Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  There are bright shining careers in counterinsurgency to be made here, and there are no obstacles in a clever boy’s path: civil liberties are permanently suspended; you can arrest any Kurdish troublemaker you want; none of your superiors cares how you get your information from the bloodied suspects in the cells. True, there are some local journalists, from a Turkish paper called Gundem, who report so-called human-rights abuses. But what’s to stop you using your gun on them, too? Eleven journalists have been shot already reporting the dirty war. Another one will hardly be noticed.

  Foreign journalists, on the other hand, require special handling. Mind you, they’re all hypocrites. Especially the British. They should know that fighting terrorists is a dirty business, but they come here and tell the Turks to be nice to the Kurds. They’ve got the IRA wanting to tear a large piece out of Great Britain, but they come to Turkey and tell us to grant “autonomy” to the Kurds. Stop the repression? Stop the arrests? It’s enough to make any good ferret sick.

  But modern security culture is all about good public relations. So the ferret bites his tongue. “You want a good show? That’s what we’re gonna give you,” he says. After all, Istanbul wants to host the Olympics; Turkey wants acceptance. Hadn’t the director of security at the border between Iraq and Turkey said that he wanted to have “human procedures, as you have in Europe”? As everyone knows, Europe’s procedures are certainly human. It is good form in the counterinsurgency business to tell the foreigners how civilized and humane you would like to be. Even the ferret ventures a few remarks in this vein. As we rock and bump our way up the mountain tracks, past the army camps, barracks, airfields, and surveillance posts, past Kurdish village women who mask their faces from the ferret, he admits that he wished the government spent a bit more on the roads and a little less on the security. The ferret is surely correct: never have I been in a country that spent more on ferrets.

  The convoy finally reaches the Kurdish village they think it is safe for me to see—a hundred poor single-story, flat roofed adobe houses, straggling up a hillside under the brow of a jagged cliff. On the clifftops, I spot the glint of Turkish binoculars. Down in the village, the women are laying ropes of sheep dung on the rooftops to dry as fuel for their fires. Children, sheep, chickens are careening down the filthy winding tracks between the houses.

  I have come to see the village guards, the Kurds who are armed and paid by the Turkish military to provide protection for the village. It is alleged that the guards terrorize their fellow villagers, commit atrocities in neighboring villages, and blame it on the “terrorists.” The ferret knows I’ve heard these stories, so before I set out, I was shown a thick wad of photographs showing recent atrocities. There were so many pools of blood, so many glassy-eyed dead children beside their mothers, so many old men with small round puncture holes in their necks that I didn’t bother to ask the obvious question. Did the “terrorists” do this or the ferrets? No one remembers anymore, or cares. What matters is that terror works. Terror is the coinage of power. Make them fear you, say the terrorists, and the people will not collaborate with the police. Make them fear you, say the police, and they will not collaborate with the terrorists. And so it goes, the logic of escalating ferocity.

  As the village children gather around the strange foreigner, a Kurdish man in a smooth silk suit with a machine gun on his back hits about with his fist, knocking the children away. Little boys yelp like beaten dogs and cower behind him. He comes up and shakes my hand: the local village guard commander.

  It is never safe here, he says, gesturing at the hilltop behind me. Over that mountain, there is a village full of “them.” Village guards are constantly ambushed on the roads at night. The schoolteacher has been scared away by the attacks, so none of the children go to school. He lays about him again and strikes a boy close by with the flat of his hand. Kurdish men in poor country people’s suits crowd around, their heads down, saying nothing. The ferret is close by, watching behind his interrogator’s glasses. A Turkish army cameraman is filming every person I speak to.

  I break away up one of the village tracks with the village grocer, a red-faced old man in traditional baggy Kurdish trousers, who whispers furtively as we walk. He is caught between the terrorists and the Turkish army. “If we collaborate with the army, the terrorists try to kill us. If we collaborate with the terrorists”—he makes a gesture toward the ferret, who is gaining on us—“he will kill us.”

  “What did he say?” the ferret asks, in a friendly, curious voice, as the convoy escorts me away. “He says the army is doing a great job,” I say. The rest of the way home, through the prison camp that is southern Turkey, the ferret and I are silent.

  The ferret is doing Atatürk’s work, fighting to keep the unitary state of modern Turkey together. You can’t compromise when the very unity of a nation is at stake. There is no price that is not worth paying. Pull the balaclava over your face; put some bullets in the chamber; go out and break some Kurdish doors down in the night. Pull them out of bed. Put a bullet through their brains. Dirty wars are a paradise for ferrets. But they are also a paradise for Apo Ocalan and his brother. Nationalism gives them both a cover for barbarism: one kills collaborators in the name of the liberation struggle; the other kills sympathizers in the name of the security of the nation-state.

  What will break this cycle? With enough terror, you can always stop terrorism. But can you stop a people from believing this place is their homeland? Can you stop people wanting their own state? The Kurds here in Turkey know there is a tiny enclave next door where a Kurd can be a Kurd, and they know what that feels like. You can smile, sing, make a joke in your own language. You can go up to a foreigner and talk to him. There are no consequences to fear in a place you call your own.

  This border region between Turkey and Iraq is where I finally learn the human difference between a people who have their own place and a people who do not. On one side, hearts and minds are open. On the other, hearts pound with fear. On the one side, they shout “Allo, Mistair” in greeting. On the other, they shrink from foreign contact for fear of trouble. Statelessness is a state of mind, and it is akin to homelessness. This is what a nationalist understands: a people can become completely human, completely themselves, only when they have a place of their own.

  The longing for this is too strong to be stopped by terror. I leave the ferret at his barracks, double back into the mountain passes, elude my security tail, and end up on a mountain road at dusk, my way blocked by a huge flock of sheep. A shepherd comes toward me through the rocky pastures. He is old, burned dark by the sun. He wears two rough, untreated hides sewn together like the armor of a warrior prophet. His eyes are blazing and he strides up to me, pushing his sheep aside with his crook: I ask him where I am, for I have lost my way on these high mountain roads. As if astonished that I should ever have believed anything else, he points to the bare burned hills around us, bathed in silver light, and he says, in a voice that is both soft and sure, “This is Kurdistan.”

  CHAPTER 6

  NORTHERN IRELAND

  MIRROR, MIRROR

  The shutters are run down on the butcher shops and the betting shops, and crowds gather silently on the pavements. In the distance, from the tight warren of streets off the Shankill Road, comes the skirl of pipes and the tread of feet. A flatbed truck appears first, bearing wreaths with the initials of the Ulster Volunteer Force picked out in red, white, and blue flowers; then comes a hearse with a flower-decked coffin, followed by a silent army of men. There are perhaps two hundred of them, wearing big-shouldered, double-breasted suits, white shirts, black ties. Their dark glasses glint as they turn to scan the crowd. When they see a camera, a posse breaks ranks and comes over to pass the word. “Now, don’t be filming. Wouldn’t be wise.”

  The Shankill is paying its last respects to Herbie McCallum. He had been providing protection for a Protestant parade, armed with a pistol and a grenade, when the police tried to reroute the march away from the Catholic Ardoyne. Sc
uffles broke out between Loyalists and the police. Some say the grenade was intended for the Catholics, others for the police, but the person who took the full force of the explosion was twenty-nine-year-old Brian “Herbie” McCallum, father of two, paramilitary hero to his friends, Protestant terrorist to his enemies.

  Before the rifles were fired into the air in the graveside salute, one of Herbie McCallum’s commanders gave a speech in which he said:

  To stand for capitulation. To stand silent, immobile in the face of treachery. To suffer ignominiously the malignment of our people, our culture, our history. To bow to the whims of mere pragmatists—is cowardice. Volunteer Brian Herbie McCallum and many many Ulster Volunteers who have made the ultimate sacrifice are testimony that this Nation will be defended.

  LATER THE SAME AFTERNOON, I am driving down Antrim Road, thinking how much it looks like my own street in north London. There are the same brick terraced houses lining both sides, with trimmed box hedges and rose bushes nestling beneath the bay windows. Everything is British and familiar, so what is this bus doing ablaze in the middle of the road? I am about thirty feet away, getting out of my car, and ahead of me a fireman is running toward the fire when an explosion throws him onto his back. When I look up again, the fireman is struggling to his feet and the bus is burning more fiercely than ever.

  I’ve driven into a Belfast bus-hijacking. A minute before I arrived, a man with a gun had stepped out onto the road, ordered the driver and passengers off, and then lobbed in a petrol bomb. Chances are the gunman may be watching, waiting to ambush the police. Armored gray Land Rovers have already blocked off the road. Officers in flak jackets have taken up position behind walls. Judging from the fact that the street leads up from the Shankill, the gunman is a Loyalist.

  Children quickly gather to splash around the hydrants while mothers stand out on the front steps in their aprons to watch the bus burn down to its frame. A woman comes over and says, “You mustn’t think this is how it is all the time. This is a great wee city. Don’t get the wrong idea.”

  I try not to get the wrong idea, but in the course of the next three hours, I come across two more hijackings, delivery vans left smoldering in the middle of residential streets, while police marksmen cover them from suburban gardens. Over the normal sounds of a British city at night, I can hear the pop and crack of automatic-weapons fire.

  The two days after Herbie McCallum’s funeral see the most extensive Loyalist rioting in Belfast in a decade. Forty buses and cars are hijacked and burned; there are twenty-eight gun attacks on the police and nine firebombings; when fire engines arrive in the Donegall Road area to put the burning cars out, the fire engine itself is hijacked, the crew thrown off it, and the tender set alight. Police called into the Rathcoole, Woodvale, Shankill, Highfield, and Tiger’s Bay districts are fired upon. The police believe the rioting is a show of force, planned by those two hundred silent young men in dark glasses walking down the Shankill behind Herbie McCallum’s coffin.

  ULSTER IS A GOOD PLACE to end my journey, because it seems to reprise so much of what I’ve already seen on my travels: paramilitaries as in Serbian Krajina and Kurdistan; ethnic paranoia as in Croatia; the cult of male violence as in German skinhead gangs; a national security state as in Turkey. The helicopters constantly drone overhead, the Land Rovers and armored personnel carriers squat astride every major junction, and men in helmets stare at you down their gunsights.

  Like most outsiders, I’d dismissed the Troubles as a throwback to the tribal past. Now, in 1993, Northern Ireland seems like a possible future writ large. No place in Europe has carried ethnic division as far as Belfast. The peace walls, put up in the 1970s to keep people in the same street from firebombing and murdering each other, are now as permanent as the borders between nation-states, twenty feet high in some places, sawing working-class Belfast in two.

  Ethnic apartheid does reduce the death toll. In the mid-1970s, between 250 and 450 people were dying every year. Now the figure is under 100. At the same time, community segregation is growing. Sixty percent of the population now live in areas that are more than 90 percent Protestant or Catholic.

  The segregation grows in molecular fashion: a tire is slashed, a child is beaten up, petrol is poured through a letter box, by one side or the other, and another family decides to choose the safety of numbers. Belfast likes to talk about “ethnic cleansing”—but molecular nastiness bears no comparison to genocide in Bosnia. If Sarajevo could look like Belfast one day, it would consider itself lucky.

  In Northern Ireland, as in Croatia and Serbia, as in Ukraine, ethnicity, religion, and politics are soldered together into identities so total that it takes a defiant individual to escape their clutches. On one side, people who have never been to a church in their lives have to live with the tag of “Protestant.” On the other, people who have no desire for a united Ireland but happen to be Catholic get labeled, once and for all, as “nationalists.”

  These labels imprison everyone in the fiction of an irreducible ethnic identity. Yet Northern Ireland’s is not an ethnic war, any more than the Serb-Croat or Ukrainian-Russian antagonisms are ethnic. In all three cases, essentially similar peoples, speaking the same or related languages, sharing the same form of life, differing in religions which few actually seem to practice, have been divided by the single fact that one has ruled over the other. It is the memory of domination in time past, or fear of domination in time future, not difference itself, which has turned conflict into an unbreakable downward spiral of political violence.

  I am in Ulster to find out what Britishness looks and feels like when it has been put on the rack of a dirty war. In mainland Britain, Britishness is a casual puzzle, a subject for after-dinner conversation. In Ulster, it can be a matter of life and death. Loyalism, I thought, would serve as a mirror that would show me what the British might look like if their nation’s life was on the line. I’ve chosen to visit in July because the great festival of Loyalism, the marching season, is about to begin. But after Herbie McCallum’s funeral I’m already unsure as to what the mirror of Loyalism reveals. Protestant paramilitaries now kill more people in Northern Ireland than the IRA. Their victims range from innocent Catholics to British soldiers and members of the police. Here is a Britishness at war with Britain, a Britishness that swears allegiance to the Crown and the Armalite rifle.

  THE ILLUSION that Britain is an island of stability in a world of troubles does not survive a day on the streets of Belfast. In reality, there is more death by political violence in Great Britain than in any other liberal democracy in the world. Since 1969 there have been three thousand political killings and more than fifty thousand people have been seriously injured. More people have died, per capita, of political violence in Great Britain than in India, Nigeria, Israel, Sri Lanka, or Argentina, all nations which the British regard as more violent than their own.

  There is nothing especially mysterious about this level and intensity of violence. Nationalism by its very nature defines struggles between peoples as struggles for their honor, identity, and soul. When the stakes are raised this high, conflict is soon reduced to a zero-sum game. Victory for one side must mean total defeat for the other. When the stakes appear to involve survival itself, the result is violence. Such is the case in Northern Ireland. Two nation-states lay claim to the province. Nine hundred thousand Protestants or descendants of Protestants wish to remain British. Six hundred thousand Catholics or descendants of Catholics mostly, but not invariably, wish to become Irish. Since one wish can be satisfied only at the expense of the other, it is scarcely surprising that the result is unending conflict.

  What is more surprising than the level of violence is the willingness of the mainland to continue to pay the price. A relatively poor liberal democracy spends £3 billion a year and deploys twenty thousand troops to back up a local police force in a struggle which can be contained but which cannot be won.

  Such commitment would be unthinkable if the territorial integrity of the Briti
sh state and the legitimacy of its authority were not both on the line. One might have expected that such a cause would rouse the deepest nationalist feeling. Yet all that seems to sustain the British presence is a weary cross-party consensus that terror must not be seen to pay and that the troops cannot be withdrawn lest civil war ensue.

  If the cause in question in Northern Ireland is defense of the Union, then already Ulster is not treated like a part of mainland Britain. There is an imperial proconsul, the Northern Ireland Secretary, who runs everything from negotiations with Dublin to the allocation of council housing. The currency is the British pound, but the Northern Ireland banknotes are not tradable as legal tender on the mainland; British political parties do not compete for votes in the province. Local democracy has been all but eliminated by twenty-five years of direct rule from Westminster. Ulster knows it is already semidetached.

  Loyalists bitterly note the curious disparity between the outpouring of nationalist feeling when Argentina invaded “British sovereign territory” in the Falklands and the indifference about Ulster. Mainland Britain would give Ulster away if it could. Opinion polls give greatest support to options that entail relinquishing British sovereignty over Northern Ireland or sharing it with Ireland.

  And the British commitment to Ulster is hedged with conditions. Since the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, Britain is committed to remain in Northern Ireland only so long as a majority of its people wish it. Thus the province is the only part of the Union with an entrenched right of secession. For Loyalists, it is an outrage that the British government should portray itself increasingly as a “neutral” peacekeeper between one community which wishes to stay British and another which wishes to become Irish.