Small Wars Permitting

by Christina Lamb

  It is not every day that one takes elevenses with a dictator – even a retired one. That the encounter took place in a rose-filled Surrey garden on a hot summer’s day, at a table overlooking a lawn in the middle of which fluttered a Chilean flag and a colourful plastic windmill, rather than in some sombre wood-panelled room lent an air of improbability. I was high on morphine, too, having only got out of hospital the previous day, after an emergency Caesarean to deliver my first child eleven weeks early, and that added to the surrealism of the situation. Had any of Wentworth’s other famous residents such as Bruce Forsyth or Fergie dropped in, I doubt I would have lifted an eyebrow.

  Gathered on the patio were several of Pinochet’s advisers in smart suits, slicked-back hair and dark glasses: the Pinochetistas. Since his arrest last October, I had often met them in the coffee bar of Claridges to hear the latest word from his camp and be delivered outrages such as ‘Pinochet denied Midnight Mass’. As we waited for the general to emerge, they shuffled nervously. Pinochet does not like journalists and had only agreed to this encounter after protracted negotiations and in the belief that his situation could not be worse – proceedings to extradite him to Spain to be tried for torture and conspiracy to torture begin in September. The current commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army had been on the phone the day before, they told us, trying to stop the interview.

  There was a sudden silence as Pinochet emerged from the French windows, then a chorus of ‘Buenos días, mi general’. I stared at the man I had read so much about, joined protests against at university and written about since his arrest, who now shook my hand, smiling and congratulating me on the birth of my son.

  Without his uniform and the sinister dark glasses he used to wear, he didn’t look as I expected a dictator to look. Eighty-three last November, he was dressed in a navy suit with a high waistband, a pearl tie-pin on his silk tie. Leaning unsteadily on a crutch, a hearing aid in his right ear and his thin white hair ever so carefully combed, he looked like someone’s elderly uncle. Adding to this impression was the pushchair propped against the wall, belonging to the youngest of his twenty-five grandchildren, three-month-old Augusta Victoria, who had just been flown over from Chile with her mother. But the most unexpected thing was the voice. Instead of the military bark that I had anticipated was a high-pitched whisper.

  The general took his seat, the Chilean Constitution placed ostentatiously in front of him. This, his extremely polite manner and frequent references to God (there are Catholic icons all over the house) took me back to an encounter eleven years before with the then military dictator of Pakistan. General Zia-ul-Haq had insisted on pouring me tea and serving me yellow iced cakes as he lied through his teeth, constantly justifying his actions with references to the Constitution, a document he had completely emasculated, and to Allah.

  ‘I do not normally authorise such meetings,’ Pinochet began, with a smile which did not reach his pale-blue eyes and was not at all reassuring. Dominic presented him with a plastic bottle of holy water from Lourdes, which the general passed to an adviser dismissively. Watching him gesture with liver-spotted hands, I was fascinated by his fingers. They were flat and meaty like those of a butcher. We could, he said, ask him anything.

  We started on safe ground with Pinochet’s midnight arrest last October while he lay in a private suite at the London Clinic recuperating from an operation on a spinal hernia. He insisted that he had been ‘kidnapped’, and strangely his main objection seemed to be that no one had had the decency to warn him beforehand. ‘The least they could have done is warn me that I was going to be arrested,’ he complained. ‘I wasn’t in England as a common bandit. I was here as a diplomatic figure and had been welcomed as such.’

  His arrest, he said, had been particularly hurtful because it had happened here in England, his favourite country, where he liked to shop in Burberry and Fortnum & Mason, visit Madame Tussaud’s and take tea with his friend Margaret Thatcher. ‘As a child, my teachers and other people who educated me always said that Chile was one of Britain’s best friends…I was always happy when I came here because I felt Britain was a place where people really respected one another.’

  Speaking so softly that we had to lean forward to catch what he was saying, his words often lost in the whirr of the fan, he reminded me of Marlon Brando in The Godfather. ‘Britain was famous for its justice system,’ he whispered, before complaining with some justification about the farcical nature of the legal proceedings against him which have so far run up millions of pounds in costs and will probably never see him brought to trial. Even if he were tried and convicted in Spain, he is too old to go to jail.

  ‘First there’s the ruling. That’s appealed; the appeal succeeds; then they appeal against the appeal and so it goes on. It’s like being on a wheel.’ He waved one of his meaty fingers to illustrate his point. ‘They are playing with the life of a person who is very old, giving him hope of being freed, then taking it away again.

  ‘I’m the only political prisoner in Britain,’ he added, banging his fist on the patio table. ‘Bandits, common criminals, violent people are all pardoned and allowed home.’ It was hard not to smile at the image of Pinochet appealing to Amnesty International, who had documented hundreds of cases, during his regime, of victims tossed from helicopters, people herded into sports stadiums and executed by firing squads, or undergoing electric shocks and other tortures in the changing rooms.

  Had he committed crimes against humanity such as torture and conspiracy to torture, for which, in their historic judgment in March, the Law Lords ruled that his status as a head of state gave him no immunity from prosecution?

  Instead of the argument I had heard many times from his advisers – that the situation in Chile under Salvador Allende had been near civil war and that the country had been in the front line of the war against communism – the general simply denied everything. ‘Never!’ he replied. ‘Not now. Nor do I think I could do something like that in future because, if you read these acts which I drafted, you will see the first thing I said was that we must encourage people’s development and provide security to anyone detained.’

  Brandishing the Constitution, he jabbed at a section: ‘It is forbidden to apply any unlawful force on any person.’ I thought of this later in his office, where I saw a shelf of Jean-Claude Van Damme videos.

  He implied that, after he had seized power in the 1973 coup, he was too busy to torture anyone. ‘I didn’t have time to devote myself to controlling the actions of others. To say that would be gross slander!’ He added: ‘There was so much to sort out. We had inflation of 500 per cent. We had to recuperate agriculture to provide food for the people and we had to build houses because they were living in shacks and huts. It would be too long to list everything…’

  This version of events did not really correspond with the report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, according to which 3,197 people were murdered or disappeared during his seventeen years in power. Was he saying he had never given orders to torture or kill anyone?

  His reply to this – the crux of the case against him – was a Chilean saying. ‘One does not erase with the elbow what one writes with the hand,’ he said, pointing again to his Constitution.

  Yet General Manuel Contreras, head of the DINA, the Chilean secret police, with whom Pinochet breakfasted every morning, claims that he did nothing without Pinochet’s authorisation. Recently declassified Pentagon papers include one stating: ‘General Contreras reports exclusively to and receives orders from President Pinochet.’

  Pressed on who was responsible, Pinochet launched into a complicated discussion about ‘how’ and ‘what’. ‘There are many things I ordered him to do but who can say what? You see, as head of the army you always ask “what”, not “how” – that’s up to the chief of intelligence. Civilians don’t understand.’

  The July sun was getting hotter and Pinochet’s Chilean butler came and served strong coffee in tiny china cups. Clearly not lead
ing anywhere on torture, the conversation moved on to his conditions at Wentworth. ‘Would you be happy confined to the same eighty square metres for ten months?’ asked Pinochet. ‘Always seeing the same place, the same people?’

  A tour of the house revealed it is less luxurious than the reported twelve-bedroomed mansion. With some of Pinochet’s family visiting for lunch – his favourite lamb stew, which his Chilean cook was making in the kitchen – the living-cum-dining room was crowded. Two of the four bedrooms are taken up by Scotland Yard officers in case Pinochet tries to leg it, as is a small room next to the kitchen full of surveillance screens. There is little space for Pinochet’s exercise bike, and he spends most of his time in a cramped office, reading books on his hero Napoleon or surfing the Internet to read the Chilean press. Typical of rented accommodation, the decor has little character – all cream carpets and cream leather chairs – and the only personal touches are the photos on every shelf and mantelpiece of the general, his family and Margaret Thatcher.

  Since last month, Pinochet has been allowed to move freely in the garden, though always monitored by Scotland Yard officers and various surveillance cameras and infrared movement detectors. His greatest joy is his grandchildren. ‘I’m too old to run around or play ball, but we have a set of remote-control cars and hold races round the lawn,’ he said.

  With this unlikely image of the dictator and his toy cars, we bade farewell to the old man and left the red-brick house with the roses rambling over the white shutters where we had taken elevenses and chatted about torture.*

  * Pinochet was eventually allowed to return home on grounds of ill health. He died in Chile in December 2006, having never been brought to trial.

  A Day Trip to Lagos – the Sad Story of Damilola Taylor

  ‘There’s something wrong here,’ said the woman at the British Airways check-in desk. ‘You’re booked to arrive in and leave Lagos on the same day.’

  ‘No, it’s not wrong,’ I replied. ‘It’s my job.’

  The previous day I had been sitting at the foreign desk thinking about lunch when I noticed my editor Dominic Lawson emerge from his glass box and head purposefully towards me. I immediately tried to find something to do. Dominic could be a bully but he was a brilliant editor with wonderful quirky ideas. However, they were just as likely to be something emerging from a dinner party with his posh friends, such as ‘no one has dining rooms any more’, or involving his pet obsessions of chess and abortion.

  In this case it was one of his interesting ideas. Two days earlier, on 27 November 2000, a 10-year-old Nigerian boy called Damilola Taylor had been stabbed in the leg and left to bleed to death in the stairwell of the grim council estate where he lived in Peckham. The photograph of Damilola in his school uniform with his shy smile was all over the papers. Even sadder, Damilola’s mother had said they had moved to Britain from Lagos for a better life for their children.

  ‘I want you to go to Peckham then Lagos,’ Dominic told me. ‘Compare and contrast Damilola’s two homes. Cast your foreign correspondent’s eye on Peckham. I wouldn’t be surprised if, for example, the trains are better in Lagos.’ (He was fixated by the inefficiency of British railways, once even asking the transport correspondent to look into what would happen if all the railways were converted to roads.)

  But there was a problem. ‘I can’t,’ I replied. ‘I’m off this Saturday for my best friend’s wedding. It’s been down in the book for months. I’m reading the lesson in the church.’

  This, it turned out, was no excuse. It was Wednesday and there was a daytime flight on Thursday which would get me into Lagos late that night. I could then fly back overnight on Friday to get home, change and be at the church in Pimlico at eleven on Saturday morning. When I would actually write (or sleep) was not clear.

  I knew someone at the Nigerian embassy so managed to get my visa the same afternoon. That evening was spent exploring Peckham and the next day I was on the flight with Justin Sutcliffe, a photographer with whom I often worked, to go and see Damilola’s birthplace. The one major flaw was that Lagos was a vast, sprawling city of 14 million people and we had absolutely no idea where the Taylor family had lived. (The news editor, who had clearly never been to Africa, suggested we tried consulting the electoral roll.)

  The flight was much delayed and it was the early hours of Friday by the time we checked into the Ekos hotel. When I stumbled into reception a few hours later for breakfast I discovered we were not the only ones. The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times had just arrived in the shape of three friends, Peter Foster with photographer Paul Grover, and Tom Walker, having persuaded the embassy it had been unfair only to give a visa to the Sunday Telegraph. Worse, Peter was clutching a fax – the ever-resourceful Daily Mail had already found the Taylors’ home and done a double-page spread that day.

  According to the article, Damilola had lived in a suburb called Isahi where he had attended Luciana school. As we were all headed to the same place we decided to join forces in two cars – and, for some reason I don’t remember, forgo breakfast, something I rarely do as on the road you never know when you’ll find your next meal.

  We set off to the nearest primary school to ask if they knew Luciana school. The secretary had never heard of it nor of anywhere called Isahi. I called a friend on the Nigerian Guardian and he hadn’t heard of it either. We bought a map but there was no district with that name or anything similar.

  Peter suggested we look in the phone directory. Finding a phone book in Lagos is easier said than done. We tried the hotel, and various shops, but no one had one. Eventually we went to the headquarters of the telephone company, Nitel. They could only produce a directory from 1990. There was no Luciana school listed. Nor had anyone there heard of Isahi.

  I was starting to become suspicious of the Mail article. One of the schools had told us all schools must be registered so we decided to go to the Education Ministry to consult the list, even though we knew this probably meant getting dragged into African bureaucracy.

  It was worse than I feared. The Lagos traffic meant it took hours to get there, then, when we arrived, the Director of Private Education said we could only have the list if we had the permission of the Deputy Undersecretary. The Deputy Undersecretary said we needed the agreement of the Permanent Undersecretary, a stern woman who said such a request needed letters from our editors and two weeks’ notice. We explained we only had that day but to no avail. ‘Why are people in Britain so interested in the death of one small boy?’ she asked, suspiciously. ‘Hundreds of boys die here every day.’

  I had spent enough time battling Third World bureaucracy to know we were heading nowhere, so I slipped outside to her assistant and asked who actually had the list of private schools. The Statistics Division on the fifth floor, she replied. I ran up the stairs into the room, clutching a wad of notes and announced, ‘I’ve come to buy a copy of the list of schools, how much is it?’ The man quickly got the idea and told me I could have it for 200 naira (about £1). I produced 500, at which point he said he’d just remembered the price had gone up to 1,000. It was still a bargain.

  Back downstairs the others were still arguing and trying to arrange faxes from editors. Waving the prized list, I beckoned them out to the car park. So intent was I on scanning it for Luciana school – and so pleased with myself – that I did not look where I was going. There was a sickening crack, so loud that people passing by turned round. I had walked straight into a pothole deep enough for a small child to be lost in, and my ankle had turned right over. Within moments it had swollen to the size of a melon.

  The knife-like pain, combined with the sweltering heat and lack of sleep and breakfast, made me feel faint and I had to lean against a parked car. This being Africa, a small crowd gathered. A man in a pinstriped suit pulled off my shoe and from out of his pocket whipped a small tin of Temple of Heaven balm with which he started massaging my ankle. It smelt revolting. Another man somehow produced an ice pack. But the swelling didn’t go down and gentlemanly
Tom had to half carry me to the car.

  We headed off to the nearby International Hotel to discuss strategy. What with the size of my ankle and the sound it had made, we all assumed it was broken. But time was ticking away and the last thing I wanted to do was go to a hospital, particularly in Lagos. The bad news was that, after all that, Luciana school was not even on the list, which left us with precisely no leads.

  My contact at the Nigerian Guardian thought we should try going to Isoshi, suggesting that perhaps the Mail had got the name wrong. This seemed plausible so we set off through another hour of traffic. When we finally got there it looked quite promising, with sandy streets and lots of children coming out of school in neat uniforms as the Mail had described. But no one had heard of Luciana school or Damilola Taylor. We had to keep explaining the story to bemused locals who, like the Permanent Undersecretary of Education, could not understand why people in Britain cared about the death of one small African boy.

  Isoshi was ruled out so we headed back downtown. Damilola’s mother, Gloria, had worked as a clerk for Union Bank of Nigeria. Maybe, just maybe, someone there would know where they lived. Our Daily Telegraph colleagues thought we were clutching at straws and decided to go to the BBC bureau to phone their desk. Justin went with them so he could call our office as our UK mobile phones did not work.

  Meanwhile, Tom and I braved more traffic to get to the Union Bank tower. By this time my ankle was agony. Tom produced some butterscotch for me to suck as neither of us had any painkillers. I was starving as the only food we’d had was a sugary Coke and a fried banana bought from a stall. I stayed in the taxi while he went in to inquire.

  He came back downcast. Gloria Taylor hadn’t worked there and nobody knew her. All we could think of was to head off to another suburb where she was rumoured to have worked. I needed to find a phone to let Justin know, so Tom helped me up the steps back into the bank. An enormous lady with her hair pulled back in a small, neat bun was coming out.