Unreasonable Behavior

by Don McCullin

  I was grabbed unceremoniously by the jacket and hustled away. I thought I must have been arrested by the army. Then close to my arm I heard the voice again, and there was no mistaking the vowel-mangling Ulster accent. I was led a short distance down what seemed like the corridor of a house. The ‘inhuman bastards’ kept going in a stream at my side as if these were the only words my unseen companion had ever learned. I was made to sit down. When again I tried to open my eyes, it was as if someone had thrown fire into them, and still I couldn’t see.

  I called into the darkness for a damp cloth, and several voices shouted, ‘Get him a damp cloth. A damp cloth here.’ In the background I heard the sound of a desperate animal honking. When a stinking floor-cloth was placed in my hand, I managed to clear my eyes enough to make out my immediate surroundings. Through a burning haze I focused on two globes just below me. They were two eyes, so near that they looked like two close-ups of the moon. My host, a midget, was standing just in front of me. For a moment I thought I had woken up in a Fellini film. My host was repeating, ‘Are you all right? The focking bastards.’

  His eyes were streaming too. Beyond him I could dimly see more people, women, children, dabbing faces. From outside came another burst of loud hee-hawing. Someone said, ‘The donkey’s been gassed too.’ A pall of burning gas lay over everything in that little Catholic community.

  For a journalist, one of the prevailing emotions in Ulster was feeling like a Judas to both sides. It was there again when I left the midget and his little house after thanking his family for their kindness. I had to pass the British soldiers posted at the street corner. I held up my cameras prominently as the badge of my profession, and saw the looks of scorn and heard the swearing under their breath. As far as they were concerned I was consorting with the enemy which they had just tear-gassed.

  Civil rights marches, boisterous but not violent, rather like Ban the Bomb demonstrations, were the order of the day when I first visited the province three years earlier. Catholics were protesting about discrimination in jobs, housing and voting rights, though under the surface old sectarian enmities smouldered. The Greens harked back to the Irish nationalist martyrs and those who had died at the hands of the Black and Tans, while the Orangemen owed direct descent from the Scottish mercenaries sent in by Cromwell to pacify and colonise Ireland in the seventeenth century.

  On the night of 4 January 1969 the old traditions welled up when the overwhelmingly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary led the predominantly Catholic civil rights marchers into a Loyalist ambush at Burntollet Bridge outside Derry. There hordes of men wielding cudgels with nails in, wooden staves and bars of iron swept down on the protest marchers like the wild Picts and Scots of earlier times charging upon the English from the Border hills. It was the green light for the IRA to gear themselves up for a struggle. They too were hard men, made stubborn because they felt cornered and had nothing to lose.

  In the Bogside itself in those days we received great kindness and hospitality from gentle people who felt oppressed by the structure of their lives. I am sure that they did not want to see the blood-letting come to their community, or spread through Ulster, but the stage was now set for just that to take place. When British soldiers arrived to keep the peace they were seen at first by the Catholics as saviours. It didn’t take long for attitudes to change when the army took up their stance as protectors of the status quo. Young Catholic girls were tarred and feathered for fraternising with the soldiers, and Protestant Loyalists were inflamed by the emergence in the Catholic community of the Provisional IRA, ready to use the gun and the bomb.

  I chose the Bogside for the many visits I made to Northern Ireland in 1971 because it was easier to bring out the issues photographically in an area not much bigger than a football pitch than in a large, anonymous city like Belfast. In the Bogside, after the pubs turned out on Saturday afternoons, you could almost guarantee that something would happen. It began with youngsters hurling stones at the troops and escalated to Molotov cocktails and sniping gunfire. Then the army would retaliate. The pictures I took of a charge by the Royal Anglians became famous because it gave such a clear view of the soldiers’ difficulty. Kitted out in flak jacket, perspex-visored riot helmet and awkward samurai-style leg and arm shields, they appeared like Bushido warriors to housewives as they passed their doorsteps. Burdened with all this medieval armour, they were expected to chase kids who could run and turn on a cat’s whisker.

  A sergeant hit by a brick, the Bogside, Derry, 1971

  One day I was approached by two men in the Bogside who demanded to know what I was doing with my camera. With my usual level of tact I told them to mind their own business.

  ‘If y’know what’s good for ye,’ I was informed, ‘y’ll do as ye’re told an’ clear off.’

  I stood my ground and said that I had never cleared off at anyone’s behest in all my life, and wasn’t thinking of starting now.

  Later that night at my hotel, the City, which was eventually flattened by a bomb, a wild Catholic porter called Tommy came up to me after I had been relaying my experience to other journalists in the bar and offered me words of assurance.

  ‘That man who stopped you this aft’noon, I’ve fixed him. Ye’re okay now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘Them’s the Provos. But ye’re all right now. Y’won’t have any more trouble. I’ve told them ye’re from the Sunday Times.’

  I didn’t have any more trouble of this sort, but it was uncomfortable to know that I had been vetted by the Provisional IRA before I could take pictures freely. It was no more comfortable crossing the lines, passing the army at checkpoints on my way to and from the other side. With tension running high in the Creggan estate, and youngsters setting fire to hijacked lorries, I spotted an older man taking up a position in a front garden near me. I sensed that he was a sniper, although I could not see any weapon as quietly he got himself organised. My companion explained what was going on, and it put me in a dilemma. Here was a man lining up to shoot and possibly kill a British soldier and I could do nothing about it except move away, as I was told, and keep quiet, for I was being closely watched. No British soldiers were killed that day in Derry, but that was just my good fortune. On another occasion I saw a soldier stretchered out of a garage after being shot in the back. I went forward to take a photograph and was confronted by another soldier who tried to beat me back with his baton-gun. I could understand how he felt after seeing me among the Catholic youths who were causing the trouble.

  It might not have been a full-scale war but covering events in Northern Ireland was an extremely dangerous business. Apart from being mistaken by one side for a member of the other, at any time I could be struck by a stray missile, a bottle or a brick, and suffer severe brain damage—as could any other innocent passer-by using the streets to go about his or her normal business. The hazards of civilian life in this province are nowhere more vividly illustrated than in an extraordinary press picture of me running from both bricks and an English Saracen armoured car that was trying to run me down in mistake for a demonstrator. The vehicle has its wheels off the ground and looks as if it is trying to seize me in its jaws. Bricks hurled at the Saracen came heading for me.

  There was a final irony to my acquaintance at first hand with the Irish troubles. I phoned a contact in the Bogside during one week to ask if anything was likely to happen at the weekend.

  ‘I think ye’d better get y’self over here,’ was the cryptic reply.

  The Sunday Times had other plans for me that weekend, and so I missed what became known as Bloody Sunday, when thirteen Catholics were killed in the Bogside in an appalling day of rioting and shooting. I should have been there—or maybe it was Fate that intervened.

  Part Three

  MATTERS OF LIFE

  AND DEATH

  24. PRISONER OF IDI AMIN

  When Christine read Donald Wise’s report in the Dai
ly Mirror, that I was among those fellow journalists who had just disappeared in Uganda before he managed to get out of the country, she was sure that I was dead. She knew that Donald and I were close, and that some of the missing Western newspapermen had been taken to Makindye jail, Idi Amin’s notorious killing-house.

  Tension was already building when I arrived at Uganda’s Entebbe Airport in the middle of a power cut. There was talk of a coup, and President Amin had begun a bloody purge of his own police force. I drove the eighteen miles to Kampala on a narrow potholed road with jungle hanging overhead. All the signs of a corrupt regime coming to an end were in the city—no service, defective plumbing, sewage backing up, shops looted or bare of goods. The Asian temple in the centre of the town was besieged by Africans begging with menace. Most Asian shops had been ransacked. Finally, in the Apollo Hotel, there was the vulture-like influx of journalists of whom I was one.

  I homed in on the Strangers’ Quarter where Somalis, Congolese, Rwandans, Burundians and all manner of Asians—people whom Amin considered trouble-makers—hung out in a crumbling, overpopulated shanty town. I knew from experience that when uprisings or disturbances are in the air, this is the sort of place in which they start. As I moved around, making friends and taking photographs, I was suddenly confronted by a huge soldier with lizard-like eyes. He was dressed in English fatigues, English-style jungle shirt rolled up at the sleeves, combat jungle boots and a soft jungle hat.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded in a snakish and hostile fashion. When I told him the obvious—that I was photographing these people—he snarled. ‘You are not supposed to be here.’

  ‘Yes, I am. I have a permit,’ I said.

  His eyes flicked to the permit which he snatched out of my hand. I tried to grab it back.

  ‘No! Get into this car.’ The vehicle, driven by another soldier, nosed up to us. This was the sort of car, I thought, that could make you disappear.

  ‘No, I won’t.’

  A crowd was gathering, for I had become the focus of an unheard-of public scene. A black sergeant was ordering a white man to jump to it and do what he’s told. In those days in Africa no black man, whatever his authority, talked to a white man like that. It entailed a calculated abandoning of respect. Repeatedly I refused to get in the car. Even so I found myself eased and nudged towards it quite against my will. Then I was hustled in and the car was driven away, tyres screaming, after the driver had executed a high-speed three-point turn that almost demolished a section of the crowd.

  I was taken to a large army complex and left in a room. At least I’m not in some anonymous spot in the forest, I reassured myself. I tried to remain cool and pretended not to care. Two men came in with files—and when I see files I get nervous. The files were placed on the table and there was a babble of conversation in Swahili before the lizard-eyed sergeant left. I smiled and spoke firmly.

  ‘Can I ask you a question? Why am I here?’

  ‘Why were you taking photographs in this district?’

  ‘Because I am working for an English newspaper and have permission to do so.’

  ‘What are these pictures for?’

  ‘To show that life in Kampala is going on as normal,’ I said with as much innocence as I could muster.

  I was asked to hand over my money and personal possessions, and I refused. I tried a high and mighty tone. ‘No, I’m not giving them to you. You can’t have them. I’m here for legitimate reasons, and I want to know why this is happening.’

  They left me to cool off for an hour. When they returned it was suddenly all courtesies.

  ‘Well, we’re going to let you go. We are sorry we had to bring you here.’

  I was so relieved I said, ‘Oh listen, absolutely no problem.’ Once you’ve been released you don’t fuss about being screwed up for the last three hours.

  They drove me back to my hotel. On the way I made a few comments about the lovely Kampala girls, just to keep the mood congenial. I even asked them if they would like a beer, but they declined; they had their duties. It was some days before I discovered exactly where I had been and what these duties were. I had spent my time in the office block of the Makindye prison and my interrogators were members of Amin’s secret police. All the same, I don’t like being intimidated into not doing my work, so I went back to the Strangers’ Quarter, this time taking my tripod for moral support.

  I was not far from the spot where I had been arrested when I came upon an excited crowd in the middle of which stood a seedy sweaty-faced man, his suit rumpled, his manner drunken and belligerent. He squinted at me through red eyes.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘It’s none of your business.’ I must be a slow learner.

  ‘Show me your passport.’

  I refused. He said he was a soldier.

  ‘Prove to me you are a soldier,’ I said with disbelief.

  He put his hand into his pocket as if to bring out papers. Instead of papers a clenched fist smashed into my face. I reeled back, clutching for my tripod. As the crowd moved in on me I swung the tripod like some demented Scottish hammer-thrower, trying to get a distance between me and them. Seeing a gap, I took off like a hare up the street. Behind me the mob swarmed and took up the chase, with me as the focus of a great hue and cry. At full spring, I heard a voice call me from an alleyway and I dived into the shadows to draw breath.

  ‘Sir, sir, follow me. I know a way for you.’ I had no idea who the African was but there was little choice. Full of qualms, I followed him quickly through a warren of alleys, the mob clearly audible behind me.

  With relief I found myself back in the hotel district, and I could see a broad path leading to the Apollo. My guide held me back as a large Mercedes loomed from the end of the street.

  ‘Dada is driving around,’ he said.

  Sure enough, the gorilla outline of Amin Dada could be seen hunched at the wheel of the car as it drew to a stop before very slowly moving on again.

  ‘Sir, you must leave this country,’ my rescuer urged me. ‘In two or three days there will be big trouble in Kampala.’

  I took a deep breath and bolted as fast as I could for the hotel, arriving breathless, adrenalin pumping. Christ, this job is getting to be a nightmare, I thought.

  That night the press met for one of those super-charged drink-ups you tend to have in beleaguered hotels in troubled zones in troubled times. I remember drinking with David Holden, who was in a serious mood. ‘I don’t like the look of this place,’ he said. ‘I’m getting out of here quickly.’

  I respected David’s sense of when to stay and when to go. He was knowledgeable and not easily scared. If anything, he dared too much. A few years later he would be killed in Egypt by an assassin’s bullet. Maybe he knew something I didn’t know. Anyhow, I listened to David and thought it over. I had some good pictures, though not as many as I would like. I decided to go—but how? Communications were in turmoil. Even British airlines were curtailing their services. It was becoming unsafe for the crews. Alitalia was still flying, but for how long? I wangled a seat with Alitalia on the eight o’clock flight that evening.

  Those of us left gathered round the pool for a farewell swim under the eyes of Amin’s ever-present security men. I was just thinking about a second dip when a strange murmuring sound drew us to the verandah. Columns of armoured vehicles told us that Amin had mobilised.

  Later we discovered that Ugandan guerrilla exiles had grouped in force on the border with Tanzania with the aim of toppling Amin and replacing him with Milton Obote, the man Amin himself had deposed. Obote had the support of Tanzania’s respected President Julius Nyerere, but the incursion was botched, driving Amin to paranoid extremes.

  The first evidence of this was the armoured cars stationed outside our hotel. Phone and telex lines were cut. Pulling clothes hastily over my swimming trunks, I decamped with Donald Wise to another hotel that might s
till be in touch with the outside world. When I went back to the Apollo to retrieve my cameras, I found the place surrounded by the Ugandan army. I held back and watched people being brought out and put into army trucks. A European emerged surrounded by soldiers with weapons and was forced to lie face-down on the floor of a Volkswagen truck. This is going to be very unpleasant, I thought, if they feel the need to humiliate people in this way.

  It crossed my mind to abandon the cameras and make myself scarce as quickly as possible. Almost immediately I saw the risks. I didn’t fancy the consequences of being caught running away.

  I strolled with a confident air into the lobby, trying to look as if I knew what I was doing while all that was going on had nothing to do with me. A British flight crew were standing stock-still, their faces pale and worried. We exchanged wide-eyed looks but no words. Suddenly I was surrounded by tall burly African soldiers. Amin’s Nubians were a daunting sight. They asked me for my room number, and I told them, very politely. Under escort I was led to the reception desk to pay my bill. I took this as a good sign, allowing myself the consoling thought—Alitalia, here I come!

  ‘We will go to your room now and pack your bags.’

  Four of them accompanied me to my room and began rifling through my belongings. In a photographic magazine containing some of my Biafra pictures, they came across the pictures of the skeletal albino on the verge of death, which made them giggle and fall about. These people aren’t just evil, I thought, they’re crazy, mad.