customs, traditions and mythologies? Our history is full of intellectual polemics — some of which have been very fierce — that have sought to answer this question. Perhaps the most famous was the polemic in the 1920s between Hispanists and Indigenists that reverberated throughout the continent. For Hispanists such as José de la Riva Agüero, Víctor Andrés Belaunde and Francisco García Calderón, Latin America was born when, through Discovery and Conquest, it entered into a relationship with Europe, when, through the Spanish and Portuguese languages brought over by discoverers and conquistadors, and through the adoption of Christianity, it became part of Western civilisation. The Hispanists did not look down on pre-Hispanic cultures, but for them, these cultures were just a substratum — and not the most important substratum — of a historical and social reality that took on its final form and definition thanks to the revitalising influence of the West.

The Indigenists, by contrast, rejected, with moral indignation, any supposed benefits that the Europeans might have brought to America. For them, our identity had its roots and its soul in pre-Hispanic cultures and civilisations whose development and modernisation were brutally checked by violence and subject to iniquitous censorship, repression and marginalisation, not only throughout three centuries of colonisation, but also after Independence. And, according to the Indigenists, the authentic American expression (to borrow a phrase from Lezama Lima) could be found in all the cultural manifestations — from native languages to beliefs, rituals, arts and popular customs — that had resisted Western cultural oppression and survived to our times. A famous historian of this school, the Peruvian Luis E. Valcárcel, went so far as to say in one of his books — Ruta colonial del Perú (The Colonial Route of Peru) — that churches, convents and other colonial architectural monuments should be destroyed because they represented the ‘Anti-Peru’, an imposition, a negation of pristine American identity, that could only be based on Indian foundations. And one of the most original novelists of Latin America, José María Arguedas, narrated, in stories of great delicacy and vibrant moral protest, the discreet, heroic survival of Quechua culture in the Andean world despite the suffocating and distorting presence of the West.

Hispanism produced some excellent historical essays, as did Indigenism, as well as important fictional works, but, from today’s perspective, both doctrines seem equally sectarian, reductive and false. Neither of them was able — caught up as they were in their ideological and slightly racist straitjackets — to capture the great diversity of Latin America. Who would dare to say, today, that only the Hispanic or only the indigenous can legitimately claim to represent Latin America?

However, attempts to define and isolate our ‘cultural identity’ continue to surface, with an intellectual and political stubbornness that would be better spent on worthier causes. Because to try to impose a cultural identity on a people is like imprisoning them and depriving them of their most precious freedom: the right to choose what, who and how they want to be. Latin America does not have one but many cultural identities, and none of them can claim to be more legitimate, more pure or more genuine than the others; they all make Latin America the plural land that it is, with its diverse languages, traditions, customs and ethnic filiations.

Of course Latin America is the pre-Hispanic world and the cultures that continue it to our day and which, in countries like Mexico, Guatemala and the Andean countries, have such an important bearing on society. But Latin America is also a great cluster of Portuguese-and Spanish-speakers, with a tradition of five hundred years, whose presence and actions have been decisive in shaping the continent. And is there not something of Africa in Latin America, which arrived on our shores along with the Europeans? Has not this African presence indelibly marked our skin, our music, our way of being, our social landscape? When we explore the cultural, ethnic and social mix that is Latin America, we find that we are linked to almost all the regions and cultures of the world. And this, which prevents us from having a unique cultural identity — we have so many that we have none — is, contrary to what nationalists believe, our greatest wealth. It also gives us excellent credentials to feel fully-fledged citizens in the global world of today.

The fear of the Americanisation of the planet is based more on ideological paranoia than on reality. There is no doubt, of course, that, with globalisation, the dominance of the English language, which has come to be, like Latin in the Middle Ages, the general language of our time, will continue to grow, because it is essential for communications and for international transactions. Does that mean that English will develop to the detriment of the other important languages? Of course not. Probably the reverse will occur. The disappearance of borders and the prospect of an interdependent world has become an incentive for the new generation to try to learn and assimilate other cultures (which could now be theirs if they so desire) out of interest but also out of need, because to speak different languages and to be comfortable in different cultures is today a very important credential for professional success. Let me take the case of Spanish. Fifty years ago, we Spanish-speakers were still a community that was more or less closed in on itself, with very little resonance outside our traditional linguistic confines. Today, by contrast, this community is increasing in strength, spreading its influence across five continents. The fact that in the United States there are currently twenty-five to thirty million Spanish-speakers explains why, in the last US elections, both candidates, Governor Bush and Vice President Gore, conducted their presidential campaigns in Spanish as well as in English.

How many young people of both sexes across the globe have, thanks to the challenges of globalisation, started to learn Japanese, German, Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Russian or French? Very many, of course, and this is a trend that, fortunately, can only increase in years to come. For that reason, the best defence for one’s own languages and cultures is to promote them the length and breadth of the new world we live in, instead of trying naïvely to guard them against the threat of English. People who suggest this remedy, even though they talk a lot about culture, are usually an uncultured bunch trying to hide their true vocation: to the cause of nationalism. And there is nothing more anathema to culture than the parochial, exclusive and confused vision of cultural nationalists. The most admirable lessons that cultures teach us is that they do not need to be protected by bureaucrats or commissars, or confined behind bars, or isolated by customs houses in order to remain fresh and healthy. Cultures need to live in freedom, exposed constantly to other cultures, which enrich and renew them. In antiquity, Latin did not kill Greek; quite the contrary, the artistic originality and the intellectual depth of Hellenic culture pervaded Roman civilisation and through this civilisation, the poems of Homer and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle reached the entire world. Globalisation will not make local cultures disappear; everything good about them will find a place to grow in this open world.

In a celebrated essay, ‘Notes Towards the Definition of Culture’, T. S. Eliot predicted that humanity in the future would witness a renaissance of local and regional cultures, and his prophecy seemed rather speculative at the time. However, globalisation will probably turn his prediction into a reality in the twenty-first century, and we should be pleased. A renaissance of small local cultures will restore the rich multiplicity of behaviour and expressions that — and this is something that is usually forgotten or people avoid remembering because of its moral implications — from the end of the eighteenth century and in particular in the nineteenth century, the nation state annihilated, sometimes in the literal rather than the metaphorical sense of the term, in order to create so-called national cultural identities. This was often achieved by force, by banning the teaching and publication of vernacular languages or the practice of religions or customs that were not seen as suitable for the Nation. Thus in most countries of the world, the nation state was formed by the forced imposition of a dominant culture over other weaker, minority cultures, which were stifled and then excised from official life. But, contrary to what those fearful of globalisation might think, it is not easy to erase cultures from the map, however small they might be, if they have a rich tradition behind them, and there is a group that adheres to their culture, albeit in secret. And we are today beginning to see that, as the nation state becomes less rigid, the forgotten, marginalised or silenced local cultures are beginning to re-emerge and show signs, on occasion, of quite vigorous life.

This is occurring everywhere in Europe. Perhaps we should point to the case of Spain and the dynamic growth of its regional cultures. During the forty years of the Franco dictatorship, they were stifled and had little opportunity to express themselves, condemned as they were to a semi-clandestine existence. But with democracy came the freedom to develop the rich diversity of Spanish culture, which has been extraordinarily successful, mainly in Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque regions, but in other areas as well. Of course, we must not confuse this regional cultural renaissance, which is positive and enriching, with the phenomenon of exclusive nationalism, which is a source of problems and a serious threat to the culture of freedom.

Globalisation presents many political, legal and administrative challenges. And if it is not accompanied by the global spread and strengthening of democracy — freedom and law — it could have damaging consequences, facilitating, for example, the internationalisation of terrorism and crime syndicates. But compared to the benefits and opportunities that it brings, above all for poor and backward countries which need to move quickly to reach decent living standards for their people, then we must look to face up to these challenges with enthusiasm and imagination. And with the conviction that never before, in the long history of civilisation, have we had so many intellectual, scientific and economic resources at our disposal to fight against the atavistic evils of hunger, war, prejudice and oppression.

Madrid, September 2002

Responses to 9/11

Just as after severe earthquakes the ground keeps shaking for many days, the responses to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in New York will be lengthy and will radically transform the public and private life of the twenty-first century. Although some of these outcomes will be unpredictable, in particular in the political and military spheres, in one specific area the effect will surely be positive. The terrorist groups and movements in five continents, and the parties and states that protect them, will find life much more difficult than before, because they will be pursued and hunted down in a systematic way by the democratic powers, which will show none of their previous indulgence. The United States and the European Union have realised how exposed they are to attacks similar to those that destroyed the Pentagon and the Twin Towers in Wall Street, and in future will coordinate their anti-terrorist activities, finally realising that among the fanatical practitioners of terror there is a basic solidarity, a common aim, above or beyond specific governments, to destroy the rule of law and liberty as forms of life.

That is the reason why ETA in Spain, the ELN in Colombia and Fidel Castro in Cuba, to give just Spanish and Spanish American examples, have rushed to condemn the attacks in Manhattan and distance themselves from Islamic fundamentalism. And, through their spokespersons, allies and figureheads, they are advancing the strange idea that not all terrorist activities are the same, that, in certain historical contexts, blowing apart peaceful citizens with car bombs, putting bullets into the necks of political opponents, or using kidnapping and extortion to finance their activities, are justifiable operations. If the campaign that democratic countries are organising against those that commit terror can be transformed into an effective and systematic support for the democratisation of countries suffering dictatorship, then the world would make rapid progress, not just in terms of coexistence and basic human rights, but also in terms of security.

But, following the declaration by the White House that the United States will not look to overthrow the Afghan-Taliban government and replace it by another less intolerant and repressive government, but rather that it will concentrate exclusively on the capture of Osama Bin Laden and his right-hand men, we are faced with alarming uncertainty. It’s clear that this declaration was made for diplomatic reasons, so as not to over-alarm the satraps of the Persian Gulf, like Saudi Arabia, that the United States relies on for logistical support, in whose despotic regimes the very idea of democracy strikes fear. But what is clear is that if the reprisals for 11 September are going to be confined just to the persecution of the Saudi terrorist and his accomplices, even if they are captured or killed, then very little gains will have been made in the fight against terror. See what happened during the Gulf War, when Kuwait was liberated but the authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein was left intact. Saddam has not only enslaved the Iraqi people but also supports political violence against the West and harbours terrorists. If the internationalisation of human rights, the rule of law and freedom are not held up as goals, then the campaign against terror that is currently being waged will be mere show, devoid of any content.

To date, the main political beneficiaries of the tragedy in the United States are Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon. Acting with undeniable speed and skill, by coming out immediately in support of Washington and placing at its disposal the vast amount of experience acquired by Russia during the Afghan War, the Russian prime minister has put himself and his government centre stage in international affairs. He has gained an audience and sympathy that he did not have before, and he has used this, with the instinct of a bloodhound, to promote his view that there is a strong alliance between Islamic fundamentalism and terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Chechen independence movement. Whether this is true or false — and the truth doubtless lies between these two extremes — his argument is now much more widely accepted than in the past. It is possible that, in the immediate future, the West will stop putting pressure on Russia over violations of human rights in Chechnya, and, perhaps, even help the Russian government, this brand-new ally, in its fight against the Chechen independence movement, a movement that has been dealt a terrible blow by the destruction of the Twin Towers.

The same is true of the Palestinians, whom the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon is now presenting to democratic countries as fundamentalists and terrorists (the Minister of Defence has called Arafat the ‘Palestine Osama Bin Laden’). This is a caricature that some weeks ago would have been roundly rejected, but now, by contrast, it is being given serious consideration and, in some sectors, is gaining approval. It is true that under pressure from Washington, Sharon lifted his ban on talks and has allowed the President of the Palestinian Authority and his own Foreign Minister, Simon Peres, to meet and make a vague declaration that seems to leave the door open for fresh negotiations. But let’s not deceive ourselves. If before 11 September Sharon was a declared opponent of the Oslo agreement, now he is even more so. That is because he feels more secure in his extremist positions, convinced that the blood of the seven thousand people murdered in the United States by Islamic terrorism can also stain the Palestine cause and strengthen those in Israel, like him and his followers, who refuse to make the smallest concession in the interests of a solid peace with the Palestinians, and believe that drastic police and military action — including state terror, that is, selective assassination — will put down the Intifada and the aspirations of the subordinate population. I, and many other old friends and defenders of Israel, think that this is a monstrous attitude and also an illusion, because apart from condoning terrible injustice and crimes, it will just serve to detract further from the international image of Israel, depriving it of the moral legitimacy over its opponents that it could claim as a democratic state in a region where despotism abounds. But, in the short term, it is possible that through proverbial reasons of state, Sharon will get his way and the Western countries, starting with the United States, will be more tolerant and even supportive of the policy of intolerance and excess of this well-trusted ‘ally’ in the fight against fundamentalist terrorism. The explosion in Wall Street has finally buried the Oslo agreements and put back the Middle East peace process a very long way indeed.

But, perhaps, the greatest damage caused by the terrible attacks of 11 September, working like a virus, will be the erosion of the culture of freedom in the democratic countries themselves. I am writing this article in London where, in contrast to the normal sangfroid of the population, public opinion is now in a state of tension and alarm over security that could be termed, without exaggeration, paranoid. In newspapers, radio broadcasts and television programmes, the obsessive topic is where the next terrorist attacks will take place: if there will be an escalation and if the next act of Bin Laden or one of his kind will be to explode an atomic device that would destroy the city, or poison the water, the air or food with biological weapons. All these possibilities are presented and assessed by experts who, quite unperturbed, explain the mechanisms of these potential acts of collective homicide, and produce horrifying statistics on the number of estimated victims. In such a climate, can all the individual liberties that Great Britain is justifiably proud of survive? For a start, a poll in a local newspaper found that a majority of the people were in favour of introducing identity cards, to be carried night and day by all citizens, so as to facilitate the monitoring and control of suspects. This might seem an unimportant measure, which is already standard practice in many democratic countries. But let us not deceive ourselves.

For the same logic that forces citizens to carry identification with them can justify a telephone tap, house searches, preventive detention, anti-immigration policies and restrictions on press freedom. It might well be the case that, faced with the threat of mass annihilation that, since 11 September, now hangs like a sword of Damocles over the inhabitants of the richest and most powerful countries on the planet, the adherence to the great values of legality and individual freedom will be weakened, and take second place to the obsessive and perfectly legitimate desire for security. Who can deny that an open society is more vulnerable to the terrorist action of small fanatical groups than a police state, where all the movements and actions of its citizens are controlled by an absolute power? Of course, the United States and the European Union are not going to become totalitarian states because of the quite understandable insecurity and fear that has spread in the wake of 11 September. But there is no doubt that the need for security, that has become the number one priority, will erode the rights and prerogatives that democratic culture had won for ordinary men and women. The fanatical criminals who crashed the planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were not mistaken: the world is now, thanks to them, less safe and less free.

London, Sunday 30 September 2001

Novelist in New York

The Eggs Benedictine and the Bloody Mary are as delicious as ever in that institution that is P. J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue, and it seems that the Broadway theatres, which emptied after 11 September, are now full once again: at the ticket office where I tried to get seats for the Mel Brooks musical, The Producers, I was told that there was no availability until May next year. In the cinemas, restaurants and museums that I visit in my very full week in New York, I do not notice anything abnormal; there is a reasonable influx of spectators and customers, and daily life seems to have gone back to normal.

However, this is just an appearance. What happened on 11 September is an ominous silent presence that hovers behind all my conversations with friends in New York and, from time to time, crops up in conversation and in everyday life in most unexpected ways. In the studio of the painter and sculptor Manolo Valdés, on 16th Street, I discover some heads wearing impressive hats made out of waste materials, and my reaction, and that of the person with me, are identical: ‘A homage to New York wounded by 11 September!’ In fact, the artist had made these sculptures some time back, but this fact does not change one iota the effect that they have on a spectator after that event: they have been imbued with a symbolism and a dramatic quality that their creator could not have imagined. Without the cataclysm, they would have just been daring experiments in transforming materials found by chance into aesthetic objects that express the fantasy and skill of an artist; now they also manifest their rage and their solidarity in the face of the violence inflicted on a city that Manolo Valdés is a part of.

In the residence of the Spanish Ambassador to the UN, Inocencio Arias, I discover an oil painting that I have seen before, but which now has become another painting. On the canvas, the artist himself, with his back to us, is contemplating a New York of radiant skyscrapers, in which, in the foreground, the Twin Towers of Wall Street stand out. It is a very beautiful painting, with very vivid colours, which, in my memory, communicated a cheerful and playful image, full of joy and life. The 11 September changed that canvas; it imbued it with a sense of apocalyptic prophecy, so that now, although it is still beautiful, it is a picture without a trace of humour, a tragic work that evokes nostalgia, mute rage and sadness.

But I found the most dramatic homage to the victims of the most lethal terrorist attack in history not in New York, but in the Arts Institute in Chicago, where I went to see an extraordinary exhibition dedicated to the nine weeks that Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin lived together in Arles in 1888. This difficult period of coexistence, that caused traumas and deep wounds in both artists, also produced a flowering of master works which leave the viewer astonished, dumbstruck. In the Arts Institute there is also, in a secluded and shaded room, among imposing columns that seem funereal, a collection of large photographs in which the Twin Towers are depicted at different times of the day and night, in different seasons and climates. These images are a selection from a vast artistic undertaking, which lasted almost three years, and seems to have been born out of a mysterious premonition. The photographer, Joel Meyerowitz, whom I had occasion to meet, told me this with a certain anxiety, as if he had yet to comprehend fully the strange mixture of chance, coincidence and working on a hunch that induced him, without really knowing why, over these last three years, to photograph hundreds, thousands of times, from the window of his New York studio, the towers of the World Trade Center, those giants of steel, mortar and glass that exerted such a fascination over him. In his photos, the Twin Towers are one and many at the same time, as they float half blurred in the mist of dawn, illuminate the night with their thousands of fireflies, or burn like torches in the splendour of the midday sun. Ostentatious or furtive, explicit or half enveloped by shadows, these constructions that were captured by the enquiring lens of Joel Meyerowitz, and are now viewed from a point of absence, have acquired the nature of icons, symbols, totems, gravestones to a civilisation brutally faced with a threat of extinction. The danger comes not just from the bombs or the biological weapons that terrorist obscurantism can use to attack civilisation; it also comes from the panic and rage that might lead that civilisation to limit its most precious attribute, freedom, in the name of security. I have rarely seen a photographic exhibition as intense and provocative as the one that has turned the basement of the Arts Institute into a funeral chamber.

The terrorist act that, on 11 September, blew up the Twin Towers and killed almost five thousand office workers, employees, workers, firemen and policemen, was diabolically planned to cause not just a human tragedy and enormous material damage, but also a psychological effect that will, perhaps, be more difficult to overcome than the grief or the physical destruction: a sense of insecurity, instability and uncertainty that US society had not known before now. If a band of fanatics could bring down those towers that challenged the heavens, what even worse atrocities might they commit? Suddenly, as an effect of 11 September, the entertaining horrors of science fiction and blockbuster cinema have lost that sense of unreality that made them innocuous and enjoyable; they seem realist and prophetic. Now, the idea that a gang of demented fundamentalists, with ample economic resources, might explode a nuclear device in Fifth Avenue — or in Piccadilly Circus or the Champs-Elysées — or poison the air, the water or the food of a city, or infect it with killer bacteria, is no longer an entertaining amusement and has become a sinister reality of our time. From now on, that nightmare will haunt us.

I say ‘us’, because although I am not a New Yorker and do not live in New York, I have never felt a foreigner in Manhattan and, like many millions of beings from around the world who have spent time in this city of skyscrapers, or visited as tourists, I also felt, on 11 September, that this apocalyptic event had also inflicted personal damage on me, destroying and obliterating something that, it’s difficult to explain, also belonged to me.

I have only once spent several months at a stretch in New York — teaching for a semester at Columbia University — but, since 1966, when I went for the first time, I have visited the city on innumerable occasions, usually for a few days. However, on each of these visits, I always felt that I was living much more intensely there for this handful of days, doing more things, getting more enthusiastic and tired than I could have done in any other city. I have always felt in New York that I was in the centre of the world, in modern Babylon, a sort of Borgesian aleph, containing all the languages, races, religions and cultures of the planet, a place that, like a giant heart, sends out to the furthest corners of the globe fashions, vices, values, trivia, ways of behaving, music and images that have been formed by the incredible mixture of people in the city. The feeling of being a tiny grain of sand in an Arabian Nights cosmopolis might be somewhat depressing; but, paradoxically, it is at the same time very energising, as Julio Cortázar once remarked about Paris: ‘It is infinitely preferable to be nothing in a city that is everything than to be everything in a city that is nothing.’ I never felt what he felt about the capital of France; but in New York, yes, every time.

New York belongs to nobody and everybody, from the Afghan taxi driver who can barely mutter a word of English, to the turbaned and long-bearded Sikh, to the Asians cooking up mysterious concoctions in China Town, to the Neapolitan who sings tarantellas to customers in a restaurant in Little Italy (but who was born in Manhattan and has never set foot in Italy). It belongs to the Puerto Ricans and the Dominicans who drown out the streets of the barrio with plena and salsa and merengue music, and to the Russians, Ukrainians, Kosovars, Andalucians, Greeks, Nigerians, Irish, Pakistanis, Ethiopians and citizens from dozens of countries, from the most exotic and even imaginary places, who, as soon as they set foot on this soil, through the integrating magic of the city, became New Yorkers.

Cosmopolitanism is diametrically opposed to fanaticism. A fanatic is a fanatic because he sees himself as the absolute master of a single truth, incompatible with any other, and for that reason he has the right to use any means to abolish differences, all the beliefs and convictions that do not coincide identically with his own. For that reason it would be impossible for fanatics of whatever shape or hue, with their obtuse tunnel-vision mentality, not to hate the mixed, plural diversity, that cannot be reduced to a single way of believing, enjoying, thinking and acting, of this Babelic, multiracial and multi-cultural city, this refraction on a small scale of the infinite variety of humanity. For those who dream of unifying, integrating and levelling the planet inside a straitjacket of a single dogma, a single god or a single religion, New York is without doubt the first enemy to be defeated.

But, for that same reason, all those of us the world over, who might disagree on some things, but who believe that accepting the diversity of beliefs, traditions and cultures within a system of pacific coexistence is the basic foundation of civilisation, have been affected by the blowing-up of the Twin Towers on 11 September. This assault came to remind us that the old obscurantist enemy is still there, obstinate, always trying, despite all its defeats, to obstruct in the name of a single inhuman truth, the advance of a humanity without dogmas, made up of relative truths, in permanent dialogue and interaction. The struggle against the ever renewing Hydra’s heads will never end.

New York, November 2001

Iraq Diary

1. Savage Freedom

Iraq is the freest country in the world, but since freedom without order and without law is tantamount to chaos, it is also the most dangerous. There are no customs houses or officers, and the CPA, the Coalition Provisional Authority, presided over by Paul Bremer, has abolished until 31 December of this year all tariffs and duties on imports, so the borders of Iraq are like sieves through which every product imaginable, except arms, can enter the country without difficulty and at no cost. On the border with Jordan, an American officer on guard told me that this week an average of three thousand vehicles a day had entered Iraq, laden with goods of all kinds.

For that reason the two long highways, Karrada In and Karrada Out, that zigzag through Baghdad, are full of countless shops that have spilled out onto the street and turned the pavements into an exuberant bazaar, offering an enormous variety of industrial goods, food and clothing. It is also a paradise for pirate records, compact discs and videos. But what the inhabitants of Baghdad are buying most eagerly are satellite dishes, to pick up stations from all over the world, something that they could never do before, and which angers the conservative clerics who see television as an invasion of corrupt Western pornography. Iraqis can now surf the Internet freely, which was a crime under Saddam Hussein, and it is interesting to see in the Internet cafés, which have spread like mushrooms throughout Baghdad, the passion with which people in that city, especially the young, are embracing this new technology that links them to the world. But the commerce on the street is more akin to primitive barter than to modern buying and selling. Since there are no banks, cheques or credit cards, everything is paid for in cash, and, because of the freefall of the dinar (there were 1,500 dinars to a dollar the day I left), to make any purchase buyers must take along great bundles of notes — suitcases sometimes — which can be snatched from them at any moment by the current plague of ubiquitous Ali Babas. For, if there are no customs officials, there are also no policemen or judges or police stations where one can report a robbery or an assault. The Ministries are not working, nor are the public services, the post or the telephones, and there are no laws or regulations to control what a citizen can and cannot do. Everything is left to the intuition, the resourcefulness or the prudence of each individual. The result is an uncurbed freedom that leaves people feeling abandoned and terrified.

The only authority is represented by the tanks, the armoured personnel carriers, the trucks, the armed jeeps, and by the foot patrols of the US soldiers who are everywhere, crossing and re-crossing the streets, armed with rifles and machine guns, shaking the buildings with the power of their armoured vehicles, but, up close, looking as lost and terrified as the people of Baghdad. Since I arrived, attacks against them have been increasing systematically, with some thirty killed and about three hundred wounded. It is not surprising, therefore, that they seem apprehensive and finger their weapons nervously as they patrol these streets full of people with whom they cannot communicate. The heat is stifling, and the soldiers, laden with helmets, bulletproof vests and military paraphernalia, must suffer from it even worse than everyone else. The four times I tried to speak to them — many are very young — I got only the briefest of replies. They were all sweating profusely and their eyes were darting everywhere, like nervous grasshoppers. But my daughter Morgana had a more personal conversation with a soldier of Mexican origin, who, from up high in his tank, suddenly opened his heart to her: ‘I can’t stand it any more. I’ve been three months here and I can’t bear it. Everyday I ask myself what the hell I am doing here. This morning they killed two of my friends. I don’t know when I’ll get back to my wife and son, damn it.’

There are lots of stories about the Americans who are patrolling Baghdad, most of them doubtless exaggerated or apocryphal. For example, that in desperation at the mounting attacks, they burst into houses and ransack them under the pretext of looking for arms. I tried to confirm some of these charges and they were invariably unfounded. But the truth is that no one knows what to believe, about this or anything else. For the first time in its history, there is complete freedom of press in Iraq — anyone can bring out a newspaper or a magazine without needing permission — and there are more than fifty newspapers in Baghdad alone (where, since April, some seventy political parties have emerged, some comprising just one person), but the reports that they print are so contradictory and fantastical that everyone complains that they have no idea what is happening.

I went to the house of Kahtaw K. Al Ani, in the Sadea neighbourhood, because I’d been told that there had been a violent incident in a house next to his the previous night, with a number of deaths. In fact, it had happened five houses down. A patrol had kicked the door down. ‘This is no good, sir!’ And there was an Iraqi fatality. But did they find arms? He does not know and does not want to know. Mr Al Ani had lived three years in Reading and has good memories of England. He had worked in the Ministry of Agriculture and now, like all civil servants of the deposed regime, he had been sacked by the CPA. Isn’t that most unfair? He and his fellow workers hated Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party that they had been forced to join, and they were happy that the Americans were liberating them from dictatorship. But what sort of liberation is this that has left tens of thousands of families who felt that they were victims of the regime unemployed and facing poverty? ‘This is no good, sir.’ He is an elderly, solemn man, with closely cropped hair, who sweats profusely. His sons mop his sweat with paper napkins and he repeatedly apologises that, because of the lack of electricity, the fan is not working. Before, he had hated Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party, but now he hates the Americans. When he says goodbye to me, he shows me his car: he does not take it onto the road because he does not want it stolen, and he is afraid to leave the house in case it is burgled and burned to the ground. ‘This is no good, sir.’

Anti-Israeli feeling is deeply rooted in the Iraqi people, because they sympathise with the Palestinians, because under the dictatorship there was a remorseless propaganda offensive against Israel, and, also, doubtless, because in 1981 the Israelis blew up the Osirak nuclear station that was under construction with French technical aid. Since the liberation, you hear all kinds of rumours about an invasion of Jewish capital into Iraq, some of them wildly fanciful. As we passed the Hotel Ekal, on Wazig Avenue, two Iraqi friends pointed out the old, grey building that looked closed and assured me: ‘The Jews from Israel have bought it. They are buying the whole city at rock bottom prices.’ In the following days, I would hear, from different sources, that Israel had obtained from the CPA a monopoly control over future tourism in Iraq, a total fabrication, but my informants were convinced it was true. One morning when, after visiting the second-hand book market in Al Mutanabbi Road, I was having a coffee in the Merchants’ Champion café, there was a bit of a commotion when customers noticed in an adjoining street, surrounded by spectacular bodyguards — black waistcoats, designer sunglasses, sub-machine guns — an elegant gentleman with a flowered tie and a multicoloured handkerchief in his jacket pocket (accessories that nobody sports in the heat of Baghdad). Everyone in the café muttered indignantly: ‘That’s the Israeli Ambassador.’ In fact, this flamboyant individual was the Italian Ambassador. But fantasies generate realities, as novelists know very well: a few days after this episode, the Sunni imams in Mosul issued a fatwa, threatening with death any Iraqi found selling houses or land to Jews.

Three wars, twelve years of international embargo and thirty plus years of the Ba’ath Party satraps have turned Baghdad, which in the fifties was known as a very attractive place, into the ugliest city in the world. The strategic centres of power of Saddam Hussein, the Ministries and the state enterprises and many of the tyrant’s residencies, have been gutted by American precision bombing. And everywhere there are the houses, buildings and installations that were looted and burned in the great criminal witches’ sabbath that gripped the city after the American troops moved in, and which has still not yet run its course. The Ali Babas ransacked and stripped half the city bare. But who were these looters? To celebrate his re-election to the presidency with one hundred per cent of the vote on 15 October 2002, Saddam Hussein opened all the prisons in the country and released all the common criminals (while, at the same time, ordering the execution of most of the political prisoners). How many did he let out? I am given different figures, ranging from thirty thousand to one hundred thousand. This does not explain all of the excesses, but certainly a good number of them, Archbishop Fernando Filoni, the papal nuncio, assures me. (He is a specialist in the field of international disaster areas: he began his diplomatic career in Sri Lanka, when the Tamils began their killings, and he represented the Vatican in Tehran during the bombing raids of the war with Iraq, ‘which did not let us sleep’.) ‘The lack of experience of freedom is what causes these disasters. That is why the Holy Father, who knows a great deal, was opposed to this war. Because they were in such a hurry, the Americans were suddenly faced with something that they had not foreseen: generalised vandalism.’

It is also true that the accumulated hatred of the governing clique encouraged many of their victims to destroy the houses of people in power and all the buildings associated with the regime. But, why the factories? A seasoned industrialist, Nagi Al Jaf, who has businesses in the Iraqi capital and in the Kurdish city of Suleymaniya, tells me that the large Farida beer factory in Baghdad, a mixed company in which he has shares, was stripped by the Ali Babas. ‘I can understand them stealing things that they can use or sell. But I can’t see why they destroyed all the machines and then, as if that were not enough, they burned them.’ How many industries in Baghdad were wrecked in this way? He is categorical. ‘All of them.’ I ask him not to exaggerate, to be objective. He takes a long look at the stars in the sky above Suleymaniya and repeats, ‘All of them. There is not a single industrial plant in Baghdad that has not been completely destroyed.’ What is the explanation then? Perhaps it is that a people cannot live in such abject terror and servility in the way the Iraqis were forced to live during the three decades of the dictatorship of the Ba’ath Party (a pro-Arab, nationalist, fascist and Stalinist party rolled into one, founded in 1942, in Damascus, by a Syrian Christian, Michel Aflaq) and the twenty-four years of the presidency of Saddam Hussein, without reacting violently when they have an opportunity. So when, on 9 April, the Iraqis suddenly felt completely and absolutely free, there was an explosion of anarchy, dissolute behaviour and savagery which has destroyed Baghdad and left a bleeding wound in the hearts of every Baghdad citizen.

Since there is no public transport working, and there are no traffic police on street intersections, traffic in Baghdad is pandemonium. (Petrol is given away: it costs scarcely fifty cents to fill a tank). Drivers go wherever they please, so traffic accidents are very frequent and the jams are extraordinary. But at least in this area I noticed signs of the ‘spontaneous institutions’ that Hayek argues are more lasting and representative because they emerge naturally from civil society and are not imposed by the powers that be. When the jams become completely impossible, there are always volunteers armed with a stick and a whistle prepared to direct the traffic. And the drivers stuck in the jam obey their instructions, relieved that finally someone is giving them orders. This is also happening in neighbourhoods around the city: the local residents are forming groups to defend themselves against the thieves, or to take piles of rubbish to the end of the street and burn it. That is why when you walk around Baghdad, you have to pick your way through not only rubble, ruins, burned-out buildings and piles of vermin-ridden filth, but also the pestilential bonfires by which the inhabitants of Baghdad try to control the rubbish that threatens to swallow them up.

But perhaps the worst thing of all for the long-suffering inhabitants of the Iraqi capital is the lack of electricity and drinking water. There are continual power cuts which in some districts last for days on end. The neighbours are defenceless against the torrid temperatures that never drop below forty degrees in the shade and sometimes rise above fifty degrees. To be subjected to this burning heat, in total darkness and without running water, is torture. In the apartment of Spanish friends working for the Iberoamericana-Europa Foundation, that has brought five hundred tons of food and medicines and a drinking water plant to Iraq, where I was put up during my first week in Iraq, I experienced at first hand the hardships that the Iraqis had been suffering for three months. The light came on intermittently, but at times the cuts went on for so many hours that it was impossible to cook, wash or air the place and, to prevent us burning up in the oven temperatures of the bedrooms, my hosts took mattresses out into the garden, choosing the cockroaches over asphyxia. The demoralisation that all this produces is one of the obstacles that the Iraqis will have to overcome in order for their country, which is emerging from one of the most corrupt and brutal experiences of authoritarianism known to humanity, to leave behind that long night of despotism and violence that is their history and become a modern, prosperous and democratic nation.

Is this a possible, realistic idea, or an illusion, since we are talking about a society that lacks even the most minimal experience of freedom and that is also torn by many antagonisms and internal rivalries? Is it feasible to imagine Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, Shia and Sunni Muslims and the internal currents that divide them, Chaldea, Asirian, Latin and Armenian Christians, tribal clans, primitive country dwellers and vast urban communities to coexist in an open and plural, tolerant and flexible system, a lay state with a solid consensus that would allow the twenty-five million inhabitants of Mesopotamia, where writing was born and which is a fundamental reference point for all the great religions and modern cultures, the cradle of the first great collection of the historical laws — the Hammurabi Code — finally to lead a worthy and free life, or is it a fantasy as delirious at that of the mythical ancestors of these people, who wanted to build a tower that would reach the sky and ended up frustrated and lost in the frightful confusion of Babel?

I have come to Iraq to try to find out if these questions have a convincing answer. Twelve days is very little time, but it is better than nothing.

25 June–6 July 2003

2. Baghdad People

Captain Nawfal Khzal Aied Abdala Al Dolame is a tall, slim, serious, elegant and tough-looking man. He studied in the Al Almiraya Military Academy, in the outskirts of Baghdad, and after graduating spent several years in the Ministry of Defence. But when things got difficult for the regime, he was assigned to a combat battalion and was stationed in Basra, coming up against the UK coalition forces. Then his battalion retreated to Baghdad and, once there, as happened in many other divisions of the Iraqi army, his commanding officers decided that it was useless to put up resistance to the Americans, and sent their officers and men back home. It was there that he learned that the captain of the Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by Ambassador Paul Bremer, had dismissed the almost half a million members of Saddam Hussein’s armed forces, and that he was without a job. Since then, he has earned his living as a bodyguard, a profession which has become very popular, given the widespread anarchy in this country without a state, or services, or a police force, or any other authorities, that is prey to myriad Ali Babas.

Armed with a pistol (authorised by the CPA), and for the modest sum of one hundred dollars, he follows me everywhere like a shadow. As a bodyguard, he is charmingly useless. The only time his services were needed, in the Imam Ali mosque in the sacred — for the Shia — city of Najaf, when an enraged believer tried to attack my daughter Morgana who, with characteristic irresponsibility, was taking photos in the midst of the wailing masses, all that he managed to do was raise his hands to his face and deplore this demonstration of fanaticism and ignorance. It was other believers in the crowd that spared Morgana’s face from the blow that was aimed at her. But I like this captain with his interminable name: Nawfal Khazal Aied Abdala Al Dolame. Without a flicker on his severe face, he comes up with lines like: ‘I am a Muslim at night and a Christian during the day, so that I can have a cold beer’. I understand and approve of what he is saying: there is no sin that any normal personal would be unwilling to commit to placate to some degree this fifty-degrees-in-the-shade inferno that is the capital of Iraq.

The captain knows many stories about Uday, Saddam Hussein’s son, who adds weight to the tradition by which the sons of the great satraps usually outdo their fathers in terms of abuses and crimes. The stories that I hear on a daily basis about the scions of the Iraqi dictator remind me, like a recurrent nightmare, of those that I heard in the Dominican Republic, about the sons of General Trujillo. But I suspect that Uday even beat the record of Ramfis and Radhamés Trujillo, for example by having the Health Minister of the regime, Dr Raja, who, like Saddam Hussein, was from Tikrit, eaten by a pack of wild dogs. One story that the captain knows very well concerns a very pretty young woman, a close family friend, who earned her living as a teacher and whose name he does not disclose to me, out of respect. Uday saw her in the street when she was on the way to the school. He ordered his bodyguards to kidnap her, and he took her to one of his palaces, where the young woman was at his mercy for almost two months. When he let her go, her family, in shame, moved with her to Mosul, where they are still living. The captain assures me that the figure of at least three hundred women kidnapped in this way by the criminal psychopath that was (and is, since he is still on the run) Uday Hussein, is completely realistic.

Despite not speaking Arabic, I understand everything that I hear around me thanks to my splendid translator, Dr Bassam Y. Rashid. He is a professor at the University of Baghdad and was for a time the director of the Spanish Department, that has more than eight hundred students. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Granada, with a critical edition of a treatise on astrology by Enrique de Villena, that took him seven years of erudite and happy study. That was where his son Ahmed was born, and his son still dreams of his childhood in Granada the way others dream of paradise. In the professor’s modest house, young Ahmed has turned his small room into a kind of shrine, with photos of the King and Queen of Spain and places in Spain — he knows the history and geography of Spain by heart and he repeats facts about the country like a mantra — the way other kids of his age would have plastered their walls with film stars or the latest rock group. Professor Bassam Y. Rashid was mysteriously summoned one day by Saddam Hussein to be his interpreter during a visit by Comandante Hugo Chávez, the demagogue who rules Venezuela, and I am sure that he must have lots of juicy anecdotes about that assignment. But I don’t ask him about it, because, knowing him, I know that he would maintain a strict professional silence and not open his mouth.

Professor Bassam is one of those decent people who are the moral backbone of a country, who might be frustrated and ruined by dictatorships, but who still manage to survive with their moral values intact all the vileness, fear, corruption and stupidity that tyrannies create, poisoning the very air that everyone breathes. In these twelve days that we have spent together, I have not heard him complain once about the infinite deprivations that he is forced to put up with, like almost all his compatriots: the complete lack of security, the uncertainty, the lack of light and water and the absence of any authorities, the terrifying mounting mounds of rubbish on all the roads and the pavements, the prevailing chaos, the economic shortages, the terrorist assaults that are multiplying daily, the attacks in the street. The only time I saw him sad was when he showed me the libraries and lecture halls of the University, where he has spent all his life, that had been ransacked and burned in the orgy of vandalism that gripped Baghdad following the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein, and which literally destroyed, along with thousands of other institutions, homes and premises, the five universities in the Iraqi capital. But he is not defeatist. Freedom is always good, even though it comes at a high price, he says, and he has not lost hope that Iraq will one day be a free, modern, and democratic country, ‘like Spain’ (is the way he puts it). In his very modest house in the Al Magreb district, he and his wife greet me with the magnificence of the Arabian Nights, in the best tradition of Arab hospitality, though I fear that this means that they will go hungry later. If, by chance, circumstances take you one of these days to Baghdad, try to meet Dr Bassam Y. Rashid, because just talking to him for a few minutes will raise your spirits.

And, after that, take a stroll around the old centre of the city and go to the Clock Tower, on the banks of the Tigris. You won’t be able to enjoy the gardens of the old building that was the seat of government in the times of the monarchy, where King Faisal I was crowned in 1922. All that has been destroyed by the Ali Babas and has disappeared into thin air. And the looters, not content with carrying off the windows, the doors, the beams, the ironwork and floor tiles of the ancient building, chipped and broke and gutted and smashed everything that they could not manage to carry away, so that, in there, you feel as if you are stepping through the ruins left by some devastating earthquake. No, go there, because, as happened to me, you may well bump into the likeable and affable Jamal N. Hussein, a small and formal man from Baghdad, in his forties, who works in the Library of the National Museum and who savours the English language as if it were sugar. He is effusive and will be delighted to tell you his story. He used to live there, on the top floor of a block next to the government building. When the looting began, he was out, and he ran back here, to protect his apartment. When he got back, out of breath, he found that the Ali Babas had taken all his belongings — his books, his clothes and his music — and were setting fire to his apartment. From these gardens he could see the smoke enveloping everything that had not been stolen.

But what is really interesting is not this seemingly banal event that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Iraqis, have also suffered, but rather that, at this point in the story, the delicate Jamal N. Hussein will raise his voice a shade and, gesturing energetically, will let you know that he was not so concerned that the Ali Babas had taken his things and burned his house, he could get over that. What really plunges him into despair and anguish, and keeps him awake at night, and brings him here every day to these destroyed gardens, is his Fiat. And then, with a wave of his child’s hand, Jamal N. Hussein will say to you: ‘Come sir, come and meet her.’ It was the apple of his eye, more important than a dog or a relative: it was like a lover or a personal deity. He cleaned it, took care of it and showed it to his friends with delight and admiration. And when you see the mortal remains of the Fiat, in a corner of that stripped garden, that heap of twisted and burned metal, bathing in the inclement heat of the Iraq summer, you will see Jamal N. Hussein’s greyish brown eyes mist over with sadness. You should leave at this point. Don’t be uncouth and try to console him with one of those stupid banalities that you hear at funerals. Tiptoe away and leave the unhappy man to his memories.

If you are very depressed at what you have just seen, less than two hundred yards from there, in among the ruined buildings and the pestilential rubbish, in a run-down street that crosses the narrow Al Mutanabbi Road, where every Friday there is a colourful second-hand book fair, you will find a crammed, timeless little café, with a surprising name: The Merchants’ Champion Café. Go there and I promise that it will cheer you up. Don’t be put off by the male throng, elbow your way into the café and sit down in any space you can find. Order a tea, a coffee or a hookah and start talking to the person next to you. If you are lucky, you’ll meet the lawyer, whose name I did not catch, with whom I shared a red-hot narrow bench, that burned my backside. He was a broad and jovial man, bathed in sweat, who chewed the mouthpiece of his hookah and blew out puffs of smoke smelling of tobacco mixed with apricot and apple, while he held forth. He told me that he was a lawyer, but that since, due to recent events, the country had no courts or judges or laws, and thus no clients, he found that, after a successful career in the courts, he had become a ‘nobody’, almost non-existent. ‘Just think, the country that gave the world the first written laws in history — the Hammurabi Code — is now a country without even shyster lawyers.’ His mocking smile flitted across the burning room, as if to say that, for someone like him, this did not matter a jot. For the time he was here, surrounded by poets, literary people and wastrels who are the locals at the Merchants’ Champion Café, and with a slow burning hookah, he was a happy man, without any problems.

‘Who do you think governs Baghdad?’ he asks suddenly, gesticulating in the air and posing like a diva to attract everyone’s attention. ‘The Americans?’ The lawyer pauses for a few seconds for effect before finally giving the eagerly awaited answer: ‘No, habibi. The real rulers of Baghdad are the Ali Babas, the cockroaches, the bugs, the fleas.’ A polite chuckle greeted his words. The other regulars must have heard his jokes many times over and did not find them very funny. I did. Cynical stoicism is like a breath of civilisation in these cases, an excellent way to fight despair.

25 June–6 July 2003

3. The Believers

Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr Al Hakim is sixty-three, and spent twenty-three years in exile in Iran. As well as being a leading authority on the Shia religion, he is a most important political figure since he is the president of the Supreme Council of the Iraq Islamic Revolution, which is the main body of the Shia Muslims in the country (that comprise some sixty per cent of the twenty-five million Iraqis). When he returned from exile, a huge crowd turned out to greet him. His solemn, bearded face is everywhere, on posters adorning walls and buses, in particular around the Shia mosques. He is considered to be the leader of the most radical sector of the Shia religion, and many accuse him of being close to the Iranian model, that is, a theocratic, fundamentalist government, controlled by the ayatollahs. But he categorically denies this: ‘Iraq is not a photocopy of Iran or of anywhere else. Every country has its own distinctive characteristics. Our idea is that Iraq must establish a democratic government where all ethnic groups and religious minorities are represented, but which, at the same time, respects our identity and our history.’

He has very pale skin and blue eyes, and his presence — with his long grey beard, his black turban and grey robes — has a studied dignity. He receives me in the city of Najaf, a sacred site for Shias, for it is where Emir Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, who was murdered in year 41 of the hegira and is considered to be the spiritual figure of the Shia, is buried. Imam Muhammad Bakr Al Hakim lives in spartan austerity, and the offices of his movement are also extremely simple. But the precautions that they take are very tight.

Clerics, bodyguards and assistants search us, take our shoes off and confiscate our cameras and tape recorders (which they return to us once they have checked that there are no arms or explosives hidden in them). There is not a single female presence in the house, and Morgana has to comply strictly with the dress code by wearing the Muslim veil so that she can come in with me and take photographs. When I tell Ayatollah Al Hakim that she is my daughter, he replies curtly, without looking at her: ‘I have six daughters.’ I do not commit the impertinence of asking him how many wives have borne these six children. (The Shia, apart from having four legitimate wives authorised by the Koran, can add a fifth — the so-called ‘pleasure marriage’ — if they are travelling without female company, so that they do not have to suffer the privations of abstinence. This fifth wedding can last solely for the duration of the journey).

The day before receiving me, the ayatollah had declared — in this country where attacks are increasing every day — that it is a mistake to kill US soldiers, and that whatever objectives the Iraqis seek to achieve by assassination can be reached by peaceful means, through dialogue. I thought that he would repeat to me the same diplomatic declaration, but I was wrong. Speaking slowly, and gesturing gently to illustrate his words, he delivered a severe diatribe against the ‘coalition forces’. He never speaks about the Americans or the British, just about the ‘coalition’, but we both know very well who he is talking about.

‘The liberation was a mere pretext. The coalition troops have become occupation forces. Bush and Blair made many promises that they have been incapable of fulfilling. There is no security at all in the country, and our sovereignty has been snatched away from us. As a pretext for the war, they argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but they have not been able to find them. Nor have they been able to capture the former dictator and his followers, despite the fact that they are people who eat and move around and leave tracks. If they had let us act, we would have found them by now.’

He speaks without raising his voice and without looking at me, his blue eyes are staring into the distance, with the quiet determination of one who knows that he is in possession of the truth. His halfdozen assistants listen to him with wrapt attention, indifferent to the horrendous heat that has turned this small, bare room, with a large bunch of plastic flowers as its one adornment, into a frying pan. Ayatollah Al Hakim is a man who rarely smiles and who pontificates and proclaims rather than speaks, like the prophets and the gods on Olympus. Crouching behind him is a man who never takes his eyes off me, ready to leap on me if I make any suspicious movement. Being so close to Ayatollah Al Hakim makes me feel deeply uneasy. Although, like all agnostics, I recognise that I secretly envy believers, when these believers are as absolute and categorical as the Iraqi imam in front of me, it makes me shiver.

‘The war has not ended,’ Ayatollah Al Hakim continues. ‘Discontent among the people is increasing every day, as are the acts of resistance against the occupying forces, which is very serious for the future of Iraq. There are different reasons for this resistance: promises made to us are not kept and our dignity is humiliated. I’m referring to the behaviour of the occupation forces. They kill innocent people and they are incapable of finding the real culprits for the crimes committed by the dictatorship. They steal quite brazenly from the private houses that they search, taking the family’s money. They take advantage of the fact that since there are no banks, people have to keep their money in their houses. As well as stealing they offend our women, they touch them and that hurts and upsets our people. Here, in Najaf, we have already organised five demonstrations to protest against these abuses. It is true that surviving groups attached to Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party also commit terrorist attacks and sabotage. But this, to a great extent, is the fault of the coalition troops, because, instead of hunting down the Ba’athists and the followers of Saddam, they disarm us, the popular forces. But that just increases the anger of the Iraqis against the occupiers.’

Indeed, adorning the earthen walls in the drab, run-down, poverty-stricken streets of Najaf, a two-hour drive to the south of Baghdad, where the dust from the surrounding desert swirls around, staining everything the colour of yellow ochre, alongside the death notices for the many people who are brought to this holy city to be buried, there are many anti-coalition inscriptions and graffiti praising the ‘Soldiers of Islam’ who are fighting against the infidels and Satan. But none of them mention the Americans by name; they all rail against ‘foreign hegemony’ as well as proclaiming ‘Death to Saddam and the Ba’athists’.

The hostility towards the coalition troops, and the anti-American feeling, is very tangible among the crowd of believers heading towards the mosque in a great procession, the women dressed in severe abayas, tunics and black veils, that cover them from head to foot. Many of them, in addition, wear black woollen stockings and some even gloves, in temperatures of forty-five degrees in the shade. The mass of the faithful grows even denser around and inside the imposing mosque that contains the tomb of Emir Ali. My translator, Professor Bassam Y. Rashid, who is the director of the Department of Spanish at the University of Baghdad, is constantly explaining to all and sundry that we are not ‘Americans’, but we are stared at and gestured at in a hostile manner as we make our way to the mosque. The people are even more belligerent inside the mosque.

This is very different to what happened to me in the main Shia mosque in Baghdad, the mosque of the Khadim Brothers (the grandsons of Emir Ali), where I was greeted most cordially by the people who ran the place. They even joked that they had to make a good impression on foreigners to dispel the rumours put about by their enemies, that Shia are fundamentalist. This accusation is doubtless quite unjust. Along with the Kurds, the Shia were the ones that suffered the worst excesses of Saddam Hussein, who was a Sunni and surrounded himself with Muslims of the same religious tendency. There are doubtless many moderate Shia just as there are fundamentalist Sunnis. In broad terms the division between the two main currents of Islam is that the Shia religion is rooted in the more primitive sectors, the rural and marginal groups, while the Sunnis come in the main from the urban sectors, are better educated and better connected socially. The Shia have always been excluded from power, which has been a Sunni monopoly.

The worst poverty and neglect I have seen is here in Najaf and in the other sacred Shia city near by, Kerbala. Realising that the crowd was hostile to us — we are the only ‘Westerners’ in sight — the two people in charge of the Emir Ali mosque decide to put us in an office and then ask us to take our shoes off. There the man in charge of the mosque decides to give me a history lesson and tells me in great detail about the remains of Prince Ali. (The same thing happened to me yesterday, in Baghdad, in the mosque of the Khadim Brothers, when a holy man explained to me at length that, at the end of time, Christ would come to kiss the hand of El Madi and, from then on, Muslims and Christians would become brothers.) I listened patiently. After he was murdered in Kerfa, the remains of Muhammad’s son-in-law were buried secretly by the faithful. They remained hidden for many years. Some time later, during the caliphate of Harun Al Rachid, the caliph noticed when he was out hunting crows that the dogs always kept a respectful distance from a certain mound. There they discovered the remains of the Emir. This beautiful mosque was then built to honour them.

While he is instructing me, I observe the mass spectacle of the believers. They come into this enormous rectangular patio with the coffins of the dead held aloft and they walk them around the crypt of the Emir. The great throng of men push and elbow each other, chanting, praying, praising Allah, some in a state of hysterical paroxysm. It is doubtless impressive but, for me, very depressing. Hands and lips reach out to touch and kiss the walls, the railings, the grooves and ridges of the doors, and some of the faithful sob at the top of their voices, prostrate, touching the ground with their forehead. Around the crypt, the group is all male. The women, dark shapes, remain behind, crowded together at the rear of the mosque, keeping a magic distance from the men, who are the only protagonists in this dramatic ceremony. My teacher explains that many of the faithful are pilgrims who have come here from far off — ‘some from Bosnia’ — and that they sleep on these sacred tiles.

‘Isn’t it the same in Lourdes or in Fatima?’, a Spanish friend tries to console me that same evening in Baghdad when I tell him about how uneasy I felt after the visit to Najaf as we drank a warm, acid beer in the semi-darkness during the latest power cut. Is it the same? I don’t think so. In these great centres of Catholic pilgrimage, there is a whole commercial apparatus involved, a major tourist exploitation of faith, which rather undermines this faith, but also makes it seem inoffensive. There is nothing of this here: here faith is pure, integral, disinterested, extreme, the only thing that many of these people, destitute and ravaged by poverty, have to hold on to as they scream and shout out their prayers, and this could easily be channelled into violence — a holy war or jihad — by a charismatic ayatollah like the one I am visiting in Najaf.

Taking the advice of friends in Baghdad, I asked Morgana and her friend Marta, from the Iberoamerican-European Foundation, not to try to enter the mosque of Prince Ali, and to wait for me instead in the main square at Najaf, and look around the colourful market. But I’ve never had the slightest authority over my daughter, so there they were, swathed in borrowed abayas, with their foreign faces visible to all, passing themselves off as Afghan Muslims! And Morgana, with that temerity that she’s always shown ever since she made her cot shake with her furious tantrums, started taking photographs. An agitated believer went up to her and flung a blow at her face, which was deflected by the camera. The bodyguard accompanying her put his head in his hands, upset at this show of obscurantism. Marta was more fortunate: instead of being greeted with aggression, she received, in English, a marriage proposal, which she turned down.

We visited the other Shia holy city, Kerbala — more open and less claustrophobic than the cramped, poverty-stricken city of Najaf — which is the site of two immense and strikingly beautiful mosques, one of which is the burial place of Imam Hussein, the son of Prince Ali, who was killed in the Yazid invasion. But the hostility in the air was such that we decided to cut short our visit and leave, with great regret, that beautiful place with its golden cupolas, tiled walls and squares and marble floors. In that city as well, in the shady arcades of the market, and in the narrow streets with its houses that looked on the point of collapse, we are pressed on all sides by a crowd that looks on us with hostility and disgust. The attempts of the three Baghdad friends that were travelling with me to convince them that we were not Americans but Spanish Muslims on a religious pilgrimage, does not convince them. My friends tell me that we should hurry up and get out. The democratic virtues of tolerance and coexistence in diversity seem alien to these parts.

When I ask Ayatollah Al Hakim what he thinks about what is happening in neighbouring Iran, where we have recently seen an increase in demonstrations by young students demanding more freedom and democracy from the repressive conservative government, he wriggles out of the question: ‘I do not have reliable information as to what is happening in Iran. We do not even know accurately what is happening in other provinces in Iraq. I do not dare take seriously what certain information media, in Qatar, the Emirates and Jordan, put out because they are just looking to incite violence and hate, so I prefer not to have an opinion on this matter.’

He doesn’t reply very openly when I ask him if he would accept a secular government for Iraq: ‘Would a secular government mean a government against religion?’ he replies tersely. I tell him not, that such a government would not be in favour or against religion, it would be independent and neutral on religious issues, it would restrict itself to guaranteeing respect for all beliefs.

Imam Al Hakin can barely disguise his displeasure: ‘Islam must be respected,’ he says firmly. ‘Like in Pakistan, Egypt or the Maghrib, which are Islamic countries. That is the type of state that Iraq will have.’

I have been given scarcely half an hour and my time is nearly up. One of the imam’s assistants is indicating in a peremptory fashion that I should take my leave. I try to move the conversation on to a more personal level and ask him how he felt when he came back to Najaf, after an absence of more than two decades. The imam is a politician who never drops his guard and he gives me the official answer: ‘I feel both happy and sad. Happy because I am among my own people and the tyrant has been overthrown, but saddened by the two million disappeared that we had in the years of Saddam Hussein, by the common graves where we find the remains of tortured and murdered brothers, and by the suffering and hardship that the Iraqi people are still suffering today.’

I left there convinced that Al Hakim would certainly like the future Iraq to be like Iran, but that he knows that the people of Iraq and, above all, the Americans would find it very difficult to agree to this, and that, as a pragmatic politician, he has given up for now this goal in favour of a more realistic and less theocratic formula: a coalition of religious, political and ethnic forces, in which the Shia, because of their overall majority, would still have majority representation. Despite his vociferous criticism of the occupying forces, I am quite sure that at this stage, at least, he would work with the Provisional Coalition Authority and Paul Bremer.

I discuss this issue with my Baghdad and Spanish friends in a restaurant full of the turbans and abayas of Kerbala, called The Pearl of Najaf, with the inevitable fried chicken with rice, pureed beans and gherkin salad with yoghurt. A menu that would shadow me throughout the twelve days of my stay in Iraq. Morgana and Marta have taken off their veils to eat, and our fellow diners look at them out of the corner of their eyes, with surprise.

I return to Baghdad, with a heavy heart, without being able to get out of my mind the image of these women buried their whole lives — in Najaf and Kerbala, you see young girls buried beneath these robes — in these mobile prisons that deny them any comfort in these suffocating temperatures, which prevent them from developing their bodies and their minds freely, a symbol of their subordinate position, their lack of independence and freedom. This is the Middle Ages, severe and harsh. And if this prevails over the other social and political forces in Iraq, the idea that this country can become a modern, functional democracy in a short period of time, is illusory.

25 June–6 July 2003

4. Looters and Books

If the visit to Najaf and Kerbala was a journey back to medieval Iraq, the morning that I spend in the National University of Baghdad shows me the most modern and progressive aspect of Iraqi society. Young men and women mingle in the courtyards, in the corridors and in the lecture halls with complete naturalness, and many young women walk around without any headgear, showing their arms, although most of them cover their hair with the Islamic veil. The only thing that still brings to mind the Arabian Nights in Baghdad are the eyes of the Baghdad women. It is graduation day and there is a festive, boisterous atmosphere. Entire subject year groups are being photographed under the trees, with bunches of flowers and with their professors in the middle. Young men are dancing to lively music that is being broadcast through loudspeakers, singing at the top of their voices, cheered on by the women. Morgana moves among the dancers, in her element, and she is very well received. The atmosphere is friendly, happy and trusting. (But, the following day, in this cafeteria, a US soldier who was talking to a group of students was killed with a bullet in the head by an individual who ran off.)

I am in the Languages Faculty, which has close to five thousand students, eight hundred of them in the Department of Spanish. They have good teachers, and I interrupt a couple of classes and have a lively discussion with students of both sexes, who are very keen to hear about Spain. By contrast, they know little about Latin America. The building is in a ruinous state because of the looting, but no one seems to be bothered since all the students are in excellent humour.

The lecturers have just been paid their salary for April, a delay of two months. The recent upheavals have meant that salaries have seen some extraordinary readjustments. People who were formerly paid the equivalent of five dollars a month (they were always badly paid, but after the Gulf War and the international embargo salaries reached rock bottom) have now received 250 dollars. However, the Rector has already announced to them that this will be cut back next month to 165 dollars. Nobody knows the reasons for these arbitrary rises and falls, or how long this fickle system, which reflects the chaotic economy of the country, will last. The only thing that is clear is that Iraqi university teachers find it very difficult to live on what they earn, which is why so many of them go to teach in Libya, Jordan or the Gulf Emirates, where the salaries are high.

It is a pleasure to talk to the head of the Languages Faculty, the stout, curly-haired and exuberant Dr Dia Nafi Hassan, a specialist in Russian literature and language and an expert on Chekhov and Turgenev. His office is an oven, and is practically empty because everything in this university — in the five Baghdad universities — was looted and burned when the dictatorship fell on 9 April, so they do not have ventilators, desks, chairs, computers, filing cabinets or books. The walls are blackened, the windows and window-panes are broken, and there are no tiles on the floor of the corridors and stairs. Perhaps worst of all, they have no records of student enrolments, grades and files because they have all been burned. ‘Like all institutions, the University of Baghdad has returned to a virginal state,’ the Dean jokes. But this hurricane of barbarism which devastated the university, like the Huns of Tamerlane, ‘the sons of hell’, who devastated ancient Mesopotamia, indifferent to the civilisation that produced the artistic and intellectual marvels of Nineveh and Babylon, seems not to have made the slightest dent in the good humour and optimism of the colleagues and students of Dr Dia Nafi Hassan, who tells me excitedly that, as a forerunner of what would soon be happening throughout Iraq, the University of Baghdad had undertaken to implement a democratic system. There had been recent elections, and here, in the Faculty, he had been elected Dean with forty-two of the fifty-three votes cast. He is proud of the legitimacy of his mandate. His enthusiasm seems to be shared by the other members of staff present.

He hopes that what has happened here will soon happen throughout Iraq. That the Iraqis themselves will take control, without the supervision of ‘foreigners’ (for foreigners, read Americans). And that this would become a free and democratic country, like Western European countries — he mentions France, Spain and England — with a lay state, tolerant of all beliefs, including, of course, Islam, which is his religion. I ask him whether events in Iraq might be similar to Algeria in the early nineties when, in the first more or less free elections in Algeria’s independent history, it looked as if the fundamentalists would win power, through democratic processes, and would then have ended up abolishing democracy and imposing a theocracy. The Dean disagrees with my analysis, waving his arms with absolute conviction. ‘Here the fanatics will never win free elections,’ he assures me. ‘Here the great majority of us Muslims are civilised, open, democratically inclined people.’

I hope with all my heart that this will be the case. But it is quite clear that there are a good number of fanatics on the loose, because the university teachers tell me that some of the thieves who took part in the looting and vandalism that destroyed this site and burned the libraries — I visit the Russian and German libraries where everything has been reduced to ashes, not a single book escaping the flames — and the offices in the Faculty, also daubed fundamentalist slogans on the wall, cursing this house of evil and the infidel.

Who were these looters, who have created more wounds, bitterness and anger than the coalition bombings? I’m not exaggerating when I say that in the dozens of conversations and interviews that I’ve had over the past days, I have not heard a single Iraqi lamenting the fall of Saddam Hussein, who was clearly detested by the majority of the people that he enslaved. Indeed, most if not all seem to celebrate his fall from power. I have not even heard many complaints from the victims of the bombing. But what everyone is agreed on is their detestation of the dreadful looting that followed the fall of the dictator and has reduced Baghdad and, so it seems, a good number of other cities and towns in Iraq, to ruins, with gutted and burned houses and piles of rubble everywhere. And a very large number of citizens who were full of hope at the end of the dictatorship — the ones who toppled the statues of the dictator and who have defaced his image wherever they find it — have lost everything they had, their furniture, their memories, their housing, their clothes, the savings that they kept hidden in their houses out of fear that the banks would confiscate them. Everyone asks: ‘Why did the Americans not get involved?’ ‘Why didn’t they stop them?’ It’s a mystery that has yet to be resolved. There were hundreds, thousands of soldiers in the streets who from the outset could have dealt robustly with that maddened swarm of Ali Babas who, like a cloud of hungry locusts, laid waste to Baghdad and other Iraqi cities over several days, without any intervention from the Americans. Up to that time they had been greeted by many Iraqis as liberators but, after the looting, this friendly feeling turned into frustration and hostility.

One of the explanations for the vandalism is the large number of common criminals let out of prison in Iraq by order of Saddam Hussein. How many were there? Between thirty and a hundred thousand. The figures never tally and sometimes reach fantastic extremes, as always happens in countries without freedom of information in which people are informed by hunches or hearsay. However, a great deal of this havoc was caused by a bunch of criminals who were allowed free rein in this country without law and order that Saddam Hussein wished to bequeath to posterity. It was also caused by the agents, torturers and bureaucrats of the regime, who were anxious to destroy all traces of their misdeeds. But it was also inevitable that circumstances turned many mild citizens into Ali Babas. Finding themselves free and uncensored, in a world without any checks or laws, some gave vent to the unbridled, savage thirst for violence that we all carry within us. The environment caused some to show their frustration and protest in the most ferocious way, or to take the revenge that they had so long dreamed of, to settle accounts with their neighbours, colleagues, relatives, litigants or enemies. Fanatics saw that the time had come to punish the pornographers and the degenerates; the envious saw it as an opportunity to take revenge on the people they had envied; in general, a people humiliated, maltreated, terrorised and alienated by thirty-five years of authoritarianism wallowed in a bath of purifying brutality and licentiousness, as in the great Dionysian festivities that began as a song to happiness and ended in human sacrifice and mass suicides. All this is comprehensible, after all. But what is not comprehensible is that the forces that occupied Iraq and had prepared for this war to perfection, right down to the technological minutiae — to judge from the speed of the victory and the mathematical precision of the bombing — had not anticipated this, and had no plan to combat it.

I hear all this, in his florid Italian, from Archbishop Fernando Filoni, the apostolic nuncio of His Holiness, who has been in Baghdad for two years. He is small, astute, tough as nails, talkative and an expert on emergencies. In Sri Lanka and Tehran he had received excellent training for this hotbed of tensions that is Iraq. ‘The Holy Father was against the war because he knew what would happen,’ he tells me, with a sad expression on his face. ‘It is very easy to win, but then it is incredibly difficult to administer the peace.’ The nuncio’s residence is a simple house, obsessively clean and tidy, an unusual haven of peace in this city.

The dictatorship literally destroyed a society that four decades earlier had reached a high level of culture, with hospitals and universities among the most modern in the Middle East, and world-ranking professionals. In the fifties, Baghdad’s culture and art were the envy of its neighbours. The Ba’athists and Saddam Hussein ended all that. There was a haemorrhaging of doctors, engineers, economists, researchers, teachers and intellectuals to the four corners of the world. (While I’m listening to him, I remember that on my way to Iraq, during my stopover in Amman, a diplomat who had spent many years in Jordan told me: ‘For this country, the tragedy in Iraq has been a blessing: the most important musicians, artists and intellectuals here are Iraqi immigrants.’) Censorship, repression, fear, corruption and isolation had increasingly impoverished the country culturally until it reached the low point that it is at today. For that reason there was so much hope among ordinary people at the time of the liberation. Whatever people say, the Americans were initially greeted in a friendly manner. But with the looting and the complete insecurity that followed, this initial sympathy turned into dislike and hostility. ‘You shouldn’t see this as love for Saddam Hussein, but rather as a hatred of chaos, of how precarious life has become.’

Monsignor Filoni says that fear of robbery, assaults, kidnapping and rape has become a real psychosis. Many families have stopped taking their children to school; they hardly leave their houses and, since there is no police force, keep the weapons that the Americans have asked them to hand in to defend themselves against robbers. The nuncio does not seem very optimistic about the possibility of a modern democracy emerging in Iraq out of all this. There are many social tensions, a complete lack of political experience among the people, little evidence of democracy and too much anarchy for any democratic process to be implemented in a short space of time. In the long term perhaps. The very, very long term. His words repeat, almost literally, what I heard from my friend in Amman: ‘The best that one can hope for in Iraq, realistically, is a controlled and relative democracy, like Jordan. Here there have just been elections and not a single woman was elected. But, according to the law, there will be six women in Parliament since there is a quota for women. The Islamists have only obtained seventeen-and-a-half percent of the vote, a triumph for the regime of King Abdallah. But, if it hadn’t been for an intelligent ad hoc electoral law which prevents candidates getting on closed lists, the Islamist extremists would have gained a much higher percentage. Also, the tribal chiefs who decide the vote of the bulk of the electorate are more macho and intolerant than the Islamists themselves. For me, a system like this is the best that could happen in Iraq.’

When I tell Monsignor Filoni that Iraqi friends have assured me that the case of Tarek Aziz, a Catholic who was the Foreign Minister and accomplice of Saddam Hussein, was not exceptional, for there were many members of the Catholic communities who sympathised with the dictatorship, he shakes his head. Catholics in Iraq, he tells me, approximately one million of them, five per cent of the population, were divided into different branches — the Chaldeans, who still use Aramaic, the language of Christ, in their liturgy; Asirians, Armenians and Latin — felt protected in the early years of the regime because the Ba’ath party proclaimed itself a secular party and put in place a system that recognised all beliefs. But, after the Gulf War, this secularism disappeared. Saddam Hussein used Islam to gain support in Muslim states, and declared himself the standard bearer of the faith against the infidel enemies of Allah. There was strict religious censorship, the regime encouraged the use of the hijab, or Islamic veil, the situation of women suffered a grave setback, and on the radio and television readings from the Koran and broadcasts by clerics and theologians became compulsory; as a result, the Catholic communities became nervous. There were also some isolated acts of religious violence that spread terror. The nuncio tells me about the murder of a seventy-one-year-old nun, Sister Cecilia Mouchi Hanna. In August 2003 she was knifed to death by three young men who, it seems, were released when Saddam Hussein decided to empty the prisons. ‘The Catholics, like every minority, are very interested in having a democratic system in Iraq that would guarantee freedom of religion. But this won’t be achieved without some kind of firm authority.’

The first time Monsignor Filoni came to Iraq, there was not the freedom that there is today, but at least there was order and a degree of safety. At this time of the year, he remembers, in the torrid heat, people would take their mattresses onto the roof and sleep there, looking up at the stars. Have I seen the stars in the Baghdad sky? I confess that I have been so preoccupied with earthly matters that I have not done so. You really must do so straight away, he tells me; make use of these blackouts that leave the whole city in darkness. Up above, in that inky vault, the stars shine so brightly and so clearly that you have to think about God. Perhaps it was these starry nights back in ancient Mesopotamia that, at the dawn of life, caused men and women to start a dialogue with the divinity. ‘Legend has it that Abraham was born here, in Ur, did you know that? Perhaps here, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, not just writing but also faith was born.’

25 June–6 July 2003

5. White Beans

Kais Olwei is a strong and handsome thirty-seven-year-old Iraqi, with a scar like a small snake on his forehead. He feels unwell every time he sees a plate of white beans on a table. This is because of what happened to him eighteen years ago, but he’ll remember it until he dies and perhaps even after that.

He was nineteen then, and was arrested in one of those raids on students that Saddam Hussein’s security forces carried out ritually. They took him to the Headquarters of the Security Services (the Mukhabarat) in Baghdad, and the following morning, before they had even begun to interrogate him, they started torturing him. That was also routine. They hung him up by the arms, like a carcass of meat, and, soon after, while they questioned him, he received electric shocks through electrodes attached to his body. The chief of the three policemen who shared the narrow, dark cell with Kais administered the shocks by pressing a button. He received the shocks in short bursts, at regular intervals, firstly on the legs. Then the wires moved up his body until they reached the most sensitive parts: the anus, the penis and the testicles.

What Kais Olewi remembers of that morning — the first of many such mornings — are not what were doubtless his screams of pain or that slight smell of scorched flesh coming from his own body, but rather the fact that his torturers often forgot about him and became involved in personal conversations, about their families or trivial matters, while Kais Olewi, trussed and suspended in mid-air, reduced to a living wound, wanted to lose consciousness once and for all, but could not manage to do so. At midday they brought the three policemen their lunch: a bowl of steaming white beans. Kais still has a very strong memory of smelling that delicious waft of cooking while he heard the three men discussing which of the cooks at the Headquarters of the Security Services prepared this dish the best. From time to time, while he was still chewing, the head of the group would remember what he was supposed to be doing and turned his attention to the hanging man. Then, as if to assuage his professional conscience, he would press that button and Kais Olewi felt the shock to his brain. Since then he has not been able to smell or taste white bean stew without feeling faint.

Kais Olewi was condemned to life imprisonment, but was lucky since he only spent eight years in Abu Ghraib prison, from 1987 to 1995, before being released under an amnesty. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, he is one of the Iraq ex-political prisoners working as a volunteer in the organisation that I’m visiting: the Association of Free Prisoners. It is housed in an enormous run-down mansion in Khadimiya, on an embankment along the river Tigris where the people of Baghdad, in quieter times, would stroll in the evenings while the setting sun turned the sky red.

What now turns this place red are the posters with photos of thousands of people who disappeared during the dictatorship. Some images — of prisoners with their faces eaten away by acid — are almost impossible to look at. They were all found in the files that the Mukhabarat kept of their victims, many of which were unfortunately lost in the fires. But the Association of Free Prisoners, which began to operate immediately after the fall of the dictatorship, have collected from police stations and other organisations involved in the repression all the documentation that had not been destroyed. There is a crowd of people in the corridors, rooms and stairs, where the volunteers, working on improvised desks or on their knees, are filling in forms, establishing lists of names, collating data and trying to attend to the innumerable people — many of whom are women — who have come here to ask for help in finding their parents, sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters, who one fateful day, x years ago, disappeared from their lives.

There are other Human Rights organisations doing similar work in Iraq, but this association is the largest. It has offices in the eighteen provinces of the country, except Ramadi, and it receives some — albeit little — support from international bodies and from the CPA run by Paul Bremer. Its main function now is to help relatives locate the disappeared and provide them with documentation which will allow them to present petitions to, and seek reparation from, the Iraqi government (when it exists). The Association also has a group of volunteer lawyers who counsel the families of the disappeared who come to the building. I speak to one of them, Ammar Basil, who tells me about some of the horrifying cases that he has become involved in, like the shooting of a newborn baby, the son of a couple of doctors who were opposed to Saddam Hussein. They were subjected to the terrible ordeal of being made to watch the infanticide before they themselves were executed.

The vice-president of the Association of Free Prisoners, Abdul Fattah Al Idrissi, assures me that, however exaggerated the figure might seem, the number of people killed or disappeared since the Ba’ath Party took power in a coup in 1963, which led to the irresistible rise of Saddam Hussein, is between five million and six-and-a-half million. That is, about twenty per cent of the population of Iraq. ‘Not even Hitler had a record like that,’ he says. Since I’ve become used to hearing fantastic figures from different Iraqis, I don’t tell him that I find that figure improbable. But it doesn’t matter: exaggerations are more expressive than the objective facts that will never be established. They show the desperate reaction of people who were powerless in the face of the extraordinary horror of the regime, which no one will ever be able to document precisely, only through vague approximations.

The repression affected all sectors, ethnic groups, social classes and religions, but it mainly affected Kurds and Shi’ites. Among those particularly targeted were intellectuals — teachers, writers, artists — whom Saddam Hussein, a thoroughly ignorant man despite his feeble attempts at studying Law in Cairo, where he was exiled, particularly mistrusted. The vice-president of the Association tells me that, based on a study of some fifteen hundred cases, it became clear that ‘the regime had intended to do away with every cultured person in the country. Because the proportion of educated people, with degrees, among the murdered and disappeared is very high’. Villages, whole neighbourhoods, clans and families disappeared in extermination operations that frequently took place, with no apparent motive, at times when Saddam Hussein had complete control over a cowed population, in a country where terror held sway. It was, says Abdul Fattah Al Idrissi, as if the despot had a sudden attack of homicidal paranoia, and decided on a quick massacre as a preventative measure, stirred by some hunch or macabre nightmare. That is the only way one can understand the extraordinary number of victims, the entire families that are turning up in the common graves that have been discovered in the past months. On other occasions, the collective killings had a precise objective: for example, to make the oil region of Kirkuk completely Arab, forcibly uprooting the Kurdish settlements and replacing them with Sunni communities, or punishing the Shia majority for their 1991 rebellion. All the Ba’ath Party buildings in the provinces were used as torture centres, since the offices of the Mukhabarat did not have enough room. The most frequent tortures inflicted on prisoners were electric shocks, pulling out their eyes and nails, hanging them until their bones were dislocated, burning them with acid, and daubing their bodies with alcohol-soaked cotton and turning them into human torches. When, as happened very infrequently, the families were informed of the death of a person, they received a death certificate that invariably attributed the death to ‘meningitis’.

The Association has a real find, an eyewitness to one of those extraordinary massacres, which took place in Tuz, a town to the north of Baghdad, on the way to Kirkuk. He was a bus driver, and he and his bus were requisitioned by the police. He thus became a passive observer of the whole operation. As he drove around different villages across the region, he saw the police loading up his bus with entire families, parents along with grandparents and children. With his human cargo he was directed by Ba’ath Party members, who were in charge of the operation, to a piece of open ground on the outskirts of Tuz. There were already thousands of people there, being taken off lorries trucks and buses like his by policemen and party activists. As soon as they were unloaded, they were immediately put to work digging a long ditch, in the form of a trench. The witness says that he arrived there at four in the afternoon and that the activity went on all night. When the ditch was deep enough, the police and Ba’ath Party activists put on gas marks and gave him one as well. He was paralysed by terror.

Bludgeoning and firing at the terrified throng, they forced them into the excavated ditch and threw toxic gas cylinders on top of them. By dawn, it was all over. The driver was warned to keep his mouth shut and then sent off by the assassins. The ditch has now been found. It is one of many that are appearing across Iraq, often with four or five thousand corpses in each. ‘They were trenches rather than ditches,’ Abdul Fattah Al Idrissi specifies. And also that, in certain cases, the victims did not have the fortune to be gassed, because the Ba’athists preferred to bury them alive.

These ditches that are being excavated attract thousands of people, who come to see whether, among the remains that are being uncovered, that bear witness to the horror of the recent past in Iraq, they might discover their disappeared family members. One of these couples, who, since April, have been searching the country for the bones of their son who disappeared twelve years ago, are two old people. The woman is very ill, and her daughter tells me that the only thing keeping them alive is the hope of finding the remains of their loved one. Her name is Mrs Al Sarrat, and I visit her in a small, precarious house built on pillars, also in the Al Kadimia neighbourhood. ‘My life is thirty-five years of grief,’ she declares, without crying, her Spartan face chiselled out of despair. She is a woman of indeterminate age, swamped by a black abaya that only allows her face to be shown, flanked by her two very young daughters, who are also veiled and remain motionless throughout the entire interview, like tragic statues. The room is very modest and hot, crammed with pictures, and there is a majestic view of the Tigris through the windows.

‘We cannot breathe or pray because misfortunes kept befalling us, one after the other. He was one of the youngest boys in the family. He was a secondary-school student and signed a petition asking for money to bury a dead school friend. Someone sent that list, which was just a charitable gesture, to the security services. All the boys were arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison, as conspirators. Some of them died in prison.’

Another of Mrs Al Sarrat’s brothers was a soldier. He was wounded three times in the eight-year war with Iran. ‘A hero, no?’ Well one day he was arrested, accused by someone of wanting to get out of the army, a crime that often meant a death sentence or otherwise a prison sentence and the added penalty of having an ear cut off. The family found out about this through rumours, since they never received any information in their frequent enquiries to official bodies. They never heard of him again.

Soon after this second misfortune, a third blow fell. Her father was arrested and disappeared into the night of the dictatorship. Three years later a stranger brought a note to the family. ‘Go to Abu Ghraib prison’, the prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, where the worst tortures and political murders took place. There was her father, and she was able to visit him for several minutes every few months. He was released six years later, as mysteriously as he had been arrested. He was never told why he was detained.

Finally there was a younger brother who disappeared when the Shia uprising of 1991 was put down in an orgy of blood. He was a soldier during the war in Kuwait. The last time anyone saw him, he was still in the forces, in Najaf. He has not been heard of since then, and Mrs Al Sarrat’s parents are searching for him in their painful pilgrimage to the common graves scattered throughout Iraq.

When I leave, rather dazed by my morning’s immersion in suffering and barbarity, instead of saying goodbye to Mrs Al Sarrat with the usual right hand on the heart, I stretch out my hand. She looks at me, alarmed.

Just in case I hadn’t had enough barbarity, this evening, in the Hotel Rimini, where I have come to take refuge, betraying the hospitality of my friends in the Ibero-American-European Foundation for a few miserable hours of air conditioning which might finally help me to sleep a bit, I have a conversation with a woman who works for the United Nations which has sunk me into depression and will probably bring me nightmares tonight. She tells me about an investigation by America’s Watch, which has yet to be made public, but which she has read, into the rape and kidnapping of women in Baghdad since the anarchy began, on 9 April. This is a taboo subject because, in terms of traditional morality in Iraqi society, a raped woman is a disgrace that dishonours her entire family and, instead of receiving compassion and support, she is shunned and despised. She knows that her life has ended, that she will never be married and that in her own household she will be subject to exclusion and derision. To wash away this affront, it is often the case that her father or one of her brothers will kill her. The law has always been lenient towards these medieval ‘honour-cleansing killings’, and the perpetrators receive symbolic sentences of two or three months in gaol. Americas Watch has twenty-five testimonies from girls, young women and older women who were kidnapped and raped in Baghdad by criminals and who, for obvious reasons, do not want to report the abuse that they have suffered. Not only because right now there is no police force or functioning judiciary, but also, and above all, because even if these bodies were in place, the procedures and infinite humiliations that heroic women in the past suffered when they dared to report such crimes did not bring them justice. It just exposed them to the disdain and humiliation of public opinion, which increased the hostility of their families. For that reason, according to the Americas Watch report, the girls and women try desperately to hide what has happened to them; they are ashamed and sorry, as if it is they who were responsible for their misfortune.

Now I understand more clearly why, at the gates of the University of Baghdad that I visited yesterday, there were so many mothers waiting to take their daughters home, as if they were nursery-school children.

25 June–6 July 2003

6. Othello Back to Front

The dramatist, journalist, soldier, artilleryman, bon vivant and firm optimist Ahmad Hadi is tall, strong and engaging, and, with his exuberant anatomy, he seems very cooped up in the narrow rooms of the house where the newspaper Azzaman (The Times) has located its editorial offices. The paper was started up, in exile in London, by a famous opposition journalist, Saad Al Bazzaz, after he split with Saddam Hussein in 1991. The cause of the split was the despot’s eldest son, the ineffable Uday, who controlled the Press Union, along with innumerable other responsibilities (including the Olympic Committee, the Football Association, the newspaper Babel and many other activities). With the fall of the regime, the newspaper now brings out four editions: in London, in the Arab Emirates, in Basra and here in Baghdad. It started printing in the capital on 27 April and already has a circulation of sixty thousand. Azzaman is considered to be the widest read and perhaps most influential newspaper. It is produced by forty-five journalists, fifteen of them women, who fit with great difficulty in this small house where we can scarcely breathe, because the electricity cuts frequently shut down the ventilators, leaving us sweating and stifling. Despite this, there is a great energy in the air, one might even say joy, and the editorial staff — almost all young people — who are coming and going, or else toiling on the computers, are very friendly.

Bathed in sweat, the main editor of Azzaman is enthusiastic, and gives a cheerful account of his busy life. He had studied theatre, graduating from the Baghdad School of Dramatic Arts with a study and a stage adaptation of Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire. He wanted to pursue a career as an actor and theatre director, but the regime decided otherwise and made him join the army, in the artillery division. He was kept in the army for eleven years, eight of which he spent in the mad war against Iran that Saddam Hussein instigated and which cost a million lives. Ahmad Hadi, who was by then an artillery captain, hung up his uniform and tried to return to his old love, the boards, when the Shia intifada against the dictatorship broke out, in which he became actively involved. Following the failure of the uprising, when the punishment killings were in full flow, he managed to escape across the border to Saudi Arabia. While he was in exile, as a reprisal for his rebellion, the regime burned down his two houses along with everything inside them. He tells me all this laughing out loud, as if the matter was funny or the victim of these misfortunes was his worst enemy.

Perhaps Ahmad Hadi is happy because, in his forties, he has finally managed to take up his theatrical vocation after so many frustrations. His work, Obey the Devil, which was performed four times in an open-air setting, amid the rubble in Baghdad, has been a monumental success and many Iraqis have told me about it, praising it to the skies. There were nine male actors and one female, who was also a dancer, and the actors appeared daubed with the ashes of the fires that every passer-by comes across in the streets of the city.

To hear the robust, sweating, gesticulating Ahmad Hadi explaining his work to me is, I am sure, almost as stimulating as seeing it myself. He describes it with great verve, lots of arm movements and loud guffaws, mopping the rivulets of sweat that soak his face and his shirt. The work is a recreation of Shakespeare’s Othello, a work which, Hadi assures me, could have been written with the Iraq tragedy in mind, since it fits so perfectly. There are also other coincidences, real premonitions by the Elizabethan bard. Othello, read backwards, from right to left, as is the case in Arabic, produces in that language a sound very similar to ‘Leota’, which means, ‘Obey him’. My translator, Professor Bassam Y. Rashid, who is a linguist, gets caught up in a philological discussion with him, and finally he admits that he’s right: it does mean ‘Obey him’. Ahmad Hadi added the word devil; although, he tells me, an infernal presence is implied in the idea that a society must ‘obey’ an irrational and destructive force. Life in the palace of the despot was indeed a world of jealousy, open hatred, rivalry, envy, crimes and betrayal. Iago’s betrayal, he assures me, is symbolic of the treachery of Saddam Hussein’s Head of General Staff, who, out of jealousy, handed over Baghdad to the American forces without letting the Iraqi soldiers fight. There is no doubt about it: his version of Othello represents what Iraq has lived through all these years, which is why the people of Baghdad identified so closely with the work.

This is the only time, in our conversation, that the optimistic Ahmad Hadi says something that could be construed as a veiled criticism of the coalition forces. In every other aspect, his view of the current situation in Iraq exudes confidence and appreciation. ‘I am optimistic for one very simple reason: nothing could be worse than Saddam Hussein. After that atrocious experience, things can only get better for us’.

He believes that once the CPA puts in place the Iraq Governing Committee which, he is sure, will be made up of significant figures from across the political spectrum, then the confidence of the people will grow, order will be imposed, services will be re-established and the uncertainty and insecurity everyone feels today will start to disappear. The main desire of the Iraqi people, he is convinced, is to live in peace, without hatred and violence, and to build a modern, tolerant, secular, pluralist democracy, on Western lines. This is what Azzaman promotes and exemplifies in its pages, where different opinions are freely expressed. Even among the most politicised religious sectors, be they Sunni or Shia, it is the moderates, not the extremists, who — now — prevail, and they are prepared to make an effort to coexist so that the nightmare of the Ba’ath Party does not recur.

The people will never forget these thirty-five years. Significant sites of memory are the common graves which continue to appear throughout all the provinces of Iraq, full of the bodies of disappeared, tortured and executed people. The figures he gives me, with emphatic certainty, are even greater than those I was given by the Association of Freed Prisoners. They make me dizzy. I know that they are more a fiction than a reality, but even after cutting them down drastically, the total remains horrifying. Every time I hear from Iraqis accounts of the horrors of Saddam Hussein, I am reminded of the Dominican Republic and what I heard there about General Trujillo’s exploits.

Ahmad Hadi states categorically that the figure of eight million victims of the Ba’ath tyranny is perfectly realistic, despite my look of incredulity. I tell him that it doesn’t matter if he is exaggerating. I didn’t come to Iraq to listen just to the truth but also to the fictions that the Iraqis believe, since the lies that a people invent very often express a very deep truth, and are as instructive a way of understanding a dictatorship as the objective truth. He insists that this mountain of eight million corpses is close to the historical truth. He adds that you can make calculations based on the numbers of bodies in common graves that have appeared since April: there are at least three in every province in Iraq, and in just one of them, in Babilonia, there were some 115,000 bodies. I tell him that this is the largest figure I have heard of in any city since the butchery perpetrated by the Nazis in the Holocaust. He insists on giving me more horror statistics: in the city of Shanafia, which has scarcely twenty thousand inhabitants, they have already counted almost eighty-five thousand human remains, victims of the homicidal rage of the Ba’athists and Saddam Hussein. After a past in which so many extraordinary horrors were committed, how could one not feel hopeful about the future, despite the blackouts, the lack of water, the anarchy and the insecurity? Ahmad Hadi wants exemplary sanctions to be imposed on Saddam and his sons (Uday and Qusay died in a fire fight with American troops on 22 July, after this statement was made) and henchmen, but he does not want them to be taken to an international tribunal. They must be judged here, in an Iraqi court, with Iraqi judges. That would be an example that would inure Iraq for ever against dictatorships.

I ask him whether one can say that today there is complete freedom in his country to write and publish. ‘Absolute freedom, like never before in the history of Iraq.’ And even in the economic sphere, those with jobs must recognise that their situation has improved (for those without jobs, the majority of the people, it is another matter, of course). For example, under Saddam Hussein, journalists earned some ten thousand dinars a month (the equivalent of five dollars). Now they earn the equivalent of two hundred dollars. Isn’t that a big improvement? He tells me that, for example, with his first two-hundred-dollar pay cheque he rushed out to by a spare part for his fridge that had been broken for two years. His wife, who is a school teacher, spent her first salary after the liberation on a satellite dish, which means that she can now pick up television stations from around the world. And she is very happy!

Ahmad Hadi is from the south, from the region of the mystic Shia cities of Najaf and Kerbala. He invites me to his house — Iraqis always do this, when they scarcely know you, something that reminds me of Latin American hospitality — so that I can visit this beautiful part of the country. But he is not thinking about Shia mysticism or the sacred emanations of the place, but rather of more material things: ‘Between Najaf and Kerbala they produce the best rice in the whole of the Middle East,’ he effuses. ‘Do come and I’ll prepare you a treat that you won’t forget for the rest of your life.’ Guffaws well up from inside that enormous body every now and then, like one of those cries that warriors make to give themselves confidence before going into battle. ‘Of course things are better in Iraq,’ he exclaims. ‘Before I had to drink that poisonous alcohol that they sell loose, and now I am drinking malt whisky.’

It is good to talk to someone like the journalist and playwright Ahmad Hadi, who is convinced that, even in this problematic, destroyed country of Iraq, life is worth living. I leave the newspaper and take a walk around the centre of Baghdad. I feel that I am walking in a world that has been conquered by the surrounding desert: the façades of the buildings, the squares, the trees, the public monuments and even the faces and the clothes of the people are all stained an earthen colour. Dry sand is floating in the air and gets into your mouth and nose. In the Al Ferdaws (Paradise) Square, where the titanic statue of Saddam Hussein had been that television viewers all over the world saw toppled the day the coalition forces entered the city, there is now an inscription in black paint, addressed to the Americans in idiosyncratic English: ‘All done/Go home.’

In my rather intermittent readings during these past weeks, as I tried to get some sort of idea about the country that I was coming to, Al Rachid Street was always mentioned, for in the forties and fifties it had been the great commercial artery at the centre of Baghdad. With its luxurious shops and jewellery stores, this was the place that the most prosperous families of the Middle East dreamed about and came to on shopping expeditions. My heart sinks when I walk along it, skirting round the foul-smelling rubbish, the scraps that scrawny dogs are scavenging, and the rubble. It takes imagination to make out the former mansions of the rich and powerful, and the elegant shops of what was Baghdad half a century earlier in these crumbling, shaky, windowless, lopsided, looted and burned-out constructions, many of them about to collapse on top of the residents who sit on benches or on the floor under the portals and columns, impervious to the impending disaster, talking and sipping at their glass of hot tea balanced on a small plate.

One street off Al Rachid is Al Mutanabbi Street, and on Friday mornings there is always a second-hand book market. I’ve visited it twice, and each time I’ve felt happy and stimulated in among the motley crowd browsing, buying and selling, or asking questions about the books and magazines that are so old that the pages come apart in your hands when you leaf through them. It is a narrow, rubble-strewn, earthen street, but it has a warm and friendly atmosphere and does good business. There are a lot of readers in this city, that’s clear. Some of them must be middle-class, but the majority are very poor, and of all ages. They eagerly thumb the old religious folio volumes, they look in astonishment at the magazines with semi-naked dancers on the cover and point at the headlines of old newspapers. There are large photos, of ayatollahs and imams who were killed or exiled, and also of politicians and revolutionaries, communist leaflets, and many books of poetry. In one of the stalls I find the memoirs of Pablo Neruda, I Confess I Have Lived, translated into Persian and published in Tehran.

I end the day in one of the few restaurants still open in Baghdad, The White Palace, where I hope to get away from that wretched fried chicken dish to which I have gained a completely unjustified aversion. The speciality of this place is Cusi, lamb seasoned with spices and served with white rice. A real feast, I am assured. But I can’t accompany it with the appropriate glass of ice-cold beer because the place does not serve alcoholic drinks. The friends I am eating with are surprised: they drank beer here a few days ago. The explanation is that religious fanatics have threatened to kill restaurant owners if they do not enforce a non-alcohol rule. It doesn’t matter, even with water — as Ahmad Hadi might exclaim, licking his fingers — the Cusi is really delicious.

5 June–6 July 2003

7. The Kurds

Travelling north out of Baghdad towards Iraqi Kurdistan, we move into a different landscape, language and culture, and also, over the days, the towns and cities look different. After four hours’ drive by car, through a flat, scorched desert, with Bedouin villages and burned-out personnel carriers and scattered army lorries, there are the mountains, which we begin to climb an hour later, in the middle of the oilfields, up to the city of Kirkuk. Leaving that city and heading for Suleymaniya, the road gets steeper and the roadside is covered in green, in pine forests and slopes covered by cultivated areas where a few weather-beaten labourers with timeless faces are working. No one would say that there had been a war in these parts.

Still less in Suleymaniya, an attractive city with broad, clean, tree-lined streets, traffic control officers on street corners, women dressed in Western styles, Internet cafés everywhere, McDonald’s and a forest of satellite dishes on the roofs of the houses. I knew that the war had scarcely touched the place, but I was not expecting to find a scene of such normality. I was also not expecting to find posters thanking President Bush for ‘The liberation of Iraq’ and greeting Paul Bremer, the proconsul, who had just been here to visit the members of one of the two Kurdish governments that have divided Iraqi Kurdistan. The government in Suleymaniya is run by Jala Talabani’s Patriotic Union Party of Kurdistan; the other government, whose capital is Irbil to the north, is the domain of Masud Barzani’s Democratic Party of Kurdistan. The fierce rivalry between the two parties, and the fratricidal violence — in the 1994 conflict between the two communities there were more than three thousand casualties — has merely increased the misfortunes of the Kurds, who represent twenty per cent of the Iraqi population (somewhat under four million). They were systematic victims of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, which attacked them viciously, especially during the attempted rebellions of 1975, 1988 and 1991, when they sought greater autonomy and resisted the enforced ‘arabisation’ of Kurdish villages that the regime was implementing, massacring the native population and replacing it with Sunni Arabs. In 1988, entire Kurdish communities — including children, women and old people — disappeared, an extermination programme that culminated in the massacre at Halabja, in March of that year, in which more than four thousand Kurds were killed with chemical weapons.

But walking through the streets of Suleymaniya, one would say that all this belonged to the far-distant past. There are no American soldiers to be seen (‘They are dressed in civilian clothing, in the cafés and restaurants, fraternising with the locals,’ Shalaw Askari, Jalal Talabini’s Minister of Information would later tell me), and the only soldiers visible are the local peshmergas (fighters) dressed in their baggy trousers, their baroque turbans that seem like something of a Rembrandt self-portrait, and the long lengths of printed fabrics that they roll around their bodies like belts.

Iraqi Kurdistan has made very good use of the twelve years of total autonomy imposed by the Allies in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, setting up a regional government and establishing an exclusion zone outside the authority of Saddam Hussein. As well as having a government of their own for the first time in their history, the Kurds have enjoyed considerable economic prosperity, as can be seen in the building work, the well-stocked food and general stores which have goods from across the world, and the throng of people in the cafés, refreshment stalls and restaurants throughout the city. However, there is not a single Kurd prepared to tell a stranger wandering around Suleymaniya that the community wants independence. They have all learned their lesson and repeat, like a slogan, that they want to remain part of a federal and democratic Iraqi government that would guarantee them the autonomy that has worked so well for them. They are very aware of the fears that the very idea of an independent Kurdistan raises in neighbouring Turkey, whose twelve million Kurds live in a state of constant tension with the central government.

All this is explained to me in perfect English — he studied in the United States and in Britain — by the young and dynamic Shalaw Askari, the Information Minister, who receives me instead of Jalal Talabini, with whom I had an appointment, but who had to travel unexpectedly to Moscow. In the past, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan was Marxist and received aid from the USSR, but now it is pro-capitalist and an active supporter of the coalition. The peshmergas had worked closely with the coalition forces, which is why this region remained almost untouched by the invasion.

‘For us, the Americans are our friends, the liberators of Iraq, and we are grateful to them for having overthrown the tyrant Saddam Hussein’, Askari tells me. Now we are speaking quite openly, but a few minutes earlier, when I came into the room and found the Minister waiting for me surrounded by advisers and private businessmen that worked with him, I felt somewhat disconcerted. Why so many people? Because of a monumental error. Shalaw Askari and his entourage were expecting someone who could immediately invest considerable sums in the reconstruction and development of Jala Talabani’s Kurdistan. They explained to me persuasively and in great detail that their most urgent need was for a four-hundred-bed hospital, for which the government already had the land and the building plans (which were at my disposal), and which would not cost more than forty million dollars, and an abbatoir for Suleymaniya, which would cost no more than fourteen million. It really upset me to have to tell them that it was not in my power to make these investments, because I didn’t represent anyone, I was just a South American writer finding out what was happening in Iraq. The young minister blanched, swallowed and — what else could he do? — smiled. ‘We Kurds have learned our lesson,’ he tells me, ‘which is why now, instead of remembering the martyrdom of our people under the dictatorship, or the unfortunate internal disputes that have done so much damage to our cause in the world, we want to work, collaborate and contribute to the establishment of a free and democratic Iraq where we can coexist in peace with the other communities. We have had this peaceful coexistence in Kurdistan for the past ten years. For example, aren’t the Turks respected? Don’t they have their own newspapers and their political organisations operating in complete freedom? It is exactly the same for the Shi’ites, the Sunnis, the Christians and the other religions. There is a place and work for everyone. We are the forerunners of what Iraq should be in the future.’

When I ask him whether the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan will be part of the Governing Council that Paul Bremer is putting together, he assures me that this is the case: this was something that had been clarified during the recent visit of the head of the CPA. (And, indeed, a few days after this interview, when the new organisation formed to lead the country to a democratic and federal system is announced in Baghdad, both Jalal Talabini and his rival Massud Barzani figure prominently.)

‘The key word for the pacification of Iraq is work’, declares Minister Askari. He is ardent, optimistic and very thin, and he talks with his hands as well, like an Italian. ‘Islamist fanaticism, for example, would drastically reduce if the great number of unemployed could all start to work and earn a salary. When you have time on your hands, you can go to the mosque five times a day and become mentally imprisoned by what is being preached there. If you work eight hours a day, plus travel to and from work and the time spent with family, then religion can no longer be your only concern in life. Other equally important things crop up. And certain cobwebs in the brain get blown away and more modern ideas come in’.

According to him, the violence unleashed against the coalition forces — assaults and ambushes kill one or two American soldiers on a daily basis — are not just the work of the remnants of the repressive forces and Republican Guard of Saddam Hussein. It also stems from foreign fighters sent by Al Qaeda, the terrorist organisation of Osama Bin Laden, and also terrorists from Iran, controlled by the most conservative clerical sectors of that neighbouring country. ‘These people are very afraid of the establishment of democracy in Iraq. They also think that sooner or later the United States will come after them. And they have decided that the war should begin in Iraqi territory.’ But, he is convinced, once the country has its institutions in place, the coalition and the Iraqi forces will soon defeat the terrorist resistance.

His ideal is transparent: an Iraq made up of professionals and engineers, incorporated into the world, emancipated from political and religious dogma, attracting capital from all parts to develop the enormous resources of the country, with coexistence guaranteed by freedom and the law, and with private enterprise as the motor for development. He points to the businessmen alongside him. They have begun to work, despite the precarious conditions and the difficulties involved in any financial operation given the uncertainty, the legal vacuum and the fact that there are no banks yet, or even a common currency for the whole of Iraq. Here in Kurdistan the dinars bearing Saddam Hussein’s face do not circulate as in the rest of the country — they use an earlier minting. (Though the truth is that the economy is becoming swiftly dollarised). Can one do business and make investments amid such disorder? One of the businessmen, the exuberant and extremely friendly Nagi Al Jaf, smiles triumphantly: ‘Tomorrow we are expecting a delegation of Swiss bankers we have almost convinced to open up a bank in Suleymaniya.’ The Minister reminds me that capital is always attracted to places where there are viable returns on investment and stable and attractive conditions. ‘Here we will have both things.’

Minister Askari becomes less loquacious when I ask him if it is true that both Jalil Talabani and Massud Barzani have promised Paul Bremer — who mainly came to talk about this issue with the two opponents — to integrate their two governments into one, so that the Kurds can have a single representative voice in the new Iraqi government. ‘We are working together and the rough edges and the old disputes are gradually being smoothed over. The desire for union exists. It is just a question of time.’ That is the only time in our long interview when I get the feeling that the friendly Minister is giving me the official line.

On the other hand, I am convinced that he entirely believes what he tells me about the Kurds’ desire to reassure Turkey, to assuage the fear that the goal of Talabani and Barzani is an independent Kurdistan, something that the Turkish government has said quite categorically that it will not tolerate. ‘On this point we are all in agreement: we will not fight for secession; we want to be part of an Iraq that represents our rights.’ And he adds, ‘Turkey made a big mistake, don’t you think? They turned down the offer of forty million dollars from the US to allow the coalition forces through their territory to free Iraq. Really stupid, wouldn’t you agree? And, as well as the money, to lose such a powerful friend. Well, that’s their problem.’

When we left the meeting, Nagi Al Jaf, the businessman, takes me to a place that, he assures me, is ‘paradise’. He is not exaggerating. Suleymaniya is ringed by mountains, and we go up one of them on a very modern road, through pine forests, the gentle slopes lush with vegetation, until we reach the summit, which is wide and offers a splendid view of the whole region. Down below, dotted with gardens and parks and trees, are the white houses of the city, just as the lights are beginning to come on. It’s a large area, and at each end there are ochre-coloured rocks and wooded sections. At this altitude, the stifling heat disappears, cooled by a fresh breeze that smells of resin. All this side of the mountain is full of families or groups of friends, many of them young, who have installed themselves under the trees, cooking dinner on small braziers, while they talk, drink and sing. Along the road there are refreshment points, and a few isolated houses. And wherever you look everything is clean, beautiful and peaceful. I have to shake my head and tell myself that this is all superficial and misleading, that in fact I am in a country that only yesterday suffered the most atrocious injustice, and that a great number of these mild-mannered trippers who are settling down contentedly to observe the myriads of stars that are just beginning to appear — the most dazzling and the greatest number of stars that I have ever seen — will have many dead, tortured or wounded people to mourn, as a result of the savagery of the dictatorship or the fratricidal blindness of the Kurds themselves.

Everywhere that I visit the next morning, the market and the adjacent streets, and all the people I talk to, leave me with the same impression: that despite the tragedies of the past and the difficulties of the present, things here are heading in the right direction, and that the people are constructive and hopeful and have a firm resolve to put an end to the ignominious past.

But when I am about to leave, a casual conversation in the hotel over a cup of hot, steaming coffee with a young construction worker from Erbil, whose name I won’t mention, undermines my optimism: ‘Don’t go away with such a positive idea of what is happening here,’ he tells me in a low voice, after hearing how impressed I have been during my brief visit to Suleymaniya. ‘Don’t be naïve.’ It’s true that a lot of progress has been made, compared to the bloody past, but other problems remain. Iraqi Kurdistan is now divided between two parties which hate one another but have set up two monopoly governments. ‘Can there be democracies with single parties? Only a democracy that is very relative and very corrupt. If you want to do any kind of business, here or in Erbil, you have to pay steep commissions to the Democratic Party of Kurdistan or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and to the leaders themselves, many of whom have become very rich in recent years with these new powers. There are no real audit mechanisms of any sort that apply to the governments, either here or there.’ Is he right or is he exaggerating? Is his criticism objective or an expression of some resentment or personal failure? I have no way of knowing, of course. But I get onto the jeep that will take me back to Baghdad with a sour taste in my mouth.

25 June–6 July 2003

8. The Viceroy

At the first light of dawn, about half past five in the morning, Ambassador Paul Bremer leaves the non-air-conditioned trailer where he spends the night and runs his daily three miles through the gardens of the old palace — which is a really a fortress — of Saddam Hussein. He showers, and for the next fifteen hours is submerged in his office, at the heart of that giant construction full of crystal chandeliers, marble tiles and golden domes that the Iraqi dictator built as a monument to his megalomania. Indeed, so that there would be no doubt about his intentions, Saddam Hussein crowned the enormous complex with four giant copper heads depicting himself as Nebuchadnezzar.

Bremer is sixty-two, but he looks a lot younger. He graduated from Yale and Harvard, he was an ambassador in the Netherlands and in Norway and a roving ambassador for President Reagan. He’s an expert in crisis management and counter-terrorism, and had been working in the private sector for ten years when President Bush called him to offer him the most difficult job in the world: to shape the democratisation and reconstruction process in Iraq. He accepted because he has always believed in public service and because his father taught him that if one is lucky enough ‘to be born in the best country in the world’ (‘Well, we believe that it is the best country in the world,’ he qualifies), then one is morally obliged to do everything that the president asks. He also accepted because he is convinced that it is possible to turn post-Saddam Iraq into a functional democracy that will have an effect on surrounding countries and will lead to an essential transformation of the whole of the Middle East.

He speaks clearly and coherently and, at times, he departs from the banalities that are the stuff of any holder of a public office and says intelligent things. But, in his enthusiasm to describe Iraq’s promising future to me, he forgets the laws of hospitality and doesn’t offer even a glass of water to me or to my daughter Morgana. We are suffering from thirst and sunstroke because we had to go through a great deal before finally reaching this office (an hour late).

The interview was arranged for 11.15 and we arrived at the entrance at 10.30, alongside the great arch, amid the barbed wire and barriers of the guard post. We should have been met there by two officers of the Spanish Military Mission of the CPA. But Lieutenant Colonel Juan Delgado and Colonel Javier Sierra had parked their car in front of the arch, and we were waiting for them behind the arch. This mix-up placed my daughter and me in the hands of some soldiers who searched us, asked us for some incomprehensible passes and told us that they would never let us cross the barriers and get to Bremer’s distant office. For about an hour, we went back and forth to different palace doors, each several hundred yards apart, that we had to cover on foot in the burning sun. When an officer finally agreed to call the information office of Ambassador Bremer, he could not reach anyone because all the staff had gone to the airport to greet the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger who was coming out to spend the 4 July with the US troops in Baghdad.

In the hottest morning of my life, when we were already half an hour late for the interview, Morgana decided, boldly and inopportunely, to teach the US army a lesson in good manners and started to shout at the platoon sergeant that she would not put up with abuse, with people raising their voices, or with this complete lack of cooperation from uncouth army men, to the extent that I thought that, apart from not seeing Bremer, it was quite likely that my bones would soon be resting in one of the dungeons of the despot’s palace. At that moment, providentially, a lieutenant appeared in his slippers, who saw reason. He understood the whole thing and asked us to follow him. That is how we reached the antechamber of the ambassador. Fifteen minutes later a friendly colonel appeared, one of the proconsul’s deputies, who asked us if we were here for the interview that Ambassador Bremer was to give to a Nobel Prize winner. Had the splendid Miguel Moro Aguilar, the head of the Spanish Embassy who had arranged the interview for me, invented this credential so that Bremer could not say no? When I explained to the disappointed colonel that there was no Nobel Prize winner around, and that the interview was to be with a mere novelist from Peru, he muttered in a rather demoralised attempt at humour: ‘If you tell the ambassador about all this confusion, he’ll fire me.’

An hour after the appointed time, here we are with the man whom the terrorists — who have already killed twenty-seven US soldiers since 9 April, and wounded a further 177 — tried to kill yesterday at the National Museum, an attack that, of course, the security forces had detected and dealt with in time. He tells me that he spent his honeymoon in Peru in 1965 and that, thanks to a rail strike, he and his wife were lucky enough to visit Machu Picchu on their own, without the normal hordes of tourists.

What is going to happen now in Iraq? In the short term, an Iraqi Council of Government is to be set up, made up of twenty-five people, representatives of all the political, religious and ethnic tendencies, that will have executive powers, nominate ministers and appoint commissions of engineers and experts to get the public institutions back working. The Council will have a role in preparing the Budget, establishing a market economy and privatising the public sector. Ambassador Bremer says that the market economy and political democracy will turn this country, that Saddam Hussein ruined with his frenetic arms expenditure and his state socialism, into a prosperous nation. ‘If Lee Kwan Yoo managed to do it in Singapore, a country with no resources other than its people, imagine what Iraq can achieve with its vast riches. And I’m not just thinking of oil, but also of the land, which in the central region is even more fertile than the French Midi.’

A couple of weeks after my visit, the Council of Government was established, its twenty-five members reflecting a proportional representation of the political and social make-up of the country: thirteen Shiites, five Kurds, five Sunnis, one Turkmen and a Christian. Among them, three women and a communist. In Bremer’s first statements, this Council was just to act as an ‘assessor’, that is, to have a decorative function, but it seems that due to the insistence of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN special envoy, the ambassador agreed to give it executive powers. When I ask him about this, he replies: ‘I work very well with Vieira de Mello.’

According to his plan, this Council of Government will see the beginning of many different initiatives, with increasing popular participation in all areas, which will help foster democracy in a practical way. At the same time, an assembly or constituent commission, made up of respected and capable people, will establish a Constitution, ‘guaranteeing freedom, legality and the rights of women’, that the Iraqi people will need to ratify through a plebiscite. Then Iraq will celebrate the first free elections in its history, and he, along with his six hundred staff in this palace and the 140,000 US soldiers, will leave.

Bremer is emphatic that this will happen and that the terrorists that are ambushing and killing US soldiers on a daily basis will not weaken the resolve of the United States to carry this democratising process through to the end. Will US public opinion continue to support this, despite the very high economic cost and the cost in human lives? Without the slightest doubt. He receives bi-party delegations here on a daily basis, and despite the public disputes over the elections which have increased recently in the US, Democrats and Republicans agree that this must be carried out successfully, whatever the cost.

Who are the terrorists? Various groups that operate in a dispersed manner, without any central control. Common criminals that Saddam Hussein released from prison. Remnants of the dictator’s armed forces, officers of the Republican Guard, Saddam’s fedayin, torturers and other members of the political police (the Mukhabarat) who, for obvious reasons, are anxious that chaos should spread. International militants from Al Qaeda coming in from abroad as well as fighters sent by the most fanatical sectors of the Iran government that fears, with good reason, a free and democratic Iraq on its borders. These forces will be defeated, methodically and with determination, through the collaboration of the Iraqi people themselves, once the police and the local militias, who are already being trained by the coalition forces, begin to operate. The capture or death of Saddam Hussein (there is a twenty-five-million-dollar reward out for him) will free many Iraqis from the terror they still feel at the possibility that one day the tyrant will return to power and seek vengeance for having had his statues toppled.

I have heard it said many times, by Iraqis and foreigners, that Paul Bremer is not in his element here, that Iraq, the Arab world, the Middle East, are exotic topics for him. That is not my impression. Quite the reverse — he seems very much at ease in the murky waters of the differences, enmities and affinities between the innumerable Iraqi factions, communities, ethnic groups and religions — the Shi’ites and Sunnis, the Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Christians, etc. — and makes subtle observations about the difficulties in making this disparate mosaic of interests coexist. ‘It will be difficult, but it will happen, it will happen,’ he repeats on several occasions. For him the determining factor will be not so much the institutions that are set up and the electoral commissions, but rather the everyday things, the discovery that Iraqis are making of what freedom means in this country which, despite the insecurity, the lack of water and electricity and the rubbish, has, since 9 April, been open to some fifty newspapers and has seen the establishment of seventy political parties. ‘All of this might appear somewhat anarchic. But what is happening is a real seismic shock, the direct and daily experience of freedom, of civic participation, at all levels of social life. Once they have understood what this means, the Iraqis will never again have it all snatched away from them. In many towns and neighbourhoods, real municipal bodies are already functioning through consensus, the residents are participating in, and funding, these initiatives with a freedom of action that this country has never known before.’

When I tell him that I have not heard a single Iraqi lament the fall of Saddam Hussein or even the bombings that brought an end to his regime, but that, by contrast, everyone that I have spoken to is upset, humiliated and offended at the passivity of the US forces in the face of the looting, robbery and arson that has destroyed Baghdad and ruined hundreds of thousands of its citizens, he reminds me that this happened ‘when I wasn’t here, when I was leading a quiet life in the private sphere’. But it is true: ‘Not to have stopped the looting was the biggest mistake that we made, and it is going to cost us billions of dollars to repair this damage.’ The United States will be unstinting in providing resources to reconstruct services and restore the infrastructure, so that the country can take off and be at the forefront of political and economic modernisation in the Middle East. He speaks with the conviction of a missionary, and I am sure that he believes what he is telling me.

Can this dream become a reality? Only, I think, if the United States or the United Nations take on the very high cost, in human losses, and in the outlay of considerable resources, of a long occupation. It is an illusion to think that the acts of sabotage, attacks and ambushes by different groups of the resistance, in a country where Ambassador Bremer estimates that there are about five million weapons in the hands of the civilian population, will be quickly crushed, even after the death or capture of Saddam Hussein. What is most likely is that for a long period of time, they will increase, the victims will multiply and the damage and sabotage to the infrastructure will be great, so that economic recovery and creation of employment, a pressing issue for seventy per cent of the population who are unemployed, will go slowly or will come to a halt. Furthermore, the adoption of democracy will not be a rapid process or one without difficulties in a country where the religious question presents complex problems for any real freedom and equality between the sexes. I’m not just talking about fanatical extremists, who are doubtless a minority. Even among ordinary and progressive Muslims and also the Christians in Iraq, when it comes to talking about women’s issues, freedom of expression or the secular state, I have heard such strong prejudice and resistance that it will take a great deal of time and patience to overcome it. The animosity and the friction between the different religious, political and ethnic communities is currently very raw and perhaps inflamed now that they can be expressed openly and not be suffocated by a repressive authority. So it will also be difficult to establish a common consensus on which to build a democracy in this mosaic that is Iraq.

But nothing is impossible, of course. Especially if, as Bremer argues, the Iraqi people are beginning to use this freedom that they have never known, and can get used to it, in a climate in which basic order is guaranteed. Today this order can only come from the coalition forces, or — and this would be a better option — from an international peace force sponsored by the United Nations.

As I’m leaving Ambassador Bremer’s office, Lieutenant Colonel Juan Delgado and colonel Javier Sierra turn up. They breathe a sigh of relief. They have spent the entire morning looking for us in the labyrinth of enclosures, barriers, control points and patrols in the former domains of Saddam Hussein.

‘We are alive,’ we reassure them, ‘but we’re dying of thirst. Give us any cold drink, please, even one of those sweet Coca-Colas’.

The following morning, during the long journey through the desert from Baghdad to Amman, from where I’ll fly back to Europe, I ask myself yet again — I have done so every day in Iraq — if I was right or wrong to oppose the war that the United States decided unilaterally, without the support of the United Nations, to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The truth is that the two reasons offered by Bush and Blair to justify armed intervention — the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between the Iraqi government and the Al Qaeda terrorists — have not been proven and, at this moment, seem more improbable. Formally, then, the reasons I had to oppose the war were valid.

But what if the argument to intervene had been, clearly and explicitly, to put an end to an execrable and genocidal tyranny which had caused innumerable deaths and kept a whole nation in obscurantism and barbarity, and to restore their sovereignty? Three months ago, I’m not so sure, but now, with what I have seen and heard in this short stay, I would have supported the intervention, without hesitation. Without the intervention, Saddam Hussein might have fallen, but from a coup organised within his own clique, which would have prolonged the tyranny indefinitely, with other despots taking his place. And the fate of the overwhelming majority of Iraqis would remain the same for an indefinite time, a life of shame and backwardness. That isn’t a pessimistic view — just look around the whole of the Middle East — but a strictly realistic one. All the suffering that the armed intervention has inflicted on the Iraqi people is small compared to the horror they suffered under Saddam Hussein. Now, for the first time in its long history, they have the chance to break the vicious circle of dictatorship after dictatorship that they have lived under and — like Germany and Japan after the war — begin a new phase, embracing the culture of freedom, the only thing that can ward off any resurrection of the past. For this to become a reality depends not just on the Iraqis, although theirs, of course, is the main responsibility. It depends above all now on the cooperation and the material and political support of the democratic countries of the entire world, beginning with the European Union.

25 June–6 July 2003

A Story about Rats

When President Fujimori fled Peru and the dictatorship that he headed for ten years collapsed like a deck of cards, the new people in charge, who had been elected by Congress to ensure a clean electoral process, found that the Government Palace had been completely stripped by its former occupants (they had taken away even the ashtrays and the sheets) and had been horribly decorated with huachafo touches (huachafería is the Peruvian variant of vulgar taste).

They also found that the former House of Pizarro was a rats’ nest. The company hired to cleanse the palace of rats captured and counted before burning them — they assured me that these were round figures — some 6,200 rodents which had been lodging in the basements, the nooks, the shelves and the recesses of the building that for four-and-a-half centuries has been an emblem of the history of Peru.

I see these palace rats bequeathed by the dictatorship to a democracy that is now rising from the ashes, in the midst of great difficulties, as an allegory for what is happening in Peru. In many respects the changes are great and exciting. The country has recovered its liberty, its freedom of speech, and criticism is now wide-ranging and often quite fierce, parties and political leaders debate and contest positions on all sides, and the fight against the corruption of the infamous decade has not stopped. Quite the reverse — for the first time in the history of Peru we find a considerable number of military men, businessmen, media owners, traffickers of influence and privilege, behind bars for robbery and other crimes committed under the protection of the authoritarian regime, and the Judiciary, which is being purged, is going about its business quite independently and firmly. It is the case that a good number of those accused of fraud, corruption and violations have fled, within the country or abroad, before the law could catch up with them. But, even so, for once it seems that there will be no impunity — no cleaning of the slate and starting again — for a large number of people who, over ten years, committed serious crimes against human rights and democracy, and pillaged the state, amassing vast fortunes.

This encouraging outlook is somewhat overshadowed by the deep economic crisis which has impoverished the country, caused very high unemployment and a fall in the standard of living, and has hit, with particular brutality, the most disadvantaged sectors. For that reason, social demands are very high, which doubtless caused President Toledo to make exaggerated promises in his electoral campaign which can never be fulfilled. All this has caused a state of unrest and social conflict, which makes agreement difficult.

To a large extent the economic crisis is a direct consequence of the systematic and widespread plunder that the gang headed by Fujimori and Montesinos perpetrated over ten years, by use of force and coercion. To give you an idea: of the almost ten billion dollars that came into the state’s coffers over this period as a result of privatisations, which were usually only carried through to transfer public monopolies over to private monopolies or to benefit groups that were complicit with, or acted as straw men for, the regime’s inner circle, not a single cent remains. Taking off certain concrete debt repayments and payments to cover the fiscal deficit, it is the case that most of this enormous sum mysteriously disappeared without trace. That is, it became lost in the labyrinth of fiscal havens and secret bank accounts of the Fujimori mafia who have been evicted from power but have left the country in a comatose economic state.

The economic power of this Fujimori mafia is almost intact because very little money has been recuperated or frozen in the foreign bank accounts of the numerous guilty parties. And the recent experience of countries that have liberated themselves from kleptomaniac dictatorial regimes and tried to recoup what has been stolen shows us that, unfortunately, we should not hold out too much hope of getting back the money stolen by the henchmen (and some hench-women) of the dictatorship.

How was it possible that a regime of this nature, controlled by shameless, undisguised villains who not only committed innumerable abuses every day, but also were recorded by Vladimiro Montesinos in hundreds and perhaps thousands of videos, which document, day after day, the extraordinary scope of the corruption, could be, throughout most of these ten years of dishonour, a popular regime? Because, to the shame of Peruvians, it was popular, right up to the last two years, perhaps less, of its insolent existence. The reply to this question is: thanks to the intelligent and unscrupulous manipulation of the media, especially the television channels accessible to all viewers, that the dictatorship placed at its service, by buying off the owners.

The way in which Montesinos, the handy evil genius of the dictatorship’s intelligence service, proceeded was both subtle and brutal. He blackmailed some media organisations through the tax office. In return for silence, servility and complicity, he could withdraw the sword of Damocles of heavy taxation that could threaten the survival of a company. Those who did not comply had to pay their debts, which increased at the whim of the regime; in other cases, the operation was cruder and more direct: the media owners sold for hard cash their editorials, their headlines and their news stories. They introduced lies, spread rumours or kept silent about certain issues in order to bolster the regime’s campaign of propaganda, and they vilified and discredited critics of the regime in invective campaigns that Montesinos thought up, administered and orchestrated. This demagogic orchestration of public opinion through the main media outlets was the main factor in the popularity of a regime that lived off and in lies.

When the journalists of Channel 2 — Latin Frequency — rebelled against these methods and began to tell the truth — they revealed the millions that Montesinos was putting into his accounts and spoke of some of the murders by the dictatorship’s death squads — the regime took away the owner, Baruch Ivcher’s Peruvian nationality and handed his channel over to minority shareholders (now in prison) that he had bribed. From that point on, Channel 2 was also, like the rest, a mouthpiece for the regime’s disgusting political actions.

The owners of the two most powerful channels in the country — 4 and 5 — were bought with dollar bills, many millions of them. And naturally, they were also filmed by Montesinos, appearing in scenes that make one nauseous, counting their pyramids of dollars and, in revoltingly coarse tones, begging the lord and master of the strong-arm regime for even more millions in return for their work as media acolytes. These characters have now fled the country: Crousillat to Miami and Schutz to Argentina. But, even though it beggars belief, they remain the owners and controllers of the channels that they rented out to the dictatorship to manipulate public opinion, broadcasting disinformation and lies, spreading calumnies, defending electoral fraud and violation of the Constitution and, of course, keeping out the opposition, to such a degree that in the last fraudulent elections, they did not even broadcast the advertisements paid for by the candidates opposing Fujimori. To keep up appearances, the fugitives have transferred their shares to family members who act as fronts.

In my opinion, to leave these channels in the hands of people who committed, through them, the worst crime that can be committed against a society — destroying democracy and supporting a dictatorship — would be a mortal danger for the democracy that is now beginning to surface in Peru, surrounded by lurking threats, after an abject decade. It would be the same as leaving in the hands of its owners a laboratory licensed to produce medicines that instead manufactured narcotics, or leaving a gun in the hands of someone who has just committed a murder. The criminal weapon that these fugitives used were the licences that they sold to the dictatorship and which they are now using through intermediaries gradually to undermine democracy. In an act of real provocation, not just to democracy but to common decency, one of these channels is looking to relaunch a ‘news’ programme fronted by one of the worst media henchmen of the dictatorship, Nicolás Lúcar, whose methods I bear testimony to, because at the time of the government coup, he prepared an ambush for me that I naïvely fell into. He offered me his programme to give my opinion of what was happening in Peru and, when the interview was to be broadcast, cut off my microphone; while I was moving my mouth without any sound coming out, he proceeded to spew out Fujimori propaganda and slogans. His return to the screen is a symbol of the shameless way in which the Fujimori mafia has started out on a new campaign to frustrate the democratisation process in Peru.

These licences must be withdrawn, not by force but by rigorously following legal procedures to ensure freedom of expression and criticism that these people helped to violate and now seek to debase in order to obstruct the democratic transition. Naturally the process must look to transfer these licences to other private enterprises through a transparent procedure, closely monitored internationally, so that neither the government nor the state of Peru can benefit directly or indirectly from this transfer, or get their hands on these companies, because, were that to happen, the cure would be as harmful as the illness. But there are many different ways of guaranteeing this transfer within civil society, without government intervention, through the involvement of organisations of proven independence — international communications associations and prestigious international auditors — to clear this obstacle that obstructs the complex process of re-establishing law and liberty in Peru. This democracy will never become a reality while, as in the Palace of Government before the purging of the rats, the vermin that the dictatorship adopted remain in their caves and hiding places preparing new attacks on freedom, in the name of freedom!

Lima, December 2001

The Captain in His Labyrinth

There are echoes of the elegant and baroque paradoxes we find in Borges’s stories in the current plight of Captain Vladimiro Montesinos, who is buried alive in one of the cells for high-risk terrorists that he himself designed, in the Callao Naval base, for Abimael Guzmán — Comrade Gonzalo of the Shining Path group — and Victor Polay from the MTRA (Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement), the leaders of the two organisations that immersed Peru in violence in the eighties. The ironic and humorous note to this, also very Borgesian, is not just that Fujimori’s right-hand man declared that he was on hunger strike, in protest against the dreadful conditions in the prison, but that — lying and greedy to the last — he cheated during his strike, eating chocolates that he had hidden in his trousers.

Montesinos belongs to an ancient lineage — of discreet and violent criminals who are like the shadows of the tyrants they both serve and profit by in their secret dealings. They use terror and commit major state crimes as well as numerous robberies, following the orders of, and in close complicity with, their masters, who see them as both absolutely essential but also, and with good reason, very suspicious. Dictatorships suppurate such people, the way infections suppurate pus, and almost all of them, such as Stalin’s Beria, Perón’s Sorcerer López Rega, Pérez Jiménez’s Pedro Estrada, and Trujillo’s Colonel Abbés García usually die — as millionaires in Paris or in mysterious, violent deaths — without opening their mouths, taking with them to hell the precise details of their misdeeds.

This is the big difference between this universal history of authoritarian infamy and the now famous Vladimiro Montesinos. Unlike others of his kind, who remained silent about their crimes, he is going to talk. He has already started talking, like a parrot, trying to show that no one is a villain in a society where everyone is a villain and where villainy is the only political and moral norm that is universally respected. To prove the point he says that he has some thirty thousand videos that document the ethical depravity and the civic filth of his compatriots, something which, if it is true, would make him not the high-profile criminal that the press writes about, but rather a hard-working Peruvian who, through skill and Machiavellian stratagems, created the conditions whereby an immense number of his compatriots could act on a deep-seated propensity: to sell out to a dictatorship and fill their pockets in the shortest time possible.

It is improbable that this apocalyptic line of defence will be successful; it is almost certain that — if the stars of this extraordinary video collection do not arrange for him to die of a heart attack or by suicide beforehand — the Law will decide that this singular character will spend, like Abimael Guzmán and Víctor Polay, men as cruel and completely lacking in scruples as him, most of the rest of his remaining life behind bars. Nothing would be more just, of course: although the long list of tyrannies that Peru has suffered has created a good number of rogues, torturers and despoilers of the public purse, none of them had ever before wielded so much power or done so much damage as this obscure captain who was thrown out of the army for selling military secrets to the CIA, this lawyer and frontman for drug-runners, a man who gave a ‘legal’ veneer to the abuses to the legal system perpetrated by Fujimori, his right-hand man in the coup that destroyed Peruvian democracy in 1992, a gun-runner for the Colombian guerrilla groups, a representative of the big drugs cartels, to which he offered the services of the army and the use of Peruvian territory in the Amazon, the head and organiser of the state terrorist commando groups that, between 1990 and 2000, tortured, assassinated and caused thousands of people to disappear who were suspected of being subversives, a blackmailer, a thief and a systematic manipulator of the Judiciary and the media which, with very few exceptions, he bought, bribed or intimidated until they gave their unconditional support to the abuses and violations committed by the dictatorship.

A mathematician has taken the trouble to calculate how many hours of tape would be on these thirty thousand videos — at an average of two hours a video — and has concluded that the ten years of the Fujimori regime would not be long enough for a production on such a scale unless, in addition to his office in the Intelligence Service, which Montesinos turned into a secret film studio after Fujimori took power in 1990 and appointed Montesinos to his coveted post, there were several other camouflaged studios where the SIM also secretly filmed other operations of pillage and political intrigue by the regime. We cannot discount this theory, of course. But it is likely that the figure is exaggerated, the desperate boasting of an official in a tight corner wanting to scare his likely prosecutors. However, even if only ten per cent of these videos exist and, as happened with Fujimori when he broke into Montesinos’s house, took the videos that incriminated him and escaped with them to Japan, many other members of the Fujimori mafia have managed to steal or destroy the videos that they star in, what is left — there are some fifteen hundred tapes in the hands of the Judiciary — is a precious, rare document, unprecedented in history, that reveals in a direct and vivid fashion the organisation and the extent — the extraordinary extent — of corruption in an authoritarian regime. For this alone, future historians will always be grateful to Vladimiro Montesinos.

There has been a great deal of speculation about what prompted him from the outset to film these scenes which both implicated legally and politically the military, professionals, judges, businessmen, bankers, journalists, and government and opposition local officials and parliamentarians, but also incriminated himself with a document that, with a sudden change of government, as happened in Peru, would be seen as a form of hara-kiri. The accepted view is that he filmed his accomplices so that he could blackmail them and bring them into line should the need arise. There is no doubt that to have, for example, Fujimori’s ministers captured on film by the hidden cameras, receiving every month thirty-thousand-dollar supplements to their salary, would turn these poor mercenary devils into loyal servants of the head of the SIM when it came to signing specific decrees. And it is not surprising that the newspaper editors or heads of television channels that received thousands or millions of dollars — that they had to count, note by note, patiently, observed by the hidden camera — would then become tame supporters of government policy and implacable opponents of anyone daring to criticise its policy.

But when you see these videos, or read the transcriptions of the conversations, you realise that they are more than just a form of coercion. They offer a particular, utterly contemptuous, view of humankind; a constant reiteration of how cheap and grimy and abject people can be when they move into a sphere where the dictator holds sway and can tempt them. They were important public figures in the country, who enjoyed great prestige and a high profile because of their office, their influence, their money, their stripes, their surnames or because of services rendered in the past. There is an entire philosophy underpinning this long sequence of images where a single scene is repeated time and again, with minimal variation, with different people and voices: some evasive and hypocritical preliminaries, to justify the imminent transaction with flatulent arguments, and then, in a few words, the essential: How much? That much! Right away and in cash.

In the ten years of the Fujimori dictatorship — perhaps the most sinister and divisive that we have ever suffered and without any doubt the most corrupt — Montesinos’s office was visited not only by mediocre opportunists and the usual suspect politicos who, like vermin in putrid waters, always prosper during strong-arm regimes. There were also people who appeared respectable, with seemingly decent political or professional credentials, and a considerable number of successful businessmen — including one of the richest men in Peru — who, because of their influence, power and wealth, one would have thought of as incapable of getting involved in such ignominious dealings. Some of this human filth that went to Montesinos’s office to sell themselves and sell the best thing that Peru had — a democratic system re-established with difficulty in 1980 after twelve years of military dictatorship — for fistfuls or suitcases full of dollars, for tax breaks for their companies, to win a hearing, or gain a tender, a ministry or a parliamentary job — were people known to me and whose support of the dictatorship I thought was ‘pure’, a production of the sad conviction that seems so widespread among the wrongly named Peruvian ruling class: that a country like ours needs a strong hand in order to progress because the Peruvian people are not yet ready for democracy.

I trust that the government of Alejandro Toledo, which is coming to office after clean elections that nobody has disputed, can show to the world that this belief is as false as the falsifiers that brought the political process into disrepute. It is clear that the new government is not able to resolve the immense problems facing the Peruvian people, which the dictatorship aggravated while adding a raft of new problems. But it can and must establish the foundations for any future resolution of these problems by preventing, once and for all, the possibility of a further collapse of the constitutional order. For that reason it must pursue the moral policy that it has initiated so firmly, giving judges all the support they need to judge and sentence criminals and thieves, starting at the top. It is a unique opportunity. The putrefaction of the Fujimori regime had spread to such an extent that when it collapsed, all the institutions collapsed with it. This means that now all the institutions — the Armed Forces, the Judiciary, the Administration — can be reformed root and branch. And the videos that, unintentionally, Montesinos has bequeathed so opportunely to democracy must be used to cleanse and reform this democracy and its leaders in the most limpid way.

Marbella, 18 July 2001

The Pinochet Affair

The ruling of the British magistrate Roland Bartle is another step towards the extradition of General Pinochet to Spain to be tried for crimes committed against human rights during the seventeen years of the dictatorship he presided over. This is a historical judgement that extends well beyond the particular case of Chile, and should be greeted with jubilation by all those millions of people across the world who have been persecuted, ill-treated or silenced for their ideas, and by all those who are not content for the culture and practice of democracy to be the prerogative of a mere handful of countries, while the barbarity of despotism and autocracy holds sway over seventy-five per cent of the planet.

People who, without being in favour of dictatorial regimes, question the right of Spain and the United Kingdom to extradite the ex-dictator, put forward a series of arguments that, for me, do not stand up to close scrutiny. The most common of these arguments is pragmatic: the international pursuit of Pinochet is endangering the Chilean transition to democracy and might destabilise the present government, aggravate and inflame the political debate, and even provoke a new coup. This doom scenario is not borne out by the facts. Quite the reverse: the reality is that, although it is very virulent, the dispute between those for and against Pinochet being tried outside Chile is being spearheaded by radical minorities, while most of Chilean society follows it at a distance and with increasing indifference. The national debate about the forthcoming elections is much more intense, and in this debate — something that the international media tend to leave out — the Pinochet affair is no longer a central issue, in what seems like a tactical (and very sensible) agreement between the main candidates, Lagos (centre left) and Lavín (centre right).

There is no serious argument to support the gloomy prediction that the Pinochet affair will destroy Chilean democracy. The opposite is true, as the New York Times has recently shown in a report on the state of justice in the country. The prosecution of Pinochet in Spain has seen a revival of legal initiatives in Chile against the crimes and abuses committed during the dictatorship, and in the last twelve months twenty-six officers accused of these crimes have been imprisoned after court cases. This is a very clear demonstration that Chilean judges have a greater willingness and freedom to act on this issue now that the obstacle to the normal development of justice — the presence of the ex-dictator, who, as a senator elected for life to one of the ruling bodies of the Chilean state, cannot be impeached — has been removed. Instead of weakening democracy, international action against Pinochet is helping to complete and accelerate the democratisation process that is already firmly rooted in Chile.

Another objection to the prosecution of Pinochet by Judge Baltazar Garzón is based on nationalism: the violation of national sovereignty implied in judging the ex-dictator outside his own country. This is an extraordinarily anachronistic argument which ignores the current historical moment of globalisation, the systematic erosion of borders and of the nineteenth-century concept of the nation state. The economy has led the great modern onslaught against this narrow and exclusive view of sovereignty, which is incompatible with the interdependence that the development of science, technology, information, commerce and culture has established between all the societies of the world at the end of the twentieth century. Why should justice be excluded from this general process of internationalisation of contemporary life? In fact, it is not excluded. No one objects if common criminals, drug-runners or smugglers are prosecuted and sentenced outside their ‘countries’; quite the reverse — it is normal for governments to seek the joint action of other countries against their criminals (for example, with regard to terrorism). Why should crimes and abuses against human rights be a separate case? Are these crimes less serious from an ethical or legal point of view?

The importance of the Pinochet affair is, precisely, that it sets a precedent to end the impunity that a great many little tyrants and satraps have enjoyed. For up until now, after perpetrating their misdeeds, robbing the public purse and amassing large fortunes, they have been able to retire and enjoy a magnificent old age, free of any sanction. Now everyone from Baby Doc to General Cedras, from Idi Amin to Menghistu, from Fidel Castro to Saddam Hussein, and so many others of the same ilk know that they will not be able to live peacefully, that wherever they go and wherever they are, the law can reach them and demand that they answer for their crimes. The deterrent effect that this might have on potential coup plotters should not be underestimated.

There are people who argue that instead of dissuading future dictators, the legal pursuit of Pinochet will encourage those who have usurped power to remain entrenched, and not commit the ex-dictator’s error of giving up office, that had made him invulnerable to sanctions. People that think this must have an image of dictators as archangels, for they believe that they retire from power because one day they will become good or democratic, and that we must encourage them towards this moral and political conversion by guaranteeing them impunity in advance. The truth is that never in history has a dictator stopped being a dictator by choice, through a sudden spiritual, ideological or ethical transformation. All of them would like to stay in power for ever (this is true of many democratic governments too, of course), and if they do not manage to do so it is simply because they cannot, because a particular situation at a specific moment forces them, irresistibly, to leave. Fidel Castro, Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and their kind will not cut short by a single moment their stay in power if the legal prosecution of Pinochet is stopped.

Another reason given against the Pinochet prosecution is the different criteria that some media and some intellectuals and politicians use to judge dictatorships: why do the satraps of the left not deserve the same condemnation as the satraps of the right? Has Pinochet been more cruel and bloodthirsty to his opponents during his seventeen years as dictator than Fidel Castro during his forty years of tyranny? Anyone reasonably well informed knows that, although they are ideologically different, both men are responsible for unspeakable abuses against very basic human rights, which should mean that they would receive the same condemnation and sanctions from the international democratic community. However, as we know, while not one democratic government defended Pinochet, only a tiny number of democratic governments dare to call Fidel Castro what he really is: a little satrap with bloodstained hands. And in a few days, twenty or so Spanish American presidents and prime ministers are going to travel down to Havana, in a grotesque political coven, to embrace this repugnant character and to legitimate him, signing with him once again, without their hands trembling or their faces falling with shame, a declaration in favour of freedom and legality as the necessary framework for the development of the Spanish American community.

Of course, this double standard in morality (this ‘moral hemiplegia’ in the words of Jean-François Revel) when it comes to dealing with dictators of the right or of the left is outrageous, in particular when it comes from the mouths or the pens of cynical people who call themselves democratic or, even more ridiculous, progressive. However, to turn this sense of outrage into a reason for exonerating Pinochet of any guilt since (for now) one cannot punish him and Fidel Castro in the same way, would give carte blanche to the excesses of fascist dictators since communist dictators are often less vulnerable than them to international sanction. It would be like saying that that since we have no absolute and universal system of justice, then humanity should abandon any form of justice, however relative and partial. This is a fundamentalist and Manichean attitude that is at variance with social reality, where it is simply not possible to aspire to perfection and the absolute in any sphere. In the penal system it is always preferable that a murderer be judged and sentenced even though many others escape punishment for their crimes. The same is true for crimes against human rights. The ‘Pinochet affair’ is encouraging from a moral, legal and political point of view because it opens the door, in future, for other dictators — whatever their politics — to be investigated and punished for their crimes, and also because, in this particular case, concrete victims of torture, murder, imprisonment and robbery are receiving lawful, if belated, redress. This is good news for all victims of persecution and abuse the world over, a sign that, finally, a new era is beginning in the history of humanity in which the great political criminals can be taken to court to answer for their crimes, without being able to hide behind ‘national sovereignty’ or amnesties that they instituted when they were in power, and go off into retirement with a clear conscience and their pockets stuffed with money. The fact that it is a right-wing and not a left-wing dictator who is the first in what will be in the future — and this depends on all of us, not just on Judge Baltazar Garzón — a long list of satraps to be punished is an incidental detail that should not in any way affect the transcendent importance of the Pinochet affair from a legal point of view. It depends on genuine democrats, on the true lovers of liberty and law throughout the world, to ensure that what has happened with Pinochet is not the exception but rather the rule, not a mere victory for the ‘left’ but a first effective legal act aimed at bringing about a drastic reduction in political murders and torture across the world, irrespective of who commits them and on whatever religious or political pretext. To some extent, by putting Pinochet in the dock, the Spanish and British judges have summoned to appear in court with him an entire harmful and immemorial dynasty.

Madrid, October 1999

Chilean Yawns

Anyone like me, who has been following closely the elections in Chile, where Michelle Bachelet, the centre-left candidate, defeated the centre-right candidate, must have felt both envy and considerable surprise. Was Chile a Latin American country? For the truth is that this election campaign seemed like one of those boring civic contests, where, say, the Swiss or the Swedes change or re-elect their government after a certain number of years, rather than a Third World election where countries going to the ballot box are staking their political model, their social organisation and often even their very survival.

In a typical Third World election, everything seems to be in question and goes back to square one, from the very nature of the institutions to the political economy and the relations between government and society. The election result can turn everything around, which means that countries can suddenly go backwards, losing overnight what they have gained over the years, or else carry on indefinitely along the wrong path. That’s why it is normal in underdeveloped countries to be continually jumping, usually jumping backwards rather than forwards, or simply jumping on the spot.

Although it is not a First World country — it is still some way from being so — Chile is not an underdeveloped country. In the last quarter of a century it has progressed systematically, consolidating democracy, opening up its economy and strengthening its civil society in a way that has no equal in Latin America. It has reduced the level of those living in poverty to 18 % (the average in Latin America is 45 %), a rate of progress comparable to Ireland or Spain, and its middle class has grown consistently, so that now it is, in comparative terms, the largest in Latin America. One million Chileans have escaped poverty in the last ten years. This is due to the extraordinary stability of Chilean society, which can attract all the foreign investment it wants, and can equally sign free-trade agreements with half the world (with the United States, the European Union and South Korea, and now it is negotiating agreements with India, China and Japan).

All this has come out very clearly in these elections. In the debate between Michelle Bachelet and Sebastián Piñera, which took place a few days before the end of the second round, you would have had to have been psychic or a diviner to discover on which points the candidates from the left and the right disagreed openly. Despite their respective attempts to distance themselves from each other, the truth is that their differences are not important. Piñera, for example, wants to put more police on the street than Bachelet.

When an open society reaches these levels of consensus, it is a long way down the road of civilisation. This is a word that finds little favour with intellectuals who are infatuated with barbarism — and it is true that, seen from a distance and from somewhere safe, barbarism seems much more amusing and exciting than civilisation, that smacks of tedium and routine — but it is the most effective framework for defeating hunger, unemployment, ignorance, human rights abuses and corruption. And it is the only environment that guarantees its citizens freedom of expression.

President Lagos left power with a 75 % approval rate, a really extraordinary figure in a democracy: only dictators, who can massage the figures, would seem to have that level of popularity. In the case of Ricardo Lagos it is absolutely deserved. He has been a socialist who, like Felipe González or Tony Blair, knew how to take advantage of the lessons of history and promote, without any sense of inferiority, a modern political economy which was liberal, open to the world, supported private initiatives and, during his government, led to significant growth.

He is also an intelligent politician, a man of ideas, a careful speaker, not charismatic, a leader who deserves the highest praise of all: that he left his country much better off than when he found it. During his administration, the anti-democratic traces of the Pinochet dictatorship were confronted and dealt with. And the ex-dictator himself, during these years, thanks to the tenacious and patient work of several judges, has appeared before the world stripped of the mask of the honest autocrat that his supporters had fashioned for him. Nobody would now dare to say that Pinochet was ‘the only dictator who did not steal’. He did steal, large amounts, which is why he and his family and his close associates are now being tried or investigated for suspect transactions to the value of more than thirty-five million dollars.

In these elections the Chilean right, thanks to Sebastián Piñera, has managed to purge a great deal if not all of its original sin: its links with the dictator. Piñera campaigned against the dictator in the referendum, and no one that knows him could doubt his democratic convictions. Many people thought that his major economic holdings would get in the way of his political leadership. But that was not the case, and the energy and intelligence with which he conducted his campaign would seem to have guaranteed him a solid future as the leader of the Chilean right.

The victory of Michelle Bachelet, among other things, showed the Chilean people willing to make moral redress to all those people who were abused, tortured, exiled or silenced during the years of the dictatorship. And it is a giant step forward towards equality between men and women in a country where machismo seemed unmovable. (It was the last country in Latin America to allow divorce.) But it is not just the rights of women that will be boosted by this new president. Secularisation, that fundamental prerequisite for democratic progress, will also be encouraged. The Catholic Church has had a much stronger influence in Chile than in the rest of Latin America. Despite all these promising signs, Chile cannot rest on its laurels if it wants to continue to progress. One of its greatest problems is that it does not have energy resources to meet the increasing demands of its expanding industry and industrial infrastructure. For this reason it is essential that Chile looks to repair relations with its neighbours, especially with Bolivia. The dispute with Bolivia goes back to the War of the Pacific in 1879, when Bolivia lost its access to the sea. One of the great challenges facing Michelle Bachelet’s government is to solve once and for all this dispute with Bolivia and also its maritime disagreements with Peru, so that active collaboration between these three countries can bring tangible benefits to all: the energy that Chile needs and that Bolivia has in abundance, the opening up of the prosperous Chilean market to Bolivian and Peruvian goods, and the investment and technology that Chile could bring to its neighbours, which they need for their own development. Such collaboration would also mean that they could put a stop to, and begin to reduce, the arms build-up in the region, which has had such disastrous consequences in the past and which currently creates suspicion and mistrust, a fertile breeding ground for xenophobic nationalism. Chile spends more on arms than any other country in South America, and under Lagos alone it spent two-and-a-half billion dollars on military equipment.

Compared with its neighbours, Chile is today a very boring country. By contrast, we Peruvians, Bolivians, Argentines and Ecuadorians live dangerously and never get bored. That is why we get what we get. Not like the Chileans, who now have to get their kicks through literature or the movies or sport rather than in politics.

Lima, January 2006

The Odyssey of Flora Tristán

The nineteenth century was not just the century of the novel and of nationalism: it was also the century of utopias. The fault lay with the French Revolution of 1789: the upheavals and social transformations brought about by the Revolution convinced both its supporters and its opponents, not just in France but throughout the entire world, that history could be fashioned like a sculpture, until it reached the perfection of a work of art. There was one condition: a plan or a theoretical model should be outlined in advance, that could then be neatly imposed on reality. This idea can be traced back a long way, at least to classical Greece. In the Renaissance, it appeared in such important works as Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which established a genre that continues to this day. But it was in the nineteenth century that the idea was at its most powerful and seductive, generating daring intellectual projects and inflaming the imagination and idealism (and sometimes the madness) of so many thinkers, revolutionaries or ordinary citizens. It was the conviction that, with the right ideas, carried through selflessly and courageously, one could create paradise on earth and establish a society without contradictions or injustice, where men and women could live in peace and order, sharing the benefits of the three principles of 1789 in a harmonious blend: liberty, equality and fraternity.

The whole of the nineteenth century is full of utopias and utopian thinkers. Alongside groups committed to violent action, like those formed by the disciples of François-Noël Babeuf (1746–97), we find remarkable thinkers like Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and Charles Fourier (1772–1837), daring businessmen like the Scot Robert Owen, men of action and adventurers, among whom the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76) stands out, flamboyant dreamers like Etienne Cabet (1788–1856) or delirious examples of the genre like Jules-Simon Ganneau (1806–51), the messianic founder of Evadisme. The most important of all the nineteenth-century utopian thinkers, in historical terms, was, without doubt, Karl Marx, whose ‘scientific’ utopia would incorporate much of this earlier thought and end up overriding it.

Flora Tristán (1803–44) belongs to this lineage of great nonconformists, radical opponents of the society that they were born into, believing fanatically that it was possible to reform society root and branch, eradicate injustice and suffering and establish human happiness. She was a bold and romantic campaigner for justice who, first in her difficult life, plagued by adversity, then in her writings and finally in the passionate militancy of the last two years of her life, offered an example of rebelliousness, daring, idealism, naïvety, truculence and adventurousness which fully justifies the praise she received from the father of Surrealism, André Breton: ‘Il n’est peutêtre pas de destinée féminine qui, au firmament de l’esprit, laisse un sillage aussi long et aussi lumineux’. (‘There is perhaps no feminine destiny that, in the firmament of the spirit, has left such a long and luminous trace.’) The word ‘feminine’ is key here. Not just because in the vast panoply of nineteenth-century social utopian thinkers, Flora Tristán is the only woman, but also, fundamentally, because her desire to reconstruct society in its entirety stemmed from her indignation at the discrimination and servitude that women of her time suffered and which she herself experienced more than most.

Two traumatic experiences and a trip to Peru were the decisive events in the life of Flora Tristán, who was born in Paris on 7 April 1803 and christened with the long, grandiose name of Flora Celestina Teresa Enriqueta Tristán Mocoso: her birth and her marriage. Her father, a Peruvian, Don Mariano Tristán y Mocoso, belonged to a very prosperous and powerful family and served in the armies of the King of Spain. Her mother, Anne-Pierre Laisnay, a Frenchwoman, had fled the Revolution and taken refuge in Bilbao. It was there that they met and apparently were joined — there is no proof of this — in a religious marriage conducted by a French priest, another exile, which had no legal status. For that reason, Flora was born as an illegitimate child, a shameful condition which, from the cradle, condemned her to life as a ‘pariah’, a term that she would later use insolently in the title of the most famous of her books, Peregrinaciones de una paria (Peregrinations of a Pariah, 1837). When her father died in June 1807, when the child was not yet five, mother and daughter, since they lacked any legal status, were evicted from the elegant property they lived in, in Vaugirard, and all Don Mariano’s possessions reverted to the family in Peru. After a few years, as their situation declined, we find Flora and her mother living in a poor neighbourhood in Paris — around the Place Maubert — and the young girl beginning to work mixing colours in the print shop of the painter and printer André Chazal, who fell in love with her. Their wedding, on 3 February 1821, was, for Flora, a catastrophe that would affect her life even more dramatically than her illegitimacy.

This was because, from the outset, she felt that this marriage made her a mere appendix of her husband, a child-breeder — she had three children in four years — someone completely deprived of her own life and freedom. It was from this time that Flora became convinced that matrimony was an intolerable institution, a commercial transaction in which a woman was sold to a man, thus becoming to all intents and purposes his slave, for life, because divorce had been abolished with the Restoration. And, at the same time, she began instinctively to reject motherhood and to develop a deep distrust of sex, which she saw as part of women’s servitude, of their humiliating subjugation to men.

When she was twenty-two, Flora committed the boldest act of her life, which would definitively mark out her destiny as a pariah and a rebel: she left her home, taking her children with her, which not only brought her into great disrepute because of the prevailing moral sanctions of the time, but was also an illegal act for which she could have been imprisoned if André Chazal had reported her. From this time on, between 1825 and 1830, we enter an unclear period in her life about which we know very little, and the little that we do know comes from her and has probably been doctored to hide the depressing truth. What is clear is that in these years she was living on the run, in hiding, in very difficult circumstances — her mother did not approve of what she was doing and from that time their relationship appears to have ended — living with the constant fear that André Chazal, or the authorities, would catch up with her. Two of her three children would die in the following years; the only survivor was Aline Marie (the future mother of Paul Gauguin), who spent most of her childhood in the country, being looked after by different women while her mother hid and earned a living in whatever way she could. Later she would say that she was employed as a travelling companion (it is very likely that she was a mere servant) for an English family whom she accompanied throughout Europe, making her first trip to England. None of this is certain, and anything could have been possible in these years. What is absolutely certain is that they must have been very hard for Flora and must have shaped her strong character, her limitless courage, her bravery and her conviction that the world was badly made, unjust, brutal and discriminatory, and that the main victims of the prevailing injustice were women.

Flora’s trip to Peru — where she was to live for a year — was, according to her, quite accidental, something out of a romantic novel. At an inn in Paris she had run into Zacharie Chabrié, a ship’s captain who often travelled between France and Peru. In Arequipa he had met the wealthy and powerful Tristán family, whose head was Don Pío Tristán y Mocoso, the younger brother of Don Mariano, Flora’s father. It was Chabrié, she said, who convinced her to write to her uncle. She did so in a heartfelt, imploring letter, referring to the hardship and difficulties that she and her mother had endured since the death of her father, due to her parents’ irregular marriage, and asking for assistance and even for recognition. Months later Don Pío replied with an astute letter in which, alongside the expressions of affection for his recently appeared little niece, and protesting his love for his brother Mariano, he firmly states that he will not legally recognise a woman who, by her own admission, had been born in an illegal union. But he sent her some money of his own and some other money from her grandmother, who was still alive.

After three years of matrimonial disputes with Chazal and repeated attempts to escape, in April 1833 Flora finally embarked, in Bordeaux, on the boat that would take her to Peru. Her captain was none other than Zacharie Chabrié. The six-month crossing, in the company of sixteen men — she was the only woman — had a Homeric element to it. Flora stayed in Arequipa for eight months and in Lima for two months before returning to France in the middle of 1834. This is the transitional moment in her life, which separates the rebellious, confused young woman who fled her husband and dreamed of a stroke of fortune — to be recognised as the daughter of Don Mariano by her Peruvian family and thus suddenly acquire legitimacy and fortune — from the social militant, the writer and the revolutionary who would resolutely direct her life to fighting, with her pen and her words, for social justice, for the emancipation of women.

In Arequipa, her uncle Don Pío dashed her hopes of being recognised as a legitimate daughter and thus claiming her birthright. But this frustration was to some extent alleviated by the good life that she had in the family house, surrounded by servants and slaves, spoiled and flattered by the Tristán tribe, and sought after and courted by Arequipa’s ‘good society’, which was turned upside down by the arrival of this young and beautiful Parisian with her large eyes, her long dark hair and very fair skin. She had hidden from everyone, beginning with Don Pío, that she was married and the mother of three children. There is no doubt that suitors must have swarmed around her like flies. Flora doubtless enjoyed all this comfort and security, this first taste of the good life. But she also observed and noted down, with fascination, the life and customs of this country that was so different to her own, which was just beginning its life as an independent republic, although the institutions, prejudices and conventions of the colonial period remained almost intact. In her memoir, she would paint a splendid portrait of that feudal, violent society, with its tremendous economic contrasts and its great racial, social and religious divisions, its convents and religious practices verging on idolatry, and its political turmoil, where caudillos fought for power in wars which, as she herself witnessed on the plains at Cangallo, were often bloody and grotesque. This book, which the citizens of Arequipa and Lima would burn in their indignation at the cruel way they were depicted, is one of the most fascinating testimonies that exists, amid all the chaos, pomp, colour, violence and frenzy, of life in Latin America after independence.

But it was not just racism, savagery and privilege that predominated in her father’s country. To her great surprise, there were also some rare customs that Flora had never witnessed before in Paris, precisely in an area that was very important to her: the world of women. Society women, for a start, enjoyed considerable freedom: they smoked, bet, rode on horseback when they liked and, in Lima, women with faces half-covered by a veil — the most sensual garb that Flora had ever seen — went out alone to flirt with men, had autonomy and were treated with a considerable lack of prejudice, even from a Parisian standpoint. Even the nuns in the cloistered convents that Flora managed to slip into enjoyed great freedom of behaviour and committed certain excesses that were not at all in keeping with their nun’s vocation or with the image of the humiliated, downtrodden woman, the mere appendage of father, husband or head of family that Flora carried in her head. Of course, Peruvian women were not free in the same way as men, nothing like it. But in some cases they could compete with men, as equals, in their own spheres. In wars, for example, the women known as rabonas accompanied the soldiers, cooked and washed for them and nursed their wounds, fought alongside them and had the responsibility of attacking villages to get food for the troops. Without their knowing it, these women had, in fact, a life of their own, and destroyed the myth of the helpless, weak woman, useless in a man’s domain. The figure that, for Flora, personified this emancipated, active woman, invading the areas traditionally considered to be exclusively male, was Doña Francisca Zubiaga de Gamarra, the wife of Marshal Gamarra, an Independence hero and President of the Republic, whose figure paled alongside the dominant personality of his wife. Doña Pancha, or La Mariscala as the people called her, had taken over running the Prefecture of Cuzco when her husband was out of the country, and she had put down conspiracies through her guile and courage. Dressed as a soldier, and on horseback, she had been involved in all the civil wars, fighting shoulder to shoulder with Gamarra, and had even led the troops that had beaten the Bolivians in the battle of Paria. When Agustín Gamarra was president, the word on the street was that she had been the power behind the throne, taking the main initiatives and causing some wonderful scandals, like whipping, in an official ceremony, a soldier who had boasted of being her lover. The impression that La Mariscala made on Flora, whom she met briefly when she was about to be exiled, was enormous, and there is no doubt that she helped Flora to realise that it was possible for women to rebel against their marginal status, and that she herself should work to change society. These are the decisions that Flora brought back from Peru when she returned to Paris at the beginning of 1835 and threw herself enthusiastically into a new life, very different from her earlier one.

The Flora Tristán of the years following her return to Paris is no longer the fugitive rebel of before. She is a resolute woman, sure of herself, full of energy, looking to become better informed and educated — she had had an elementary schooling, as her grammatical errors reveal — and to make her way in intellectual circles, where she could do battle in the name of women and justice. While she was writing Peregrinations of a Pariah, she made contact with the Saint-Simon groups, the Fourierists (she knew Fourier himself, and would always speak of him with respect) and other groups that to a large extent opposed the status quo, she interviewed the Scottish reformer Robert Owen, and began to contribute to important publications like the Revue de Paris, L’Artiste and Le Voleur. She wrote a pamphlet arguing that a society should be established to help women arriving in Paris for the first time, she signed petitions for the abolition of the death penalty and she sent a petition to parliament to re-establish divorce. At the same time, these years witnessed her own legal and personal battle against André Chazal, who even kidnapped her children on three occasions. In one of these kidnap attempts, the youngest child, Aline, accused him of trying to rape her, which led to a famous trial and a social scandal. This incident had such an impact because Flora was now very well known. The publication of Peregrinations of a Pariah in 1837 was a great success, and she was a regular visitor to salons and rubbed shoulders with eminent intellectuals, artists and politicians. Unable to put up with the supreme humiliation of seeing his wife triumph in this way, with a book that laid bare her married life in horrifying detail, André Chazal tried to murder her, in the street, firing at her at point-blank range. He only wounded her, and the bullet remained lodged in her chest, a cold companion on her travels for the six remaining years of her life. At least on these travels she would no longer be haunted by the nightmare vision of André Chazal, who was condemned to twenty years in gaol for his crime.

Flora Tristán could have settled into the celebrity status that she had achieved and spent the rest of her life consolidating it, writing and moving in the intellectual and artistic circles in Paris that had opened their doors to her. She might have become a distinguished salon socialist, like George Sand, who always looked down on this upstart. But despite not having any formal education due to the privations of her early life, and also despite her sometimes explosive nature, she possessed a deep moral integrity which very soon made her realise that the justice and the social change that she so ardently desired would never be won from the refined and exclusive circles of writers, academics, artists, snobs and frivolous people for whom, in most cases, revolutionary ideas and proposals for social reform were mere bourgeois salon games, empty rhetoric.

While recovering from the attempt on her life, she wrote Méphis (1838), a novel full of good social intentions and forgettable from a literary point of view. But the following year she came up with a bold project that showed just how far her thinking had become radicalised, more openly anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois: to write a book about poverty and exploitation in London, the hidden face of the great economic transformation that had turned Victorian England into the first modern industrial nation. She travelled to London and stayed for four months, visiting all the places that the tourists never saw, some of which she could only enter disguised as a man: workshops and brothels, slum neighbourhoods, factories and insane asylums, prisons and thieves’ kitchens, union associations and schools in poor neighbourhoods run by the parishes. Also, perhaps by way of contrast, she visited the Houses of Parliament, the races at Ascot and one of the most aristocratic clubs. The resulting book, Promenades dans Londres (1840) is a fierce and merciless — sometimes excessive — attack on the capitalist system and the bourgeoisie whom Flora holds responsible for the appalling poverty, the wicked exploitation of workers and children and the condition of women — forced into prostitution to survive or to work for miserable wages, much lower than the modest wages earned by men. Unlike the success of her memoirs of her journey to Peru, this book, dedicated to the ‘working classes’, was received in France with sepulchral silence by the bien-pensant press and received just a few reviews in working-class publications. That is not surprising: Flora was taking on serious issues and attracting powerful enemies.

The journey to the London she loathed also changed her when she returned to France. Because in the capital of England, Flora did not just see young children working fourteen hour days in factories, or serving prison sentences alongside hardened criminals, or adolescent girls in luxury brothels being forced by powerful men to drink contaminated alcohol so that they could watch the girls vomit and fall down drunk. She also saw major demonstrations of the Chartist movement, the way they collected signatures on the street, how they were organised, by district, city and workplace, and she also attended, with characteristic daring, a clandestine meeting of the leaders, in a Fleet Street pub. Due to this experience she conceived the idea, that no one has yet attributed to her, and which some six years later Karl Marx would proclaim to the world in the Communist Manifesto: that only a great international union of workers from all over the world would have the necessary power to end the current system and usher in a new era of justice and equality on earth. In London Flora became convinced that women would be unable to shake off their yoke alone: that, to achieve this aim, they would have to join forces with the workers, the other victims of society, that invincible army of the future that she had glimpsed in the orderly marches of thousands of people organised by Chartists in the streets of London.

Flora Tristán’s personal utopia is expressed succinctly in L’Union Ouvrière (1843) — a small book that, because she could not find a publisher willing to take the risk, she published herself, by subscription, calling on all her friends and acquaintances in Paris — in her correspondence and in the Diary that she wrote during her journey around France, that would only be published many years after her death, in 1973. The objectives are clear and magnificent: ‘Donnez à tous et à toutes le droit au travail (possibilité de manger), le droit à l’instruction (possibilité de vivre par l’esprit), le droit au pain (possibilité de vivre complètement indépendant) et l’humanité aujourd’hui si vile, si repoussante, si hypocritement vicieuse, se transformera de suite et deviendra noble, fière, indépendante, libre, et belle, et heureuse’ (‘Give everyone, men and women, the right to work (the possibility of eating), the right to education (the possibility of living for the spirit), the right to bread (the possibility of living completely independently), and humanity, which is today so vile, so repulsive, so hypocritically dissolute will be transformed and will become noble, proud, independent, free, beautiful and happy’).⁴⁸

This revolution must be peaceful, inspired by love of humanity and filled with a Christian spirit which (as Saint-Simon also argued) would get back to the values of early Christianity — generosity and support for the poor — that the Catholic Church later betrayed and corrupted by aligning itself with the rich. Even God is reformed by Flora Tristán: God becomes Gods in the plural (Dieux), but would still be a single entity, because the divine being ‘is father, mother and embryo: active, passive and the seed of an unclear future’. The revolution would not be nationalist; it would cross borders and be internationalist. (In her first pamphlet Flora proclaimed: ‘Our country must be the universe.’) The body that would effect this social transformation would be the army of secular, peaceful workers, the ‘Workers’ Union’, in which men and women would participate on an entirely equal footing. Through persuasion, social pressure and working through legal institutions, it would completely transform society. This union would need to be strong economically in order to undertake urgent social reforms straight away. Every worker would contribute two francs a year and, because there are eight million workers in France, that would be a capital of sixteen million with which one could immediately open schools for the sons and daughters of the workers, who would receive a free and common education. The Union, in line with the British Chartists, would demand that the National Assembly elect a Defender of the People — paid for by the Assembly — to promote revolutionary measures within that body: the re-establishment of divorce, the abolition of the death penalty and, the main measure, the right to work, through which the state commits to guaranteeing employment and a wage to all citizens without exception. Similar to the phalanges or ‘phalanasteries’ proposed by Charles Fourier, the Union would create Workers’ Palaces, complex bodies offering many different services, where the workers and their families would receive medical attention and education, where they could retire and live a secure and protected old age, where every victim would be given help, advice and information and where those who spend long hours of the day working with their hands could enjoy culture and educate their spirit.

Even though some of these aspirations might today have been met by Social Security, we should not lose sight of the fact that these proposals were very daring, almost fantastic, in the context of the mid-nineteenth century, as can be seen from the criticisms and the reservations of the workers themselves to Flora’s ideas, which they regarded as most unrealistic. But she was convinced that there were no obstacles that will-power, energy and action could not overcome, because she was both — and this was an unusual mixture — a romantic dreamer, capable of being caught up in fantasies completely disconnected from reality, and a formidable activist, with a contagious power of persuasion and a passion that led her to confront every difficulty. From the time that she conceived of the Workers’ Union in 1843, until her death, some two years later, Flora Tristán was a real volcanic spirit, incessantly active and versatile: instead of artists and writers, her flat in the Rue du Bac was now full of workers and leaders of friendly societies and unions, and when she went out, it was to appear in workshops or to publish in proletarian publications, attending interminable meetings and sometimes getting caught up in heated discussions with those that objected to her ideas. It could not have been easy for a woman, with little experience of this work and unfamiliar with the political climate, to cope with these proletarian venues, which were not used to the involvement of women in activities which had until then been the domain of the men. And yet she threw herself into the task. For even though she saw that among the workers there were also many bourgeois prejudices and discriminatory attitudes towards women (which were also shared on occasion by the women workers themselves, some of whom insulted her, thinking that she was looking to seduce their husbands), she was not intimidated and she did not soften her message or her approach, that mystic, redemptive energy that fuelled her Union crusade.

That was why, in April 1844, she began her propaganda tour around the central and southern regions of France, which was to be just the beginning of a journey throughout other parts of the country and then through the whole of Europe. Weakened by illness and with a bullet lodged in her chest, she had to deal with innumerable obstacles on her journey, including the hostility of the authorities that searched her hotel room, confiscated her belongings and banned her meetings. She held out for a mere eight months, until her death in Bordeaux, on 14 November 1844. But in the course of her journey, she became ever more impressive and her actions became increasingly moving as she took her social message not just to the workers but also to the leading members of the establishment — bishops, businessmen, newspaper owners — convinced that her ideas for social justice would also win over the exploiters. Her tragic death, at forty-one years of age, brought to an end a richly varied life, admirable in its dedication — albeit marked by the nineteenth-century dream of utopia — which represents an important stage in the struggle for women’s rights and for a society free of all forms of discrimination, exploitation and injustice.

There is no better introduction to the life and work of this extraordinary woman than Flora Tristán. La Paria et son rêve, a very thorough edition of her correspondence edited by Stéphane Michaud, Professor of Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne, President of the Society of Romantic and Nineteenth-Century Studies and the author of a recent important book on Lou Andreas-Salomé, which combines erudition with a clear and elegant style. Professor Michaud is probably the leading expert on the life and work of Flora Tristán, having tracked it for many years with the obstinacy of a bloodhound and the tenderness of a lover. Her studies on Tristán and the symposia she has organised on her intellectual and political achievements have been decisive in rescuing Flora Tristán from the unjustified critical neglect she had suffered, despite isolated work like the admirable book Jules Puech wrote on her in 1925.

This new edition of her correspondence, expanded and enriched by notes and commentaries, contains new letters alongside the ones we already know, and also many letters from her correspondents, as well as mapping the social and political context of Flora’s life. The volume as a whole offers an excellent overview of her times: the hopes, polemics and personal disputes that were bound up in the first attempts in France to organise workers politically, the distance that often existed between reality and the ambitious messianic plans of the utopians, and the psychology of the main character herself, who is extremely frank in her letters and in the comments that she wrote in the margins of the correspondence that she received.

There are still major gaps in her biography, but these letters offer an absorbing portrait of her life following her return to France from Peru, especially the final two years. The letters are disarmingly fresh and sincere — luckily she did not write for posterity — revealing all her contradictions and weaknesses. She was a realist and a dreamer, generous and irascible, naïve and pugnacious, truculent and romantic, bold and never discouraged.

This book is the best homage that Flora Tristán could be offered in this the second centenary of her birth.

Marbella, July 2002