During that time, we heard sporadic gunfire from the other side of the bridge, where the Muslim Brothers were supposed to be demonstrating. We asked some Egyptian journalists why they hadn’t tried to cover the conflict from the Islamist side, and they said they used to, but then stopped because they would be systematically attacked with knives and stripped of their equipment.
Suddenly a minibus drove through the crowd and hit one of the officers on the bridge, adding to the confusion and raising the tension. Dozens of people started to gather and police responded with tear gas. Everyone ran away, and following the advice of our Egyptian colleagues we ran with them. Then a young Egyptian took me and Dorothée and pushed us into a taxi, saying the street might suddenly turn against us.
The following day, January 25, was the third anniversary of the revolution that led to Mubarak’s fall. All our Egyptian contacts were telling us to lie low and stay away from crowds celebrating. At midday, we decided to try our luck at Tahrir Square, which was like a fortress surrounded by soldiers. We passed through the identity check and pretended to be tourists. I had taken care to bring a discreet backpack that didn’t make me look all kitted out like most photographers.
The square wasn’t that crowded yet, so we took the opportunity to shoot some pictures, schmooze with a few people, shake hands, and let them ham it up in front of the camera. But as soon as we felt we were being observed by an undercover police officer we bailed out.
Later that afternoon, we decided to cover a demonstration organized by the Third Square movement—youth advocating a third way, opposed to both the Islamists and the military, who feel the need to continue the initial Tahrir Square protests that had brought down Mubarak. I took pictures freely there. As the demonstrators were trying to reach Tahrir Square, they were immediately chased away by the police, who caught them in a pincer, firing tear gas at the rear and causing panic.
Up ahead a police van barreled full steam into the crowd and let loose with more tear gas. The demonstrators dispersed in all directions and I ran away with Dorothée, trying to protect her from getting stampeded. We finally followed a group into an alleyway and escaped between the buildings. Later we heard that one of the protesters had been killed by police at that spot.
After returning to the hotel to send the photos, we went back out into the streets and came by chance upon a new skirmish between Sisi supporters and those of the Third Square. We had to duck down to keep from getting hit by flying objects. As I approached the heart of the riot, an Egyptian grabbed me by the arm, obviously unhappy with my presence. It was time to bail. I signaled to Dorothée that we needed to leave immediately. One of the rioters followed us for a few seconds before giving up.
The next morning we decided to leave our press cards and radio recorder at the hotel. We went to Heliopolis with a friend, Paul, to attend a Coptic Christian mass. Everything went well, but as we were having tea with Paul in a coffee shop, two plainclothes policemen, armed and holding handcuffs, approached us and asked why we were there. We explained that we were tourists. They took Paul off to the side to check his identity card and even checked what images I had in my camera. Luckily for us they bought our story and didn’t hassle us any further.
On the twenty-seventh, Paul called and informed us that three journalists, an Egyptian, an American and a Brit, had been arrested in the apartment where they were working. Another American journalist friend said her cameraman had disappeared. A French colleague told us there had been several arrests on the twenty-fifth of journalists in Tahrir Square. She summed up the situation this way: “Watch out, because today, as soon as someone starts filming, they’ll suspect it’s someone who works for Al Jazeera and they’ll start chasing him.” Since late December, four Al Jazeera reporters—an Australian, a Canadian and two Egyptians—had been arrested. The army suspected them of complicity with the Muslim Brotherhood, because the television channel was funded by Qatar, which was known to bankroll the Muslim Brotherhood all across the Middle East.
Finally Dorothée and I came to the conclusion that there was no way we could do the story on the street kids we’d originally set out to do.
In all likelihood, before my capture in Syria, I would have been more reckless. I probably would have decided to stay, get a bit closer to the crowd, catch the wild look in the demonstrators’ eyes. But the thought of rotting in an Egyptian prison dissuaded me.
On top of that, Egypt was Arab and Muslim. Everything about the people around me—their voices, the harsh guttural sounds of their language, the way they gesticulated and screamed at you when there was an issue—reminded me of everything I’d just been through. It brought me back to Syria and I had a lot of trouble keeping cool.
I also sensed an underlying menace to everything about Islam: the submission and conformity it exacted, the heavy-handed metaphors of violence. As someone who is drawn to violence, I understand its attraction and feel that most people who would accuse me of being an Islamophobe don’t appreciate just how powerful and appealing those metaphors of violence and conquest—which permeate the Quran and so much of Islamic culture—can be.
As a European and American—proud of the Western culture grounded in that refined weave of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Judeo-Christian ethics—I see today’s expression of Salafi Islam as a threat, a real existential threat. Europeans have become so soft, so complacent, so absorbed by their own hedonism that they can’t even recognize the violence directed at them until there’s an explosion or a puddle of blood at their feet. They rally behind ideals whose sources they’ve forgotten, if not rejected outright. And their defense of those ideals rarely goes beyond rhetoric—or worse, smug offensive satire. Since so few are willing to act violently in defense of their ideals, they keep themselves in a state of denial with respect to those who have long ago declared war on those ideals and have readily backed their declarations by shedding blood.
Now Europeans are beginning to wake up. But this will probably lead to conflict among Europeans before the real threat is dealt with.
I’ve traveled through more Islamic countries and spent more time shoulder to shoulder with Muslims than most Westerners, often risking my life with them and coming to their aid. And there is a beauty to Islam that is unique. It’s a sublime expression of belief in God.
But I do not want it in Europe. And that’s because I doubt today’s Europeans have the mettle it takes to stave off a force that would, in the name of God, raze the foundations of what we Europeans cherish. Anyone who’s spent any time with a jihadi in combat knows what his ultimate concern is. And in the jihadi’s eyes, that ultimate concern will not tolerate the commitment to reason, freedom and universal love that has painstakingly informed Europe over the course of millennia. It’s so simple and so clear that most Europeans have lost the ability to see it.
UKRAINE: EUROPE’S FAULT LINE
WHILE I WAS IN EGYPT, Europe had begun to crack along one of its historical fault lines. In late November, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych backed out of the long-negotiated European Union Association Agreement, encouraged by pressure from Russia and a $15 billion incentive loan. The pro-European Ukrainians started protests in the heart of Kyiv and the Yanukovych government tried clumsily to prevent a repeat of the 2004 Orange Revolution, when his electoral victory was deemed fraudulent. Initially the protests were small, but within a week he had the Interior Ministry’s special riot police, known as the Berkut, crack down violently on what was mostly young people and students. This only caused the protests to grow.
Thousands of protesters set up a tent city in the middle of Independence Square, known as the Maidan, in frigid temperatures. It was immediately dubbed “the Euromaidan” and garnered the support of the international community, which infuriated Moscow. I followed the events closely in the news, and by early January it seemed as if the protests would peter out. Then, on January 16, the Yanukovych government hastily rammed a bill through the parliament that would have severely limited freedom of
expression and right to assembly. Over the next three days the demonstrations gathered momentum and turned violent, with protesters attacking the Berkut and other Interior Ministry troops, using cobblestones, Molotov cocktails, even makeshift catapults. Protest leaders began disappearing; one even turned up several days later, badly beaten and with half his ear cut off.
Dorothée and I decided to go to Kyiv a few days after we got back to Paris from Cairo. We wandered around the vast tent city in temperatures that dropped down to minus 28 Celsius (minus 18 Fahrenheit) and published a piece in Elle about the women on the Maidan. But the atmosphere had settled into a stalemate, with Interior Ministry troops on one side of the barricades made of sandbags filled with snow and protesters on the other huddled around burning trash bins. At times it felt like there was more conflict among the hordes of photojournalists trying to get a shot from the top of the barricades than on either side of them.
We decided to go to the eastern part of the country, which most journalists ignored. With respect to the EU Association Agreement, Ukraine was divided virtually fifty-fifty, along geographic lines. The west of Ukraine, closer to Europe, wanted to be part of the EU and have that vast market open for their products. They also felt that setting themselves on an EU membership track would expedite Ukraine’s perennial battle against the corruption poisoning its politics and society. It would also make it harder for Russia to carry out its revanchist designs: that is, turning Ukraine into a client state it could fully control. In the east, however, where ties to Russia were much closer, they felt that moving away from Moscow would adversely affect their primary trading relationship. They also had more of a historical distrust of Western capitalism, Catholicism, and Atlanticism—viewing the EU as a stalking horse for a Western occupation that would force its decadent consumerism and gay marriage on them.
We went to Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, both Russophone cities where you would seldom hear any Ukrainian spoken on the street. There you could see that the Soviet Union had not entirely vanished. Many people were wary of the protesters in Kyiv, seeing them as pawns for violent nationalists. They also didn’t trust the opposition politicians, who they assumed were almost as corrupt as Yanukovych. Perhaps the one thing that everyone had in common was a loathing for the corrupt Yanukovych government and his “Family,” a close group of cronies that included his sons, who had become fantastically wealthy in just three years of his presidency. The only place where Yanukovych still had support was in his hometown of Donetsk and in the coal-mining and steel towns of the Donbas region that surround it.
Shortly after we returned to Europe, the Maidan exploded. Protesters tried to reach the nearby parliament buildings to force Yanukovych’s resignation. Pressure was building on him from Russia to crush the demonstrations. On February 18 the Berkut broke through the barricades and took back nearly half the square. Protesters piled up new barricades of tires and wood, then set them on fire, feeding the flames with anything that would burn.
Things settled down the next day, with the Maidan divided practically down the middle. The standoff couldn’t last and opposition leaders, who were always a step behind the street, were frantically negotiating with the government, which wanted to relinquish as little power as late as possible, offering early elections and other concessions. But it was too late.
Just before dawn on the twentieth, shots rang out and several Berkut soldiers were hit. They were sitting ducks there in the square surrounded by tall buildings, so they decided to retreat up a hill and regroup. The protesters followed, and that’s when the massacre started in earnest. As the protesters climbed the hill on Institutska Street, which led from the Maidan past the Ukraina Hotel and up to the cluster of government buildings, Berkut shooters began picking them off one by one. By the end of the day around seventy people had been killed and many others wounded.
I watched much of this from New York, streaming live from various Ukrainian news outlets. It was incredibly frustrating not being able to be there and move around. I rarely trusted other people’s eyes. The media always needed to trim most of the chaos. When you’re there in the flesh, the full sensorial impact makes you aware of just how complex any given event is. If you’re attuned to the complexity of all the inputs, you can draw conclusions that benefit from both intellect and intuition.
Within two days the government had fallen. Yanukovych left Kyiv and eventually turned up in Russia. A new interim government was in place—mostly full of familiar faces from Ukraine’s parliament.
The country was still in shock when less than a week later Russia launched its operation to take over Crimea. On the twenty-seventh Russian special forces broke into the Supreme Council building in Simferopol. A puppet government was installed, Ukrainian airports and military bases were surrounded, ships were blockaded, and by March 16 a referendum was held.
Not only did the Ukrainians not put up any resistance, but many troops defected to the Russian side—which, due to a long-standing treaty from the fall of the Soviet Union, had an important naval base in Crimea, with at least twenty thousand troops stationed there permanently.
As soon as the pro-Russian population in eastern Ukraine saw how easy it was to divorce from Kyiv with a little help from Moscow, protests began flaring up in Donetsk, Kharkiv, and other cities with high concentrations of ethnic Russians. The country was rapidly splitting apart and unless the new government in Kyiv could mobilize its lame army, the revolution would fizzle out and Russia, which had amassed upwards of a hundred thousand troops along its border with Ukraine, would march into Kyiv and install a Moscow-friendly puppet the way it did in Crimea. Later, interviews with and intercepts of key Russians involved in fomenting the uprisings confirmed that the revolts in the Donbas as well as in Kharkiv, Zaporizhia and Odessa were part of a coordinated Kremlin plan. At the very least, the new Ukrainian government would have to crush the growing rebellion in the east. In other words, a war was practically inevitable.
* * *
NOTWITHSTANDING ANY VOWS I may have made to myself while captive, I never had any reservations about going to Ukraine. My father didn’t seem very pleased, but he understood. My mother told me I was out of my mind. But this was something I needed to see up close because many of my ideas about Europe and the direction in which it was headed were being played out on the ground in real time.
In Syria I’d gotten an intimate sense of how complicated the geopolitical situation was—much more intimate than I’d bargained for. I got to see how jihadism grows and festers on its own soil. Now that Europe seemed to be cracking, with a sclerotic NATO alliance trying to keep a resurgent Russia down, I needed to immerse myself in the oncoming waves, even at the risk of getting caught in a rip again.
This was the first time in my adult life that a war seemed imminent in Europe. I’d covered the war in Georgia, but that always felt like the periphery of Europe. And during the Yugoslav wars, where many of my older colleagues had cut their teeth, I was just an adolescent. The resurgence of nationalism in Europe was something I’d been watching and predicting for many years.
In the context of Ukraine, the initial conflict was ostensibly between half the country who wanted to be part of a supranational European Union and half the country who wanted to remain in a neo-Soviet Union, which by definition implied a sort of internationalism. Both these movements were part of the fabric of a globalization process that dates back to long before the term became a buzzword, back to mercantilism and the rise of colonial empires. But on a deeper level, notwithstanding the chants of “Ukraine is Europe,” the Ukrainians were not willing to die for the sake of a bureaucracy in Brussels. Very early in the Maidan protests, anyone with any knowledge of Ukrainian history could see that regardless of the calls for an association with Europe, the country’s ultranationalists were poised to hijack the movement. And most of those nationalists didn’t care much for the EU. What they wanted was to get rid of the pro-Russian Yanukovych and break further away from Moscow’s influence. The more mode
rate protesters were largely aware of this fact. Indeed, with all the posters of Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists during World War II (who was vilified by Soviet historians as a Nazi collaborator and lionized by Ukrainian nationalists as a hero who opposed both Soviets and Nazis), it was impossible not to be aware. But the moderate protesters also knew that if Yanukovych decided to crush the Maidan with force, these nationalists were the ones who would put up a fight. They were the ones throwing cobblestones and Molotov cocktails, and they were openly recruiting young men for what they understood would degenerate into a war once Russia decided to intervene with force.
Meanwhile, the coal miners around Donetsk, who were protesting against Kyiv, harbored only a lukewarm allegiance to any notion of an international workers’ movement or Soviet glory. They simply felt more Russian than Ukrainian and hoped Putin would march in at their request to rid them of the fascist junta full of faggots and American agents who had taken over in Kyiv.
In Ukraine, all of Europe’s ivory-tower illusions of transnational solidarity would swiftly be trumped by good old-fashioned nationalism—just as in Syria the rebels’ hopes for liberal democracy ceded to good old-fashioned sharia law.
For years I’ve been gradually ostracized by colleagues when I talk about statism in Europe. Basically, this view considers the European Union to be an untenable overlay on European nations, one that will ultimately paralyze if not destroy Europe as a political and cultural force. Whether we like it or not, the nation-state is still far and away the most viable form of political organization. The European Union, though it may have originated as a noble measure to keep European countries from starting more wars, has in effect reduced Western Europe to a place where maintaining the neoliberal free market system is the overriding concern. All its high-minded ideas of four freedoms—the free movement of goods, capital, services and people—were originally aimed at creating a single market, at making money. Today Eurocrats justify these developments with the assumption that if everyone is making money and there is widespread prosperity, then we will have a quasi-utopia in which rational self-interest will prevent different nations from trying to destroy or subjugate each other.
The Shattered Lens Page 21