‘Another World is Possible’
On 21 July 2001 an estimated 300,000 demonstrators gathered at the G8 – that centre of global economic and political power. Hosted by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian media mogul and prime minister, and attended by Bush and Blair, it was held in a barricaded red zone behind a massive police presence to keep demonstrators at bay. After 9/11 nothing was left to chance, and even the anti-globalisation movement, which was opposed to violence, was seen as a threat. The carabinieri were not so restrained and 23-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani was shot dead from the back of one of their Land Rovers and run over.26
‘The issue is not how to stop globalisation’, Blair told the Labour Party Conference the following October. ‘The issue is how we use the power of community to combine it with justice.’27 The anti-globalisation movement present at Genoa was not going to leave global justice to governments. It gained traction in opposition to the ambition of multinational companies, facilitated and legitimised by the neo-liberal project of the governments of the industrialised North, to impose their will and conditions on the global South. The first drama was the ‘Battle for Seattle’ on 30 November 1999, when protesters disrupted a ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization. One of the leading demonstrators was José Bové, a French activist who had dismantled a McDonald’s restaurant at Millau, at the base of the Larzac plateau, and was photographed at his trial in France holding his chained hands above his head like the Gallic hero Vercingétorix.28 The lessons learned from Seattle were fed into the World Social Forum which brought 10,000 people to a first meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2001. It was timed to challenge the annual closed meeting of the global political and corporate elite at Davos in Switzerland, and was open to activists from all social movements, trade unions, political parties and NGOs which shared its values. It was masterminded by the Association for the Taxing of Financial Transactions to Help Citizens (ATTAC), set up by French intellectuals around Le Monde diplomatique, and by a cluster of Brazilian trade unions and associations. Its Charter of principles, approved in April 2001, said that it was ‘a plural, diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental [space where], in a decentralised fashion, interrelated organisations and movements engage in concrete action at levels from the local to the global in order to build another world’. It saw the neo-liberal project as a form of imperialism, opposed ‘neoliberalism and […] domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism’, and condemned ‘all forms of domination and all subjections of one person to another’.29
The 9/11 attacks forced the World Social Movement to take a stand on global jihadism and the War on Terror. Its second meeting at Porto Alegre in January 2002, attended by 55,000 people, ‘absolutely condemn[ed] the terrorist attacks’ but also criticised the launch of ‘a permanent global war to cement the domination of the US government and its allies. The war reveals another face of neoliberalism […] Islam is being demonized, white racism and xenophobia are deliberately propagated.’ Antonio Negri, a veteran of the Italian Red Brigades, and American radical Michael Hardt had argued in 2000 that imperialism, which had a power centre and boundaries, was being replaced by empire, which had no centre or territory.30 It now seemed that the global financial empire was showing its teeth. The World Social Movement was behind the massive success of the worldwide demonstrations of 15 February 2003 against the war being driven by Bush and Blair. It was, according to Negri and Hardt, a push-back against ‘a common enemy – whether it be called neoliberalism, US hegemony, or global empire’.31 In the short term the protest failed, but in the medium term it isolated the US and UK governments, who were held responsible for a war based on deceit and whose consequences had not been thought through.
Nemesis 1: ‘Everything Falls Apart’ in Iraq
About 130,000 American and 28,000 British forces attacked Iraq on 19 March 2003. The rhetoric of Operation Iraqi Freedom did little to hide the reality of ‘Shock and Awe’. Massive air strikes were launched on Iraqi cities before ground forces went in. The initial fighting lasted no more than three weeks. British troops entered Basra during the night of 6–7 April while US troops took Baghdad on 9 April. Two or three thousand Iraqi fighters were killed in the attack on Baghdad but total casualties from the invasion in the first eighteen months including civilians were estimated by The Lancet at 98,000.32
The Americans and British had been preparing a long time for this war. Militarily, they were effective at knocking out the Iraqi Army, but they were not prepared for what might happen next. In his note to Bush of 28 July 2002 Blair had mentioned ‘unintended consequences’:
Suppose it got militarily tricky. Suppose Iraq suffered unexpected civilian casualties. Suppose the Arab street [Arab public opinion] finally erupted […] Suppose that, without any coalition, the Iraqis feel ambivalent about being invaded and real Iraqis decide to offer resistance.33
On 6 September 2002 he foresaw ‘a danger of Iraq blowing up in the absence of a serious opposition figure to take power’.34 On 10 February, only five weeks before the offensive, Blair received advice from the Joint Intelligence Committee that ‘the threat from al-Qaeda will increase at the onset of any military action in Iraq’. The same committee warned him again on 17 February that ‘the threat from Islamic terrorists, including al-Qaeda, will increase in the event of war with Iraq’.35 The first ministerial meeting about post-conflict planning was held by Blair on 6 March 2003, two weeks before the invasion, and that only to request a plan from the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development, which could not in any case agree between themselves.36
If one failing of the British government was not to listen to intelligence or to plan for post-conflict, another was not to envisage the situation from the perspective of the Iraqis and of Arab and Muslim populations, for whom this was simply a more brutal repeat of age-old colonial violence. Iraq had been a British mandate between 1921 and 1932 and a sphere of influence long after that. The bombing of Iraq by the British in 1920 was engraved on the Iraqi consciousness. As the bombs fell again in 2003, Sadiq, who worked for the Antiquities service in Baghdad, had a flashback to a massacre of a family wedding in 1920, when ‘a two-winged plane suddenly came over the horizon and dropped a fireball among the celebrations’. Men and women had been separated for the occasion and half the men were killed or maimed. Now, in 2003, he sighed:
It’s the British again. They have been bombing my family for over eighty years now. Four generations have lived and died with these unwanted visitors from Britain who come to pour explosives on us from the skies. It first began in 1920 […] I often wonder how they would feel if we had been bombing them in England every now and again from one generation to the next, if we changed their governments when it suited us. They say that their imperial era is over now. It does not feel that way when you hear the staccato crack of fireballs from the air. It is then that you dream of real freedom – in shaa’ allah – freedom from the RAF.37
The trauma suffered in 1920 by Iraqi populations now returned. Pictures of the atrocities instantly relayed across the world had a powerful impact on the ummah, the whole body of Muslim believers. On 21 March, the day after the offensive began, protest marches were held in Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan and Indonesia.38 Journalist Jonathan Raban described how a wound inflicted by the invasion on one part of the Muslim body was felt by members of the same body hundreds or thousands of miles away. For many decades Muslim suffering had focused on Palestine; now Iraq was the seat of pain.
To see the invasion of Iraq as a brutal assault on the Ummah, and therefore on one’s own person, is not the far-fetched thought in the Islamic world that it would be in the west. For weeks the Jordan Times, like every other newspaper in the region, carried front-page colour pictures of civilians killed or wounded in Operation Iraqi Freedom […] On April 2, the picture was of an Iraqi father in a dusty grey jellaba, arms spread wide, screaming at the sky in grief, while at his feet, in a single
barewood open coffin, lay huddled the three small, bloodied bodies of his children. His rage and despair can be seen exactly mirrored in the faces of Egyptian demonstrators in Tahrir Square, as the Ummah bewails the injuries inflicted on it by the western invaders.39
The invasion was presented by the Americans and British as the liberation of the oppressed Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, whose statue was filmed being ritually toppled. According to Mark Steel official reports were designed to convey this message: ‘Iraqis only count if they’re dancing in the streets’.40 On 1 May, standing on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, George W. Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’.
In fact, the mission was far from accomplished and a new version of what Chalmers Johnson called ‘blowback’, and what Tony Blair had feared might be unintended consequences, began only too soon. The liberation of Iraq was actually its occupation by military forces under a Coalition Provisional Authority headed by diplomat Paul Bremer, who had the power to rule by decree. One of his first acts was to disband the defeated Iraqi Army, lest it become a tool of resistance. The immediate result of this, however, was the breakdown of law and order and widespread looting. Journalists were quick to make comparisons to other war zones and failed states. ‘Baghdad has turned into Afghanistan faster than Afghanistan’, wrote one; ‘Palestinisation of Iraq as Iraqis throw stones at troops’, said another.41 Blair himself visited Iraq and reported back to George Bush on 2 June 2003 that Bremer was ‘doing a great job’. That said, he admitted:
the task is absolutely awesome and I’m not sure we’re geared for it. This is worse than rebuilding a country from scratch. We start from a really backward position. In time, it can be sorted, but time counts against us. My sense is, we’re going to get there but not quickly enough. And if things fall apart, everything falls apart in this region.42
Resistance to the military occupation of their country might be spontaneous, such as riots in Basra against British occupation on 9 August 2003. Or it might be organised and targeted by groups which had never before worked together: former supporters of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Sunni fighters belonging to Ansar al-Islam, which was linked to al-Qaeda, Shia Muslims of the Mahdi army of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and mujahideen drawn from outside the country.43 Resistance attacks were brutally effective. A car bomb explosion at the Jordanian embassy on 7 August killed 23 people and injured 100, while a lorry bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad on 22 August killed 22 people, including the UN special envoy.44
As in Afghanistan, the military occupation involved the imprisonment and torture of captured ‘terrorists’ by the army and CIA in order to track down other members of their network. The main centre of this activity was Abu Graib prison. So long as what went on in violation of the Geneva Convention was kept secret only so much damage was done. In April 2004, however, pictures of the most degrading, humiliating and sadistic torture of prisoners were leaked to CBS News and broadcast across the world. It was alleged that Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld had authorised these practices. ‘Abu Ghraib had become, in effect, another Guantánamo’ reported The New Yorker, with ‘enormous consequences […] for the integrity of the Army and for the United States’ reputation in the world’.45
Although France had opposed the war in Iraq, it was not against furthering its own neo-colonial ambitions. It had used its influence in Françafrique to reinforce its position on the Security Council. It was also more effective than the United States and Britain in undertaking military operations under the radar and away from public attention. This lesson it had learned while crushing the movement for Cameroonian independence behind the screen of the Algerian War. The issue in 2004 was to remove President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, whom the French and Americans considered a thorn in the side, while the world’s attention was focused on Iraq. Aristide was a radical priest who had countered the dictatorship of the Duvalliers, and enjoyed massive support among the black slum poor. He presented himself as the heir of Toussaint Louverture who had led a slave revolt against the French in the 1790s. He challenged French and American interests in the Caribbean and wanted to obtain compensation from the French for the tyranny of slavery on the island. On 26 February 2004 he was denounced by Foreign Minister Villepin as a fomenter of disorder and during the night of 28–29 February the French orchestrated a coup to topple him. Just as Toussaint had been captured and sent to die in France, Aristide was kidnapped and flown to the Central African Republic.46 France had demonstrated how to undertake regime change at its most clinical, without everything falling apart.
Nemesis 2: The Colonial Fracture at Home
The metropolitan front was another matter. These invasions and occupations had a profound effect on immigrant communities in France and Britain, who too often felt humiliated, stigmatised and alienated. Those of Muslim origin were attacked as outside the national community and sympathetic to terrorists. In France a poll of 28 March 2003 registered that 78 per cent of respondents supported Chirac’s line against intervention in Iraq. Another poll of 5 April 2003 revealed a gulf between Muslims and non-Muslims: a quarter of French people but two-thirds of French Muslims felt themselves on Iraq’s side while a third of French but nearly three-quarters (72 per cent) of French Muslims did not want the United States to win.47 A survey of British Muslims in 2005 found that 85 per cent were ‘very proud to be Muslims’. Most did not justify violence but 29 per cent of those for whom being Muslim was very important said that there were circumstances in which acts of violence against non-Muslims could be justified, while 23 per cent justified violence against other Muslims.48
In both France and Britain national security was tightened up to deal with this threat. Egyptian-born preacher Abu Hamza was arrested on 26 August 2004 under the 2000 Terrorism Act. On 16 December 2004 the Law Lords ruled that the detention without trial of eight foreigners at Belmarsh Prison, known as the ‘Belmarsh Eight’, even under the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, was unlawful, being incompatible with European and therefore domestic human rights legislation. To avert their imminent release emergency legislation was rushed through and became the 2005 Prevention of Terrorism Act. This provided the government with powers to place control orders on suspected terrorists. It brought an end to the so-called ‘covenant of security’ under which the British authorities had sometime tolerated Muslim radicals so long as they pledged not to organise attacks in the United Kingdom.49
In France, young men of Muslim origin who felt excluded from French society formed a large part of the prison population, but prison only too often increased their radicalism. In 2003 Muslims in Britain accounted for 3 per cent of the overall population in 2003 and 8 per cent of the prison population, whereas in France Muslims accounted for 7 per cent of the population but up to 70 or 80 per cent of prisoners.50 Omar, a French Muslim prisoner of North African origin, aged 40, explained his predicament:
I feel abandoned, cheated. They made me believe in [wonderful] things. I was told that I could be successful in France. But all this is false […] You need a diploma to succeed. […] As young people of Arab origin, we have always been mistreated in every respect; there was nothing for us, and it’s even worse now for the young generations. This is why, with all the injustices that happen to us everywhere and which are getting even worse, it is good to have people like Bin Laden awakening the masses. The Arabs are asleep. […] Bin Laden woke them up with what he did on September 11th.51
France’s leading jihad university was Fleury-Mérogis prison south of Paris, the biggest prison in Europe. Djamel Beghal, also aged 40, was a radical preacher there, described by Gilles Kepel as ‘a pure al-Qaeda product, a rare case for a Frenchman’.52 Of Algerian origin, once a youth worker, he moved to Leicester in 1997 and then on to the Afghan jihadist camps. He was arrested on a return trip in 2001, accused of plotting an attack on the US embassy in Paris, and finished up in Fleury-Mérogis. There he became the mentor of two young men of the Buttes-Chaumont gang in Paris
, Chérif Kouachi and Amédy Coulibaly, who ten years later would commit the Charlie Hebdo killings.
Heightened concerns about the failure of Muslims to integrate and about the threat they posed provoked a reaffirmation of national values. In France this triggered a return of the veil controversy that had broken out in 1989 but had not been settled definitively because the Conseil d’État encouraged the local negotiation of compromises. President Chirac took the opportunity of the approaching centenary of the 1905 Separation of Church and State to set up a commission to look into laïcité as a tool to strengthen the Republic and promote national unity. The commission reported on 11 December 2003, declaring that laïcité was ‘the keystone of the republican model’ and that ‘conspicuous’ religious signs should not be worn in state schools. Enacted by a law of 15 March 2004, it applied nominally to all religions but discriminated very plainly against the Muslim veil.53
Presumed threats to national identity also provoked a controversial rehabilitation of France’s colonial past. The memory of the Algerian War, which had long been cultivated mainly by the extreme Right and by veterans’ associations, was now resurrected officially in order to justify France’s past as an empire but, as might have been anticipated, this proved even more divisive than before. France was now a postcolonial society but found itself fractured by conflicting experiences and memories of that war.
Empires of the Mind Page 24