New world disorder reviews

Reviews of books or exhibitions about wars since 1990.

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The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff (2004)

How should democracies respond to terrorist attacks? In particular, How much violence, secrecy and violations of human rights should a Western government deploy in order to safeguard a democratic state which, ironically, claims to deplore violence, secrecy and loudly promotes human rights?

How far can a democracy resort to these means without undermining and to some extent damaging the very values it claims to be defending?

How far can it go to deploy the lesser evil of abrogating some people’s human rights in order to ensure the greater good of ensuring the security and safety of the majority? These are the questions Ignatieff sets out to address in this book.

The book is based on a series of six lectures Ignatieff gave at the University of Edinburgh in 2003. Obviously the context for the lectures and their starting point was the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America.

Historical context – the War on Terror

It’s difficult now to recreate the mood of hysteria which gripped so much public discourse in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. US President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror (18 September 2001) which justified major military attacks on Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom starting 7 October 2001), then Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom starting 20 March 2003), alongside combat operations in a number of other Muslim countries (the Philippines, Sudan et al). The US Congress passed a law allowing the President to declare war on anyone he thought was a threat. In his State of the Union speech, 29 January 2002, Bush singled out three likely contenders as the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’, being Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

Apart from the mismanagement of the two major wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the most contentious aspect of the so-called War on Terror became what many perceived to be the egregious breaches of human rights which a newly bullish America began to practice. Critics claimed the so-called war was in reality an excuse for creating a hi-tech surveillance state, for reducing civil liberties and infringing human rights.

Within a month of the 9/11 attacks the US government passed the Patriot Act which included three main provisions:

  • expanded surveillance abilities of law enforcement, including by tapping domestic and international phones
  • easier inter-agency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counter-terrorism efforts
  • increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify for terrorism charges

The law upset human rights groups on various grounds, for example, the powers given law enforcement agencies to search property and records without a warrant, consent, or even knowledge of the targets. But the single most contentious provision was its authorisation of indefinite detention without trial, which became associated with the notorious detention centre at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba,

Ignatieff’s approach

The lectures were given at the heart of this period (2003), 18 months into the War on Terror, as the Patriot Act was still being rolled out, just after the US government launched its invasion of Iraq (March 2003).

In his introduction Ignatieff makes the point that already, by 2003, there was a well-developed legalistic literature on all these issues. He is not going to add to that (he isn’t a lawyer). He wants to take a broader moral point of view, bringing in philosophical and even literary writers from the whole Western tradition, to try and set the present moment in a much broader cultural context.

My purpose is…to articulate what values we are trying to save from attack. (p.xvii)

It’s worth noting that at the time he wrote and delivered these lectures, Ignatieff was the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I.e. he didn’t have an amateur, journalistic interest in these issues, but was a senior academic expert in them.

Contents

The text is full of Ignatieff’s trademark complex, subtle and often agonised moral reflections, mixing reportage on contemporary politics with references to writers of the past, continually teasing out subtle and often very illuminating insights. At the same time, as I worked my way through the rather laborious networks of arguments, I began to have less and less confidence in his arguments. Fine words butter no parsnips and seminars on moral philosophy can go on forever. What were his practical conclusions and recommendations?

Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil

Democracies have often deployed coercive measures, seeing them as the lesser evil deployed to avert the greater evil of terrorism, civil conflict and so on. But it requires that the measures can be justified publicly, subject to judicial review, and have sunset clauses i.e. fixed lengths so they don’t become permanent features of the society.

Government infringement of its citizens’ rights must be tested under adversarial review. This idea recurs again and again in the text. The defining feature of democracies is intricate sets of checks and balances. If some rights have to be abrogated during emergencies, these suspensions can still be independently tested, by judges, by independent advisers, and they will eventually have to be revealed to the citizens for ultimate approval.

There is a spectrum of opinions on suspending civil liberties. At one end, pure civil libertarians maintain that no violations of rights can ever be justified. At the other end, pragmatists eschew moral principles and judge restrictive legislation purely on practical outcomes. Ignatieff is somewhere in the middle, confident that actions which breach ‘foundational commitments to justice and dignity – torture, illegal detention, unlawful assassination’ – should be beyond the pale. But defining precisely what constitutes torture, which detentions are or are not legal, where killing is or is not justified, that’s the problem area.

If lawyers and politicians and intellectuals are going to bicker about these issues forever i.e. there will never be fixed and agreed definitions, the one thing all good democrats can rally round is ‘to strengthen the process of adversarial review‘ i.e. to put in place independent review of government measures.

Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency

If laws can be abridged and liberties suspended during an ’emergency’, what remains of their legitimacy in times of peace? If laws are rules, and emergencies make exceptions to theses rules, how can their authority survive once exceptions are made? (p.25)

Chapter 2 examines the impact the emergency suspensions of civil liberties has on the rule of law and civil rights. Does the emergency derogation of normal rights strengthen or weaken the rule of law which we pride ourselves on in the Western democracies?

Ignatieff takes the middle ground that suspension of rights does not destroy them or undermine the normal practice of them, indeed helps to preserve them – provided they are ‘temporary, publicly justified, and deployed only as a last resort.’

Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong

Why do liberal democracies to habitually over-react to terrorist threats? Why do we seem so quick to barter away our liberties? One way to explain it is that majorities (i.e. most of us) are happy to deprive small and relatively powerless minorities (in the War against Terror, Muslims and immigrants) of their rights in order to achieve ‘security’.

But our opponents have rights, too. Just as in the debate over freedom of speech, any fool can approve free speech which they agree with, it’s harder to fight for the right of people to say things you dislike or actively think are wrong. But that is the essence of free speech, that is its crucial test – allowing the expression of opinions and views you violently disagree with, believe are wrong and immoral. It is precisely these kinds of views we should make every effort to allow free expression. ‘I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ as Voltaire famously put it.

It’s easy and uncontroversial to defend the human rights of poets and activists who protested against apartheid or communist oppression. Much harder to insist that detainees being grabbed in Iraq or Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world and flown half way round the world and who might well be members of al Qaeda or ISIL, are provided just the same level of legal representation and rights as you and me. But that is exactly the test of our commitment to human rights: whether we extend them to our bitterest enemies.

Same goes for the other elements in the system of checks and balances, namely the other wings of government, the courts and the media. The temptation and the tendency is for everybody to ‘rally round the flag’ but this is exactly the opposite of what ought to happen. The American constitution vests power in the Presidency to take extraordinary steps in times of crisis or war but that is precisely the moment when the other elements in the division of power should increase their oversight of executive actions.

In his searing indictment of America’s mismanagement of the war in Iraq, Thomas E Ricks makes just this point. The build-up to the war involved questionable evidence (about weapons of mass destruction), wrong assumptions (about the response of the Iraqi population to foreign invasion), criminal mismanagement and the complete absence of a plan for the aftermath. While describing all this in forensic detail, Ricks points out that this is precisely the point when the administration’s plans should have been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny, something which might have saved tens of thousands of lives, billions of money, untold materiel. Instead, in the atmosphere of hysterical patriotism which gripped America, Congress rolled over and approved the plans with little serious examination and the press turned into bombastic cheerleaders. Both miserably failed to live up to the roles assigned to them in a free democratic society.

In fact most of this chapter is taken up with a useful and informative history of terrorism as a political tactic, starting with the Nihilists in nineteenth century Russia, then onto the two great loci of political violence, in revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany, before turning to post-war terrorism in Latin America (Chile, Colombia, Peru), in Sri Lanka, in Israel, before cycling back to Europe and the 1970s terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades, before a brief consideration of the separatist/nationalist terrorism faced by Britain in Northern Ireland and Spain in the Basque Country.

Ignatieff’s summary from this brief conspectus is that terrorism never works, it never achieves its political aims. The Russian and Weimar regimes weren’t undone by political violence but by the cataclysm of World War One and the Great Depression, respectively. Marxist terrorism in 1970s Germany and Italy aimed to create media spectaculars and psychological tipping points whereby the population would be woken from their slumber, rise up and overthrow the repressive bourgeois state etc. Complete failure with the terrorists either committing suicide or publicly recanting.

In Latin America political terrorism either produced the exact opposite of what was intended, for example in Argentina, where it helped a repressive military junta into power. Or, as in Sri Lanka and some extent Israel, it became a stalemate that extended over such a long period of time that it became the social reality of the country, giving rise to a society characterised by random atrocities, intimidation of local populations by the terrorists, and repressive state apparatuses. The host society wasn’t liberated and transformed but permanently degraded.

Ignatieff then considers how the British, on the whole, managed the Northern Ireland situation successfully by abrogating various civil rights but under the aegis of government and judicial review.

But part of the reason his review of traditional terrorism is so enjoyable is because it’s so familiar from decades of print and TV journalism – but this itself highlights, I think, a weakness of the whole book: which is that the campaign of al Qaeda and related groups was not to achieve political change (like the Marxist terrorist groups of the 1970s) or to achieve constitutional change / nationalist independence (as with the Basques or, at the other end of the Europe, the Kurdish terrorist groups in Turkey). Those aims could both be handled in Ignatieff’s model i.e. carefully incorporated into the existing political structures.

By contrast Al Qaeda wanted to destroy the West not only as a goal in itself but as part of an even grander aim which was to undermine the contemporary world order of nation-states and re-create the historical umma, the worldwide community of Muslims that was once held together under the caliphate of the prophet Mohammed. Osama bin Laden identified America as the chief bulwark of the existing world order, especially in the Arab world, where it subsidised and underpinned repressive states. So as a first step to remodelling the world, bin Laden ordered his followers to attack Western targets anywhere, at any time.

Ignatieff was writing in 2003. We had yet to have the 2004 Madrid train bombings (193 dead), the 7/7 2005 attacks in London (56 dead), the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April 2013 (3 dead), the 18 March 2015 attack on a beach in Tunisia (21 dead), the 13 November 2015 attack at the Bataclan theatre in Paris (90 dead), the Manchester Arena bombing on 22 May 2017 (23 dead), plus numerous other Islamist atrocities in countries further afield.

If the central aim of al Qaeda and its affiliates is to kill and maim as many Westerners as possible, it’s difficult to see how this can be incorporated into any kind of political process. And in the next chapter Ignatieff indeed concludes that the organisation itself can only be defeated militarily.

Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak

An examination of terrorism itself.

In this chapter I want to distinguish among forms of terrorism, identify the political claims terrorists use to justify violence against civilians, and propose political strategies to defeat them (p.82)

Ignatieff considers terrorism the resort of groups who are suppressed and oppressed, who have no voice and no say in the power structures which rule over them. He gives a handy categorisation of six types of terrorism:

  1. insurrectionary terrorism aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of a state
  2. loner or issue terrorism, aimed at promoting a single cause
  3. liberation terrorism, aimed at the overthrow of a colonial regime
  4. separatist terrorism, aiming at independence for a subordinate ethnic or religious group within a state
  5. occupation terrorism, aimed at driving an occupying force from territory acquired through war or conquest
  6. global terrorism, aimed not at the liberation of a particular group, but at inflicting damage and humiliation on a global power

With the last one sounding like it’s been made up to describe al Qaeda-style hatred of America.

Terrorism presents a classic challenge for liberals, who have traditionally been on the side of the underdog and oppressed minorities, from the early trade unions to blacks under apartheid, and so often have an instinctive sympathy for the social or political or economic causes of terrorism but who, obviously, want to stop short of supporting actual acts of violence. Where do you draw the line?

Ignatieff says the only practical solution is to ensure that the oppressed always have peaceful political means to address their grievances. Purely military means cannot solve terrorism. It requires political solutions, above all bringing the voiceless into peaceful political processes. He doesn’t mention it but I think of how the warring factions in Northern Ireland were cajoled into joining a political ‘peace process’ which promised to take seriously the concerns of all sides and parties, to listen to all grievances and try to resolve them in a peaceful, political way.

Mrs Thatcher said ‘we do not talk to terrorists’ but, rather as with free speech, it is precisely the terrorists that you should be talking to, to figure out how their grievances can be addressed and the violence be brought to an end.

Thus even if al Qaeda’s values come from completely outside the modern framework of human rights, even if they base themselves on Islamic traditions of jihad and unrelenting war against the infidel, even if they cannot be reasoned with but only crushed militarily, this doesn’t prevent Ignatieff making the obvious point that we in the West can still bring pressure to bear on many authoritarian Arab regimes to try and remove the causes of grievance which drive young men into these causes. These would include overt American imperialism; repressive police policies which enact brutal violence and deny human rights; lack of pluralistic political systems i.e. which allow subaltern voices a say and some influence. And so on (pages 99 to 101).

The weak and oppressed must be given a peaceful political alternative that enables them to rise up against the violence exercised in their name. (p.106)

The Arab future

Trouble is, a lot of this kind of hopeful rhetoric was claimed for the movements of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, when authoritarian regimes were overthrown in Libya, Egypt and nearly in Syria. Just a few years later it was clear that the ‘spring’ comprehensively failed: an even more authoritarian regime was in place in Egypt, Libya had split into warlord-run areas and a ruinous civil war had bedded down in Syria which would pave the way for the rise of ISIS.

Personally, I think the countries in that part of the world which aren’t lucky enough to be sitting on vast reserves of oil will be condemned to perpetual poverty and conflict, because of:

  • the lack of traditions of individual civic responsibility and the complex matrix of civil society organisations which make the Western countries stable as politically stable as they are;
  • as the main offshoot of the above – universal corruption
  • the entrenched political tradition of strong rulers invoking ethnic nationalism or Islamic models of rule or both (Nasser, Gaddafi, Saddam)
  • what Ignatieff calls ‘the corruption and decay of the Arab and Islamic political order’ (p.152)
  • the economic backwardness of most Arab countries i.e. preponderance of subsistence agriculture
  • widespread lack of education
  • marginalisation / lack of education or political rights for women
  • the extraordinary population explosion (when I first visited Egypt in 1981 it had a population of 45 million; now it’s 110 million) which ensures widespread poverty
  • and now, the speedy degradation of the environment by climate change (loss of water and agricultural land)

One or two of these would be tricky challenges enough. All of them together will ensure that most countries in the Arab world will remain breeding grounds for angry, aggrieved and unemployed young men who can be persuaded to carry out atrocities and terrorist acts against domestic or Western targets, for the foreseeable future.

Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism

This chapter addresses the way that, in the absence of peaceful talks, terrorist campaigns tend to degenerate into destruction and killing for their own sake, as does the behaviour of the authorities and security services set to combat them. Tit-for-tat killing becomes an end in itself. Violence begets violence in a downward spiral.

This is the most serious ethical trap lying in wait in the long war on terror that stretches before us. (p.115)

Ignatieff realises that this well-observed tendency can be used by opponents of his notion of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. the moderate and constantly scrutinised, temporary abrogation of human rights. Their argument goes that what begins as a high-minded, carefully defined and temporary ‘abrogation’ of human rights law has so often in the past degenerated into abuse, which then becomes standard practice, becomes institutionalised, and then causes permanent damage to the democracies which implemented it.

As you’d expect, Ignatieff meets this claim by breaking the threat down into categories, and then analysing them and the moral problems and issues they throw up.

First, though, he starts the chapter with some low-pressure, enjoyably colourful discussion of Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Possessed – which describes a terrorist group which takes over a remote Russian town – and then of Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent, which features a nihilistic character named the Professor, who walks round London with an early version of a suicide vest.

Part of the chapter addresses the practical, administrative problem of preventing anti-terrorist campaigns from descending into violence. But, as mention of the novels suggest, he also explores (as far as anyone can) the psychology of the nihilistic terrorist i.e. people who just want to destroy, for no purpose, with no political aim, for destruction’s sake.

It can be an individual who wants to make a name for themselves through a spectacular, for example Timothy McVeigh who carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured 680. Lone actors like this are always going to be very difficult to detect or deter.

Then he discusses the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo which carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, killing 13 commuters, seriously injuring 54 and affecting 980 more. Terrorists who (claim to) represent an ethnic or nationalist cause can, in principle, be negotiated with for at least two reasons: one is that negotiations may hold out the hope that some at least of their goals may be achieved; the other, is that, insofar as they represent an ethnic group, a population, this population can be worked on to reject the group or moderate its behaviour.

With single actors or death cults, levers of negotiation and bargaining are obviously absent. Having established the key characteristics of these kinds of actors, Ignatieff moves on to a detailed consideration of al Qaeda. In his view it has twisted Islamic teachings so completely as to become a death cult. The 9/11 bombers didn’t leave demands or any way to negotiate – they just wanted to strike a blow at the West, specifically America, and that meant killing as many Americans as possible.

His analysis is on the brief side (there are, obviously, hundreds of books about bin Laden and al Qaeda) but, as usual, throws up fascinating insights and ideas. a) It is impossible to negotiate with a suicide bomber because being negotiated out of detonating is, by definition, a failure of the mission they’ve taken on.

b) More subtly, an organisation that sets out to use suicide bombing as a strategy cannot fail because it has no defined, workable political goals or aims. Bin Laden’s aim of clearing Westerners out of Arab lands, overthrowing the existing Arab states, recreating the 7th century caliphate and implementing Sharia law in full, is not a practical programme, it is a utopian millennarian vision. It is so impractical, it is such a long-term and enormous goal, that true believers can’t, in a sense, be demoralised.

c) And this is where the promise of immortality comes in. Once true believers are promised direct entry into heaven, they have ceased to be political actors and, in this narrow sense, Ignatieff defines them as fanatics.

He adds a distinct and fascinating idea which is that all death cults, and most terrorist groups, have to have a theory which discredits the idea of civilian innocence. Obviously blowing up a load of people going to work in their offices is murder. So, just as obviously, terrorists who do it have been re-educated or indoctrinated not to see it that way. The most basic route is for their ideological leaders to persuade them that nobody is innocent; that so-called ‘civilians’ are as guilty as the acts of repression or infidelity or murder as the armies or forces of their countries.

The Algerian National Liberation Front used this defence to justify blowing up cafes full of civilians as part of their ‘war’. Scores of other terrorist groups use the same justification, erasing the difference between the soldier (a figure defined and attributed specific rights and responsibilities under international convention going back at least as far as the Geneva Conventions) and the civilian (who, under human rights law, is not responsible in warfare and should not be a target).

But this works both ways. For when terrorists are embedded in local populations, emerging to ambush soldiers then disappearing back into the crowd, a tendency develops for those soldiers to come to hate the civilian population and take out their anger and frustration on them. Happened in Vietnam (My Lai etc), happened in Iraq (Haditha etc). And of course all such breakdowns of military discipline it play into the terrorists’ hands by getting the population to move over to support them. That’s why terrorists work hard to trigger them.

So, blurring the difference between soldier and civilian can be practiced by both terrorist and security forces and always heads in the same direction, towards ever-growing atrocity and massacre. Eventually both sides are murdering unarmed civilians, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Something which distinguishes us from the terrorists is that liberal democracies put huge value on human life, and this particularly applies to civilian human life. Therefore the kinds of massacres which US troops carried out in Vietnam and Iraq sully the reputation and undermine the meaning of liberal democracy itself. I.e. they drag us closer to the indiscriminate violence of our enemies.

These pictures of fanatical death cults are by way of preparing the way for the second half of the chapter which moves on to try and define precisely when two anti-human rights tactics may be used, namely selective assassination and torture. Ignatieff is not an absolutist or civil libertarian i.e. he reluctantly admits that, in addressing the kind of nihilistic fanatics he has described, assassination may be the only way to eliminate people you can’t bargain with, and that extremely ‘coercive’ interrogation may be necessary to extract information from fanatics which may save lives.

This is a detailed discussion of contentious issues, but the bottom line is Ignatieff things they may be permitted, but so long as his basic criteria are fulfilled, namely that they are a) approaches of last resort, after all else has been tried b) and that some kind of independent judicial review or oversight is in place. It is when these kind of policies turn into secret death squads that a rules-based liberal democracy starts to be in trouble.

Ignatieff repeats some familiar objections to torture, namely that it simply doesn’t work, that it produces intense hatred which can motivate those who survive and are released into going on to carry out atrocities, and it degrades those tasked with carrying it out. There’s evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by American operatives tasked with torturing during the War on Terror.

Typically, Ignatieff adds another point I’d never considered which is that there is a slippery slope from torture to plain murder. This may be for two reasons: the tortured may be converted by the process into such inveterate enemies of the state that their interrogators realise they will never be rehabilitated; and, more sinisterly, the torturers realise they can never release their victims because they themselves, will eventually be implicated i.e. the truth will out. Therefore it’s easier all round just to bump them off. Hence the ‘disappeared’ in South American dictatorships, all those detainees who, after extensive torture, were taken out in helicopters and thrown into the sea. Torture doesn’t just not work, create new enemies and degrade the torturers – it creates a problem of what to do with the tortured? A downward spiral all the way.

Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon

The book ends with a bleak discussion of what may happen as and when terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction i.e. terror attacks on a devastating scale. Are our democracies strong enough to withstand such attacks? How can we strengthen our institutions to ensure that they are?

Ignatieff has a number of suggestions about how to prevent the proliferation of terrifying WMDs. But he comes back to his fundamental position which is that the way to defend and strengthen liberal democracies in the face of increased terrorist threats is to make them more liberal and democratic, not less.

Other thoughts

1. Internecine killing

The text is continually spinning off insights and ideas which I found distracted me from the main flow. For example, the notion that every terror campaign, sooner or later, with complete inevitability, ends up terrorising and killing people on their own side – moderates and ‘sell-outs’ and anybody in their ethnic group or repressed minority who threatens to engage in political discussion with the oppressors. In a sense, moderates are more threatening to a terrorist group than their overt enemy, the repressive state, which is why so many terrorist groups end up killing so many people on their own side (p.104).

2. The threshold of repugnance

The savagery of the Algerian fighters for independence in the 1950s left a permanent scar on the national psyche of all concerned so that when, 30 years after independence (1962) in 1992, the ruling elite disallowed an election which would have given power to the new radical Islamist party, the country very quickly descended into a savage civil war, with Islamic terrorists and government security forces both murdering unarmed civilians they considered guilty of aiding their opponents.

Both sides, with generational memories of the super-violence of the struggle for independence, invoked it and copied it in the new struggle. There was little or no threshold of repugnance to deter them (p.105). Violent civil wars set new lows of behaviour with after-comers can then invoke. The whole process ratchets ever downwards.

3. The world is watching

There’s plenty of evidence that if a movement judges that it needs the help of the outside world (of the ‘international community’ which Ignatieff is so sceptical about in his previous books) then it will tailor its behaviour accordingly. It will, in other words, try to restrain violence.

The African National Congress knew it had strong support across the Western world and put its faith in international pressure eventually bringing a settlement, so that its political leaders (and its defenders in the West) chose to play down the violence of the movement’s activist wings (which, as per rule 1, above, were mostly directed against their own i.e. the black community, witness the invention and widespread use of ‘necklacing).

In other words, the international community counts. It can exert pressure. It can use its leverage to turn liberation movements away from terrorist methods. Up to a point. As long as the movement is well organised, as the ANC was and is. At the other extreme is the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), little more than a rag-tag band of psychopaths, who led an 11-year ‘civil war’, little more than a campaign of terror against their own populations (as described in stomach-churning detail in Anthony Loyd’s book, ‘Another Bloody Love Letter’). They had nothing whatsoever to gain from outside influence except being shut down. So with nothing to lose, they continued their killing sprees for 11 long years (1991 to 2002).

At the other end of the organisational scale, Russia was able to carry out atrocities and conduct a war of total destruction in Chechnya because they know no-one was looking (it was almost impossible for foreign journalists to get in) and nobody cared (it wasn’t a location of strategic significance, no oil, none of the racial discrimination the West gets so worked up about) so mass murder proceeded with barely a ripple in the Western press.

These examples prove a general rule which is that the ‘international community’ can have some moderating influence on some insurgences, terrorist campaigns and wars (p.98).

Notes and thoughts

This is a complex and sophisticated book. The language of human rights often segues into discussion of particular conventions and international declarations in such a way that to really follow the discussion you have to be pretty familiar with these documents and laws and rules.

I also found some of the political concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around quite obscure and unfamiliar – communitarianism, the conservative principle, adversarial justification, the decision cycle and so on.

I got along with his first political book, ‘Blood and Belonging’, very well. Ignatieff began his discussions with detailed descriptions of the political situations in half a dozen countries, giving plenty of colour and a good feel for the place, its history and issues and people, before getting on to the philosophical discussion, and only applied a handful of relatively simple ideas in order to shed light on the nationalist conflict he was covering.

This book is the opposite. It is sustained at a high academic level, continually introducing new concepts and making fine distinctions and drawing subtle conclusions, with only passing reference to real world examples. It sustains a level of abstraction which I eventually found exhausting. I wasn’t clever enough, or educated enough in the concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around, to really make the most of it. Probably the best way to read it is one chapter at a time, going back and working through the logic of his argument, chewing over the tumble of clever conclusions. It’s certainly the most demanding of Ignatieff’s half dozen politics books.

Seven days later

Having pondered and revisited the book for a week, maybe I can offer a better description of how the text works. The best bits of ‘Blood and Belonging’ were where Ignatieff shed light on the psychology of different types of nationalism (especially the crude sort of ethnic nationalism which so quickly degenerates into violence).

The same is true here, as well. The best bit about, say, the chapter on nihilism, is Ignatieff’s categorisation of different types of terrorist psychology, and then his exploration of what each psychology is, how it comes about and works in practice. This is fascinating and hugely increases the reader’s understanding, especially when he applies the categories to real historical examples.

What I found harder going, where I think the book comes adrift, is when he moves on to discuss how ‘we’ in liberal democracies ought to deal with the new post-9/11 terrorism threat. It’s at this point, throughout the book, that he keeps using his concept of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. we should, temporarily, and with supervision by some kind of objective person like a judge, abrogate some of our treasured human rights in some circumstances, where it’s absolutely necessary – it’s these passages, and the entire concept of ‘the lesser evil’, which I sometimes struggled to understand and never found completely clear or convincing.

Ignatieff’s categorisations and definitions of types of society or politics or terrorism, and his descriptions of the psychologies behind them, I found thrilling because they’re so incisive and instantly clarified my own thinking; whereas his discussions of the ‘morality’ of the political response to terrorism, I found confusing and unsatisfactory.


Credit

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2004. All references are to the 2005 Edinburgh University Press paperback edition.

New world disorder reviews

Virtual War: Kosovo and beyond by Michael Ignatieff (2000)

Michael Ignatieff (born 1947) is a public intellectual, academic, journalist and, at one point, back in his native Canada, a high profile politician. Back when I was a student in the 1980s he was all over the British media, fronting thoughtful documentaries and high-end discussion programmes on Channel 4.

Ignatieff’s written a lot – novels, memoirs, histories, countless articles. One consistent strand of his output has been a series of books meditating on the nature and meaning of contemporary warfare. This began in 1993 with Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism and was followed by The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience in 1998.

In the introduction to this volume, written in December 1999, Ignatieff says Virtual War is, in effect, the third in a trilogy about the nature of modern war – but this statement has been rendered redundant by the fact that he’s gone on to publish several more. As far as I can make out the sequence now runs:

  1. 1993: Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism
  2. 1998: The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience
  3. 2000: Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond
  4. 2003: Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan
  5. 2004: The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
  6. 2017: The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World

His books contain extensive descriptions of contemporary conflict zones, fighting, wars and aftermaths. The first book in the series (‘Blood and Belonging’) contains riveting eye-witness reporting from the conflicts in former Yugoslavia; the second one has a chapter where he accompanies the head of the United Nations to Rwanda, Zaire and Angola; and the fourth one adds scenes from the conflict in Afghanistan. This one contains reportage from a Kosovar refugee camp and a description of a Kosovar village, Celine, where a disgusting massacre was carried out by Serb paramilitaries.

But Ignatieff is not a war reporter; there are plenty of those, filing daily reports from the front line of conflicts around the world. And similarly, he is not a military analyst; there are thousands of those, publishing papers in specialist journals analysing this or that aspect of the hardware or strategy involved in the world’s many conflicts.

Ignatieff stands aside from both those genres because his stance can perhaps best be summarised as ‘a moral philosopher considers modern conflict’. He goes into military and technical detail where necessary – for example, in this book he gives a detailed description of the command and control centres running the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, an extended explanation of how targets were established, confirmed and then the complex bureaucracy planners had to go through in order to get permission to bomb them. Very detailed, very informative.

But that isn’t where Ignatieff’s interest lies. He is interested in what this kind of conflict tells us about the nature of modern warfare and, above all, about the moral and political attitudes of the West – what it tells us about ourselves and the modern societies we live in. He is interested in trying to unpick the complex moral issues which the conflicts he covers raise or have created or are evolving or distorting. His aim is:

exploring the new technology of war and the emerging morality governing its use. (p.7)

Maybe it’ll help if I summarise the short introduction in which Ignatieff unpacks the different senses of the word ‘virtual’ which underpin this book and give it its title.

(If you want to know the historic and geopolitical background to the war in Kosovo read the relevant section of my review of Anthony Loyd’s book, Another Bloody Love Letter. Ignatieff devotes a fascinating chapter, ‘Balkan Physics’, to a detailed account of the recent history and complex power politics which led up to the conflict, paying special attention to the failure of American diplomacy in the region and then to the change of tone brought by new Secretary of State, Madeline Allbright, pages 39 to 67.)

Virtual warfare

Ignatieff thinks the Big New Thing about the war in Kosovo was that it was a virtual war. What does he mean? Well, he uses the word ‘virtual’ in quite a few senses or contexts.

1. The public

It was a war which most people in the West watched on their screens, in which they had little or no investment or commitment. For Ignatieff this is a worrying new development. For example, will ‘war’ slowly morph into a particularly gruesome spectator sport? Does this mean that the populations of the West no longer believe in their causes enough to slug it out face to face? Will this, over the long run, weaken our resolve to mount wars when we need to?

2. Air force screens

It was a ‘virtual war’ in at least two further senses. The ‘war’ consisted mostly of NATO’s 78-day-long bombing campaign carried out against Serbian forces inside Kosovo and against crucial infrastructure in Serbia itself, especially in the capital Belgrade. No ground forces were sent into Kosovo and this, apparently, confused NATO’s air force, whose doctrine and training leads all of them, from air commodores down to pilots, to be expect to co-ordinate air attacks with ground forces, to be called in by radio to support ground attacks. They were unused to an army-less war.

Instead, the pilots, and their controllers back in control and command centres in locations in the West (Italy, Germany, Belgium, the US, the UK) worked via computer readouts of target information and then by sharing the view of the in-plane cameras which the pilots were using.

Thus the people choosing the targets and guiding the pilots towards them had pretty much the same view as the viewers at home (who got to see selected plane or missile-based footage which NATO released to the press). Obviously they were deeply involved in actually making it happen, identifying, assessing, instructing and so on. But nonetheless, it was, for these technicians, also a ‘virtual’ war, fought or, more accurately, experienced, via screens.

3. No army

Let’s go back to that point about no army. There was no NATO presence at all in Kosovo during the 78-day bombing campaign. There had been Western observers and peacekeepers in Kosovo but overnight they became enemies of Serbia, liable to be arrested and used as hostages, and so they were all withdrawn. So there were no NATO soldiers on the ground at all. Which is why Ignatieff very reasonably asks, What kind of war is it which involves no army at all on our side?

And furthermore, no casualties. None of the pilots of the thousand or so NATO planes which flew nearly 100,000 sorties were lost. A couple were downed by ejected. So Ignatieff further asks, What does it mean that the West can now go to war without fielding an army and without risking the life of a single combatant? Surely this is the kind of war fought by people who don’t want any casualties, a kind of war without the physical risk.

Previously, wars have involved loss of life on both sides. Western leaders have been slow to commit to war (British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain being maybe the most famous example) because they knew the bloody horror it entailed. But now there is no bloody horror. There is no risk. What, Ignatieff asks, does that do to the very definition and concept of war?

How does that change everyone’s perception of what a war is? How does it effect:

1. Policy makers Does it make them more liable to intervene if they think they’re risking less – financially, but above all in terms of casualties, with consequent minimal damage to their domestic reputation and ratings?

2. The public in Western nations Will it teach the public to become so risk-averse that as and when a serious commitment of soldiers on the ground is required, it will be unacceptably unpopular? Will old-style fighting become less and less acceptable to a public acculturated to watching everything happen on a video screen? Will we refuse to countenance any conflict in which we lose soldiers?

3. The enemy On the face of it, the use of laser-guided precision weapons ought to scare adversaries so much that they are put off ever triggering the intervention of the West and its high-tech weapons. In fact, as he reports in detail, the reality in Kosovo turned out to be the exact opposite: President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, cannily triggered the West and then, in defiance of all our best efforts, carried out his nation-scale ethnic cleansing.

Because Milošević knew that as soon as the bombing started NATO would withdraw its ground forces and so he would be free to do what he wanted to the Kosovar population. He intended to drive them right out of their own country using exemplary terror i.e. using his army and paramilitaries to massacre entire villages and burn them to the ground, thus terrorising populations nearby to flee across the border into Macedonia or Albania – and that is exactly what happened. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees were harried out of their own country, even as the NATO bombing campaign proceeded. According to Human Rights Watch, by early June 1999, more than 80 percent of the entire population of Kosovo and 90 percent of Kosovar Albanians had been displaced from their homes. Amnesty International estimated that nearly one million people were forced to flee Kosovo by the Serb terror campaign.

On the face of it, then, this new kind of hi-tech gee-whiz ‘virtual’ war let the bad guys get away with it, with genocide and ethnic cleansing. In other words, the first ‘virtual’ war undermined its own rationale: it seemed very much as if what was needed to force the Serbs to end their ethnic cleansing was precisely what had been so carefully avoided i.e. face-to-face clashes between NATO forces and Serb forces. In other words, traditional warfare.

4. No mandate

Lastly, Ignatieff claims it was also a virtual war in the sense that the forces involved weren’t technically at war. The NATO forces who bombed the Serbs for 78 days never actually declared war on Serbia, no UN resolution was passed to justify this attack on a sovereign state, and none of the legislatures of the European countries who went to war were called on to vote for it.

NATO lawyers cobbled together a justification in law but, like everything to do with the law, it is subject to endless interpretation and debate. Even the outcome was unorthodox, a so-called ‘military technical agreement’ which didn’t settle any of the issues but merely allowed the entrance of NATO ground forces into Kosovo to protect the population while the diplomats went back to the negotiating table. But the fundamental issue is simple: Was NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia legal or illegal under international law?

I’m no lawyer but what I took from Ignatieff’s account was that the campaign was technically illegal but was morally and politically justified. NATO used force as a last resort, after all attempts at mediation and conflict resolution – mainly at the talks held between NATO, the Kosovo Liberation Army and Milošević at Rambouillet in France – failed to find a solution.

NATO’s aim was to save lives, to put an end to Serbia’s low-level policy of massacre and ethnic cleansing. But does a worthy aim – saving the lives of a defenceless population – justify breaking one of the fundamental principles of the UN and the post-war international consensus, namely that the integrity of the nation state is sacrosanct; that nobody has a right to intervene militarily in the affairs of another state. This is one of the central moral-political-legal questions which Ignatieff returns to again and again.

To intervene or not intervene?

Like its two predecessors and its successor, Virtual War is a) short and b) not so much one consistent through-written book, but a collection of articles, published at different times in different magazines, but with enough thematic unity to work as a book. And each article or chapter focuses on particular aspects of the Kosovo war which I’ve itemised above.

Thus the issue I just described – whether the West was justified in attacking Serbia – is dealt with in chapter three, which consists entirely of an exchange of letters between Ignatieff and the British lawyer and politician, Robert Skidelsky, three from each of them.

The chapter may be short (16 pages) but it gets straight to the point and is packed with argumentation on both sides. Skidelsky argues that respecting the integrity of states has (more or less) kept the peace since the Second World War. If we alter that fundamental premise, if – like UK Prime Minister Tony Blair – we argue that we are so convinced of our moral rectitude and our case that we are justified in intervening in other countries wherever minorities are threatened by oppressive governments – then the world will descend into chaos.

Ignatieff politely but firmly disagrees. He describes himself as an ‘internationalist’, meaning that he agrees that the basis of the international system is the integrity of the nation state, but he also believes in the human rights of individuals and of communities, and that this second principle can clash with the first and, in Kosovo, trumps it.

He’s our author, so the weight of evidence from the other chapters tends to bolster Ignatieff’s argument. But Ignatieff tries to present a fair fight, giving Skidelsky’s objections as much air time as his own views. I very much took Skidelsky’s point that the notion Tony Blair was promoting in various public speeches (particularly, apparently, one given in Chicago on 22 April 1999, pages 72 and 74), that the West not only has the power to intervene in rogue regimes, but is obligated to intervene, is a terrible precedent. The road to hell is paved with good intentions (p.73).

And indeed, we know what happened next, which is that, after the 9/11 attacks, the US, under President George W. Bush, bolstered by Tony Blair and his interventionist stance, decided to intervene in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Overthrowing the absolutely awful dictator, Saddam Hussein, sounded like a great idea. Liberating Iraq and rebuilding it as a modern democracy sounded like a great idea. And how did those interventions turn out? Catastrophic wastes of time, money and lives, which left the region more unstable than before.

In this respect, Virtual War is a snapshot in time, capturing a moment when the interventionist mindset was new and still being explored and worked through. This is a fancy way of saying that quite a lot of it feels out of date. Ignatieff’s subtle premonitions about a new type of warfare have been completely superseded by subsequent events in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Content

As mentioned, the book consists of chapters which bear a strong resemblance to standalone magazine articles. In his previous books these had each been based around particular issues or countries. Here each chapter revolves around a central figure. These are:

  • Richard Holbrooke, impresario of the 1995 Dayton Agreement which ended the Bosnian War, architect of US policy in the Balkans, who Ignatieff follows and interviews as he mounts frantic shuttle diplomacy in the runup to the outbreak of hostilities (December 1998).
  • Robert Skidelsky, British economic historian, crossbench peer in the House of Lords, and vocal opponent of the bombing campaign against Serbia who Ignatieff debates the legality of the NATO bombing offensive with (May 1999).
  • General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) from 1997 to 2000, who commanded Operation Allied Force during the Kosovo War, and is profiled as part of an extended description of how the bombing campaign was managed, not only technically in terms of selecting targets etc but at a diplomatic level (June 1999).
  • Louise Arbour, a Canadian, who was Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, and of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. In this role she indicted then-Serbian President Slobodan Milošević for war crimes on 27 May 1999, the first time a serving head of state was called to account before an international court. Ignatieff interviews her at length on the tribulations of setting up the Tribunal and especially of getting enough evidence to prosecute Milošević (July 1999).
  • Aleksa Djilas, Yugoslav writer and dissident, friend of Ignatieff’s, opponent of the bombing campaign not only on general humane grounds but because he is a Serb and so imprisoned by the propaganda of the regime. He flatly denies that the massacres of civilians, whose bodies Ignatieff saw with his own eyes, were carried out by Serbs. claiming they must have been caught in the crossfire of battles with the KLA. He couldn’t accept the fact that his nation was carrying out a genocide using Nazi tactics. Refusal. Denial.

As in The Warrior’s Code, Ignatieff has fantastic access to the top dogs: he accompanies leading figures such as Holbrook and his cohort of other US negotiators (ambassador Richard Miles; liaison officer with the KLA fighters, Shaun Byrnes) in the fraught weeks leading up to the bombing campaign; he has lunch with US ambassador to Macedonia, Chris Hill; he is part of the press pack covering a visit of Arbour’s to the Kosovar village of Celine, scene of a typical Serb massacre of unarmed civilians (lined up and machine gunned in cold blood). He interviews Arbour at her headquarters in the Hague, a conversation he reports at length.

Ignatieff vividly conveys what life is like for these jet-setting international politicians and lawyers: 1) the hectic lives, the endless mobile phone calls, dashing for planes or helicopters, setting up meetings, taking more calls. He 2) acutely dissects the issues they have to grapple with. But where Ignatieff comes into his own is with his 3) insightful analysis of the themes or issues or moral problems arising from the challenges they face; the general issues which arise from trying to resolve ethnic conflict, from intervening in a sovereign state, from trying to achieve some kind of justice for the victims.

Critique

1. The idea of a screen war not so novel

For me the weakest part of the book was Ignatieff’s claim that watching a war via a TV screen was somehow a) new, b) morally degrading, c) fraught with perilous consequences. It shares the same tone of moral panic as the chapter in The Warrior’s Code about the ever-increasing power of television. Looking back from 2023 both concerns seem out of date and overblown. Since Ignatieff was writing (in 1999) screens have come to dominate our lives to an unimaginable extent, and this has had many social consequences which impact Ignatieff’s ideas and interpretations.

But I disagree that watching a war on the telly was something radically new in 1999. People in the UK had been watching war footage on telly at teatime ever since the TV news was established in the 1960s. I remember listening to punk songs taking the mickey out of it in the 1970s (5.45 by Gang of Four, 1979).

And, of course, in the UK we had a war of our own, in Northern Ireland, which was on the TV news almost every night for decades before Ignatieff started worrying about it. So I question Ignatieff’s claim that watching the Kosovo conflict on the telly was a radically new departure with worrying social implications.

2. Kosovo’s ‘virtual’ war in no way replaced conventional conflict

At a more serious level, the ‘virtuality’ Ignatieff wants to make such an innovation of Kosovo hasn’t changed the face of war as much as he claims. In his long final chapter Ignatieff claims the West is living through a revolution in warfare, and that the new technology of cruise missiles, laser-guided bombs, and remote control will change warfare for good, and he sets off worrying about the implications for all of us.

But it wasn’t true. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 wasn’t carried out entirely by remote control, it required a conventional army with tanks and armoured cars and all the rest of it, and then degenerated into a counterinsurgency which was even less remote, very much requiring boots on the ground (as described in excruciating detail in Thomas E. Ricks’s two books about the Iraq War, Fiasco and The Gamble).

OK, so was Iraq just a blip, have other wars continued the radical new ‘virtual’ path worries about? No. Take the war in the Ukraine. A conventional army (accompanied by its disgusting mercenaries) has invaded a neighbouring country and is being repelled by an entirely conventional army and air force. No doubt lots of screens are being used by everyone involved, maybe drones are being deployed and maybe some of the missiles are cleverly targeted, but most are not, and the whole thing feels like a traditional boots-on-the-ground conflict.

So not only have a lot of his concerns about war and society been superseded by the events of the last 23 years, but his central concern about the perilous consequences of ‘virtual war’ can now be seen to be exaggerated and unwarranted. He worries that war via screens will end up being no more than a spectator sport, emptied of meaning, and lacking engagement or understanding by the wider population. That is not at all what happened with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Anticipations of ‘Empire Lite’

In scattered remarks through the book, and then more pithily in the introduction, Ignatieff draws the central conclusion which will go on to underpin the next book in the sequence, 2003’s ‘Empire Lite’.

It is based on the run of events during the 1990s in which the UN and the so-called ‘international community’ performed so abysmally. They let down the Marsh Arabs who revolted against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and were very slow to support the Kurds who Saddam drove up into the mountains to die of exposure. They abandoned the mission to Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident in 1994; in the same year the member states of the UN failed to cough up enough troops to enable the peacekeeping force in Rwanda to prevent the fastest genocide in history. Then in July 1995 UN peacekeepers once again stood by helplessly while Serb militia rounded up some 7,000 boys and men in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica and murdered them all.

In his earlier books Ignatieff visited the sites of mass murder in Rwanda and of massacres in Bosnia. This book gives a stomach-turning description of the massacre of unarmed Kosovar women and children carried out by Serb paramilitaries at a village called Celine. Did those Serb soldiers think it was serving their country to shoot unarmed women and children point blank in the head? Did they think this is what soldiers do? That this is what makes you a man – murdering little children?

These experiences drive Ignatieff to his Big Conclusion, which is that the West needs to intervene more, more deeply, more extensively, with more troops and resources, and for longer, than it has hitherto done.

Sitting above the Stankovec 2 refugee camp, packed with Albanian Kosovars who have been hounded from their homes by the Serbian army, and reviewing the West’s dismal record of failing to prevent ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, Ignatieff’s conclusion is surprisingly blunt:

This must be stopped. Now. By persistent and precise military force. (p.45)

His humanitarian principles, his concern to protect the vulnerable, lead him to believe that the intervention of the West is vitally required, as here in Kosovo, to prevent yet another crime against humanity, and this is the nexus of his argument with Robert Skidelsky.

But he goes further. Ignatieff thinks that the only way to prevent these crimes happening in the first place is to help developing countries build stronger states. And the only way this can be done is by major intervention, supervisions and investment in failing states by the West. And that means, in practice, America. He shares the view he attributes to the roving American diplomat Richard Holbrook, that:

the Americans are the only people capable of replacing the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians – the only people with the character required for an imperial vocation. (p.35)

America needs to be more imperial, more prepared to intervene to stop states failing, to prevent genocides, to create more stable polities. And it’s this idea which was to be the central theme of the book which followed this one, Empire Lite, arguing for greater American commitment to places like Afghanistan and written on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

In other words, Ignatieff’s fine and subtle humanitarian principles led him to support George Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, support he later came to bitterly regret. Seen from this perspective, Ignatieff’s books on foreign affairs are almost like a tragic novel, about a highly intelligent and deeply philosophical man who argues himself into supporting Bush and Blair’s idiotic invasion of Iraq.

The scale of the waste

Alongside Ignatieff’s brilliant descriptions and fascinating insights, one aspect which comes over really strongly is how extremely expensive it is to wage this, or any kind, of conflict in the modern world. The cost of one jet. The cost of maintaining it. The cost of training one pilot. The cost of training the small army of technicians and engineers required to maintenance the jets. The cost of housing and feeding them all somewhere far from home. And then the cost of the munitions, up to a million dollars per missile.

One of the problems which the bombing campaign encountered was that the Serbs turned out to be very good indeed at hiding from the planes. They were expert at camouflage, deception and the use of decoys. They learned to turn off the radar on their anti-aircraft guns so as not to be detected. They hid all their real armour and created fake tanks and trucks made of wood and canvas. Hence the accusation that NATO was dropping million-dollar missiles to blow up ten-thousand-dollar decoys (p.105).

But stepping back, for a moment, from the geopolitical, historical, military and diplomatic contexts which Ignatieff explains so well…My God, what a colossal, colossal waste of money! If a fragment of what the war cost had been invested in the economy of Kosovo and its million-strong population it could have been rich as Luxemberg by now. I know the waste of war is a cliché but given the extortionate cost of modern equipment, arms and infrastructure, modern war amounts to the expense of hyperwaste in a sea of need.

Pleasure

Hopefully, by now you can see where Ignatieff is coming from. As I said above, he is not a war reporter or a military analyst or a commentator on international affairs. He is fascinated by the moral issues thrown up by conflict in the modern age and by the way our understanding of those issues and their implications were changing and evolving during the 1990s and into the Noughties.

He is also a really beautiful writer. Ignatieff writes a clear, deceptively simple prose which fluently embodies his continual stream of sharp observations and acute analysis. The combination of lucid prose with measured analysis and thoughtful reflection makes him a tremendous pleasure to read.


Credit

Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond by Michael Ignatieff was published by Chatto and Windus in 2000. References are to the 2001 paperback edition.

New world disorder reviews

Human history

Andromache trying to prevent Achaian soldiers murdering her son, Astyanax, during the sack of Troy, by Georges Rochegrosse (1883)

The Iliad

The Iliad is the first great work of Western literature. It is a story of war and death, rape and pillage and conquest. It starts with two warlords bickering over ownership of a slave girl which ends with Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks, taking the girl Briseis away from Achilles, who, as a result, withdraws to his tent in a massive sulk.

In the days that follow, deprived of their greatest warrior, the Greeks are bested again and again by the resurgent Trojans, until Achilles’ friend and lover, Patroclus, begs to be allowed to wear the great hero’s armour into battle. Achilles reluctantly agrees but warns him not to take on the Trojans’ mightiest warrior, Hector. Having fought his way across the battlefield Patroclus does, indeed, come face to face with Hector and, ignoring his friend’s advice, confronts him and is promptly slaughtered.

When he hears the news Achilles’ wrath knows no end, but it isn’t just anger, it’s unbearable guilt at  how he let his lover expose himself to injury, chagrin at giving in to Patroclus’s pleas.

Achilles’ mother, Thetis, begs the blacksmith god Hephaestus to make Achilles a new set of armour and in this he leaps to the top of the Greek defences and lets out a roar of agonised, guilty, self-recriminatory pain – then storms like a tsunami through the Trojan lines, slaughtering everyone who gets in his way.

Finally, like Patroclus, he confronts Hector, his nemesis, in an epic contest between the two heroes, kills him, ties his ankles to ropes, the ropes to his chariot and drives his chariot round and round the walls of Troy until Hector’s corpse is reduced to a bloody pulp, in a bid to assuage his bottomless rage.

Late that night, Hector’s father, King Priam, slips through the Greek lines, finds Achilles’ tent and goes down on his knees before great hero, begging for his son’s body back. Then both men burst into tears, united in the endless loss of war. Homer’s long poem ends with the funeral of Patroclus which is proper and fitting for a fallen hero, but which is also some attempt by the author and his culture to make sense of the endless grief of war, the endless doom of generations of men to fight and die.

Personally, I see the Iliad as the founding text of Western literature, and the great cry of pain of Achilles when he hears of his friend’s death, to me, echoes through the two and a half thousand years of literature ever since. In that roar of pain are mingled all the colours of emotional agony, an epic expression of guilt and mortification and anger and outrage at the unfairness of the universe.

The many deaths of Astyanax

Many more warriors were to be slaughtered before the Trojan War finally ended with the famous trick of the Trojan Horse, dreamed up by wily Odysseus. Once they breach the city’s walls, the rampaging Greeks massacred the city’s inhabitants. They murdered old King Priam at an altar, they killed all his sons and raped all his daughters, before carrying them off into slavery.

They discovered Hector’s young son, Astyanax, in his hiding place and, while his mother, Hector’s widow Andromache, begged for her son’s life, the Greek soldiers threw him over the battlements to be smashed on the rocks below.

The Iliad was set down some time in the 7th century BC, though it refers to events which happened before 1000 BC. It was at some time over the same period that most of the Jewish psalms, now gathered in the Bible, were written, including Psalm 137, the one which curses the Israelites’ enemies by saying: ‘Happy is he who seizes your [the Israelites’ enemies’] children and dashes them against the rocks’.

In other words, the brutal slaughter of defenceless children is as old as the oldest written records of the two cultures which lie at the root of Western civilisation. And has been practiced right down to our own times.  In his first book of war reportage, Anthony Loyd describes the results of a Russian bombing raid in Chechnya.

I had seen the dead child – or what was left of him – only a few days before. He was a Chechen. A Russian jet had bombed his mountain village home in a botched attempt to destroy a nearby bridge. Five-hundred pound bombs had transformed him, his two sisters and mother into butcher-rack-sized lumps of flesh. The severed heads of the two girls, curiously untouched by the blast, had stared blankly from a ghastly pile of severed limbs. Two other sisters had survived, blood-masked and mangled, tiny children with enormous wounds.
(My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd, 1999)

The many modern Iliads

It is only ignorance of the fact that multiple wars are happening somewhere in the world, all the time, that deludes people in the pampered West into thinking that the natural state of humanity is peace. It isn’t. The natural state of humanity is conflict.

The invasion of Ukraine has woken Westerners from their slumber but there has been continual warfare around the world since the fall of the Soviet Union, for every single one of the past 30 years – in Lebanon, Kuwait, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda, Congo, Burma, Yemen, Guatamala, Iraq, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Angola, Liberia, Indonesia, Nepal, Burundi, Georgia, Sri Lanka, Peru, Chad, Colombia, Mozambique, Mexico, Sudan, Chad, Syria.

This slumber ignores the fact that in most modern wars far more civilians than soldiers are killed and entire areas are reduced to bombed-out pre-modern wastelands run by medieval warlords. This isn’t the exception. In many parts of the world it is the rule. Between writing and publishing this blog post rivalry between two generals has broken out in the Sudan. It looks like it might draw in regional powers and escalate into a real civil war, yet another civil war in the Sudan. All round the world fragile states teeter on the brink of civil conflict and collapse.

Through the 1990s into the 2000s Michael Ignatieff wrote a series of books to trying to understand what he calls ‘the epidemic of ethnic civil war and state failure that has convulsed the developing world since the end of the long imperial peace of the Cold War’ (Empire Lite, 2003, page 93). Reviewing the landscape of lawless militias, massacres and burning villages, Ignatieff concludes:

I cannot help thinking that liberal civilisation – the rule of laws not men, of argument in place of force, of compromise instead of violence – runs deeply against the human grain and is only achieved and sustained by the most unremitting struggle against human nature.
(Blood and Belonging, 1994, p.189)

Ignatieff’s message is that it is only by an unremitting effort to maintain the institutions of civil society despite all its imperfections, and by resisting the temptation to identify ourselves primarily by ethnicity or religious allegiance but instead as rights-bearing citizens equal in the eyes of an independently administered law, that we in the democratic West can hope to repress and control the brutal tendencies of human nature and avert the fate of so many other countries – avoid endlessly re-enacting the fates of Hector, Andromache and Astyanax – massacre, rape and infanticide.


New world disorder reviews

Another Bloody Love Letter by Anthony Loyd (2007)

Raised by talkative women, my childhood perception of what it took to be a man had long before attached itself to the wartime experiences of my family’s silent males…
(Another Bloody Love Letter, page 45)

Although I am going to subject it to detailed analysis and criticism, this is a bloody good book. It is deeply readable and hugely enjoyable, predominantly, for me, because of Loyd’s confident insights into the political, military and cultural conditions of the four conflicts he reports on – Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq – are profoundly interesting and illuminating. As in the first book there are extended passages about his family and his drug habit, which I find a lot less interesting, but every paragraph he writes, about more or less any subject, is instinct with intelligence, reefed with psychological insight and written in an often gloriously over-the-top purple prose. A real pleasure to read, I hope he publishes another volume soon.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So (1999)

Anthony Loyd is an award-winning war correspondent. He works mostly for The Times of London. He’s published two volumes of war reporting. The first one, 1999’s ‘My War Gone By, I Miss It So’, was a critical and popular success for several reasons. It contains blisteringly intense, visceral descriptions of the author’s experiences during the Bosnian War of 1992 to 1995, namely the sites of atrocities and massacres he visited. Emerging from these vivid scenes are numerous insights and commentary on the reasons for the start and development of the war, which I found very useful.

Between 1992 and 1995 just over two hours flying time from Heathrow more than 200,000 people, the majority of them Muslims, were slaughtered. Set free by Europe’s stunning moral failure and refusal to intervene, the forces of nationalism and religious intolerance, emanating principally from Bosnia’s Serbs and Croats, were allowed to crush the more tolerant aspirations of the state’s Muslim community then reform them in their own mould. (Another Bloody Love Letter, page 48)

But what lifted it far among the usual run of war correspondent books were two further elements. One is the fact that Loyd was, throughout the period in question, a heroin addict. The book includes a surprising amount of material covering the origins and development of his addiction, along with frequent passages describing his struggles to give it up.

But the heroin sections fed into something even more unusual in a war correspondent book, which was the inclusion of a lot of autobiographical material, his unhappiness at boarding school then Eton (!) which he managed to get kicked out of; in particular describing his awful relationship with his father, who divorced his mother when Anthony was just 6 years old but continued to be a cold, domineering presence in his life.

As the book progresses it becomes clear that Loyd’s motivation to become a war correspondent was driven by the same compulsion as the drug addiction, and that both were ‘ways of escape’, ways to submerge, obliterate and repress the deep misery he felt if he found himself just living ‘normally’, in London. He tells us that trying to live the kind of everyday commuter life which he sees going on around him in London –

the clustering barnacle growths of life’s trivia and problems…my London world of rehab, relapse, routine normality and unutterable boredom… (p.22)

– drives him into deep despair at its futility and emptiness. At one point he discusses his descent into non-stop, all-day drinking and thoughts of suicide.

Only the effort required in a weekly visit to a therapist helped him at least partly emerge from his unhappiness, and it was out of this feeling of desperation that was born the idea of heading off to Bosnia as the war there started to kick off (in spring 1992) to busk it, to wing it, to see what happened. He went without a job, with no contacts, and with only a flimsy post-graduate qualification in photography to fib and bluster his way through. But on this basis (and with the kind of confidence which a top public school education gives you) he blagged a UN press pass, which he then used to travel to war zones, to get to know other correspondents, to prove himself as a man in the face of terrible suffering and real danger.

Eventually one of the journalists he was hanging out with was wounded enough to be sent back to England and he asked Loyd to temporarily replace him, giving Loyd the number of his editor in London. Again, Loyd’s posh bluffing paid off and he found himself a freelance war correspondent.

The rest of ‘My War Gone By, I Miss It So’ alternates between 1) eye-witness accounts of the terrible atrocities he saw in Bosnia; 2) descriptions of his father’s illness and death, with the revelation of more upsetting family secrets which have clearly damaged him; and 3) his ongoing trials and tribulations as a heroin addict, whose addiction serves as an escape from normal life back in London – which he just can’t handle – and also as a substitute for the intense experience of life under fire in Bosnia.

He is quite frank and open about all of this, especially the way that the heroin high and the buzz of war are related, cousins, sisters, extreme experiences which both stop him falling back into profound ennui and despair.

For months at a time I had exchanged the abandonment of the drug for the fulfilment of the conflict, then come home for a break and swapped mistresses. War for work, heroin for holidays. (p.56)

Another Bloody Love Letter (2007)

So this is Loyd’s second and, to date, final book, and it very much carries on the theme and style of the first one. With the war in Bosnia concluded by the Dayton Agreement of December 1995 there must have a lull in opportunities to feed his war addiction. But the new book finds him in Kosovo in the spring of 1998 as the political situation unravels and this is the theme and setting of the first hundred pages or so of this 300-page book.

Heroin

Loyd is still on heroin and the book describes the rehab centre in West London he visits (CORE), the other outpatients he meets there and delves extensively into the psychology of the junkie. It covers his relationship with his dealer, Dave (who dies, during the course of the book, but whose job is immediately taken over by his junkie wife, Cathy, page 65). More importantly, it contains extended passages on the mind-set of a junkie, continually trying to give up, continually failing, in an endless ‘Sisyphean’ cycle (p.71).

There is always more to lose as an addict (p.59)

The thrill of war

Again and again he compares the highs of heroin with the thrill of being in a war zone, hanging with his homies, a tight crew of super-cool war aficionados. He repeatedly describes the buzz and kick and fulfilment to be got from close encounters with extremes of human suffering and danger.

The sheer high-octane thrill I had got out of the war. It had taken me to peaks of excitement, life affirmation and sensory enhancement. (p.48)

In his seemingly endless search for kicks, highs and intensities, his life is ‘a quest for event and happening’ (p.133).

Hero-worshiping colleagues

If the third element of the first book was the extended passages about his wretched childhood and his terrible relationship with his father, there’s some of that here (in particular his mother’s tearful terror that he’ll be found dead on a toilet floor somewhere or she’ll get a call from his employers saying he’s been killed in a war zone) – but the really deep emotional/relationship content of the book derives from his close friendship with a superstar American war correspondent who he calls Kurt.

In my review of the first book I commented on the odd dynamic whereby Loyd’s unblinkingly honest reporting of the atrocities he saw in the war zone was accompanied, in a strange logic, by idealisation of other aspect of the narrative, namely the British Army – whose officers he tends to see in a rosy light – and encounters with a succession of women who all turn out to be beautiful, statuesque, intelligent, passionate etc etc. A very James Bond litany of gorgeous babes he keeps tumbling into bed with, impassioned fucking amid the bombs and bullets.

The same odd dynamic between super-real and super-idealised elements obtains here. On the one hand he describes children with their heads blown off, just-raped young women weeping, old men dying in the snow, burned-out houses containing incinerated human remains, with clear-eyed accuracy. Yet when he comes to describe his closest friends among the war correspondents, and especially Kurt, his attitude descends into gushing, schoolboy hero worship.

Kurt was a man unlike any other I have met, or ever expect to, a rare and inspirational comet who one way or another affected the lives of almost everybody who met him, and many who did not. He was a pure force in a tainted world, a beacon of integrity: brilliant. And such essence needs protection for the world crushes fast…

Difficult and uncompromising, as a war correspondent he was a one-man Zeitgeist to the small band of Balkan war reporters, the standard bearer to our values. His work was succinct, sincere and consistently credible, its power singly lifting the level of reportage throughout the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts. Innumerable journalists can crank out professional reports, observe and criticise. Kurt was different because of his vision and profound, Solomon-like sense of justice. Fuelled by an angry compassion, contained by common sense, this foresight and talent to discern righteousness beyond simple truth set him apart and, in allowing him to reveal a moral context within his stories it took him far beyond what most reporters are capable of doing. (p.27)

There’s more, much more:

[Kurt]’s extreme IQ and zero bullshit tolerance made him the terror of military and civilian spokesmen…

His involvement with war was the inevitable product of his being, for he was a man physically and mentally at his best in conflict and he glowed in that environment. War both completed and complimented him.

The man was the embodiment of purpose. He was vital… (p.139)

It’s odd. As if the brutal reality of the one aspect of his experience (war) can only be managed, coped with, by assigning a romantic glow and almost supernatural powers to the other aspect (friends and lovers).

He was my friend, my mentor. I was not looking for another father to replace my own, dead four years by then but absent much longer. Nevertheless, Kurt embodied goodness and wisdom to a degree I could never have imagined should I have had a thousand fathers.

Whatever the darkness of addiction or life’s other pitfalls, I could fall back on the certainty that Kurt was somewhere out there, and that his continued existence meant everything would work out fine in the end. He had a shine about him, the glow of assurance and invincibility that encouraged me to stick close and believe in hope. And, in my mind, he was never going to die. (p.28)

Of course, the second I read that final sentence, I realise that Kurt would die. The blurb on the back says this book is ‘a moving and painfully honest memoir of love and friendship, betrayal and loss, war and faith’ so I figured that the friendship and loss parts would be about Kurt. As the book progresses the hints get heavier.

Like his life force, his faith in both himself and his decision-making was so strong that I assumed him to be one of those rare men destined to survive while all around him died… (p.77)

Yep, he’s definitely going to die, and (spoilers) sure enough he does, in chapter 8, providing Loyd with a motive to fly to Freetown and obsessively try to track down the militia unit and officers who staged the ambush in which Kurt – and another old friend, Miguel – died in a hail of bullets.

Women

In true James Bond style, there’s references to a number of beautiful, brave women Loyd has had hurried affairs with in the past, though this book’s Bond girl is the tall, intelligent, beautiful Alexandra, with whom he has ‘a chariot race of a love affair’ (p.83) and ‘on-the-run relationship’ (p.140). Kurt’s death affects them in different ways (Loyd becomes cold and withdrawn) and they split up soon afterwards.

Tall

Loyd’s number one attribute of praise is when someone is tall. All good people in his narratives (British officers, sexy women, valiant colleagues) are tall.

  • [Sami was] one of five brothers, born in Lausa, a small Drenica town with a long history of nationalist sentiment and armed resistance, he was a tall, rangy, thirty-year-old, bearded and with the shining eyes of a Biblical prophet. (p.32)
  • Miguel was not drinking either. the long, tall Spaniard, beak-nosed and gaunt like a young Jean Reno, preferred coffee and cigarettes. (p.43)
  • Alexandra [was] a Parisienne, striking in looks and temperament, she was a photographer in her thirties, tall, long-haired and veteran of Bosnia and numerous other conflicts. (p.83)
  • A tall, heavily built man with a shaven head and a goatee beard, Jago had once been the party king in the court of our early nineties London gang of revellers, able to work and play on minimal sleep and seemingly oblivious to comedown… (p.141)

It’s another aspect of the oddly comic-strip aspect of a lot of the text. The tall, striking men and women, the super-hero Kurt, his beloved grandmother in her ideal rural cottage etc. I dare say it’s all true. But it also has a kind of super-real, idealising feel to it. Sunday supplement perfection.

More wars than last time

The first book almost entirely described Loyd’s experiences in Bosnia and so had a geographical and geopolitical unity. (In fact, it contains one long chapter about the completely unrelated war in Chechnya which he was sent to cover, but Bosnia is the main setting and backdrop to his various personal dramas.)

By contrast, this book is more varied in location. It includes descriptions of wars in not only Kosovo but also Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. ‘My War Gone By, I Miss It So’ was very focused on the Bosnia War 1992 to 1996. This one covers the period from February 1999 to spring 2004, when a lot of other major conflicts kicked off and Loyd, now no longer blagging his way into the role, as he’d done in Bosnia, is now a full-time professional working for an employer and so goes where he is told.

1. Kosovo

In Yugoslavia ruled by the communist leader Josip Broz Tito from 1945 to 1980, Kosovo was a province of Serbia, one of the 6 republics which made up the federation of Yugoslavia. Tito held the country together by, in the cultural realm, the force of his personality and charisma; in politics, by shrewdly distributing power among Yugoslavia’s fractious ethnic groups; but mostly, like any communist state, by the rigorous deployment of the army and secret police to repress any serious opposition.

In one sense the mystery is how the complicated power sharing structures he set up survived so long after his death in 1980. The answer is that the heads of each republic remained communists and had a vested interest in keeping the existing power structures in place. It was the collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe which precipitated the Yugoslav wars. Because the leaders of the three relevant republics realised they could use nationalism as a force to maintain their hold on power.

1. Slovenia The Slovene Republic in the north was the first to declare independence from Yugoslavia, in June 1991, which led to a brief ten-day war between Slovene nationalist forces and units of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav Army. It was so brief because Slovenia was ethnically homogenous i.e. there was no substantial ethnic minority to contest Slovenian rule (unlike all the other republics) and also because the leader of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, wanted to keep all units of the Yugoslav Army, predominantly Serb in character, for the war which was kicking off in neighbouring Croatia.

2. Croatia The war moved steadily south like a plague. The war in Croatia was caused by the fact that the tough Croatian nationalist tone of the new regime under president Franjo Tudjman led Serbs in the eastern part of the country to rebel and win backing from the Serb government and Yugoslav Army. The resulting war lasted from March 1991 to November 1995.

3. Bosnia Long before it was over, however, the infection moved south into Bosnia where the Serb minority again rebelled against the country’s declaration of independence in April 1992. The war in Bosnia was the central and longest lasting conflict of the Yugoslav wars and changed character during its course. The Bosnian War is generally agreed to have lasted from April 1992 to December 1995 when the Dayton accords were signed. What made it so cruel was that, to begin with, adherents of the country’s multi-ethnic identity i.e. the country’s Croats and Bosnian Muslims (or Bosniaks), fought alongside each other against the Serb nationalists who seized Serb-majority territory in the east and north of the country.

But then, like a plague, the infection of nationalism spread among Bosnians and, eventually, turned Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims against each other, turning the war into a three-way conflict. Often the Serbs, always the best supplied of the warring parties because of their links with economically dominant Serbia and the former Yugoslav Army, stood aside and watched the Croats and Bosniaks slaughter each other.

Loyd’s first book, ‘My War Gone By, I Miss It So’, is a vivid and heat-breaking record of this process, how the split between the former allies, Croats and Bosniaks, spread from valley to valley, from village to village, with disgusting consequences of civilian slaughters and massacres.

4. Kosovo There was a lull between the end of the Bosnian War and the start of the conflict in Kosovo in spring 1998. Under Tito, Kosovo had been an autonomous part of Serbia i.e. had a lot of autonomy but ultimately came under Serb administrative control. The population was made up of about 1.8 million people of Albanian ethnicity and Muslim religion, and 200,000 or so Serbs, ethnic Slavs and believers of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Serbs tended to hold all the positions of power, and derived their control from Belgrade (capital of Serbia), something which had rankled for generations with Kosovo separatists.

Once the lid of communist rule was removed the way was open for nationalists of both sides to rouse ‘their’ people. Scattered militias, criminals and freedom fights came together to form the loosely organised Kosovo Liberation Army or KLA who carried out violent but ineffectual and counter-productive attacks on symbols of Serb power, like police stations. They began doing this following the end of the Bosnian War in what has become known as the Kosovan Insurgency, starting in 1996.

In 1997 there was anarchy and a brief civil war in neighbouring Albania early 1997, following the fall of President Sali Berisha. In March the police and Republican Guard deserted their posts, leaving their armouries open. Large amounts of guns and ammunition were stolen from barracks and smuggled across the porous border into Kosovo to equip the KLA.

What complicated the picture was that Kosovo happened to be the location of a famous battlefield, where Serbian defenders of Christendom and Europe had been defeated by the advancing Turks in 1389. On the anniversary of the battle, Serb leader Slobodan Milošević travelled to the site of the battle and made a highly publicised speech telling the Serbs in Kosovo that they would never be bullied or defeated again.

Thus, when in early 1998, KLA attacks increasingly targeted Yugoslav authorities in Kosovo, the Serbs responded by increasing the presence of army units and battle-hardened Serb paramilitaries. These set about pursuing a campaign of retribution, targeting KLA sympathisers and political opponents. In February 1998 this situation was recognised as being a war.

Extremists on both sides came to the fore. The KLA’s aim was to declare an independent Kosovo republic and take all the positions of power and administration out of Serb hands, driving all Serbs out of Kosovo if necessary. The Serbs, far more organised and better equipped, wanted to take full control of Kosovo and absorb it into their notion of a Greater Serbia. To do this required terrorising as many ethnic Albanians as possible into fleeing the country. So, as in Croatia and Bosnia, the Serbs set about ‘exemplary’ massacres, entering rural villages and killing everyone they found, rounding up civilians and shooting them in front of mass graves, letting some escape and shooting them as target practice, round them up into houses which they set fire to burn them to death.

Loyd reports on the KLA’s supremely cynical tactic which was to let the Serbs do it. Because they gambled that if the Serbs carried out enough well-publicised atrocities, NATO would be forced to intervene and then their moment would come. They were right but thousands of their own people had to die wretched, agonising deaths first.

But they were also wrong for they and NATO miscalculated and Slobodan Milošević showed himself to be a canny strategist. For Milošević realised that NATO was badly split. The Europeans were reluctant to intervene militarily, it was the Americans pushing for decisive action. So Milošević anticipated a NATO attack but banked on NATO lacking the resolve to follow it through.

Not only that but he realised that as soon the NATO air campaign began (as it did on 24 March 1999) he would be able to let loose his forces in a real wave of ethnic cleansing. Thus as the first NATO planes flew sorties against Serb targets, Serb forces unleashed a tsunami of ethnic cleansing across Kosovo. The air campaign was not as effective as anyone thought, due to bad weather and the strict limits NATO set itself to avoid all ‘collateral damage’. Nonetheless NATO planes hit a number of civilian targets, killing as many civilians as the Serbs. Moreover, if the aim was to protect Albanian civilians the air campaign had the opposite effect: the death toll among all concerned (including ethnic Albanians) skyrocketed following and a post-war report by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe noted that ‘the pattern of the expulsions and the vast increase in lootings, killings, rape, kidnappings and pillage once the NATO air war began on March 24’.

After a total of 78 days the Serbian Parliament passed a resolution to comply with NATO requirements and the air campaign ceased. The NATO-led peacekeeping Kosovo Force (KFOR) of 30,000 soldiers began entering Kosovo but Loyd is acid, not only about the West’s miscalculation about Serb resolution, but what happened next. He devotes some scathing pages to NATO’s complete unpreparedness for the levels of ethnic hatred and vengeance they were about to encounter. They didn’t realise the extent to which returning Kosovar Albanian refugees, and emboldened units of the KLA, would wreak the kind of massacre on unarmed Serb civilians that Serb paramilitaries had meted out to Kosovars. So now it was the turn of many innocent Serb villagers to be shot out of hand and have their homes and villages burned. The NATO force lacked the manpower, and legal expertise, to intervene into the tens of thousands of grievances which flared across the country.

Outside Pristina, Serbs and gypsies were slain in their dozens and their property burned. Once the dominant minority, in the months following NATO’s arrival most of the province’s Serbs simply packed their belongings into their vehicles and fled north to Serbia…The list of the international community’s excuses for failing to protect the Serbs was endless…So many of the war’s good intentions died in the peace, as the result of the failure by Western powers to anticipate the level of hate that would remain in Kosovo after the arrival of their troops there…It was difficult even for a believer in NATO’s intervention such as me to swallow… (pages 130 to 132)

Incidentally, the point about ‘the Western powers’ not being prepared for the level of ethnic hatred they encounter in Kosovo is echoed by Michael Ignatieff who, in his 2003 book, Empire Lite, says the UN’s humanitarian ambassador to Kosovo once the fighting ended, Bernard Kouchner, was taken by surprise by ‘the ferocity of the hatred in Kosovo’, p.63. What Ignatieff’s book brings out that Loyd’s doesn’t is that the Kosovars came to think of themselves as the intended victims of a genocide. Ignatieff quotes the NATO estimate that between March and May 1999 Serbian police and paramilitaries killed some 10,000 Kosavar Albanians and would have carried on killing as many as they could had not the bombing campaign eventually brought a halt. When you believe an enemy force has tried to exterminate your entire race, then no amount of revenge is enough. Hence the virulent hatred the West, NATO and Kouchner were astonished by.

2. Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone was granted independence by the UK in 1961. It is a poor country whose main assets are diamonds, gold, bauxite and aluminium in the east of the country. In 1991 a brutal civil war broke out which was to last 11 years. In part it was a spillover from the civil war in neighbouring Liberia whose dictator, Charles Taylor, sent forces to overthrow the Leonean government of Joseph Momoh. Nigeria sent peacekeeping forces in to try and secure stability. The main element of the conflict was the rise of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) which became notorious for:

  • abducting children who they brainwashed and drugged into becoming psychopathic killers; as many as 11,000 child soldiers were recruited
  • amputating hands or arms as a form of intimidation and terror

The Sierra Leone civil war lasted 11 years, destroyed large parts of the country, and left up to 200,000 dead and tens of thousands disfigured and handicapped.

In Sierra Leone, in the west of the continent, the Revolutionary United Front, possibly Africa’s most infamous rebel army, had routed government troops, killed numerous United Nations soldiers, taken others prisoner, encircled many more, and was moving on the capital, Freetown. (p.134)

And:

The RUF was about as raving and insane as rebel groups get, its operations hallmarked by savage and wanton cruelty, utilising terror as a delight rather than as a tool…

The RUF’s political leader was Foday Sankoh, a clinically mad former corporal, by 2001 in jail on war crimes charges, whose manifesto was a mix of archaic Marxism and voodoo, and whose forces’ battle honours included class acts such as ‘Operation No Living Thing’, in which thousands of civilians had been butchered. The cutting off of prisoners’ hands with machetes was so commonplace that the rebels even had a terminology for it: ‘long sleeve’ and ‘short sleeve’ describing whether victims received their amputation at the wrist or elbow. (p.147)

So much for the grisly specifics. Loyd then delivers the kind of pithy and insightful summary which recur throughout the text and help you understand not just the specific conflict but the world we live in.

The RUF was an enduring manifestation of the general West African malaise: a lumpenproletariat of angry, ill-educated young men produced by the extreme poverty, rampant government corruption, spiralling disease and exploding population of the region. (p.147)

It was here that Loyd’s hero, Kurt, was killed, in a pointless roadside ambush carried out by the RUF, and which Loyd then devotes weeks to tracking down the killers, although he hasn’t really succeeded before he is badly injured in a car crash caused by his reckless local driver.

3. Afghanistan

Life for most Afghans was a subsistence battle in a year-zero world (p.197)

Loyd’s account brilliantly conveys the wrecked, devastated nature of the country, shedding light on its harsh, basic but attractive culture (Islamic fundamentalism, hashish, beards). But I thought the most interesting part was his dwelling on the cultural acceptance of Afghan fighters switching loyalties (pages 206, 223 to 230)

Afghan timeline

1953
General Mohammed Daud becomes prime minister of Afghanistan and turns to the Soviet Union for economic and military assistance, the start of a long association with the USSR.

1963
Mohammed Daud forced to resign as prime minister.

1964
Constitutional monarchy introduced but leads to political polarisation and power struggles.

1973
Mohammed Daud seizes power in a coup and declares Afghanistan a republic. Daud tries to play off the USSR against Western powers.

1978
General Daud is overthrown and killed in a pro-Soviet coup. The People’s Democratic Party comes to power but is paralysed by infighting and faces opposition by US-backed mujahideen groups.

1979 December
With the communist government in danger of collapsing, the Soviet Army invades to prop it up.

1980
Babrak Karmal is installed as ruler, backed by Soviet troops, but the opposition from mujahideen groups intensifies, with the muj armed and equipped by the US, Pakistan, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Low level guerrilla war spreads across the country.

1985
The mujahideen come together in Pakistan to form an alliance against the Soviets. It’s estimated that half the Afghan population is displaced by war, with many fleeing to neighbouring Iran or Pakistan. In the same year Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the USSR and institutes his policies of perestroika and glasnost.

1986
The US starts supplying the mujahideen with Stinger missiles, enabling them to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships. Babrak Karmal is replaced by Mohammad Najibullah as head of the Soviet-backed regime.

1988
Under Gorbachev’s aegis, the USSR signs peace accords with Afghanistan, the US and Pakistan and starts pulling out troops but leaving the communist government under Najibullah in place.

1989
The last Soviet troops leave but civil war continues as the mujahideen unite to overthrow Najibullah.

1990
Najibullah wasn’t a Soviet stooge. He tried to build support for his government via the National Reconciliation reforms, he distanced himself from socialism, abolished the one-party state and let non-communists join the government. He remained open to dialogue with the mujahideen, made Islam an official religion, and invited exiled businessmen back to re-take their properties. In the 1990 constitution, all references to communism were removed and Islam became the state religion

1992
Following the August Coup in Moscow and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Najibullah was left without foreign aid. His government collapsed and he resigned in April 1992. The mujahedin were triumphant but immediately relapsed back into regional factions and a devastating civil war began.

1996
A new, much more hard-line Islamist faction, the Taliban, seize control of Kabul. They ban women from work, and introduce Islamic punishments which include stoning to death and amputations. They do not, however, control large parts of the country.

1997
The Taliban are recognised as the legitimate government of Afghanistan by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. They now control about two-thirds of the country.

1998
US embassies in Africa are bombed. US intelligence points the finger at Osama bin Laden who runs a terrorist organisation called al-Qaeda. The US launches missile strikes at suspected al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan.

1999
The UN imposes an air embargo and financial sanctions to force the Taliban government to hand over Osama bin Laden for trial.

2001 September
Ahmad Shah Masood, leader of the main opposition to the Taliban – the Northern Alliance – is assassinated on 10 September. This is the point where Loyd enters the picture, with reminiscences of meeting Masood on previous visits to the country.

11 September, the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, quickly traced back to al-Qaeda and bin Laden.

2001 October
When the Taliban government in Kabul refuses to hand over bin Laden, the US commences a bombing campaign against the Taliban, co-ordinated with ground attacks by the Northern Alliance of mujahedin, formerly led by Masood. Loyd is with these forces when the first air strikes begin and then follows the escalating pace of the war, and is with Northern Alliance troops when they enter Kabul (which has largely been abandoned by the Taliban).

2001 December
Leaders of the various mujahedin groups are brought to Germany, where NATO i.e. the US, lean heavily on them to agree to create an interim government.

2002 January
Deployment of the first contingent of foreign peacekeepers – the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) – marking the start of protracted fighting against the Taliban.

2002 June
The Loya Jirga, or grand council, elects Hamid Karzai as interim head of state. Karzai is to be a key figure in Afghan politics for the next 15 years.

2003 August
NATO takes control of security in Kabul, its first-ever operational commitment outside Europe.

This map from Wikipedia gives a sense of the landholdings by different Afghan groups between the fall of Najibullah in 1992 and the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

The War of Afghanistan in four maps, showing the changing territory held by the major armed militias between 1992 and the October 2001 US-led intervention

4. Iraq

For Loyd’s involvement, see chapter 17, below.

Iraq timeline

28 February 1991
The Gulf War ends, leaving Iraq subject to United Nations sanctions and arms inspections designed to track down weapons of mass destruction (biological, chemical and nuclear weapons). Disputes over inspectors’ access to Iraqi facilities continue for years.

December 1998
US-led air raids on Iraq as punishment for not giving UN weapons inspectors access to facilities.

11 September 2001
Hijacked airplanes are flown into the World Trade Centre towers in New York, at the Pentagon and a fourth one was brought down by the passengers en route to attack a target in Washington DC. A Muslim fundamentalist organisation called al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi citizen living in Afghanistan, is quickly identified as being behind the attacks.

20 September
President of the United States George W. Bush first uses the term ‘war on terror’ in a speech to Congress. The enemy in the war on terror was ‘a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them’. The phrase was immediately criticised by every literate person who realised that you cannot declare war on an abstract noun, but also by US officials such as Richard Myers, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

October 2001
US intelligence knows that al Qaeda and bin Laden are based in Afghanistan. When American demands that the Taliban government of Aghanistan surrender bin Laden are rejected, US-led forces begin planning and then implementing military action in Afghanistan. Loyd is with Northern Alliance mujahedin forces as they fight their way south against the Taliban and into Kabul. Though the Americans don’t know it, the struggle to bring peace and security will last for twenty years and, ultimately, be a failure.

January 2002
Flush with success in Afghanistan, US President George W. Bush returns to the Middle Eastern nation which had been a thorn in the side of US policy since the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq. Many hawkish Americans think the coalition led by Bush’s father should not have stopped at pushing the Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait, but should have continued on to Baghdad. In his State of the Union address on 29 January 2002 Bush identifies Iraq as part of an ‘axis of evil’ along with Iran and North Korea i.e. preparing the public and international community for war.

12 September 2002
President Bush addresses the United Nations General Assembly and warns Iraq that military action will be unavoidable if it does not comply with UN resolutions on disarmament.

24 September 2002
Keen to side with a bellicose America, the British government under Prime Minister Tony Blair publishes an intelligence ‘dossier’ which claims to assess the threat posed by Iraq. It includes the claim that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction which could be deployed within 45 minutes. Even at the time, to anyone of even moderate intelligence, it was clear that this was complete bollocks and, even if it was true, it wouldn’t be London or Paris let alone Washington that Saddam would attack with his useless Russian rockets, it would be Iran, which he’d failed to defeat in an 8-year war, or Israel, which is very capable of protecting itself.

8 November 2002
The UN Security Council unanimously passes resolution 1441, giving Iraq ‘a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations’ and warning of ‘serious consequences’ if it does not. It is obvious to observers that Bush Junior wants to finish off what his pappy started.

November 2002 to March 2003
Despite carrying out over 700 inspections in Iraq, the UN’s Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission fails to find weapons of mass destruction.

15 February 2003
As America continues to ramp up its warlike rhetoric, millions of people around the world conclude that America’s strategy is warlike, destabilising and completely unjustified. On 15 February hundreds of thousands of people – the organisers estimated almost two million – march through London to protest military action in Iraq and Tony Blair’s craven kowtowing to Bush. There are similar marches in Glasgow and Belfast, part of a worldwide weekend of protest. Loyd knows that, despite coming from a military family, his mother and sister go on the march.

25 February 2003
The US and the UK submit a draft resolution to the UN, stating that Iraq has missed its ‘final opportunity’ to disarm peacefully. To their great irritation the resolution is opposed not just by the usual obstructor, Russia, but by two NATO allies, France and Germany. In fact France emerged as the chief opponents of an invasion.

It was during this period that a joke line from the cartoon series The Simpsons, about the French being ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ was revived in the American media, along with the widespread renaming of French fries as ‘freedom fries’.

March 2003
In face of opposition from France and Russia, the UK and US abandon attempts to secure a second UN resolution authorising force. US President George Bush gives Saddam and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq or face war.

18 March 2003
Tony Blair wins House of Commons backing to send UK forces into war in Iraq, despite a major rebellion by Labour MPs.

19 March 2003
First air raids on Baghdad as part of the so-called ‘shock and awe’ campaign of aerial bombardment. 20 March ground forces invade. The invasion of Iraq lasted just over one month, led by combined force of troops from the US, UK, Australia and Poland. 9 April, 22 days after the invasion, coalition forces took Baghdad after the six-day-long Battle of Baghdad.

Loyd accompanies Northern Alliance forces through the fighting into Baghdad.

1 May 2003
Bush declared the ‘end of major combat operations’ in his Mission Accomplished speech, delivered on an aircraft carrier off the coast of California.

29 May 2003
A BBC report casts doubt on the government’s 2002 dossier stating that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction capable of being deployed within 45 minutes.

18 July 2003
Government weapons expert David Kelly is found dead after being exposed as the source of the BBC story about the dossier.

13 December 2003
Saddam Hussein is found by US troops hiding in a cellar south of Tikrit, his home town.

Late 2003 onwards
Insurgents in Iraq begin targeting US-backed forces and fighting erupts between rival militias.

14 July 2004
The Butler Review on military intelligence finds key information used to justify the war in Iraq was unreliable. MI6 did not check its sources well enough and sometimes relied on third-hand reports. The 2002 dossier should not have included the claim that Iraq could use weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes without further explanation.

In other words, Tony Blair’s government leant on British Intelligence to distort the information and lie in order to back line of action he had already decided on, which was knee-jerk solidarity with America.

Structure of the book

The text consists of a prologue and 17 chapters. The paperback edition I have consists of 302 large format pages.

Prologue: Iraq, winter 2004

Like ‘My War Gone By, I Miss It So’ the text starts with a scene from the very end of the period being covered, in this case standing with an American NCO named Carlisle at the end of a firefight in a village on the edge of the al Anbar which has become the epicentre of the insurgent opposition to the American occupation, in which one of his soldiers has been killed and is even now being choppered back to the base where his body will be tidied up ready for the long journey home to the States.

Loyd describes the course of this one particular American ‘patrol’ and introduces a recurring leitmotif when he describes Carlisle as ‘a tall, rangy man with an aquiline nose, pale Celtic eyes and a straight mouth that hinted of something mean’ (p.3).

But the main purpose of the prologue is to establish the author as someone who has knocked around war zones for over a decade, knows that all battlefields are haunted, knows there is no rhyme or reason in who will survive and who will die, is haunted by his own cast of characters (naming people we will meet in successive chapters of the book).

The prologue then reverts to Loyd’s experience in Operation Desert Storm back in 1991, when, a fresh-faced 24 and nearing the end of a 5-year contract in the British Army, he volunteered to join a Scots regiment in order to be part of the British military contingent in the huge US-led coalition which kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in February 1991. But he was bitterly disappointed to see no fighting, just trenches of demoralised conscript Iraqis eagerly surrendering. The war was over in just 100 hours. A few weeks later he was flown back to Britain and officially left the army, with the itch for action, the urge to test his mettle and live up to the challenge of his warrior ancestors unappeased.

And then briefly refers to the scene 13 years later, in post-invasion, occupied Iraq.

  1. Kosovo, February 1999 – Loyd describes his base at the hotel and bar of Beba, ‘a Serb gangland daddy’ (p.16) in Pristina, capital of Kosovo, from which he and other correspondents drive out to the countryside to see the evidence of the latest Serb atrocity. Description of the shootout between KLA and Serb forces which triggered the war. Introduces Kurt, his hero, with the anecdote of the time they took on sound bouncer-like Serb paramilitaries who beat them up.
  2. More Kosovo: introduction to Sami, an amateurish KLA fighter then onto a gripping analysis of the political and military situation, the aims of the three parties: the KLA, the Serbs and NATO. Graphic, sickening descriptions of Serb massacres carried out in revenge for a KLA one. Both sides massacre defenceless civilians, while the Western press was obsessing about whether Bill Clinton had sex with Monica Lewinsky. Loyd celebrates his 32nd birthday among colleagues, a psychological profile of his fellow war correspondents and then the family background which brought him to war.
  3. London, September 1998 – Back in London for R&R and an extended description of his heroin addiction with a full description and psychology of the addict, his family’s response, the CORE rehab centre. ‘War for work, heroin for holidays’ (p.56).
  4. Kosovo, February 1999 – Back in Kosovo the situation has deteriorated with the Serbs carrying out more massacres confident that NATO lack the resolve to punish them. The psychology of the war correspondent. ‘It was our profession but it was also our delight.’ (p.75) More stories about his hero Kurt, coming under fire reporting on a bombed bridge. With the collapse of the Rambouillet talks, NATO monitors are withdrawn, NATO goes to battle stations, and the Serbs hugely accelerated their campaign of murder and massacre. Loyd sees the, decapitated, mutilated bodies. The smell of fresh meat. At a stroke Western correspondents become potential spies or hostages, so their hurried, fraught, dicey escape from Kosovo into Macedonia.
  5. Albania, spring 1999 – Now based in a scuzzy hotel in Bajaram Curri in north Albania, they undertake trips across the border into Kosovo to see and interview KLA forces, for example ‘the Fighting Emir’. Description of the Albanian version of vendetta, kanun (p.100) and how local officials (the town’s chief of police) are involved in it. Commentary on the NATO bombing campaign i.e. deeply disappointing and only encouraged the Serbs into ferocious action. The only thing that would stop it would be NATO committing ground troops which it was mortally afraid to do.
  6. England, summer 1999 – extended description of his lovely grandmother and the rural cottage she lived in which has Loyd’s retreat as a boy. Memories of catching his first trout, and the odd characters who lived locally. A tribute to his mum’s hard working, tough but calm character.
  7. Kosovo, June 1999 – The grim end-game of the conflict, with the KLA finally in the ascendant and Serb forces withdrawn from Kosovo, Loyd testifies to the Kosovars’ vengeance on any Serbs they can get their hands on, the usual rural massacres, fields of bodies etc, the utter unpreparedness of the occupying NATO forces for the level of hatred and vengeance they encounter, and their pathetic inability to stop revenge attacks on Serb civilians.
  8. Ethiopia, May 2000 – Loyd is in Ethiopia when the office call to inform him of Kurt’s death in a roadside ambush in Sierra Leone. He flies to Paris where, with other friends, he meets the body, then onto America to meet the family and attend the funeral. Part of him dies. Back in London he goes on a bender with an old mate, Jago, who is both a crack head and a smack addict.
  9. Sierra Leone, May 2001 – A year after Kurt’s death Loyd embarks on a personal quest to track down the RUF unit responsible for his death. I can see it meant a lot to him, but what struck me was his description of hot humid West Africa, the disgusting atrocities carried out by the RUF, and the terrifying volatility and unpredictability of the warlords he meets on his quest. Poro initiation ceremonies which involve scarring and magic and can stretch to cutting the heart out of a living victim and eating it raw (p.155). Politically, Sierra Leone is important because the UN’s entire role as a peacekeeping force was being called into question by the rebel successes. During a ceasefire he is invited by Nigerian peacekeepers to an RUF party given to celebrate 20 years since Bob Marley’s death (p.157).
  10. Sierra Leone – Loyd’s efforts to reconstruct the events leading up to Kurt’s killing in the ambush, going deep into rebel territory to interview RUF officers, and visiting the scene and actually getting into the rusting wreckage of the Mercedes Kurt was travelling in. On one journey the very bad driver he’s been lumbered with crashes the car after a tyre blows.
  11. Sierra Leone – vivid description of aftermath of the crash (the car spun over and lost its roof) and his attempts to save the life of his translator, Allieu, who dies anyway. Locals call the nearest Nigerian UN forces. He is helicoptered back to town. Still recovering from bad cuts and grazes Loyd soldiers on with his quest for Kurt’s killers…
  12. France, summer 2001 – Loyd’s step-father owned a converted stable in rural France. When he sold it Loyd bought it and it became a refuge and sanctuary (p.187). He invokes boyhood memories of fishing. He has barbecues with local mates. 10 September 2001 his manager in London phones to tell him Ahmed Shah Masood has been assassinated, which leads into anecdotes about meeting Masood a few years previously, interviewing him, following him round the front line. Masood was leader of the Northern Alliance of mujahedin who are in a civil war with the Taliban. Back in the present, next day his mum phones to tell him about the 9/11 attacks.
  13. Afghanistan, September 2001 – Profile of Afghanistan, ruined, impoverished land of endless war, from the Soviet invasion of 1979 onwards. With a good friend and colleague, Shay, he shares a bone-rattling ride north from Kabul to the front line. Lots of insightful explanations of Afghanistan’s history, wars, ruined economy, national character, the overwhelming role of Islam, the ubiquity of strong hashish (p.208). When, according to their values of hospitality and honour (p.204) the Taliban refuse to give up their guest, Osama bin Laden, after the 9/11 attacks, the American government decides to overthrow them. Loyd arrives just as the American campaign is girding its loins and finds the Northern Alliance upset at the death of their leader (Masood) but confident of American support. Complete scepticism about the bullshit spouted by Western military experts crapping on about precision strikes and drone warfare and other bullshit (p.207). In a bizarre digression, on their journey Loyd and Shay are invited to join the crowd witnessing the circumcision of a 7-year-old boy (p.211).
  14. Afghanistan – Being shown round the dusty front line by Sher Agah. A night time firefight. Description of the Hazara as a distinct ethnic group. A visit to Bagram airport. Extensive description of the Afghan ability to switch sides with ease, really interesting insight into the base level survival tactics of most impoverished, beaten down Afghans.
  15. Afghanistan – When some American special forces arrive Shay and Loyd are kicked out of their crib and find another place to stay in a derelict hotel without electricity or toilet in Golbahar. Their perilous consumption of the local moonshine. The stomach-turning story of Karimullah, a 26-year-old who fights against the Taliban, is captured, has his foot and hand surgically removed in the football stadium (p.244). His luxury was visits to an amateur hamam or Turkish bath. Explanation of the exchange value of enemy prisoners or corpses. A telling evening hosted by local businessman and warlord Fahrid Ahmad Shafaq, who can see that Afghanistan needs development but worries that the Americans might be waging a war against Islam? Are they, he asks Loyd.
  16. Afghanistan – After months of hanging round, Loyd describes the Northern Alliance assault on the Taliban lines, break through and advance on Kabul which is captured on 13 November 2001. Firefights, the newly dead and the bleeding-to-death. Some journalist friends are murdered by bandits. But once he’s in the city he realises he’s tired, exhausted, demoralised. Taliban leaders and Osama bin Laden escaped into the Tora Bora mountains, to the Americans’ dismay. After a shave at a newly liberated barbers’ (with some sociology about the importance of the beard in fundamentalist Islam) he takes a ludicrously derelict chopper flight to neighbouring Tajikistan, and so home.
  17. Iraq, March 2003 – 16 months later he is in northern Iraq. The Allies have assembled a huge force in Kuwait and are on the brink of invading to overthrow Saddam. Most reporters have based themselves there, ’embedded with the troops’. Loyd takes the conscious decision to go to the north of the country, entering Kurdish-held territory from Iran and hoping to catch a lift with the American forces which will come down through Turkey, into Kurdistan and sweep on to Baghdad. He is uneasily aware that his mother and sister, scions of a military family, both went on the million-people march against the war in Iraq. He doesn’t touch on the farce of the UN searches for weapons of mass destruction, but instead on his own personal farce. He has come back to Iraq 13 years after taking part in Operation Desert Storm and leaving frustrated that he saw no fighting, hoping for closure and completion, hoping that after over ten years of chasing wars he will experience some kind of revelation. But the Turkish government blocks the Americans from sending any men or equipment through Turkey and the northern offensive is delayed while in the south the Allied forces storm through the Iraqis. In the end, with the help of a small force of Green Berets calling down air attacks, the peshmerga (Kurdish militias) break through successive Iraqi lines and fight their way south, taking the talismanic city of Kirkuk. Baghdad has fallen and he missed it. He experiences no closure after all, and takes a taxi back into Iran, then a plane back to London, in the ‘identical’ state of frustration as when he first left Iraq, back in ’91.

Epilogue: Baghdad, spring 2004

A year or so after the setting of the final chapter, Loyd is now back in Baghdad, in a hotel bedroom. The insurgency is bedded in, the Americans have withdrawn to a heavily fortified compound, and Loyd is finally here, where he fantasised of being all those years ago during Desert Storm. Big deal.

In fact the epilogue turns out to be entirely about his beloved mother’s diagnosis with a brain tumour, loss of sight in one eye leading her to wear a piratical eye patch, her stoic strength of spirit described in Loyd’s best hero worshiping style and clichés come tumbling out:

Defeat was not an option as we geared ourselves for the coming treatment, but my heart was afflicted by naked dread masked by desperate resolve… (p.300)

He was covering the trial of Slobodan Milošević when his sister rang him to say his mother had collapsed and been rushed to hospital. By his mother’s hospital bed he is awed when she asks to be taken home to die, despite being told that such a move will hasten her demise. Here, a chastened Loyd realises, is the bravery he had spent his life seeking: not on some foreign battlefield but in the heart of his indomitable mother. She dies as Loyd and his sister hold her hand. She is buried on a beautiful winter’s day with the whole village turning out to see her off.

You can read this as either a really beautiful and moving tribute or a pack of high-minded clichés or, as I do, both at the same time, the one inhabiting the other.

Clichés

It’s tempting to analyse Loyd’s style at length. It can be very florid and purple, hyper-real Sunday supplement prose, burnishing every situation, every thought with gloss and sheen.

One aspect which struck me was his consciousness of the risk of cliché in writing about a) war, b) heroin addiction, c) his unhappy family, all subjects which have been done to death for generations.

Regarding war, as early as page 5 Loyd describes how the American marines nervously patrolling the backstreets of al Anbar, expecting an ambush at any moment, invoke folk memories of the Vietnam War and scenes from Apocalypse Now, a war that was over and movie that was released before they were born. The point is they all feel like they’re experiencing the war through the filter of someone else’s tropes and patterns.

Some barely out of college and experiencing their first foreign country, many of the younger American soldiers in Iraq were living in their own war films, life and art enmeshing in a freakish coupling to a contemporary soundtrack of thrash metal and gangsta rap… (p.5)

So it’s hard to avoid cliché when you and the people you’re reporting on all feel as if they’re living in a huge cliché, when reality itself seems to be made up of well-worn tropes. Still, Loyd raises the issue. When analysing his general unhappiness, he says:

Even the rages that sprang forward so easily from memories of my father seemed too trite, too convenient, too clichéd, to weave into a noose from which to hang heroin. (p.63)

A sentence which is also an example of his use of florid and elaborate metaphor. A little later he is writing about the motivation of war correspondents and says:

‘Death wish’ is a tired old cliché – simplistic, absolute and inept in describing our motivations. (p.75)

But it’s a risky strategy to highlight your aversion to clichés unless you can be quite certain that you will avoid them and, in the kind of stereotyped situations in which he finds himself, and much-described battlezone feelings he finds himself experiencing, this is very difficult.

Starting out in London, talking of his fellow drug addicts at the West London rehab centre, he writes:

A few had been crushed by such cruel hands of fate that I wondered how they had any alternative… (p.55)

‘Cruel hands of fate’? On the same page he talks about his gang of London friends:

Hardcore libertines, we thought we were cool and beautiful and turned on. (p.55)

Not so much a cliché of phrasing as of thinking. Sunday supplement thinking. When he describes his little cohort of friends they are all tall and beautiful and successful. You can virtually see the Sunday supplement photos.

Elsewhere, you consistently come across phrases describing stereotypes which boost the text, make it seem more hyper-real, idealised, airbrushed to a kind of generic perfection.

  • My sister Natasha, younger than me by four years, a woman of flint-like resolve beneath a gentle exterior… (p.58)

Later, in Kosovo, when NATO commences its bombing campaign, Loyd and all his fellow correspondents immediately become liable for arrest or worse:

  • From that moment on, our fate hung above the cauldron of harm on the frayed thread of the night’s few sleepless hours and Beba’s word. (p.91)

OK, that’s not a cliché as such, but it is a typical example of his purple prose. ‘Our fate hung above the cauldron of harm…’ Loyd’s prose, in other words, is very much not Hemingway minimalist, it’s the opposite; full of florid metaphors and similes, which, along with the clichés and stereotypes give the whole thing a super-real vividness. There’s a kind of continual psychological over-writing at work. When an American army chaplain shares his disillusion, Loyd remarks:

Once, I may have privately sneered at his predicament, for the crushing of another’s hope can be cruel sport to behold from the pedestal of nihilist certainty. (p.5)

Is this too purple and engorged? For frugal tastes, maybe. Then again, considering the extremes of experience which he is describing, maybe it’s a perfectly valid approach.

The few phrases I’ve picked out are fragments of Loyd’s overall strategy, which is to push language into baroque shapes and see what happens, to create a new idiolect. It’s easy to pick holes in, but the overall impression is of tremendous readability and enjoyability. He risks using odd words or words in odd combinations to capture moments and perceptions and often achieves brilliant effects. No risk, no reward.

Almost every conversation seemed to snag on this issue of money, a moment always marked by a pause, that tilting second of challenged pride or grace… (p.235)

In the buildup to the mujahedin attack on the Taliban lines, the fighters go about their preparations, loading up lorries, fuelling tanks and so on with no attempt at concealment.

As this readiness for war progressed with the same flagrant labour of a medieval siege… (p.255)

And leads him to deploy obscure, recherché terms. In a vivid account of battle of running through a minefield towards the Taliban lines, he writes:

Gunfire crackled. More shouts. More mujahedin piling into cover, wild-eyed, revved up, faces contorted, fervorous. (p.261)

Like a stone dropped in the pond of your mind. Nice. Reflecting on what he’d hoped to find back in 1991, during Operation Desert Storm, he writes:

Epiphany? It is an arrogant word of claim, suggesting more completion than the human state is capable of. (p.11)

‘An arrogant word of claim’, what an odd but evocative phrase.

Late in the book I noticed a particular mannerism which contributes to his creation of idiolect, which is omitting particles i.e ‘a’ and ‘the’. At one point he mentions the poet W.H. Auden and this omitting articles was one of the tricks of Auden’s early poetry. It creates an ominous sense of uncertainty, an uncertainty whether we’re dealing with a specific or general noun.

I had once asked Kurt what made him weep, supposing perhaps that his self-possession would have held him back from such release. (p.220)

I’d expect ‘such a release’ there, wouldn’t you? The choice of ‘weep’ instead of the more everyday ‘cry’ is already lending the sentence that super-real, idealised, airbrushed glamour I’ve described.

Yet loss had often rewarded me with some surprise and unexpected gift. (p.221)

‘Unexpected gift’ sounds like Auden to me. ‘Unexpected gifts‘ would be far more mundane. ‘Unexpected gift’ makes it sound mythical, like something from the age of legends. Describing the intensification of American air attacks on Taliban lines:

No longer the coy hit-and-run affairs of night, now attack jets and bombers appeared by day, in flagrant and riveting spectacle that had the locals gathered in audience on their flat rooftops.’ (p.222)

You’d expect it to be ‘in a flagrant and riveting spectacle’. See how removing that article (‘a’) makes it more archaically momentous. Same with ‘gathered in audience’, an unusual way of phrasing it. Talking of Kosavar cigarettes:

A dollar for twenty, they were the best local tobacco available, their acrid, woody smoke affording great sense of luxury. (p.241)

Where’s the ‘a’? Interviewing local Afghan warlord, Fahrid Ahmad Shafaq:

After admiring the three herons wandering through his garden – as well as flowers, ornamental birds are a source of endless fascination to Afghans – we sat on the baked mud floor to enjoy a lengthy feast of chicken, rice and watermelon and debated the war in lively exchange. (p.25)

Another missing ‘a’ lends the phrase a strange archaic quality, matching the archaic medieval feel of so much of Afghan society.

I hope these examples demonstrate the way Loyd develops a prose style which adds a kind of pregnant meaning to so much of what he sees or feels, lending everything a legendary grandeur. This isn’t a criticism. I’m trying to understand the elements of his style (over and above the searing content of many of his descriptions and his extremely acute insights into the geopolitical situations of the wars he’s covering) which make the book such an enjoyable and sumptuous read.

Credit

Another Bloody Love Letter by Anthony Loyd was published by Headline Review in 2007. All references are to the 2007 paperback edition.


War reporting book and exhibition reviews

My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd (1999)

[The Bosnian War] was a playground of the mind where the worst and most fantastic excesses of the human mind were acted out.
(My War Gone By, I Miss It So, page 172)

‘Do not chase the war. Wait, and it will come to you.’ (Croatian saying, p.220)

You can only argue so far with armed men. (p.27)

This is a gripping, searing, addictive book, a record of the three years (1993 to 1995) which the author spent covering the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, first in Croatia, then in Bosnia. Loyd gives the reader a hundred and one insights into the nature of modern warfare, into brutality and ethnic cleansing, along with explanations of the political and sociological causes of the wars, the terrible descent into internecine conflict which spread like a zombie plague across Bosnia, and descriptions of the horrific barbarities the Balkan peoples carried out against each other. Some of it will give you nightmares.

All this I expected from reviews and summaries. What I hadn’t expected was the depth and power of the autobiographical content which is woven into the narrative. This comes in two flavours. 1) First, there is a lot about Loyd’s heroin addiction, snippets and interludes woven in between the war scenes which describe the start and slow growth and then heavy weight of a serious smack habit, and his numerous attempts to go cold turkey.

2) The second autobiographical strand is the surprisingly candid and detailed descriptions (‘black childhood memories’, p.135) of his miserable childhood and seriously dysfunctional family. These only crop up a couple of times and make up only 5% of the text, but in a sense they are key to the whole narrative. Both the heroin and the compulsion to travel to the worst war scenes he could find – ‘the sensation of continuous exile’ which he’s constantly trying to escape (p.57) – stem from the deep misery of his broken family and, above all, his appalling relationship with his controlling, vindictive father.

I feel sane as anything in war, the only one there earthed to rational thought and emotion. It is peace I’ve got a problem with. (p.186)

War and heroin, in their different ways, were both for Loyd what another depressive posh man, Graham Greene, called ‘ways of escape’, refuges from his sense of unbearable unhappiness.

War and smack: I always hope for some kind of epiphany in each to lead me out, but it never happens. (p.58)

Poshness

I started off disliking Loyd because of his privileged, posh background. He comes from a posh cosmopolitan family (his great-grandfather was Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart who was not only a highly decorated British soldier but also one of the most wounded. p.60). Loyd was sent to prep school, then Eton (p.64), then on to the poshest army training available, at Sandhurst Military Academy. This was followed by five years in the Army, mostly in Northern Ireland, and then his freelance trips to Bosnia during which he wangled a gig as war correspondent with the poshest newspaper in Britain, The Times, a job he still holds. As the cherry on the cake, in 2002 Loyd married Lady Sophia Hamilton, daughter of James Hamilton, 5th Duke of Abercorn, at Baronscourt, the Duke’s 5,500 acre ancestral estate, near Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Peak posh.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, because everything I’ve mentioned (bar the marriage, which took place after this book was published) is described in the book itself, which contains a surprising amount of autobiographical material. For example, Loyd tells us a lot about his great-great-grandfather the war hero (p.60-61), about his grandfather who was a navigator in an RAF bomber (p.62), and his great-uncle who died leading a British offensive during the Great War (p.66). He comes from a family of war heroes.

But he goes to great pains to tell us he doesn’t come from a posh, successful and happy background. No. Almost everything from his boyhood and teenage years is misery and unhappiness. He describes the very negative impact of his parents splitting up when he was six (p.60). He tells us that he was miserable and lonely at prep school, and then really miserable at Eton, where he was one of the youngest in his year and felt bullied and subject to cruelty and humiliation.

Escaping poshness

How do you escape from this kind of stifling background? By being naughty. Loyd tells us that in one of the half-yearly drug sweeps through Eton the authorities found some hashish in his possession (p.65). He was sent down for a month during which he pleaded with his mother and estranged father (who was paying the bills) not to be sent back. His parents acceded to his wishes and sent him to a 6th form college in Guildford (p.65).

Here he managed to disappoint again by being determinedly unacademic and leaving with poor A-levels. Having hated the entire education system up to this point the last thing he wanted to do was go on to university so he bummed around a bit, as posh 18-year-olds confidently can, in his case working for a spell as a ‘jackaroo’ in the Australian outback, before travelling back through South-East Asia, where he had the standard adventures i.e. smoked dope in exotic settings and tried to get laid (p.65).

But the weight of family tradition began to bear down. His great-grandfather, grandfather and numerous great-uncles and cousins had all served in the military, so… He joined up. Being posh (solid family, Eton) he was readily accepted for officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

My own path was obvious: I wanted to go to war so I joined the army. There had never been any family pressure upon me to sign up. There never had to be. From my earliest recall I had wanted only to be a soldier. The legends of my own ancestors were motivation enough. (p.63)

Loyd joined the Light Division and deployed to Northern Ireland. He doesn’t say a lot about the four years he spent there, but does have a couple of vivid pages about his relatively brief time in Iraq. Basically, he was just about to leave the army at the expiration of his five year contract, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Wanting to see action, Loyd extended his contract for the duration, underwent quick desert training and then was shipped off to Kuwait, joining the 700,000 or so troops of the 35-country military coalition which was assembled in the desert and then swiftly expelled Saddam during Operation Desert Sabre in February 1991 (pages 131 to 133).

His experience was disappointing. He never saw any action, never fired a shot in anger. The Iraqi troops just surrendered, in their tens of thousands, without a hint of a fight. Saddam’s threat to unleash ‘the mother of all wars’ turned into ‘the mother of all surrenders’.

I had left my beloved Light Division and come a very long way for a war that did not happen, not to me anyway. The closest I got to killing anybody was a moment when I considered killing one of our own sergeants in a fit of rage at his ineptitude. (p.132)

Disillusioned, Loyd returned to London and quit the Army for good. But he didn’t know what to do next. He became depressed. He drank all day, barely bothering to open the curtains. He became suicidal (p.133). Eventually he went into therapy and found the discipline of turning up, once a week, looking reasonably presentable, at the therapist’s, was the start of recovery (p.134).

He signed up for a post-graduate course in photojournalism at the London College of Printing, located in the Elephant and Castle, and completed it in the summer of 1992 (p.135). It was during these months, in the spring of 1992, that the political situation in Yugoslavia began to unravel. Slowly the idea formed of heading off for this new war, using his experience as a soldier to understand the situation, hopefully using his recently acquired photography qualification as some kind of ‘in’ into journalism. For months he sent off his CV to newspapers and magazines but this led to exactly zero replies, so he decided, ‘fuck it’ (p.14) – to head off for the Balkans anyway, to see the war for himself and see what happened. His therapy had helped to some extent but also:

in many ways only fuelled an appetite for destruction. I wanted to throw myself into a war, hoping for either a metamorphosis or an exit. I wanted to reach a human extreme in order to cleanse myself of my sense of fear, and saw war as the ultimate frontier of human experience. (p.136)

Structure

Loyd’s narrative has been very carefully chopped up and rearranged to create maximum dramatic and psychological impact. If it had started the way I have, with the autobiography of his life up to the moment he decided to go to the Balkans, it would have been pretty boring. Prep school, Eton, screwing up his A-levels, Sandhurst – makes him sound like tens of thousands of nice but dim sons of the aristocracy who ended up in the Army for lack of any other career options and were packed off to run some remote province of the Empire. A time-honoured story.

Instead, the text opens with a preface of eight pages describing the scene and, more importantly, the very spooky atmosphere, inside the forest outside the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, a year after Serbian paramilitaries carried out the genocidal killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys there in July 1995.

In other words, the reader is thrown right into the heart of darkness, and to the end of Loyd’s odyssey through the Balkan Wars, a moment of grim reflection which allows him to reminisce about the people he’s met, the horrors he’s seen, the things he’s learned about human nature and himself – and then we’re off into a sequence of places and dates which have been very cannily arranged so as to build up an immensely powerful, persuasive and addictive collage.

It’s these vivid impressions and experiences, first in Sarajevo and then at villages close to the front line of the three-way Bosnian war between Croats, Muslims and Serbs, which make up the bulk of the narrative.

Sarajevo, spring 1993

While he was planning his trip, Loyd rang the Serbian restaurant in Notting Hill asking if anyone could teach him Serbo-Croatian. A woman called Mima replied and gave him lessons. She also introduced him to her friends Omar and Isidora. They had fled to London from Sarajevo, leaving Isidora’s parents behind in the besieged city. Loyd offered to take them a parcel of food and letters. He hitched a ride with two friends who were driving to Moldova and dropped him in Budapest. Then he took trains and buses to Split on the Dalmatian coast. Here he flashed an official-looking letter from a well-placed friend (posh connections) claiming he was a photojournalist and so managed to blag a UN press pass, and then onto the next flight into Sarajevo. After finding a hotel room and acclimatising himself to the siege conditions (map of danger areas, which streets not to cross), he made his way to the flat of Isidora’s parents, delivered the parcel and letters, and was welcomed into their extended social circle. He was in.

He begins to make local friends – Momcilo, Endre – and get to understand the realities of modern militia war. The eerie way you never see enemy. The first thing you know there’s a deafening racket of the shellburst or ‘the fluttering zings, smacks and whistles’ of machine gun fire (p.23). The anecdote of two old ladies pulling a trolley of potatoes across a gap between buildings, who are shelled but, miraculously, survive. ‘Fuck your mother,’ seems to be the universal expletive.

His first encounter with what passes for authority in the chaos of war. The key point is how erratic and unpredictable ‘authority’ has become in a war zone. He’s getting on well with the soldiers hunkered down in the Bosnian parliament building when some fat guy in a pink t-shirt and slippers starts throwing his weight around and comes up and confronts Loyd. When Loyd tells him to ‘fuck off’, he finds himself being escorted by reluctant soldiers to the local police station.

For a start the route takes them via sniper alley, which they have to run across as bullets zing around then. After surviving this few seconds of madness, the soldiers and Loyd break out in hysterical laughter of relief, hand round fags and are all very pally. When they arrive at the police station the head cop turns out to have a daughter in Islington so they chat about London for a bit until he’s told he’s free to go. When he asks for some kind of document authenticating his release or which he can use against future fat men in pink t-shirts, the cop laughs out loud. Loyd still hasn’t grasped the logic of a war zone.

It is amazing how quickly you get accustomed to saying nothing when dealing with Bosnian authority. Very soon you realise that it is a waste of time trying to explain anything. (p.45)

Mafia groups had been quick to grasp the new realities of life in a war zone. As the Bosnian police chief tells him, ‘Some of today’s heroes were yesterday’s criminals’ (p.28). The black market, smuggling, illegal channels – all these are now good things which enable ordinary citizens and even the state, to carry on.

We meet Darko the 24-year-old sniper, smart, well educated and a slick assassin, member of the HOS, the extremist Croatian militia. Darko takes Loyd with him on a night-time excursion to a ridge overlooking Serb positions. Darko lets him look through the rifle’s night sight where sees human shapes moving and feels an overwhelming urge to pull the trigger – not to kill, exactly, but to complete the process, ‘to achieve a conclusion to the trigger-bullet-body equation’ (p.34).

From now on the narrative is full of descriptions of corpses in all kinds of postures and conditions. He sees civilians killed, shot, eviscerated by shrapnel. The recently killed. A mother wailing over the body of her beautiful daughter, shot dead only moments earlier. The sense of universal randomness and pointlessness.

Herzegovina, summer 1993 (p.38)

Feeling too much like a tourist, bereft of a really defined role (he was neither a soldier, nor a journalist, nor a photographer – what was he?) Loyd decides to leave Sarajevo. Word is coming in that the war in wider Bosnia is taking a new direction. Three months after he left London, he takes the UN flight out of Sarajevo, and another plane which lands him in the coastal city of Split which, after Sarajevo, seems ‘a lotus fruit to the senses’ (p.42).

He meets Eric, deserted from the French Foreign Legion’s parachute regiment and a mercenary (p.49). He learns about the HVO, the Bosnian Croat army. In 1991 the Bosnian Croats and Muslims fought side by side against the nationalist Serbians. But in 1992 this alliance began to fall apart and Croats and Muslims turned against each other, creating a three-way conflict. He sees a platoon of HVO back from a sortie, lounging in the sun, swigging plum brandy.

Their leering faces and swaggering shoulders were the first examples of the porcine brutishness I was to see so much of in the months ahead. (p.46)

Central Bosnia, summer 1993 (p.69)

In Tomislavgrad he meets a soldier who is unashamedly Ustashe i.e. invokes the name of the Second World War Croat fascist party backed by the Nazis. This soldier calmly tells Loyd that he cuts the ears off dead Muslims.

Loyd hitchhikes to a place called Prozor and then beyond, till it’s dark and he’s walking along a scary road and comes to an outhouse which contains HVO troops. They welcome him and it’s all fags and plum brandy till their commander turns up and insists on interrogating Loyd, cocking a pistol in his face, convinced he’s a spy. Rather bathetically, Loyd says, deep down, it wasn’t much different from the grilling he got at Eton when he was caught in possession of drugs (p.79).

In Stara Bila he rents a room in a house owned by Viktoria and Milan, which was to turn out to be his home for the next two years. The barbecues, the parties, his mates, including a pair called Boris and Wayne.

The Bosnian war, a brief introduction

In June 1991 the Croatian government declared independence from Yugoslavia. But the eastern parts of the country had large Serb minorities which promptly rose up to defend themselves from what they feared might be a revival of the wartime fascist Croatian rule. In particular, they feared their language and positions in society would be threatened. And so towns and villages all across eastern Croatia were rent by ethnic division. They were backed by the predominantly Serb Yugoslav national army and the Serb government in Belgrade.

In 1992 the Serbs in neighbouring Bosnia also rose up to defend their communities and then went on the offensive against what they saw as the threat from the Bosnian government. The Yugoslav National Army, predominantly Serb, surrounded the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, for a siege which turned out to last for nearly four years, from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996.

Inside Sarajevo many Croats and Muslims still believed in the liberal multi-ethnic state that Yugoslavia had once been and believed it was what they were fighting for. But outside the city, in the towns and villages of Bosnia, the fragile alliance between Croats and Muslims began to crumble. This was the cause of the Bosnian War – that Croats and Muslims, initially united in opposition to the Serbs, began to fall out among themselves.

Loyd paints the breakdown in relations between Croats and Bosnian Muslims as coming from the Croat side. War in Croatia against the Serb insurgents had hardened Croat hearts and led to a flourishing of take-no-prisoners Croatian nationalism. Loyd describes the process whereby paramilitary emissaries of this new, crude and violent nationalism were sent into Bosnia where they set about terrorising the Muslim population.

Time and again Loyd hears of villages where Croat and Muslim had lived alongside each other as friends and neighbours for centuries, but then the militias arrived – outsiders, merciless and cruel – and set about massacring the Muslims, and everyone in the community was forced to take sides. Whether you wanted to or not, you were forced back on your ethnic ‘identity’. It was like a plague that spread from valley to valley, from village to village.

Loyd meets Croatian nationalist fanatics who want to annex all of Bosnia as far as the border with Serbia, in order to create a Greater Croatia. To do that they have to either exterminate the Muslims or so terrorise them with exemplary massacres that they voluntarily flee the country.

Central Bosnia, autumn 1993 (p.137)

Brutal description of the rape of a young woman while her incapacitated father watched, in Vares, an ugly mining town north-west of Sarajevo. The Serb warrior who had the skull of an imam mounted on his jeep. Back to the Middle Ages, back to the Mongol hordes.

Swedes operating as UN soldiers try to force a confrontation with murderous HVO troops in Vares but are forced to back down. The UN prevents them shooting unless definitely fired upon, which means they have to stand by passively while atrocities are carried out under their noses.

He, Corinne and others go to Stupni Do to survey the scene of a massacre, the entire civilian population of the village having been executed, tortured, burned to death. Some very upsetting sights, the work of Kresimir Bozic and the Bobovac Brigade, themselves under the control of Ivaca Rajic. Loyd uses it as a case study of the complexity of the Bosnian War, the conflicting motivations of many on all sides, the brutality of the most brutal, and the complete inability of the UN to stop it.

Central Bosnia, winter 1993 (p.164)

Novi Travnik. The disgusting story of the three Muslim soldiers who are mined by the HVO and then forced to walk back towards their lines as human booby traps until they were close enough for the Croats to detonate them, leaving nothing but stumps of legs in boots. This introduces a chapter about the tides of war in the small area known as ‘the Vitez pocket’.

The Fish-Head Gang, lawless guardians of the long narrow ravine leading from Gornji Vakuf to Vitez (p.175). Why the name? They were based on the corner of the main road through the valley where it came close to a ruined fish farm in a lake. Loyd and Corinne survive an encounter with them, but other journalists weren’t so lucky.

Back in Sarajevo for a visit, Loyd is reunited with local friends only to find them all more impoverished, stressed and desperate. The story of his friend Momcilo who is desperate to be reunited with his wife and child in Croatia and so pays people smugglers to get him out, with predictably dire consequences.

In the spring Croat authority in the pocket collapses and the area disintegrates into firefights between rival warlords, little more than gangsters fighting for control of the black market. Darko, who had risen to become a crime boss, is victim of an assassination attempt, shot three times in the stomach, helicoptered out and disappears.

Weeks later Loyd needs a break and flies back to London. He is astonished to meet Darko at the airport (p.199). By the time he arrives back in Bosnia peace has been imposed on Croats and Muslims by outsiders, mainly America, via the Drayton Accords. The fighting stops (p.197).

But peace between Croats and Bosniaks didn’t mean the joint conflict against the Serbs was over, it was merely in abeyance. In the spring of 1994 the war against the Serbs stagnated. The Croats used the time to re-arm. He’s back in Bosnia, touring quiescent front lines when he gets a letter from his mother telling him his father’s dying. Comparison of what one personal death means amid so many slaughters.

Everything I had seen and experienced confirmed my views about the pointlessness of existence, the basic brutality of human life and the godlessness of the universe. (p.207)

An extended description of the garbled messages he receives in Bosnia, his hasty flight back to England, but too late, his father’s dead. His rage, his well of resentments, he attends the funeral but finds no peace. His unassuaged anger fuels his determination to return to the war, suck deep of its horrors, and blast them in his readers’ faces.

Western Bosnia, summer 1994 (p.214)

After all the bitter emotions stirred by his last communications with his dying his father, and his alienated, unwanted attendance at his father’s funeral, Loyd finds solace in the fact ‘that at least I had a war to go home to’ (p.214). War is his cure. War is his solution to his intractable personal demons.

He travels to Bihac, jumping off point for Velika Kladusa, capital of a self-styled statelet set up by Fikret Abdic, known as ‘Babo’. Loyd calls his followers ‘the autonomists’. Insight into how quickly and totally a society breaks up into warlord-led fragments. Against him is General Atid Dudakovic, known as Dudo, commander of the 5th Corp, who was to become the most renowned Bosnian government commander. Assisted by the Bosnian 502 brigade, known as the ‘Tigers’, led by Hamdu Abdic.

Loyd arrives in Bihac, with two colleagues, Robby and Bob, seeking an interview with Dudo which they eventually carry out. Then they wangle their way into Velika Kladusa, just a day or so before Dudo’s 5th Corp attack. In the attack Loyd and colleagues see a carful of civilians raked with machine gun fire and discover a three-year-old, Dina, who has somehow survived a bullet wound to the head. With considerable bravery, he and his colleagues drive the injured child and distraught mother through the fighting to a French UN camp on the outskirts of town.

Chechnya, new year 1995 (p.234)

The thirty pages describing his weeks in Chechnya reporting on the Russian invasion are a kind of interlude in the mostly Yugoslav setting of the book, and require such a long complicated prehistory, such a completely different setting with different rules, causes and consequences from Bosnia, that to summarise it would confuse this review. Suffice to say that the destructiveness and barbarism of the Russian army put what he saw in Bosnia in the shade.

Northern Bosnia, spring 1995 (p.278)

The absolutely disgusting story of the lone Serbian shell which landed in Tuzla old town square on 25 May 1995, leaving 71 people killed and 240 wounded. The experience of two freelance friends of Loyd’s, Wayne and Boris, who get spat on and kicked when they arrive at the square soon after the disaster to film the blood and guts and bone and brain splatted all over. Loyd attends the funeral and is awed by the dignity of the coffin bearers and relatives.

How Loyd learns through hints and tips that the Bosnian army in Sarajevo is finally going to attempt to break the 3-year-long siege, agonises about whether to report it to his newspaper but decides he needs to sit on it, to prevent the Serbs preparing – only to watch a puffed-up Canadian press officer spill the beans at a press conference. Didn’t matter. The Bosnian offensive quickly bogged down. Now as for the previous 3 years, because of the arms embargo enforced by the West, the Bosnians lacked the heavy heavy weaponry and ammunition available to the Serbs.

Zagreb, autumn 1995 (p.289)

Description of going cold turkey in the Hotel Esplanade in Zagreb, the dreams of corpses coming to life and talking, the sweats, the diarrhoea.

July 1995 the Srebrenica Massacre: more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were rounded up and murdered by units of the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of Ratko Mladić, alongside the ‘Scorpions’, a paramilitary unit from Serbia. Loyd doesn’t see it, none of the press see it because the town was hermetically sealed by the Serb forces.

The international community’s patience finally snaps. NATO launches co-ordinated attacks against Serb infrastructure and supplies. Loyd checks out of the Esplanade and drives to Bihac where he hooks up with the 5th Corps of the Bosnian army, and with the 502 Tiger Brigade, led by Hamdu Abdic, ‘the Tiger’ who we met at the siege of Velika Kladusa.

Bosnians are sweeping back through Serb-held areas but Loyd dwells on the failed offensive at Sanski Most which he observed at first hand.

What does a man want?

‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.’ (Samuel Johnson)

Loyd’s account contains blistering scenes. He is frequently disgusted, sometimes traumatised, has a whole, gripping, passage about being possessed by sudden panic fear in the midst of battle. When he flies back to London he finds he can’t connect with his old friends, his relationship with his girlfriend falls apart. He is caught between ‘irreconcilable worlds’ (p.44). He feels burned-out, jaded. He cannot convey what he’s seen, even to his closest friends.

What is really, really obvious is that this is what he wants. His ostensible aim is to ‘see the war for himself’ but it is blatantly obvious that his deeper aim is to achieve precisely this cynical, world-weary, war-torn position/feeling/character. This is how he wants to end up, jaded, cynical and burnt out.

Why war?

Why do men want to fight? Pacifists and progressives the world over ponder this question as if it is a deep mystery, but it isn’t deep at all. Back when he applied for Sandhurst Loyd wanted to tell the recruiting officer the simple truth that he just wants to go to a war, any war, anywhere. 1) He wants to see what it is like. And once he joined up he discovered that most of his fellow officers felt the same. As one of them tells him, ‘We want to know what killing is like.’ (p.67)

So there’s one positive motive, to see and find out what war and killing are like. There’s a second incentive: 2) to get your kicks, because it looks like a laugh. For the lolz.

I had come to Bosnia partially as an adventure. But after a while I got into the infinite death trip. I was not unhappy. Quite the opposite. I was delighted with most of what the war had offered me: chicks, kicks and chaos; teenage punk dreams turned real and wreathed in gunsmoke. It was an environment to which I had adapted better than most, and I could really get off on it. I could leer and posture as much as anyone else, roll my shoulders and swagger through stories of megadeath, murder and mayhem… (p.207)

In other passages he describes how incredibly cool it is to be driving with buddies wearing leather jackets and aviator shades yelling your head off as mortar shells explode all around and the bullets zing and chatter. Early on he visits an underground nightclub in Sarajevo where all the men are festooned with guns and ammo and the chicks are hot and sexy. Teen punk fantasies indeed. Later he makes it through heavy incoming fire to the wrecked Hotel Ero in Mostar:

The scene was chaotic. The floor was a skidpan of congealing blood, broken glass and spent bullet casings, while through a haze of smoke and dust HVO troops fired Kalashnikovs in random bursts from the edge of windows on the other side of the foyer to unseen targets beyond. Every few seconds a round would smack back through the windows into one of the walls around us, sending everybody ducking in unison. It was obviously the place to be. (p.51)

In another passage he speculates that this is what unites all the outsiders who, these days, flock to war zones.

Men and women who venture to someone else’s war through choice do so in a variety of guises. UN general, BBC correspondent, aid worker, mercenary: in the final analysis they all want the same thing, a hit off the action, a walk on the dark side. It’s just a question of how slick a cover you give yourself, and how far you want to go. (p.54)

Arguably, he is here expanding his own personal motivation out to fit quite a wide range of people (war correspondents). But then again, he’s been there and he’s met these types. Is this a fair summary?

Anyway, matching the positive incentives to go to war, there’s a pair of distinct and negative motivations as well. 1) The first, overarching one is to escape from normal civilian life. Repeatedly, Loyd believes he is expressing the feelings of all bored, frustrated young men who can’t find a place in the dull routines of civilian life.

… If you are a young man of combat age frustrated by the tedium and meaninglessness of life in twentieth-century Europe, you may understand them [his fellow officers at Sandhurst]. (p.67)

So on the one hand, the quest for the extreme edge of human experience; on the other, the obsessive need to escape the humdrum boredom of bourgeois existence.

The oppressive stagnation of peacetime, growing older, of domestic tragedy and trivial routine. Could I accept what to me seemed the drudgery of everyday existence, the life we endure without so much as a glimpse of an angel’s wing. Fuck that. Sometimes I pray for another war just to save me (p.186)

He despises and wants to escape from:

the complacency of Western societies whose children, like me, are corrupted by meaningless choice, material wealth and spiritual emptiness. (p.261)

This sounds fine but, on reflection, is surely a very immature attitude. Loyd’s descriptions of the scenes he witnessed in Bosnia are almost all handled brilliantly and written in a vivid, sometimes florid style. But when he comes to consider his motivation and psychology, he risks slumping into cliché. For example, this talk about ‘spiritual emptiness’ sounds like some Anglican bishop or the padre at Eton; it’s the kind of pompous waffle a certain kind of pundit has been spouting for half a century or more about the ‘moral decline of the West’.

Also, seeing the world as a place of ‘meaningless choice, material wealth and spiritual emptiness’ hugely signposts his own privilege. It is (as he acknowledges) the view of a comfortably off, middle-class person, as he is well aware:

We were all consumerist children of the Sixties with an appetite for quick kicks without complications. (p.123)

Back in the real world, there are over 2,800 food banks in the UK and about 2.2 million people use them. In 2021/22 over 1.89 million schoolchildren were eligible for free school meals in England. According to the Rowntree Foundation, in 2020/21 around one in five of of the UK population, some 13.4 million people, were living in poverty.

Loyd’s is the voice of a particular type of posh waster. He may have gone through a few periods without a job or much money, but his posh family, his posh friends and his posh contacts, meant he was never in much danger of going hungry. (His friends being, as he writes with typical self-dramatisation:

a talented, incestuous band of West London hedonists with leanings towards self-destruction. (p.120))

He got on well with his colleagues at Sandhurst because they were all Ruperts like him (my understanding is that ‘Rupert’ is working class squaddie slang for the officer class in the British Army, populated as it apparently is by chinless wonders named Rupert and Jeremy and Sebastian.)

He got the gig of war correspondent with The Times, not because of any qualifications or experience (which he conspicuously didn’t have), but because Eton and Sandhurst meant that he understood the tone of voice, the attitude and the good manners required for the job. He fit right in. ‘Good to have you aboard, old chap.’

If the first negative motivation is to escape the ennui of being a posh waster, the second negative motive is 2) to escape from his family.

Loyd’s family romance

Early on we learned that his parents divorced when he was just 6, he was sent to boarding school etc. It’s only a lot later, two-thirds of the way through the 321-page text, that we are given a second, far deeper and more disturbing portrait of his family. His father moved some distance away and lived on a farm with his new wife and her son. We hear in some detail how awful young Anthony’s visits to his father were, how everything was regimented and controlled, of his ‘abusive and intimidating behaviour’ (p.190). So awful that on one occasion young Anthony threw himself down the stairs of his mother’s house in Berkshire in a bid to injure himself so he wouldn’t have to go.

Most of the time I hated him. He was a selfish and damaging bastard. (p.213)

As he became a teenager he rebelled against the visits and his conversations with his cold father became more and more cruel and damaging. But the situation held two secrets which his vindictive stepmother enjoyed skewering him with. One was that his beloved younger sister might not have been his father’s child at all; that his mother had an adulterous affair way before his parents split up. And a lot later, when his father was seriously ill and dying, he’s told that he has an older sister he’s never met; that his mother had by a relationship before her father, and who she was forced to give up for adoption.

There’s an extended passage describing his father’s illness and death (pages 206 to 213). He was in Bosnia when he learned of this, and there’s an agonising tap dance of whether he should return immediately, there are exchanges of letters, but his father continues in the same style, insisting that Anthony ask for forgiveness before he grants him a visit. Messages back and forth and the spiteful interferences of his stepmother, what a snakepit of poisonous emotions. And then came the news that his father had died. And his reaction?

I had wondered whether his death would end the anger inside me, so much of which was responsible for motivating me in war. But I had nothing to fear there. The embers of resentment glowed with a new intensity…I went back to war wanting to suck deeply on the pain out there and blow it back in the faces of people like my father: the complacent, the smug, the sardonic. (p.213)

Doesn’t need much interpretation or analysis. Loyd lays out his motives as clinically as a post mortem dissection.

Not rocket science, is it? Probably most men do not want to fight in a war, but some do, and the ones that do, really really want to – and, in generation after generation, they are enough to bring down death and destruction on all around them. Middle-aged men in power want more power and glory (for example, Vladimir Putin) and enough young men want to see and experience war for themselves, to make it happen – and this explains why wars will never end.

Peace? It was a hideous thought. (p.198)

So, that’s about 4 reasons, two positive, two negative, why Loyd himself was motivated to go and suck on the tit of war. That’s what it means to be a highly educated Englishman, raised in the bosom of a liberal democracy, pampered and bored and seeking out the most extreme environment imaginable.

But the book also mentions the motivations of the actual warriors for going to war, and the chief reason is that some people do very well out of war. Some people make a terrific living. It suits some men down to the ground. Take Darko the sniper. He has found his vocation:

Darko exuded a hypnotic charisma common among those who have found their vocation in killing…Darko was one of the many in Bosnia who had tapped into their own darkness and found there bountiful power. (pages 169 to 170)

War has helped Darko find his vocation, his purpose in life. Some men are born to kill, most never get to express this side of themselves, but in war, many, many of them can. Thus:

The war with the Muslims had given him power, freedom and prestige. While it continued he had been a hero… (p.199)

And the book is sprinkled with descriptions of the various other gangsters, crooks and petty criminals who seized the opportunity to raise themselves to positions of power, power over life and death, for example, the notorious Arkan, a one-time petty criminal who war empowered to become head of the Serb paramilitary force called the Serb Volunteer Guard and then an influential politician.

And then there are the mercenaries, people who’ve travelled from all over the world to take part in the fighting. He meets quite a few of these and Peter the Dutchman speaks for all of them when he says:

‘We don’t fight for the money and we’re not in it for the killing. It’s about camaraderie and, sure, it’s about excitement’. (p.54)

Clichés of the genre

Alongside these extensive meditations on his own motivations and other people’s, for going to war, there are passages describing classic wartime experiences and the emotions they trigger. These are covered so systematically that I wondered whether he had a bucket list of must-have war experiences and then ticked them off, one by one, in the course of the narrative. They include:

  • the first time you see a dead body, fascinated, repulsed – then, the more you see, the more numb you become – until eventually the sight of corpses loses all emotional impact and it becomes a subject of purely intellectual interest, a collector and connoisseur’s interest
  • the first time you’re under fire you don’t even realise it – the next few times you wet yourself or freeze – eventually you learn to control your panic
  • the sensation of powerlessness when you see the wounded and dying
  • the first time you look through a sniper rifle sight at an enemy and feel a tremendous urge to pull the trigger
  • trying to reason with the fighters, discuss the issues, enquire into their motivation – but it is a chilling discovery to learn that some people just enjoy killing – that’s all there is to it
  • being pulled over by local police / militia, hauled off to jail, interviewed by suspicious cops, scary the first time it happens and then settles down to become part of the black pantomime of a disintegrated society

Eventually he becomes so detached from his own feelings that he can’t begin to communicate with his girl at home and his family. But, as I said above, all of this has a studied, practiced feel to it. It isn’t happening to a naive ingenu, a wide-eyed innocent out of All Quiet on the Western Front; it’s happening to an educated young man who’s read his Graham Greene and his Michael Herr (Herr is namechecked on page 66), and wants it. He actively wants to achieve this state of jaded numbness.

When the likes of Martin Bell and John Nichol queue up to load the book with praise with blurbs on the cover, it is partly because it is a most excellent book and contains searing descriptions and penetrating insights. But it’s also because it’s all so recognisable. The tough guy who’s also really sensitive and carries deep hurt (his miserable childhood) inside is as clichéd a literary figure as the hooker with a heart of gold.

It’s as if the actual chaos and the bestial atrocities Loyd witnessed can only be contained within a straitjacket of clichés. As if, if one part of your life is completely deranged, all the other parts must be sentimental stereotypes. In many ways the book is an interesting reflection on the nature of writing itself, or of this kind of writing.

Tall, beautiful, unobtainable women

Take the way that all the women he knows or meets are stunningly beautiful:

  • After Sarajevo, Split seemed like a lotus fruit to the senses, a blast of waterfront restaurants, light, space, wine and beautiful, unobtainable Dalmatian women. (p.42)
  • I was with Corinne at the time. An American a few years older than me, she combined feminine compassion with a high tolerance for violence and a fine temper. (p.95)
  • Alex’s beautiful honey-blonde wife, Lela, tempered his excesses with an often intuitive insight and gentleness. (p.121)
  • Stella was one of the most striking women in West London, an actress with a gymnast’s body. (p.121)
  • I spotted a small buzz of activity in the square…two Europeans heading towards the hotel….The first was a girl of exceptional beauty…She must have been close to six foot, moving fast with the swivel-hipped arm-swinging assurance of the very beautiful. (p.129)
  • Sandra paid us a visit, stepping shyly into the flat on the finest pair of legs in central Sarajevo. (p.180)
  • We enjoyed half a party with the attractive Red Cross girls before a Bosnian soldier walked in and stole the sound system at gunpoint… (p.220)
  • A Red Cross girl who had heard of the incident with the wounded children approached me…She looked good, smelled good; I had just come out of the war and could have done with a fuck. (p.232)
  • I looked around. A very tall, very beautiful girl stood at the reception desk (p.295)

This roll-call of tall, attractive women comes direct from the conventions of the airport novel, from paperback thriller territory, more worthy of Frederick Forsyth than the alert perception Loyd shows whenever he describes the actual fighting or his encounters with swaggering militias or weeping civilians. As I mentioned above, it’s as if the fresh and insightful parts of the text need the foil of cliché and stereotype to set them off.

The United Nations

It’s worth recording the view of someone who’s seen the UN in action on the ground. Suffice to say  that Loyd expresses repeated contempt for the cowardice and inaction of the UN at all levels, failures which, in his view, only prolonged the war:

  • the impotent moral cowardice of an organisation that only perpetuated the war with its hamfisted ineptitude and indecision [shaming] officers of every nationality on whom the UN’s blue beret was forced. (p.92)
  • The blame lay with the organisation that put them [peacekeeping troops] in that situation – the UN. (p.100)
  • [The UN] could not decide if the troops it sent to Bosnia were part of a trucking company or a fighting force, and was prepared to go to almost any length to preserving inaction at the cost of lives. (p.205)

Mind you, the UN are merely reflecting the criminal inaction of the Western powers in general.

What good did reporting in Bosnia ever do anyway? By that stage of the war it was obvious that, despite our initial optimistic presumptions to the contrary, West European powers were prepared to tolerate the mass slaughter and purging of Muslims regardless of the reporting. (p.228)

By contrast, Loyd celebrates and praises the values of the British Army who he sees doing the best job possible of safekeeping unarmed villagers (p.195). Some people might say he is biased, but obviously he’s aware of this and consciously reflects on his own attitude.

Writing as therapy

Maybe Loyd’s therapist suggested he write this powerful and emotional autobiography as therapy. It would make sense of the extended passages of autobiography, which go into unnecessarily bitter detail about the terrible relationship he had with his father.

Although the majority of the content and the eye-catching descriptions are all of war, and that’s how the book is packaged and marketed, the personal, family bleugh is, in one way, the core of the narrative. It explains Loyd’s near death wish, his need to escape the unbearable tedium of the workaday world of peacetime Britain. He has to force himself to travel to wherever there’s news of atrocities and horrors, because he is on an unending mission to blot out his own psychological pain with even greater, maximal, real-world horrors.

He thinks about suicide a lot, has ‘narcissistic death dreams’ (p.194) but he keeps to this side of them by always having somewhere even worse to travel to, and a ready supply of colleagues to accompany him in the endless quest to spend the days recording atrocities and the nights getting off his face. But try as he might, he can never escape himself. Hence his deep sense of the endless recurrence of the ‘goldfish bowl war’ he finds himself in (p.194).

And writing? Not only is writing a form of therapy, an exorcism, meant to get it all ‘out of your system’. It’s also a reliving and a memento and a tribute. This is one of the deep pleasures of the book, that so much is going on in it, at so many levels.

Credit

My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd was published by Doubleday in 1999. References are to the 2000 Anchor paperback.


War reporting book and exhibition reviews

Ukraine: Photographs from the Frontline by Anastasia Taylor-Lind @ Imperial War Museum London

The Imperial War Museum London is hosting a free exhibition of photos taken in the Ukraine by internationally renowned photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind from the Ukraine. It’s a smallish display, in just one room, of 17 big colour photos.

Maybe the Ukraine came to most people’s notice with Russia’s invasion of 24 February 2022. But something like that doesn’t come out of the blue and in fact Ukraine has been in a low-level war since 2014, the year when a complex political crisis in Ukraine came to a head. This explains why the exhibition is divided into three parts or ‘moments’ and 2014 is the first one:

1. 2014 protests (3 photos)

Background

In 2013 the Ukrainian parliament had overwhelmingly approved finalising a political association and free trade agreement with the European Union (EU), something which marked a decisive shift away from its eastern neighbour, Russia. Russia, for its part, offered Ukraine very favourable trading arrangements, large state loans and brought political pressure to bear on Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych who, as a result, at the end of 2013 abruptly cancelled the negotiations with the EU and reaffirmed Ukraine’s economic and political ties with Russia.

This led to huge pro-EU protests in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities which turned into violent clashes between protestors and security forces. Government buildings were occupied, there were running street battles, in all over 100 protesters were killed and over 1,000 injured. The protesters opposed what they saw as widespread government corruption and abuse of power, the influence of oligarchs, police brutality, and human rights violations. A large, barricaded protest camp occupied Independence Square in central Kyiv throughout the ‘Maidan Uprising’.

Eventually a bill was introduced into Parliament stripping Yanukovych of the presidency and a few days later another one called for his arrest. He fled to the Russified east of the country. This demonstration of people power came to be referred to as the Revolution of Dignity or the Maidan Revolution.

Photos

Taylor-Lind was in Kiev during the Maidan Revolution and took some cracking photos, in fact the single best image from the exhibition captures the messy defiance of protesters swarming over some grand statuary in central Kiev while thick black smoke from burning tyres gives the scene an apocalyptic vibe.

Anti-government protests, Kyiv, February 2014 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

The 17 photos in the exhibition can perhaps be sorted into 3 or so categories: one is actuality, snapped on the hoof, as it appears, such as the image above. A completely different type is the photographs Taylor-Lind took in the makeshift studio she created which could be quickly set up in trouble spots. She rigged one up in central Kiev during the revolution and spend weeks photographing hundreds of protesters, including tired, injured Yevhen Shulga.

Yevhen Shulga, Kiev 2014 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

There are four of these ‘studio’ portraits in the show and, interestingly enough, one of the other three is also of Shulga, but from 2022, showing his transformation from street protester to fully-fledged soldier in the Ukraine Army.

2. 2014 to 2020 the Donbas (4 photos)

Unfortunately, overthrowing an unpopular president wasn’t the end of it, the Maidan Revolution wasn’t as decisive or final as the overthrow of communism had been in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the other Eastern bloc countries 25 years earlier.

Ukraine’s situation is complicated and the war doesn’t make any sense unless you listen to the Russian side. The Russians have a number of grievances. Number one, in deep history, Kiev is actually the spiritual home of the Russian Orthodox Church, for it was here, in 987, that the Kievan Prince Vladimir married the daughter of the Byzantine emperor and concerted, along with all his subjects, to the Orthodox religion. To quote Michael Ignatieff’s excellent study of modern nationalism, ‘Kievan Rus is the beginning of the Russian nationalist experience’ (Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff, 1993, page 87). So there’s a deep Russian nationalistic claim to the capital.

During the nineteenth century the Ukraine was fully incorporated into the Russian Empire and the eastern part of the country heavily settled by Russian speakers. As a result of the Russian Revolution the aristocracy fed and the middle classes expropriated of their land. Between the wars Stalin pushed through the forced collectivisation of the vast fertile farms of central Ukraine and this led to one of the biggest man-made catastrophes of the twentieth century, when as many as 5 million Ukrainians starved to death between 1931 and 1933. The Russians also attempted to exterminate the Ukrainian intelligentsia.

This explains why, when the Nazis invaded as part of their attack on the USSR in June 1941, they were at first greeted as liberators from the yoke of the murderous, semi-genocidal Soviet regime, at least until it became clear that the Nazis were even worse. The whole brutal period is described in Timothy Snyder’s often stomach-churning book.

So Ukrainian nationalists, predominantly in the west of the country, found themselves fighting a three-way war, against the Soviets and against the Nazis and, a few years later, when the resurgent Red Army pressed the Germans back through the Ukraine, many nationalists fought the Russians. In fact Ignatieff says that some nationalist guerrilla forces weren’t completely neutralised until the 1950s. Ukrainian nationalists may remember these forces as heroes but the Russians, of course, lump them together with the Nazi enemy and this gives them a veneer of plausibility when Russian propaganda paints anyone who opposes Moscow’s wishes, right up to the present day, as ‘fascists’.

Back to 2014 and Russia didn’t take the ousting of Viktor Yanukovych lying down. Within a matter of weeks two things happened:

  1. Russia annexed the Crimea
  2. Russia sent paramilitary forces to bolster armed uprisings in the far east of Ukraine, on the Russian border

Bucha, April 2022 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

1. The annexation of the Crimea

Crimea was part of Russia from 1783, when the Tsarist Empire annexed it a decade after defeating Ottoman forces in the Battle of Kozludzha, until 1954, when the Soviet government transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This in-depth article gives the reasons why.

In summary, 1) the Russians had only just finished managing a violent little civil war in the newly annexed western regions of Ukraine, especially Volynia and Galicia; 2) the new Communist Party boss, Nikita Khrushchev, had himself been head of the CP of Ukraine and knew the republic well; 3) in the 1950s the population of Crimea — approximately 1.1 million — was roughly 75 percent ethnic Russian and 25 percent Ukrainian.

In other words, assigning the Crimea to the Ukraine added nearly a million ethnic Russians to the troublesome Republic. It was a swift, administrative way of increasing the Russian minority in the country.

The downside was that the Crimea is host to Russia’s Black Sea ports and navy. This didn’t matter so long as Ukraine was under the thumb of Russia within the USSR. But amid the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was clear to the Russian military (Navy) that handing over Russia’s main Black Sea naval base to a different country was crazy. The status of the Crimean bases remained a source of controversy and tension throughout the 1990s, with Boris Yeltsin and successive leaders negotiating leasing and access deals.

In a way it’s a surprise that a leader as increasingly bullish and nationalistic as Vladimir Putin took until 2014 to annex the Crimea. You can see why, from his point of view, if Ukraine had remained under Yanukovych who would have been cemented to Russia by favourable trade deals, then Putin and the Russian military would have let the negotiated arrangements about Crimea continue; but how, when Yanukovych was overthrown, and the Ukraine parliament made clear its commitment to ally with the West, Putin and the Generals acted.

According to the 2014 census, Crimea had a population of 2.3 million, of whom 68% were Russian and 16% were Ukrainian. So although many in the West and international fora like the UN disapproved of the annexation, you can see both the a) military and b) ethnically nationalist thinking behind the move.

2. The Donbas

Back to the exhibition, the second consequence of the overthrow of President Yanukovych was that Russia supported rebellions against Ukraine’s government in areas along the border. I’ll just quote Wikipedia:

In March 2014, following Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, anti-revolution and pro-Russian protests began in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, collectively ‘the Donbas’. These began as Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. Armed Russian-backed separatists seized Ukrainian government buildings in the Donbas and declared the Donetsk and Luhansk republics (DPR and LPR) as independent states, leading to conflict with Ukrainian government forces. Russia covertly supported the separatists with troops and weaponry, only later admitting sending “military specialists”. After a year of fighting, the conflict developed into trench warfare. There were 29 failed ceasefires. About 14,000 people were killed in the war: 6,500 pro-Russian separatist and Russian forces, 4,400 Ukrainian forces, and 3,400 civilians on both sides of the frontline. The vast majority of civilian casualties were in the first year.

Apparently, the conflict was very fierce in 2014 and 15 but then settled down to First World War-style trenches and attrition.

The exhibition includes four photos to cover this prolonged conflict. I mentioned categories of photos, above. The best photo here is an example of a hybrid form, which is posed, but not as posed as a studio photo. This, for me, is arguably the best image in the show.

A Ukrainian soldier, Donbas, 2018 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

At first I thought this was an interior, and the backdrop was some kind of old wood panelling, fitting for a comfy sofa and a framed oil painting. Only when I looked more closely did I realise that the ‘wall’ is made from a big stack of army ammunition boxes. In fact the wall label explains that the whole thing was set up under a bridge and completely outside. When you look closer you can see the sofa is a bit of old tat with rips in it and the painting is a cheap reproduction in a chipped frame.

So the whole thing represents a complex attempt to recreate the comforts of home in a war zone but is by way of being a sort of trompe l’oeil fabrication which, at the same time, beautifully captures the spirit of invention and blagging which characterises all front lines.

3. Spring 2022 Russian invasion (10 photos)

The third and largest part of the little exhibition contains 10 photos covering aspects of Russia’s invasion of the whole of Ukraine which started on 24 February 2022. By now you can see that this attack didn’t come out of the blue but had deep historical, cultural, political and military roots.

But if annexing the Crimea could, possibly, be justified by ethnic nationalism and politics, a full-scale attack on an independent nation state is clearly in breach of the United Nations charter and international law. It’s has been deplored by the International Court of Justice, the Council of Europe, and the International Criminal Court.

There’s widespread consensus (in the West, at any rate) that Putin intended his forces to mount a pincer movement on Kiev and seize it within a week, presumably intending to force the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy into exile, whereupon the Russians could impose their own Russia-friendly government and then hold some kind of rigged referendum or plebiscite. Their playbook really hasn’t changed since the deepest communist days of 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia.

The most obvious thing about the war is it has revealed how rubbish the Russian army is. Despite the element of surprise and overwhelming superiority of numbers, their advances got bogged down on all fronts. As usual, their leadership was bad and the quality of the average Russian squaddie very poor. Discipline was bad, units fell apart, equipment was inferior to Ukraine’s western kit.

For humanitarians like Taylor-Lind and the IWM the focus is less on the historical and military roots than on the humanitarian tragedy the invasion has triggered. These 10 photos come from spring 2022 i.e. three or four months into the present conflict, and show: a grieving mother; one of Taylor-Lind’s makeshift studio portraits of two adult sisters who have fled the fighting and are now refugees; an older lady taking receipt of a coal delivery (since all the gas pipelines have been blown up).

There’s the shot of the back of a middle-aged woman receiving hospital treatment after a shell exploded in her back garden; there’s a sick old woman with a name tag tied to her wrist who’s being evacuated from a hospital near the front line. There’s a shot of four soldiers digging a defensive trench and another of five soldiers firing a volley over the grave of a local farmer.

There’s a mass grave being excavated at Bucha where the Russians are alleged to have carried out atrocities against civilians, tying their hands behind their backs, torturing them, executing them – a grim roll-call which recalls the behaviour of the Serbs during the Yugoslav Civil wars 30 years ago.

The brutal nature of this kind of hybrid warfare, with its paramilitaries and mercenaries, with its badly-disciplined troops encouraged by their officers to spread terror, hasn’t changed or evolved. Like a plague, like a scourge of God, it just visits different areas and leaves grieving relatives, burned out houses and mass graves. Above all it leaves destruction on an epic scale, and this is the fourth category of photo I’d identify in the exhibition – unpeopled ruins.

A damaged apartment block, Sumy region, April 2022 © Anastasia Taylor-Lind

It’s not so much the deaths which appal me, it’s the unremitting, pointless, futile, death-drive destruction and devastation which forces like the Russians or the 1990s Serbs inflicted everywhere they went. Too weak, badly led and indisciplined to actually win battles, these forces nonetheless have the resources to destroy, mindlessly, pointless, for days and weeks and months, destroying home and offices, infrastructure, power plants, water. If they can’t have it, no-one can. It’s the pathetic infantile, teenage spitefulness of it which is so utterly soul-destroying. What wankers.

P.S.

Every photo has a caption. Initially, I thought these were the words of the people in the picture but, after counting, I note that only four of them are directly quoted, all the other captions are the comments of Anastasia Taylor-Lind or her long-term collaborator and friend, Ukrainian journalist Alisa Sopova. Some of Alisa’s comments are enlarged and painted directly onto the wall to create a textual commentary.

May also be worth commenting that all the text, from the introductory wall label to the photo captions, is bilingual, printed in English and Ukrainian. The curators tell us this is designed to ‘engage directly with the UK’s Ukrainian community’. As a matter of interest I checked and at its peak, in 2019, there were 25,000 Ukrainians in the UK. Since the war that number has been swelled by some 82,000 refugees i.e. a little over 100,000 in total.

The end

I’ve been rereading Michael Ignatieff and Anthony Loyd’s books about the Yugoslav Wars. Ukraine is a different situation but, based on comparable situations in Bosnia in particular, where neither side was strong enough to secure a convincing victory, my guess would be that:

  1. the war drags on throughout 2023
  2. if Western support for Ukraine doesn’t remain high i.e. keeping up a reliable supply of arms and ammunition, then the Russians might score some victories, but
  3. eventually the UN will draw a ceasefire line across the eastern and southern parts of the country, which will remain in Russian hands, and the line will be like the one which divides Cyprus or Korea

It’s hard to imagine Russia seizing the entire country; think of the permanent insurrection and guerrilla war they’d face. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine Ukrainian forces pushing the Russians right out of their country. So some kind of stalemate / ceasefire / partition seems the most likely outcome. But war is unpredictable, so it’s anybody’s guess.


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Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery

This isn’t an exhibition, it’s an awesomely immersive installation of blistering power and intensity. I loved it. I wanted to stay all day. I can’t recommend it too highly. And it’s free.

Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery

You go in the main entrance, up the stairs. through swing doors and across an old-fashioned gallery lined with grand 18th century paintings, to arrive at the entrance to the installation, with the title in big letters over the doorway – ‘Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different’.

Here a couple of visitor attendants stand, pointing out the wall label which explains the installation, the list of paintings used in it, and a list of quotes from the text, as well as advising people that it contains loud music, sounds, flashing lights, and brutal, violent imagery. All sounds great!

The animation chamber

If you want to proceed, you simply turn left and walk into a big, big room, the size of a school gym or assembly hall. The room is in pitch darkness but suspended from the ceiling are nine or so projectors and these are projecting continuous loops of overlapping, continually changing images and animations onto all four walls.

The basis of the loops are a selection of 22 classic paintings from the National Gallery collection and 3 from the Holburne Museum, Bath: 25 in total. There’s a full list in a wall label in the ante-room to the show but you don’t need to know them to ‘get’ the show – what they are becomes perfectly apparent as they morph in and out of view. The point is the treatment they’ve been subjected to, which is radical and brilliant.

Malani has turned them into continuous unfurling animations whereby each image appears and is immediately subject to all kinds of manipulations –flooded with colour wash, disintegrated as if by acid, and scribbled over with blunt crayon markings and animated figures generated by an iPad.

These beautiful, graceful classical paintings are walked over by matchstick figures engaged in indecipherable activities, are revived and reappear, are washed and disintegrated again, merge with other images, with photographs, with non-classical imagery of black or Asian people, are subject to random bars of colour exploding across them, at one point stock-market charts and graphic examples of complex financial systems, dancing stick figures, splurges of blood red paint, anarchy, chaos.

Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery

Apparently there are 25 distinct animations, one for each classical painting, but they’re of different lengths and are projected over each other, so being played together like this creates endlessly changing juxtapositions and interactions. I was entranced, I was transported.

Cassandra’s story

Why the systematic over-writing, destruction and transformation of such beautiful, elegant paintings? The clue is in the voiceover because, if your eyes are overwhelmed by the continual huge looping animations coming at you from all directions, your ears are hearing a narration, a woman’s voice telling a terrible story from amid the crashes and blizzards of imagery, and it is a story of war.

For it is Cassandra talking, princess of Troy, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, sister of Paris and Hector. According to legend, Apollo fell in love with beautiful Cassandra and promised her the gift of prophecy if she would have sex with him. He gave her the gift but she went back on the deal, refusing to sleep with him, making him furious. Now the ancient gods could not rescind gifts they had given so Apollo couldn’t withdraw his gift of prophecy – so instead he took revenge by adding a codicil to the original gift – Cassandra continued to have the gift of seeing the future but Apollo now added that nobody would believe her.

Her plight was more than ordinarily significant or tragic because the main thing she foresaw was the sack of Troy after its long siege by the Greeks, its complete destruction, the murder of most of its inhabitants, including her venerable father, Priam, and the taking away into slavery of the remaining women, including herself and her mother Hecuba. This terrible fate she saw with crystal clarity and told everyone around her, but nobody believed her. Can you imagine the mental torment of her position, knowing the absolute worst but being powerless to prevent it?

Sound and vision

So, to recap, as images of classic paintings emerge out of the darkness, are defaced and scribbled over, a calm, detached woman’s voice reads a text which references the Tale of Troy, identifies as Cassandra, mentions key figures in the story such as Aeneas, Paris, Hector, seems to hint at the trauma of war and destruction, and yet, at other moments, segues off into what may be a description of a large sailing ship struggling through rain and storm of an ocean.

Noises, sound effects, washes of sound, obscure and cloud the voice just as the scribbles and animations deface the paintings.

The voice belongs to Malani’s longtime collaborator and friend, Alaknanda Samarth, and has the lofty visionariness of a classical actor – cool, detached, oblique – wonderfully fitting with both the classic paintings and the classical subject matter.

Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery

Troy and Basquiat

1. Troy and Greek violence

I really loved this installation for two reasons. One is that I am besotted by the Tale of Troy and the Iliad, which I read as a boy and has stayed with me for the rest of my life, underpinning my studies at university, the central work of literature of the entire western tradition, standing at the door like a violent, lowering presence.

I happen to have recently read a lot of Roman literature including retellings of the tale of Troy by poets like Ovid and Seneca which has refreshed my memory with the extreme violence and rapine of the old Greek myths. Our modern culture has a cosy place for the old myths, treats them as assimilated and contained, but to reread them is to be appalled all over again by the brutality, the often exquisite tortures and the persistent sexual violence.

Thus, at the fall of Troy, Cassandra sought shelter from the pillaging Greeks in the temple of Athena, clinging to a statue of the goddess, but was dragged away and raped by Ajax the Lesser (there were two heroes named Ajax at the siege). For this desecration of her temple, Ajax was later killed by Athena. Cassandra passed as a slave into the possession of King Agamemnon and sailed back to Mycenae with him, where she was murdered along with Agamemnon by his wife, Clytemnestra, who had never forgiven him for the ritual sacrifice of their daughter Iphigeneia right back at the start of the war.

The Greek myths are not cosy and comforting. It’s bloodshed all the way through – rape, abduction, war, killing, massacre, more rape, revenge of the gods, murder. So what thrilled me about Malani’s installation is the way she has found an audiovisual equivalent of the terrifying destructive violence at the heart of Greek myth and legend. The scribbling over Old Master paintings with rude graffiti, acid destruction, incoherent animations perfectly captures the destruction of war, which is at the core of human history. That’s what thrilled me. Malini creates an audiovisual expression for the deepest truth about human nature. Congo. Iraq. Syria. Ukraine. The beauty of human perception and sensitivity is everywhere bludgeoned by brutes.

Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery

2. Basquiat

The other reason was the powerful influence of Basquiat on the entire experience. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 to 1988) was a brilliant young American artist who rose out of the street art and graffiti scenes in New York to create a stunning visual language to capture contemporary urban experience. The Barbican had sell-out exhibition devoted to him back in 2017.

Basquiat developed a vibrant visual style based on the primary colours found in spray cans, on the designs and logos used in graffiti, incorporating and deploying all aspects of street art with style and panache. A lot of Malini’s animated squiggles, random attacks of primary colour, scribbling out, reveals, animations, matchstick figures struggling through the blare of pattern, reminded me of Basquiat at his vivifying, energising, bracing best.

It was pure visual pleasure to slump against one of the walls (like everyone else was doing) and watch the incredible panoramic animations explode across the walls.

Contemporary fellowship

My Reality is Different is result of Malini’s selection in 2020 to be the first artist to receive the National Gallery’s Contemporary Fellowship, supported by Art Fund and part of the National Gallery’s Contemporary Programme. As far as I’m concerned, it’s an absolute triumph. More, please.

Installation view of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different @ the National Gallery

Two videos

As far as I can tell there’s no official video of the installation. In a sense, how could there be, if it’s designed to create a loop of indeterminable duration and complexity? So I’ve embedded here the longest of the three videos of it you can find on YouTube which have obviously been made by visitors. They’re obviously amateur – a bit chaotic, out of focus, swinging round too fast – but they give you a good sense of the barrage of brilliantly changing imagery and ghostly, shimmering narrative that the visitor is subjected to.

And:

The text

Here’s the text that Alaknanda Samarth reads out. It’s adapted by her and Malini from ‘Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays’ by the East German writer, Christa Wolf (1951 to 2011).

It was here. This is where she stood. These stone lions looked at her, now they no longer have heads. The walls, today as in the past, the gate, where no blood can be seen seeping out from beneath. Into the darkness. Into the slaughterhouse. And alone.

Keeping step with the story, I make my way into death. Why did I want the gift of prophecy? To speak with my voice. There’s something of everyone in me, so I’ve belonged completely to no one. Troy’s end was in sight. We were lost. Aeneas had pulled out with his people.

What I grasp between now and evening will perish with me. ‘She’s laughing.’ They don’t know I speak their language.

Who was Penthesilea? I knew Penthesilea was going to fall in battle. I rejoiced to see her, a woman, put on her weapons. Who will find a voice again? ‘You’re lying when you prophesy we’re all doomed.’

War gives people their shape.

Nothing left to describe the world but the language of the past. The language of the present has shriveled. The language of the future, one sentence only. ‘Today I’ll be killed.’

Apollo. He conferred on me the gift of prophecy, approached me as a man. Due to my terror, he transformed into a wolf with mice, spat furiously into my mouth when he was unable to overpower me.

Dream-image. The sea burning. Last thing in my life, a picture, not a word. Will I split myself in two? Will I… How many realities were there in Troy beside mine? One day I announced ‘Troy will fall.’ A hot terror.

When I look, there’s no god, no judgement, only myself.

Events that aroused the craving for more events, finally for war. The first thing I really saw.

The paintings

  1. German School – The Judgement of Paris
  2. Jan van der Venne – The Temptation of Saint Anthony
  3. Johan Zoany – The Auriol and Dashwood Families
  4. Jacopo Bassano – The Way to Calvary
  5. Hieronymus Bosch – Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns)
  6. Pieter Bruegel the Elder – The Adoration of the Kings
  7. Bronzino – An Allegory with Venus and Cupid
  8. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio – Boy Bitten by a Lizard
  9. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio – The Supper at Emmaus
  10. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio – Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist
  11. Paul Delaroche – The Execution of Lady Jane Grey
  12. Luca Giordano – Perseus turning Phineas and his Followers into Stone
  13. Hans Holbein the Younger – Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (‘The Ambassadors’)
  14. Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece – The Deposition
  15. Michelangelo – The Virgin and Child with Saint John and Angels (‘The Manchester Madonna’)
  16. Guido Reni – Lot and his Daughters leaving Sodom
  17. Guido Reni – Susannah and the Elders
  18. Guido Reni – Saint Mary Magdalene
  19. Peter Paul Rubens – Samson and Delilah
  20. Jan Steen – The Effects of Intemperance
  21. Harmen Steenwyck – Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life
  22. Zanobi Strozzi – The Annunciation
  23. Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden – Pietà
  24. Paolo Veronese – The Family of Darius before Alexander
  25. Joseph Wright ‘of Derby’ – An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump

Related links

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Foe to Friend: The British Army in Germany since 1945 @ the National Army Museum

The main exhibition space at the National Army Museum in Chelsea is currently hosting an exhibition titled ‘Foe to Friend: The British Army in Germany since 1945’. It is premised on one core fact: Germany has been at the heart of the British Army’s story since 1945.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum

Overview

The exhibition does what it says on the tin, giving a straightforward chronological account of the British Army’s time in Germany, from the closing battles of the Second World War (Germany unconditionally surrendered on 8 May 1945( through to the present day. It covers:

  • the British Army’s role in helping to rebuild a completely shattered and broken Germany
  • how this quickly evolved into providing protection and defence against possible attack by Russia during the long period of the Cold War (1945 to 1990)
  • how the well-trained battle-ready forces in Germany then became a base from which to deploy troops across the world, specifically during the first Gulf War (1990), the civil wars in Yugoslavia (1991 to 2001), then the wars in Iraq (2003 to 2011) and Afghanistan (2001 to 2021)
  • finally, the drawdown in British forces in Germany, whose presence officially ended in 2019

Movement Forwarding Office boxes

Dotted through the exhibition are replica Movement Forwarding Office boxes. These were the wooden boxes personnel’s belongings were sent to Germany in. Here they are stamped with information panels but are also the site of recordings of ordinary people’s voices from each of the five sections of the exhibition (see below). In other words, the exhibition isn’t silent but, as you move through it, you hear a whole range of voices describing their experiences, from the occupying soldiers of 1945 onwards.

Two aspects

The British Army had a significant presence in Germany from the country’s defeat in 1945 to its final departure in 2019, near enough 75 years. During that time more than two million British service personnel and their families called Germany home. Many were posted for significant periods of time, got married and lived with spouses and children

The exhibition has two aspects: one is to give a detailed account of the changing military situation, describing all aspects of what was at first a military operation and then changed into a defence function as part of NATO. The second aspect looks at the social history of these people and this period, at what it was like to serve and live in Germany, at the impact it had on those two million service personnel and their families, and at the many traditions and institutions which rose between Brits and locals.

The exhibition is divided into five themes:

1. Winning the Peace

On 8 May German forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. These nations – Britain, France, the USA, the USSR – divided the defeated nation into Zones of Occupation which they administered. The British forces were christened the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR).

German map of the occupation zones (1945)

The BAOR was confronted with enormous problems. They had to feed the impoverished population. They had to deal with the revelations of the Holocaust. They had to manage the millions of refugees and homeless people. They literally had to set about rebuilding roads, houses, factories, the entire infrastructure of a modern nation. The display includes:

  • maps of the zones of influence
  • a hand-written statistical record compiled by a British soldier detailing the state of inmates, numbers of deaths, burials and evacuations at the Belsen concentration camp
  • the BAOR supervised the rebuilding of the Volkswagen factory at Wolfsburg

In 1946 families were allowed to join the soldiers of the BOAR. Barracks were created. The British remained entirely segregated from the local population, using their own schools, their own currency, forbidden to fraternise with the enemy. The scale of the devastation and the task ahead were detailed in this 1946 documentary film.

Field Marshall Montgomery and Churchill took a victory parade of 10,000 British troops through the ruins of berlin on 21 July 1945. A series of letters from Montgomery give instructions on the strict non-fraternisation policy between Brits and Germans.

The athletics medals of Bevis Shergold, a veteran of the war in Europe who lived in Germany with her husband in the 1950s, indicate the thriving sporting and cultural scene that was established to cater to service personnel and their families. Many service personnel lived better in Germany, enjoyed better facilities, than back in Britain, much of which was also in ruins and subject to strict rationing.

‘Who was a Nazi?’ A major goal of the occupying forces was the denazification of Germany. Leaflets and pamphlets were written to help ordinary soldiers question German citizens and identify Nazis. Two million cases were investigated in the British Zone alone.

The Berlin airlift 1948 to 1949

Tensions with the Russians climaxed on 24 June 1948 when the Soviet authorities blockaded Berlin, in theory a city occupied by all four Allies but which was embedded deep in the Soviet Zone. The three Western Allies promptly set up airlifts to fly in food and other necessities. At its height a British or American plane was landing in one of Berlin’s three airports every 60 seconds. Eventually, after nearly a year, the Soviets abandoned their blockade on 12 May 1949.

Now it was clear for all to see who the enemy was, and the prolonged commitment of the Allies to Berlin changed the relationship between Germans and their occupiers. If it wasn’t obvious before, it was now, that the Germans were allies against the mightier threat, Russia.

2. Walls and Wire

Churchill had warned of an iron curtain dividing Europe as soon after the war as March 1946. The Berlin Airlift crystallised tension between the former Allies. But it wasn’t until 1961 that things took a further turn for the worse, when, on the night of 12 August, Soviet soldiers erected 100 miles of barbed wire around West Berlin, cutting it off from the outside world. In the weeks that followed the wire was followed by a concrete wall.

But the Berlin Wall was just a small forerunner of the bigger divided between east and West Germany. Eventually a wall, accompanied by barbed wire and guard towers, ran 866 miles from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia. It eventually became, along with the border between North and South Korea, one of the most heavily militarised zones in the world.

The Berlin Airlift clarified the British commitment to Germany. The manpower of the British Army on the Rhine was set at 53 to 55,000. The sense of embattled threat from the East set the tone of British soldiers’ lives for the next 40 years. In Berlin itself, service life was dictated by a host of rituals, rules and regulations surrounding the Wall and the exhibition highlights many little known aspects.

For example, I didn’t know that the Queen visited British forces in Berlin on three separate occasions, in 1965, 1978 and 1987.

Westerners were only allowed to travel from the West to Berlin via one heavily monitored road and one heavily monitored railway line. The exhibition includes movement orders and information leaflets relating to both.

We learn about BRIXMIS, which was the British Commanders in Chief Mission to the Soviets in Germany. Officers from BRIXMIS held parties and receptions, but were also allowed to go on three-man fact-finding missions anywhere inside the Soviet sector. It was a small organisation, numbering just 31 people, yet had wide-ranging freedoms to travel in the Soviet sector. Despite their official status, members of the little BRIXMIS parties could still be subject to harassment and even violence from Soviet or East German troops.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing uniform and equipment used by the BRIXMIS unit.

The British Army presence in Berlin numbered 3,100, deployed in three infantry battalions, with a number of supporting units. They were rotated every two years.

In 1947 the BAOR instituted the Berlin Tattoo, two days of displays and pageantry. This was open to German citizens and became  part of the city’s social calendar. It continued until 1990.

3. Active Edge

‘Active Edge’ was the term used by the Army for exercises that brought about fast mobilisation under the Soviet threat. This section documents the changing face of the BOAR during the Cold War years of the later 60s, 70s and 80s. During this period there was a growing threat from biological and nuclear weapons, with far-reaching consequences for training and equipment. It saw the inauguration of so-called ‘Survive to Fight’ training. Suits designed to protect against nuclear, chemical or biological weapons are on display.

The army’s readiness peaked with 1984’s Exercise Lionheart, the biggest British military exercise held since the Second World War, which involved 131,000 UK troops.

National Service ended in 1960 although the last national servicemen were only discharged in 1963. By the 1970s the BAOR had long ceased to be an army of occupation and was a smaller, more professional army which focused entirely on the possibility of having to fight a war of defence on the North German plain. Money was invested in better uniform, weapons and equipment, some of which are on display here.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing weapons used by the British Army on the Rhine during the 1970s and 80s

A magazine was set up for service personnel and titled ‘Threat’ which kept its readers up to date with intelligence about Soviet weapons, and their weaknesses, and likely battlefield tactics.

A video shows the Queen’s visit to the BAOR in 1977 to mark the jubilee of her reign, alongside photos and a commemorative mug. There’s an old-style push-button display which contains a dinky diorama of rolling landscape with half a dozen toy tanks scattered among it. When you press a button spotlights illuminate the different tanks and you have to press another button to identify the vehicle as friendly or enemy, using the list of profiles next to the buttons.

A surprisingly dominant display is of a mocked-up catering van, testament to an enterprising German, Wolfgang Meier, who spotted a commercial opening for someone to offer grub to hungry thirsty troops on the well-known Soltau-Lüneberg training range. For 25 years his bright blue catering vans offered hungry squaddies a menu including bratwurst, currywurst, fish and chips, chicken and chips, and Coke, Fanta or Sprite.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing a mock-up of one of Wolfgang Meier’s distinctive refreshment vans

4. Deployments

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was quickly followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw pact, which had glowered at NATO forces for 45 years. What now for the British Army? What was it for? What should it do?

In brief, the Army in Germany was cut in size by half. But as the 1990s progressed new types of threat or emergency emerged, notably:

  • Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait which triggered the Gulf War (2 August 1990 to 28 February 1991)
  • the wars in former Yugoslavia, consisting of:
    • the Slovenian War of Independence (1991)
    • the Croatian War of Independence (1991 to 1995)
    • the Bosnian War (1992 to 1995)
    • the Insurgency in Kosovo (1995 to 1998)
    • the Kosovo War (1998 to 1999)

In Operation Granby an entire division of BAOR was deployed out of Germany as part of a multinational coalition that drove Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait. British forces based in Germany also made major contributions to operations in Bosnia and the wider Balkans. They were then involved in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The BAOR came to be seen as a highly trained, highly motivated force which could be drawn on for operations in these other theatres.

This section examines the complete rethink about what the British Army in Europe was for, and contains mementos of the army’s involvement in some of these conflicts.

There’s a Seventh Armoured Brigade pennant from Kosovo. A copy of ‘Threat’ magazine, now focusing on Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army rather than the Warsaw Pact. A road sign from Basra. A mannekin sporting a uniform worn by a Major in the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars in Kuwait.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing the uniform worn by a Major in the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars in Kuwait with the flag of 1(BR) Corps in the background

At the same time, this final section dwells more than previously on the social aspects of British military life in Germany. A  case displays the wedding outfits of local girl Sigrid Krueger and British soldier Anthony Young whose marriage in 1990 symbolises the ever-closer ties between service personnel and locals. They met singing in an Anglo-German Choir in Rinteln and still live in Germany today. The harsh non-fraternisation policies outlined in Montgomery’s letters right at the start of the exhibition seem to come from another age.

There’s mention of the British Forces Broadcasting Service which began broadcasting in 1945 and kept going till the end. Generations of young Germans grew up listening to it, not least because it had lots of fashionable pop hits in the 60s and 70s.

There’s more about army schools, including a school uniform for a British forces-only school. Notes on the British Army  Summer Show which developed in the town of Bad Lippspringe and became a regular part of the British Forces Germany calendar, with its live music, equestrian events, trade stands, car show and beer tents. A description of the NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) which ran pubs, clubs and supermarkets for the British. The biggest NAAFI in the world opened in Rheindahlen in 1972 and wives in particular would travel a hundred miles to stock up on British food and drink.

Grateful German municipalities sometimes awarded their local British forces a Fahnenband, the highest award that can be bestowed on a British unit by the German military, and several examples are on display here.

But the 1990s brought change on the social front, too. The first British Military Tattoo was held in Berlin in 1947. The last one was held in October 1992.

5. Legacy

In 2010 the Liberal-Conservative British government decided to reduce the size of the army from 112,000 to 82,000 with a reserve of 35,000. And plans were announced to withdraw the entire remaining 20,000 forces from Germany by 2020.

At the culmination of this 10-year drawdown, the British Army’s permanent deployment to Germany came to an end in September 2019. No British combat units now remain in Germany. It was the end of an era.

However, in November 2021 the Ministry of Defence announced that Germany would become one of three ‘Land Hubs’, along with Kenya and Oman, where the British Army can train abroad with NATO allies and partner nations. Significant numbers of British tanks, armoured cars and other vehicles remain in storage at a training area in Sennelager. A garrison support unit remains in Germany to to provide health service support, welfare and the British Forces Broadcasting Service. From the peak of 780,000 British troops in Germany in 1945, there are now just 135 Army personnel remaining in Germany, none of them combat forces.

In-depth walk through the exhibition (40 minutes)


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Road to Recovery @ the National Army Museum

‘Rehabilitation starts the moment a life is saved. From that moment we start to consider life beyond survival.’
Major Peter Le Feuvre MBE (Physiotherapist, Royal Army Medical Corps)

‘Road to Recovery’ is a fairly small but well laid-out and very powerful exhibition at the National Army Museum. It describes the modern treatment of soldiers who have experienced life-changing battlefield injuries, both physical and mental, and paints a vivid picture of the journeys of rehabilitation and recovery which each injured soldier has to take.

Installation view of ‘Road to Recovery’ at the National Army Museum

The exhibition is staged in one medium-sized room. In the centre is a starburst-shaped set of panels which present the stories of five particular soldiers who suffered life-changing injuries. They are:

  • Captain Harry Parker – double lower-limb amputation
  • Simon Brown – traumatic facial injury and severe visual impairment
  • Dave Henson – double lower-limb amputation
  • Gemma Morgan – complex post-traumatic stress disorder
  • Johnson Beharry – severe head and brain injury

Each panel gives the facts of their injury and their battlefield treatment, details of subsequent operations, and the physical and mental legacy. Then they describe the rehabilitation process. All of this is stated in a kind of bureaucratic summary, a standardised list of fields and very clipped text descriptions, their brevity making them all the more powerful. Here’s an example:

Harry Parker

Rank and regiment: Captain, The Rifles

Dates of service: 2006 to 2013

Operational tours: Iraq 2007, Afghanistan 2009

Present occupation: Writer and artist

Injury: Double lower-limb amputation (right leg above knee, left leg below knee); lost a finger of left hand

Cause of injury: Stepped on an IED (improvised explosive device) while leading a patrol

Impact: 18 minutes from point of injury to Camp Bastion hospital; resuscitated three times; right leg amputated after 10 days due to fungal infection; 10 days in intensive care unity; 6 weeks and 11 operations in Selly Oak Hospital; 10 weeks after injury standing on prosthetics; in and out of Headley Court Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre (Epsom) for six years

Treated: Camp Bastion Hospital, Afghanistan; Selly Oak Hospital Birmingham; Headley Court Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre

The details of each injury are harrowing enough, but each of the five case studies also has an interactive panel accompanied by headphones, where you press a tab and can watch and listen to the person in question being interviewed. The three short videos address the same topics, namely 1) the incident, 2) rehab, 3) the legacy.

Placed around the central panels describing the five specific stories, are more general panels describing different aspects of modern rehabilitation and how it’s changed and improved in recent decades. There’s a case showing a selection of prosthetic limbs, there are several artworks – three paintings and a bust associated with other survivors – and there’s a video in which occupational therapists, nurses and specialists explain the details and thinking behind modern rehabilitation treatment.

Unexpected survivors

In the last 20 years, particularly during the long conflicts in Iraq (2003 to 2011) and Afghanistan (2001 to 2021), huge improvements in battlefield medical care have led to many soldiers surviving physical injuries that only a decade or so earlier would have been fatal. In the jargon of the trade these soldiers are referred to as ‘unexpected survivors’. The wall panels indicate the extraordinarily skilled and sophisticated medical procedures which saved their lives on the battlefield and then at the rear area medical facilities in the first minutes and hours after the injury.

Respect to all the medical staff involved, but what really impresses is the resilience, bravery and determination of the patients themselves. The medics saved the soldiers’ lives but then, as the soldiers and physiotherapists and counsellors all make abundantly clear – that’s when the real journey to recovery begins, marking the start of the psychological journey to recovery.

The determination and bravery of the five selected soldiers is awe-inspiring. Would I be that brave and determined if my legs were blown off, if half my brain were permanently damaged, if I was blinded by a shell exploding a few feet from my face?

Here’s a painting done by Harry Parker, whose story I outlined above. He had studied art before joining the army. This is the first painting he did after his injury and, according to the wall label, painting it made him realise that he had more options in life than just being a soldier.

‘Legs’ by Captain Harry Parker (2013)

Harry realised there was more to him than obeying orders in the Army, that he had a lot more to contribute and live for. In its way this painting epitomises the fat that the key to recovery for most injured veterans is regaining their independence and finding a fulfilling alternative career.

PTSD

The exhibition is at pains to point out that soldiers suffer not only physical injuries but can suffer from severe mental trauma, too. The best known condition is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The symptoms of this include nightmares and flashbacks, trouble sleeping, being hypervigilant and angry, or, at the other extreme, becoming completely emotionally detached from your surroundings. As well as hurting the sufferers, PTSD can obviously also have a devastating impact on family and loved ones, struggling to cope with a loved one who, in extreme cases, becomes a complete stranger.

In the past the Ministry of Defence was guilty of failing to screen soldiers back from active service adequately, failing in its ‘duty of care’ as the jargon has it. Nowadays everyone is much more aware of the seriousness of the condition and soldiers can be referred to the NHS or to charities which offer help and support. Treatment usually takes the form of a combination of therapy and medication.

Four of the five detailed profiles laid out on the wall panels are of soldiers who suffered horrific physical injuries, but one of the five is devoted solely to psychological damage, the case of Gemma Morgan.

Gemma Morgan

Rank and regiment: Royal Logistics Corp

Dates of service: 1996 to 2002

Operational tour: Kosovo 1998 to 1999

Present occupation: Speaker and Leadership Consultant; ambassador at Help for Heroes

Injury: Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Cause of injury: Observing and verifying instances of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo (a further wall label explains that Gemma witnessed acts of ethnic cleansing but, due to the nature of the mission was unable to intervene; it was this inability to help the innocent which caused her mental anguish)

Impact: Nightmares and flashbacks; alcohol abuse and emotional withdrawal; suicidal tendencies; wrongly diagnosed with moderately affective disorder, not attributable to her military service; three years after leaving the Army diagnosed with severe PTSD attributed to her service in Kosovo; seven weeks as an in-patient and over a year as an out-patient at a private clinic

Treated: Department of Community Mental Health, Aldershot; NHS; the Priory

As Gemma’s story indicates, the mental wounds are often harder to diagnose, harder to identify, and so harder to treat than physical ones. There’s an interactive panel which lets you listen to Gemma herself explaining her journey through the three steps of: incident, rehabilitation, and legacy. God, the poor woman.

Another wall label tells us that local villagers in Kosovo called Gemma ‘Djamelia’. At first she thought this was a local pronunciation of her name but then learned that it was a local word meaning ‘bringer of hope’, and this meant a lot to her later on, during her recovery. You can imagine how something like that must answer the need for purpose and meaning to events which otherwise just seem too horrific to process.

‘Rehabilitation for me has been about learning to find new meaning, learning to find new purpose to my life and finding a tribe that I belong to.’ (Gemma Morgan)

Jaco

The exhibition tells three or four more inspiring stories. Jaco van Gass lost his arm and suffered other life-changing injuries when he was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan in 2011. After years of rehabilitation he became a para-cyclist and won two gold medals at the 2020 Paralympic Games.

Jaco van Gass by Caroline de Peyrecave (2017)

Snippets

At the peak of the war in Afghanistan, 2009 to 2010, Headley Court Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre in Epsom was the largest centre for prosthetics in the UK with 11 full-time prosthetists.

There are over 2,000 Armed Forces charities in the UK, from well known ones like Help for Heroes and the Royal British Legion to more specialised ones like Blesma, Combat Stress, KartForce or Waterloo Uncovered.

The Invictus Games were set up in 2014 under the patronage of the Duke of Sussex, to give injured veterans a platform to compete at sports against their peers. Many have gone on to compete in the Paralympic Games.

Kings College London leads research into military mental health. As a result of its work, early screening and treatment for PTSD are being implemented.

Although there is more institutional help than ever before, more understanding, more therapeutic approaches and more charities working in the area of soldiers’ mental health, some still slip through the net. Surprisingly, maybe, the suicide rate among veterans is lower than the general population, but in 2018 75 veterans took their lives.

Best wishes

This is a very moving and often upsetting exhibition. Best wishes to all the veterans injured, either physically or psychologically, in all the stupid wars our politicians have sent them to fight. And huge respect to all the professionals – the medics and physiotherapists and psychotherapists and counsellors – who help put them back together again.


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