Political exiles who decide to defy reality, or even those who merely hope to overthrow it, still have to settle somewhere. For some, it is important to raise the standard in a positively sympathetic country, offering political support and perhaps even money or weapons. France before 1848 gave the Polish emigré leaders pensions corresponding to their rank and comforted them with liberal rhetoric. The Cuban exiles are assured that the United States will never abandon their cause; the Palestinians find effusive but unreliable welcome in various parts of the Arab world.
Other exiles have learnt that those who defy reality have no true friends. Every ‘sympathetic’ host will try to use an emigration for its own purposes, dividing it, distorting its aims, in the end betraying it.
Perhaps it is better to live in an indifferent country, which does not pretend to care, to be a free carp in a huge and turbid pond rather than a goldfish exhibited to admiring guests – and cats.
London was and is a pond. The Metropolitan police are more inquisitive than they used to be. The population is not. I remember the German revolutionary Rudi Dutschke living in northern London, his face on the cover of every Continental magazine. His neighbours had no idea who he was, and would not have cared if they had known.
Even today, individuals who will raise or destroy nations are quite certainly serving in kebab shops at night, reading philosophy in launderettes, wheeling corpses around London hospitals. Indifference, to them and to their queer foreign leaflets, is what they prefer.
In the end, exile is about the loss of Eden, or about the waters of Babylon. It is about the refusal to forget or to despair in the face of temptation, usually dressed up as bracing ‘realism.’ How tiresome of the old people at Eaton Square, who insist on remembering what cannot be restored! But (they might reply) to accept that which is unjust as if the passage of time rendered it just – that would be to replace history itself by a ‘meaningless façade.’
[1986
Terrorists
In the museum at Naples, there is a statue of two terrorists. Harmodius and Aristogeiton stand naked, brandishing their daggers, their empty eyes bulging and exalted.
They have just killed Hipparchus, brother of the Athenian tyrant Hippias. They think the crowd is about to surge towards them with cheers and flowers. They are wrong, for Harmodius was instantly cut down by the bodyguard while Aristogeiton was arrested and tortured to death. And the tyrant ruled on.
They had meant to kill Hippias too, but failed. They struck for liberty, but also because Hipparchus was the unfaithful lover of Aristogeiton. While Hippias lived, they were called degenerate assassins. When he died, they became ‘The Liberators’; statues were made of them, and their relations were granted the right of free meals for ever in the official dining room.
All these events in the sixth century BC have a bearing on modern terrorism. They illustrate its genius for political miscalculation, its tendency to kill the wrong person, its capacity for making bad worse, its steamy mixture of motives, and its gift for making history behave like a whore.
These seem to me points worth following up in the context of the Hezbollah, the Provisionals and all the rest. None of them occurred in the speech on terrorism made, before his operation, by President Reagan, which strikes me as one of the most hypocrtical and dangerous bags of wind ever inflated by a modern Western leader.
It is dangerous, not because (I think) it presages violent action but because it nudges already nervous millions towards paranoia. It is hypocritical, because the Reagan list of ‘terror states’ – Iran, Libya, North Korea, Cuba and Nicaragua – has omitted Syria, always previously high on the American list but now owed something for helping to release the TWA hostages. And because, less surprisingly, neither South Africa nor Israel figure. Neither of those countries use terror against the United States, of course.
President Reagan spoke of a new ‘Murder Inc.,’ a co-ordinated international conspiracy directed against his country by governments ‘united by one simple criminal phenomenon -their fanatical hatred of the United States.’
To hate America may be misguided and deplorable, but until now it has not been a crime. Embarrassed diplomats tell us privately that this was a speech only for domestic consumption … probably written by Patrick Buchanan … not meant to be taken seriously abroad, and so forth. One gets tired of this sort of explanation. A loud enough bark amounts to a bite, in politics.
To define terrorism is almost as hard as to suppress it. The late Senator ‘Scoop’ Jackson tried valiantly to dispel the fog of moral relativism when he said; ‘the idea that one person’s “terrorist” is another’s “freedom fighter” cannot be sanctioned. Freedom fighters or revolutionaries don’t blow up buses containing non-combatants; terrorist murderers do…. Freedom fighters don’t assassinate innocent men, women and children; terrorist murderers do. It is a disgrace that democracies would allow the treasured word “freedom” to be associated with acts of terrorists.’
That is a quotation constantly used by Secretary of State George Shultz, who added the other day that ‘We know the difference between terrorists and freedom fighters, and as we look around the world, we have no trouble telling one from the other.’
Mr Shultz may have no trouble as he looks around the world because he is not, in fact, using Jackson’s definition of terrorism by methods but a much cruder definition by intentions. Those who use guerrilla and urban guerrilla war against the United States and its friends are terrorists. The others – Mr Savimbi’s men or the Afghan resistance – are freedom fighters. This is a useless distinction, but Senator Jackson’s is not much better.
Put hindsight away for a moment. In 1940, the legal government of France signed a peace with Germany. But a handful of ‘irresponsible’ people put the lives of Frenchmen and even the survival of the State at risk by conducting a terrorist struggle against the German occupiers and the collaborators of the Vichy government. Many innocent people died. Four years later, the terrorists were marching down the Champs-Elysées as the saviours of the nation. This is the whoreishness of history, manifested also in the freedom struggle of Israel through terrorism to statehood, in the transformation of Kenyatta from the leader of blood-smeared Mau Mau to the father of modern Kenya, in Zimbabwe’s way from merciless guerrilla war to independence.
So method is not the measure of the terrorist. Almost all freedom fighters, whether we like their sort of ‘freedom’ or not, use terror at some time and to some degree. Nicaragua supports guerrilla rebels in Salvador, but the Contras, publicly sponsored by the United States, use terror much more directly. And there is also government terrorism. Noam Chomsky distinguished the ‘retail terror’ of rebels from what he called ‘wholesale terror,’ referring to ‘the numbers tormented and killed by official violence.’
It is a lot easier to say what we mean by ‘terrorist acts.’ Here Senator Jackson’s examples will stand, and even Mr Shultz’s certainties. I have watched blood pouring down the gutter from the skulls of innocent men, and the tatters of what had been a bus queue enlaced in the twigs of a tree. The deliberate murder of uninvolved civilians for the end of intimidation is always abominable and always wrong.
But there are two disagreeable – morally queasy – riders to that. One is that terror sometimes ‘works.’ I am pretty certain that if the IRA were able to mount a far more terrible and sustained bombing campaign on the British mainland, public opinion would force a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. The second rider is that the use of terrorism does not always or automatically vitiate the cause in which it is used.
President Reagan is deliberately creating confusion between guerrilla movements which include terrorism in their armoury, and groups – like the left-wing bands in Western Europe which he mentions and the right-wing bands which he does not -committed to terrorism and nothing else. To equate the Red Army Faction in West Germany with the Salvador guerrillas, and then to portray the Soviet Union as the controlling spider at the centre of the web of world t
errorism, is not only fatuous but makes the question of how to respond to events like Shia air piracy far more difficult.
Retaliation? A hundred years ago, ‘punitive expeditions’ burned villages in the bush. Violating another State’s sovereignty by air strike or commando raid is much more complicated. To its credit, the United States has always been reluctant to do this, even to combine a hostage rescue with a satisfying thunderclap of vengeance like the Israelis at Entebbe or the French at Kolwezi. President Carter’s failed rescue of the Iran hostages in 1980 allowed for heavy losses among raiders and hostages, but not for a ‘retaliatory’ slaughter of Iranians.
But this reluctance may be weakening. With actual terrorists hard to find, ‘terror states’ become an inviting target. Libya exported some 25 acts of terror last year; Iran about 60. And a first step to retaliation is to bring the target into sharp focus, to remove the shadings of motive and method and responsibility which are inherent in the ambiguous nature of terrorism. This initial focusing is what President Reagan’s speech has done. But so far he has not moved his finger to the trigger.
[1985
Alive and Well
The Nazi-hunting season is upon us again. Mengele is finally dead, it is a year or two since anyone found Martin Bormann, and hot tips on Nazi gold in lakes and mine-shafts have become rare. But President Waldheim sits alone in Vienna, contemplating the well-deserved contempt of the world which landed on him last year. And Tom Bower, in ‘The Paperclip Conspiracy,’ has reminded us that Britain as well as America welcomed Nazi scientists after the war. Now the Home Office is anxiously checking out the charge that at least 17 war criminals have been living in this country.
Yes, Nazi murderers should be pursued for their crimes as long as they live. And yes – the hypocrisy of those who for reasons of state and expediency helped to conceal their crimes should be exposed. And yet the competitive zeal to ferret out and name guilty old men sometimes make me uneasy.
So we gave shelter to 17 men who are now accused of atrocities. Let me remind readers of an episode which has been not so much concealed as simply and totally forgotten. Just 40 years ago, the British authorities brought to this country some 8,000 men who were the survivors of a Waffen-SS division. And many of them still live here.
Put like that, it sounds like an inconceivable, unpardonable scandal. But it was not. The decision to bring these men to Britain in May 1947, and eventually to permit them to settle and acquire British citizenship, was a strange compound of casualness, British self-interest and – above all – of a merciful generosity rare in those years.
I am talking about the formation which began its life as the XIV Waffen-SS Infantry Division (Galizien). It was composed of Ukrainians and led by German SS officers. Established rather late in the war, in 1943, the division fought against the Red Army on the eastern front and was then transferred to Slovakia, to the Jugoslav frontier regions and finally to Austria. In the last days of the war, the unit got rid of its German officers, renamed itself the First Ukrainian Infantry Division of the Ukrainian National Army, and on 8 May 1945, surrendered to the British near Graz in Austria.
This isn’t the place to explain the miseries of Ukrainian nationalist politics. But the Ukrainians are the largest European people who never managed to establish and maintain a State of their own. Everyone manipulated them against everyone else. During the last war, many Ukrainians felt that while they disliked the German invaders, they hated the Russians infinitely more. Tens of thousands of them were induced to put on SS uniforms and fight their arch-enemy – on the understanding that they would not be asked to fight against the British and Americans.
Among their leaders were some fanatical pro-German Fascists, whose predecessors had been subsidised for years by German military intelligence. Anti-semitism was rife, and – as the Demjanjuk trial in Israel shows – Ukrainian police and militia units under German command carried out some of the most revolting mass slaughters of the war. But the Galizien division after a bloody defeat by the Red Army at the battle of Brody in 1944, became increasingly composed of Ukrainians either conscripted against their will or anxious to join the retreat away from the vengeful Soviet advance.
So, at the end of the war, they threw themselves on the mercy of the British. They were disarmed and transferreed to a huge camp near Rimini in Italy. The Soviet authorities visited them and informed the British that, under the terms of the Yalta conference, they wished all renegade Soviet citizens to be repatriated.
And here something remarkable happened. We all now know that, at the same time, the British were forcibly repatriating the Cossacks and Russians who had belonged to German units, and that by doing so we consigned thousands of human beings to their deaths. Nobody remembers that we refused to give up the Ukrainians.
The key was a legalism. Many of the Rimini men came from the western Ukraine, from areas which until 1939 had belonged not to the Soviet Union but to Poland. The Soviet authorities claimed that they were now ‘retrospectively’ Soviet citizens -and traitors. But the British decided to treat them as ‘Poles’: citizens of an Allied nation. Those who in fact came from beyond the 1939 border now lied about their places of birth. The British pretended not to notice.
In February 1947, a British commission carried out a sample screening at Rimini. It concluded that the Ukrainians had given ‘aid and comfort’ to the enemy for understandable reasons which were ‘incidental and not fundamental’: patriotism, ignorance, fear and ‘to have a smack at the Russians, whom they always refer to as “Bolsheviks.” ‘The commission backed up the argument that most of them were de jure Polish citizens, and recommended ‘most strongly’ that they all be defined as Displaced Persons.
In May that year, they were moved to Britain, where they worked as farm labourers with ‘prisoner of war’ status in the English Midlands. In September 1948, they were released and registered with the police as Displaced Persons. In 1950, the Home Office began to screen them all individually in order to ‘formalise their stay.’ Some went to Canada. Many remained in Britain, where the Ukrainian community now numbers something over 30,000.
But did we ‘turn a blind eye to murder’? What did the SS Galizien division really do? German veterans of the Waffen-SS claim that they were merely soldiers, but in fact some Waffen-SS divisions committed barbarous crimes. Survivors of Galizien to whom I have spoken say that there were no massacres, only straightforward fighting or garrison duty in occupied regions.
Soviet sources, rather naturally, say the opposite. They attack Britain for ‘illegally listing Ukrainians as refugees,’ and denying them ‘the possibility of liberating themselves from capitalist slavery’ by ‘forcing’ them to stay in the West. But they also allege atrocities.
Some are nonsense. The division did not take part in the massacre of civilians after the Warsaw Rising: that was a different Ukrainian outfit. A few allegations, however, sound more solid. The division is said to have murdered the population of Huta Pieniacka, a Polish village. And the divisional chronicle – unless it is a Soviet forgery – records that the third battalion of the fourth regiment, at Tarnopol on 6 March 1944, drove ‘all the Poles into a cathedral and exterminated them.’
It’s hard to know. My guess is that evil deeds were done. A unit in SS uniform commanded by German Nazis and operating in hostile territory against partisans has about as much chance of emerging with clean hands as a snowflake has to survive in hell. But for what it is worth, the SS Galizien seems to have behaved less horribly than some other Ukrainian formations.
I would guess that there are a few old Ukrainians in this country with plenty to hide. Neither their compatriots nor the British have bothered to find out what, and that is culpable. On balance, though, most of these men were ignorant victims of oppression and war. The decision to open Britain’s doors to them was – also on balance – something to be proud of. But if this country had opened its doors as widely to Jews fleeing from Hitler a few years earlier, I would be prouder still.
[1987
Spies
The little exchange of populations between Britain and the Soviet Union has stopped. It has cost us our Moscow correspondent, Mark Frankland, a shrewd but not unaffectionate watcher of the Russian scene. It has devastated Anglo-Soviet relations, damaged the careers of some quite blameless individuals, and brought joy only to transcontinental furniture-movers.
The British, though shocked by the force of the Soviet response, are not as outraged by the activities of the KGB in London as they affect to be. An open political system invites spying, among other prices which are not too high to pay. But Whitehall sees a decent limit to everything, and Soviet intelligence has become indecently greedy. The Foreign Office view is that the KGB should show some table manners when faced with this luscious buffet of easy information, and should not push their luck too hard.
It is a stoic way of looking at what has happened. It also reveals how generations of Cold War have taught the West to live with the fact of espionage, or at least to think in terms of a ‘reasonable’ level of spying. Many years ago, when the use of spies in international relations was considered as disgraceful as the use of poison gas in war, moral categories were firmer. Later, ‘our’ spies were secret heroes, while ‘their’ spies were monsters. Today, there are those who regard foreign intelligence as no more than a shady section of the mass media.
Writing in the Spectator, Tim Garton Ash has attacked such moral indifference: those who ask whether the new flock of West German spies can really be described as ‘traitors’ forget that the democracy and tolerance of the Federal Republic deserve the patriotism and loyalty of its civil servants – and secretaries. But this fair comment also asks us to go on treating the Cold War as a real war – as an emergency in which a good end justifies the means used by the secret agent, while an evil end does not.
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