SERBIA IS NOT PAKISTAN. OR SYRIA

The long arm of the (Western) law reaches into Serbia and plucks Ratko Mladic out of hiding with a view to whizzing him off to The Hague (52 degrees North, 4 degrees East), where he will face an international war crimes tribunal. The same long arm, but this time of the (Western) lawlessness, reaches into Pakistan and summarily executes Osama bin Laden. 

Both actions are greeted as triumphs for freedom and democracy, but questions arise as to why these two much-sought renegades received such different treatment. Part of the answer is that Serbia is not Pakistan. Serbia is in Europe, at least in that eastward-expanding version of Europe that is growing since the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Serbia wants Europe. Europe – Germany and France – wants Serbia, but doesn't know what it wants with Pakistan.

Mladic stands accused of horrendous crimes of violence and sexual depravity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing during the forty three month siege of Sarajevo (43 degrees North, 18 degrees East), which killed some 12, 000 people and the July 1995 Srebrenica (44 degrees North, 19 degrees East) massacre of 8, 000 Muslim men and boys. Of course Serbia is not the USA and Mladic did not kill Americans. His targets were Bosnian and Muslim.

The death toll of the World Trade Centre suicide plane attacks was 3, 000, an horrific figure, but considerably less than the outcome of the devastation ordered and inspired by Mladic. Other killings were inspired and/or ordered by bin Laden, but he never reached the grotesque numbers achieved by Mladic. However, he is not before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. He is buried at sea, following summary execution. Perhaps if he had moved to Serbia and not Pakistan he would still be alive?

And if not Serbia, then perhaps Syria? How the long arm of the (Western) law curls back upon itself, rather than intervening as it is in Libya! What exactly is happening in Syria? A peoples' uprising? An ethnic civil war?

In Act 1 Scene 3 of Shakespeare's Macbeth, the witches, waiting to ambush the Scottish General, plan havoc on the husband of a 'rump-fed ronyon' who refused the First Witch some of her chestnuts. 

The First Witch says

'Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger:

But in a sieve I'll thither sail,

And, like a rat without a tail, 

I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.'

Aleppo (36 degrees North, 37 degrees East) is the second largest city in Syria, with an ethnically and religiously mixed population of Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Muslims, Eastern Christians, Jews and others.  See pictures of the city and hear a song by the wonderful Fairuz at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF3EooAkUzI

Repression and killing by President Bashar al-Assad and his regime are the problem. The 1982 massacres in Hama (35 degrees North, 36 degrees East) and Aleppo ordered by his father and his uncle hang over the current unrest. Will the long arm of the (Western) law reach for him? Sanctions are being discussed, but no clarity exists as to The President's fate, whether it is to be summary execution or arrest. Put him in  sieve without a sail and launch him down the Euphrates river, through Iraq, all the way to the Persian Gulf and then on to The Hague for a war crimes tribunal? Along with the Second and Third Witches, George Bush and Tony Blair?

THE QUEEN'S SPEECH

Today is the last day of the state visit of The Queen of England to the Republic of Ireland. The citizens now only have the visit of The President of The United States of America to host. (See May Visitations. March Demises. 25th March 2011). 

A comic song of Dublin (53 degrees North, 6 degrees West) goes: 

The Queen she came to call on us, she came to call on all of us 

I'm glad she didn't fall on us, she's eighteen stone.

So take her up to Monto, Monto, Monto

Take her up to Monto, langeroo

The song, though written in 1958 by the music critic of The Irish Times,  George Hodnett, refers to Queen Victoria. The current British monarch is very far from eighteen stone. She is, in fact, a slim and sprightly octogenarian, seen bending to wield a garden spade to good effect at a tree planting with The Irish President, Mary McAleese, in Áras an Uachtaráin, Dublin. A Belfast (54 degrees North, 5 degrees West)  woman, the President is chiselling her name into the history books as a champion of reconciliation, accelerating a peace process she has advanced forcefully throughout her public life, now that the end of her Presidency draws near.

It won't make a film title like its gendered opposite but The Queen's speech at a Dublin Castle banquet, during which she wore an ultra-bling dress and tiara she could sell to feed a refugee camp, used the language of disappointment -  we could have done things differently or not at all – in an attempt to say something positive about the historical legacy of the colonial relationship between two neighbouring islands. 

The people of England are re-evaluating their imperial past. That it is a wealthy and nuclear-armed country today is a legacy of that imperial past. Some discomfort is being experienced among political and military elites that the British Prime Minister and the monarch are using the language of wrongdoers - regret, sorry, should not have happened - with familiarity and ease, but historical legacy issues appear increasingly present on public agendas as pressure from below has greater and greater effect. The elites know they must manage this pressure in order to maintain control.

In Ireland, there is some energy coming from elites to lance the boils of the past. One of the most inflamed and daunting of these is a damning legacy of urban poverty. The British monarch did not, in fact, get taken up to Monto, Dublin's historical red-light district, made famous by James Joyce in the Night Town sequence of Ulysses. Monto, as such, is gone, but the north inner city remains notoriously poor, full of native poor and an increasing immigrant poor population, not to be seen by The Queen, and certainly not  allowed within an ass' roar of the banquet in Dublin Castle.

The inner city is clamped in a ring of cold blue steel formed by Gardaí and elite Army personnel. Dissident republican threats necessitate this. The obverse side of the ludicrous actions of militant republicans are the fawning and the kow-towing the Queen's visit elicits. Hardly surprising, as Ireland is a young republic, with a long history of royalty holding sway, both indigenous ones, regional and national, and foreign ones of English-Norman, Dutch, Scottish and, in the current case, German origins.

Hodnett's song also has the lines:

Mister Milord the Mayor says she,

Is this all you've got to show for me,

Why no Mam there's more to see, 'Póg Mo Thóin'.

The Irish translates to English as 'kiss my arse', a line for citizens corralled behind police lines perhaps?

ARCADIA

Arcadia is a play by English playwright Tom Stoppard. It is a tonic and a puzzle, words that could be applied to the new administration emerging in Northern Ireland. Arcadia is also the idyllic Greek district ruled by the mythological King Arca, who showed his people how to weave, grow corn and make bread, tasks facing the kings (and a small number of queens), Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs), taking power by appointing themselves to various ministries.

Stoppard stands on the shoulders of Farquhar, Wilde, Ayckbourn and Frayn. He tonics us with Lady Croom: 'I have had the experience of being betrayed before the ink was dry, but to be betrayed before the pen was dipped, and with the village noticeboard, what am I to think of such a performance.' He puzzles us with Septimus Hodge: 'We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing is lost to it.'

There is nothing outside the new administration. Voters, even allowing for the relatively low turnout, overwhelmingly chose the two parties, Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party, who run the coalition government in Northern Ireland, by sharing or carving up, depending on your political view. Other parties declined in votes or flattered themselves by taking votes off each other. 


The procession is indeed long and new life is breathed into it as power is disbursed. What was let fall by the last administration is picked up: the economic mess is faced by favouring international capital via preferential corporate tax arrangements; fiscal problems are addressed by cutting public services and capping social welfare, thereby underusing resources and taking money out of the economy; coping with the legacy of the violent past is airbrushed, photoshopped and talked to a standstill. The ink dries on agreements and new pens are dipped in readiness for signing new deals.

Citizens are tonicced and puzzled, but, in the main, pleased that the state military presence is thoroughly lessened and paramilitary violence is intermittent and small-scale. But herein lies a  paradox and Lady Croom warns us: 'Do not dabble in paradox..... it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit.'

Can Arcadia be enjoyed by governing - weaving, growing corn and making bread, countless other tasks - in this way?

The march is long and looking both in front and behind great aeons of time present, hence a tortoise on stage in Stoppard's play Arcadia. Named variously as Plautus and Lightning, it is the cleverest clock device in theatre. Taking the long view then, the new administration may perhaps be the route to building Arcadia, yet one of the puzzles not faced by Stoppard is how to reconcile the differing experiences and needs of the various people on the march, linked by an essential humanity, yes, but divided by, amongst other things, social class. His dazzling and wonderful play is set among aristocrats, Regency and modern, landed gentry and academics, who gently tolerate, but don't trust, the rest. Chloe says they're running: 'A dance for the district, our annual dressing up and general drunkenness. The wrinklies won't have it in the house, there was a teapot we once had to bag back from Christie's in the nick of time, so anything that can be destroyed, stolen or vomited on has been tactfully removed.'  

Arcadia will not be enjoyed by the tactful removal of resources or prohibiting entry to certain of the long marchers. There is more than a paradox here. There is a political and social puzzle. One for the new administration to unravel. As Stoppard says in his great play: 'It's the wanting to know that makes us matter'

          

UNPARLIAMENTARY LANGUAGE

A leader of a political party, tired and hungry at the end of lengthy election campaign and count, refers to supporters of an opposing party as 'scum' and describes the flags they are carrying as 'foreign'. As an exercise in community relations in Northern Ireland, it is a disaster. It may yet be a political disaster and a career-ending outburst. As a farmer, the party leader can have no trouble with the colour green. As a member of the Orange Order, he can have no problem with the colour orange. And how could he possibly have a problem with the colour white in a tricolour?

That mere cloth, colour and words - hot air?- can cause such uproar gives us pause. That one politician should let down his political guard so badly allows others to smugly congratulate themselves on their tolerance and respect. Unfortunately, the language and attitudes displayed are widespread in Northern Ireland. They are a manifestation of one of the sources of the conflict, viz. communal fear. As well as being among the sources, the language and the attitudes are part of the legacy of the violence that erupted from the conflict. In the hall, where the party leader lost his political grip, were former members of paramilitary groups who opposed the state. The party leader is a former soldier in state forces.  Language reveals its use as a weapon. As do cloth and colour, in various combinations.

The party leader apologised belatedly and somewhat cack-handedly. It may not be enough to save him politically. Other words are being exchanged, quietly and away from the public gaze, which may yet lead to the party leader changing roles. Smaller weapons, daggers and kris, are being held to his neck and perhaps plunged into his back.

Thankfully not in possession of daggers and kris, a football fan hurdles a steward, a gate, two fences and advertising hoardings to clatter the manager of an opposing team during a tense end-of-season game in Edinburgh (55 degrees North, 3 degrees West), Scotland. The manager has previously been attacked on the street and received bullets and, most recently, parcel bombs in the post. The leader of the newly-forming Scottish Assembly is appalled at further evidence of rising sectarianism – largely anti-Catholic and anti-Irish. It is not part of his plans for the brave new world of an independent Scotland.

Language, cloth and colour will have to be considered. Evelyn Waugh's ironic novel title Put Out More Flags may be relevant. Does it mean fly more flags? Or extinguish them? Basil Seal, a villain in the very funny book, says: 'But you see, one can't expect anything to be perfect now. In the old days, if there was one thing wrong, it spoiled everything; from now on, for all our lives, if there's one thing right the day is made.'

Getting 'language, cloth and colour' right is just one of many challenges facing the new Assemblies in Northern Ireland and Scotland.

KILLING OSAMA BIN LADEN

The opening lyrics in a famous George and Ira Gershwin song, sung wonderfully by Billie Holiday, Fred Astaire and many others, are: You say either, I say either. You say neither, I say neither. Either, either, neither, neither. Let's call the whole thing off. New lyrics for the song could be: You say Obama, I say Osama. You say birth-cert. I say death cert. Obama, Osama, birth cert, death cert. Let's call the whole thing off. 

The key line is the last, but how to do that, when the primary aim of the killing of Osama bin Laden by US elite naval personnel (a form of industrialised suicide missionaries) in Abottabad, Pakistan (34 degrees North, 73 degrees East) is the preserving of the American imperium, given changing world and domestic circumstances? The production of birth and death certificates in one week mark the trumpeting of the election campaign that will see Obama back in The White House for a second term. 

Of course there is no equivalence between The President of the United States of America and the leader of Al-Qaeda. But their linkage through violence and their invocation of their Gods is remarkable. On the one hand, a highly resourced state-sponsored delivery of the death penalty in the context of an internationalised war. On the other an ideology and impetus for terror and destruction in the name of religion. 

A 'shoot to kill' policy is applied. A trial could have been embarrassing, however unlikely given the Guantanamo Bay (20 degrees North, 75 degrees West) incarceration process and the fact that the USA, along with a number of other states, including Israel, Sudan, Iran and North Korea, exist in a state of permanent or near-permanent war. Permanent war, whether waged by states or jihadin, permits acts that seriously challenge the human understanding of terms such as 'justice' and 'revenge', gravely damage commitments to freedom and cauterise the language to such an extent that it cannot build peace.  

A cycle of violence is given an extra spin in Abottabad. New fuel is added to already foetid and burning pyres, such as The Twin Towers and the ravaged villages of Iraq and Afghanistan. Hawks everywhere scream 'vengeance'. Ironies abound. The compound where bin Laden lived is in the same neighbourhood as an elite army training centre, no doubt visited by US military personnel. More Muslims than people of any faith or none are killed by jihadin. Osama bin Laden is more dangerous dead than alive. Many Americans are embarrassed by jubilation exhibited by groups of people (frat packs?) in Washington and New York. Al-Qaeda and its associates make plans. And Pax Americana prevails. 

Another George and Ira Gershwin song ends with

What a break, for heaven's sake

How long has this been goin' on?

Peggy Lee sings it wonderfully, with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. It's quite a question and currently merits the coda: How long will it continue?