The Tyranny of Silence

by Flemming Rose

  “The other parents were so nice. Two mothers went back home with me and the little one. They said they would take care of her if I needed to go out looking for Carlos.”

  By now, Maria was worried. The mothers soothed her. Her father and brother came over.

  “None of us imagined at that time that Carlos might be dead. We just had to find him. There was a lot of confusion,” Maria explained.

  But Carlos was dead. He had been dead since 7:38, when two bombs had gone off in separate carriages of train 21435 from Alcalá de Henares to the main station of Atocha in the center of Madrid. The fatal explosions occurred just as the train pulled out of El Pozo del Tío Raimundo, a few kilometers east of Atocha. Ten bombs concealed in backpacks on four different trains were detonated by mobile phones. One hundred and ninety-one people from 17 different countries lost their lives, a number of whom commuted into the city and were immigrants who had found benefit in Spain’s favorable economic climate. More than 2,000 people were injured in the blasts.2

  That terrorist attack, which took place three days before Spanish parliamentary elections, was the worst Europe had seen since 1988, when Pan Am Flight 103 had been blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Political commentators agreed that the Madrid bombings were a political success for the terrorists, since they had a significant effect on the elections. Contrary to the opinion polls, the Socialists won, resulting in an immediate decision to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq.

  “I’ll never forget the sight of what happened here,” one rescue worker told British newspaper the Guardian a year later, at a memorial service held at the El Pozo station where Carlos was killed. “I can still recall the smell of gunpowder smoke, how we found bodies on the platform, the head of a boy lying on a bench.”3

  Television crews arrived swiftly on the scene. Their footage shows the roof torn off one of the train carriages. A second carriage’s side was ripped open. A body lay on top of a roof, blown into the air by the blast. Others lay strewn over the tracks. Sixty-seven people lost their lives here. Many bodies were so badly mutilated that DNA tests were the only means of identifying them.

  Maria Gomez found Carlos late that evening. Rescue workers had discovered his wallet and ID on his body and had contacted her. She drove to the hospital with her brother and his girlfriend while her parents went in another car. By the time Maria arrived, her father had already identified Carlos, though the body had been barely recognizable.

  “I said to my mother, ‘Where is he?’ She replied, ‘He is gone.’ It was like some foggy dream. I recognized his tattoo, the remains of his clothes he had on, his hands. Both his legs were missing from the knees down.”

  Maria’s world collapsed. She had just given birth to the couple’s first child, her two older children being from her former marriage. The family had only recently moved out of the city, anticipating the security of a new life away from the daily hustle and bustle. Her plans and dreams for the future died with Carlos. “It was like life just disconnected from me. I existed inside my own little space for months on end while life went on around me. I didn’t care about anything. Now, it doesn’t bear thinking about, but that’s the way it was. It was terrible.”

  At the time of the attack, Spain’s prime minister was José María Aznar of the People’s Party. But in the parliamentary elections shortly after the bombings, Aznar’s party was swept from power by José Zapatero and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. Many voters’ confidence in Aznar was shaken by his mistaken claim that the Basque separatist group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) was responsible for the bombings. Experts disagreed as to whether the group responsible for the Madrid attack was affiliated with al Qaeda, but it seemed clear that the blasts had been at the very least inspired by al Qaeda’s ideology. In the spring of 2010, terror researcher Fernando Reinares presented new information about the terrorists’ financial backers, confirming that the plan had probably been conceived, developed, and approved by al Qaeda in a Pakistani region close to the Afghan border.4 The massacre that occurred in Madrid was another battle between radical Islamists and Western secularism.

  Somewhat to her surprise, Maria found that after the attacks, her views on a number of issues aligned with Aznar’s conservative party. She became a news junkie. Rather than savor quiet mornings by puttering around her home in tree-lined suburbia, she compulsively consumed the news on television, radio, and online.

  “I never want to leave home again in the morning without knowing exactly what’s going on,” she explained.

  I met Maria Gomez after reading a short newspaper article in the spring of 2007. A woman had appeared in court during the trial of the alleged Madrid bombers wearing a T-shirt printed with Kurt Westergaard’s infamous cartoon. The piece piqued my curiosity, and I sought out an interview. We met less than three weeks before the bombers were sentenced.

  Like the relatives of other victims, Maria had closely followed the trial. She told me about the first day in the courtroom. The victims’ families had not had a chance previously to see the 28 men on trial. One woman, whose mother had been killed, began shouting at one of them: “You murderer!”

  “I wanted to look them in the eye,” Maria told me. “I felt the need to confront them to see if there was anything that might tell me more about what happened. But their eyes were empty; they told me nothing.”

  Many female relatives of victims were particularly outraged by 36-year-old defendant Rabei Osman Sayed, who in a phone conversation had bragged about planning the attack for two and a half years.

  “I wanted to plan it so it would be unforgettable for everyone, including me. I was ready to blow myself up, but they stopped me,” the transcript of his call read.

  Spanish authorities found Osman in 2004 in Milan, where he was serving a sentence for his part in planning acts of terrorism. From 1999 until he was arrested in Italy, he had traveled throughout Europe, visiting Germany, France, Spain, and Italy, making contact with radical cells in search of potential suicide bombers. Searching his Madrid apartment, police found a computer program designed to simultaneously activate a chain of mobile phones. That same technology was used in the March bombings. According to Spanish intelligence, Osman had been an explosives expert in the Egyptian army and had served a prison sentence in Egypt for his membership in Islamic Jihad.

  Osman was the first defendant to be called in the trial, but he refused to answer any questions. Maria Gomez says that at one point she made eye contact with him and was able to read his lips: “He said, ‘Whore.’ I could tell from the movement of his lips. I could have killed him. But I have three children to think about,” Maria told me.

  After the attack, Maria developed a deeper interest in Islam. When she was a child, her grandfather had been concerned about immigration into Spain from North Africa and the Middle East, and he had often told her about Spain’s long history with Islam. Muslims conquered Andalusia in the eighth century and held it until 1492, when Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella reclaimed the region and forced Muslims and Jews to convert or leave the Iberian Peninsula. As a young girl, Maria had paid little heed to those stories, but now she found herself reflecting on his words. Her grandfather had feared that with the high birthrate among Muslim immigrants, parts of Spain would soon be “reconquered” by Muslims.

  “I really want to understand [the terrorists], and in a way I do. Not the fact that they kill other people, of course, but we do step all over them, and I would probably be angry myself if I was one of them. But I’ll never understand them fully,” she said. “I don’t want to bring my children up to be racists, but there is good reason to tell them about the threat of Islam. There are reasons we should be critical of Islam. Religion can be a very dangerous thing.”

  Maria compiled an extensive archive on her computer. One folder contained the Muhammad cartoons that had been published in Jyllands-Posten. Surfing the Internet one day, she found a German firm selling customized T-shirts, and she ordered a w
hite one with a print of Westergaard’s cartoon. It came to less than 20 euros, and the shirt arrived a few days later by post.

  I asked her why she chose that particular image.

  “Because it was the most representative of what the Islamists are all about. That drawing expressed how I felt inside my heart. It represented a piece of reality. I’ve had a poster of it done, too, which hangs inside my house.”

  On March 26, 2007, Maria dropped off her children earlier than usual at school and drove the half hour to the courtroom in Madrid. The sun was shining in a clear blue sky. So as not to call attention to herself prematurely, she was wearing a black shirt over the T-shirt.

  “I felt good. I felt I would be able to show the terrorists exactly what I thought of them.”

  The day turned out to be more dramatic than Maria had imagined. Earlier in the proceedings, she had chosen a seat at the back of the courtroom. On this day, though, she sat up front in full view of the accused. She unbuttoned her shirt and pulled it aside, flashing Westergaard’s image at the defendants on the other side of the glass cage. “I could tell from the Egyptian’s face that he didn’t like what he was seeing.”

  Several of the defendants reacted immediately, calling on their defense attorney to have Maria Gomez removed from the courtroom for offending their religious sentiments. An officer of the court informed Maria that her actions were insulting and asked that she discreetly leave the court. A secretary led Maria out. On her way out, the judge asked for her name and to speak with her in private following the day’s proceedings.

  The defendants watched with obvious satisfaction as she was removed. Maria was shocked. “I didn’t know what to say. I was absolutely furious and started crying when we got out into the corridor. ‘What is this? Don’t we live in a free country? Aren’t I allowed to wear whatever I want?’ I asked. I felt really, really bad.”

  Later in the afternoon, Maria met with the judge, who made it clear to her that he would not allow her T-shirt into the courtroom, because, he said, it could be exploited by the defense to claim that the proceedings were a showcase against Islam and that the defendants were therefore not being accorded a fair trial. A similar incident had already arisen, prompted by a prosecuting attorney wearing a crucifix.

  “It wasn’t because I wanted to offend Muslims in general that I showed the T-shirt in court,” Maria explained. “The only ones on my mind were the Egyptian and the other defendants. They were the ones I wanted to get at. I told that to the Arabic interpreter when he came out into the corridor to see the T-shirt.”

  On October 31, 2007, the judge ruled on the case. Twenty-one of the 28 defendants were convicted of assisting in the attack. Nineteen of those convicted were from the Middle East; three were Spanish citizens. Three were convicted of murder and received the maximum penalty of 40 years in prison. The other 18 were sentenced to less than 23 years in jail; the presumed ringleader, Rabei Osman, was acquitted, though he still had to complete his 10-year sentence in Italy.5

  Osman’s acquittal, and the fact that only three of the defendants were convicted of murder, came as a shock to Maria and the other victims’ relatives. A spokesman expressed their indignation: “We are extremely surprised by the acquittals. If they didn’t do it, we have to find the ones who did. Someone must have given the order.”

  Another response was more blunt: “I’m neither a judge nor a lawyer, but this is shameful and outrageous.”

  Is there indeed an Islamic ban on depicting the Prophet Muhammad, and if so, to whom does it apply? Muslims expressed various reasons for their affront at the Muhammad cartoons, both in their incarnation as a newspaper illustration and as a woman’s T-shirt. Some said it was the act of depiction itself that offended them. Yet if that were the case, why didn’t they react to Danish daily Politiken’s depiction of the Prophet in June 2005, in a cartoon that portrayed Muhammad as a psychiatric patient? Or to Gary Larson’s interpretation of Muhammad and the mountain in 1994? Or to the comic strip Mohammed’s Believe It or Else?

  There have been many other pictures of the Prophet. Indeed, religious historians inform us of a long tradition within Islam of depicting Muhammad. “In the past, and still today, pictures of the Prophet Muhammad have been produced, and are still produced, by Muslim artists for Muslim patrons,” wrote Oleg Grabar, a leading expert on Islamic art, in the New Republic. In Grabar’s view, nothing in Islamic law unequivocally prohibits images of the Prophet. Although historically a majority has condemned depiction, the spectrum of opinion had always been broad, and until recently, posters had been freely available in Iran, for example, depicting the young Muhammad in a sensual pose.

  Some imams in the Middle East explained that even simple knowledge of the cartoons’ existence was offensive, since it could suggest to some Muslims that they could question their religion. Forbidding such cartoons was thus not about the need to protect the religious sensitivity of the individual; it was more a matter of trying to prevent them from inspiring Muslims to break with their community of faith and demand free exercise of religion and free speech. The cartoons were a challenge to the religious powers that be and their interpretive monopoly.

  The well-known Saudi cleric and TV preacher Muhammad Al-Munajid, speaking on Al Jazeera, made that point clearly:

  The problem is that they want to open a debate on whether Islam is true or not, and on whether Judaism and Christianity are false or not. In other words, they want to open up everything for debate. That’s it. It begins with freedom of thought, it continues with freedom of speech, and it ends up with freedom of belief.

  Having said goodbye to Maria Gomez, I ambled beneath the shady trees toward Sofia Reina Museum to look at Guernica, the painting whose twisted images of carnage and chaos have become an icon for the torment of war.

  The Madrid bombings may not have wrought such total destruction on the Spanish capital as the German and Italian air strikes did on the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, but eyewitness descriptions of the bloodbath of that March day inevitably bring to mind the horrors depicted in Picasso’s painting.

  I walked on toward the Atocha station where the four trains had been headed. Here, on the third anniversary of the attack, Spain’s royal couple had inaugurated a memorial to the victims: a cylinder of glass, 11 meters tall, engraved inside with thousands of messages sent from around the world in the days following the attack to express sorrow, condolences, and support. Below ground level, underneath the wide boulevard in front of the station, is a stark, blue room illuminated only by streetlights above. Visitors can look up inside the cylinder and study the messages.

  I thought about Maria Gomez and what she had told me. To her, Kurt Westergaard’s depiction of the Prophet represented in some way what she and others bereaved by the attacks had endured. It was not an image that invited intellectual or moral analysis; to her, it was simply true. A group of Muslims had murdered her husband and destroyed her life. In their own words, their actions had been motivated by their religion—by the words and life of the Prophet as represented in the Koran. To Maria, those facts were indisputable, and they meant that criticizing Islam was a fair and reasonable response.

  Is it really inappropriate to engage in pointed but nonviolent criticism of violent Islam? Philippe Val, editor of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, asked of the uproar at the cartoons’ publication, “What kind of civilization is this if we cannot mock and satirize those who blow up trains and planes and indiscriminately murder innocent people?”

  A courtroom may not be the appropriate place for protest, but the interaction between Maria and her husband’s presumed murderers is quite relevant to the Cartoon Crisis and to the broader issues it has raised about tolerance and the distinction between words and actions. After all, who was the victim and who was the perpetrator on that March day in a Madrid courtroom?

  Who had the right to feel most violated—a woman who had lost her husband or the men who had orchestrated his death?

  Maria’s
small protest brings to mind the adage “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Should it not be considered a mark of civilization that in the face of barbaric violence, we respond only with a cartoonist’s pencil and a T-shirt?

  3. From Moscow to Muhammad

  I divide all works of world literature into those authorized and those written without authorization.

  —Osip Mandelstam

  As Maria Gomez waited in vain for her husband in Madrid on the morning of March 11, 2004, I was at the airport in Copenhagen, on my way to Moscow. An election was scheduled in Russia on Sunday, March 14, the same day that the Spanish parliamentary elections were to take place. Covering that vote was to be my farewell to Russia, and to my job as Jyllands-Posten’s Moscow correspondent, a position I had held since 1999. It was also the last stop in my roaming existence as a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Washington.

  The most memorable experience had been the Soviet Union’s dramatic collapse in 1991. Each day had been dizzy with new events. Issues long taboo lost all sanctity, and dogmas long accepted were torn away. People who had spent years in prison camps as enemies of the state were elected to high office. Televised debates had people glued to the screen. For someone like me, who had been closely involved with some of the country’s dissidents, it was a euphoric experience to watch the communist regime crumble into the ocean like a latter-day Atlantis, although for millions of innocent people, events grew nightmarish when the dissolution of the Soviet Union robbed them of their savings. Revolutions are overwhelming.

  I was surprised by what I felt to be a moral dilemma when the Soviet Union collapsed. I had thought I approved of separatist movements. It seemed to me self-evident that every nation that had been forced into the Soviet Union (or any other empire) should be allowed its freedom. But I discovered a darker side to those nationalist movements. As I traveled through the ruins of the empire, covering armed conflicts and ethnic clashes in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, Georgia, Moldova, South Ossetia, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Tatarstan, and Chechnya, it became evident that the leaders of many of those movements looked on human rights as basically reserved for people from ethnic groups they approved of. People from other groups were to be reduced to second-class citizens, driven away, or even killed.