Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

by Salman Rushdie

  These days, in addition, the Pakistani authorities are under pressure from their country’s mullahs and radical Islamists, who characterize the struggle to “liberate” (that is, to seize) Kashmir as a holy war. Ironically, Kashmiri Islam has always been of the mild, Sufistic variety, in which local pirs, or holy men, are revered as saints. This openhearted, tolerant Islam is anathema to the firebrands of Pakistan and might well, under Pakistani rule, be at risk. Thus, the present-day growth of terrorism in Kashmir has roots in India’s treatment of Kashmiris but also in Pakistan’s interest in subversion. Yes, Kashmiris feel strongly about the Indian “occupation” of their land; but it is also almost certainly true that Pakistan’s Army and intelligence service has been training, aiding, and abetting the men of violence.

  India’s and Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons makes urgent the need to move beyond the deadlock and the moribund fifty-year-old language of the crisis. What Kashmiris want, and what India and Pakistan must be persuaded to offer them, is a reunited land, an end to Lines of Control and warfare on high Himalayan glaciers. What they want is to be given a large degree of autonomy, to be allowed to run their own lives. (A dual-citizenship scheme, with frontiers guaranteed by both Pakistan and India, is one possible solution.)

  The Kashmir dispute has already exposed the frailty of the Cold War theory of nuclear deterrence, according to which the extreme danger of nuclear arsenals should deter those who possess them from embarking on even a conventional war. That thesis now seems untenable. It was probably not deterrence but luck that prevented the Cold War from turning hot. So here we are in a newly dangerous world, in which nuclear powers actually are going to war. In such a time, the special-case status of Kashmir must be recognized and made the basis of the way forward. The Kashmir problem must be defused, or else, in the unthinkable worst-case scenario, it may end in the nuclear destruction of Paradise itself, and of much else besides.

  JULY 1999: NORTHERN IRELAND

  Even before Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern spelled out the details of the latest Northern Ireland peace plan, the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble was describing those urging him to accept the terms as “willing fools.” Since then, his colleague Ken Maginnis has spoken of “betrayal,” and Trimble has announced that he has “great difficulty in seeing how we can proceed with this.” So are Blair and Ahern and Mo Mowlam and the other mediators really history’s idiots, the IRA’s foolish dupes and therefore fellow-travelers of evil, hell-bent on permitting terrorists “into the heart of government,” as the Unionists imply they are?

  Newspaper reports speak of a meeting between Blair and Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness at which, after recording equipment was switched off, McGuinness said he was now speaking on behalf of the IRA, and made the offer that persuaded the British prime minister that the prize of IRA disarmament was within grasp.

  Has Blair been deceived? We know that General John de Chastelain, head of the decommissioning body, thinks he has not. The general’s report states that there is a basis for believing that the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries will fully disarm by May 2000. But Trimble and his team, suspicious of the reasons for delaying the report’s release by a couple of days, are worried that de Chastelain had his arm twisted, and that the final version of his text was slanted toward the Republican position by British spin doctors.

  Up to a point, it’s possible to sympathize with Trimble, who took one courageous and politically risky step for peace a year ago, and who is now asked to endorse a further strategy that the unreconstructed masses of Drumcree marchers and the rest of the Unionist faithful will utterly detest. It’s easy, in particular, to understand Unionists’ exasperation with the infuriating brand of doublespeak still practiced by Sinn Fein, whose leaders insist, on the record, that their party is not to be confused with the IRA while, off the record, they speak powerfully on the Provos’ behalf.

  It’s clear, too, that between Unionism and Sinn Fein there exists a mutual loathing so deep that no peace process can wipe it away. One remembers the distaste with which the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin took Yasser Arafat’s proffered hand. Trimble feels at least as much disgust for Gerry Adams as Rabin felt for the chairman of the PLO. And it probably hasn’t escaped his memory that Rabin’s handshake cost him his life. But, as Israelis and Palestinians know only too well, peace is not the same thing as reconciliation, it’s not about kissing and making up with the foe you’ve fought for generations. Peace is simply the decision not to fight. Reconciliation may come after that, very very slowly, or it may not. And right now, most citizens of Northern Ireland—like most Israelis and most Palestinians—agree that peace without reconciliation is what they want. The silence of the guns will do.

  This is the analysis—the gamble, really—on which the Blair-Ahern peace initiative is based: that the longer the cease-fire in Northern Ireland can be maintained, the harder it will be for the paramilitary war to resume. However imperfect the cessation of hostilities, however vicious the continued punishment beatings, however inflammatory the language still used by the two sides about each other, this lengthening stretch of minimal violence, this breathing space, may just enable peace to take deep enough root to last. It may get the distrustful communities of the Six Counties so used to their unreconciled peace as to make a return to war intolerable.

  Risky as it is, this “peace gamble” remains the only game in town, and Unionist refusals will quickly come to be seen (as Tony Blair has warned) as unforgivable sabotage. Right now, Gerry Adams looks like he’s dragging the IRA kicking and screaming toward the war’s end, while Trimble is making us wonder whether he has become convinced that the peace on offer is a mirage, or simply that its price is too high. If he digs in his heels now, those conclusions will be hard to avoid. When, as Blair keeps saying, the prize is so great, then such intransigence looks like a greater folly than excessive “willingness.”

  David Trimble is right to insist that there must be no fudges, that disarmament must be real, prompt, and verifiable. But if Unionist stubbornness derails the peace train, the party will always stand accused of being history’s “unwilling fools,” who shirked the risk and refused to travel toward hope. And David Trimble may then be remembered as Northern Ireland’s Netanyahu, not its Shamir or Rabin.

  AUGUST 1999: KOSOVO

  In the wake of the Gracko killings, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has appealed to the Albanians of Kosovo to set aside their enmities. “We fought this conflict,” Mr. Blair said in the provincial capital Pristina last Friday, “because we believe in justice, because we believed it was wrong to have ethnic cleansing and racial genocide here in Europe towards the end of the twentieth century, and we didn’t fight it to have another ethnic minority [the Kosovan Serb minority] repressed.” These are good-hearted, high-minded, decent words, the words of a man who believes he has fought and won a just war, and for whom “justice” includes the idea of reconciliation. But they also indicate a failure of imagination. What happened to the Albanians in Kosovo was an atrocity whose dark effect on the spirit may lie beyond the power of decent men like Mr. Blair to wish away. What happened may be, quite simply, unforgivable.

  Tragically, this is not the first such imaginative failure. In the conflict’s early days, many Kosovar Albanians also failed to grasp the scale of the horror that was coming their way. In many villages, the men decided to flee, convinced that Milosevic’s army was intent on massacring them. They vanished into the woods, over the mountains, out of the Army’s murderous reach. But they made a miscalculation: they left their families behind, unable to believe that their wives, children, and infirm parents would be at risk from the advancing soldiers. They underestimated the human capacity for the atrocious.

  Now let us imagine the refugees’ terrible return at the conflict’s end. Nervously, hoping for joy, they near their village. But before they get there they understand that the unimaginable has occurred. The fields are littered with bloodied garments and severed limbs. Carrio
n birds flap and strut. There are odors. The men of this village must now face a truth in which profound shame and humiliation mingle with great grief. They are alive because they ran away, but the loved ones whom they left behind have been murdered in their stead. The bodies that they now carry in farmyard carts to the burial ground speak accusations through their shrouds. My son, in the weakness of my old age you were not there to save me. My husband, you allowed me to be raped and slaughtered. My father, you let me die.

  The village’s survivors tell the returned refugees the story of the massacre. They tell them how some of the Serbs in the village put on Serbian Army uniforms and used their local knowledge to help the killers flush out the terrified Albanians from their bolt-holes. No, they said, don’t bother to search that house, it has no cellar. Ah, but this house, there’s a cellar under that rug, they’ll be hiding in there.

  These Kosovan Serbs have fled now. But Milosevic doesn’t want them in Serbia, where they are the living proof of his defeat. And Mr. Blair, too, wants them to go home and be protected by K-FOR [the UN’s Kosovo peacekeeping force]. They are reluctant to return, fearing vengeance. And guess what? They’re right. They’re right, and Tony Blair, with his vision of a new Kosovo—“a symbol of how the Balkans should be”—is wrong.

  I supported the NATO operation in Kosovo, finding the human-rights evidence in favor of intervention to be powerful and convincing. Many writers, intellectuals, artists, and left-leaning bien-pensants thought otherwise. One of their arguments was, if Kosovo, then why not Kurdistan? Why not Rwanda or East Timor? Oddly, this kind of rhetoric actually makes the opposite point to the one it thinks it’s making. For if it would have been right to intervene in these cases, and the West was wrong not to, then surely it was also right to defend the Kosovans, and the West’s previous failures only serve to emphasize that this time, at least, they—“we”—got it right.

  The anti-intervention camp’s major allegation was and is that NATO’s action in fact precipitated the violence it was intended to prevent; that, so to speak, the massacres were Madeleine Albright’s fault. This seems to me both morally reprehensible—because it exculpates the actual killers—and demonstrably wrong. Set emotion aside and look at the cold logistics of Milosevic’s massacre. It quickly becomes apparent that the atrocity was carefully planned. One does not make detailed plans to wipe out thousands of people just in case a speedy response to a Western attack should be needed. One plans a massacre because one intends to carry out a massacre.

  True, the speed and enormity of the Serbian attack took the NATO forces by surprise (another failure of imagination). That doesn’t make it right to blame NATO. Murderers are guilty of the murders they commit, rapists of their rapes.

  But if “we” were right to go in, and the war was indeed fought for idealistic motives, the idealism of the present policy looks increasingly starry-eyed. The reality, as reported by experienced foreign correspondents who have returned from Kosovo to say that they have never seen anything like it, is that there are few Serbs left in Kosovo, and it is probably impossible to protect them. The old, multicultural Sarajevo was destroyed by the Bosnian war. The old Kosovo is gone too, very probably for good. Mr. Blair’s ideal Kosovo is a dream. He and his colleagues should now support the construction of the free, ethnically Albanian entity that seems like a historical inevitability. The aftermath of a war is no time for dreaming.

  SEPTEMBER 1999: DARWIN IN KANSAS

  Some years ago, in Cochin in South India, I attended the World Understanding Day of the local Rotary Club. The featured speaker was an American creationist, Duane T. Gish, who attributed the malaise of Today’s Youth to the propagation, by the world’s school systems, of the pernicious teachings of poor old Charles Darwin. Today’s Youth was being taught that it was descended from monkeys! Consequently, and understandably, it had become alienated from society, and “depressed.” The rest—its drift, its criminality, its promiscuity, its drug abuse—inevitably followed.

  I was interested to note that a few minutes into the lecture the habitually courteous Indian audience simply stopped listening. The hum of conversation in the room gradually rose until the speaker was all but drowned. Not that this stopped Duane. Like a dinosaur who hasn’t noticed he’s extinct, he just went bellowing on.

  This summer, however, Mr. Gish’s lizardy kind will have received cheering news. The Kansas Board of Education’s decision to delete evolution from the state’s recommended curriculum and from its standardized tests is, in itself, powerful evidence against the veracity of Charles Darwin’s great theory. If Darwin were able to visit Kansas in 1999, he would find living proof that natural selection doesn’t always work, that the dumbest and unfittest sometimes survive, and that the human race is therefore capable of evolving backward toward those youth-depressing apes. Nor is Darwin the only casualty. The Big Bang apparently didn’t happen in the Kansas area, either—or, at least, it’s just one of the available theories. Thus in one pan of the scales we have general relativity, the Hubble telescope, and all the imperfect but painstakingly accumulated learning of the human race; and, in the other, the Book of Genesis. In Kansas, the scales balance.

  Good teachers, it must be said, are appalled by their state board’s decision. As the new academic year begins, battle is about to be joined, and it may yet be that reason will prevail over superstition. But respected professors publicly concede that “it’s going on everywhere, and the creationists are winning.” In Alabama, for example, a sticker on textbooks hilariously suggests that since “no one was present when life first appeared on earth,” we can’t ever know the facts. Seems you just had to be there.

  Or, not so hilariously. This stuff would be funny if it weren’t so unfunny. American fundamentalists may be pleased to know that elsewhere in the world—Karachi, Pakistan, for example—the blinkered literalists of another faith have been known to come into university classes armed to the teeth and threaten lecturers with instant death if they should deviate from the strict Quranic view of science (or anything else). Might it be that America’s notorious gun culture will now also take up arms against knowledge itself?

  Nor should the rest of us feel too smug. The war against religious obscurantism, a war many people believed had been won long ago, is breaking out all over, with ever greater force. Gobbledygook is back in style. The pull of stupidity grows everywhere more powerful. The young speak of the spiritual life as if it were a fashion accessory. A new dark age of unreason may be beginning. High priests and fierce inquisitors are cackling in the shadows. There are, once again, anathemas and persecutions.

  Meanwhile, slowly, beautifully, the search for knowledge continues. Ironically, in the whole history of the sciences, there has never been so rich or revolutionary a golden age. Big science is unlocking the universe, tiny science is solving the riddles of life. And, yes, the new knowledge brings with it new moral problems, but the old ignorances are not going to help us solve these. One of the beauties of learning is that it admits its provisionality, its imperfections. This scholarly scrupulousness, this willingness to admit that even the most well supported of theories is still a theory, is now being exploited by the unscrupulous. But that we do not know everything does not mean we know nothing. Not all theories are of equal weight. The moon, even the moon over Kansas, is not made of green cheese. Genesis, as a “theory,” is bunk.

  If the over-abundant new knowledge of the modern age is, let’s say, a tornado, then Oz is the extraordinary, Technicolor new world in which it has landed us, the world from which—life not being a movie—there is no way home. In the immortal words of Dorothy Gale, “I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” To which one can only add: thank goodness, baby, and amen.

  OCTOBER 1999: EDWARD SAID

  All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented.” This is the opening of Out of Place by Edward Said, one of the finest m
emoirs of childhood and youth to be published in many a long year, a work that prompts the critic to reach for his highest comparisons. It can justly be likened to Proust’s great novel-cycle because of its own recapturing of lost time; to Balzac, for the clarity of its social and historical perceptions; and to Conrad. The author is a Conradian scholar, but he is also, like the Nigger of the Narcissus, a sick man who is nevertheless determined to live until he dies. (Said suffers from CLL, a form of leukemia.) One of the many things to be said about this book is that it is a heroic instance of writing against death.

  As its beginning shows, Out of Place is keenly aware of the inventions, blurrings, and imagination-figments that go to make up our sense of ourselves and our kin. It knows everything there is to know about displacement, about rootings and uprootings, about feeling wrong in the world, and it absorbs the reader precisely because such out-of-place experiences lie at or near the heart of what it is to be alive in our jumbled, chaotic times. How extraordinary, then, that so nuanced, so transparently honest a book, whose every page speaks to its author’s immense honesty and integrity, should become the center of an intercontinental political storm! For Said has been malevolently accused of fraud, of having falsified his own life story and having based a lifetime of political involvement upon “thirty years of carefully crafted deception”: of, in short, not really being a Palestinian at all.

  The author of the current attack, Justus Reid Weiner, has unsavory backers: the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, primarily financed by the Milken Family Fund. Yes, that Michael Milken, the crooked financier jailed for, you’ve got it, fraud. But even though he boasts of having spent three years on Said’s trail, his accusations are flimsy nothings. Weiner can’t deny that Said actually was born in Jerusalem. To “prove” that Said and his family don’t merit the status of Palestinian “refugees” or “exiles,” however, Weiner does claim that Said didn’t go to St. George’s School in eastern Jerusalem and that the family house there never belonged to them. This is all hogwash. Fellow-students of Said’s have come forward to confirm that he did indeed attend St. George’s, and that the Saids were well known as an old Palestinian family. At least one of these students said as much to Weiner, who conveniently failed to mention the fact in his attack.