untitled

This blog is no longer active

All of the posts here, and plenty of others that aren't, have been archived at my new site, which will hopefully be updated a little less infrequently.

By Daniel Simpson

[This article is cross-posted here, with comments]

Of all the warm words clouding Britain's "partnership of purpose" with America, four rang especially hollow this week: freedom, justice and human rights.

Far away from Camp David, and Gordon Brown's choreographed coming out, one of history's footnotes was picking holes in the Churchillian script about "a joint inheritance not just of shared history but shared values."



In a letter to The Times, a man named Olivier Bancoult complained that:

"Calls for justice in the world are hollow as long as Britain denies justice to its own people."

Readers could be excused for scratching their heads here, but the outrage of which he writes ought to be a national scandal: it's as much an indictment of British subservience to Washington as the decision to invade Iraq.

Almost 40 years ago, Mr Bancoult and his compatriots were evicted from an old British colony in the Indian Ocean, where their coral-encrusted islands were turned over to the Pentagon. The largest, Diego Garcia, now serves as an American aircraft carrier and plays host, on occasion, to planes ferrying prisoners to foreign torture chambers.

Mr Bancoult's challenge to Britain doesn't extend to demanding "the Footprint of Freedom" be shut down. On the contrary: he thinks his
fellow Chagos islanders should be working there in place of Filipino contractors. Having already won three court cases against the Government, he just wants it to accept the Chagossians' right to go home.

The most recent verdict in their favour said that efforts to bar them forevermore "constitute an abuse of power", the judicial equivalent of an uppercut. Undeterred, the Government is appealing to the House of Lords, wasting more taxpayers' money on a legal bill that runs into the millions.

"The effect of the Court of Appeal's judgment, even if correct, should be clarified," argues Tony Humphries, who administers the islands for the Foreign Office. Decoded, this comment is alarming. It suggests firstly that the Government expects to lose, and secondly that it's given up challenging the right of return.

Instead, officials wants to know if they can still govern overseas territories by decree, free from parliamentary oversight and the threat of judicial review. Although the specific Orders in Council used against the Chagossians were illegal, the Government could in theory keep issuing new ones until these too were slapped down.

Why bother? What could be less in keeping with Mr Brown's belief that "government should be open and accountable"? If the Labour Party needs prerogative powers to impose its will on far-flung subjects, it's either hopelessly colonialist or passing the wrong laws.

The United States claims a resident population would pose a security risk to Diego Garcia, even from atolls 100 miles beyond the horizon. After the courts first allowed Chagossians to return to outlying islands, Britain wheeled out a study that said resettlement would be too expensive, despite not investigating what it would cost.

David Miliband's "new diplomacy" calls for "the spread of democracy and good governance". His credibility will be limited if he can't extend either to British citizens.

Instead of playing legal games, Britain and the United States should apologise to the powerless people they dispossessed. Many have already died in penury; the rest deserve compensation and funding for resettlement, without which they'll be exiled indefinitely.

"While lives may be ended, the belief in liberty never dies," Mr Brown opined this week in the Washington Post. "While hearts may be broken, the faith in a better future is unshakeable."

If he really wants his foreign policy to "honour human dignity", where better to begin than by sending the Chagos islanders back to where they came from?

[Please consider distributing this leaflet. And write to your MP.]

--

This blog is no longer active

All of the posts here, and plenty of others that aren't, have been archived at my new site, which will hopefully be updated a little less infrequently.

Another corporate casualty

"For more than 150 years, Reuters has been one of the great independent news organisations. No longer," writes the BBC's business editor Robert Peston. "This morning it has agreed to be bought for £8.7bn by Thomson of Canada."



Having been schooled in the dark arts of hackery by disciples of the Baron, it would be easy to get overly sentimental. A former colleague counsels against it:

There are some great journalists at Reuters, in print, video and pictures, and some great former ones who got killed in pursuit of their work. They are, or were, far better journalists than I could ever hope to be. Their organisation, however, is not the unblemished force for good that it likes to project as its image. It fails miserably to bring the independence, impartiality, integrity and freedom from bias that is needed to throw clear light on the world’s problems. That, in the very least, would demand unrelenting analysis and criticism of the issues presented by global capitalism and the holders of capital, most of whom are Reuters clients past or present. It can claim to do a better job than many other media organisations but that’s hardly difficult.

The rot started decades ago. Having survived without profits for 120 years, Reuters staked its future on a black box called the Monitor. This gizmo and its successors fed headlines and exchange rates to bankers at their desks, enabling them to sell currencies to each other. Ever since, the news agency this was supposed to be subsidising has taken a back seat to the business of flogging trading systems (and the bulletins that offer punters constantly updating reasons to gamble in a $2 trillion-a-day casino).

For a while it was a licence to print money, which is pretty much what the journalists who ran the company did. Then the markets got wise to their woeful grasp of management and the price of Reuters shares collapsed, just as I was being offered an option to buy some at five times their value.

Enter Tom Glocer, an American lawyer who's spent the past couple of years negotiating himself a new corporate shell to get rich in. So much for the empty rhetoric he's supposed to fill full of the promise of what Reuters once claimed to want to be. Not any more. To quote a senior editor who takes day-to-day decisions about global coverage:

"We are a capitalist company providing capitalist news. We do not go in for campaigning."

Err... except when it comes to framing stories according to the requirements of banking clients. Anyhow, enough of this directionless carping. Touchy-feely Tom is soliciting personal mind-bullets:

"If any of you have any pressing questions please, catch me in the corridor – as you often do – or send me an email. I'll do my best to answer them."

Very well then.

Subject: Your statement today
Date: 15 May 2007 17:09:48 BDT
To: tom.glocer@reuters.com

Dear Tom,

You say the sale of Reuters marks "a turning point in [its] 156-year history". Absolutely: you've just shredded its code of ethics.

How can the Reuters Trust Principles "be adopted by the combined companies in full" if Thomson has already bought the right to violate them?

The first principle stipulates that "Reuters shall at no time pass into the hands of any one interest, group or faction", while the company's constitution bars anyone from holding more than 15 percent of its shares.

Now that you've exempted Thomson from these basic requirements, why should it care about such lofty abstractions as "integrity, independence and freedom from bias"?

Moreover, the Trust Principles mandate Reuters to provide "reliable news services to newspapers, news agencies, broadcasters and other media subscribers". Why then does today's deal only refer to news in the context of "creating a global leader in electronic information services [and] trading systems"?

Is all reporting now to be geared explicitly to the demands of financial markets? If so, how can it possibly be sold as "unbiased"?

Finally, The Observer reported on Sunday that you stood to make £30 million from the takeover. Is that figure accurate? If not, how big is your windfall?

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Daniel Simpson

Actually, I'm not at all sure I do.

--

This blog is no longer active

All of the posts here, and plenty of others that aren't, have been archived at my new site, which will hopefully be updated a little less infrequently.

Redefining public service broadcasting

With support for Tony Blair and his wars at an all-time low, Britain is cracking down on public protest. From the scene, Daniel Simpson reports. See it now:



Now read all about it:

"This instrument can teach. It can illuminate and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it towards those ends.”

-- Edward R. Murrow, 1958

--

This blog is no longer active

All of the posts here, and plenty of others that aren't, have been archived at my new site, which will hopefully be updated a little less infrequently.

By Daniel Simpson

[Another one hits the spike]



March 2006

• Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media by David Edwards and David Cromwell, Pluto Press, January 2006
• Letters to a Young Journalist by Samuel G. Freedman, Basic Books, May 2006
• My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism by Andrew Marr, Pan, July 2005
• Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, Penguin Modern Classics, August 2003 (First published 1938)

The first law of journalism, dictated to scribes down the ages, is to tell us something we don't already know. "News," quoth Corker, the archetypal hack of Evelyn Waugh's Fleet Street satire Scoop, "is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead. We're paid to supply news. If someone else has sent a story before us, our story isn't news." This adage from a bygone era of copy boys and hot metal printing lost none of its currency with the advent of videophones, satellite trucks and all the rest of the panoply of gizmos that consigned telegrams to the same historical dustbin as the quaint cablese in which they were written. If anything, its tyranny holds fiercer sway than ever. The quest for novelty, no matter how trivial or tangential to everyday life, preoccupies even the most jaded and deskbound reporter as he scuttles from fax machine to inbox in pursuit of hitherto untransmitted revelations, embellishing the quotidian for the apathetic with the requisite sexing up. Few ever stop to ask why.

That journalists subsist on a diet of innuendo and intricate misrepresentation, or as Waugh put it seven decades ago, "the luscious, detailed inventions that composed contemporary history", is so widely held to be true in these days of instant refutation by blogger that it scarcely merits a mention in the news-in-brief section. To the doyens of the press corps, however, it remains anathema, regardless of how readily they devour Scoop and all its barbs. Lubricated by alcohol, and out of earshot of the customers, they may give voice to occasional doubts about the ethics of their trade, but such moments of weakness are soon drowned out by old war stories and gripes about their employers. For all their pretensions to fearless truthseeking, the task of telling it like it is about the news business is left to satirists like Waugh, his fortnightly imitators in the pages of Private Eye and an ever-widening circle of media critics, most of whom are confined to cyberspace.

Today's jobbing journalist has little time for searching questions about what ought to be newsworthy; with websites to refresh and round-the-clock schedules to fill, rolling deadlines have become the norm and product-peddling the professional imperative. As competitors converge on a common agenda for fear of losing market share, rival brands report the same stories with only the most minor variations in "angle", lapping up the tsunami of rent-a-quotes, spin doctors and public relations executives that floods the average newsroom with press releases. A fixation on access to powerful sources skews the news to focus on their words while rigid conceptions of balance protect them from systematic scrutiny of their actions. Truly investigative journalism is a rarity; managers prefer to pump money into cheaper and more dependable sources of revenue: opinionated punditry, lifestyle features and celebrity tittle-tattle. The bottom line trumps all other considerations, even the cherished journalistic clichés of leaving no stone unturned and shining lights into dark places. "We are a capitalist company providing capitalist news," stresses an editor at Reuters, a global media conglomerate, which subsidises foreign reporting by selling trading systems to banks. "We do not go in for campaigning."

So entrenched are the structural constraints that deter corporate media from serving as more effective watchdogs over the powerful, or guides to the way the world works, that attempts to discuss them are alternately derided as cynical and idealist. Exceptions to the routine mediocrity, meanwhile, are held up to dispel suggestions that the priorities and proclivities of most reporters are so at odds with the duties of a Fourth Estate that their modern role might more accurately be rendered as being "4 the state".

Such is the contention of Guardians of Power, a compilation of five years of work by David Edwards and David Cromwell on their Media Lens website. Operating on a shoestring, the two Davids take a scalpel and a selective magnifying glass to the output of mainstream news organisations, deconstructing for their readers the hidden agendas they find embedded therein. Their focus is not the tabloids, or Rupert Murdoch, or any of the other obvious bugbears and sitting targets. Instead, they reserve their contempt for Britain's "least worst" media, lampooning the Guardian and the Independent as pseudo-radicals and the BBC for its lapses in impartiality.

Media Lens, which describes itself as "correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media", publishes regular newsletters encouraging subscribers to email journalists and challenge their version of events with evidence that contradicts it. The resulting exchanges often reveal parallel universes of incomprehension, but are all the more enlightening because of it. "I'm afraid I think it is just pernicious and anti-journalistic," scoffed the BBC's Andrew Marr in response to a suggestion he was regurgitating government propaganda. A subsequent Media Lens mailout skewered the point home, quoting Marr's Downing Street speech to the nation on the day American soldiers stormed into Baghdad and staged the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein. Apparently, or so we were told, this vindicated Tony Blair's support for the invasion. "It would be entirely ungracious," Marr declared on the Ten O'Clock News, "even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister." Was this what the BBC's premier political reporter described in My Trade, his autobiographical survey of journalistic history, as "the high civic purpose of informing the voters"?

One is reminded of Lord Copper, proprietor of Waugh's fictional daily, The Beast, expounding on his requirements for reporting conflict in colonial Africa:

"Remember that the Patriots are in the right and are going to win. The Beast stands by them foursquare. But they must win quickly. The British public has no interest in a war which drags on indecisively. A few sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the Patriot side and a colourful entry into the capital. That is the Beast policy for the war."

The arguments about bias in coverage of the Iraq invasion are well rehearsed, but it bears repeating that the BBC, supposedly the bastion of balance, gave less airtime to anti-war opinion than any other British broadcaster. There is no particular conspiracy at work here; it's the logical outcome of an editorial paradigm that regards official sources as the font of all the most newsworthy knowledge. The condition may particularly afflict the BBC, christened "the child of the British parliament" by Marr, but its commercial rivals are by no means immune. "It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking," reflects Nick Robinson, who succeeded Marr as political editor after performing the same function for ITN. "That is all someone in my sort of job can do. We are not investigative reporters."

The trouble is that all too few journalists are. "Breaking original stories is expensive and time-consuming," argues Peter Barron, the editor of the BBC's flagship current affairs bulletin, Newsnight. "These days it tends to be the specialists and the bloggers and to some extent print journalists who have the time to really dig away." They tend to have to do so on their own time, however; according to the New Statesman editor John Kampfner, "few news organisations now devote adequate resources to painstaking investigations." Whether or not he counts his own magazine among their number, it has at least sought to document some of the shadows cast over society by big business, to cite John Dewey's definition of politics, such as the influence of nuclear power lobbyists on energy policy. Although Newsnight also unearths scoops of its own, it was striking that one of its most incisive revelations of recent months – an exposé of how foreign companies exploit Iraq's oil wealth – emerged from research conducted by activists on a miniscule budget. "We have to keep the daily beast running," says Newsnight's editor, but it's questionable whether the average day's drip-feed of events and pronouncements is worth the investment of so much attention. After all, as the veteran American broadcaster Bill Moyers observed on his retirement: "News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity."

Inspired by this dictum, and others of a similar ilk, like the view of Israeli journalist Amira Hass that the reporter's true vocation is "to monitor power and the centres of power", the editors of Media Lens aim to "democratise the setting and content of news agendas, which traditionally reflect establishment interests". Essentially, they're talking about a responsibility to speak truth to power instead of acting as its stenographers. Passion of this kind, widely regarded as the preserve of ideologues, or practitioners of a suspect pursuit dubbed "crusading journalism", has been as unfashionable as fedoras for at least as long. Its reputation is undergoing a prominent rehabilitation, however. Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney's film about the chainsmoking CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow and his showdown with Joe McCarthy, is less about anticommunist witch-hunts than the question of what TV journalism is actually for. The urgency of Murrow's closing monologue, delivered as a speech to broadcasting bigwigs in 1958, is only heightened by the industry's failure to heed it over the intervening half century:

"This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful."

Of course, the BBC – like Channel 4 and even, on occasion, ITV – still has its moments. The odd documentary gem glimmers among the anodyne nuggets hewn from the current affairs coalface; the skeleton of Panorama, to quote one of its longest-serving correspondents, Tom Mangold, "rises occasionally, rattles a chain or two, then sinks back into its coffin". But the business of presenting the stories of the day is entrusted to blow-dried personalities who, as Andrew Marr once boasted of himself, have all had their organs of opinion removed. The consequences for a corporation scared witless by the Hutton report are stark: instead of setting the agenda, its staff, with the exception of a couple of combative interviewers, simply communicate other people's. "Our purpose needs to be to report and enquire on behalf of our audiences," insists Peter Horrocks, the BBC's Head of Television News. "That is different from journalism which has as its purpose the intention of undermining or denigrating authority." Quite how his reporters are supposed to deal with truths that do just that is, like so much else, simply left unsaid.

The hands of newspaper journalists appear at first glance to be relatively untied. Simon Kelner, the editor of the Independent, prides himself on having shrunk his publication to tabloid size while expanding the horizons of its writers by giving them freer rein to speak their minds. "The X-factor which will make people choose your newspaper over another," believes Kelner, "is the way it adds to their understanding of what's going on in the world and gives them a depth of opinion, comment and analysis that other media don't have." Critics may mock his populist "viewspaper" as a Daily Mail for Liberal Democrats, but its front-page banner headlines have at least been screaming about the climactic chaos that may yet wipe out human life on swathes of the earth's surface. When it comes to the question of solutions, however, the Independent is stuck with slogans, ethical shopping guides and exhortations to switch off domestic appliances. Questioning the logic of our addiction to energy-sapping economic growth, on which its own drive for profitability depends, seems as alien to its executives as banning adverts for cars, or the cheap flights that pump so much carbon into the atmosphere. When Media Lens suggested as much, the deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday dismissed readers who emailed him in protest as "a curmudgeonly lot of puritans, miseries, killjoys, Stalinists and glooms."

More insidious, perhaps, than this refusal to lobby for top-to-bottom social change is the subtle way in which stories are framed to present assumptions about the status quo as simple statements of fact. Despite its frequent hand-wringing about the arms trade, the Independent kicked off its recent announcement of a £10 billion fighter jet sale to Saudi Arabia by declaring: "Britain's aerospace industry received a massive boost yesterday." No mention, however, of the massive dent in Whitehall's commitment to human rights when there's a profit to be turned arming one of the world's most repressive regimes, even though the deal was deemed so "likely to heighten tension in the Middle East" that this prospect was highlighted a few sentences later. "It is not important to make sense," stress the Media Lens editors, if one aspires to a successful career in journalism. "It is important only to be able to bandy the jargon of media discourse in a way that suggests in-depth knowledge." This is particularly true of bored jobsworths on the editing desk, who can generally be relied upon to rewrite stories to accord better with received wisdom. Once again, the visions conjured up by the newsroom of Waugh's Beast are by no means as outlandish as they sound:

"On a hundred lines reporters talked at cross purposes; sub-editors busied themselves with their humdrum task of reducing to blank nonsense the sheaves of misinformation which whistling urchins piled before them."

The Guardian, long synonymous with left-liberal opinion, typos and embarrassing corrections and clarifications, is rebranding itself as the antidote to such cavalier practices as front-page editorialising. "This is an upmarket, serious mainstream newspaper," announced its editor, Alan Rusbridger, after spending £80 million on a new midsized format that has already won an award for its au courant colour palette. "There's more potential for growth there than taking comfort in political positioning." Shortly after the paper's relaunch, a leader writer insisted in the face of the latest cataclysm in Iraq that "no one is arguing for an immediate pull-out, and Britain must discharge its responsibilities," whatever they may be. Not only did this assertion ignore countless anti-war activists who've been demanding a withdrawal since Iraq's borders first were penetrated, it overlooked a front-page puff picture of the newest recruit to the Guardian comment pages, the former Times editor Simon Jenkins, resplendent beside the caption: "It's time to leave Iraq."

Translated from the journalese, the Guardian leader was observing that nobody with the power, or the corresponding inclination, to say "cut and run" had any intention of giving such an order. Unless steeped in the skills of Kremlinology, however, a right-thinking reader would be none the wiser. The effect, noted by George Orwell, is one of "words falling upon the facts like soft snow, blurring their outlines and covering up all the details." Elsewhere in the same edition of the paper, senior columnist Jonathan Freedland gave clearer form to the bind in which many journalists find themselves. Castigating Labour MPs for their supine acceptance of Blair's crimes, in terms that applied almost equally to his own comments, Freedland's frustration was palpable. "There is no outrage, just a shrug of the shoulders," he mused on page 31, lamenting further: "there is no realistic way of getting rid of him," without so much as spelling out why the prime minister ought to be held to account, let alone demanding it in plain English.

The intellectual straightjacket hobbling reporters is institutionalised by their definition of who, or what, makes news. Aside from crime stories, disasters and slice-of-life sagas of "human interest", editors have collectively decreed that the journalist's democratic duty is to inform people what those in power are doing, and what they plan to do next. Media outlets consequently see themselves as selective channels for the views of politicians and other powerful figures. "If they learn how to use the prime medium of the age," believes the BBC's Andrew Marr, "people like me will be out of a job." This is highly unlikely, not least because the mediation of the messages by supposedly neutral journalists lends them additional credibility. Balance is nominally supplied by canvassing rival political parties for an opposing view, with the weight given to their words determined largely by their power to influence what happens next.

But what of the shades of popular opinion unrepresented by Britain's three principal parties, which have converged on the same pro-business platform? A recent public inquiry, lavishly entitled Power to the People, concluded after 18 months of research that voters were boycotting elections because: "The main political parties are widely held in contempt. They are seen as offering no real choice to citizens." If parliamentary political debate is increasingly a matter of mudslinging rather than fundamental policy difference, it is hardly surprising that media coverage tends towards a focus on who's up and who's down that might as well be headlined: "PM refutes critics with barnstorming blustery bullshit". Matters of more serious concern, meanwhile, such as evidence of a widening gap between rich and poor, or proposals for a radical restructuring of trade rules, pass almost without comment. Unless a prominent figure in the power hierarchy suggests doing something about a development, it's effectively not news, although it might get written up for the record and buried well down the running order.

An influential school of thought, propagated most eloquently by John Lloyd of the Financial Times, holds that journalists in a parliamentary democracy have no business appointing themselves as a substitute opposition. This argument has some merits if taken to mean that televised slanging matches are as much of a waste of space as the prurient obsession with politicians' sexual peccadilloes and other trivial transgressions. But, given that the government has just drawn up a bill enabling it to make laws without the inconvenience of submitting them to parliament, it seems at best a diversion. Dissent is the basis of democracy; if challenging debate and forensic scrutiny are lacking elsewhere, the media ought to be facilitating both, not just offering a mouthpiece to our masters, whether elected or not. "We report, you decide" is the mantra of Fox News Channel, not of responsible journalism for the 21st century, at least not unless it casts its net wider than the cesspool of corporate lobbying and party lines that is modern mainstream politics. If editors are content merely to ride these waves rather than make some of their own, for what are they being so handsomely remunerated other than running a tight ship? It certainly pays to rock some boats more than others if your business is selling audiences to advertisers, as most media companies do to make money.

"How," ask the editors of Media Lens, "can we believe that greed-driven hierarchies of corporate power can provide honest information to democratic society?" The question is intended rhetorically, but it betrays a penchant for sweeping generalisation that detracts from its underlying point. So eager are Edwards and Cromwell to establish the corporate media's systemic shortcomings that they gloss over wide variations in ownership structure, and even performance. Indeed, the companies they most chastise reported most of the facts on which they base their analyses, sometimes on the front page. This is irrelevant, they argue, citing Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's defence of the "propaganda model" thesis they outlined two decades ago in Manufacturing Consent, the book which begat Media Lens. "That a careful reader looking for a fact can sometimes find it with diligence and a sceptical eye tells us nothing," Chomsky and Herman stressed, "about whether that fact received the attention and context it deserved, whether it was intelligible to the reader or effectively distorted or suppressed."

The problem, then, is essentially one of context. Media Lens and its subscribers berate journalists for pushing facts through an interpretive framework that obscures their significance; for sacrificing analysis on the altar of novelty; for accumulating information without joining up the dots. Editors tend to favour news stories that recycle the idées fixes of conventional wisdom in their presentation of background material. These are regarded as unbiased, while those structured on alternative interpretations arouse suspicion. Newspapers consequently devote forests of column inches to supposed scepticism, which takes as its starting point the premises of those it purports to challenge. This "feigned dissent", according to Edwards and Cromwell, is the stock-in-trade of liberal commentators, whose heft and vigour belie their conformity to established opinion. More outspoken dissidents, whether opinionated reporters like the Independent's Robert Fisk, or investigative columnists like George Monbiot at the Guardian, survive in pockets, but they don't get to take editorial decisions. As such, the Media Lens editors argue, they may do more harm than good. "Dissident appearances in the mainstream act as a kind of liberal vaccine," they assert, "inoculating against the idea that the media is subject to tight restrictions and control."

This is an absurd claim, predicated on the assumption that there could, even in theory, be any such thing as a truly free press. The repeated references to this holy grail suggest, however, that it is necessarily elusive, serving as a kind of Trotskyist transitional demand with a Situationist twist. "Be realistic, demand the impossible," as the sloganeers of 1968 would have it. Or, more bluntly: "No replastering, the structure is rotten", as if it might somehow crumble of its own accord once enough people noticed. Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model identified five filters distorting media coverage: the interests of parent companies, pressure from advertisers, dependence on official sources, flak from the government and other powerful lobbies and an ideological belief in free-market capitalism. Media Lens seeks to raise awareness of these issues by demonstrating that there are limits to what many journalists are prepared to discuss. More honest reporting is impossible, Edwards and Cromwell argue, unless the filters blurring their vision are removed. "We cannot change the mass media," they write, "until we change the culture, which cannot change until we change the mass media." Their objective is to lobby for a revolutionary restructuring of society by highlighting flaws in journalism, which they ascribe to an all-encompassing theory passed off as axiomatic fact. In effect, then, they are manufacturing dissent.

It is questionable whether the unvarnished truth would be any more likely to circulate under different socio-economic conditions. Apart from anything else, what is truth? According to scripture, Pontius Pilate's famous question went unanswered by no less a mortal than the earthly embodiment of omniscience Himself. Two millennia later, the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard offered a more worldly response. "What matters," Bernhard wrote in his autobiography, Gathering Evidence, "is whether we want to lie or to tell the truth and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth." Journalists rarely report what they see with the candour they deploy when discussing it over drinks. Some might argue this is no bad thing; that comment is free, but facts are sacred, as per the maxim of longstanding Guardian proprietor C.P. Scott. Professional standards are all very well, but not if reporters simply hide behind them to churn out whatever they're being fed, presuming that anything goes as long as it's sourced. It doesn't, argues Samuel Freedman, a Columbia Graduate School professor, in his inspirational Letters to a Young Journalist. "Great journalism," Freedman believes, "comes from the curmudgeons, the dissidents, the lonely individualists, who insist on pursuing what fascinates or outrages them and tracking it to the ground."

Bloggers do this in abundance, but their duelling noise machines are as much a reflection of what's wrong with modern journalism as a tentative response. Reams of guff have been spouted about the transformative potential of a world in conversation with itself, yet the impact on news organisations and their output is minimal: established pundits have merely embraced the same format. Blogging encourages the venting of high-octane opinion, replicating and amplifying trends in the mainstream media, where chic misanthropy seems to be all the rage. Legions of aspirant columnists hone style at the expense of substance, spewing elegant bile like wannabe H.L. Menckens with a status fetish worthy of Tom Wolfe, had he written for Heat magazine. Their online rivals may lack the same pizzazz but they tend to specialise in weightier obsessions, like debunking the arguments of more earnest commentators before their words even hit the newsstand. In this sense, at least, debate is being democratised, if only among the cognoscenti who bother to follow it. Most media consumers continue to assume that "all the news that's fit to print," as the New York Times advertises its contents, will show up in the following day's paper.

The trouble with blogging is that it's largely parasitic. A recent Columbia Graduate School study found that just one percent of posts on current affairs featured an interview with someone else and only five percent involved some other original work, such as examining documents. The rest were commenting on stories researched by professional journalists. Although blogs tend to focus more on broader issues neglected by daily news coverage, they rarely uncover fresh information. Instead, their strength is the way they synthesise it, but the insightfulness of the analysis depends on the author's expertise, not their facility with Google or LexisNexis. "The very ease of online reporting makes it seductive and dangerous," Freedman warns. "In both the blogosphere and the ever-expanding field of media criticism, I see a version of reporting that eschews human contact and first-hand observation, two things that have an inconvenient way of complicating or contradicting one's preconceived opinions."

Away from the world of websites like Indymedia, where activists upload their latest exploits, original reporting costs money, which next to no bloggers generate. This is a significant handicap, as the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger identified when Media Lens challenged him to justify his paper's dependence on advertising for three quarters of its income.

"I'd be interested to know what alternative business model you propose for newspapers which would sustain a large, knowledgeable and experienced staff of writers and editors, here and abroad, in print as well as on the web. Do you prefer no advertising lest journalists are corrupted or influenced in the way you imagine? If so, what cover price do you propose? Or, in the absence of advertising, what other source of revenue would you prefer?"

Edwards and Cromwell not only have no answer, they argue it's unreasonable to expect one. "The highlighting of important issues for discussion is in itself an important and legitimate activity," they write. This is true, but the discussion has to take place some time. In the meantime, they suggest, Media Lens is an embryonic solution per se, but it is difficult to see how if it only reports on reporting, and does so with dogmatic insistence that the corporate media are irredeemably corrupt. If so, surely action would speak louder than critique, since the only pressure that editors can't ignore is competition. "You must be the change you wish to see in the world," as Gandhi put it. At its best, Media Lens does this, hosting rational debates and disseminating marginalised perspectives, backed up by evidence. But, like bloggers, they piggyback on the work that profit-oriented businesses have paid for.

Ironically enough, one of the new media initiatives they tout as exemplary is itself both profit-oriented and dependent on advertising. In South Korea, one of the world's most wired countries, where broadband Internet is the norm, web-based journalism swept a president from power in 2002. Bypassing the conservative Korean press, thousands of ordinary citizens wrote articles for OhmyNews, a collaborative media site, persuading compatriots to elect a reformist rank outsider. There's more to OhmyNews than group blog advocacy though. Its editors provide basic reporting training for contributors, proofread their submissions and vet them for accuracy and adherence to ethical guidelines. Far from putting media professionals out of business, this model takes advantage of their skills and pays both them and their amateur rivals for their work. "If only journalists would understand how to reinvent themselves," laments Jean K. Min, the director of OhmyNews International. "Trained journalists will be in greater demand as an increasing number of 'citizen journalists' start to produce explosive amounts of news themselves."

Information may want to be free, to paraphrase the cyberpunks, but that doesn't mean it wants to be accurate, as Wikipedia users will recognise. Editorial oversight is essential, both to correct factual errors and to codify a focus for reporting. Nevertheless, a paradigm shift is under way in defining what makes news in the United States, where the spoof newscaster Jon Stewart is widely regarded as the most probing interviewer on TV. From next year, Independent World Television will broadcast a nightly news bulletin financed entirely by viewer subscriptions and relayed by cable, satellite and the Internet. "Informed by a commitment to social justice," the advance publicity announces, "IWTnews will focus on news other media ignore or suppress, and on individuals and groups that are transforming the world." This is no fringe activist outfit; its backers include the executive director of Human Rights Watch and the editor of Harper's, one of America's most highbrow magazines. The news agenda is outlined thematically, from war and peace to such outmoded topics as class, labour issues and social policy, and its editors promise to hire staff "for their experience, political acumen and understanding of history." Workaday hacks need not apply.

Despite the proliferation of cheap video technology, Britain has nothing comparable in the pipeline, in part, perhaps, because fewer viewers see the need. "People tend to suppose journalists are where the news is," the BBC's Martin Bell once observed. "This is not so. The news is where journalists are." More than ever, they're confined to barracks, or hunting in packs, taking cues from almost anyone other than the public they're supposed to be serving. Change is afoot, however. A BBC pilot project is allowing communities in the West Midlands to produce their own programmes for local digital channels, although most of what's screened is still shot by professionals. Once people wake up to the potential of broadband distribution, showcased by sites like Google Video and YouTube and the peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, citizen journalism could start to bite back. The prospect alarms Andrew Marr as much as it fascinates him.

"The digital revolution threatens to do for broadcasting what mechanical presses and cheap paper did for print putting it further beyond the practical control of politicians. They have begun to face up to the looming possibility of a broadcasting world which is as diverse, openly biased and aggressive as print journalism; and they are right to be frightened because such a force might finally destroy the remnants of parliamentary democracy."

Whether or not this conclusion is as overblown as it seems, the empowerment of people to hold their rulers to account is surely the essence of spreading democracy. The court of public opinion can't subpoena witnesses or evidence, so it's ultimately no match for select committees or the judiciary. But, used judiciously, it could chip away at the concentrations of power that dictate policy, forcing government to become more open and decentralised.

It has long been said that journalism's defining mission is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. As Samuel Freedman cautions, however, the world does not divide neatly into oppressors and the oppressed. Speaking truth to power shouldn't morph into misrepresenting reality, presumably with the intention of comforting the powerless. "Being adversarial sounds righteous," Freedman notes, "except when it is a mere reflex, just one more way of imposing black-and-white absolutism on a world washed in greys." The cultivation of compassion, offered as a panacea by Media Lens, is a fine source of motivation, but not much of a guide to what the American writer J. Anthony Lukas termed "the stubborn particularity of life". It's tempting to trade in blithe certainties, like a correspondent ad-libbing to camera, but far more revealing to demystify subjects by exploring their complexities, to sketch out the paradoxes and conflicting points of view. Too many stories are reported from the perspective of the chief protagonists and their peers, for whom they're effectively written. Those on the receiving end are lucky if they get more than a soundbite and the customer is generally short-changed.

If people are to be persuaded to buy their news elsewhere, it has to be able to sell itself. Public service media should inform, educate and entertain, as the BBC's founder Lord Reith suggested, but without undue deference to the establishment, of whose pillars Reith wrote in his diary: "They know they can trust us not to be really impartial." The ultimate challenge is to make sense of the world in real time, as the continuous present is known, not years after the fact. "Genuinely objective journalism," according to the esteemed American reporter T.D. Allman, "not only gets the facts straight, it gets the meaning of events right. It is compelling not only today, but stands the test of time. It is validated not only by 'reliable sources' but by the unfolding of history." Producing it is confoundedly difficult.

First, you have to sift disclosure from disinformation, which is far easier said than done. The public domain is awash with historical evidence, but extrapolating from it to hypothesise about the present is a poor substitute for hard facts. In 1945, the U.S. State Department described Middle Eastern oil as "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history". Half a century later, while still chief executive of Halliburton, Dick Cheney argued that crude's strategic significance was unique. "We are not talking about soapflakes or leisurewear here," the Bush administration's éminence grise told the Institute for Petroleum in 1999. "Energy is truly fundamental to the world's economy. The Gulf War was a reflection of that reality." Yet when Tony Blair was asked in 2003 whether oil was a factor in the decision to invade Iraq again, he dismissed the suggestion as "one of the most absurd conspiracy theories ever". Unsurprisingly enough, journalists devoted even less space to examining the plausibility of this statement than they did to critical appraisal of classified, and therefore apparently incontestable, theories about Saddam's weapons of mass non-existence. Sources with sceptical insight into either question were rarely consulted and only the business press has since kept track of the occupation force's losing battle against pipeline saboteurs and recalcitrant tribesmen. Whatever its role in the push for war, Iraqi oil isn't gushing.

Reporters get distracted from their duty to explain by the pressure to deliver exclusives. Nothing sets the blood racing like the prospect of a front-page splash. But trawling for leaks makes you a conduit for someone's vested interest, which it's difficult to expose without turning off the information tap. Wherever you turn there are sources looking to steer you in a particular direction; it's little wonder that official spin gains such traction in the newsroom when its purveyors have the power to shape your assumptions and even your daily schedule. Scoop depicts these processes in caricature, reflecting Waugh's frustration with his short-lived stint as a correspondent for the Daily Mail in Abyssinia, where he went sightseeing while his rivals filed sensational stories that he couldn't match. Nonetheless, his satire has a ring of truth. When a bogus government tip-off dispatches the rest of the hackpack to a place that doesn't exist, Scoop's hapless hero stays behind. As a result, the Beast's William Boot stumbles across the real conflict in fictional Ishmaelia: a struggle to control its gold reserves, in which a Briton named Baldwin has the upper hand, provided he can press home his advantage militarily. "I possess a little influence in political quarters, but it will strain it severely to provoke a war on my account," the mysterious Mr. Baldwin explains as he feeds Boot the story. "Some semblance of popular support, such as your paper can give, would be very valuable." The relaying of this message requires a certain nuance, however, which Baldwin is conveniently on hand to supply.

"PRESS COLLECT URGENT MAN CALLED MISTER BALDWIN HAS BOUGHT COUNTRY, William began. 'No,' said a gentle voice behind him. 'If you would not resent my cooperation, I think I can compose a dispatch more likely to please…'"

For journalists to set their own agenda, they need editorial backing. A news outlet cannot realistically ignore day-to-day developments, but it's debatable whether there's a requirement to duplicate the efforts of agencies like Reuters and the Press Association to assemble a daily digest. Newspapers are already brimming with rewritten wire reports and agency camera crews shoot much of the foreign footage broadcast on TV. If basic facts were simply conveyed with bullet-point concision, reporters could be freed up to tell the stories behind the headlines, to examine processes instead of events and to analyse what's happening and what might be done about it rather than just the dilemmas that policymakers confront. Stripping out the trivial and the ephemeral needn't make for dull content either. If infotainment remains the order of the day, it doesn't have to be dumbed down to be accessible. Perhaps there is even a gap in the market for a more learned culture of explanation and investigation. Whatever the format, journalism needs to raise its game or the public interest will continue to be cheated by the pursuit of corporate profit and the path of least resistance. "Those who love the world serve it in action," as William Butler Yeats proclaimed.

"And should they paint or write still it is action:
The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality.
What portion in the world can the artist have
Who has awakened from the common dream
But dissipation and despair?"

Scrupulously honest reporting is itself an art, offering but a vision of reality that's fleeting, imperfect and dependent for its sharpness not on opinion, quoted or otherwise, but on well-sourced fact. It's more in demand than ever and yet the news business seems to value it less and less. Swimming against the tide is wearing: resist the pressure to conform to lowest-common-denominator expectations and editors mark you down as a prima donna, a troublemaker or worse. As Nietzsche observed, even the strong are weak when confronted by the organised instincts of the herd. Our greatest physical fear may be death, but psychologically we fear nothing as much as rejection and social exclusion. We hypnotise ourselves into faith in absurdities, if only to hang on to our jobs. Need it always be thus? Journalists of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your illusions.

--

This blog is no longer active

All of the posts here, and plenty of others that aren't, have been archived at my new site, which will hopefully be updated a little less infrequently.

By Daniel Simpson

[This article elaborates on an earlier posting, available here]



February 2006

CRAWLEY, England - Allen Vincatassin is an immigrant with a difference: he wants to go back to where he came from but the British government won't let him. So he's importing his compatriots instead.

Five hundred have joined this exodus since the chilly September dawn that greeted Vincatassin and the 18 friends and relatives he'd persuaded to trade tropical sunshine for a one-way ticket to Gatwick airport, where they hunkered under strip lighting by the toilets while he badgered officials to find them a hotel. The letter he'd received from London a few days earlier failed to deter him. "There is no question of our offering any temporary accommodation or other means of short term financial support," a Foreign Office minister had insisted. No matter. After three days of belligerent phone calls and eating out of cans, they were given 30 pounds each for food and rooms in the airport Travelodge. Vincatassin's audacity had paid off; their bills were covered for six months until they'd cobbled together enough cash between them to decamp to suburbia.

This was no asylum-seeking stunt, however, and it drew none of the usual tabloid newspaper hysteria about refugees exposing Britain as a "soft touch". All 19 carried British passports, thanks to an Act of Parliament offering them the right to settle in a country they'd never seen, although its flag still flies over the coral atolls they called home until their families were expelled to make way for an American military base. For decades, these dispossessed exiles have demanded the right to return to their islands in the Indian Ocean, but to no avail. Most remain where the retreating British Empire dumped them: in the shantytowns of Mauritius and the Seychelles. Appeals for assistance have gone unheeded since 1982, when a meagre payout was authorised on the condition it would never be repeated.

"The passport came as a lifejacket," Vincatassin reflects. A short man of 35, given to grandiloquence, he puffs out his chest and surveys the living room of a squat terraced house he shares with his wife and brother in Crawley, a drab commuter belt New Town, barely five miles from the London runway where they landed three years ago. "It was like enlightenment for me and I said, yes! At least if we are on their doorstep they'll have to do something."

Not all of his fellow islanders are impressed by Vincatassin's quest to secure welfare payments for new arrivals to a community dispersed across the cul-de-sacs and crescents of Crawley's post-war housing estates. To some, it's a distraction from their ongoing struggle to resettle the depopulated Chagos archipelago and, as such, a symptom of identity crisis. The disputes over how best to seek redress from the British establishment reflect conflicting notions of what it means to be Chagossian; whether suffering is something to escape or to exhibit, whether a felicitous future lies in reviving a bygone way of life or in making the most of present opportunities.

Olivier Bancoult, chairman of the Mauritian-based Chagos Refugee Group and claimant in a legal challenge to Britain's decree that the islands should remain uninhabited, is clear on how he sees it. "Here is not our country," he said during a recess at his High Court hearing in London, which he's flown in from Port Louis to attend. "If Allen Vincatassin cared about his fundamental right to return to his homeland, he should have taken up the case against the British government, not come here and settled."

***

Of the two-dozen Chagossian visitors shivering alongside Bancoult in the court's public gallery this winter, just three speak enough English to have more than the faintest idea what's going on. The case unfolding beneath them turns on arcane constitutional principles and its two judges have no power to send them home, but might just reinstate a theoretical right of return that Bancoult's lawyers have already established once, before the government revoked it. Anything further-reaching is almost unthinkable: the island of Diego Garcia hosts a precious Pentagon outpost and the United States remains as opposed to the presence of indigenous people as it was when it ordered Britain to deport them 40 years ago.

"Our view," wrote Eric Newsom, assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, in a letter to British officials in 2000, "is that any settlement of a resident civilian population even on the outer islands of the archipelago would significantly degrade the strategic importance of a vital military asset unique in the region to both our governments." In other words, forget about it. Four years later, Britain duly obliged. Although the High Court had ruled in November 2000 that the original expulsion of the Chagos islanders constituted "an abject legal failure", ministers simply reinstated the law that banished them, only this time it was even tougher. Magna Carta be damned; "No person has the right of abode," declared the July 2004 ordinance. To bypass Parliament, which would almost certainly have slapped down the legislation, the government used the Queen's ancient Prerogative power as a rubber stamp. As Britain has no written constitution, it is now up to the courts to determine whether, as the government insists, Her Majesty still has the right to do whatever she pleases to her subjects in colonial dominions.

"There is no precedent that we have been able to find in statute, case law, or indeed in history for what has been done," argues Bancoult's barrister, Sir Sydney Kentridge, who made his name defending Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko in their struggles against apartheid. Kentridge's opposite number says he has "a knockout blow", however, in the form of an 1865 statute granting the Queen unlimited power under colonial law unless Parliament expressly forbids a particular course of action. Regardless of which side the judges take when they hand down their decision later this year, the losing party is almost certain to appeal. An eventual Chagossian victory would be virtually meaningless in any case, the islanders' solicitor concedes, because it would change nothing in practice. "I don't see any hope that the government will take anything approaching a humane view or what one might call a rational view of these people's rights," regrets Richard Gifford, a London lawyer who has devoted much of the past eight years to preparing Bancoult's two cases and an unsuccessful class action for compensation. "I think they've made a policy decision: the exercise is simply to serve their master as best they can."

The United States itself has long since washed its hands of its role in what the Washington Post described in 1975 as an "act of mass kidnapping". Even if there were no legal duty to recompense the Chagossians, the chairman of a House of Representatives committee stressed later the same year, "it is certainly not a glorious chapter in the compassion of the United States to deny responsibility for those people." Three decades later, following Bancoult's initial victory in London, an American attorney filed a lawsuit against a string of secretaries of defence, from Robert McNamara to Donald Rumsfeld, but a judge ruled they had immunity against litigation by foreigners. Either way, both the Pentagon and the State Department lay the blame for what happened at Britain's door and refer probing questions to Whitehall. "Every time the British government feels uncomfortable they point the finger at the United States and every time the American government feels uncomfortable they point it at the United Kingdom," says Bancoult's Washington lawyer, Michael Tigar, who is appealing the decision against his client. "The two parties acted in concert all along the way."

Undeterred by all the stonewalling, Olivier Bancoult swears he'll never give up. An electrician by trade, he sill lives within walking distance of the tin-shack slum where he grew up in Mauritius, juggling his campaigning work with appointments to read metres. His family lost its hut on the Peros Banhos atoll, 100 miles north of Diego Garcia, when he was four. After a cart ran over his youngest sister's leg, Bancoult, his eight siblings and their parents boarded a boat for the nearest hospital, 1,000 miles away in Port Louis. When they tried to return home, they learned the local shipping company had cancelled all departures. Their island was officially off-limits; it had been "sold" to the U.S. military. This was depopulation by stealth: like hundreds of others in the late 1960s, the family had inadvertently signed up for a one-way passage. Their possessions were lost, their future bleak. Bancoult's father, an unskilled coconut farmer like his peers, failed to find work in Mauritius and died within a few years. One of his sisters set herself ablaze in despair. Two brothers drank themselves to death. "Animals have better treatment than us," he protests. "We have never asked for the closure of the base. As far as we are concerned we should just have the same rights as all human beings."

Fighting talk and faith may not be enough to sustain the expectations generated by Bancoult's original success in court. Five years on, fewer and fewer Chagossians believe they'll ever set foot on their islands again. "Many people want to move here," their leader acknowledges over dinner at his suburban hotel, "but the ticket from Mauritius is very expensive. Life in London is very expensive." Supporters in Britain chipped in to pay for Bancoult and his party to fly over to watch the case; another local sympathiser cooked the chicken and rice they're devouring in a corner of the hotel restaurant; all they've eaten since the morning are the leftovers they pocketed from the breakfast table. One of their number is here to stay; unlike most of the other Chagossians in the room, Jean-Paul Selmour is not wearing a woolly hat; he's acclimatising. "I think England will become my second country," he says. "I will take any job I can find. My 12-year-old daughter wants a better education."

***

Most mornings, from first light, Crawley's extravagantly named central artery plays host to impromptu gatherings of Chagossians. Singularly lacking in greenery, The Boulevard is landscaped out of concrete and tarmac and flanked by poky discount retailers. In the shadow of the T.J. Hughes department store, and its prominently displayed sales pitch: "Because everybody loves a bargain", two recent immigrants swap job-hunting tips. An open-air public telephone stands beside the bench where they've congregated; across the street lies an employment agency specialising in temporary work. Dieson Tiatous, a sprightly 19-year-old, has just finished his first night shift at a bakery. Already, he's looking for something different. "It was the same thing all night – very boring," he says. "I went to this office now," he nods in the direction of the agency, "and I asked them if they have other work and they told me yes, come back at one o'clock. Every day I need to come here in the morning and afternoon. I like it here but it's difficult to find a job."

Apart from the language barrier – Chagossians speak a Creole dialect and many, especially the elderly, are illiterate – there's paperwork to process and bureaucracy to negotiate. Enter Allen Vincatassin, pioneer of the Crawley community and now a one-man citizens' advice bureau, dispensing the insights he's gleaned from his own struggle to navigate his way around the system. Whether you need a translator, a new house, or guidance on getting a national insurance number, Vincatassin's your man. And he's indignant at the rumours that he charges for his services. "It's my mission," he says. "I help this community and I do it with joy." It's not just Chagossians who benefit, either. Other immigrants seek him out, so well established is his reputation as a fixer at the local social security office. "Everybody knows Allen," the duty manager says. When his mobile phone rings, Vincatassin flips into a different gear. "Do you have any witnesses?" he asks a woman from the Cayman Islands, who's just been evicted by her landlord and wants help finding temporary accommodation. "Is it your first year in the country? Tell them that you don't know the rules on how it works here."

Judging by the religious references that pepper his speech, including a self-conscious comparison of himself to Moses, Vincatassin derives much of his inspiration from his Catholic faith, bequeathed to Chagossians in part by their original colonial masters, the French. The rest seems to stem from the memory of his grandfather Michel, who put his name to the first attempt to claim compensation from Britain in 1975. "Every time my grandfather talked about the islands, he would cry," Vincatassin recalls. "I remember one day he stopped me and said Allen, if there is one thing that you need to do, the most important thing in your life and that's where success lies, it's to fight for this cause."

Michel Vincatassin's writ against the British government was filed on the strength of an eviction notice. As a supervisor on the Diego Garcian coconut plantation, he'd been summoned by the island's administrator and told there'd be no work once the Americans arrived: everyone still remaining would have to leave. Michel insisted on having the order in writing; when a prominent Mauritian lawyer got wind of this document several years later, he contacted Michel and took up the appeal. Although Britain had awarded the Chagossians £650,000 in 1973, the money was paid to the Mauritian government, which waited five years to pass it on. Inflation had eaten away most of its value in the meantime and nobody had given any thought to the housing projects it was supposed to fund. After protracted legal hearings and a series of rejected offers, Britain eventually agreed to a second payout of £4 million in 1982, provided Michel Vincatassin dropped his case. He reluctantly agreed. There was another proviso, however: to qualify for compensation, the Chagossians had to sign a document waiving their rights both to future claims and to return to their islands. Debate has raged ever since as to whether they understood the papers they marked with inky thumbprints. Either way, at less than £3,000 a head, the payout was a pittance, considering the indebted and impoverished state of its recipients.

"If you're thirsty, the first glass of water that appears before you, you are going to drink," muses Allen Vincatassin. "You won't take into consideration whether there is any poison in it." Arguments such as these drew little sympathy from the British legal establishment when the Chagossians filed a fresh suit in 2002. "Justice does not require an obviously unmeritorious case to be allowed to proceed," ruled the judge who threw out the claim, dismissing testimony from witnesses who swore they had no clue what they were supposed to have renounced. "Ill-treatment does not require a hopeless case to be allowed to continue." Mindful of these damning statements, Vincatassin has focused his attention on a different form of financial assistance: benefit payments.

Under the 1948 National Assistance Act, a cornerstone of Britain's welfare state, local authorities are obliged to house adults "who by reason of age, illness, disability or any other circumstances are in need of care and attention which is not otherwise available to them." This was the safety net that caught Vincatassin when he landed at Gatwick: West Sussex County Council stepped in to foot his bills. It set an expensive precedent that's cost more than £750,000 as fellow nationals flock to the same destination. Many recent arrivals have found work at the airport itself and the vast majority have settled within a 10-mile radius. Since more than 5,000 Chagossians remain eligible to relocate to the United Kingdom, local politicians are worried about the long-term implications. "Plainly the British government owes the Chagos islanders a substantial moral debt," says Crispin Blunt, the Conservative MP for Reigate and Banstead, "but if repaying this debt is left to a very small proportion of the British population then the goodwill these people deserve may rapidly dissipate."

Vincatassin agrees this is a concern, although he reports no hostility from Crawley residents. He's taking the government to court later this year to appeal against its ruling that Chagossians need to live here for six months before they're eligible to sign on for unemployment benefit and other centrally administered welfare payments, as he himself has done. Having been awarded full British citizenship in 2002, the islanders should be entitled to the same rights as UK natives, he argues: "I'm a British islander born on Diego Garcia, therefore a British Diego Garcian." When the council sought to cut its costs by offering people plane tickets back to Mauritius, Vincatassin was incensed. "I said if you want to send us back, send us back to Diego Garcia," he recalls. "If you can't send us there then we will settle here."

***

Paradise is a vision debased by countless package holiday brochures, but the U.S. Navy wasn't exaggerating when it dubbed Diego Garcia "Fantasy Island". Its vast deep-water lagoon, framed by a palm-clad horseshoe of coral limestone, offers "unbelievable recreational facilities and exquisite natural beauty," a Pentagon website boasts; living conditions on "the Best Kept Secret in the Navy" are described as "outstanding". Of this the former inhabitants are well aware. They once led simple lives there, husking the bountiful supply of coconuts and drying their kernels in kilns to yield a substance called copra, which they ground in donkey-driven mills to extract an oil used in cosmetics and confectionary. Although they owned no title to their land, the plantation managers let them build houses where they liked, providing sheets of tin and wooden planks, straw for the roofs and the stone that paved their floors, as well as rations of rice and corn. They kept chickens, pigs and goats, planted sweet potatoes and manioc in the fertile soil and cooked fresh fish over fires on the beach. Many never had to buy anything except clothes.

Life was not always so idyllic, however: the original Chagossians were slaves, imported from east Africa by French plantation owners. After defeating Napoleon in the early 19th century, Britain took control of the 65 "Oil Islands", as the archipelago was then known, and supplemented the workforce with contracted labourers from its newly acquired colonies in Mauritius and the Seychelles. When slavery was abolished, these groups inter-married and their children mostly remained on Diego Garcia and the neighbouring clusters of atolls, Peros Banhos and Salomon. By the 1960s, when American strategists were scouring the Indian Ocean for a foothold to replace bases the British could no longer afford, the permanent population of the Chagos islands had swelled to about 2,000. This was unacceptable to military planners, who feared they would be obliged, under Chapter XI of the United Nations Charter, to honour their "sacred trust … to develop self-government" for these people, thereby handing them the power to veto a foreign presence. Once the United States had decided to build what it euphemistically termed "an austere communications facility" on Diego Garcia, diplomats preoccupied themselves with the question of how to rid the island of its inhabitants without attracting worldwide condemnation.

"We must surely be very tough about this," declared Sir Paul Gore-Booth, the permanent under-secretary at Britain's Colonial Office, in a 1966 briefing. "There will be no indigenous population except seagulls." A junior colleague appended a hand-written note to this document, presumably amused at its wit: "Unfortunately along with the birds go some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure and who are being hopefully wished on to Mauritius." A £3 million backhander and the promise of independence secured the latter objective; the Chagos islands were duly hived off and reconstituted as the British Indian Ocean Territory, complete with its own flag: a bastardised Stars and Stripes featuring a Union Jack in the top left corner, 13 blue-and-white wavy bars and a palm tree embellished with a crown. Reclassifying the resident population as Mauritian migrant workers was more complicated, but Britain's willingness to "make up the rules as we go along", to quote a Foreign Office legal adviser, ensured it was done. In return, Washington rewarded Harold Wilson's Labour government with a $14 million discount on the Polaris nuclear missile system, which the Prime Minister had previously pledged not to buy. These agreements were concealed from Parliament and Congress, while officials concocted "a whopping fib", as one memo put it, to tell the United Nations. All that remained was to evict the islanders.

It would be difficult to find a Chagossian who could not recount in detail what happened next, regardless of whether it actually happened to them; their "deracinement", or uprooting, defines them as a people. It was a piecemeal process, drawn out over five years, in part to keep the plantations active for as long as possible so the cost of removing the workforce might be defrayed. Rations were gradually run down to persuade people to leave and those who ventured offshore found it impossible to return. Eventually, in 1971, a ship docked at Diego Garcia to evacuate those who remained. Before their eyes, the island's administrator demanded that their dogs, numbering around a thousand, be rounded up and poisoned with strychnine. So gruesome was the sight of the animals' plight, however, that he changed his mind and ordered them to be shot by an advance detachment of U.S. Navy Seabees, who had landed earlier in the year to bulldoze a runway. When this proved too difficult to accomplish quickly, the dogs were herded into a shed used to dry copra and gassed with exhaust fumes from military vehicles. Distraught, the Diego Garcians boarded their boat with a few bags of possessions and crammed into the hold for a 10-day voyage in the company of a cargo of fertiliser. Two years later, the Peros Banhos plantation closed and the final group of islanders set sail for Port Louis, where they, like the others, were simply left on the wharf to fend for themselves.

"The Chagossian cultural identity is all about suffering," stresses Steffen Johannessen, a Norwegian anthropologist who spent a year living with exiles in Mauritius. "In order to change their situation they have to expose it, because they're dependent on other people to help them." Most Mauritians treat "les Ilois", as the islanders are known in Creole, with disdain. On arrival, they received no practical assistance to integrate themselves into local society; nobody provided training that might have helped them find work. It is hardly surprising that many turned to drugs and prostitution, or that "sadness" is blamed for a spate of deaths and suicides in the 1970s. The communal sense of grief can take on a life of its own, as the Chagossians found to their cost when the judge who dismissed their compensation claim accused witnesses of falsifying evidence. "There was an element of 'collective' or 'folk memory'," he ruled. "Stories went round which became lodged in people's minds as events which had happened and then as events which they had witnessed."

For a while, a few years back, it seemed their luck might finally be turning. After declining to appeal a High Court judgement that invoked Tacitus ("They make a desert and call it peace") to declare the expulsions unlawful, the British government agreed in 2000 to investigate how to repopulate the archipelago's outer islands. The first phase of their study concluded resettlement was only feasible if the Chagossians had transport links to the outside world. Diego Garcia's 2.5-mile runway is reserved for the stealth bombers and B-52s stationed on what U.S. officials regard as "an all but indispensable platform" for policing the world. Without another airstrip elsewhere, it would be difficult to exploit the islands' tourist appeal, although they're already a popular yachting stopover. It's rare to find less than a dozen boats moored in the lagoons of Peros Banhos and Salomon, where they're allowed to lay anchor for months at a time on payment of daily fees to British officials. An organisation funded by the Foreign Office even publishes a leaflet suggesting visitors step ashore. "There is nowhere in the world like Chagos," it proclaims. "Get out and look for yourself."

The islanders themselves yearn for such an opportunity. For five years they've been waiting for Britain to honour a promise to let 100 of them visit the graveyards where, in a uniquely Chagossian tradition, they buried their umbilical cords beside the bodies of their ancestors. On five separate occasions, a date has been set, only for the trip to be cancelled at the last minute. In the meantime, phase two of the feasibility study on their resettlement concluded it would cost too much. The report ignored potential funding from a €20 billion European development budget for overseas territories and said rising sea levels caused by global warming would make human habitation "highly precarious". There are no plans to evacuate Diego Garcia, however, where two thirds of the 3,500 personnel at "Camp Justice" are Filipino civilians hired to work on the base. Chagossians who apply for jobs there are routinely rejected, as are their requests to return to the eastern half of the island, a designated nature reserve unused by the military. For them, the options are limited: lives of penury in Mauritius and the Seychelles or a struggle to escape by whatever means possible. "If I were Chagossian," ventures a retired British diplomat, "I would make for the UK and derive all the benefits of living here, with a future for myself and my children."

***

Even the Grande Dame of the struggle has lost hope. Tired of wrestling policemen and starving herself on the British ambassador's lawn, Charlesia Alexis has come to Crawley to die. She spends her days sleeping, or squinting at the television in a Turkish-run guesthouse under the flight path into Gatwick. "I don't have a future, that's why I say the future is here," she announces, as if addressing a crowd. "What else can I do? The British government owes me." At the age of 71, she may be little more than a figurehead, albeit one with the thickset neck and splayed nostrils of a prize fighter, but she remains an inspiration and a whack of her palm is still enough to shake a table. "When I met Charlesia at the airport I had goose bumps," remembers Allen Vincatassin, who is helping her apply for a pension that will buy plane tickets for her family. "I had tears in my eyes because she represents the old battles." Back in the 1970s, a return to her birthplace on Diego Garcia seemed as improbable to Alexis as it does today, but the hunger strikes and street protests she coordinated persuaded British officials to improve their original compensation offer. She sees her decision to move here in the same light. "I have come to open a door for my children so they can join me," she explains. "If they don't, their children will always have problems."

Vincatassin agrees. "This is the place they should have sent us originally," he says. "That decision would have been wrong too, but at least the islanders who are in the UK are in a better position." Over the past three years, he's personally welcomed seven parties of Chagossians to this enclave on the outskirts of London; others have arrived independently after learning of the example he set. "My role is to force the authorities to do what needs to be done," he stresses. Instead of spending more than £1.5 million on fighting the islanders in court, the government could have paid for their airfares and taught them all English, argues Xavier Siatous, who arrived in Crawley last summer, and promptly ran up a £600 phone bill speaking to the children he left behind. It's a moot point, but one that would resonate with Chagossians in Mauritius who can't afford to take advantage of their right to full British citizenship. Were it possible to resettle the islands tomorrow, only a minority of exiles would be likely to return, primarily the 900 or so survivors who were born there. Four decades on, even they are divided. "You can't undo a crime against humanity," says Siatous, once a fisherman on Peros Banhos. "When something like this happens you look for the way to go back, but really you have to find the way forward."

Charlesia Alexis still dreams about her island every day. A diet of fresh seafood would cure her diabetes instantly, she quips. But her days of shouting: "Give us back our Diego!" are past. Instead, she writes songs about her loss and awaits the free bus pass that will come with her pension. Her latest composition describes the journey to Britain, which was funded in part by royalties from a CD she recorded a couple of years ago. "Here, I will get my compensation," her husky lament concludes. "I will eat until I die." Although she's lonely without her three remaining children, and the 16 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren they've spawned, she prefers life in Crawley to the hardships of Mauritius and believes the other islanders would be wise to follow her. "I'm not saying they're leaving hell and coming to heaven," she cautions. "It's kind of purgatory here unless you can speak the language." For now, she copes by looking forward to a reunion with her family, although the memory of her mortality is never far away, and with it her fear that the campaign she started will wither once she's gone. "It's very sad," she reflects, looking vulnerable for the first time since she lowered herself into a chair. "To struggle you need natives, but we're dying every month. In a few years there won't be any native Chagossians left."

--

This blog is no longer active

All of the posts here, and plenty of others that aren't, have been archived at my new site, which will hopefully be updated a little less infrequently.

By Daniel Simpson

Forget Iraq's weapons of mass non-existence, the lies about torture and other facts fixed around policies cooked up in Washington: nothing demonstrates British subservience to the United States quite as blatantly as the theft of Diego Garcia.



Almost four decades after Britain evicted 2,000 Indian Ocean islanders to make way for American stealth bombers and B-52s, the dispossessed are appealing to London's High Court to overturn a royal decree that bars them forever from returning to their homes.

They've been here before. Just five years ago, their lawyers humiliated the British establishment by winning a case that ruled there was no legal justification for the expulsion of these "Tarzans" and "Men Fridays", as diplomats dubbed their distant subjects in official correspondence sanctioning the deportations.

With the briefest of nods to Robin Cook's supposedly ethical foreign policy, the British government initially agreed to readmit them to the Chagos archipelago, a dependency hived off from Mauritius in the 1960s after Washington earmarked its largest atoll, Diego Garcia, as an ideal military base. The promise was empty, however, and promptly slapped down by the Queen, using an arcane prerogative that harks back to pre-Magna Carta days of absolute monarchy.

Such abuse of power is unparalleled, even in Britain's long legacy of imperial crimes, argues the Chagossians' barrister, Sir Sydney Kentridge, who in the past defended Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko in their struggles against apartheid.

"There is no precedent that we have been able to find in statute, case law, or indeed in history for what has been done," he told the two judges presiding over the High Court. "The matter has never been placed before the UK parliament."

Presumably because it would have been thrown out, and with good reason. So just how did the Chagossians come to be denied the most basic of human rights in a decision that makes a mockery of British democracy? The answer remains shrouded in secrecy, but declassified documents shed some light on what probably went on.

After a U.S. Navy Rear-Admiral first set foot on Diego Garcia in 1961, the question preoccupying Washington and Whitehall in secret was how to effect the "cleansing" and "sanitising" of the Chagos islands without attracting worldwide condemnation.

A 1965 Foreign Office memo describes how the United States made the depopulation of the archipelago "virtually a condition of the agreement" to lease it from Britain, ostensibly fearing for the security of what was to become one of the Western alliance's most treasured bases. In return for promising to "make up the rules as we go along", Harold Wilson's Labour government was rewarded with a $14 million discount on an American nuclear weapons system that it had previously pledged not to buy.

To justify the decision that there would be "no indigenous population except seagulls" after transporting the Chagossians 1,000 miles to Mauritius and the Seychelles, British officials invented "a whopping fib" to "maintain the pretence that there were no permanent inhabitants" on the islands.

The rationale for concocting these lies was clear. "We could not accept the principles governing our otherwise universal behaviour in our dependent territories," one briefing paper stressed. "When a particular island would be needed for the construction of … defence facilities, Britain or the United States should be able to clear it of its current population."

It remains unclear whether Washington has designs on other islands than Diego Garcia, since all were emptied and declared off-limits to their former residents. Although that ban was nominally lifted in 2000, the U.S. warned this was a "threat to national security" and nobody was so much as granted permission to visit before the Queen exercised her prerogative to intervene with an Order in Council.

In Parliament last year, the Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond asked Tony Blair whether the right of return had been revoked because Washington was intent on keeping Diego Garcia, "perhaps to use it as another Guantanamo Bay?"

There was "no question" of any such thing, the Prime Minister insisted. Twelve months later, Amnesty International told a U.S. Senate hearing it had evidence that the island was part of a network of secret CIA prisons, where "detainees are being held arbitrarily, incommunicado and indefinitely without visits by the Red Cross."

Camp Justice, as the U.S. calls its base, also plays host to feral donkeys and chickens abandoned by the islanders, in addition to 3,500 military personnel, a satellite spy station and warplanes used to bomb Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Chagossians still dream of returning to Diego Garcia itself, but their chances are slim. Whether or not they can resettle the neighbouring atolls will be resolved by a debate about the use of the same royal powers that helped ignite the American Revolutionary War. Will justice prevail over Britain's allegiance to the whims of the Pentagon? History suggests not.

--

This blog is no longer active

All of the posts here, and plenty of others that aren't, have been archived at my new site, which will hopefully be updated a little less infrequently.

By Daniel Simpson

Why isn't it front-page news that the United States used chemical weapons in Iraq and then lied about it?

Until last week, evidence of what amounts to a war crime had languished for months in an obscure military journal. When an Internet search by bloggers brought it to light, the State Department conceded, in mealy-mouthed terms, that white phosphorus had in fact been fired in Falluja as a chemical weapon. Photographs and eyewitness accounts suggest the victims included civilians. But somehow it's still not a story.



"The mainstream American news media, whose reporters had witnessed the fighting and apparently seen no evidence of this, largely ignored the claim," The New York Times reported at the weekend, after Italian state television broke ranks and screened an investigative report entitled Falluja: The Hidden Massacre.

This documentary, which depicted a white phosphorus shower raining indiscriminately over a built-up area, featured images of corpses charred to the bone, apparently consistent with burns from phosphorus pentoxide. Many of these pictures, taken by the unembedded reporter Dahr Jamail, have been available online for the best part of a year, but ignored by newspapers and broadcasters.

Questioning the conduct of the U.S. military just isn't on the news agenda unless journalists have enough evidence to prove what's officially denied. Even then, the reluctance to stand up to power is palpable.

Within 30 minutes of publishing a report about the Italian documentary, BBC News Online had retracted its original headline ("US 'used chemical arms' in Iraq"), removed the word "indiscriminate" from its reference to the use of white phosphorus and recast the story to give prominence to an American denial that has since been discredited.

For daring to print the Italian allegations without caveats, The Independent drew the ire of the U.S. Ambassador to London, who wrote in a letter to the editor: "Had your correspondents acted responsibly by checking these assertions with either the US Embassy or with the Department of Defense, they would have learned the truth."

Hardly. The official story keeps changing as the truth leaks out. Having insisted for months that U.S. forces used white phosphorus bombs "very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes", the State Department was forced to admit last week that this was a lie: "We have learned that some of the information we were provided … is incorrect," it said. "White phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, i.e., obscuring troop movements and, according to an article, 'The Fight for Fallujah,' in the March-April 2005 issue of Field Artillery magazine, 'as a potent psychological weapon'."

Unsurprisingly, this statement left out the most damning quote from the Field Artillery story, in which three American officers boasted about their exploits: "We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents," they wrote, "using [white phosphorus] to flush them out and [high explosive] to take them out."

Since the vast majority of those left in Falluja to face Operation Phantom Fury were civilians, it is almost unthinkable that innocent bystanders escaped the "shake and bake" treatment.

The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention exempts white phosphorus from its proscriptions for "military purposes … not dependent on the use of the toxic properties of chemicals as a method of warfare." As soon as it's fired at people, however, its classification changes.

If it can be proven that the quantities of white phosphorus fired in Falluja were inconsistent with the purposes of using its toxic smoke to hide troop movements, then the case against the U.S. military is unanswerable.

It's high time investigative reporters went to work on it.

--

This blog is no longer active

All of the posts here, and plenty of others that aren't, have been archived at my new site, which will hopefully be updated a little less infrequently.

By Daniel Simpson

GULU, Uganda - What can atone for the mutilated children who've learned to smile without lips, to clasp pens with stumpy limbs and even to flirt with forgiveness? For the militia of abducted villagers and teenage gunmen terrorising northern Uganda, the first step towards justice crushes an egg.

On a knoll outside Gulu, a bustling town on the frontier of Africa's most neglected war zone, 60 former rebels from the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) line up to repent of their crimes at a traditional cleansing ceremony. All have recently surrendered to the government, or been captured in skirmishes with Ugandan troops. Their right feet are bare. On their left, some sport battered flip-flops; others the footwear of choice for guerrillas across the continent: green wellington boots.

Wailing ululations from local tribeswomen crescendo above a bassline beat out by a drummer in a "50 Cent" T-shirt as the procession of LRA commanders, footsoldiers and their child brides hobbles towards a solitary egg, propped up in the dust by a forked stick. The first foot cracks its shell, smearing the branch with a slimy coating for the others to tread on before shaking hands with a tribal chief clad in white robes and a pinstriped jacket. Reconciliation is officially under way.



FILM: available here.

"When two elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled." (African proverb)

"This is just a peace-building measure to build confidence, to let them come back, let us have peace and then people are going to talk," explained Rwot David Onen Acana II, who was crowned paramount chief of the Acholi tribe in January after studying conflict resolution strategies at Birmingham University. "An egg symbolises purity and innocence and yet there is life in it, so we do this as a means of purification and indicating the innocence of these people because they were taken against their will."

The LRA doesn't accept recruits; it kidnaps them. Tens of thousands of abducted Acholis, a substantial proportion of them children, have kept the northern insurgency alive for 19 years. Their obedience is secured at gunpoint, sometimes accompanied by orders to commit atrocities as grotesque as murdering their own families and eating the boiled corpses.

Those not cowed by guilt or fear are brainwashed with a concoction of apocalyptic Christianity and tribal spiritualism cooked up by the LRA's leader, Joseph Kony, who claims to be a prophet. The rebels have issued no demands except to say they're purifying the north to govern in accordance with the Ten Commandments, most of which they ignore.

The tide could be turning, however. Government offers of amnesty, plots of land and a stipend from the state have enticed thousands of LRA fighters out of the bush over the past year, including a wave of high-profile defections. Mr Kony's charismatic spokesman and his dreadlocked director of operations were both lined up in penance before Mr Acana, but the warlord holding northern Uganda to ransom remains at large, while the International Criminal Court (ICC) prepares to indict him for crimes against humanity.

Opposed from the outset by the United States, which has undermined its attempts to hold war criminals to account in Burundi and Sudan, the new court has much to prove. When the Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, asked the ICC to intervene last year, prosecutors seized on their first major case, but the implications are stark for an ongoing conflict that can only be resolved peacefully by making rebels an offer they can't refuse. The struggle to end the war is now at odds with efforts to put international outlaws on trial.

Humanitarian relief organisations are as upset as the Ugandan mediators who accompanied Mr Acana to The Hague in March to plead for a delay in proceedings. The ICC might be a good thing in principle, argues Oxfam, but if four people out of five in northern Uganda have been driven from their land, alleviating their suffering ought to trump what other critics dub "international law fundamentalism". Having previously announced that indictments were imminent, the court now says it has no timetable for prosecuting Mr Kony and his top lieutenants. In Gulu, confusion reigns.

"There are definitely institutionalised tensions between the ICC, the amnesty process and conventional approaches to peace-building, which are by and large geared to rewarding the most violent to stop them being violent," said Dr Tim Allen, a specialist on East African conflicts at the London School of Economics. "But the aid agencies complaining about this come across as daft: they're now campaigning against the court they helped to set up."

Aid workers and tribal elders also lobbied President Museveni to pass an amnesty law underpinned by traditional justice rites that hark back to days when warriors bent spears to cement a truce. Sceptics, both Acholi and Western, have questioned the utility of these ceremonies in confronting cannibalism, sex slavery and mass mutilation, but Mr Acana is a keen advocate.

"This process is not yet conclusive," said the soft-spoken chief after overseeing the cleansing. Public truth-telling rituals would follow, he continued, with the local community deciding whether to demand redress, as happens at the open-air village courts which cross-examine Rwandan genocide suspects. "Those who will be singled out will have to go through this traditional process until we reach a point of compensation and reconciliation and that is where forgiveness comes in."

Surprisingly few speak openly of revenge. Geofrey Obita was 16 when rebels hacked off his lips, ears and fingers and stuffed them into his pocket, together with a letter warning all Acholis to expect the same treatment if they collaborated with the government. Hunched on a Gulu veranda over a bottle of soda, which he sips through clenched teeth via a straw, Geofrey insists he bears no grudge against the younger boys who ambushed him two years ago.

"I have forgiven them, because even if I catch them, my ears and my fingers are not going to grow back," he said. "There is an amnesty, so I can do nothing to them."

Others are less charitably inclined. Fearing reprisals were they to return to their old homes, senior rebel defectors live in Gulu barracks. Resentment festers in the surrounding region, where the government has herded 1.5 million people into fenceless concentration camps patrolled by Ugandan soldiers and kept alive on food handouts from the United Nations, which describes the conditions as "sub-human". Swollen stomachs and glazed eyes betray the prevalence of disease and malnutrition; alcoholism and prostitution are rife. Demobilised LRA commanders, meanwhile, get armed guards, mobile phones and monthly allowances of up to £200.

"In the bush, these people show no mercy," a local relief worker protested. "I think they should expect the same after all they've done to us."

Tempting as it may be to have faith in cults of collective healing, it is unclear what power they possess. From the perspective of the penitents waiting under a mango tree for their absolution, it's largely a question of going through the motions of a ritual more commonly performed to welcome back relatives who've been away from home.

"It has been done since time immemorial by our ancestors and elders and the paramount chiefs are obliged to carry out their duty," explained Joaquim Opoka, a 54-year-old former headmaster who served 10 years in the LRA as secretary, general dogsbody and occasional infantryman. "That is why they have summoned us."

The message of redemption is broadcast widely. Three nights a week, repentant rebels take to the airwaves of Mega FM to beg their former cohorts to join them in laying down arms. "Kony come home," warbles the chorus of a song in heavy rotation on Gulu's most popular radio station. Everyone should be eligible for amnesty, believes Mr Acana, no matter how serious their crimes.

"Kony can return and lead a normal life here," he said. "It might only be his own feelings of guilt that can drive him away."

Wary of rushing to judgment, some anthropologists argue that Western conceptions of punitive justice are just as alien to Acholi beliefs as tribal rituals might seem to supporters of the ICC.

"We have to really understand how they've come to define and practise justice before we dismiss it," cautioned Dr Erin Baines, a Canadian academic who came to Gulu to study traditional healing rites. "I remember a woman once said to me: 'First the whites came as missionaries and they brought for us religion. Then the colonialists came and they brought for us the state and boundaries. And now the ICC is here to bring us justice. We know what justice is'."

Injustice has prevailed in the north since President Museveni fought his way to power in 1986 and took revenge on Acholis for their involvement in earlier massacres of southerners. The vicious rivalry between north and south is rooted in imperial policies of divide and rule: when the British colonised Uganda, they told Acholis they were born warriors and sent them to join the King's African Rifles; southern tribesmen staffed the administration.

Since Uganda gained independence in 1962, the balance of power has swung by coup and countercoup, from the tyrannies of Idi Amin and Milton Obote to President Museveni's civil war. Aid workers and Acholis alike accuse the president of exploiting the LRA rebellion to subjugate the north while the rest of the country enjoys relative stability and prosperity. The war also allows him to maintain a semi-militarised state, despite calls for cuts in defence spending from the international donors who supply half of his government budget.

"Is it chaos or conspiracy? In the end it's probably a bit of both," said Jim Terrie, senior East Africa analyst at the International Crisis Group. "Museveni's scared of talks because they open a Pandora's box of northern grievances. He's only really interested in a resolution on his terms."

Foreign powers have largely left him to it. The war festered for 17 years before the United Nations spoke of moral outrage; until then, Western governments were more interested in touting Uganda as an African success story. President Museveni's economic reforms have earned him plaudits from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, while President George W. Bush has hailed his efforts to combat AIDS and added the LRA to the State Department list of terrorist organisations.

Earlier this year, Washington presented President Museveni with a fleet of trucks worth $800,000 as part of an ongoing programme of military aid. Having urged the ICC to investigate allegations of torture, rape and other abuses by the Ugandan army, human rights activists also want America to rein in its ally.

"The Bush administration must ensure that Mr. Museveni does not interpret continuing U.S. support, including military assistance, as a blank cheque to violate civil and political rights and avoid his responsibility to protect civilians," Human Rights Watch said in January.

Military success for the government generally gives Acholis fresh reason to mourn. The most brutal phase of the war followed Operation Iron Fist, the biggest Ugandan offensive to date, which pushed the rebels back over the border from their southern Sudanese hideout in 2002. Supply lines from Khartoum were cut, so the LRA took to looting northern Uganda. Estimates of the death toll vary wildly from the tens to the hundreds of thousands.

The search for a peaceful outcome hobbles on. Government mediator Betty Bigombe telephoned Mr Kony last month to renew truce talks, which collapsed in February after the LRA's chief negotiator, Sam Kolo, negotiated his own surrender.

Ms Bigombe, a World Bank consultant who has dealt with the rebels since 1994, describes Mr Kony as a man with multiple personality disorder. The cult leader seems friendly, others report, until the spirits begin to talk through him.

"On good days, he talks to God and on other days he thinks he is God," the State Department's Donald Yamamoto told U.S. lawmakers earlier this month when a Congressional committee questioned whether Mr Kony was a rational actor. Either way, President Museveni has yet to come up with a coherent peace offer.

Nobody seems to know what the rebels want. Not even Mr Kolo, their former spokesman.

"I'm no longer in the LRA," he replied when confronted in a bar after the cleansing ceremony. "Please go and ask Joseph Kony."

--

This blog is no longer active

All of the posts here, and plenty of others that aren't, have been archived at my new site, which will hopefully be updated a little less infrequently.

By Daniel Simpson

The New York Times

BELGRADE, Serbia, March 12

A sniper today shot and killed the Serbian prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, a reformer who helped overthrow Slobodan Milosevic and send him to face trial on charges of orchestrating genocide in the Balkans.



Within hours, Serbian government officials said they believed the killing was carried out by a notorious Belgrade underworld group accused of dozens of other murders and kidnappings. The leader of that group is a former special police commander, Milorad Lukovic, whose support helped Mr. Djindjic oust Mr. Milosevic in October 2000.

Officials said Mr. Djindjic had been killed because he had been preparing to arrest Mr. Lukovic and his associates, some of whom are suspected of committing war crimes.

The intense pressure on Mr. Djindjic by Western governments to arrest war crimes suspects, particularly Gen. Ratko Mladic, had forced him to confront holdovers from the Milosevic era, officials said. Mr. Lukovic had been a backer of the ousted president before switching sides.

The killing of Mr. Djindjic, 50, who was shot in the parking lot outside his office and had many political enemies, carried echoes in its portent for the Balkans of the June 1914 assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Today's death leaves Serbia, a struggling country at the center of a conflict-ridden region ravaged by a decade of war, with neither a prime minister nor an elected president.

''The assassination portends a dark period for Serbia and the region,'' said Brenda Pearson, a specialist on Balkan affairs at the Washington-based Public International Law and Policy Group. ''This period will see a resurgence of nationalism that was never repudiated by much of the Serbian establishment and continues to be allied with the underworld.''

The assassination was the first of a European prime minister since the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme, was shot walking home from a movie in 1986.

Mr. Djindjic was shot on the very day that his cabinet was to sign warrants for the arrests of Mr. Lukovic, who is known throughout Belgrade by his nickname, Legija, and other leaders of the gang that is believed to be behind today's assassination and other recent killings, according to a statement issued by the Serbian government. That statement listed 20 members of the self-styled ''Zemun clan,'' named after a Belgrade suburb. Among those named was a man arrested two weeks ago after he tried to drive a truck into Mr. Djindjic's motorcade on the highway to the Belgrade airport. Despite this recent attempt on his life, the prime minister was not wearing body armor when he was shot in the chest today as he got out of his car, moving slowly because of a soccer injury.

The police said his assailant used such high-caliber bullets that they would probably have penetrated his chest through a flak jacket.

Television film of the ambush showed Mr. Djindjic's bodyguards bundling his crumpled body into a black Audi sedan that sped off to hospital. Surgeons kept him alive to operate on him for 40 minutes, but he was dead on arrival.

Although his fractious coalition now only retains power thanks to support from Mr. Milosevic's old party in Parliament, Mr. Djindjic had been a favored leader of Western officials since he was in the political opposition. None of the politicians likely to succeed him has the same backing from international officials, or a comparable track record on extraditing people accused of war crimes to the United Nations tribunal in The Hague.

Jailed after protesting against Marshal Tito's Communist in the 1970's, Mr. Djindjic then spent a decade in Germany, gaining a philosophy doctorate before returning to Serbia to campaign against Mr. Milosevic. Sonja Biserko of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, one of many longtime democracy advocates grieving tonight for Mr. Djindjic, described him as ''a young, modern and dynamic politician, who had been doing his utmost to take out the former regime's mortgage on this country.''

Tributes to Mr. Djindjic poured in from abroad, where officials also praised his efforts to revive an economy battered by conflict and sanctions. But in Serbia, where few people yet see the benefits of such reforms, the reaction was more muted.

A small crowd of several dozen mourners gathered outside the government building where he was shot, clutching candles and red roses. Some were in tears. But elsewhere in the city, life went on much as normal and other people were almost indifferent after a decade of war and the assassination of many other senior officials. Most of those killings are unsolved, but the murky circle of businessmen and criminals who gained sway in Serbia in the 13 years Mr. Milosevic ruled before he was ousted on Oct. 5, 2000 are widely blamed.

''Sure it's a tragedy, but he's not the only one,'' said a woman who gave her name only as Branka. ''People are dying all the time here and no one seems to do much about it.''

In response to the assassination, the government immediately declared a state of emergency, handing the army powers to search and detain people without a warrant, and appointed the deputy prime minister, Nebojsa Covic, as Mr. Djindjic's temporary replacement.

Like the acting president, Natasa Micic, who took over last year after low voter turnout invalidated two successive presidential elections, he has no popular mandate and represents a fringe party. Moreover, any attempt to form a government of national unity is likely to be undermined by politicians scrambling to fill the vacuum left by Mr. Djindjic, who effectively centralized power around himself.

''The main consequence of all of this will probably be elections, but it's difficult to see any decisive leadership emerging,'' said Bratislav Grubacic, a political analyst. ''In any case, whoever is in power still has to deal with the mess this country's now in and the relentless pressure to hand over suspected war criminals.''

In a conversation less than an hour before Mr. Djindjic's death, the American ambassador at large for war crimes issue, Pierre-Richard Prosper, who was visiting the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, said that in Belgrade ''the political climate is turning in favor'' of the arrest of General Mladic. The general was indicted for genocide in connection with the 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo, and the massacre of an estimated 7,500 Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995.

The pressure to hand suspects over to the tribunal had forced Mr. Djindjic into a corner. Under stern orders from a variety of Western countries and institutions to extradite General Mladic by June 15, the prime minister had been trying to buy time by first cracking down on underworld criminals, some of whom are suspected of committing war crimes. Chief among these is Mr. Lukovic, who deserted the French Foreign Legion in the early 1990's and returned to the Balkans, becoming a senior officer in the most feared Serbian police unit under Mr. Milosevic. He later switched his loyalties to Mr. Djindjic when street protests forced the former Yugoslavian president from office.

''Many owe their lives to Legija, including me,'' Mr. Djindjic said after a peaceful transfer of power that could not have happened without the support of such senior figures in the security establishment.

Several commentators had warned in recent weeks of the risks inherent in Mr. Djindjic's efforts to distance himself from Legija and satisfy Western demands that more be done to arrest organized criminals as well as those responsible for wartime atrocities.

''The thing is that the foreigners are not asking the Serbian premier only to deliver some people to The Hague tribunal,'' declared an editorial in this week's edition of the magazine Blic News. ''They are in fact demanding a playoff between Mr. Djindjic and Milosevic-era holdovers in the state security services. The services, the magazine said, had found a new leader in Mr. Djindjic, but ''carried too much baggage from the past to follow him where he was going.'' The government said it would not relent in the fight against Mr. Lukovic and his associates, as well as others who would rather ensure that Serbia remains a gangster's paradise. But many analysts believe it has few chances of succeeding where the most outspoken advocate of reform failed.

Despite the prevailing pessimism, some observers in Belgrade contended that the murder of Mr. Djindjic could unify the quarreling advocates of reform.

''It's crunch time,'' said Dejan Medic, a 37-year-old graphic designer. ''Either people are going to get serious and take on the criminals trying to undermine our country or we're doomed.''

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

--

This blog is no longer active

All of the posts here, and plenty of others that aren't, have been archived at my new site, which will hopefully be updated a little less infrequently.

By Daniel Simpson

The New York Times

BELGRADE, Serbia, Jan. 27

It would be difficult to find a more divisive figure in Serbia than Svetlana Raznatovic and her come-hither cleavage.



But it is not the cut of Ms. Raznatovic's revealing outfits that most irks her detractors, nor the fact that her murdered husband, Zeljko, better known as Arkan, was the most notorious warlord in the Balkans. Rather, it is the sound of her music.

A hybrid of traditional folk and modern electro-pop, the songs of Ceca, as Ms. Raznatovic styles herself, were the soundtrack to a decade of destruction that reduced Yugoslavia to an impoverished pariah state dominated by Serbia.

Her maudlin lyrics do not indulge the inward-looking nationalism that still poisons the region, and the lurching melodies of the genre, called turbo-folk, are heavily influenced by Turkish music, a legacy of the centuries when the Ottomans ruled this corner of Europe.

To many people here, however, Ceca and her musical peers epitomize all that was wrong with Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic, when wars, ethnic cleansing and international economic sanctions helped cliques of common criminals to acquire extensive wealth and power.

Although Mr. Milosevic's autocratic government crumbled in the face of mass street protests more than two years ago, the popularity of turbo-folk -- and of Ceca herself -- has endured, much to the chagrin of those who are appalled by its glorification of a garish, gangster lifestyle and want Serbia to embrace an international future and move beyond its past.

The vogue for synthesized folk music throughout the Balkans has even won her a small following among non-Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, even though Arkan's paramilitary units swept through both countries committing atrocities in the 1990's.

''I'm irresistible,'' said the 29-year-old singer in an interview in the boardroom of F. C. Obilic, a soccer club she has presided over since her husband, the previous president, was assassinated three years ago. ''Music shouldn't be confined to borders and it shouldn't be linked to politics.''

Her fans mostly beg to differ.

When she took to the stage last June for her first concert since her husband was shot in the face in a Belgrade hotel lobby, a crowd of about 70,000 roared its appreciation by screaming, ''Arkan! Arkan!''

''It's a normal reaction from my audience because my husband was such a great patriot,'' she said, dismissing his indictment by the United Nations war crimes tribunal as politically motivated. ''It was a spontaneous celebration.'' Despite the widely documented murderous rampages carried out by her husband and his followers, she defends him to the hilt.

Although she was already famous when she first met Arkan at a party at his paramilitary training camp in 1993, Ms. Raznatovic regards him as the most significant influence on her career.

''He always told me that I was gifted, that no matter how happy I was in my private life I needed to be on stage to feel fulfilled,'' she reminisced. ''I lived with a man who made me feel like a princess and my love for him has not diminished.''

A single photograph of her late husband adorns the boardroom of F. C. Obilic, which is named after a Serbian warrior killed by invading Turkish forces six centuries ago. It pictures Zeljko Raznatovic in uniform, sporting a cocky grin and his beret at a jaunty angle.

Even the comeback concert was inspired by Arkan, who had long cherished the vision of his wife performing to an adoring crowd in the Belgrade soccer stadium within view of their lavish home.

His death, which Ms. Raznatovic witnessed, only postponed the plan.

''For a year after that tragedy, I didn't leave my house. I wore black and mourned,'' she said. ''I was thinking of never going back to singing again, but I knew he would have insisted. That's why I dedicated the concert to him.''

Although her husband, 21 years her senior, clearly strengthened her self-belief, Ms. Raznatovic was apparently never short of it.

''I got this feeling I was a star when I was much younger,'' she said, reflecting on her childhood in the southern Serbian countryside and vacations on the Montenegrin coast, where she started singing in a restaurant one summer and was promptly offered a job.

''Ever since I was 5, I performed in amateur singing competitions,'' she said. ''I got used to people all over the Balkans looking at me as if I was a wunderkind.''

According to Kim Burton, a British musician who has worked with artists across the Balkans, the sound of Ceca and other turbo-folk stars is ''at its best in noisy company with some form of alcohol abuse.''

But heard in an office decked out with two Spanish suits of armor and 13 broadswords in a display rack, its invigorating melancholy may be even stronger.

Asked to sing during an interview, Ceca leaped at the opportunity, a cigarette burning between her fingers as she shut her eyes and let rip with the quivering, husky voice that has enchanted thousands in dimly lit bars packed with men knocking back strong drinks.

It was television that really made Ceca a star. She cavorted with tigers, the mascot of Arkan's paramilitaries, in her music videos and was married in a ceremony broadcast live to the nation in 1995, with a beaming groom firing a pistol into the air afterward. Some commentators compared the event to the wedding of Charles and Diana. Others referred to Ms. Raznatovic as ''Serbia's Scarlett O'Hara,'' although the Southern belle she probably resembles most is Dolly Parton.

''If I was American I would definitely be singing country music,'' she said. ''It's the same as Serbian folk: it speaks to ordinary people.''

This is precisely what concerns her critics, who worry that tentative economic and political reforms will do little to transform Serbia if popular culture remains stuck in the vulgar excesses of the 1990's.

''This country is split right down the middle,'' said Zoran Milosavljevic, a 34-year-old journalist and part-time D.J. ''The easiest way to work out whether someone supports change here is to ask them if they like Ceca.''

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

--

This blog is no longer active

All of the posts here, and plenty of others that aren't, have been archived at my new site, which will hopefully be updated a little less infrequently.

By Daniel Simpson

The New York Times

PRISTINA, Kosovo, Dec. 22

There is a taboo in Kosovo that none of the foreign officials who administer the province want to mention: independence. Most residents want to discuss little else.

Ever since NATO bombed the Serbia of Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 to stop his attempts to crush an armed rebellion by Kosovo's repressed Albanian majority, the international bureaucrats have tried to defer a decision on the ultimate status of what remains, officially, a Serbian province.

It is an act increasingly hard to pull off -- largely because many of the Albanians of Kosovo are aware of the foreigners' desire, particularly palpable in conversation with American officials, to end their involvement here.

Driving out of Pristina, a sprawling mass of Communist-era tower blocks and muddy streets, the road signs on the main highway are supposed to be bilingual -- Serbian and Albanian.

Instead, stickers written in English cover the Serbian listings of all destinations. Using the Albanian spelling of the province's name, they proclaim: ''Independence for Kosova! The only way to peace in the Balkans.''



The stickers reflect the growing impatience of many Kosovars with foreign diplomats who neither constrain Albanian ambitions nor try to entice Serbian politicians to abandon their claim to land that was the heart of Serbia's medieval empire.

''The status quo is not tenable for much longer,'' said Brenda Pearson, an expert on Balkan affairs with the Washington-based Public International Law and Policy Group. ''The Albanians and Serbians alike are waiting for the international community do something courageous. Yet, left on their own, both would quickly choose partition, ignoring the consequences for their neighbors.''

Splitting Kosovo in two, and trading the northern parts where most Serbs live for land inhabited by Albanians in other parts of southern Serbia, could open a Pandora's box of border disputes, potentially threatening the territorial integrity of both Bosnia and Macedonia.

But in simulated talks on Kosovo's future, former Serbian and Albanian officials in the province -- brought together by another Washington research group, the United States Institute of Peace -- repeatedly chose partition as the solution to Kosovo's problem.

''The Serbs want rid of this place,'' a European diplomat said. ''They know full well it's lost, but they are holding out for something in return. Partition is a very convenient quick fix, but history suggests it just generates more suffering.''

Michael Steiner, the German diplomat who runs Kosovo on behalf of the United Nations, is eager to avoid an outcome that would expose the West's failure to revive a multiethnic society, as was promised when NATO intervened.

Mr. Steiner has told Albanian leaders that Kosovo will have to meet a series of internationally determined benchmarks before he will allow a discussion about independence.

Mr. Steiner is talking about standards before status, particularly emphasizing minority rights, because he wants Kosovo to learn to fend for itself, a senior international official said. ''No one is going to recognize an independent Kosovo if it remains totally dependent on international aid,'' he said.

Outside of a political class composed largely of veteran leaders and former guerrillas, many Albanians welcome the push for more self-sufficiency.

''I'm glad to see that people are finally trying to create the conditions that Kosovo needs to be able to prosper, but the whole process is moving far too slowly,'' said Denis Mehmetaj, a 31-year-old Pristina waiter. ''These conditions could allow them to postpone independence for years.''

Mr. Steiner is meanwhile trying to assert United Nations authority in the areas where Serbs live, in part simply to prevent violence, but also to try to win some trust in Belgrade, the capital, where any decision to let go of Kosovo would ultimately have to be made.

In a significant breakthrough, the Serbian government has agreed to work to disband the Bridgewatchers, a militant group of former Serbian policemen and local criminals who have patrolled the Serbian half of the divided city of Mitrovica since 1999.

Local Serbian politicians appear to have recognized, after three years of international supervision, that they must at least appear more constructive if they are to persuade anyone to listen to their complaints about the maltreatment of the Serbian minority.

''We'll never agree about the past but we have to start talking about the issues that affect everyday life and not look too far into the future,'' said Oliver Ivanovic, a former commander of the Bridgewatchers, who now has a seat in Kosovo's fledgling parliament. ''They can't eat independence and they'll soon have to wake up to social problems of their own,'' he said of the Albanians.

In a walled compound around an Orthodox church, the stubbornness of the 16 Serbs who persist in living south of the river Ibar that divides Mitrovica illustrates how distant a multiethnic Kosovo remains. They will not leave their homes; neither will they accept their Albanian neighbors.

''We're just pawns in somebody's power games; no one cares that we live like prisoners here,'' said Slavica Nojic, 33, whose father is the church's priest. ''But if we start cooperating with the U.N. we'll be forced to learn Albanian because these people refuse to recognize our culture and our history here that we've fought to defend.''

Serbs living in enclaves in central Kosovo and Pristina have little choice but to mix with their Albanian neighbors. Although some now consider it safe enough to speak Serbian in public, they feel their complaints barely register with international officials.

''I never believed in Milosevic's conspiracy theories about everyone hating Serbs, but now I'm starting to wonder,'' said a woman in the central town of Gracanica, who gave her name only as Marija. ''The international community is blatantly pro-Albanian, purely because it suits their interests better.''

Officials barely try to conceal this fact.

''We don't really care what solution develops so long as it sells to the majority population,'' one Western diplomat said. ''Stability is what matters.''

Nebojsa Covic, the Serbian government official responsible for Kosovo, is angry that Western powers have failed to distance themselves from the side they backed in the 1990's, when they opposed Mr. Milosevic.

''It is imperative that the international community handle Albanian nationalism and extremism in the same way it handled Serbian nationalism and extremism,'' Mr. Covic said. ''Only a stalemate can preserve peace in the Balkans, a state in which no one gains victory or defeat, and in which there is neither the triumph of nationalism nor the annulment of essential national interests.''

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

--

This blog is no longer active

All of the posts here, and plenty of others that aren't, have been archived at my new site, which will hopefully be updated a little less infrequently.

By Daniel Simpson

Reuters World Service

TARGOVISTE, Romania, Dec 21 (Reuters) - Christmas has never been quite the same for Dorin Carlan and Octavian Gheorghiu since they executed Stalinist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife on December 25, 1989.



But flashbacks to the day they pumped bullets into Romania's first couple disturb them less than bitterness about their own fate. They brought eastern Europe's bloodiest revolution to its climax, yet feel betrayed by the men they helped seize power.

"The whole process was a farce," said Carlan, 38, and now retired from the elite paratroop regiment selected for the task.

Many Romanians agree. The belief that second-tier communists hijacked a popular revolt, or even engineered it, is widespread, particularly since the man who emerged as president, Ion Iliescu, has run the country for all but four years ever since. The haste with which the Ceausescus were put to death by the cabal that took over only fuels popular suspicions further.

"Our commander summoned us at 8:00 a.m. on Christmas Day," remembers Gheorghiu, 37, who now has a defence ministry desk job. "He wanted eight volunteers for a vital mission, with a 90 percent chance we wouldn't return. We stepped forward."

Within a couple of hours the eight were in two helicopters, hugging the ground to dodge radar as they flew to Targoviste, an ugly steel town Ceausescu had planned to make his new capital.

They had no idea that the man who had tyrannised Romania for 24 years was now locked up with his wife Elena in a poky office at the rust-coloured army barracks where they landed.



And the troops stationed in Targoviste, 80 km (50 miles) north of Bucharest, were clearly not expecting a firing squad.

"We were all trying to work out what was going on," Carlan said on his first return visit to the execution site.

KANGAROO COURT

The Ceausescus had been captured just three days earlier, after attempting to flee Bucharest in a helicopter while swarms of protesters tried to storm the Communist Party headquarters.

According to Victor Stanculescu, a general who held senior posts in the first post-communist government, the couple's fate was decided in a defence ministry toilet early on Christmas Day.

"It was the only safe place to talk," Stanculescu said.

Hours later he was standing in the cold in Targoviste to hand pick the executioners, while inside the barracks a few plastic wood veneer tables were being assembled in preparation for a show trial that was later broadcast to the nation.

"Stanculescu singled three of us out and took us to one side," Gheorghiu told Reuters. "The Ceausescus were inside, he told us, and they were about to be condemned to death."



After learning the nature of their mission all three men - Gheorghiu, Carlan and their colleague Ionel Boeru - were terrified. Not so much by the task, but by what might follow.

"We didn't trust anyone," Gheorghiu said. "We thought we'd be killed as soon as the job was done."

They waited in a corridor while prosecutor Gica Popa, who died mysteriously a few months later, accused the Ceausescus of genocide and bleeding Romania dry. The lawyer appointed to defend them, who was shunned by his "clients", joined in too.

"The trial was just as Stalinist as the way Ceausescu ran the country," Carlan said. It was over in less than an hour.

CRUMPLED CORPSES

Video footage of the proceedings, parts of it deemed too shocking for a television airing, shows the Ceausescus spitting defiance throughout, right up until the moment their wrists were bound with lengths of old rope as they were dragged outside.



"They thought we were complete nobodies," Gheorghiu said. "I hated them both with such a passion I couldn't control myself."

Nicolae, 71, walked from the courtroom singing snatches from the Internationale, a socialist anthem, and proclaiming history would judge him well. His wife, the more feared of the two, was less resigned, screaming at everyone to go to hell.

Seconds later they were crumpled corpses beside a muddy wall - Nicolae buckled backwards on his knees staring at the sky and Elena slumped sideways in a pool of her own blood.

"They said they wanted to die together so we lined them up, took six paces back and simply opened fire. No one ordered us to start, we were just told to get it over with," Gheorghiu said.

"I put seven bullets into him and then emptied the rest of my magazine into her head," Carlan said. "Bits of her brain were spattered here on the floor," he added, surveying the cracked cement beneath a wall still pockmarked with bullet holes.

"Then people from all directions started shooting," he said. "I was scared but I had this huge sense of relief. I could feel the hopes of 23 million people pumping through my veins."



But euphoria soon gave way to distress and later anger - much of it directed at Ion Iliescu, the leader of the anti-Ceausescu faction which surfaced in December 1989.

"We made it possible for him to take power and he hasn't even bothered to thank us, let alone reward us," Gheorghiu said.

"The worst thing is I even believed in his programmes and look at the results. Romania is worse off and so are we."

BITTER LEGACY

Gheorghiu and Carlan are not alone in struggling to come to terms with the events of 1989. No one has been officially declared responsible for over 1,000 deaths in the revolution and living standards have slumped for all but a handful of new rich.

"How am I supposed to live? By scrounging off my mother’s pension of 500,000 lei ($16) a month?" asked Carlan. "I have three kids to support."

Although rich in natural resources, Romania has not yet recovered from Ceausescu's warped brand of economics, especially his 1980s decision to pay off all foreign debts by strangling domestic consumption and exporting as much as possible.

Equally enduring is the psychological and social fallout from surveillance by his Securitate secret police, which enlisted one in seven Romanians as informers, and intrusive policies such as severe family planning restrictions.

"We didn't win the battle in 1989 like everyone else. We barely got started", said Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, a leading academic. "The invasion of privacy in Romania cannot be compared with any other communist country except perhaps North Korea."



Frustration with the slow pace of economic and political reform has led a tiny minority to yearn for Ceausescu-era certainties. Headstones were erected at the couple's unmarked graves a few years ago and supporters light candles there daily.

Most Romanians are more resigned to their fate, despite resentment that democracy has not yet delivered prosperity. The national mood is well evoked by the popular expression "asta e" (that's the way it is), a sort of melancholic "c'est la vie".

But Ceausescu's executioners find it harder than most to deal with the sense of having been cheated by the revolution.

"Our actions changed this country's history, yet it seems that only a few people profited," lamented Carlan.

"We'll dream about this forever," Gheorghiu said. "But does Iliescu think about it now he has what he wanted? I doubt it."

(C) Reuters Limited 2001

--

This blog is no longer active

All of the posts here, and plenty of others that aren't, have been archived at my new site, which will hopefully be updated a little less infrequently.