Night of power, p.59
Night of Power, page 59
Yet far from now demanding freedom for the majority of Bahrain’s population, British prime minister David Cameron in May 2011 invited the Bahraini crown prince for an official visit to the UK, exchanging a warm handshake with Sheikh Salman outside 10 Downing Street as the latter set out to repair his kingdom’s reputation for violence. There were obvious reasons for what the Independent called Britain’s ‘morally offensive’ selective blindness. The Royal Bank of Scotland alone revealed that it had £302 million of loans tied up in Bahrain, and in April 2011, the Bahrain British Business Forum looked back on what it called ‘a record year’. Yet in that same month of May, Cameron’s foreign secretary William Hague was organising EU sanctions against Syria after Assad’s troops fired on protesters.
We do not know how Ian Henderson, Bahrain’s former security boss, reacted to the 2011 uprising. He had retired to his Dartmoor home in the English west country fifteen years earlier, weighed down with honours from the monarchy he so faithfully served. He was to die in 2013, untroubled by the numerous accusations of brutality made against him by human rights groups. In 2000, Scotland Yard’s Serious Crimes Branch organised a lacklustre investigation of Henderson’s outrageous behaviour in Bahrain but no charges were ever levelled against the most trusted of the king’s foreign servants – despite evidence from disfigured torture victims who were able to identify him.
In July 2002, British Carlton Television broadcast a half-hour documentary on Henderson’s career in Bahrain, ‘Blind Eye to the Butcher’. It disclosed a Foreign Office report which mentioned Henderson – and was probably written by Sir Anthony Parsons, a former political agent at the British embassy in Bahrain in the late 1960s and later ambassador to Iran. An extract from the document describes how ‘over the past three years [Bahrain] Special Branch under the able leadership of Henderson has established a dominating position over the subversive [sic] groups’.
Nor, in those sensitive days immediately following its publication, was the Bahraini royal family bereft of advice from another experienced former British police officer. For in early December 2011, the Bahraini monarchy hired ‘Yates of the Yard’ to advise on the reform of its security services. John Yates had been Assistant Commissioner in the London Metropolitan Police Service, holder of the Queen’s Police Medal for coordinating the police response to the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Yates ran the British ‘Special Inquiry Squad’, investigating cash-for-honours accusations in the UK, but retired in 2011 after severe criticism of his handling of a re-investigation of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. Lord Justice Leveson would refer to Yates’ approach during the later inquiry as an ‘inappropriately dismissive, defensive and closed-minded attitude’. This obviously did not worry his new employers in the Bahraini royal palace who hired Yates less than six months after his resignation from the Met.
He arrived in Bahrain, in his own words, ‘to reform the practices of the police force’ along with former US police chief John Timoney, an Irish-born officer who had transformed the Miami police department – with a reputation for recklessly shooting civilians – into a force which did not fire a shot for almost two years. The New Yorker, no less, described Timoney as ‘one of the most progressive and effective police chiefs in the country’. But confronting protests against a 2003 trade summit in Miami, Timoney was bitterly criticised for organising the extensive use of pepper spray, rubber bullets, tasers and batons against protesters.
Neither Yates nor Timoney were accused of encouraging the brutalisation or torture of Bahraini prisoners, but even after the arrival of the two police ‘experts’, condemnation by human rights groups continued. The Bahrain Centre for Human Rights logged thirty documented cases of Bahrainis dying after confrontations with the police or security forces between November 2011 and March 2012. Reports persisted in 2012 of Shiites accused of plotting with Iran to overthrow the monarchy. The Anglo-Danish Redress NGO complained in 2013 that detainees from the 2011 protests had still not been released, that policemen were never charged with torture – but with ‘assault resulting in death’. In early 2013, a prestigious medical ethics conference in Bahrain was cancelled by Médecins Sans Frontières after the authorities failed to give written permission for the meeting at a Manama hotel to go ahead. Jonathan Whittall of MSF in the Middle East said that the conference had been intended to ‘restore trust in the health system of Bahrain’ because health facilities in Bahrain had become a battleground during the 2011 protests. The Irish president of the Medical University of Bahrain resigned. He had received a verbal assurance from the crown prince that the event would go ahead – ‘I want this conference to happen,’ he apparently told the university president – but the necessary written permission never arrived.
Only months later, the Washington-based Human Rights First movement called on the Obama administration to withhold arms sales because King Hamad had not fulfilled his promised reforms. In January 2014, Shia crowds fought police after a twenty-three-year-old died in custody. The Bahrain justice minister sought to suspend the Shia Al-Wefaq party; then the government ordered Tom Malinowski, the US assistant secretary for human rights, to leave Bahrain after he met leaders of Al-Wefaq, including Sheikh Ali Salman. The Obama administration failed to react, although the State Department devoted forty-nine pages of its 2014 report on human rights to Bahrain, detailing arbitrary detention, torture, prison overcrowding and constraints on free speech.
Incredibly – an overused word which in this case is justified – many of these abuses were almost identical to those I was writing about two decades earlier. The reports of torture and deaths in custody after the 2011 demonstrations were interchangeable with my own files of Amnesty International records of equivalent events in the 1990s. In November 2014, an inmate was beaten senseless by Bahraini security police and thrown into solitary confinement where he died from his wounds. In the summer of 2016, the Bahraini government closed down Al-Wefaq, stripped Bahrain’s Shia spiritual leader, Ayatollah Isa Qassim, of his citizenship and doubled a prison sentence on the veteran opposition leader Sheikh Ali Salman, the secretary general of Al-Wefaq. The sheikh – once, of course, a detainee of Henderson and now an essential figure in the theatre of the absurd which Bahrain constructed around his existence – is, at the time of writing, still in prison. Sentenced to four years in 2015 for speeches he made in 2012 and 2014 – he had then dared to call for a peaceful settlement of the 2011 demonstrators’ demands and the arrest of those committing human rights abuses – Ali Salman was arraigned yet again after a successful appeal court hearing in 2018, and sent to prison for life. The evidence for this latest travesty in justice was based on a telephone call Salman made to the Bahrain prime minister, Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, eight years earlier. Nothing, in other words, had changed.
But amid Bahrain’s rule of repression, detention and death, there was one unique opera bouffe performed by the royal family and its faithful retainers: to persuade the world – despite all the evidence to the contrary – that Bahrain was just an ordinary, freedom-loving, peaceful little kingdom in the Orient, as beloved by its Western friends (and Saudi Arabia) as it was suffering only from occasional troublemakers and unspecified ‘activists’ on the streets. The key word was normality – demonstrated most potently by the holding of the Bahrain Grand Prix in 2012, only a year after it was cancelled because of the Arab uprising in Manama. The island was safe for this great international sporting event, the Khalifas insisted; more than that, it was a symbol of national unity. Sport – however much a parody its physical expression might be in the circumstances – was supposed to be above politics. The UK Foreign Office urged fans to stay away, but the crown prince turned the arguments round. Having decided to stage the race, he announced that ‘cancelling just empowers extremists’ – thus proving that sport had a good deal to do with politics, especially of the violent kind.
He did not have to worry. Those kings of motor-racing Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton were only in it for the sport, they announced. ‘I think it’s a lot of hype,’ declared German driver Sebastian Vettel. The Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone said it was ‘business as usual’, arguing that ‘the press should just be quiet and deal with the facts rather than make up stories’ – as if the death and torture of protesters in Bahrain was fiction. Suppose, I asked in the Independent, if Bashar al-Assad had been hosting the Formula 1 weekend. Would Ecclestone have been dining out in Damascus, happy to give the regime a soft sporting cover for its oppression? But none were as convinced of Bahrain’s integrity – nor more loyal in upholding its government – as the writer of a long and sometimes bitterly argued post-Grand Prix article which appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 24 April 2012 under the self-pitying headline: ‘Bahrain is bewildered by the world’s hostility’.
Yes, terrible ‘things’ had happened in 2011 and the king had acknowledged this; some of the thirty-five deaths had been at the hands of the security forces. But there was to be a new police ombudsman, 500 extra ‘community police officers’, a new police ‘code of conduct’ and the CID was being reformed, the article promised. ‘I am not an apologist for what happened last year,’ the writer lamented, but ‘like many Bahrainis and expats … I am bewildered by the level of criticism aimed at a nation that has acknowledged its mistakes’. This small nation had been left amazed
at the level of ignorance about what is really happening here, at the level of animosity and bile, at the media bias. And bewildered that so many in the UK … could so readily swallow everything opposition groups and activists were saying … Headlines suggested that the country was in flames … I do not wish to trivialise the situation in Bahrain. There remain difficulties [sic], all of which require political solutions. But this is not Syria …
Henderson would have approved. The article was written, the Telegraph explained, by ‘the former UK Head of Counter-Terrorism’, John Yates – ‘Yates of the Yard’.
1 A day later, thousands of Iranians walked in silence through Tehran to mourn those students killed at the university and, afterwards, in Azadi Square. A young commercial lawyer among them had studied psychology. ‘If we let go now, we are going to face someone like Pinochet – and our dictators here are not even up-to-date dictators,’ she told me without a trace of a smile. ‘My psychological training is very useful. Ahmadinejad has a classic psychosis problem. He lies a lot and he’s hallucinatory and the problem is, he thinks he’s related to someone up there!’ And here the lady pointed in the general direction of heaven. Years later, trying to elevate his most trusted lieutenant to his private office, Ahmadinejad found his friend accused of sorcery and witchcraft. This was the world of occultism which Khomeini had managed to frame for his Islamic state.
2 In the first weeks of the revolution, Bouazizi’s memory was burnished by the retelling of his sacrifice by intellectuals. Tunisian author and psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama, for example, would claim that Bouazizi ‘has become an example … of how each man is reduced by qahr – a word we might translate as “total powerlessness” – and who prefers total annihilation rather than a life as a nobody. I believe that he heralds, or reveals, a change in the role model of the “martyr” in the Arab world.’
3 Ben Ali, who was seventy-four, died in his Saudi exile eight years later. A story, subsequently investigated by Le Monde, said that he and his family had not ‘fled’ to Saudi Arabia on 14 January 2011 but had travelled to Jeddah for an official ‘holiday’ visit on a Tunisair flight. The crew, walking into the airport’s VIP suite, apparently saw an Al Jazeera newscast claiming that their president had run away to Saudi Arabia. At which point, the aircraft’s captain, Mahmoud Cheikhrouhou later revealed, called his airline boss and decided to leave his president behind in Jeddah, taking his plane and crew straight back to Tunis after only two and a half hours on the ground.
4 Published in 1975, Gaddafi’s thin volume sets out his political philosophy.
5 Blair was an official Middle East envoy when travelling on Gaddafi’s private jet.
6 It is hard to avoid the impression, Cowell concluded, ‘that in the murky worlds of intelligence agencies that first tracked Colonel Qaddafi as a sponsor of terrorism, then collaborated with him after his Pauline conversion to cooperation with the West less than a decade ago, there may have been relief that he was denied an opportunity to unburden himself of his manifold secrets’.
7 Our journalistic response to all reports of atrocities in the Middle East was heavily influenced by the history of propaganda warfare. After reports of German outrages against Belgian civilians in 1914 – some of them true, but grossly exaggerated – were used to inflame Allied anger against the Kaiser, British and American officials doubted initial accounts of the Holocaust which reached them in 1942. These turned out to be not only true, but a gross underestimation of the evil committed by Nazi Germany against the Jews of Europe and other minorities. After the Second World War, armies regularly publicised atrocity stories about their enemies, and journalists – unwilling to repeat those initial expressions of disbelief at Nazi war crimes – readily accepted almost any accusation of massacre, mass rape or torture alleged by Western military or political leaders.
8 Within weeks, widespread Islamist violence would become a routine part of the Libya war. In early October, more than 200 heavily armed, uniformed and bearded Salafists attacked a Tripoli mosque and smashed the tombs of two imams. Pneumatic drills were used to destroy two Muslim cemeteries near the capital. In Benghazi five months later, Commonwealth and Italian military graveyards from the Second World War would be desecrated.
9 Readers might start their search for the truth of this mysterious but tragic mass killing by studying Megrahi: You Are My Jury – The Lockerbie Evidence (2012) by journalist John Ashton, who was a researcher with the legal team representing Megrahi. While it contains its own flaws, several reviewers and the campaigning MP Tam Dalyell were convinced that Ashton’s 497-page investigation provided convincing evidence of Megrahi’s innocence.
10 Syria alone in the Middle East was capable of finding the operatives capable of destroying an American aircraft. Yet the moment Syria sent its tanks to defend Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait less than two years later, all the MI6 truth-telling was switched off. Syria was now an ally of the United States. So the spies and diplomats – and the man from the Daily Telegraph – suddenly peddled a new and far less likely story. It was not Syria but Colonel Gaddafi who had destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.
11 He would have done well to read the work of Patrick Haimzadeh, a former French diplomat in Tripoli. He has written at length of the Libyan tribes who, for political as well as geographical reasons, supported both Gaddafi and the rebels. Some different allegiances – those of the Zintan and the Machachiya, for example – went back to the period of Italian colonisation. Tribes from Bani Walid, Tarhouna and the Fezzan were loyal to Gaddafi.
12 On behalf of the UK government, Richards – still the head of the defence staff – also drew up plans to train and equip a 100,000-strong Syrian rebel army to overthrow Assad, a scheme later abandoned by the British cabinet. After his retirement in 2013, Baron Richards of Herstmonceux would become an adviser to the United Arab Emirates government and the American arms company DynCorp.
14
The Men in White Socks
… I think too of
The conquered condition, countries where […]
Courts martial meet at midnight with drums,
And pudgy persons pace unsmiling
The quays and stations or cruise the nights
In vans for victims, to investigate
In sound-proof cells the Sense of Honour …
W. H. Auden, from The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, Part One (Rosetta), 1947
Waiting in Aeroflot’s Moscow lounge for a flight back to Beirut, I was attracted by a Russian magazine containing a feature on the Prophet Mohamed. I cannot read Russian, but the article was illustrated with an extraordinary sixteenth-century oil painting of the Prophet riding up to heaven on the Night of Power, his face covered with a veil, his horse Buraq galloping up to the seven heavens for Mohamed’s ultimate arrival at the throne of God. In the painting, his journey was surrounded by gouts of golden fire that curled and writhed across a pitch-black surface. It crystallised the fearful, magnificent, brave and terrible events that I was witnessing with my own eyes across these lands of super-history.
And never would there be more golden fire and darkness as in Syria. I had been visiting this country for three and a half decades. And the moment I heard in 2011 of civil unrest and anti-Assad demonstrations in Damascus and then Daraa, I knew what to expect. In my Beirut archives, I searched back to some of my first reports from Syria after I arrived in the Middle East as a correspondent for The Times. I had almost forgotten one series of dispatches, which I filed from Aleppo in 1980 – all of thirty-one years before the civil war broke out. These telexed reports of mine were a ghostly template of what I would be writing as the civil war reached Aleppo in 2012. Were it not for the rusting staples and the creased old paper I might have been persuaded this was an aberrant version of my current reports. But sure enough, on 26 March 1980 I reported from northern Syria on how the country’s deputy interior minister had
just sent a report to his superior on the violence in Aleppo and the central city of Hama. Usually, the minister’s weekly report is just half a page in length but this document covered five full pages and listed outbreaks of rioting and shooting not only in Aleppo and in Hama but in the towns of Deir ez-Zor on the Euphrates, Idlib and at Maarat al-Numan where the army maintains a well-guarded barracks. More significantly, the document gave the casualty toll as eighty dead in Hama – nearly all of them Baath party officials – and almost a hundred dead in Aleppo, most of them civilians.1
