The Times Companion to 2017

by Ian Brunskill

  “When I go to sleep, I still see what happened almost every night. Either I see them or I hear them. There is the fear. For a long time it was very complicated to leave home. I still don’t take the métro or commuter trains. I only take the bus.

  “Before, it was simple to make plans. Now I advance day by day. When I go to bed I wonder what will happen tomorrow and what will I see on the news.”

  Christophe Molmy has been affected, too: “You don’t emerge unscathed from an intervention like the Bataclan. It’s impossible.”

  He organised sessions with psychologists for his brigade and gave them and their families the opportunity to make appointments on a one-to-one basis. Some did; the majority did not. “We are still in a macho culture where we say, ‘Nah, I don’t need that,’ but in fact we need it,” he says. “I saw the psychologist.”

  We meet in his office at the end of a warren of corridors in the 19th-century building that is the Parisian equivalent of Scotland Yard. He had never confronted terrorism before 2015. Now he lives permanently with the threat — a phone at his side at all times, in the shower, everywhere — and admits it has changed his job. “We always used to intervene against gangsters whom we tried not to kill. Today if we go in against terrorists, we go to kill the terrorists. We won’t manage to get them to put their hands up.

  “We are becoming a little like paramilitaries. We are training and equipping ourselves like soldiers to fight a war.”

  He talks about the old days of fighting criminals with a certain fondness. “We arrested them; they behaved well; we understood each other. We could have a bite to eat together. But what am I supposed to do with people who come to die? The human relationship is not the same. I don’t even know if there is a human relationship.”

  Surprisingly, perhaps, Georges Salines seems almost the most sanguine of all, despite the loss of his daughter. When we meet in his office, he looks bright-eyed, and says in his book, “I am sad from time to time, I sometimes cry, but I sleep, I work, I talk and I sometimes laugh. You can’t avoid the suffering but resilience is possible, particularly in a family whose members love each other.”

  Salines is head of 13 Novembre: Fraternité et Vérité, an association set up by victims two months after the attacks, and he has used the post to denounce the shambolic organisation faced by relatives of victims in the aftermath of the attack — some being shown the wrong body in the morgue. But he is not vindictive, and insists on the need to heal the split in French society, to avoid marginalising Muslims and pushing them into the arms of the terrorists.

  He says in his book that he has no hatred for the jihadists. “I have never experienced this feeling,” he says. “I cannot hate the sinister cretins who took my daughter’s life and lost theirs in this business. They are victims, too.”

  Antoine Leiris, a French radio journalist, has written a book, too, after losing a loved one — Hélène Muyal-Leiris, his 35-year-old wife — at the Bataclan. As with Salines, the book is more about love than hate: Vous N’Aurez Pas Ma Haine (You Will Not Have My Hatred) is the title.

  Leiris recounts his love for his wife, and for Melvil, their 17-month-old son — and his fear, uncertainty and pain at the realisation that he will have to bring up Melvil on his own. Of the killers, he has little to say. “I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know. You want me to be frightened; you want me to look at my fellow citizens with suspicion; you want me to sacrifice my liberty for security. I won’t.”

  Claude-Emmanuel Triomphe, who had two operations and a month in hospital after being injured in Café Bonne Bière, says much the same thing. “I feel indifference for them. I feel no hatred. I tried to have hatred; I thought it’s not normal after all they did to me. If I must express a feeling it is rather pity — pity in the sense that these guys have massacred their own lives: ‘Not only have you massacred the life of other people but you have messed up yours as well.’”

  He says he has no nightmares, no worries about going out. After months of lethargy he has rediscovered some of his old intellectual energy, too. Nothing is quite the same now, however.

  Having given up his post as head of a think tank, he wants to specialise in the estates that are home to a generation of second-generation immigrants, among whom a handful have turned to radical Islamist violence.

  “I need to understand why my country is affected by terrorism, why my country has manufactured more jihadists than any other in Europe. It’s not to say that other countries are not affected, but France is particularly so.”

  The incomprehension is widespread in France, and it is Sophie, perhaps, who sums it up best. “You ask yourself questions: what was in their heads when they did that? The youngest terrorist at the Bataclan was 23. Me at 23, I was in Lyons, in university and thinking how I was going to dress the next day and not going to a concert hall to kill people. These are questions that remain and to which we will not have an answer.”

  YOU CAN’T TRUST THE PEOPLE WITH DEMOCRACY

  Roger Boyes

  OCTOBER 5 2016

  IT MUST HAVE seemed like a shoo-in for the Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos. After four years of negotiation with Farc guerrillas, a peace deal was unveiled to the accompaniment of a choir singing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. After half a century of debilitating war, how could anyone vote against peace in the subsequent referendum? In the end, though, he set himself up. It was a bit like the US civil war general whose last words, glancing at the enemy lines, were: “They couldn’t hit an elephant from that dista …”

  It wasn’t just the Colombian referendum that went awry. There is a quiet revolt under way across the globe. In vote after vote, people have been rejecting the guidance of political establishments, baffling elites and adding to the sum of anger in the world. In the age of rage, direct democracy is a risk. Referendums are infallible only for dictators — think of Napoleon, master of the strategic plebiscite — when instructions are handed down to voters, when ballot boxes are stuffed and there’s a secret police snitch living next door.

  The fact is that in free societies a government should not abdicate its responsibility to govern by using a single-issue vote to demand guidance from ordinary punters. Clearly if you want to avert a populist avalanche you should keep capital punishment or mosque-building off the ballot paper. And by now leaders should have learnt too that referendums are not a suitable vehicle for deciding on war, peace or immigration. Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, has just asked his citizens the impossibly loaded question: “Do you agree that the European Union should have the power to impose the compulsory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without the consent of the National Assembly of Hungary?” Of those who voted, 98 per cent rejected the idea, as was intended. But most voters stayed at home, perhaps sensing that the vote wasn’t about migrant quotas at all (since they are more or less off the table anyway) but rather propelling Orban to a new level in his gladiatorial contest with Brussels. Many Hungarians are quite comfortable inside the EU.

  The problem with referendums is that they become a receptacle for grievances and bear little relationship to the question posed. Take Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, who earlier this year was saddled with a referendum on the ratification of an economic deal between the EU and Ukraine. The treaty had been agreed by the government, ratified by all other EU states and was 2,135 pages long. The Dutch rejected it, not because they had done their homework but because they were railing against weak government, against EU dogma and against the possibile eastward expansion of the union. Rutte was ambushed and called the No vote “disastrous”. Vladimir Putin rubbed his hands with glee and called it a truly democratic act.

  The fact is that voting in a referendum can, without knowledge and preparation, become an almost random transaction between leaders and led. The political philosopher Jason Brennan calculates that the probability of your individual vote changing policy is about as low as winning the lottery. You could of course win hundreds of millions but
it is still irrational to buy a ticket. And so it is with direct democracy. Voters, he says, “have no incentive to be well informed. They might as well indulge in their worst prejudices — democracy is the rule of the people but entices people to be their worst.”

  Most democratic governments that deploy referendums do so out of weakness. In doing so they fool themselves that the wisdom of the people must inevitably support their world view. That’s how Juan Manuel Santos and David Cameron ended up in the same leaky canoe without a paddle. The Brexit referendum was a way of pacifying the Conservative Party. Cameron failed to grasp the potency of a national vote that fused mild dissatisfaction with the EU and the seeming inability of the government to get a grip on immigration or shield British jobs from a global slowdown.

  By the end of this year there will have been eight major referendums — the next crucial one is Matteo Renzi’s attempt to secure backing for his constitutional reforms in Italy. It’s too late for the Italian premier to call it off now. If he loses in December, he could also lose office. If the Five Star movement and the Northern League take power in the resulting election they are promising a referendum on Italy’s membership of the euro. Few analysts would now rule out an Italian No vote. But whatever the verdict, the uncertainty of a referendum campaign would bring chaos to Italy, where the banks are already wobbly, and speed the unravelling of the eurozone.

  The watchword has to be: listen to the people at your peril. Referendums can act as the safety valves of democracy but never as their engine. If legislators run away from their responsibility to consider and scrutinise complex questions, then power will seep away from the centre. The biggest risk posed by Donald Trump is surely that he could undermine or circumvent instititutions that keep America on an even keel. James Madison, the fourth American president, identified the problem: democracies endanger the right of minorities and must therefore devise solid institutions to protect those rights, civil liberties and free trade. Referendums, over-used and cynically steered, can end up subverting rather than enhancing democracy.

  It is too late for the Colombian president and for David Cameron, but let’s declare a five-year moratorium on referendums. And yes, that means you too, Scotland.

  BURNT AND TORTURED MIGRANTS FILLED DECKS AS WE RUSHED TO HELP

  Bel Trew

  OCTOBER 8 2016

  Saturday, October 1

  “Dignity is a dancer,” jokes Captain Louis Ferres when the floor lurches sideways as we drop off a 2.5m wave. The battered ship that can hold up to 450 people is one of three that Médecins Sans Frontières uses to patrol the Mediterranean, searching for migrants in distress. Everyone on board, including Carla the cook, works on the rescues. Dignity pirouettes her way to the search and rescue zone 20 nautical miles off the Libyan coast where most migrant boats run into trouble. Huge waves wash over the deck. Half the non-sailors aboard are in their bunks throwing up.

  We are told we may not see a rescue as even the most ruthless smugglers don’t force migrants into the sea in bad weather. But we still spend the afternoon putting together 450 emergency care packages — socks, nutritional biscuits, water and a towel. There is a strict cleaning schedule to prevent disease spreading through the ship. On Saturday night it’s my turn to scrub the inner decks, which I manage without vomiting.

  Sunday, October 2

  We are woken by news that there will be a rescue at 9am. More than 100 migrants in a rubber dinghy called the Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Rome by satellite phone at dawn but it takes Dignity four hours to reach the position. By the time we arrive the dinghy is nowhere to be seen. Courtney, the ship’s nurse, begins to worry. They would have been at sea now for at least ten hours.

  Likely weakened by months of starvation and ill-treatment in Libya, many don’t last a couple of hours exposed to the blistering heat of the sun. A co-ordinated effort with helicopters and nearby warships finds the dinghy. I jump aboard the rescue speedboat, which cuts through choppy waves to the dinghy. The terrified faces of women and children peer up from the bottom of the waterlogged tub, where they are crouched in lines as if on a slave ship.

  This is the dangerous part. Desperate and delirious, people may try to jump aboard and risk turning the boat over. “Try to stay calm, we will rescue all of you,” urges MSF’s Nicholas over a megaphone while we hand out life jackets. The sickest — including an emaciated Ethiopian boy of 16 — are hauled aboard in the first round. When everyone is on deck and registered, people open up about the hell they escaped in Libya: floggings, rape and kidnappings for ransom. They are transferred to a Save the Children vessel returning to Italy.

  Monday, October 3

  The shriek of the rescue alarm wakes us. It’s 6.30am and a drifting boat has bumped the Dignity. The rescue goes well but the MSF team is told of a second, third and fourth boat in the area. The smugglers spotted a break in the storms and packed thousands into life rafts then scuttled home to make more quick profits before the winter ends the crossing season.

  The stink of fuel knocks the breath out of me as the survivors of the second rescue stagger on board, their skin coming off in strips. The medics rush to treat a few who have stopped breathing. One pregnant woman grabs my arm and, pointing at a raw strip of flesh, screams. Another woman writhes on her back on the floor, screaming too. A third points to her shredded calf. Then it hits me: these are chemical burns from boat fuel.

  “Get their clothes off and shower them now,” a voice shouts. We strip most of the 90 men, women and children and hose them down. I carry semi-conscious women to the showers. “We need to support a woman in the hospital to sit upright so she can breathe,” says Irene, grabbing me. I end up, covered in blood and faeces, cradling Lovett to keep her breathing.

  I hold the hand of her pregnant sister, Joy, who dies on the bed beside us. Her body is packed in ice and placed in the bow. Lovett and the little boy are airlifted to hospital by the Italian coastguard, who won’t take Joy’s body.

  Tuesday, October 4

  The soft sobs of the Nigerian woman who lost her two boys, aged four and five, the day before are heard on deck. With nearly 420 migrants on board, including toddlers and a corpse, Dignity sails back to Italy. We are posted in shifts as guards to defuse any arguments, spot medical problems and regulate the endless queue for the toilet.

  In French, Arabic and English, the men on deck, fleeing Ivory Coast, Mali, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, tell their stories. In the evening I check on the Nigerian girls from Monday’s horrific sinking. They giggle at photos of my stupid cat and tell me about their favourite sugar-cane recipes.

  Peace, who is spattered with torture scars, asks: “Do white people in Europe like black people? I’m afraid. We’re always treated like animals.” At night, while on watch on the men’s deck upstairs, I listen to Michael, 17, from Nigeria, talking of “making [his] mother proud” in Italy. “Do you think they will let me study? I want to be a doctor.”

  Wednesday, October 5

  Overnight the Italian coastguard again refused to take Joy. Her corpse is beginning to smell. In the morning we dock and the ship goes quiet. Everyone is split into groups depending on their injuries and their ages. They go ashore for medical checkups and registration.

  The UN says that more than 80 per cent of Nigerian girls landed in Italy are trafficked into prostitution. I warn the girls to keep together and stay in the reception centres. Hope is mortified that she has only a blanket to wear. I wash and dry my pyjamas to give to her.

  Hours later, as I leave the boat, I hear my name called. The girls are still being processed. Hope, wearing my pyjamas, is grinning. We hug and they board buses, promising to stick together.

  Thursday, October 6

  More than 10,000 people were pulled from the water in 48 hours this week. We have no idea where people have gone or if Lovett and the others made it. I add as friends the few who have Facebook. Kougan, 23, from Cameroon, who kept me company on night watch, pops up on Messenger: “I very grateful to be
come your friend Bella, take care for ur self.”

  ‘TANTRUMS AND SHOCKING RACISM’ OF INQUIRY’S DYSFUNCTIONAL DAME

  Andrew Norfolk, Sean O’Neill

  OCTOBER 14 2016

  ON A SUMMER afternoon this year Dame Lowell Goddard stood at the doorway of her Westminster office and shouted in anger. Unless she got her own way, she is said to have declared, “I’m going to pack my bags, go back to New Zealand and take this inquiry down with me.”

  A visitor to the headquarters of the national child sex abuse inquiry might have been shocked, not least because the threat was made by the judge paid £500,000 a year to lead an investigation forecast to run for a decade at a cost of £100 million.

  Dame Lowell’s staff, however, barely flinched. They were used to her tantrums, and worse. Multiple senior sources have told The Times that the judge peppered her 16 months at the helm of Britain’s biggest public inquiry with racist remarks and expletive-ridden outbursts. Insiders say that Dame Lowell, 67, also appeared to have memory lapses and failed to grasp legal concepts.

  She allegedly said that Britain had so many paedophiles “because it has so many Asian men” — a comment that left colleagues stunned. “I was so shocked to see the number of ethnic people,” she is said to have told a colleague, while she allegedly commented that she had to travel 50 miles from London to see a white face. Her home in the capital was a smart, taxpayer-funded flat in Knightsbridge.

  Several sources described Dame Lowell’s reluctance to question the propriety of the royal family. Discussing the Prince of Wales’s friendship with a bishop jailed last year for sex offences against young men, the judge is said to have insisted: “Prince Charles couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with that, not with his breeding.” The source added: “For someone who claimed not to understand what the establishment was, she had a reverence for it that was quite astonishing.”