9
Vol 184 No 21 £2 €3.80* Exclusions apply
Uganda
Arab Spring
spreads
south
News, page 9
A week in the life of the world | 6-12 May 2011
The world after Osama bin Laden
Al-Qaida leader created
the model of ‘holy war’
Threat of ambitious
large attacks recedes
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
Julian Borger
From the shrub-covered, bullet-
riddled frontlines of Mogadishu, to
the concrete slums in the outskirts of
Amman and Damascus, from a camp
in a pine forest in eastern Afghanistan
to the sprawling deserts of southern
Yemen, zealots with Kalashnikovs
have spoken about their aspirations to
fight, kill and hopefully die in the war
against the infidels and their agents.
A holy war inspired, led and catalysed
by the Sheikh.
The Sheikh, Osama bin Laden, cre-
ated the model for that holy war: he
articulated its objectives through his
acts of violence, and his life became
a manual of the jihad fighter in the
collective imagination of those young
men – the learned ascetic and fero-
cious fighter.
His pictures and sermons, radio
massages and TV appearances lived,
flourished and sprang to life in these
alleyways and faraway mountains,
nourished and nurtured by poverty,
perceived injustice and decades of
oppressive rule.
Yet none had met the Sheikh, none
had any direct contact with him. They
didn’t receive their orders from the
Sheikh, they didn’t communicate with
him, and they did not consult him be-
fore they went out to fight.
Bin Laden, the creator of mod-
ern-day terrorism and founder of
Abu Dhabi AED10 Bahrain BHD1.25 *Cyprus €2.30 Czech Rep KC100 Denmark DKK26 Dubai AED10 Egypt EGP15 Hong Kong HKD35 Hungary HUF650 Iceland ISK500 *Republic of Ireland €2.25 Japan JPY600 Jordan JOD2 Kenya KSH220 Kuwait KWD1 Lebanon LBP4000
*Malta €1.95 Mauritius MR139 Morocco MAD25 Norway NOK35 Oman OMR1.25 Pakistan PKR200 Poland PLN9.50 Qatar QAR10 Romania ROL25.50 Saudi Arabia SAR11 Singapore SGD5.50 Sweden SEK37 Switzerland CHF6.20 Syria SYP145 Thailand THB250 Turkey TRY6.00
Mystery solved
Ancient hunters’
killing zone
uncovered
Science, page 32
Close-up ... Americans react to Osama bin Laden’s death Mark Lennihan/AP
al-Qaida, who was killed in Pakistan
by American troops on Monday, had
become more of a spiritual father than
field commander.
The dream of all those so-called
jihadists and their local establish-
ments was to be anointed by the fa-
ther figure as a bearer of his ideology,
to be recognised as a “franchise” of
the mother organisation, to gain the
respect and support, and a lot of money
from wealthy Arabs, that would allow
them to fight their own local wars and
contribute to the jihad.
Many local franchises have sprung
up: Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Somalia
and others. Bombs are manufactured
locally, knowledge is shared on inter-
net forums, fighters don’t need to head
all the way to Pakistan or Afghanistan
770958 991484
18
Incorporating material from the Observer,
Le Monde and the Washington Post
to get training; they can do that in their
own home towns or villages in Britain,
the Caucasus, Mogadishu, Iraq, Mali
and Yemen. The effect is that al-Qaida
has succeeded in separating ideology
from leadership.
For many years, the Sheikh had been
isolated, his organisation disrupted
not only by US kill teams and lethal
drone attacks but also by general Mus-
lim apathy and outright hostility to the
organisation. For most of the victims
are Muslim: not only Shia Muslims and
Sunni moderates and seculars, but also
bystanders who have committed the
deadly sin of buying vegetables while
one of those holy warriors decides to
fight his battle and start his ascend-
ance to the hereafter.
Local jihad wars will continue, al-
Qaida in Yemen will continue to at-
tempt to bomb targets in the west,
and the Taliban will not stop fighting
in Afghanistan.
But in the US, the killing of Osama
bin Laden provided a moment of
catharsis that had eluded the nation
for a decade. Flag-draped crowds
spontaneously gathered outside the
White House and at Ground Zero in
New York, singing the national an-
them. On television, Peter Bergen,
an expert on al-Qaida and one of few
people in the field to have actually met
its leader, declared: “Killing Bin Laden
is the end of the war on terror.”
The mood then became more sober,
however, as Americans cast their
minds back on past premature dec-
larations of victory, in Afghanistan at
the end of 2001 and at George W Bush’s
infamous “Mission Accomplished” tri-
umphalism over Iraq in 2003.
The struggle against terrorism does
not give itself easily to neat beginnings
and endings. Continued on page 2≥
2 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
News
The world after
Osama bin Laden
≤Continued from page 1
In one sense, the “war on terror” ended
in March 2009 when the incoming
Obama administration decided it was
a counter-productive phrase in the
first place, bringing America’s enemies
together rather than dividing them.
The most likely short-term impact
of Bin Laden’s death is an increase in
al-Qaida attacks around the world, as
the martyr effect kicks in and these
disparate groups carry out attacks to
ensure that the killing of their spiritual
leader does not go unavenged. If they
fail to do so, their supporters and
enemies alike could rightly question
whether they are still in business.
Bin Laden’s end comes at a time
when al-Qaida’s influence is on the
wane in the Arab and wider Islamic
world. It has been conspicuous by its
absence in the Arab Spring. But the
Arab revolt is still in its early stages
and its outcome is unclear. It is still
possible that disillusion, protracted
violence and the failure of the Nato
intervention in Libya could create an
opportunity for jihadists.
If and when that moment comes,
much will depend on whether the
martyrdom of Bin Laden is a more
powerful factor than the absence of
any plausible successor. Ayman al-
Zawahiri, the aged, mumbling Egyp-
tian doctor who has fulfilled the role
of deputy since he brought his Egyp-
tian Islamic Jihad into the al-Qaida
fold in 1998, has none of Bin Laden’s
charisma. The group’s Libyan ideo-
logue, Abu Yahya al-Libi, also lacks the
stature and respect necessary.
The most likely outcome is frag-
mentation, with the possible rise of
al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula
(Aqap) as the leading “brand” leader.
The Yemeni-based group showed its
ingenuity last November by smuggling
pentaerythritol tetranitrate bombs
inside printer cartridges on to planes
flying to the west. Aqap’s strategy is
to attempt frequent small attacks, to
inflict a death by “a thousand cuts” on
its western enemies. But Yemen is a
narrow base to operate from and easier
to isolate.
What does seem probable is that
al-Qaida is today less able to mount a
spectacular mass-casualty attack on
the west, because it has lost Bin Lad-
en’s grand ambitions and the neces-
sary cohesion he instilled.
But while the threat of a devastating
attack on the west, possibly involving a
new weapon like a “dirty” radiological
bomb, has almost certainly receded,
there remains the constant menace of
the bomb in a cafe, as in Marrakech last
week where a tourist cafe was targeted
and 16 killed, or once more on a plane.
That threat may never go away.
Jonathan Freedland, page 19 ≥
Obituary, page 37 ≥
World roundup
Americas
Tory triumph in Canada
The Conservative prime minister
of Canada, Stephen Harper, won a
majority for his government in par-
liamentary elections that marked
a shattering defeat for Michael
Ignatieff ’s opposition Liberals. In
another significant shift, the leftist
New Democrats were projected to
become the main opposition party
for the first time with 106 seats, in
a stunning victory over the Liber-
als, who have always been either in
power or leading the opposition.
‘Social richness’ reward?
Argentina is to consider granting
a special pension to writers on
the grounds that they generate
“social richness” but often end up
impoverished. The lower house
of congress will study a proposal
that would give published authors
a monthly stipend of about $900,
well above the state minimum
pension. The idea would offer the
pension to those who are aged over
65 and have published at least five
books or invested more than 20
years in “literary creation”.
Solitary confinement ends
Bradley Manning, the US soldier ac-
cused of leaking classified cables to
WikiLeaks, is no longer being held
in solitary confinement and can
move among other military prison-
ers at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas,
the Pentagon said. His former treat-
ment while at Quantico in Virginia
was condemned by human rights
groups.
Chávez wins custody fight
An alleged drug lord, Walid Makled,
who has implicated senior Ven-
ezuelan officials in cocaine-
trafficking, is bound for Caracas af-
ter President Hugo Chávez won an
extradition tussle with the United
States. Makled, known as “the
Turk”, who is in a high-security
jail in Colombia, is expected to be
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Winning ways ... Stephen Harper now has a Conservative majority in Canada Reuters
flown to Venezuela this week to be
tried on charges of trafficking drugs
through Venezuela’s ports.
Europe
French find flight boxes
The black box flight recorder from
an Air France plane that crashed off
Brazil in 2009, killing 228 people,
has been recovered, reviving hopes
of understanding what caused the
crash. French investigators said the
flight data recorder was located by
a robot submarine 3,900 metres
below the Atlantic’s surface. The
audio recorder was also discovered,
two days after the data device.
EU herbal crackdown
New EU rules came into force
last weekend banning hundreds
of herbal remedies. The laws are
aimed at protecting consumers
from potentially damaging “tradi-
tional” medicines. Herbal medi-
cines will have to be registered and
meet safety, quality and manufac-
turing standards.
Asia/Pacific
Fukushima parents fuming
Furious parents in Fukushima
have delivered a bag of
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radioactive playground earth to ed-
ucation officials in protest at moves
to weaken nuclear safety standards
in schools. Children can now be
exposed to 20 times more radiation
than was permissible before the
March earthquake, tsunami and
nuclear crisis. The new regulations
have prompted an outcry. A senior
adviser resigned and the prime
minister, Naoto Kan, was criticised
by politicians from his own party.
North Korean demand
North Korea has demanded US
security guarantees in return for
abandoning its nuclear weapons
programmes, former US president
Jimmy Carter has said after a three-
day trip to the country. He had been
told that North Korea wants to im-
prove relations with the US and is
willing to talk with Washington and
Seoul without preconditions.
Chinese lawyer held
Campaigners warned that Chinese
human rights lawyers remain under
intense pressure following the dis-
appearance of Li Fangping, another
high-profile legal figure. He went
missing last Friday after phoning
his wife to say that state security
agents were waiting for him – just
as lawyer Teng Biao returned home
after a two-month disappearance.
Next week
Wee dramss
make
h
global cash
galore
 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 3
Kicker here in Black (alt+enter)line of
International
Osama bin Laden
news
killed copy runs on followed by soft return to
Section name and page 00 ≥

It took years to find terror chief,

just 40 minutes to end his career
Identification of trusted courier led CIA to hideout not far from Islamabad
Ewen MacAskill Washington

The trail that led the CIA to Osama bin

Laden began with his most trusted
courier. It had taken the CIA years to
discover his name and then the home
where he was hiding the al-Qaida
leader. But it took only 40 minutes
last Sunday for US special forces to kill
both the courier and Bin Laden.
Contrary to speculation that Bin
Laden was living in one of the tribal
areas of Pakistan, or across the border
in Afghanistan, the al-Qaida leader
was found in an affluent area not far
from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.
Senior US officials, briefing journal-
ists in a late-night teleconference, said
that after 9/11 the CIA chased various
leads about Bin Laden’s inner circle,
in particular his couriers. One courier
came in for special attention, men-
tioned by detainees at Guantánamo
Bay by his nom de guerre. He was said
to be a protege of Khalid Sheikh Mo-
hammed, the 9/11 planner, and one of
the few couriers Bin Laden trusted. Of-
ficials said they were initially unable
to identify him but finally did so four Tense moments ... watching the mission against Bin Laden unfold in the White House situation room Pete Souza/AP
years ago.
Two years ago, the CIA found the Obama began chairing a series of five aware that something was happen- and one helicopter crashed due to
rough location where the courier and national security meetings. At the last ing. There were four US military heli- mechanical problems. Witnesses re-
his brother lived in Pakistan, and in one, last Friday, he gave the order to copters, carrying elite troops of Navy ported hearing two small blasts fol-
August last year they narrowed it mount an operation. Obama met his Seal Team Six, a top counter-terrorism lowed by a huge explosion.
down to a compound in Abbottabad, national security adviser Thomas unit, US officials told AP, under the The details of the operation, includ-
about 60km north of Islamabad, which Donilon, counter-terrorism adviser direct command of CIA director Leon ing the number of US military person-
had been founded as a British garrison John O Brennan, and other national se- Panetta, whose analysts monitored nel involved, remain unclear. Senior
town in the 1840s and named after curity aides to go through the detailed the compound from his conference administration officials will only say
its first deputy commissioner, Major plan to attack the compound, the New room. One Pakistani official said the that Bin Laden “resisted” during a gun
James Abbott. They realised imme- York Times reported. “We shared our helicopters had taken off from the battle. He died from a bullet to the
diately this was no normal residence. intelligence on this compound with no Ghazi airbase in the north-west of the head, they said. Bin Laden was iden-
The walls of the 278 square metre other country, including Pakistan,” a country. Fighters on the compound tified by facial recognition.
compound were 3.5 to 5.5 metres high, senior administration official said. roof opened fire on the choppers with The al-Qaida courier, his brother
topped with barbed wire. There were At around 1.15am local time on Mon- rocket-propelled grenades, according and one of Bin Laden’s sons were also
two security gates, and access was se- day, Abbottabad residents became to witnesses and Pakistani sources, killed. One of Bin Laden’s sons, Hamza,
verely restricted. The main part of the is a senior member of al-Qaida. The of-
residence was three storeys high but Burial at sea draws criticism ficials said one woman died when used
had few windows, and a third-floor as a shield by a male combatant, and
terrace was shielded by a privacy wall. Osama bin Laden was buried at sea, Laden’s wives identified the al- two other women were injured. Other
Built around five years ago, it was val- a move criticised by Muslim schol- Qaida leader, and he was visually unidentified males were taken from
ued at about $1m but had no phone or ars who claimed it had breached identified by members of the US the scene, a Pakistani official told AP.
internet connection. The two broth- sharia law. Others used the sea raiding party, the Pentagon said. Four children and two women were
ers had no known source of income, burial issue to question whether he Burying him on land could have detained and left in an ambulance.
adding to CIA suspicions. The CIA was dead at all, with doubts fuelled led to his grave becoming a focus of The operation took 40 minutes, after
learned that there was a family living by the absence of authentic photo- pilgrimage, US officials said. They which flames were visible on the roof.
with them, and that the composition graphs of his corpse. told news agencies that his body Before withdrawing, US forces blew
of this family matched Bin Laden’s. US officials said tests using DNA was disposed of in accordance with up the helicopter wreckage.
By September, the CIA had deter- from several of Bin Laden’s family Islamic tradition, which involves Bin Laden’s body was loaded on to
mined there was a “strong possibility” members had provided “virtual ritual washing, shrouding and burial a helicopter and taken from the scene.
the hideout was Bin Laden’s, and by certainty” that it was his body. A within 24 hours. “We don’t want a bunch of people go-
February it was confident it had the woman believed to be one of Bin Ian Black and Brian Whitaker ing to the shrine for ever,” an official
right location. In March President told the Washington Post.
4 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11

Osama bin Laden killed

Dead, but how did

he hide for so long?
Pakistan comes under
increased scrutiny for
‘hiding in plain sight’
Ewen MacAskill Washington
Declan Walsh Abbottabad
The Obama administration is demand-
ing an explanation from Pakistan on
how Osama bin Laden was able to hide
in the country for so long before he
was killed by US special forces.
Bin Laden was staying in a promi-
nent million-dollar, high-security
residence in an area full of soldiers and
close to the country’s premier military
academy.
John Brennan, a counter-terrorism
adviser to Barack Obama, told journal-
ists at the White House: “People have
been referring to this as hiding in plain
sight. We are looking at how he was
able to hide out there for so long.”
He added it was “inconceivable”
that Bin Laden did not enjoy a “sup-
port system” in Pakistan.
The al-Qaida leader was killed by US
special forces who attacked the com-
pound in Abbottabad, about 60km
from Islamabad. Although Obama,
secretary of state Hillary Clinton and
Brennan expressed the importance of
Pakistan in helping to fight al-Qaida,
the presence of Bin Laden so close to
the capital, and just streets away from
the principal training ground for the
country’s officer corps, threatened
to create a fresh rift in US-Pakistan
relations.
Such was the American distrust of
the notoriously leaky Pakistan govern-
ment that it did not even inform it of
the raid in its own territory until after
US helicopters had cleared Pakistani
airspace.
Members of Congress threatened
to withhold economic aid to Pakistan
over the affair. Carl Levin, a Demo-
crat who heads the powerful Senate
armed services committee, reflected
scepticism in the US about Bin Laden’s
ability to remain hidden in Pakistan.
“I think the Pakistani army and intelli-
gence have a lot of questions to answer
given the location, the length of time
and the apparent fact that this facil-
ity was actually built for Bin Laden
and its closeness to the central loca-
tion of the Pakistani army,” he told a
press conference. The US will step up
pressure on Pakistan to hand over the
Taliban leader, Mullah Omar and Bin
Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri,
if they are in Pakistan. The death of
Bin Laden could also lead to a rethink
of the scale of the US involvement in
Afghanistan.
President Asif Ali Zardari has hit
back against American accusations
that his country secretly sheltered
Bin Laden.
“Some in the US press have sug-
gested that Pakistan lacked vitality in
its pursuit of terrorism, or worse yet
that we were disingenuous and actu-
ally protected the terrorists we claimed
to be pursuing,” Zardari said. End of the line ... terrorism experts are wondering how the death of Osama
“Such baseless speculation may bin Laden will affect his followers worldwide Sipa Press/Rex Features
make exciting cable news, but it
doesn’t reflect fact.” Zardari said his country was “the co-operation and partnership between
It was the first high-level rebuttal by world’s greatest victim of terrorism”, the United States and Pakistan led up
the Pakistani government after criti- called Bin Laden “the source of the to the elimination of Osama bin Laden
cism from US commentators and offi- greatest evil of the new millennium”, as a continuing threat to the civilised
cials, who questioned how the Saudi and claimed that Pakistan had played a world,” he said.
fugitive managed to live for years in a role in identifying the al-Qaida courier Clinton, anxious not to alienate a
town housing one of Pakistan’s most who led US forces to Bin Laden. partner that may yet be needed for
prestigious military facilities. “Although the events of last Sunday actions against al-Qaida and the Tali-
Writing in the Washington Post, were not a joint operation, a decade of ban, emphasised America’s “close

Killing prompts worldwide security alert

Robert Booth
Richard Norton-Taylor
Embassies and defence facilities
around the world have been placed on
high alert amid fears of terrorist retali-
ation after US forces killed Osama bin
Laden.
The US, Britain and Australia all
stepped up security at their diplomatic
missions while the governments of
the Philippines and Indonesia, where
al-Qaida affiliates have been active,
tightened security at potential targets
including embassies and airports.
The Port Authority of New York and
New Jersey said it would increase po-
lice numbers at airports, the George
Washington bridge and Ground Zero,
in what one official described as “an
abundance of caution”. Ronald Noble,
general secretary of Interpol, urged
law enforcement authorities in the
crime agency’s 188-member countries
to respond to “a heightened terror risk
from al-Qaida-affiliated or al-Qaida-
inspired terrorists as a result of Bin
Laden’s death”.
The security clampdown came as
the UK’s Foreign Office warned the
killing “may lead to an increase in vio-
lence and terrorist activity” and urged
British nationals abroad to “remain
vigilant, exercise caution in all pub-
lic places and avoid demonstrations,
large crowds of people and public
events”.
The defence secretary, Liam Fox,
directed his department to “maintain
a high level of vigilance in all UK de-
fence facilities at home and abroad”,
while the Department for Transport,
which oversees security at airports,
rail stations and ports in Britain, said it
was keeping security “under constant
review”.
“This is not the end of being vigi-
lant against al-Qaida and associated
groups,” William Hague, the foreign
secretary, said on Monday while on a
visit to Cairo. “There may be parts of
al-Qaida that will try to show that they
are in business in the coming weeks, as
indeed some of them are.”
Noman Benotman, a former Libyan
militant, who knew Bin Laden in the
1990s, agreed Bin Laden’s followers
will use his death to attempt to rally
more supporters and to portray him
as a martyr. “Bin Laden has always
sought to die in battle as a martyr and
now he has achieved this,” he said in
his role as analyst at Quilliam, the anti-
extremism thinktank.

co-operation” with Pakistan. She said:
“In fact, co-operation with Pakistan
helped lead us to Bin Laden and the
compound in which he was hiding.”
The Pakistan government wel-
comed the killing as “a major setback
to terrorist organisations around the
world”.
But former Pakistan president Per-
vez Musharraf reflected his country’s
unease over a breach of sovereignty.
“America coming to our territory and
New doubts on strategy in Afghanistan
Jon Boone Kabul
Hamid Karzai’s reaction to the news
of Osama bin Laden’s violent death in
Pakistan could be best summed up as:
“I told you so.”
Speaking in front of a packed hall
in his palace in Kabul, the Afghan
president said the discovery that the
world’s most wanted man was holed
up in a garrison town in Pakistan
proved that the west’s entire military
strategy is misconceived.
“Year after year, day after day,
we have said the fighting against
terrorism is not in the villages of
taking action is a violation of our sov-
ereignty,” Musharraf told CNN.
“Handling and execution of the op-
eration [by US forces] is not correct.
The Pakistani government should
have been kept in the loop.”
Clinton suggested that US policy on
Afghanistan would not shift, but other
officials hinted the dynamics may have
changed. The Pentagon only wants to
see a token force of a few thousand
withdrawn beginning in the summer,
Afghanistan, not among the poor peo-
ple of Afghanistan,” he said. “The fight
against terrorism is in safe havens. It
proves that Afghanistan was right.”
In recent months Karzai has become
increasingly strident in his criticism
of the US-led coalition, saying it has
focused on counter-insurgency opera-
tions in the Pashtun south of the coun-
try rather than the Taliban safe havens
over the border.
“My concern is his death becomes
the justification for US premature dis-
engagement from the region,” said
one senior Afghan government official
who specialises in foreign affairs.
but Obama may want a more signifi-
cant reduction.
An Afghan government official said
he feared the death would give “justi-
fication for US premature disengage-
ment from the region”.
But one of the most senior Ameri-
can officers serving in Afghanistan,
General William Caldwell, said the
death might encourage moderate
elements within the Taliban to give
up.
It was a view echoed by Ahmed
Wali Massoud, an Afghan politician
and brother of Ahmed Shah Massoud,
the resistance fighter who was assas-
sinated on Bin Laden’s orders days be-
fore the 9/11 attacks. “This is not the
end,” he said. “Al-Qaida is still there
and there are so many other groups
that are just as ideologically strong.
The younger generation of the Tali-
ban have come up and they now make
up the bulk of the Taliban ideologi-
cally and are not very different from
al-Qaida itself. We believe there is still
scope for operations in Afghanistan,
because the threat is still here.”
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 5
White House
gets a big gift
Analysis
Ed Pilkington
Barack Obama’s announcement from
the East Wing of the White House
that Osama bin Laden was dead,
delivered sombrely but with evident
relish, will almost certainly dash any
remaining hopes on Donald Trump’s
part that his wife Melania will be
choosing new curtains for the White
House in 2013. It may also sweep
away the aspirations of other poten-
tial Republican candidates.
Rarely has an incumbent presi-
dent been handed such a gift in the
run-up to an election year. As the
huge crowd that assembled outside
the White House testified, “getting
Osama” is grounds for national jubi-
lation, free from party affiliation.
Obama was at pains in his an-
nouncement to emphasise the
personal role he had played as
commander-in-chief. He underlined
that he had ordered the CIA to make
the killing or capture of Bin Laden its
top priority, that he had met repeat-
edly with the national security team
when the al-Qaida leader’s where-
abouts had become known, and that
it was “at my direction” that the
operation was launched.
The accent on his firmness in the
face of the terrorist threat is unlikely,
in the case of Bin Laden, to displease
even the most liberal of Democratic
voters, who have grown increasingly
despondent about the president’s
refusal to break with the central
features of George Bush’s “war on
terror”, such as the maintenance of
the detention camp at Guantánamo
Bay. It is also likely to play well with
the independent voters upon whom
his re-election depends.
In his wording, it was clear that
Obama was seeking to put to rest the
comparison with Jimmy Carter, the
last Democrat to be thrown out of
the White House after just one term,
that has dogged his presidency.
The president will be hoping that
the feelgood fallout from the news
of Bin Laden’s death will lead to a
bounce in his popularity ratings,
which have remained worryingly
low for many months. But with
petrol prices at a historic high, and
unemployment still at 9.2%, Obama
will know that even the death of Bin
Laden will not secure him a second
term unless the economy improves.
For now at least, however, he has
the pleasure of watching his oppo-
nents squirm.
6 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11

Arab unrest

Gaddafi family deaths fuel Nato doubts

Campaign leaders say
only aim is to target
command structures
Julian Borger
Ian Traynor Brussels
Ewen MacAskill Washington
Nato was this week facing urgent
questions about the legality of its air
strike on a Gaddafi family compound
last weekend, which the Libyan gov-
ernment said had killed the leader’s
second-youngest son, 29-year-old Saif
al-Arab, and three unnamed grand-
children under 12.
The Libyan spokesman, Moussa Ib-
rahim, said Muammar Gaddafi and his
wife, Safiya, had been in the building
at the time but escaped injury. He said
the aim of the attack was clear: to assas-
sinate the Libyan leader. Nato swiftly
denied that it was targeting individu-
als, insisting it was interested only
in attacking the military command
structure. The British prime minister,
David Cameron, told the BBC that UN
resolutions permitted attacks against
the regime’s “command and control”
sites because their aim was to prevent
“a loss of civilian life by targeting
Gaddafi’s war-making machine”.
But the deaths of Gaddafi’s three
grandchildren, if confirmed, will
reinforce the doubts of alliance mem-
bers uncomfortable with Nato’s six-
week bombing campaign and gener-
ate criticism from countries such as
Russia that Nato is pushing beyond its
UN security council mandate. “State-
ments by participants in the coali-
tion that the strikes on Libya are not
aimed at the physical destruction of ...
Gaddafi and members of his family
raise serious doubts,” the Russian
foreign ministry said. “The dispropor-
tionate use of force ... is leading to det-
rimental consequences and the death
of innocent civilians.” The ministry
called for “an immediate ceasefire and
the beginning of a political settlement
process without preconditions”. The
Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez,
said: “There is no doubt the order was
given to kill Gaddafi. It doesn’t matter
who else is killed … this is a murder.”
The attack, which one diplomatic
source said was carried out by Dan-
ish airmen possibly in an F16 bomber,
ripped through the Gaddafi residence
at around 8pm last Saturday night. Ib-
rahim indicated that someone within
the leader’s circle may have leaked
intelligence on his whereabouts.
In Washington Stephen Hadley,
former national security adviser in the
Bush administration, warned that the
assassination of Gaddafi by Nato air-
craft could prove counterproductive.
“The narrative we want to come out
of this is that the Libyan people over-
threw a dictator – not that we came in
and toppled a despot,” he told CNN.
“What we really want him to do is to
leave or to die at a Libyan hand, not an
American hand.” Targeted … journalists inspect the damage to Gaddafi’s house EPA/STR
But senior Republicans expressed
little concern over Gaddafi becoming foreign leader, he’s a murderer.” John Fox: “When President Obama went
a casualty. Senator Lindsey Graham McCain, another Republican senator in, his doctrine was to enter Libya for
told Fox News: “Wherever Gaddafi who specialises in foreign affairs, told humanitarian purposes. The point of
goes, he is a legitimate military target. CBS: “We should be taking out his what I am saying is that we are seeing
He’s the command and control source. command and control. If he is killed or many, many lives lost, including inno-
He’s not the legitimate leader of Libya injured because of that, that’s fine.” cent civilians’ lives. What will be the
and the way to get this to end is to go Michele Bachmann, a Republican ultimate objective and gain? I don’t see
after the people around him and his congresswoman considering seeking it. I think it was a foolish decision to
support system.” Reminded that as- the presidential nomination, said it have gotten involved.”
sassinating foreign leaders is illegal, was foolish of Barack Obama to have Despite criticism that Nato is trying
Graham said: “In my view, he’s not a become involved in Libya. She told to assassinate Gaddafi, Moscow has

Syrian leader shatters his well-crafted reformist image

Analysis
Peter Beaumont
My encounter with Syria’s president,
Bashar al-Assad, was an oddly infor-
mal one in a country suspicious of
the foreign media. An interview with
his British-born wife, Asma, had
been arranged, but an aide to the
president invited me to coffee with
Assad himself. He said he wanted
peace with Israel, talked about re-
form, discussed relations with the
US, and reflected on his father’s
harsh line on Islamists.
Syria’s new president seemed
then, almost a decade ago, a
plausible figure, uncertain and al-
most modest, an impression encour-
aged by the marketing of him in the
west by the British PR agency Bell
Pottinger. He had been president for
two years, having in 2000 succeeded
his authoritarian father Hafez al-
Assad. That early image is one that
Assad and his wife have promoted
assiduously, most recently in an
interview given by Syria’s first lady
to a gushing Vogue magazine, which
included pictures of Assad playing
with his sons.
It is an image that served the Lon-
don-trained ophthalmologist well,
securing him a state visit to London
at a time when Tony Blair’s govern-
ment – as well as other
European governments – thought
he was a different proposition to
his father, who gained notoriety for
ordering the deaths in 1982 of up to
20,000 in the town of Hama during a
revolt by the Muslim Brotherhood.
But in the last few weeks that
early image has seemed at odds with
the acts carried out in Assad’s name
in a murderous clampdown on those
demonstrating against the regime.
What is less clear now is who As-
sad really is and what he represents.
Indeed, how powerful he really is.
Last Friday, when a “day of rage”
was called to follow Friday prayers
– this time endorsed by the banned
Muslim Brotherhood – Assad took
a leaf out of the book of deposed
President Mubarak of Egypt and
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya,
flooding the streets with armed se-
curity forces as his opponents dem-
onstrated in more than 50 locations.
To underline the message of what
might happen should the regime
fall, state media and posters on the
streets have pushed fears of chaos,
especially of a sectarian nature.
In Latakia, gunmen believed to
belong to the shabiha, an Alawite
smuggling gang drawn from the As-
sad clan, have shot at Christian areas
with warnings of a Sunni takeover,
before going to Alawite areas and
warning of Sunni revenge.
For Assad, the survival of the
police state founded by his father
 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 7

≥
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guardian.co.uk/world

Tripoli speaks of ‘betrayal’

stopped short of raising the attacks at
the UN security council.
The Libyan government has been
pressing Russia and China to challenge
the legality of the Nato action. Both
have expressed sympathy with the ar-
gument that Nato strikes against com-
pounds where Gaddafi and his family
live go beyond the UN mandate to pro-
tect civilians in rebel-held areas.
A UN security council official said
last Sunday that there was no sign of
Moscow seeking to bring the issue up
at the security council. The official said
China was taking its cue from Russia.
Both abstained in the vote on the
resolution sanctioning action against
Libya in March.
According to British diplomats,
the Gaddafi regime retaliated against
the airstrike by dispatching a mob to
attack western embassy buildings,
which have been abandoned in recent
weeks as the hostilities have gathered
pace. A spokeswoman said a building
housing the ambassador’s residence
had been set on fire, and according to
initial reports had been burned down.
Sky News journalist Mark Stone, who
visited the embassy, reported on Twit-
ter: “Totally burnt out. WW2 memo-
rial smashed on the ground. Burnt out
cars. Looted.”
A British official, speaking on condi-
tion of anonymity said there was no
doubt in London that the mob attacks
had been officially sanctioned. “There
are no demos allowed to move any-
where in Tripoli unless they are 100%
orchestrated by the regime.”
William Hague, the British foreign
secretary, said: “I condemn the attacks
on the British embassy premises in
Tripoli as well as the diplomatic mis-
sions of other countries. The Vienna
convention requires the Gaddafi re-
gime to protect diplomatic missions in
Tripoli. By failing to do so that regime
has once again breached its interna-
tional responsibilities and obliga-
tions. I take the failure to protect such
premises very seriously indeed.”
Omar Jelban, the Libyan ambassa-
dor, who has worked as a diplomat in
London since 2001, was given 24 hours
to leave. Britain expelled five Libyan
diplomats in March, saying that they
were a threat to national security.
Harriet Sherwood Tripoli
The reported death of Muammar
Gaddafi’s youngest son and three
grandchildren in a Nato airstrike will
reinforce and magnify the sense of
victimhood gripping the inner circle
in Tripoli. Feelings of betrayal and in-
comprehension at the west’s rejection
of the Libyan regime, particularly di-
rected at the UK, are compounded by
aggression, belligerence and merciless
military assaults. It is a potent mix.
Regime officials believe they are
victims of a “great injustice” perpe-
trated by the international coalition
– led, they say, by Britain and France.
A series of private conversations with
figures considered to be among the
more open and reform-minded within
the government highlights a fin-de-
siècle mood. “I face losing everything I
have worked for,” said a diplomat who
has clocked up more than 30 years in
Gaddafi’s service.
Britain was frequently singled out.
“We gave them everything,” said one
official. “We gave up our WMD [weap-
ons of mass destruction] voluntarily.
We were the best country participating
in the fight against terrorism. Gaddafi
gave all the information we had about
al-Qaida. We gave them the file about
the IRA.” Libya had eventually co-
operated over the Lockerbie investi-
gation and had offered British oil firms
access to Libya’s greatest natural asset.
A second diplomat said that the UK had
“decided from day one. It was a plot,
10 times a plot, a conspiracy to remove
Gaddafi, to change the regime.”
Libyan arguments about betrayal
were rejected by Sir Richard Dalton,
UK ambassador to Tripoli from 1999
to 2002. “What the hell do they expect
when they behave the way they did af-
ter 17 February? They shouldn’t be sur-
prised that their friendships through-
out the world deserted them.”
Libyan officials claim that Gaddafi
is ready to implement political reform
as part of a negotiated end to the civil
war. They insist that he must not be
forced out in any deal – but there is an
underlying reluctant recognition that
epochal change is inevitable. A foreign
businessman in Libya, well connected
with regime figures, said without pre-
amble: “It’s over. The regime. It’s over.
Everyone knows it, but no one says.”

is a very personal affair that he has
dressed up as a national necessity to
“prevent” his country from slipping
into civil war. Syria has split inter-
national opinion as to the nature of
both the regime under Assad and
the character of Assad himself, with
a significant minority still believ-
ing that, despite everything, he can
be manoeuvred on to the course of
genuine reform that he has spoken
about but never delivered.
It is this that explains the absence
of Assad himself from the newly
announced US sanctions against his
state, explained officially as target-
ing those directly responsible for the
violence. It is a judgment predicated
on one reading of Syria’s dynamics
– that Assad is less powerful than
other figures around him, including
his brother Maher. Others, however,
believe that, far from being the weak
link, Bashar is as powerful as his
father in a regime that is no longer
Ba’athist but one bound together by
close and corrupt financial interest.
The Lebanese journalist Hisham
Melhem believes many western
politicians made a naive assumption
that Bashar had the makings of a re-
formist leader because he was in part
western-educated, spoke English
and married a professional invest-
ment banker. It is the outcome the
west is still betting on as the odds
get daily longer. Observer
Steve Bell, page 21 ≥
8 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
International news
Hamas demands new PM in Fatah deal
Israel fears a terrorist
influx after Palestinian
factions sign agreement
Conal Urquhart Gaza City
Hamas has insisted on the departure
of Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian
prime minister favoured by Israel and
the west, under a deal agreed last week
with its rival faction, Fatah, for a unity
government, sources in Gaza said.
The Islamist organisation also said
it would keep control of the Gaza Strip
under the accord, which was expected
to be formally signed in Cairo this week
by leaders of the two factions.
The plan drew criticism last week
from Israel, which has said it would
not deal with a Palestinian govern-
ment that included Hamas members.
However, the interim Hamas-Fatah
government will have no involvement
in negotiations with Israel. Talks will
still be conducted by the Palestinian
Liberation Organisation, led by Pales-
tinian president Mahmoud Abbas.
Abbas said a caretaker government
would feature technocrats and exclude
Hamas members. “The people will be
independents, technocrats, not affili-
ated with any factions,” he said. He
said it was “too early to tell” whether
Fayyad, an independent, non-elected
prime minister, would continue in
post. Under the reconciliation deal,
presidential and legislative elections
will be held next year.
Egypt said it would send a security
team to Gaza. “An Egyptian secu-
rity delegation will head to Gaza to
help settle and organise the internal
security situation there, now that the
reconciliation agreement is finally in
place,” an Egyptian security source
told Reuters. Egyptian negotiators,
who brokered the deal in secret meet-
ings, persuaded Hamas to accept a
non-political cabinet, which will not
Ahmadinejad dismisses talk of rift with supreme leader
Thomas Erdbrink Tehran
Washington Post
In his first public appearance in a week,
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad led
an Iranian cabinet meeting last Sunday
and dismissed rumours of tensions
with the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, state media reported.
Reports of a dispute between the
two surfaced after Khamenei publicly
overturned the president’s decision
last month to dismiss the minister
New views ... a security man watches a Hamas rally Mahmud Hams/Getty
Change in Egypt boosted talks
The emergence of a Hamas-Fatah
deal took most observers by sur-
prise, but a new cast of players had
been moving the pieces into place
ever since a popular revolution
ousted Egyptian president Hosni
Mubarak. His regime had long de-
clared that Palestinian unity was a
key objective. Hamas was a trou-
bling neighbour and Cairo wished
to lock the political Islamists into a
more moderate political framework.
Egypt’s stewardship of negotiations
boosted its regional status and en-
sured US support – and money.
But Egypt was more interested in
the appearance than in the reality.
Israel and the US had no genuine
desire to see a unified Palestinian
government, and Egypt’s thinking
followed suit.
of intelligence, Heydar Moslehi. The
minister, a cleric, did not attend the
cabinet meeting, but instead travelled
to the Shia learning centre of Qom for
talks with leading ayatollahs, the semi-
official Fars news agency reported.
During the meeting, Ahmadinejad
thanked the leader for his continuous
support of the government and said all
government members were obedient
to the supreme leader, Fars reported.
“The enemies and deviators should be
sure that their efforts [to create a rift]
Murad Muwafi, Egypt’s new spy-
master, did take the issue seriously
– so much so that five Israeli delega-
tions were dispatched in an effort
to ward off a unity deal. A key was
the rise of the career diplomat Nabil
el-Arabi to be foreign minister in
Egypt’s interim government. “It is
time to stop managing the [Israeli-
Palestinian] conflict; it’s time to end
the conflict,” he said last month.
This Cairo mindshift coincided with
turmoil in Syria, where most of
Hamas’s leadership is based.
With pro-reconciliation demon-
strations bringing thousands to the
streets of Gaza and the West Bank
in mid-March, the political climate
was pushing both factions in one di-
rection – and last week’s announce-
ment was the result. Jack Shenker
will not have any results,” the agency
quoted him as saying.
Ahmadinejad faced unprecedented
criticism from clerics, MPs and other
senior leaders for failing to promptly
and publicly accept Khamenei’s deci-
sion. The disapproval increased when
Ahmadinejad stopped going to work
eight days ago, which led to rumours
he was about to resign and charges
that he was playing a game of “politi-
cal chicken”.
The two men have worked as close
deter foreign donors, and convinced
Fatah to allow Hamas to maintain its
security control of Gaza.
But Hamas insisted on the removal
of Fayyad. Although his stewardship of
the Palestinian Authority and success
in reforming its institutions has been
praised by the international commu-
nity, he is seen as anti-Hamas. Abbas
will appoint the new prime minister.
The most popular candidate is Munib
al-Masri, a US-educated businessman
respected by both factions.
Israel’s President Shimon Peres
called the deal a “fatal mistake that
will prevent the establishment of a
Palestinian state and will sabotage
chances of peace and stability in the
region … the world cannot support the
establishment of a state that part of its
regime is a terror organisation”. The
hardline foreign minister, Avigdor Lie-
berman, told the Army Radio station:
“Hundreds of terrorists will flood the
West Bank, and therefore we need to
prepare for a different situation.”
The two factions were persuaded
by “friends in the Arab world and the
European Union that it was time to fin-
ish the split”, said Faisal Abu Shahla, a
Fatah legislator in the Gaza Strip.
But some expressed scepticism.
Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of
political science at al-Azhar University
in Gaza, described the deal as “a very
vague format which will allow Pales-
tinians to speak with one voice but,
at a practical level, there will remain
two separate entities in the West Bank
and Gaza in terms of security. Hamas
will be able to maintain its militias
and its rhetoric of resistance to Israel.
There will not be many changes on the
ground. Each one will be in charge of
their territory.”
Hamas officials indicated they un-
derstood the unity agreement could be
jeopardised by militant operations.
After the signing of the deal, Abbas
may make his first visit to Gaza in more
than four years.
allies in the past. In a recent speech,
Khamenei lauded Amadinejad’s
government but said he sometimes
needed to step in when “expediency”
was neglected.
There has been a flurry of public
criticism aimed mainly at the presi-
dent’s adviser, Esfandiar Rahim
Mashaei, who local media reported as
being the instigator of the minister’s
dismissal. Mashaei is controversial for
being seen to promote Iranian over
Islamic culture.

International news
Crackdown fails to halt Uganda protests
David Smith Kampala
Riots swept across Ugandan’s capital,
Kampala, last week in the biggest anti-
government protest in sub-Saharan
Africa so far this year. Security forces
launched a brutal crackdown, firing at
unarmed civilians with live rounds,
rubber bullets and teargas. Two people
were killed, more than 120 wounded
and around 360 arrested. Women and
girls were been among those beaten,
according to witnesses.
Two weeks of growing unrest had
gained fresh impetus after the violent
arrest of the opposition leader Kizza
Besigye. Critics say President Yoweri
Museveni, in power for 25 years, is los-
ing his grip.
Protests spread to several towns,
leaving seven people dead and hun-
dreds in jail. The riots mark a new
level of defiance. Facebook and Twit-
ter, which the government has tried
unsuccessfully to block, are reverber-
ating with dissent.
Robert Mayanja, a self-described
activist, said a repeat of the revolts
in Egypt and Tunisia was “definitely”
possible. “What we are seeing here
are people who are not armed but are
taking a stand against armed forces,”
he said. “People are ready. It’s just a
question of time.”
The subversion began on 11 April
with the defeated politician and half a
dozen allies walking down a street. The
walk to work campaign is intended to
highlight soaring food and fuel prices,
which leave many Ugandans unable to
afford public transport.
If Besigye, who has lost three
Mobile phone generation may give despots a wake-up call
Analysis
Greg Mills
Might the northern African uprisings
spread south? Of course, Africa
south of the Sahara is not a single
political and economic entity. There
are states in conflict, reformers and
laggards, small and big countries.
A group of reformers – including
Ghana, Tanzania and Mali – have
grown their economies at more than
5% annually since 1996, radically
reducing poverty and mortality
rates. This has been on the back
of improved governance, higher
commodity prices and the mobile
phone revolution.
In 1980, there were just two
African democracies – today more
Watchful ... anti-riot police patrol the streets of Kampala, where protests have broken out Reuters
elections to Museveni, had been ig-
nored the protest might have fizzled
out. But instead riot police blocked the
group, used teargas and arrested him.
At a stroke a waning establishment
figure was reborn as a hero.
Ssemujju Ibrahim Nganda, an
MP-elect for Besigye’s Forum for
Democratic Change, said: “We never
intended to have a Tahrir Square to
remove Museveni. We just wanted a
reawakening.”
At the third protest Besigye was hit
in the hand by a rubber bullet. Images
of him with hand bandaged and in a
sling gave the opposition a publicity
coup. With each walk he has attracted
more followers.
Besigye, 54, was detained again
in Kampala last week after police
smashed their way into his vehicle
than 40 countries regularly stage
multi-party elections.
Despite this, Africa faces common
challenges. Sub-Saharan Africa will
be an urban continent by 2025, when
one in four of the world’s people
aged under 24 will be from this
region. And, as witnessed across
north Africa, it is urban youth who
have driven the revolutions.
This also highlights a second
challenge: the imperative to create
jobs. At independence in 1964,
Zambia had 3 million people; today
it has more than four times that
number. But formal employment has
only risen from 300,000 to 400,000.
Growth in itself is not enough, as
Egypt illustrates, with perceptions
of inequality and government failure
to deliver able to bite politically.
A third challenge concerns the
and shot pepper spray into his eyes,
potentially causing permanent dam-
age to his sight.
An hour earlier he had admitted
he was hesitant to draw comparisons
with Egypt and Tunisia. “The only
parallel goes to the extent that people
are discontented with what is going
on and their governments are non-
responsive,” he said. “There is a loss
of trust between the regime and the
people. I think that is the only parallel
I can see. How this popular discontent
is channelled is always governed by the
unique qualities of governments.”
Museveni has refused to copy
neighbouring Kenya by cutting fuel
taxes, while his recent re-election
campaign is estimated to have cost
$350m, and the bill for new military
fighter jets stands at $740m.
depth of democracy. Elections are
frequent but the quality of Africa’s
democracy is patchy. Freedom
House – a Washington NGO that
studies democracy, political freedom
and human rights – ranks most sub-
Saharan African states in the “partly
free” category. Countries where
the ruling party won by more than
80% – including Equatorial Guinea,
Ethiopia, Rwanda and Djibouti –
were scarcely more democratic
than those that resorted to outright
repression or had no polls at all.
A final challenge is the limited
extent to which African leadership
is connected with its youthful
population. While the average age
of Sub-Saharan Africans is 25 and
falling, that of their leaders is 70.
What is puzzling is the tolerance
of its people to the most egregious
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 9
Museveni, whose election victory
has been denounced as fraudulent, is
confident he can avoid the fate of Arab
leaders. “Nobody can take over power
through an uprising,” he said recently.
“Whoever thinks like that, I pity such
a person.” His spokesman, Tamale
Mirundi, added: “In Tunisia and Egypt
democracy was lacking; in Uganda we
elect our leaders at every level. The
president organised and campaigned
in transparent elections. Besigye can-
not say he was cheated and that is why
he is jumping on oil prices.”
Yet every day in Uganda, and else-
where in Africa, people are connecting
and interacting through social media
sites for the first time. “Uganda is sit-
ting on a time bomb,” tweeted Richo
Nuwagaba. “It’s just a matter of time.
I am scared.”
of leaderships, from Robert Mugabe
in Zimbabwe to Equatorial Guinea’s
Teodoro Obiang. The former’s
electoral and policy excesses are
well-known; the latter’s, who came
to power via a bloody coup in 1979,
less so, even if he was recently
elected chair of the African Union.
Even though they regularly berate
their colonial inheritance, Africa’s
leaders have shrewdly worked their
people’s ethnic, racial and linguistic
divisions in their own favour. They
have also kept their armies on a
tight leash. In many cases, including
Rwanda, Uganda, Eritrea, Ethiopia
and Zimbabwe, these armies brought
them to power in the first instance.
But the new challenge of mobile
phones and youthful anger should
make African autocrats increasingly
uncomfortable.
10 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
International news
WHO takes on chronic disease
Controversy over food
companies’ engagement
in plans for UN meeting
Will Englund Moscow
Washington Post
The World Health Organisation focused
for decades on infectious diseases, but
now it is putting non-communicable
diseases near the top of its agenda. The
fight against heart disease, diabetes,
stroke, lung cancer and chronic respira-
tory disease may not seem as heroic as
the struggle against smallpox or H1N1,
but chronic illnesses account for 63% of
deaths worldwide.
“And these are preventable,” said
Margaret Chan, director general of the
WHO, at a three-day series of meetings
devoted to chronic diseases.
No tobacco and less sugar, fat and
especially salt are the WHO’s top tar-
gets; reducing alcohol consumption
and increasing exercise are right be-
hind. Those factors alone account for
25m of the 36m deaths attributable to
chronic diseases annually, according to
the WHO, and place a huge economic
burden on families and nations.
But fighting chronic diseases re-
quires political decisions – in areas as
disparate as finance, regulatory policy,
agriculture, education and trade – and
the will to see them through.
Unhealthy food, and what to do
about it, was the most sensitive topic
at the gathering. Representatives of
PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and Nestlé joined
the discussions after a decision by the
WHO to allow the big international food
concerns a voice as the organisation
prepares an agenda for a UN meeting in
September. (Tobacco companies were
deemed beyond the pale.) The Russian
prime minister, Vladimir Putin, talked
about the need to enlist the business
China bans smoking in indoor public spaces
Tania Branigan Beijing
China has introduced a ban on smok-
ing in indoor public spaces, hoping to
thin the ranks of its 300 million smok-
ers and protect the health of others.
But in a country where half of all
men smoke, and where it is common
for people to light up in hospital wait-
ing rooms, there is a feeling the meas-
ure may have little effect.
The new regulations do not specify
any penalties for smokers who infringe
the ban or business owners who let
them. Instead, they say owners should
Dangerous imports … Tonga has an obesity problem Neil Sands/AFP/Getty
community, as did the US secretary of
health and human services, Kathleen
Sibelius.
“Did anybody mention conflict of
interest?” said Patti Rundall, policy
director for Baby Milk Action. She and
others say they worry that lobbying by
companies that are part of the problem
will undermine the WHO’s efforts.
Janet Voute, of Nestlé, said the com-
panies were unfairly blamed for con-
sumers’ choices, and Herve Nordmann,
chairman of the Industry Council for De-
velopment, a trade group, said that “the
overfed are voluntarily overfed”.
Still, the three firms here have joined
with seven other big producers to form
an alliance that says it is committed to
reducing salt, sugar and fat in processed
food and restricting advertising aimed
at children. “Self-imposed voluntary
action is a good first step,” Chan said.
“Industry needs to earn trust.”
“The voluntary approach in the
US has begun to yield some pretty
impressive results,” Sibelius said. It’s
put up conspicuous non-smoking
signs, promote non-smoking, and
designate staff members to tell cus-
tomers not to smoke. The regulation,
issued by the ministry of health, bans
smoking in places such as hotels, res-
taurants, theatres and waiting rooms
at railway stations and airports. Most
workplaces are not included.
China should have introduced the
measure in January under the com-
mitment it made when it signed the
World Health Organisation’s frame-
work convention on tobacco control
several years ago. Many believe that
much quicker, for one thing, than get-
ting legislation passed. But, she added,
“there’s definitely a role for regula-
tion”.
Tobacco provides a model for that.
New York City took regulatory steps
against smoking, said Thomas Frieden,
head of the Centres for Disease Con-
trol and Prevention and formerly
New York’s health commissioner, and
reduced the number of smokers by
350,000 over six years.
Sibelius said the United States was
“late to the table” on non-communica-
ble diseases. “America’s really behind
the curve, compared to some of these
countries, on smoking cessation,” she
said. “We’re unfortunately leading the
way on obesity.”
The chronic nature of these ill-
nesses helps to dissipate a sense of
urgency about addressing them. Yet
high blood pressure killed four times as
many people around the world as HIV/
Aids, Frieden said – and it cost one one-
hundredth as much to treat.
efforts to tackle the country’s tobacco
habit have been hindered by the vast
profits it yields for parts of the govern-
ment. The tobacco monopoly is state-
owned and, according to state media,
as much as a 10th of the country’s tax
revenues come from the industry.
Yang Gonghuan, director of China’s
National Office of Tobacco Control,
welcomed the ban and told state news
agency Xinhua the guidelines made
the responsibilities of business own-
ers clearer. “It is realistic to demand a
bigger role for these business owners
in dissuading smokers,” she said.
Drug scarcity
puts patients
in danger
Rob Stein Washington Post
Doctors, hospitals and federal regula-
tors are struggling to cope with an un-
precedented surge in drug shortages in
the US that is endangering cancer pa-
tients, heart-attack victims, accident
survivors and a host of other ill people.
A record 211 medications became scarce
in 2010 – triple the number in 2006.
The paucities are forcing some
medical centres to ration drugs ,
postpone surgeries and other care,
and scramble for substitutes, often
resorting to alternatives that may be
less effective, have more side effects
and boost the risk for overdoses and
other sometimes-fatal errors.
“It’s a crisis,” said Erin Fox, manager
of the drug information service at the
University of Utah, who monitors drug
shortages for the American Society of
Health-System Pharmacists. “Patients
are at risk.”
The causes vary from drug to drug,
but experts cite a confluence of factors:
consolidation in the drug industry has
left only a few manufacturers for many
older, less profitable products, mean-
ing that when raw material runs short,
equipment breaks down or govern-
ment regulators crack down, the snags
can quickly spiral into shortages.
While the dearth that has garnered
the most public attention is for a bar-
biturate that is hindering prisons try-
ing to execute inmates, the scarcities
are having a much broader impact on
keeping people alive, especially in
emergency rooms, oncology wards
and intensive care units.
No one is systematically tracking
the toll of the shortages, but reports
are emerging of delayed treatments,
anxious searches for desperately
needed drugs, devastating injuries
from mistakes and less-adequate
drugs, and even possible deaths.
Federal regulators have been rush-
ing to alleviate the shortages, some-
times helping firms resume production
more quickly or approving emergency
imports of supplies from overseas. The
Food and Drug Administration eased
a shortage of the anaesthetic propofol
last year by allowing foreign importa-
tion, for example, and this year ap-
proved bringing in several other medi-
cations, including two cancer drugs.
In Congress, legislation has been in-
troduced to address the problem. For
example, a bill would require compa-
nies to notify the FDA in advance about
anything that might cause a shortage
and give the agency new powers to try
to assuage them.
 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 11

International news

Residents pull together after US tornadoes

Stephanie McCrummen Rainsville
Washington Post
Suzanne Goldenberg, Agencies
Last week, a day after President Barack
Obama promised people in the tor-
nado-ravaged state of Alabama that
they would not be forgotten, a day af-
ter exhausted rescue workers pulled a
dead three-year-old from tangled tree
limbs and still hours before the first
federal relief officials began arriving
at the Tom Bevill Enrichment Centre,
there was the sound of buzzing saws
clearing fallen oaks in Rainsville.
In front of the Rainsville Church
Pew Co, the “free food” sign was
there again. In a parking lot nearby,
the Southern Baptists were organising
yellow-shirted volunteers for a second
day. And over on Marshall Avenue,
Joyce and Harold Parris’s neighbour
Tammy was crossing a now-empty
green field, saying, “Y’all OK?”
When asked about the president’s
visit and the federal aid, people in this
predominantly Republican area – one
of the places hit hardest by last week’s
Twisters ... sifting through debris in Alabama Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty
barrage of tornadoes – said some ver-
sion of, “I did hear something about
that”. They had had had no power
for days.
Harold Parris, 69, said of the presi-
dent, “I’m glad he did come check on
us.” A neighbour, Stephen Wooten,
said federal help – “really, any help” –
is welcome. “I’m proud Obama came,”
he said. “I am.”
But in other ways, Obama’s visit
and the promise of federal aid, while
appreciated, was somehow abstract
in comparison to people like Kyle
Jeffreys, of the Southern Baptists,
who had organised teams to help cut
down fallen trees; or Matt Bell, who
was helping a neighbour search for
a document in a field of splinter-size
wood, ripped insulation and shreds
of paper.
At least 33 people were confirmed
killed in Rainsville, a town of 5,000
residents, and surrounding DeKalb
County. The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration said that
it had received 200 reports of torna-
does. The storms – the deadliest since
1974 – swept across six southern states.
Some were a more than a kilometre-
wide and stayed on the ground longer
than typical systems, it reported.
The death toll by last week had ex-
ceeded 340, and “with initial reports
of buildings destroyed approaching
10,000, property insurance losses are
expected to range from $2bn to $5bn”,
a catastrophe risk modelling company,
Eqecat, said.
Alabama was singled out for the
worst punishment but deaths and
heavy destruction were also reported
in Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia
and Virginia.

‘Peak human’ approaches

Analysis
Jonathan Watts
There have never been more people
on earth, and we have never con-
sumed more energy, but could the
age of peak man be upon us?
For China at least, the answer
is yes and perhaps sooner than
expected. Two influential reports
last week suggest the world’s most
populous nation and largest energy
consumer is likely to trim its size and
appetite soon after 2030.
The last national census results,
released last Thursday, showed pop-
ulation growth has slowed by half in
the last decade. Since 2000, about 70
million people were added to a na-
tion that is now home to 1.34 billion
people. This is slightly lower than
previous forecasts by demographers.
Partly as a result of such trends,
energy demand could taper off
earlier than previously predicted.
Last week, the influential Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory is-
sued detailed projections indicating
China’s power consumption was
likely to flatten out 20 years from
now because there will be less need
for steel and cement. “Saturation in
ownership of appliances, construc-
tion of residential and commercial
floor area, roadways, railways, ferti-
liser use, and urbanisation will peak
around 2030 with slowing popula-
tion growth.”
That would be good news for car-
bon emissions, which could plateau
or even start to decline three years
earlier, according to the projections.
The government says its family plan-
ning policies are largely responsible
for the slowdown.
At a news conference to announce
the results, Ma Jianting, the director
of China’s National Bureau of Statis-
tics, said the one-child policy had
“eased the pressure on resources
and the environment and laid a rela-
tively good foundation for steady
and rapid economic and social
development”.
So, can China and the world
breathe more easily? Not yet. The
economy will soon have to cope with
a shrinking labour force, and a grow-
ing number of elderly dependents.
Society will have to deal with a gen-
der imbalance that will leave tens of
millions of men unable to find wives.
And the environment will continue
to come under immense pressure
from a population that is increas-
ingly mobile, affluent and resource-
hungry. But whether 2010, 2030 or
2050, our generation looks set to
witness an extraordinary moment in
human history – peak human.
12 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
International news
Border controls set to return in Europe
France and Italy want
national checks restored
among 25 countries
Ian Traynor Brussels
Brussels said last Sunday that na-
tional passport controls might be re-
introduced across Europe to allow the
“temporary” re-erection of borders
between 25 countries.
Responding to intense pressure
from Italy and France to tighten the
no-borders system known as the
Schengen regime, José Manuel Bar-
roso, the president of the European
commission, said he was looking at
ways of satisfying the two countries’
concerns. Paris and Rome are alarmed
at an influx of migrants fleeing revolu-
tionary north Africa.
In a letter to the French president,
Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Italian prime
minister, Silvio Berlusconi, Barroso
said that the commission would unveil
new proposals this week on immigra-
tion policy, common European asylum
procedures, and reform of the Schen-
gen system.
The commission’s proposals are
to go to a summit of European Union
leaders next month, with France and
Italy leading the charge for a partial
renationalisation of border controls,
Migrants bring new life to Calabrian village
Salvatore Aloïse Riace
Le Monde
They call it the “migrants’ village”. On
entering the square at Riace, perched
on a hill near the coast at the far end
of Calabria, in Italy, you soon under-
stand why. The girls running around
are from Ethiopia, Eritrea or Soma-
lia. Their mothers watch from the
dressmaking workshop up the street.
A sign is marked “Host Town”.
At the other end of Italy the Tuni-
sians who have landed on Lampedusa
in recent weeks have met with hostil-
ity, but here the mayor, Domenico
Luciano, told the government the
locality was prepared to accommodate
its share of the newcomers. About 40
other councils in the region have an-
nounced they are ready to follow the
example set by Riace in July 1998.
When a boat carrying 300 Kurds
landed, local people immediately
opened their doors, triggering a sud-
den change of outlook. The foreign-
ers were a boon for the village with its
dwindling population.
Border order ... Tunisians flee a camp in Italy Carlo Hermann/AFP/Getty
a trend the commission would like to
resist but looks too weak to counter.
The Franco-Italian push to place
greater restrictions on the Schengen
regime, launched last week after a furi-
ous row between Paris and Rome over
refugees from Tunisia, has already
won support from a handful of other
EU countries, including Germany.
At one point there were 2,500 in-
habitants, but only a few hundred are
still in the town. In 1972 the discovery
off the coast of two fifth-century BC
Greek sculptures – the Riace bronzes
– turned into yet another disappoint-
ment. The statues were taken away to
a museum in Reggio di Calabria, and
with them the tourists who were sup-
posed to flock here.
Riace decided it would fill the gap
left by the many migrants who had
moved to Canada or Australia with
incomers. “There was once again
some hope for the future, with a new
sense of pulling together. People were
leaving, the school had closed, there
was a growing lack of basic services.
We began to wonder if there was any
point in planning public works, or
even sustaining the village which was
gradually emptying. But the new ar-
rivals brought fresh hopes,” Luciano
says.
Sitting in the cafe or shopping at
the market, local people now view the
situation as normal. “The population
has gone up again quite a lot, but I can
The Schengen system, introduced
in 1995 after being agreed a decade ear-
lier, abolished frontier checks between
22 EU countries plus Norway, Iceland
and Switzerland, and is viewed by
many of the 400 million Europeans
concerned as one of the more tangible
benefits of the EU.
Britain and Ireland are not part of
tell you, the place was literally dead,”
said a local man.
A neighbour endorsed this view,
looking at children running along the
narrow streets: “For us, they are all
grandchildren.”
A non-profit organisation looks out
for empty homes and refurbishes them
to accommodate refugees. While they
wait for the grants given to asylum-
seekers, which are subject to long de-
lays, the migrants can use a local cur-
rency in Riace, with vouchers bearing
portraits of Gandhi, Martin Luther
King or Che Guevara. When funds ar-
rive, the shops send the vouchers to
the local council for payment.
While they wait for formalities to be
completed, the refugees are gainfully
occupied. The silence of the streets is
broken by the hum of workshops help-
ing them to acquire skills in dressmak-
ing, joinery, pottery or glass-blowing,
set up as part of an integration scheme
funded by the regional government.
Lubaba, who works at the glass fac-
tory, arrived here from Ethiopia three
years ago after a long journey. From
the system, insisting on retaining their
national border controls.
Despite pressure from Malta and
Italy over around 30,000 refugees,
mainly from Tunisia in recent weeks,
the commission has rejected calls for
a temporary suspension of the Schen-
gen regime.
But in his letter, Barroso conceded
that national authorities may be given
greater leeway to play with the Schen-
gen rules.
“Strengthening the application of
the Schengen rules is an area that the
commission is in the process of exam-
ining,” the commission president said.
“The temporary re-establishment of
[national] borders is one possibility
among others which, subject to spe-
cific and well-founded criteria, could
constitute one element for strength-
ening observance of the Schengen
agreement.”
Member states are allowed to freeze
Schengen and mount border controls
solely on national security grounds at
present, a move that has to be blessed
by Brussels.
The commission, though, appears
to be moving, reluctantly but under
great pressure from national capitals,
towards granting governments more
scope for closing down the passport-
free zone that extends from the Arc-
tic to the Mediterranean and from the
Atlantic to the Baltic Sea.
Libya she travelled to Lampedusa,
then started another long trail through
various Italian reception centres. Her
journey ended in Riace, where she de-
cided to stay. “I have a home, enough
to live on, I’m learning a trade, and my
daughter was born here,” she says.
Around 6,000 refugees have passed
through the village over the years.
Many move on, but some of them stay
and try to start their own craft or retail
business.
It is not easy, as we heard from an
Afghan woman from Herat who left
home with her two children when her
husband died, finally opening a shop
selling knitwear in the village. “We
make a living. In the winter it’s OK, but
selling woolly jumpers in the summer
is a struggle,” she explains, knitting as
her daughter Faeze looks on.
Faeze is in no doubt about her fu-
ture here in Italy. Speaking Italian with
a powerful Calabrian accent, she says
she feels “like the others at school”.
More than 200 refugees like herself
and her family have chosen to settle
permanently in Riace.

International news
Muslim victims ... bodies from a mass grave are reburied Dado Ruvic/Reuters
Bosnia faces worst
crisis since war’s end
Ian Traynor
Bosnia is facing its worst crisis since
the end of the war 16 years ago because
of Serb secessionist policies aimed at
paralysing the country, according to
the leading international official over-
seeing the state.
Valentin Inzko, the Austrian diplo-
mat who is the international commu-
nity’s high representative in Sarajevo,
said he would act to halt a referendum
called by Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian
Serb leader, on whether to reject Bos-
nia’s state war crimes court and special
prosecutor’s office established in 2005
by international decree.
Inzko said heavy European Union
Milorad Dodik,
the Bosnian Serb
leader, wants a
referendum on
whether to reject
Bosnia’s state
war crimes court
sanctions could be imposed on Dodik
and his coterie if he did not back down
from the vote, which the Bosnian Serb
parliament approved by a huge major-
ity last month.
“This is definitely the most serious
crisis since the signing of the Dayton
agreement [which ended the four-
year war in 1995],” Inzko said. “Never
before has such a referendum been
planned. The intention is to roll back
all the achievements. It challenges
the role of the high representative. It
would be a direct attack on the Dayton
settlement.”
Dodik, the president of the Serbian
half of Bosnia known as the Repub-
lika Srpska, pledged last week that
he would not back down and that the
vote would go ahead. The decision
to stage the referendum was posted
officially last Wednesday, meaning
the vote must take place within eight
weeks. Dodik argued that the court
and prosecutors were biased against
Serbs and the court’s authority should
be rejected. He claimed the Bosnian
Muslim leadership, with international
support, was bent on creating a domi-
neering Islamic state.
Dodik regularly taunts the inter-
national envoys, who have struggled
to manage Bosnia since the 90s. He
professes no loyalty to a state called
Bosnia-Herzegovina, and questions
its viability. The referendum is seen
as his most destabilising move yet
and as a step towards Bosnia’s break-
up, which could trigger a war. “Many
think this referendum is a rehearsal
for a future one on Republika Srpska
status [secession], but those are just
speculations, unrealistic at this time,”
he said last month.
The EU’s new Balkan envoy, Miro-
slav Lajcak, is to go to Banja Luka,
Dodik’s base, to read him the riot
act and order him to call off the vote,
according to senior diplomats.
Inzko indicated that the interna-
tional community was heading for
a showdown with Dodik and that at
some point in the next few weeks he
would invoke his official powers to try
to stop the referendum. “I hope [Laj-
cak] can talk them out of doing this.
Otherwise I will have to act. The [Bos-
nian Serb] law would be annulled. The
deadline can’t be very long, 10 days to
two weeks maximum.”
Lajcak is expected to warn Dodik
that if he defies the international ref-
erendum ban, he could face EU sanc-
tions similar to those placed on Robert
Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi: a ban
on travel and the freezing of his assets
and bank accounts.
Dutch police use company’s
satnav data to set speed traps
Charles Arthur
Dutch drivers might have wondered
how it was that speed traps were always
in just the right place to catch speed-
ers. It turned out to be simple enough:
if they owned a TomTom, their in-car
satnav was spying on them, and the
data about cars’ speed was being sold
via the government to the police – who
used it to set the traps.
The company, which is Europe’s
largest satnav manufacturer, was
forced into an embarrassing apology
last month as the revelation emerged
alongside its first-quarter financial
earnings, which showed weak demand
and led it to forecast growing sales
from “service revenues” – including,
it said, selling data to governments.
In a public apology (repeated in a
video on YouTube), TomTom’s chief
executive, Harold Goddijn, said the
company sold the anonymous data
believing it would be used to improve
safety or relieve traffic bottlenecks.
“We never foresaw this kind of use
and many of our clients are not happy
about it,” he wrote, and promised that
licensing agreements would “prevent
this type of use in the future”.
Normally, the aggregated data
would be used to tell subscribers to
TomTom services how to route around
traffic conditions and give improved
estimates of journey time. The sale of
data to the government was intended
to help it understand causes of conges-
tion and accidents. But the police had
Trevi trawlers cause row
Jon Hooper Rome
The chief of Rome’s municipal police
is facing calls for his resignation amid
a scandal over the illicit removal from
the Trevi fountain of coins thrown into
it by tourists.
Last week, members of Angelo
Giuliani’s force stood by as a TV re-
porter was pushed into the fountain
by one of three men who had been
filmed as they drained it of thousands
of euros.
An estimated €2,000-€3,000
($3,000-$4,500) is thrown into the
fountain each day. In theory, the
money goes to the Roman Catholic
charity Caritas. But a programme last
week on one of Silvio Berlusconi’s
channels, Italia 1, showed a hidden
camera recording a man using a broom
to sweep the coins into piles. He was
helped by two accomplices who car-
ried the money off in buckets.
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 13
a simpler idea for how to use the data
to offset the cost of buying it.
The timing of the admission comes
just after a wave of concern over data
collected by smartphones and passed
back to the companies controlling
them, such as Apple, Google and
Microsoft. Apple admitted last week
that the iPhone records location data
about mobile cell masts and Wi-Fi net-
works, but not individuals, and said its
retention of the data for many months
was due to a software flaw that would
be remedied. Google and Microsoft
says that users are asked to opt in to
the anonymised use of location data.
The Dutch newspaper Algemeen
Dagblad reported that police had ob-
tained the TomTom information from
the government and used it to set tar-
geted speed traps.
TomTom’s predicament is that the
market for satnav devices has begun
to slow and even shrink, meaning
that it cannot rely on hardware sales
to keep sales growing. It said last
week that it expected the market for
personal navigation devices to shrink
by 15% this year, amid poor consumer
demand and competition from smart-
phones and tablet computers.
That in turn means that at some
point it will have to rely more on soft-
ware and services revenue rather than
more profitable and revenue-generat-
ing hardware – which analysts see as
its key “crossover point” somewhere
in its future.
John Harris, page 24 ≥
The entire operation was calmly
watched, by a police officer who was
handed something by one of the collec-
tors, and then by two others. When the
programme’s reporter stepped in to ask
the police why they were not taking any
action, he was insulted and threatened
by the man at work in the fountain and
then pushed into the water.
It was only when the cameraman
was assaulted that the police inter-
vened. Even then, however, the offic-
ers did nothing to prevent the reporter
being elbowed in the face by the other
accomplice.
The Trevi fountain is famous for
its Baroque extravagance, and the su-
perstition that anyone who throws in a
coin is assured of returning to Rome.
Rome’s mayor, Gianni Alemanno,
said the attitude of the three police
officers was “intolerable” and that
they had been suspended from duty
pending an inquiry.
14 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
UK news
Going up … cleaners at Queen Mary College in London celebrate the introduction of Living Wage Campus policy Graham Turner
Living Wage campaign marks
decade of fighting for poorest
It has persuaded major firms and institutions to lift pay for contract workers
Heather Stewart
Katie Loweth Observer
Ken Livingstone calls them “the best
example of the big society I’ve seen
in the past decade”. London Citi-
zens, which started as a ragtag band
of church groups and trade unionists
appalled at the living conditions of
many workers in the capital, held a
mass rally in Trafalgar Square on Mon-
day to celebrate 10 years of its Living
Wage campaign.
Along the way, they’ve brought
blushes to the cheeks of politicians
and chief executives, and persuaded
scores of major employers to agree
to pay their staff well above the le-
gal minimum. At a rally attended by
all the party leaders in the run-up to
last year’s election, David Cameron
described the living wage as “an idea
whose time has come” – though he has
yet to follow through on a pledge to
implement it for cleaners and other
support staff across Whitehall.
“It was obvious that the minimum
wage was having virtually no impact
in London,” says Livingstone, who is
gearing up for another shot at the Lon-
don mayoralty next year. “You needed
to have the living wage if you were to
avoid poverty in your employees.”
When L ondon Citizens was
founded, its members, most of them
religious leaders, were angry that
family life had become impossible for
many parishioners, as parents strug-
gled to hold down two jobs, often
travelling miles across the capital and
working antisocial hours. They de-
cided to mobilise this army of workers,
many of them migrants, who keep the
capital running, and fight for a differ-
ent way of working.
High spending, poor outcomes
Britain is one of the biggest inves-
tors in families across all countries
of the Organisation of Co-operation
and Economic Development
(OECD), the organisation said. The
UK spent 3.6% of GDP on family
benefits, compared with an OECD
average of 2.2% over all benefits,
in 2007. Only Denmark and France
spent more, at 3.7% each.
The OECD report found the UK
spends about £138,000 ($230,000)
from birth up to the age of 18; the
When the campaign began, many
employers refused to accept respon-
sibility for staff employed on con-
tracted-out services such as cleaning.
In 2003, night cleaner Abdul Durrant
confronted HSBC’s chairman Sir John
Bond at the bank’s annual meeting and
asked whether the bank would be will-
ing to pay a living wage.
“I work in the same office as the
board members; the only difference is
I don’t operate computers. My func-
tion is to operate a mop and bucket,”
he told him. Bond’s reaction was that
OECD average is £95,000. Most was
on cash benefits, such as child ben-
efit and working tax credit.
But in terms of better outcomes
for families, such as lifting children
out of poverty, gender equality and
family employment, Britain lags
behind countries that spend less.
One of the report’s analysts said
that Nordic countries, which spend
proportionally more on services
than in cash, got “more bang for
their buck”. Karen McVeigh
Powerful voices Women in Congo learn
to speak out against sexual violence
Review, page 25 ≥
Durrant’s terms and conditions were
not his responsibility.
It took time – and the example of
Barclays, the first Canary Wharf firm
to pay a living wage – but HSBC even-
tually agreed, and London Citizens set
off to conquer the City, targeting one
firm after another.
Since then, more than 100 busi-
nesses and other organisations have
signed up, and there is a Living Wage
unit in County Hall that calculates how
much it costs to live a decent life in the
capital, and updates the figure annu-
ally. It was £7.85 ($13) an hour, but this
year’s increase – 45p, given the high
rate of inflation – was announced on
Monday, bringing the rate to £8.30.
Mike Kelly, director of corporate so-
cial responsibility at accountancy firm
KPMG, an early convert, says contract-
ing out comes at a price that results in
workers earning the bare minimum
wage and working antisocial shifts.
Before KPMG adopted the liv-
ing wage, turnover among cleaning
staff was more than 100% a year;
afterwards, it dropped dramatically.
With better sickness and holiday pay,
absenteeism also fell.
Madeleine Bunting, page 20 →

UK news
Calm down … David Cameron at last week’s prime minister’s questions PA
Slap in the face for
‘sexist’ Cameron
Patrick Wintour
David Cameron was accused of reveal-
ing his ill-suppressed Bullingdon Club
instincts last week when he shouted at
the Labour frontbencher Angela Eagle
to “calm down, dear” as she berated
him for misleading MPs at prime min-
ister’s questions.
Labour accused him of being “sex-
ist, patronising, insulting and un-
prime ministerial”. The Labour dep-
uty leader, Harriet Harman, called for
an apology, and a spokesman for the
Liberal Democrats – increasingly eager
to show they are locked in a loveless
marriage with Cameron – said: “We
would not have used that language.”
Eagle, writing in the Guardian,
said it was “a phrase that no modern
man would use towards a woman.
It reminds me of none other than
Flashman, the appalling bully in Tom
Brown’s Schooldays. Flashman’s in-
creasingly frequent appearances at
Westminster are now being remarked
upon even by MPs in his own party.”
Downing Street claimed Labour
had lost its sense of humour and Cam-
eron was merely using a catchphrase
uttered by film director Michael Win-
ner in an insurance advert. In a rapid
damage limitation operation, the
prime minister’s spin doctors said he
had used the phrase before, as leader
of the opposition, in remarks aimed at
Gordon Brown and David Miliband.
Cameron oscillates at prime min-
ister’s questions between showing
great courtesy to backbench MPs and
suddenly displaying a fierce temper.
Likeability and modernity are two of
his strongest suits, and aides have told
him before to rein back on anything
that smacks of posh-boy pugilism.
The row broke out as he was forced
on to the defensive over his troubled
health reforms. Eagle picked him up
when he started to claim that a former
Labour MP who supports the health re-
forms, Dr Howard Stoate, had been de-
feated at the election by the Tories.
Eagle shouted that Stoate had
stood down before the election and
the PM had got his facts wrong. Cam-
eron told the shadow chief secretary
to the Treasury to “calm down, dear,
and listen to the doctor”. Chancellor
George Osborne laughed his head off,
while the Liberal Democrat leader and
deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, sit-
ting on Cameron’s other side, looked
nonplussed. Cameron repeated the
phrase five times.
Winner sprung to Cameron’s de-
fence: “I find it unbelievable that Har-
riet Harman, the deputy leader of a sup-
posedly important party, sees fit to go
on about my phrase ‘calm down, dear’.
“Which planet is Miss Harman on? Does
she not know that this phrase, which I
created 10 years ago, has become a part
of the nation’s language?
“It’s used by everybody. All classes
of people shout it at me, truck drivers,
builders, posh people, they come over
in restaurants, it’s a bit of fun, Labour
should get a sense of humour. Fun
is fun, and please don’t try and stop
people having fun; things are dour
enough as it is.”
Eagle said: “It is for the prime min-
ister to decide whether he expressed
himself appropriately. It is up to him
whether he wants to annoy 51% of the
population.”
Danny Alexander, the Liberal
Democrat Treasury chief secretary,
said: “Obviously, if something has
caused offence, obviously that was not
right. I hope it has not caused offence,
because it was a joke.”
AV vote exposes Labour rift
Patrick Wintour
David Blunkett, the former Labour
home secretary, kicked off the No to
AV campaign’s final drive to persuade
wavering Labour supporters not to
use Thursday’s referendum on voting
reform to punish David Cameron by
voting yes.
Both sides in the campaign on the
alternative vote system claimed unde-
cided Labour supporters could deter-
mine the outcome. Blunkett said: “If
you think we should keep the system
that is simple and straightforward and
has stood us in good stead, then please
join us by voting no.”
But the Labour leader, Ed Mili-
band, said voters should vote yes if
they were unhappy with the political
system, at the start of a last-minute ef-
fort to show that the leadership of the
Labour party – including most of the
shadow cabinet and all of last year’s
leadership candidates – were backing
the yes campaign.
Miliband said: “This is a once-in-a-
generation opportunity to change our
voting system. The last time we had a
nationwide referendum was 36 years
ago in relation to the European Union.
These things don’t come along often
and in the end it’s about this: if you’re
happy with politics as usual, vote no.
I see lots of people who are unhappy
with politics as usual. This is a chance
to change it.”
While not a single Tory or Lib Dem
MP had broken from their party line,
Labour MPs were split ahead of Thurs-
day’s poll: 130 declared for no to AV, to
86 in favour. Lord Kinnock, the former
Labour leader and still a good judge
of party mood, claimed this division
might not be matched at grassroots
level. “Talk to the activists and they
are not split down the middle. They
are in favour of this change.”
Tom Watson, the Labour MP for
West Bromwich East, said: “I always
expected there would be a majority of
New health warning for PFI
Polly Curtis
The government’s spending watchdog
has issued its strongest health warning
to date over the use of private finance
deals to build new schools and hospi-
tals, saying ministers should urgently
find alternative ways to invest in major
infrastructure projects.
Private finance initiatives (PFIs),
whereby banks and construction
companies pay for public-sector capi-
tal projects then lease them back for a
period of up to 30 years, have become
increasingly expensive since the credit
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 15
Labour MPs voting no. Much of this is
to do with [Liberal Democrat leader
and reform champion] Nick Clegg. I
have never known an issue inside the
Labour party that is being so deter-
mined by your attitude to one man.
The wider arguments have not been
heard.”
Historically, like any other party,
Labour’s attitude to electoral reform
has been governed by self-interest. It
began to show a serious tactical inter-
est in AV during the 1929-31 Labour
government of Ramsay MacDonald.
But a bill introducing AV was aban-
doned after the formation of a national
government to meet the challenge of
the Depression.
Neither of the revisionists of the
1950s, Anthony Crosland or Hugh
Gaitskell, saw Labour’s problems in
terms of an electoral system. In the
1980s, the position started to change as
Margaret Thatcher – with the popular
support of just 43% of the population
– used enormous Commons majorities
to impose her will.
But there is a long history of Labour
leaders vacillating. Neil Kinnock inti-
mated in the 1992 general election
campaign that he might support a
royal commission into electoral re-
form. After Kinnock’s defeat, John
Smith was confronted with a report
his predecessor had commissioned,
recommending a form of AV called the
supplementary vote. Smith deferred
the issue, saying he would hold a ref-
erendum if Labour were elected.
Tony Blair set up the Jenkins com-
mission, but when it proposed a mix-
ture of 500 seats elected by AV and 150
seats filled by a top-up to make the sys-
tem more proportional, he drew back.
Even Gordon Brown’s late conversion
to AV on the eve of his election defeat
appeared as the forced product of cir-
cumstance, rather than conviction.
It is only in the past four months
that the party has had a leader who
unambiguously supports a change.
crisis and ministers should consider
slowing down the number of new
deals, the National Audit Office says.
Ongoing costs have not always pro-
vided best value for money, instead
locking the government into hugely
expensive deals for decades.
The Tories in opposition were
highly critical of PFI deals and the
coalition has announced changes to
the way deals are struck. But research
suggests that the chancellor, George
Osborne, has so far signed off more PFI
deals than were signed in any of the
previous three years.
16 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
UK news
Royal wedding gives tourism
a £2bn boost as Britain parties
Zoe Wood
Most weddings blow a hole in the
happy couple’s finances, but last
week’s royal extravaganza is predicted
to have delivered a much needed boost
to the UK’s beleaguered economy.
The tourist authority VisitBritain
predicts the wedding of Prince Wil-
liam and Kate Middleton will trigger
a tourism boom that will last several
years, eventually pulling in an extra
4m visitors and some £2bn ($3.3bn)
for the country’s coffers.
In the short term, the accountancy
firm PricewaterhouseCoopers esti-
mates the influx of wedding watchers
delivered a £107m boost to London,
as hotels, West End shops and restau-
rants picked up extra trade.
The British Retail Consortium fore-
cast that shops and pubs will benefit
by nearly £500m. With 5,500 street
parties in full swing the biggest ben-
eficiaries were the supermarkets, as
people piled their tables with sausage
rolls, coronation chicken and Victoria
sponge. Sales of Wills and Kate mer-
chandise, which ranged from mugs
and tea towels to union flag contact
lenses, were put at £26m.
Middleton’s entry into the royal
family has made her fashion’s hottest
property. High street chains Reiss and
Whistles have already seen the ben-
efits after the bride wore their clothes
in her official engagement photos.
Aside from the cost of the wedding
itself, however, some City analysts
worried that the extra day off was one
bank holiday too many for the stut-
tering economy. The Confederation
HIV patients ‘imprisoned at hospital’
Diane Taylor
HIV patients at a London hospital have
in effect been imprisoned following a
move by immigration officials to se-
cure the sexual health unit, NHS con-
sultants claim.
Hillingdon hospital in west Lon-
don treats detainees at two immigra-
tion removal centres near Heathrow
alongside other patients. The prob-
lems began when doctors refused to
treat an HIV-positive detainee because
the guard to whom he was handcuffed
refused to uncuff him. An incident re-
port was sent to the medical director.
Officials from the UK Border Agency
then installed restraints on the win-
dows at the hospital’s sexual health
Hang out your flags … a souvenir of the royal day Marcelo del Pozo/Reuters
of British Industry calculates that a
bank holiday costs the economy £6bn
in lost productivity and overtime, but
the government thinks the impact will
be far less.
The day off for the Queen’s golden
jubilee in 2002 affected growth and
economists at Royal Bank of Scotland
suggested the late Easter combined
with the royal wedding could shave
between 0.1 and 0.2 percentage points
off growth in the second quarter.
Police said they made a total of 52
arrests in the capital as the festivi-
ties took place, including 13 at Char-
ing Cross station, where people were
found to have climbing equipment
and anti-monarchy placards, in addi-
tion to 21 arrests during earlier raids at
five squats in London.
Trouble flared at an unofficial street
clinic to ensure that detainees could
not escape.
HIV specialist Ben Holden said:
“The unit is now a prison for us all. Our
windows only open two inches but
UKBA have installed chunky locks on
them. We were told they would bring
removable window restraints but
these are permanent.
“No detainee has ever absconded
or attempted to abscond. As doctors
we believe that to keep immigration
detainees restrained or locked in is
discriminatory. I don’t want to be part
of a process that treats people in a less
than human way.”
An audit by the hospital revealed
that none of the detainees removed
from the UK was dispatched with a
• Pressure on George Os-
News in brief
borne to rethink his North
Sea tax reforms increased
with a report from leading ac-
countancy experts criticising
the changes. The report, com-
missioned by the Treasury
select committee, says that
the surprise increase in tax
to 32% from 20% on offshore
drilling profits introduced in
the March budget will dam-
age UK competitiveness.
• The government’s of-
ficial spending watchdog
has rejected the accounts of
the body set up to replace
the Child Support Agency
after discovering millions
of pounds of wrongly made
payments and questioning a
£3.69bn ($6.2bn) backlog in
uncollected debts.
• The committee at St An-
drews golf club has written
to its 2,000 male members
recommending that it admit
women. The club, founded
party in Glasgow organised through in 1843, says that under the
social networking websites. Strath- new Equality Act it could face
clyde police said 21 arrests were made prosecution for failing to al-
in Kelvingrove Park, for a variety of low women to join.
offences mostly related to disorderly
behaviour and drunkenness. • The cost of building two
Chief Superintendent Bernard Hig- aircraft carriers for the Royal
gins said: “We made a number of ar- Navy has soared again and
rests at the time and we will now study could reach £7bn. The carriers
CCTV footage and make further arrests were estimated to cost less
if appropriate. The level of drunken- than £4bn when they were
ness was completely unacceptable.” announced in 2007.
Four people were arrested the night
before the wedding, three in London • More than half of the 650
and one in Cambridgeshire, for con- sessions at the London 2012
spiracy to cause a public nuisance and Olympics are already over-
breach of the peace. One of them, Chris subscribed at the end of the
Knight, was planning to behead an ef- first round of ticket sales. The
figy of Prince Andrew with a theatrical opening ceremony, for which
guillotine, in what his friends said was tickets range from £20.12 to
a piece of street theatre. £2,012, was the most popular
event and was more than 10
times oversubscribed.
• Ministers have admitted
they are failing to collect data
on the number of people who
three-month supply of antiretroviral claim or are refused asylum
drugs (in accordance with British HIV on the basis of their sexuality,
Association/National Aids Trust guide- despite a government prom-
lines) because often doctors were not ise not to deport lesbians and
notified prior to their removal. The gay men at risk of persecu-
Border Agency frequently cancelled tion.
appointments and some HIV-positive
patients were removed before they • Addiction charities are
were seen at the hospital. reporting a sharp rise in the
The UK Border Agency said: “ The number of young people who
welfare of detainees is important but say they are worried about
this must always be balanced with the their use of ketamine. Addac-
security of the detainees and the pub- tion, one of the UK’s largest
lic.” A spokesman for the Hillingdon charities helping people
hospitals NHS foundation trust said: with drug problems, says it
“We are continuing to negotiate an believes a surge in the drug’s
agreement with the agency that will popularity is down to people
offer a solution that allows us to treat switching from mephedrone
all our patients with respect.” after it was made illegal.
 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 17

Finance

Apple’s iPad factories ‘exploit workers’

Chinese plants enforce
excessive hours for
little pay, says report
Gethin Chamberlain Observer

The spate of suicides made headlines

around the world. Last May, seven
young Chinese workers producing
Apple iPads for consumers across the
globe took their own lives, prompting
an investigation into working condi-
tions at the Foxconn factory in Shen-
zhen, southern China.
Nine Chinese sociologists wrote an
open letter to the media calling for an
end to restrictive work practices that
they condemned as “a model where
fundamental human dignity is sacri-
ficed for development”.
One year on, an investigation by
two NGOs reveals that many workers
making iPhones and iPads for eager
world markets are exploited and liv-
ing a dismal life.
In Shenzhen and Chengdu, a joint
Foxconn workforce of 500,000 is
providing the labour that, in the first
quarter of 2011, contributed to Apple
Inc’s net profit of $6bn. Interviews
with mainly migrant employees and
managers have laid bare a Dickensian
world of work that would be consid-
ered shocking in the west.
The Centre for Research on Multi-
national Corporations and the human
rights group Students and Scholars
Against Corporate Misbehaviour
(Sacom) have a track record in inves-
tigating the human cost of China’s
economic boom. The interviews they
conducted in Shenzhen and Chengdu
are at times heart-rending.
“Sometimes my roommates cry
when they arrive in the dormitory
after a long day,” one 19-year-old girl
told investigators. “It’s difficult to
adapt to this work and hard to be away
from your family.”
Li (not her real name) arrived a few
months ago to join the rapidly grow-
ing workforce at the newest factory
opened by Foxconn, which is Apple’s
major supplier. She was attracted,
like many of her colleagues, by gov-
ernment adverts promising work and
good pay.
Apple is publicly committed to
good employment practice. Its sup-
plier code of conduct demands that
employees are treated with respect
and dignity. But Li claims that her ex-
perience has been one of long hours
and draconian rules for a basic daily
wage of as little as $8.70. Like her,
many Foxconn workers manage to go
home only once a year.
For the first few days at the factory,
Dismal life … a worker inspects motherboards at the Foxconn plant in Shenzen Voishmel/Getty Images
Li said that she and her colleagues –
most seem to be aged 18-20 – were
put through military drills by former
soldiers: “They made us do marching
and standing still and walking. It was
very boring.”
The dormitories where she and
most others live offer little comfort.
Up to 24 people can share one room
and the rules are strict, even prohibit-
ing the use of a kettle or a hairdryer.
Many workers claimed that they
were regularly required to work far in
excess of the 36 hours of overtime a
month that Chinese law permits. At
Chengdu it was claimed that between
60 and 80 hours of overtime a month
was normal.
The rule that employees should
have one day off in seven is often
flouted, some claimed. Others said
they had to work through their lunch
Microsoft falls behind rival
Microsoft’s quarterly profits and
revenues were eclipsed for the
first time in 20 years by Apple as a
slowdown in the PC business and
continuing huge losses in its search
division held it back.
Though the company reported
net income up 30% to $5.2bn from
$4bn, and revenues up 13% to
$16.4bn from $14.5bn, both were
smaller than figures released by
Apple showing $6bn profits on
revenues of $24.7bn.
breaks to make up missed targets.
Some said they were forbidden to
speak to each other.
Foxconn, a Fortune 500 company,
does not deny it breaks Chinese over-
time laws, but claims that all overtime
is voluntary.
A typical working day in Chengdu
means getting up at 6.30am, catch-
ing a bus to the factory at 7.10am and
attending a compulsory – but unpaid
– assembly at 8.10am, before start-
ing work at 8.30am. Shifts, including
overtime and breaks, end at 8.30pm.
Night shifts follow a similar pattern;
with demand for the iPad2 outstrip-
ping supply in many countries, this is
a round-the-clock operation. Demand
for the first iPad was so intense that
workers claim they had to put in a
seven-day week.
“We only had a rest day every 13
Microsoft overtook Apple in
profits in 1991, and revenues in
1995. But since the launch of the
iPhone in 2007, and then the iPad in
2010, Apple has grown rapidly, and
its market capitalisation overtook
Microsoft’s in May 2010.
Analysts believe that the iPad
and other tablets using Google’s
Android software are eating into
Microsoft’s PC business, and sales
of its Windows Phone have been
unimpressive. Charles Arthur
days,” claimed one. “And there was
no overtime premium for weekends.
Working for 12 hours a day really made
me exhausted.”
Sacom says the company’s initial
response to the suicides was to bring
in monks to exorcise evil spirits. The
chief executive later suggested work-
ers were committing suicide to se-
cure large compensation payments
for their families. Workers were even
asked to sign a document promising
not to commit suicide and pledging
that if they did their families would
not claim more compensation than
the legal minimum.
Eventually, the company raised
wages at Shenzhen, though it is cur-
rently switching much of its produc-
tion to Chengdu, where eventually it
expects to employ 200,000 people.
There are about 400,000 workers at
Shenzhen, a number expected to drop
to around 300,000.
While Apple says it expects high
standards from suppliers, its own
audit reports suggest that fewer than
one in three supplier factories are
obeying the rules on working hours.
The audits also show that 30% broke
rules on wages and benefits, while
24% were in breach of strict rules on
involuntary labour.
In a statement, Apple said: “Apple
is committed to ensuring the high-
est standards of social responsibility
throughout our supply base. Apple
requires suppliers to commit to our
comprehensive supplier code.”
18 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
Finance
EU rate rise portends more pain
Central bank president
insists priority lies in
quashing inflation
Phillip Inman
Europe’s north-south divide has wors-
ened as figures show Spain and Greece
faltering, with rising unemployment
and plummeting retail sales. Mean-
while, the European Central Bank
(ECB) is preparing to raise interest
rates on the back of a booming Ger-
man economy.
Spain’s unemployment rate jumped
to a European record of 21.3% in March
while Greece’s retail sales dropped
more than 10% year-on-year as both
countries demonstrated the difficul-
ties of spurring economic growth
while implementing severe public
spending cuts.
Almost 5 million people are out
of work in Spain, according to offi-
cial statistics, despite efforts by the
socialist-led government to kick-start
the economy and generate jobs. Youth
unemployment remains above 40%.
The gloom in Madrid was reinforced
by retail sales data for March, which
showed the country’s sharpest decline
for more than two years.
Despite the problems facing Spain,
Greece and other troubled eurozone
nations, the ECB is expected to raise
interest rates, possibly as early as this
week, after inflation climbed to 2.8%.
The inflation figure, published by Eu-
rostat, the EU statistics agency, was up
from 2.7% in March.
The central bank president, Jean-
Claude Trichet, said last week policy-
Opposition grows to Australian carbon tax
Marie-Morgane Le Moël
Le Monde
In Australia the carbon tax tabled by
the Labor government is struggling to
gain acceptance. Every week sees an-
other industrial pressure group come
out against the bill.
There have been demonstrations all
over the country, led by “shock jock”
radio broadcasters, focusing on the
prime minister, Julia Gillard. Her poll
ratings have dropped steadily since
the bill was launched in February.
The Australian government has
been trying to step up measures to
combat greenhouse gas emissions
since 2007. In terms of overall volume,
Australia is still only a limited source
of pollution, but it has one of the
Going rate … the ECB’s Jean-Claude Trichet Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters
makers must quash inflation expecta-
tions to avert the risk of wage rises lead-
ing to even higher prices, adding: “We
have risks of second-round effects.”
Inflation has remained above the
ECB’s goal of just under 2% largely
owing to higher oil and food prices. Al-
though the bank expects prices to ease
next year, it has been worried enough
to start raising rates from record lows,
increasing them by 0.25 percentage
points this month to 1.25% in order to
combat inflationary pressures. Econ-
omists predict several more such in-
creases by the year’s end.
Trichet is at odds with his counter-
parts in the US and Britain, who have
consistently argued the recovery
needs to be firmly entrenched before
implementing rate rises. A meeting of
highest levels of per capita CO2 emis-
sions in the world. Coal generates more
than three-quarters of its energy.
An initial scheme to set up an
emissions market foundered in 2009
after being thrown out by parliament,
where the Greens refused to support
it. Two years later the government
seems to have won them over to its
plan to tax all CO2 emissions from
mid-2012 onwards.
For the first three to five years the
price will be fixed, then the carbon tax
will be converted into a cap-and-trade
mechanism. The main sectors targeted
by the tax are energy, mining and trans-
port. By 2020 Canberra aims to have cut
emissions by 5% on 2000 levels.
But a significant share of public opin-
ion is opposed to the tax. The Liberal
• Federal Reserve chairman
Finance in brief
Ben Bernanke used his his-
toric first press conference
to warn that the US deficit
is “not sustainable” and tell
political leaders they must
address it “as quickly and ef-
fectively as they can”. Speak-
ing at what was the first-ever
press conference on interest
rate policy to be given by
a Fed chairman, Bernanke
confirmed that the US will
keep interest rates low and
continue its huge programme
of buying back government
bonds in order to keep the
fragile economic recovery
on track.
• Standard & Poor’s lowered
its outlook for Japan’s credit
rating to negative amid con-
cern that finances will dete-
riorate further as it rebuilds.
The change from a stable out-
look means Japan’s sovereign
debt rating could be down-
graded, which might increase
the government’s borrowing
the Bank of England’s monetary policy costs. Data last week showed
committee this week was expected to Japan’s factory production
keep rates on hold at 0.5%, despite and consumer spending both
inflation reaching 4% and three mem- suffered record falls in March
bers of the nine-strong committee vot- as the earthquake, tsunami
ing for a rise last time. and nuclear disasters sent the
Trichet infamously refused to cut halting economic recovery
interest rates in line with the Federal into reverse.
Reserve ahead of the banking crisis
before being forced to cut radically • Sony warned that the
following Lehman Brothers’ collapse names, addresses and other
in September 2008. personal data of about 77
The EU’s broad economic senti- million people with accounts
ment indicator fell significantly, by 2.3 on its PlayStation Network
points to 105.1, for the 27-member EU, have been stolen, apologising
weighed down by a sharp drop in Brit- for the incident. After that
ain. The index fell more moderately announcement, Sony also
by 1.1 points to 106.2 for the eurozone, said that an extra 25 million
propped up by Germany, France and customers who played games
the Netherlands. on its Sony Online Entertain-
ment PC games network have
had their personal details
stolen. The hacks meant an
“illegal and unauthorised
person” had access to names,
addresses, email address,
opposition’s leader, Tony Abbott, has birthdates, usernames, pass-
toured the country in protest against words, logins, security ques-
“the new tax”. People’s main fear is tions and more.
that electricity prices will go up.
“The energy resources sector is do-
ing fine, but for the average Australian Foreign exchanges
things are not so easy. Pensioners will
still get the same pension but bigger Sterling rates (at close)
bills,” said Chris Johnson, President 2 May 25 Apr
of the Consumers and Taxpayers As- Australia 1.52 1.53
Canada 1.58 1.57
sociation, which is campaigning hard
Denmark 8.37 8.43
against the tax.
Euro 1.12 1.14
The government seems to be taking
Hong Kong 12.97 12.79
a big risk. It may well be dangerous to Japan 135.42 134.95
take on the mining industry, which New Zealand 2.06 2.06
has enjoyed substantial growth since Norway 8.72 8.83
the early 2000s. Only last year plans to Singapore 2.04 2.03
tax mining profits played a large part Sweden 10.00 10.03
in bringing down the then prime min- Switzerland 1.44 1.45
ister, Kevin Rudd. USA 1.67 1.64

Comment&Debate
Barack
L
ast week, when Barack Obama released his
birth certificate to silence those who had
long questioned his American identity, he
Obama explained that he did not normally respond
to such nonsense because “you know, I’ve
got other things to do”. Now we know that
and the those “other things” included meticulous
planning for an event that could well transform his presi-
dency, reshaping both the way he is seen and the foreign
Lilliputians policy he pursues.
That Obama was able to announce the death of Osama
bin Laden so soon after he had crushed the absurd
charge that he was a foreign (maybe Kenyan, maybe
Indonesian, maybe both!) usurper of the White House
felt oddly appropriate. For the success of the operation
Jonathan Freedland
in Abbottabad now makes Obama’s rivals look small in-
deed, Lilliputians chasing wild fantasies while Gulliver
The US president has deals with the things that matter. He has rendered even
more laughable Donald Trump’s declaration that “I feel
proved himself the kind proud of myself” for flushing out the proof of Obama’s
of macho leader that his Hawaiian birth. The president has shown what a true
achievement looks like.
country craves. And his For, like it or not, no trophy mattered more to Ameri-
rivals cannot question can public opinion. As the perpetrator of the most lethal
terrorist attack on US soil, Bin Laden was a national hate
his patriotism now figure, loathed far more viscerally than, say, Saddam
Hussein. That’s why his death brought spontaneous mid-
night crowds to Times Square and Pennsylvania Avenue
– a response that never greeted the capture of Saddam.
One US commentator described last Sunday night as feel-
ing like VE Day. Obama’s role in slaying the dragon may
not make him a national hero, but it will take a special
kind of stupidity for Republicans to question his patriot-
ism now.
The killing in Pakistan will bury another criticism,
rarely articulated explicitly: the suggestion that Obama
was somehow insufficiently tough, insufficiently macho,
to be America’s commander-in-chief. It was there in the
mockery of his taste for “arugula”, the repeated descrip-
tions of him as “professorial”. A former speechwriter
for Mario Cuomo, the hardball ex-governor of New York,
once told me: “There is a subtext of male violence that
runs through American politics.” He reckoned male vot-
ers especially want to believe the president could take
a guy out if needed, that he is capable of aggression.
This partly explains the rapturous response that greeted
Obama’s merciless slapdown of Trump during his stand-
up at the White House correspondents’ dinner last

Like it or not,
no trophy mattered
more to American
public opinion
than the body of

Osama bin Laden
Daniel Pudles
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 19
Saturday night. Americans need to know their president
has steel. Crude though it may be, Obama just passed
that test with flying colours of red, white and blue.
He did it, though, his own way. The tenor of his tel-
evised announcement was revealing. Yes, he was keen
to take full credit: speaking of his own involvement and
decision-making over several long months, lest anyone
think this was the work of underlings or a drone that
got lucky. But he avoided the crass cowboy talk that was
a hallmark of the previous administration: the official
statement of Saddam’s capture began with the words
“We got him”. Obama’s style was, by contrast, measured
and steady, recalling 9/11 and speaking movingly of the
images of “that September day” that the world did not
see, starting with “The empty seat at the dinner table”.
From now on Obama will be viewed slightly differ-
ently at home and abroad, his coolness understood to be
unflappable and poker-faced, rather than chilly and pro-
fessorial. One former foreign minister who has seen the
president up close believes that Bin Laden’s scalp will
lead other world leaders to conclude that, to paraphrase
Teddy Roosevelt, “Obama may speak softly – but he car-
ries a big stick”. Expect the comparisons with Jimmy
Carter – whose own raid to rescue US hostages in Tehran
famously failed – to dry up pretty quickly.
All this augurs well for Obama’s re-election prospects
in 2012, though of course 18 months is a long time in any-
body’s politics. If there should be another spectacular
attack on a US target, conducted to avenge Bin Laden’s
death, then the current euphoria will melt away. Besides,
next year’s campaign is likely to hinge on the economy
rather than security. But for now at least, the killing of
the world’s most wanted man presents the president
O
with an important opportunity.
bama’s greatest non-domestic headache
remains the war in Afghanistan. One
well-informed source says that, until last
Sunday, Obama was “hemmed in”, espe-
cially by a military brass reluctant to walk
away with anything that did not look
like victory. The immediate argument in
Washington centred on the number of troops scheduled
for withdrawal starting 1 July, the military speaking only
of a “symbolic” figure, the White House wanting more.
In that dispute, Obama’s hand is now strengthened,
with public opinion likely to shift decisively his way.
That’s because, for a lot of Americans, the purpose of the
US war in Afghanistan remains inseparably linked to its
initial cause: 9/11. Now that the arch-perpetrator of that
crime has been removed, why, many Americans will ask,
do we need to stay? This may not fit with the highfalutin
logic of the geopolitics crowd, but that is how much of
US public opinion will see it.
Obama could, however, do more than simply insist on
greater numbers of US troops coming home. He could
use Bin Laden’s death to shift towards a full exit strategy,
seeking what is surely the only credible solution: a peace
settlement that holds both inside Afghanistan, neces-
sarily including the Taliban, and outside, necessarily
including Pakistan, whose own role in harbouring Bin
Laden – unwitting or not – will cause many Americans to
wonder if that country is actually friend or foe in the war
against al-Qaida.
There are risks for Obama. If he does not act quickly,
he could find public opinion gets ahead of him – as impa-
tience over the decade-long Afghan war turns into impa-
tience with the president for not winding it down.
For now, though, he has scored a valuable victory, one
that lifts his own standing but also arrests the gloomy
mood that has gripped Americans who are convinced
that US power is on the slide. He has done in two years
what his predecessor failed to do in eight. But Bush’s
“Mission Accomplished” banner should stay in the
White House basement: al-Qaida remains, the war in Af-
ghanistan is not over, and there is still much work to do.
20 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11

Comment&Debate

Women are
A
cleaner sums up her life to the French
journalist Florence Aubenas, who went
undercover to explore the “unmaking of
I don’t think it’s an accident that it is women journal-
ists who have pursued Orwell’s lead in the last 15 years;
it’s a reflection of how this low-paid part of the labour

bullied by the French working class” and the reces-

sion: “The harder he makes us work, the
shittier we feel. The shittier we feel, the
market has been feminised. It’s the shadow side of the
transformation of women’s employment opportunities
over the last 30 years; for every Aubenas, Ehrenreich and

work woes more we let ourselves get ground down.”

Madeleine Bunting
A French bestseller
reveals how the flexible
employment market
damages lives
The result, The Night Cleaner, has been a bestseller in
France and is now being published in Britain, an appro-
priate memorial for 1 May, International Workers’ Day, a
reminder of forgotten traditions.
It tells its tale in gritty detail. The churn of employ-
ment agencies with their cheerful euphemisms – they
even talk of solidarity – and endless training courses for
jobs that the agencies and the trainees know don’t exist.
It’s a charade in which applicants have to think up ways
to convince prospective employers of their motivation
for the most menial of cleaning jobs. The lesson that
Aubenas, a successful Paris-based journalist, is taught
again and again is that she is one of hundreds, even thou-
sands, chasing every opportunity: she is surplus.
“Permanent” jobs are like gold dust in such low-paid,
low-skill agency work. For a woman in her late 40s with
no qualifications, as Aubenas claimed to be, she discov-
ered there weren’t even jobs in any traditional sense,
there was work sliced into small portions – a couple of
hours here, an hour there.
To cobble together a wage of around €700 ($1,000) a
month required several different jobs often long jour-
neys apart. Bus timetables didn’t accommodate early
morning or late evening cleaning shifts, so she had to
rely on lifts and borrowed cars. The precarious timeta-
ble could collapse at any moment: “I suddenly became
aware of how fragile my way of life is and feel that I’m at
the mercy of everything and everybody,” she writes, as
the stress was evidently getting to her – despite knowing
that her make-believe life as a cleaner was finite.
But perhaps the most disturbing incident was when
Aubenas was cleaning an office as the employees left; a
couple stayed behind to make out. They were only a few
metres from where Aubenas was vacuuming but they
behaved as if she was an inanimate object, an extension
of her vacuum. She had become invisible.
The style of writing and the quiet horror owe much
to George Orwell, the father of this kind of undercover
journalism. Aubenas is also following in the footsteps of
other women journalists such as Barbara Ehrenreich and
Polly Toynbee, who also both went undercover.
Toynbee, there have been thousands of women trapped
in dead-end jobs. We celebrate the former and deter-
minedly avert our eyes from the latter.
The contrast with Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier is
instructive. There are interesting similarities – dirt and
cleanliness feature prominently in both books. Orwell
was shocking by the physical deprivations of the living
and working conditions in mining towns. He challenges
the middle-class complacency and prejudice that toler-
ated such suffering. His book is a morally charged argu-
ment: it should not be like this.
The bleakness in The Night Cleaner is less about mate-
rial deprivation than about the total absence of social af-
firmation in these working lives. They are cajoled, ticked
off, hectored, humiliated and bullied by a sequence of
advisers, trainers, bosses and team leaders. In all these
work relationships they cease to be people, simply
units of labour to be bought and sold; it’s a cruel deper-
sonalisation in a culture that ceaselessly promotes the
individual personality. It’s this isolation and emotional
deprivation that is the hardest to imagine – and which no
undercover journalist can fully convey after experienc-
ing it for only a few months. How does it grind down the
human capacities for hope, trust and wellbeing?
This is surely what lies behind the disturbing finding
that between 1992 and 2006 the number of women suf-
fering job strain (a measure of stress) tripled to 25% in
the UK, according to a British Academy report summaris-
ing a decade of research. Women have borne the brunt of
flexible labour markets. Given that all the factors known
to increase stress such as job insecurity and work inten-
sification have shot up during the recession, that figure is
likely to be even higher now.
For over a generation, no political party has had any-
thing much to say about bad jobs. They have focused
on education and social mobility as an implicit bargain
– wanting to offer a tiny number a passport out of the
predicament faced by their parents and contemporaries.
Small rises in living standards have been the only con-
solation for working lives that numb and scar people’s
sense of dignity and self; now even that promise has
run out.

T
You just can’t o see the deep roots of hyper-consumerism
in our lives, take the average British “seri-
ous” paper. In elegantly typeset prose,
stifle novelty we enjoy its cosmopolitan and concerned
world-view: all points are weighed and con-
sidered. Yet inserted into these spaces are
messages from a much narrower domain. I
Pat Kane
did a basic ad count on the Guardian over a recent week.
Consumer electronics of all kinds tops the list; next come
We must save the Earth holidays, financial services, furniture and cars.
The story this tells about our consumer economy
without denying our is stark: it’s about discarding familiar arrangements of
need for excitement metal, fabric and plastic and buying new ones. It’s about
stretching towards the financial liquidity needed to
attain or house the stuff, and softening the blow with
brief overseas escapes from the treadmill of acquisition.
If you were a climate crisis guru looking for evidence that
big business understands the environmental urgency of
reducing material consumption ... well, you wouldn’t
look here. It’s business very much as usual.
The recently deposed head of the UK Sustainable
Development Commission, Tim Jackson, has tried to
capture the green critique of consumer society in a
one-liner: “We spend money we don’t have, on things
we don’t need, to make impressions that don’t last, on
people we don’t care about.” Among many activists in
the last few years, great efforts have been made to con-
nect the psychological discontents of status consump-
tion to the acute requirement for low-carbon economies.
In their argument, not only do your vanity baubles
make you much less happy than the strength of your re-
lationships or the sense of purpose in your life, but your
frantic pursuit of them is crisping the planet. But there is
still something deeply attractive about these very objects
and services that have amplified our natures. One of the
push-backs to eco-austerity in the developed west will
always come from our sheer delight in the intricate inno-
vations that our fellow humans serve up to us.
A green politics has to be thinking passionately about
zones of creativity and innovation for human beings, as
well as the constraints and duties of low-carbon living.
Otherwise the transformative dimension of our own na-
ture will end up repressed and frustrated.
No one is suggesting we forgo interactivity, domestic
comfort or mobility. But might the coming citizenry of
“playful makers” provide new, collaborative opportuni-
ties for those very same device hawkers and mortgage
facilitators that one finds in the average Sunday paper?
Cultivating such an adaptive, practical exuberance
could answer both our human itch for excited engage-
ment and the call of the damaged Earth. Both are entirely
natural, after all.

Comment&Debate
Degrees:
L
ike an addict back on the smack, the UK is
hooked on hope once more, but this time
the bubble is in higher education rather
the new than housing. The provocative idea that ris-
ing fees are feeding an overvaluation of the
investment – a bubble waiting to pop – has
bubble? been floated in the US by Peter Thiel, the
venture capitalist whose backing for Facebook made the
social network happen.
His description of education as a “classic bubble”
makes uncomfortable reading as British universities rush
to charge £9,000 a year ($15,000). A bubble, Thiel says,
Jeevan Vasagar
must be overpriced and there must be an intense belief
in it. That belief has enabled both the University of East
As in the housing boom, London and Cambridge to charge the same fee next year,
despite the fact that a recent university guide ranked
cheap money is chasing the former fifth from bottom for graduate job prospects
overpriced education while Cambridge was third from the top. That could be
the makings of a new sub-prime crisis – cheap money
assets. The challenge being pumped into paying for an overpriced asset. And
is to avoid poor value in this case it’s government money that is paying tui-
tion fees upfront. The challenge for one of the record
numbers applying for a university place is how to avoid
ending up with a degree that offers poor value.
Start with this question – is it worth getting a degree at
all? In some cases, university can actually depress your
earnings. Research by Ian Walker at Lancaster University
finds that a male graduate with a poor arts degree can
expect to earn less over his lifetime than a man going
straight into employment after A-levels. That’s not the
case for a good arts degree, of course, still less one that
leads to a profession. Walker finds that a law, economics
or management graduate can expect to earn $50,000 a
year more on average than a school-leaver.
There’s a choice to be made here. Like house buyers,
prospective students need to decide what they’re going
to university for. In the housing boom, the question “Is
this a place I want to live in?” got subsumed in the idea
that housing was an investment – “Will this place be a
foothold on the ladder?” If you’re picking an institu-
tion, the question is whether your main goal is pursuit
of knowledge or getting away from the family home
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 21
Comment is free...
Have your own say
Steve Bell’s blog
Read the comments that were inspired by
this week’s editorial cartoon
http://bit.ly/kwTV4a ≥
Freedom gets closer
The popular revolutions across the Arab
world have given Palestinians a new sense
of hope
http://bit.ly/lfyUyC ≥
Mad accounting
By not having to account for emissions
caused by imported goods, rich nations are
living in Alice’s wonderland
http://bit.ly/kJOEWd ≥
and spending three years partying. Hedonism is a per-
fectly respectable goal, and a crucial rite of passage for
thousands of young people. But it might not involve the
institution or degree you’d choose if you want to send a
message about your employability.
That’s not simply a matter of a traditional subject at
an old university. Some vocational degrees, in subjects
like computer gaming, are prized by recruiters. After all,
by the time you’ve trained an Oxford PPE graduate in
fashion retail they might be too old to be cutting edge.
What can the government do? Well, it could abolish
the cap on fees; without a ceiling you’d get less of the
bunching that’s distorting the market. But that might
only allow the bubble to inflate to new heights.
If the government is serious about bringing prices
down, that will require a more radical shake-up of
universities. The main barrier to change is “number con-
trol”, the quota of undergraduate places each university
is allowed to offer every autumn. It allows the govern-
ment to plan, but stifles growth at good universities,
while poorly performing universities aren’t punished
because they still get their ration.
A new model called “core and margin” would allow
universities a smaller core allocation, but they would
have to bid for extra marginal places if they wanted to
take on more students that year. The government would
look at the repayment record of a university’s graduates
before accepting bids.
So universities where fewer graduates get good jobs
would have to trim prices. Stung by the headlines over
fees, the government is likely to limit the margin to no
more than 10% of places.
But if we’re going to put pressure on universities
that are charging high prices for poor-quality courses,
that reform doesn’t go far enough. With a progressive
loan system in place, with scholarship schemes, and
above all with a determined effort to encourage the
poor to apply, there’s no reason why that 10% could not
become 100%.
Having come this far down the market road, it might
now be that competition red in tooth and claw is the only
means of bursting the university bubble.
22 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
theguardianweekly
Osama bin Laden
Laying ghosts to rest
Gesturing at the dazed and bloodied survivors
sitting crumpled in the road, a bystander asked:
“How can someone think of doing this kind
of thing?” In the two decades that followed
the car bomb attacks on the US embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the answer to that
question was to become terrifyingly clear. To
the relatives of the thousands of lives he de-
stroyed, the answer was intimate. To those
elected to govern them it was a test of cred-
ibility. Osama bin Laden was the author of the
most catastrophic attack on US soil since the
second world war, and for those who gathered
outside the White House, in Times Square and
at Ground Zero, laughing, chanting and singing
The Star-Spangled Banner, news of his death
brought relief.
Barack Obama, the third US president to
have vowed to hunt their nemesis down, talked
repeatedly of justice being done. Anyone who
has passed a fire station in New York and seen
the memorial plaques to the firefighters who
died on 11 September 2001 cannot fail to ap-
preciate the deep scar America still bears.
Vengeance was theirs.
But not theirs alone. Buried in this final
reckoning is that fact that, in Bin Laden’s war
against the US, countless more Muslims paid
with their lives than Americans, Britons, Aus-
tralians or Spaniards did. Thousands of Iraqi
Shias, Pakistanis, Yemenis and Jordanians also
lost their lives as a result of an ideology that
cast any Muslim who did not embrace the true
Sri Lanka
No-inquiry zone
When Richard Goldstone, the judge who
headed a UN fact-finding mission to Gaza,
partially recanted in March, the saga was used
as Exhibit A in the case against the UN. The
organisation, it was claimed, was so biased
against Israel that it lacked the moral author-
ity to investigate it. Where was the Goldstone
report about Sri Lanka, some asked?
A UN panel has just produced such a report
about the carnage among civilians that took
place two years ago when government forces
crushed the Tamil Tigers. It is as hard-hitting
as anything Goldstone produced, and there-
fore is just as likely to be shelved. The point is
that truth and accountability, let alone interna-
tional justice, are not divisible. One country’s
ability to bury the evidence of war crimes en-
dangers how civilians are treated in all other
conflicts. A single failure of international jus-
tice is also a collective one.
That there is credible evidence that gov-
ernment soldiers targeted civilians, shelled
hospitals and attacked aid workers in the final
months of the war against the Tamil Tigers is
path as a traitor – worse still, an apostate. The
result of this fratricidal carnage is that al-Qaida
has now lost what fatal attraction it once held
for anti-imperialists. There is no more potent
sign of the demise of al-Qaida’s brand of revolt
than the Arab spring, in which one dictatorship
after another has tottered and fallen, out of a
yearning to end tyranny. The fight for democ-
racy, not a caliphate, has begun to redeem dec-
ades of lost honour and dignity. No shockwave
swept through the Arab world as news of Bin
Laden’s death spread, and that is perhaps the
most fitting epitaph.
In the end, it all now comes down to one
man: Mr Obama. On 11 September 2001 he was
an obscure senator who reacted to the attacks
on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre
by talking of the need to raise the hopes of
embittered children across the globe. Almost
a decade further on, the softest touch, in Dick
Cheney’s insulting view, has become the man
who succeeded in hunting his quarry down.
The irony will not be lost on Republicans who
claim that America is now less safe under a
Democrat president. There will undoubtedly
be an al-Qaida response to their leader’s death,
and there is no shortage of evidence that plots
are in the pipeline.
A terrible life that brought misery to thou-
sands is now over. Ending the legacy of that
conflict will require all of Mr Obama’s earliest
and truest instincts. He now has the authority
to carry them out.
indisputable. That the Tigers used civilians as
human shields and shot those attempting to
flee the carnage at point-blank range is equally
true. Tens of thousands died as a result of these
twin brutalities.
Two years on, the goal has to be to establish
an independent inquiry into these events. The
Sri Lankan government has consistently op-
posed the UN. It has established two ad hoc
bodies, but no one has been held account-
able. Its supporters claim that anything more
trenchant would endanger the peace. All of
these arguments are self-serving.
That leaves the UN itself. The secretary
general, Ban Ki-moon, claims he lacks the
authority to order an inquiry into the mass
killings without the consent of the Sri Lankan
government, which is not a member of the
international criminal court, or a decision by
an appropriate international forum of mem-
ber states. Human Rights Watch is right to
disagree. Having fought to establish the panel,
the UN secretary general has a responsibility
to finish what he started.
5 May 1865
Encyclical on
celibacy ‘rubbish’
A married Pope would command
far more confidence than a celibate
one, says the “Church of England
Newspaper” in a leading article.
After referring to a new encycli-
cal which, it says, “is kind enough
to refrain from criticising marriage
but calls itself Holy Virginity,” and
which lists the good works done
by celibates and remarks that such
prodigious activity would be ren-
dered practically impossible by
solicitude for the home and family
cares, the newspaper comments:
“Now this is palpable rubbish: it
is correct and proper to feel sorry
for the Pope because he has been
deprived of the experience of a
happy married life. A married Pope
would actually command far more
confidence than a celibate one,
because of the greater understand-
ing he would acquire.
“This fear of sex, which has
always been an element in Roman
Catholicism, is a curious phenom-
enon and difficult to explain. It is
permissible to wonder, however,
whether the majority of Roman
priests and nuns would fully en-
dorse the principle of celibacy if
they had the opportunity of do-
ing otherwise. Most of them are
whisked into their seminaries and
convents at an age when they have
not had sufficient experience of life
to know what they are doing. By
the time they realise the truth they
are trained for one profession and
could not easily abandon it to enter
another.
“Not only do they sacrifice
their own usefulness but also the
confidence of the public: for the
plain fact of the matter is that
people – not altogether unjustly –
are suspicious of men who live in
enforced celibacy without necessar-
ily having a vocation for it.”
Moral welfare’s wider field
Sir Hugh Lucas-Tooth, Under-
Secretary of State, Home Office,
told delegates to the annual meet-
ing of the Church Army in Central
hall, Westminster, yesterday: “I
wish we had some more attractive
name than ‘moral welfare worker’
in England, since to many people
it still denotes a sort of spinsterly,
condescending approach.”
Sir Hugh said it was right that the
idea of moral welfare had gradually
widened from concern with the par-
ticular problem of so-called “fallen
women” to a wide field of causes
which might lead to their downfall.
archive.guardian.co.uk ≥

Reply
Women as peacemakers
In her article, Mariella Frostrup asks
“Local groups are best placed to
mediate in civil war, so why aren’t
we listening to them?” (Let women
lead way to peace, 15 April). This and
the other questions she asks in the
body of the article are more pressing
when we look at the resolution 1325
that the UN security council passed
unanimously in October 2000 and its
companion resolutions 1820, 1888
and 1889.
These resolutions are the culmi-
nation of several decades of growing
realisation of the dire consequences
paid by women and girls in violent
conflicts. They are the result of ac-
tive involvement and advocacy by
women’s organisations for recogni-
tion of the diverse roles that women
play both in conflict resolution and
building peace. Progressive media
such as the Guardian must take a
more active part in ensuring that the
most basic rights to life, safety and
participation of 50% of the world
population do not continue to be
ignored.
Thank you for publishing Fros-
trup’s article. I would urge you to
consider undertaking special cover-
age of these issues on a regular basis.
Bruna Nota
Toronto, Canada
The rise of India
I cannot but agree with Steven
Pearlstein’s scepticism about India’s
ascendancy (What’s retarding India’s
growth? April 22). We visited India 10
years ago and returned for a month
in January of this year, curious to
witness for ourselves the great de-
velopments we had heard and been
told about. Unfortunately you had to
look hard to find them.
Of course the population had
grown by 20% in those 10 years,
which does not simplify the situ-
ation. But when are they going to
tackle basic problems like rubbish
collection (non-existent), toilets,
railways (the biggest rail network in
the world but all of it needs rebuild-
ing), buses etc? I had been happy at
India getting ahead but came back
rather dismayed and feeling that
its economy is bound to stagnate
if development is limited to so few
sectors.
Alexandra Tavernier
Marcq-en-Baroeul, France
• Hollow laughter from Italian grow-
ers greeted Nishika Patel’s comment
that growing olives in Rajasthan
would provide a “lucrative cash
crop” (Rajasthan seeks new harvest,
15 April). One only has to see the
thousands of hectares of abandoned
groves in Umbria and other parts of
central Italy to realise that the olive
oil industry provides meager returns
Gary Kempston
to growers. India with lower labour
costs, like Tunisia and Turkey, may
just survive but the farmers will cer-
tainly not prosper.
Olives are a long-term investment
and are under threat from geneti-
cally modified crops that mimic olive
oil. Monsanto has been applying
around the world for oil from its
soybean variety which is inno-
cently named: “Food derived from
Herbicide-tolerant, High Oleic Acid
Soybean Line MON87705”.
High levels of oleic fatty acid are
the ingredient that gives olive oil
many of its healthy properties. It is
difficult to tell what impact these
GM oils will have on olive oil but the
outlook for lower-quality olive oils
looks grim indeed.
Brian Chatterton
Montegabbione, Italy
Business as usual
My heart sank when I read Ben
Ramalingam’s article Business as
usual is not an option (8 April). The
last thing the destitute of the world
need is more research on how best to
help them.
Academic and NGO careers have
been made for decades by thousands
of people who crowd in to research
every disaster, deprivation and dis-
ease suffered by the poor. It is time
we take dusty PhD theses on devel-
opment and disaster management
off the university and NGO shelves
and decide to practise what they
have been telling us all along.
Our problem is not that we don’t
know how to respectfully assist
people in need, but rather that most
of us are in the helping game to
make our own lives satisfying and
meaningful rather than theirs.
Karin Ramachandra
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Biography, warts and all
In answer to John Sutherland’s ques-
tion: no I would rather not see Paul
Greengrass’s “big-budget biopic”
about Martin Luther King Jr (White-
wash could be required, 15 April).
People like Sir Richard Attenborough
Send letters to: Kings Place, 90 York Way,
London N1 9GU United Kingdom,
fax +44 (0)20 3353 3186 or email
weekly.letters@guardian.co.uk
are film artists, not sensationalists,
which is what Greengrass and Joseph
Lelyveld movies would be.
When Attenborough made the
film Gandhi, it was to show the
man as a person to the world, not to
delve into his private life as many
would have wanted; the director had
integrity. Why should everyone be
forced to hear what goes on behind
closed doors just to be historically
accurate? How would film directors
like Greengrass and Lelyveld feel
if someone made a movie about
their private lives and coated it with
innuendo?
Everyone knows that men and
women who have made dramatic
changes in the evolution of human-
kind have feet made of clay. But that
doesn’t mean we must dissect their
lives as though they were separate
beings.
King struggled to prove that all
men and women, regardless of skin
colour and religion, were part of
the human race. No matter what
horrible suggestions there are that
King was unfaithful to his wife and
family – which is a matter strictly for
them to deal with – what he did for
African Americans and poor people
everywhere cannot be undone by
anything trivial dug up about his
personal life.
Yasmin Wooldridge
Edenwold, Saskatchewan, Canada
• Surely there’s no question that in
biography one deals with contribu-
tions and legacy as well as demons.
Forget the demons, which are
common to all humans, and you’re
writing hagiography. Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John have already
captured that market. If reporting
the truth about Martin Luther King’s
demons and peccadilloes threatens
to sink the civil rights ship, then I
can only conclude that the ship was
never very seaworthy.
R B Fleming
Argyle, Ontario, Canada
The scourge of malaria
Annie March states that chloro-
phyll, which synthesises oxygen in
algae and plants, has a very similar
molecule to haemoglobin, which
transports oxygen in humans (Reply,
29 April).
Recent research suggests that the
malaria parasite evolved from its life
in the ocean as a unicellular plant to
a new parasitic lifestyle in human
blood, offering new ways to combat
the disease using herbicides initially
designed to kill plants. This has
important implications for human
health, since the World Health Or-
ganisation estimates that 500 mil-
lion people are infected with malaria
and 1 million die each year.
Bryan Furnass
Canberra, Australia
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 23
Please include a full postal address and a
reference to the article. We may edit letters.
To contact the editor directly
weekly.feedback@guardian.co.uk
Dingo’s kidney on display
Richard Orlando advances the
intriguing notion that we must judge
a work’s artistic merit based on its
creator’s respect for the laws of
property (Reply, 15 April). One won-
ders what Orlando might suggest
we do if it were discovered that the
Mona Lisa were painted on a stolen
canvas: toss it from the Louvre and
reclaim it to its rightful purpose of
surrounding a mass of flour, per-
haps?
Must we require the Guardian’s
art critics, on next attending a major
installation at the Tate Modern, to
request a receipt for each shrunken
head, ball bearing or dingo’s kidney
on display? Surely we can judge
whether a work of art has been
responsibly produced, but these
considerations cannot inform our
judgment of its artistic merit.
Also, briefly, R M Fransson’s odd
suggestion that quirky singers have
been displaced due to “political
correctness” brought Gary Younge’s
superb definition of that term as
meaning “whatever its opponents
want it to, so long as they don’t like
it” irresistibly to mind.
Adam Williamson
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Briefly
• In the excellent letter from my
fellow-Canadian Peter Scott (Reply,
15 April), the given name of our
current prime minister has been
assimilated to that of the leader of
the opposition, Michael Ignatieff.
The correct name of our mean-
spirited, anti-democratic, angry
and vengeful PM is Stephen (not
Michael) Harper. I hope I make my
feelings about him clear, feelings
which I share with millions of my
fellow citizens.
Donald Grayston
Vancouver, BC, Canada
• I balked at Pierre Le Hir’s state-
ment that “The name El Hierro
means ‘island of fire’” (22 April).
Hierro is Spanish for “iron”. But a
little research indicated that the
meaning of the name is not a simple
matter, and that it may be derived
from a word in the indigenous
(Berber-related) language. The
Canaries were inhabited before the
Spanish arrived in the 15th century.
Lee Hartman
Carbondale, Illinois, US
• Your archive piece on Mark Twain
(22 April) was interesting. Did the
original 1910 article really say “set
fourth”? Reminds me of my father’s
old joke: “And the Lord called on
Moses to come forth, but he came
fifth and won a toffee apple”.
Paul Barker
Auckland, New Zealand
24 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
Comment&Debate
Get your
head out of
the clouds
John Harris
If we allow our personal
data to be stored in
giant electronic centres,
we deserve what we get
A whole new
e-chapter
James Harkin
The digital revolution is
giving books and music
a beautiful new life
I
magine this: a notorious multinational is on the
lookout for new business. For the sake of argument,
let’s imagine it’s Lockheed Martin, the defence,
security and “advanced technology” corporation
that has lately been seeing to Britain’s census. From
somewhere in their R&D division comes an idea:
“personal lifestyle security services” for millions
across the planet. The wheeze is simple: sign up and hand
them your personal correspondence, financial records,
bank details, ID documents and more. They’ll have all
your stuff, and you’ll have a unique password. Just think:
more clutter shunted out of your life, leaving you to glide
through the minimalist bliss of 21st-century living.
You would have to be out of your mind. But this is the
world we are hurtling towards, although it’s not defence
conglomerates who are in charge – yet – but private tech-
nology giants. The key is cloud computing, whereby just
about anything that can be digitised is stored in remote
servers, leaving us to access it from wherever we fancy.
If you have a Gmail or Hotmail account, you’ll already be
a practised cloud user. Two years ago, David Cameron
suggested that Google and Microsoft might be involved
in the cloud-based storage of people’s NHS records; now
the UK’s Department of Health appears to have plans for
exactly that. In 2009 the worth of cloud computing was
put at $58.6bn; by 2013 it’s forecast to reach $150bn.
The new world is, of course, less a matter of clouds
than data centres: huge impersonal sheds in which serv-
ers whirr away, while millions log in and out – a turna-
bout with an intriguing circularity. Up until the late 20th
century the history of the industry was partly the mass
transfer of data from hulking mainframes to ever smaller
personal computers. Now the momentum is in the other
direction, and what you might think of as digital central-
ism is back, in a world awash with prying governments,
hackers, corporations that seem as prone to skulduggery
as they ever were – and terrorists who may well eye data
centres as mouthwatering targets.
So why aren’t we worried? Inspired branding un-
doubtedly does its work. First, there is the term “cloud
computing” itself, whose uncertain etymology is less
important than its implicit suggestion of an innovation
with all the unremarkable ordinariness of the weather.
Consider also the cuddly, kids’-TV-esque Google logo, or
the way that so much of the Microsoft brand is synony-
mous with the humanitarian work of Bill Gates. All this
chimes with a culture in which, as supposedly maverick
organisations get ever closer to government, mass trust
T
he most fetching book I’ve come across for
ages wasn’t in a traditional bookshop but
in the South London Gallery in Peckham.
It was Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, but not the
Penguin Popular Classic. This one was pale
pink and as big as a box, newly typeset, ac-
companied by 30 gorgeous illustrations and
available at a very reasonable hardback price.
Even as the big beasts of publishing struggle, and their
traditional retailers lurch from crisis to crisis, there are
reasons to be hopeful. Some publishers are doing well
by producing objects beautiful enough to be collectible.
That Vanity Fair I saw is from Four Corners Books, a tiny
east London publisher with two employees.
In music, independent stores like Rough Trade East in
London and Truck Store in Oxford have begun to reverse
the tide of closures. Shops like this sell themselves on
the expertise of their staff, but much of the trade they do
is in vinyl as beautifully produced artwork rather than in-
visible download. For some years, sales of old-fashioned
vinyl albums have been growing steadily on both sides of
the Atlantic, while CD sales fall through the floor.
This new publishing ecosystem is brimming with
exotic minutiae in the most unusual places. Even when
publishers are working online, they’re learning to pro-
duce things in different shapes and sizes. As music is
in their operations still seems to know no bounds – even
when such revelations as the iPhone’s surreptitious
tracking of its users’ movements point to slightly more
on their minds than the convenience of their customers.
While we’re here, take note: all messages on Gmail are
automatically scanned so Google knows where to place
any relevant ads – and deleted messages and accounts
“may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active
servers and may remain in our offline backup systems”.
Inevitably, hacking into stuff stored in the cloud is
a global pastime, with its own grim star system. Last
month, for instance, a very unpleasant Californian
named George Bronk was jailed for six years for rifling
through Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts belonging to
women and girls, and sending any revealing pictures
he found to all their Facebook contacts. Meanwhile the
world’s more authoritarian states know exactly what the
cloud allows them to do: in late 2009, for instance, Goog-
le’s servers were breached by Chinese hackers, presumed
to be under government orders, who tried to break into
the email accounts of human rights activists.
We all know how even democratic states tend to view
the kind of informational riches that the cloud contains.
Britain’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is in the
process of being partly reformed, but even more invasive
data-gathering powers seem in the pipeline. In the US,
whether to drop or renew provisions in the infamous
Patriot Act is currently the subject of a noisy debate – but
extensive powers to pry into data and communications
will remain. (In Canada this has fed into a fascinating
debate about public and private sectors using US-based
cloud services, and thereby leaving people open to US
surveillance.)
There is, perhaps, a worrying time lag at work here.
The computer industry came of age in the 1990s, that
giddy phase of US and European history when authori-
tarianism was assumed to be on the wane. For sure, it’s
still nice to live in a liberal democracy, but given that the
world has since moved in no end of sinister directions,
isn’t our unthinking embrace of the cloud an ill-advised
throwback? And what of the long view: looking ahead 50
years, how certain are we that the surveillance state will
not have extended its tentacles; that nasty, illiberal poli-
tics will not be all the rage; or that Google, Microsoft et al
will not have learned dangerous new tricks?
Right now, I think of protest campaigns over which
our spooks presumably keep watch, and feel a pang of
unease. This cloud, I fear, may yet turn very dark indeed.
produced for digital storage, songs are expanding be-
yond the three-minute limit. And with the ebook, the
definition of a book is becoming more fluid. Take Ama-
zon’s Kindle Singles outlet – a showcase for nonfiction
between 10,000 and 30,000 words. Publishing like this
might put paid to the padding out – or squeezing – of
ideas into the 70,000 words of a traditional book.
But it isn’t only the book that is changing its form.
Many of us don’t want to spend all our time consum-
ing random gobbets of electronic information. We’re
hungry for longer things to get our teeth into. The same
people who snack on bite-sized nuggets of online video
at work might revel in a long HBO serial like The Wire an
episode at a time in the evening. Just as novels evolved
in the 19th century to cope with newspaper serialisa-
tion, television is liberating itself from stale formats and
stretching out into more intricate kinds of story.
It’s hardly a coincidence that the concept album, that
creature of the 1970s, is making a comeback. When eve-
rything is granulated into digital bits, some bands have
discovered, lavish storytelling becomes even more im-
portant as a way of holding everything together.
The future may belong to epic feats of storytelling that
defy traditional categorisation. Rather than being writ-
ten out of history, books and music may only be getting
brand new containers, and beautiful new wrapping.

Power for the powerless
Congo’s City of Joy centre teaches women who have been victims of
sex attacks how to make their voices heard, reports Katharine Viner
J
eanne is 27, with a round face that makes
her look younger, but she struggles on to
the stage. She finds walking difficult, ever
since she was tied to a tree and gang raped
for many weeks, had surgery to repair the
damage, went home and was raped again.
She became pregnant during one of the attacks and
was forced to give birth in the company of the mili-
tias; the baby died. Jeanne finally escaped to Panzi
hospital in Bukavu, at the eastern edge of the Demo-
cratic Republic of the Congo. She has had repeated
operations on her desecrated lower body. She looks
small, shy, defeated.
But then this woman, a victim of the biggest hor-
ror story of modern times, in one of Africa’s largest
countries, steps up to the microphone and starts to
speak. “When you look at me, what do you see?” she
asks, with the bold delivery of the born orator, the
preacher, the leader. “Do you see me as an animal?
Because you are letting animals treat me like one.
You, the government, if it was your children, would
you stop it? You, you white people: if this violence
was happening in your country, would you end it?”
She speaks with the kind of fury and focus rarely
seen in western politics. Hundreds of other survi-
vors of sexual violence cheer wildly.
Jeanne (who has requested her last name be with-
held for her protection) is not the only speaker here
at the opening of City of Joy, a centre for survivors of
rape in Bukavu. There is the founder, the New York
playwright, author of The Vagina Monologues and
activist Eve Ensler. There is Barack Obama’s ambas-
sador for women and girls, a prominent congress-
woman, someone from the UN. But it is Jeanne who
steals the show. And this is the premise on which
the centre is founded: that even the most trauma-
tised and brutalised people need not be mere pas-
sive recipients of foreign aid, but can in fact become
political leaders.
For more than a decade, eastern Congo has
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 25
Red scares and rebel rousers Just how did the cold
war affect the US and its neighbours? Books, page 38 ≥
become infamous as the “rape capital of the world”
and the “worst place on earth to be a woman”. Half
a million women, perhaps many more, have been
raped since 1998, and in particularly brutal ways.
And one response has been the building of City of
Joy, a haven where survivors of gender violence who
have healed physically (not always straightforward)
live for six months and are educated. It is the prod-
uct of a shared vision that the women don’t just
need help, they need power. “Eve asked us what we
wanted,” says Jeanne, the orator. “And we said: shel-
ter. A roof. A place where we can be safe. And a place
where we can be powerful.” Jeanne, and women like
her, hope to change Congo for good.
There was a big party at the grand opening of City
Of Joy in February: survivors in celebration clothes
danced and sang and banged drums. Some, very
badly injured, were carried in. Women who helped
construct City of Joy danced with bricks balanced on
their heads. Local men taking Continued on page 26≥
26 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11

Weekly review
≤Continued from page 25 a stand against sexual vio-
lence – the “V-men” (after Ensler’s feminist V-Day
movement) – made themselves visible with special
T-shirts. American donors join a conga line. Women
from the stage speak not just of rape but about laws
that discriminate against women, the lack of free
HIV treatment, what happens to the children of
rape. There’s a lot of hugging, but the atmosphere
is fierce.
The centre’s story begins in 1999, when the
gynaecologist Denis Mukwege rang his friend Chris-
tine Schuler-Deschryver, a human rights worker
in Bukavu. He said he had started to see injuries
he had never seen before – women who had been
raped in terrible ways, whose reproductive organs
had been wrecked, who were suffering from fistulas
between the vagina and rectum inflicted not just by
gang rape but by attacks with sticks, guns, bottles.
“I said to Christine, this is new,” he recalls. “Their
vaginas are destroyed. I couldn’t understand what
was going on.”
Everyone in Bukavu knows Christine – she is
1.8 metres tall without heels (and she’s never with-
out heels), mixed race (her father was from a family
of Belgian colonisers, her mother a Congolese serv-
ant in the tea fields of his plantation), dramatic, de-
manding. “When Dr Mukwege told me about these
injuries, we were very afraid,” she says. “And then,
in 2000, I was in my office when a woman ran in with
a baby girl, 18 months old, her legs both broken back
– the baby had been raped. She died in my car on the
way to Panzi hospital. I ran into the cathedral with
the dead baby in my arms, shouting at God. And that
was the day I became a radical fighter.”
Bukavu is a ragged, devastated town built on the
banks of Lake Kivu in the east of Congo. There are
no roads, so when it rains the pathways turn to mud.
Women (rarely men) stagger beneath gigantic sacks
of cassava and charcoal; they sit on the ground with a
single tomato to sell. Once a town of 50,000, it is now
home to hundreds of thousands, most of whom have
fled fighting in the bush to come to the comparative
safety of the city.
Congo is the poorest country on earth, by GDP,
and yet one of the richest in terms of resources – the
fertile soil that produces such a lush landscape and
juicy avocados brings with it gold, diamonds and Crimes against humanity … defendants at a military tribunal that found a lieutenant colonel and nine
precious minerals, with criminals, militia and klep- others guilty of mass rape; previous page, a Congolese woman waits for the verdict Pete Muller/AP
tocrat politicians not far behind. Since colonialism,
when King Leopold II of Belgium ran a notoriously “The bodyguard explained, ‘When I was a child I was crisis with an efficiency that was missing from the re-
genocidal regime in order to plunder Congo’s rub- forced to bury a man who was still alive. This image sponse to the mass slaughter of the Tutsis: they fed,
ber, armies have tried to grab its wealth. President is with me every night and I can’t sleep in darkness.’ clothed and inoculated the genocidaires and their
Mobutu Sese Seko, who renamed Congo Zaire and There are people like that all through our society. followers, while the few Tutsi survivors mourned
stole a personal fortune of billions, showed that it Destruction and rape are destroying all humanity in their families and scrabbled around for food. The
wasn’t only outsiders who could get in on the act. the province.” interahamwe who did not take up President Paul
Today’s gold rush is over coltan – Congo has 80% The particular brand of brutality that emerged in Kagame’s offer to return home disappeared into the
of Africa’s reserves of the mineral, which is used in eastern Congo in the late 1990s has its roots in the Congolese bush.
mobile phones, laptops, iPads; with the resource in Rwandan genocide of 1994, when 800,000 Tutsis The Rwandan genocide was, in the words of
such demand, there’s a direct link between the tech- and some Hutus were murdered in three months by French writer Jean Hatzfeld, “enthusiastic proces-
nology consumer boom and the fighting in Congo. Hutu gangs known as the interahamwe (what they sions of ordinary people who every day went sing-
Rape is a feature of war, and is often seen as an in- call themselves) or genocidaires (what their oppo- ing off to work as killers”. Neighbours and friends
evitability. But it is more widespread and more vio- nents call them). When the genocide was stopped by went out “hunting” Tutsis with farming implements
lent in some wars than others. According to Joanna the arrival of the Tutsi exile-led Rwandan Patriotic such as machetes and hoes. As interahamwe leader
Bourke, author of Rape: A History, its prevalence Front, the interahamwe fled to eastern Congo where Adalbert Munzigura told Hatzfeld in A Time For
depends on how violent a society is already; the they established gigantic refugee camps in Goma, Machetes: “They needed intoxication, like some-
disparities between men and women in the culture; a town close to the Rwandan border. Notoriously, one who calls louder and louder for a bottle. Animal
whether soldiers fear any kind of punishment for the global aid community responded to the refugee death no longer gave them satisfaction, they felt
rape; and the extent to which the values that enable frustrated when they simply struck down a Tutsi.
mass rape are shared by men on each side of the con-
flict. On every count, Congo rates disastrously.
‘We wanted shelter, They wanted seething excitement. They felt cheated
when a Tutsi died without a word. Which is why
And there’s also a particular problem, what Jean-
Claude Kibala, the deputy governor of South Kivu,
a place where we can be they no longer struck at the mortal parts, wishing
to savour the blows and relish the screams.”
describes as a “bomb in the middle of society”: safe. And a place where It was these very interahamwe who imposed
former child soldiers. “Nobody has a programme themselves on the Congolese people, later rein-
for how to deal with them,” he says. He tells of a we can be powerful’ vented as a militia called the FDLR (Forces Démocra-
bodyguard who kept falling asleep during the day. tiques de Libération du Rwanda). And over more

than a decade of violence, in which power passed
from Laurent Kabila to his son Joseph, Rwanda in-
vaded Congo, Africa’s “first world war” was played
out in Congo (involving Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi,
Zimbabwe, Angola, Chad, Namibia and Sudan, leav-
ing an estimated 5.4 million dead, according to the
International Rescue Committee); through all of
this, a multitude of new and primarily Congolese
rebel militias were formed, and all of them raped
women with extreme violence. Which is why Muk-
wege started to see injuries he’d never seen before.
Rape, devastating everywhere, particularly un-
dermines Congolese society. After being raped a
woman is usually excluded by her family. Society
breaks down. “If you destroy women, you destroy
the Congo,” Ensler says. “Raping women is the
cheapest and most effective way to instil fear in and
humiliate a community. It doesn’t even cost a bul-
let.” But is there something deeper at work? Has the
epidemic mass rape in Congo got something to do
with the country’s own history, the result of many
years of subjugation, played back? Michela Wrong in
her book In The Footsteps Of Mr Kurtz memorably
describes Congo’s population as being “marinated in
humiliation”. Says Ensler: “There is so much rape in
men who’ve been colonised and enslaved. You have
to wonder what it’s done to these men, to their col-
lective psychological memory.”
The particularly violent way of rape that has be-
come current destroys the women’s reproductive
organs. They can no longer have children (espe-
cially terrible in a society in which motherhood so
defines being female that the word for “woman” is
“mama”). As Mukwege, who has worked for more
than two decades with women on the ground in east-
ern Congo, says: “This will be the destruction of the
Congolese people. If you destroy enough wombs,
there will be no children. So then you come right in
and take the minerals.” Here in Congo, in the heart of
Africa, home of the origin of man, the rapist wants to
stop the human race for good. I was told of a woman
being raped who asked the rapist why he was doing
it. He replied: “Because I’m already dead.”
But something is changing. In February, a lieuten-
ant colonel, Kibibi Mutware, and three other Congo-
lese army officers were convicted of crimes against
humanity for ordering rape and other crimes in Fizi
town, South Kivu, on New Year’s Day this year. They
were sentenced to 20 years in prison. This is truly a
landmark – the first time a senior ranking Congolese
army officer has been arrested, tried and convicted
for rape crimes. But one case is hardly enough: there
has been no action taken against other officers ac-
cused of similar crimes committed that same day,
the mass rape of 39 women and one girl in Bushani
and Kalambiro villages in North Kivu. And, as Ensler
asks: “Will they keep the lieutenant colonel in jail?”
But it is, at least, something.
The women of Congo have been hopeful before.
Since the late 90s, they have been intermittently
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 27
fashionable as a global cause in the west; an activ-
ist noted wryly that every 18 months or so there’s
a flurry of media interest, and then silence. “They
come and visit,” Schuler-Deschryver says bitterly,
“and leave me with a pile of business cards.” Hillary
Clinton, the US secretary of state, visited in 2009. “I
made Hillary cry when she came, and it made me full
of hope. But then – nothing.”
Melanne Verveer, who, in a new role created
by Obama, is the US ambassador for women and
girls, and who attended the opening of City of Joy,
denies that the Clinton visit was followed by no
extra money; her aides fluster around me proffer-
ing sheets of numbers, proclaiming cash provided
($42m over five years, they say). But Congo is clearly
not a priority for international aid: when Ensler went
to talk to Michelle Obama about the cause, she got
inside the White House before an aide, high up in the
Obama administration, informed her that “Congo
was not going to be part of the Michelle brand”. It is
notable that, despite the enormous hope raised in
Africa when Obama was elected, both his predeces-
sors, George W Bush and Bill Clinton, showed more
interest in the continent.
Although the money for City of Joy is provided
by Ensler’s movement V-Day (which raises cash
through performances of The Vagina Monologues),
plus Unicef and various foundations and donors, all
are keen to emphasise that the project is owned and
led by Congolese women. And their big idea is not
aid, but empowerment. If we accept that rape is a
violent expression of the power imbalance between
men and women, then you prevent rape by helping
women get more power. In other words, the City of
Joy is all about a Congolese kind of feminism.
The programme will be run by Bahati Bachu, a
strong-looking woman who carries an air of disbelief
that this City of Joy is happening at all, and is a living,
breathing rebuttal to those who imagine that femi-
nism does not exist in developing countries. She is
58 (a good age in Congo, where life expectancy is
53) and a longtime women’s rights activist, a tough
role to take in this harsh place. For international
women’s day in 1999, she asked all the women in Bu-
kavu to stay indoors; they did, and the entire town
shut down. She was sacked from her role as regional
women’s officer as a result. She once threatened to
walk bare-breasted through the streets as a protest
against women’s place in society.
“When the rapes started to happen, I denounced
it everywhere,” she says. “Germany, France. And
nothing. I worked for so many years for Congolese
women, but eventually I stopped because I was dis-
couraged. But now, with City of Joy, I am seeing the
fruit of my work, and others want to join. I will not
die before we have a revolution.” She does not laugh
at this.
Mama Bachu’s programme lasts six months. Sur-
vivors have “detraumatisation” sessions; they learn
about women’s rights (“Some are shocked to hear
they have any rights at all,” Bachu says), literacy, the
economy, accounting, farming, production, busi-
ness, self-defence, the internet. The women asked
for small brick houses, arranged like a village, and a
place for exercise, “so we can use up our energy and
not row in the evenings”.
Sixty women will live here for six months, passed
on from the gynaecology ward at Panzi hospital. It’s
almost unbelievable that the poorest country on
earth could give birth to a women’s movement, just
like the incongruousness of the beautiful landscape
with the horrific past and present; the terrible dam-
aged lives with the singing and dancing. It’s got to
have a chance. As Schuler-Deschryver says: “There’s
something you need to know about Congolese
women. When we can’t walk, we run.”
28 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
Weekly review
Grand on screen,
crap in real life
Real smokers may be pariahs now, but smoking
retains a visual glamour, argues Euan Ferguson
M
ost people, even non-smokers,
have their favourite smoking
moments from films. Well,
maybe not the most rabid
anti-smokers, but those peo-
ple probably don’t even have a
favourite film. There, I’ve declared my credentials.
I am a smoker: not a proud smoker, but certainly
proudly anti rabid-anti-smoking and its tyrannies:
denials of choice and of personal responsibility. Any-
way, my own favourite is not a style moment, not a
macho moment, but a logic moment, from 1997’s
oddly underrated Love and Death on Long Island.
Grumpy NY cabbie, to passenger John Hurt, play-
ing the filthily English Giles De’Ath: “The sign says
‘No smoking’.”
Hurt (smoking. Languidly and stylishly but,
somehow, with fury): “No. The sign says ‘Thank you
for not smoking’. As I am smoking, I don’t expect to
be thanked.”
And how we, or at least I and the then love of my
life, smiled. At last, the passive-aggressive mimsiness
of that cutely conspiratorial phrase – hey guy, let’s
build a happier, cleaner world, and most passengers
don’t smoke, and I am aware that your not-smoking is
a physical wrench for you, not a whimsical choice, but
I wrote the damn sign polite, so up yours, buddy – had
been demolished by dry Englishness.
shness.
And how impossible to smile ile now, just 14
years later. There are signs, tinyy signs, of a last
hurrah for the coolness of the cigarette, most
recently in the fashion world: but it’s not just
that the health argument roundly ndly (and
rightly) won the day, the vaulting aulting
change in societal attitudes means ans it’s
probably a doomed battle. It’s justust
not done, today. The last Bond d w
to smoke on screen was in n fashion features director at
1989. Since the start of the e Vogue. “Oh, it’s just fashion.
new millennium, especially y Fashion loves to do this, to pro-
since smoking bans have gradu- u-
ally been introduced in many
countries, a sea-change
has occurred. Even smok-
ers don’t like other smokers
breaking the rules.
Sit in a pub or restaurant today
ay and watch
someone light up inside near the doors, and
the nostrils flaring will be thosehose of fellow-
smokers, like Dracula scenting g garlic, and the
denouements scarcely less bloody. ody. Put a living,
polluting smoker on TV, an advert,vert, the cover of
a magazine, an anything, and they’ll be as wel-
come as a streaker at Queen Victoria’s
ctoria’s funeral.
And we certainly can’t have it properly adver-
tised, aspirational, appetising,, sexy.
Which is why it was intriguing ing to pick up
the latest edition of Love magazine,
zine, a week
after Kate Moss deliberately smokedmoked on
the catwalk.
Love is an impossibly stylish biannual fashion
magazine, edited and styled by the rather fabulous
Katie Grand, who also styled/ran the Louis Vuitton
catwalk Kate-smoke show. Her mag is shudderingly
chic. And, in this issue of Love, there are more than
a dozen shots of models smoking. Mostly smoking
rather well. Old-style. Sexy. (Wisps of blue-blue
smoke escape, like half-remembered perfume-
ghosts. The thin white dukes of paper jut from lips,
from long fingers, promising intention. Much is
intensely sexy.
But is this our last hope? Given even professional
smokers – musicians, writers, drunks – have kow-
towed into out-of-door pariahship and showed not
even a throaty croak of dissent, is this our last hope
for cool? The beginning of the lung goodbye? A faintly
awkward catwalk stunt, and a fashion magazine?
“Christ, no. Smoking will always be cool. On
paper. In fashion. In photos. But it’s always been like
that,” says Valentine Fillol Cordier, a former catwalk
model and now a successful stylist.
“Fashion loves to go back, to reference itself.
And smoking helps: it says history, and style, and
it works well for what it says in two dimensions. It’s
a bit dreamy, a bit intellectual, it gets smoky and
it fills the screen. But it’s in films, in stills, in pho-
tos, in something that happened before. It’s in two
dimensions. That’s what we love. In all dimensions,
in real life, well… you know, it actually stinks. It are far from alone in telling me that, while they like
kills. I was a smoker, hell yes. When
smells. And it kill to/may have liked to smoke, once, it is now hard to
I was a model – and the people who have a go get away with.
at models who smoke, well, it kept our weight “I think it’s age, yes,” says Harriet. “As people,
down. But
B it has always been far more friends, grow a bit older, they have children and
cool on
o the screen than in real life. It suddenly it is, frankly, just not done to ever smoke.
just works better there.”
ju Probably quite right.”
There is an echo of her words Valentine, with a little more French expansion,
when I speak to Harriet Quick, tells me that “things are changing. It is better that
we realise the lumps in the lungs, so horrid. I just
wish it wasn’t.”
Which leads me to governmental strategies. De-
v
voke. It’s not really saying any- signed by people who don’t smoke. I can’t really put it
thing. But, yes, there’s something
th better than my colleague Victoria Coren, who recently
a
about smoking which works won- wrote: “The idea is that hiding cigarettes in plain
d
derfully well on the screen or the boxes, then hiding the boxes under the counter, will
photo. It fills the screen, gives im-
p stop children wanting them. That is an excellent idea.
pact. Just doesn’t
do work that well in real life.” Unless you’ve ever actually met any children.”
It was, actu
actually, always so. The Hollywood Smoking is, essentially – and no one, certainly not
stars who promoted
prom cigarettes, and were paid folk who don’t smoke, can take this away – great in
to so do, most
mostly didn’t smoke. John Wayne the imaginarium. It fills the screen. It gives poise,
spent the last part
pa of his life making anti-smok- balance, pause, thought. Authors, photographers,
ing adverts, to cocounter the earlier pro-smoking directors love their characters to smoke. Especially
adverts that had helped get him the money to crime authors. It gives their guys something to do
get the cigarettes
cigarett to get the cancer that killed when they can’t pull out a gun, which certainly helps
Gable, Spencer Tracy, Joan Craw-
him. Clark Gab in Britain. But I digress, and so I eagerly answer the
ford, Bette Da
Davis, Betty Grable – all appeared call from Maggi Hambling, the artist and grand
newspaper ads (Lucky Strike, Old Gold,
in newspape smoker, although I’m told she quit five years ago.
Chesterfield and
a Camel… ) but few smoked, “Yes. I did. But I started again the Thursday before
even fewer sm
smoked the featured brands. Even last. I have to tell you – cigarettes have never tasted
even fewer to
towards their ends. better!”
Because it ddoes kill. Valentine and Harriet Hambling, helpfully, wanders deeply complicit

‘It fills the screen, gives impact’ … smoking has a ‘dreamy’ image in the fashion world Reuters
into my burgeoning theory that smoking is Grand
on screen, Crap in life. “Absolutely. On screen, in a
portrait, it fills the corners. And the glamour, the
wisps, the formality, the romance!” I ask her a little
about her friend George Melly, thinking what jazz
may have been like without cigarettes.
“Well, it wouldn’t have existed. I painted George
for the two years after he died. And each time with a
glass of whisky and a cigarette. Otherwise it wouldn’t
have been true!”
So: smoking – grand on screen, on stage, crap in
life? Hambling rather unhelpfully, disagrees. “Fuck
no. I don’t even go out to a dinner party unless
there’s a guaranteed ashtray. I hate anti-smokers. I
did three, three, sculptures of Oscar Wilde. Bronze,
steel and then hardened steel. In each case some
lunatic anti-smoker managed to saw the cigarette
off the end of the hand. The last one must have taken
a real effort. What kind of chuff would summon that
effort?”, except she doesn’t say chuff.
It stinks, smoking. There are many websites to tell
you as much. If you’re a non-smoker, you’ll nod along
with it. If you are a smoker, you’ll nod along with it.
Here’s the difference: we smokers understand your
concerns and anger, and increasingly try not to pro-
voke. You fabulously fail to even entertain the idea
of our addiction, and constantly attempt to find new
ways to provoke, and ban, because you can.
And, no, it doesn’t make you cool. It makes you ad-
dicted. Your teeth stain and fall out. Your lungs stain
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 29
Where two
Letter from Nigeria
wheels dare
not venture
Maggie Fick
H
ere in the heart of
Nigeria’s embattled
“Middle Belt” region,
where violence has torn
formerly mixed communi-
ties apart, the street scene downtown in
the temperate city of Jos resembles that
of any small west African city. Children
hawk random items such as rat poison
and chewing gum for the equivalent
of pennies, women fry up delicious
doughnuts streetside and mobile phone
“air time” is for sale every five metres.
Young men driving motorcycles and
sporting stylish sunglasses weave art-
fully through traffic-clogged streets,
carrying passengers of all ages and sizes
to their destinations.
On the surface in Jos, these motor-
cycle taxi drivers – known locally as
achabas – do the same work as the
drivers in Yaoundé and Lomé, with one
notable difference: they may well die
doing their jobs, but not because of a
traffic accident. Instead, achaba drivers
are killed if and when they venture
into the “wrong” neighbourhoods. The
majority are young Muslim men from
the Hausa ethnic group, and Moham-
med Lawal Ishaq, who leads a Muslim
affairs council in Jos, told me that when
a young driver recently went missing,
his family and friends had reason to fear
and fall out. Barack Obama just about got away with it, the worst. The missing driver’s corpse
because it revealed a charming human weakness. was soon found in a well.
But that’s life, and death, and what we’re talk- In early 2010, in the aftermath of a
ing about here is art, or at least styling, and expres- spree of tit-for-tat sectarian violence,
sion: 2D smoking, images of smoking . Wispy, ethe- the city experienced an apartheid-like
real, perfumed smoking, through a glass smokily. process, which saw Muslims and Chris-
Sculptures should be allowed to hold cigarettes. tians move to different areas of the city.
Paintings should be allowed to contain cigarettes. As I was paying my bill at a coffee
Photographs should, surely, be allowed to portray shop, I mentioned to the man behind
cigarettes. Theatres, too. In all cases, the fourth wall the counter that I was heading off to
protects us. It’s an image, a representation – do with interview the Catholic archbishop. I
it what your brain will allow. wondered if the waiter might help me
Smoking doesn’t make you cool. It doesn’t make flag an achaba taxi down, since I don’t
you clever. Actually, scratch that last: it does, a bit. know the city well. The waiter, who
Here are three differing quotes. “Smoking kills. If told me that he is a Muslim though his
you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your mother is a Christian, said that the arch-
life,” said Brooke Shields a while back. A rather lovely bishop is a “straightforward man who
woman from ASH (I had expected some doomglut tells the truth about our crisis”. I later
naysayer) said to me, “It’s not illegal, models smoking, learned that the archbishop holds many
it’s down to them,” which made me cheer inwardly, of his fellow religious leaders responsi-
and then she added, “but they are role models, which ble for perpetuating the violence.
makes it disappointing.” No, they’re models. While we stood on the bustling road-
And then there’s Bill Hicks, the late US comic. side, I asked the waiter why he was not
“The worst kind of non-smokers are the ones that flagging down the many passenger-less
come up to you and cough. That’s pretty fucking achaba drivers. “You cannot go with any
cruel, isn’t it? Do you go up to cripples and dance?” achaba to the archbishop’s,” he said,
Not dancing, Bill. None of us addicts are danc- as we waited until he could flag down
ing. But we can tell the many differences between a a Christian driver not from the Hausa
seriously sexy picture and a seriously advanced lung ethnic group – my ride to the area where
tumour. That’s our dance. Observer people such as this waiter dare not go.
30 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11

Weekly review

Right equation for a better job?

US educators are split over the
need to stress skills in advanced
algebra, says Peter Whoriskey

W
ith its intricate mysteries
of quadratics, logarithms
and imaginary numbers,
advanced algebra often pro-
vokes a lament from US high-
schoolers. What exactly does
this have to do with real life? The answer: maybe
more than anyone could have guessed.
Of all of the classes offered in high school, ad-
vanced algebra, or Algebra II, is the leading predictor
of college and work success, according to research
that has launched a growing national movement to
require it of graduates. In recent years, 20 states have
moved to raise graduation requirements to include
advanced algebra, and its complexities are being
demanded of more and more students.
The effort has been led by Achieve, a group organ-
ised by governors and business leaders and funded
by corporations and their foundations, to improve
the skills of the workforce. Although US economic
strength has been attributed in part to high levels of
education, the workforce is lagging in the percent-
age of younger workers with college degrees, accord-
ing to the Organisation of Economic Co-operation Too remote … many students and teachers can’t see the relevance Markku Lahdesmaki/Corbis
and Development.
But whether learning advanced algebra causes of education researcher Clifford Adelman found that Among the 15 students gathered recently in an
students to fare better in life, or whether it is merely students who took advanced algebra and at least one advanced algebra class, however, the difficulties
correlated with them doing better – because smart, more maths course attained “momentum” towards were apparent. Eight of the students said it was
motivated kids take advanced algebra – isn’t clear. receiving a bachelor’s degree. the hardest class they had ever taken, and several
Meanwhile, some worry that its requirements are “There was a fair amount of judgment that went questioned why they needed it. Garrett Baldwin,
leading some young people to quit school. into this,” said Michael Cohen, president of Achieve an outfielder on the baseball team who wants to be
No state has pushed advanced algebra more than and a former assistant secretary of education in the a firefighter, said, “I’d enjoy it – if I ever knew what
Arkansas, which began requiring the class last year Clinton administration. But “to get the skills needed, was going on.” Hunter Venable, who likes nothing
for most graduates and assesses how well students students had to reach Algebra II”. better than duck hunting – “it’s all I do” – snorted
have done with a rigorous test. Only 13% of those The push for advanced algebra had begun, and at a question about the relevance of the subject.
who took it were deemed “prepared” or better, but it was embraced by many states. But not every- “Ass-um-topes,” he said, intentionally stumbling
state officials said they are aiming to raise that figure one is convinced that advanced algebra is the over the word “asymptotes”, which they have been
rather than lower standards. answer. Among the sceptics is Carnevale, one of studying. “I have no idea what those are.”
“All those numbers and letters, it’s like another the researchers who reported the link between In Arkansas and elsewhere, educators worry that
language, like hieroglyphics,” said Tiffany Woodle, a advanced algebra and good jobs. He warns against the class requirement could lead students to quit.
Conway high school student and an aspiring beauty thinking of advanced algebra as a cause of students “Some students, who’ve gotten behind over the
salon owner. “It obviously says something. I’m just getting good jobs merely because it is correlated years, are never going to pass Algebra II,” said Teresa
not sure what, sometimes.” with success. “The causal relationship is very, very George, a veteran teacher, after a morning coaxing
One of the key studies supporting the advanced weak,” he said. “Most people don’t use Algebra II in students through rational functions. If it becomes
algebra focus was conducted by Anthony Carnevale college, let alone in real life. The state governments an obstacle to graduation, “then you’ve lost them.
and Alice Desrochers, then both at the Educational need to be careful with this.” And what’s their next option?”
Testing Service. They used a data set that followed Conway, about 50km north of the Arkansas state For proof of the usefulness of advanced alge-
a group of students from 1988 to 2000, from eighth capital, Little Rock, is a small town with rural roots; bra, students need look no farther than the largest
grade to a time when most were working. The study the annual summer festival is known as Toad Suck employers in Conway. Acxiom, a database company
showed that of those who held top-tier jobs, 84% Daze, a local reference to a time when steamboats that employs 2,100 people in the town, hires soft-
had taken advanced algebra or a higher class as their worked the Arkansas river. The Conway high school ware and database developers, most of whom have
last high school maths course. Only 50% of employ- mascot is the mythical Wampus cat. About 44% of bachelor’s degrees in technical fields. At Snap-on
ees in the bottom tier had taken advanced algebra. its students have qualified for free or reduced-price Equipment, a plant that employs 170 making the
“Algebra II does increase the likelihood of being lunches. Yet its students have performed better on sophisticated gears that garages use to align and
employed in a good job,” they reported, although the test than all but a handful of other districts. balance tyres, most production jobs require asso-
warning that many factors come into play. ciate’s degrees in electronics.
To check the advanced algebra findings against
the “real world”, the Achieve researchers then
‘All those numbers Whatever the demands for advanced algebra,
state officials are loath to lower the bar. “Everybody
asked college professors and employers to identify
which skills are necessary to succeed. To their sur-
and letters. Obviously else in the world believes it takes effort when it
comes to math,” said Gayle Potter, associate direc-
prise, they found that whether students were going algebra says something. tor of academic standards. “In America, we seem to
into work or college, they needed the skills taught believe that there is a math gene, and if it’s not there,
in advanced algebra. Other independent studies I’m just not sure what’ forget it. But math is challenging, and you have to
backed them up. One conducted by US department work at it.” Washington Post
 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 31

Shortcuts
How we cling to on the moon, only to find himself
unsuited to a terrestrial economy.

clickety-clack Awful though Gaddafi’s book is,

he is not alone. Tyrants seem fond
of writing. Hitler, Stalin, Khomeini,

T
he image of Snoopy sitting
on top of his kennel rattling
out the opening of his latest
bestseller (“It was a dark
and stormy night.”) on a typewriter
is as familiar as it is cherished.
Endearing, yes, but dated. We
learn that possibly the world’s very
last typewriter factory – in Mumbai –
has closed. A spokesman for Godrej
& Boyce has told the global media
that “currently the company has
just 500 machines left”. Hurry while
stocks last, as the imposing Prima
model dating from the 1950s, now
selling for about $260, is sure to be-
come a sought-after classic.
Or is it? There are now millions
of people worldwide tapping away
on keyboards who have never sat in
front of a typewriter. The machine
that gave us the modern open-plan
office, with its rows of clerks and
typists, can seem as outmoded
as hand looms and horse-drawn
ploughs.
Typewriters still hold a certain
romance: something to do with the
Metal dinosaur? The last typewriter factory is selling its final 500 machines Corbis
on in outer space should the Earth
cease to exist.
Bök has spent nine years research-
ing the Xenotext project and, despite
having no academic training in bio-
chemistry, he is doing all the genetic
and protein engineering himself.
Using a “chemical alphabet”, Bök is
translating his short verse about lan-
guage and genetics into a sequence
of DNA, which will be implanted
into the genome of the bacteria.
provide shipments for medical insti-
tutions and the healthcare industry.”
A coffin? “We can do that,
unoccupied of course.”
A sandwich? “If someone wants
to pay to ship a sandwich, we can do
that.”
A caravan? “If a shipper needs
service to transport some, if not all,
parts of a caravan we can work with
them.”
A missile? “I can’t answer that
Mao: one wonders if they chose des-
potism as a route to publishing.
Take Zabiba and the King, a
historical romance “by its author
Saddam Hussein”. It tells the story
of an eighth-century Arab king’s re-
lationship with a beautiful woman;
it became a bestseller in Iraq.
Or consider Kim Jong-il. The
North Korean leader managed to
write 1,500 books in his university
years alone. Among his mature
works, the best known are the
forbiddingly titled Our Socialism
Centred on the Masses Shall Not
Perish and On the Art of the Cinema.
Perceptive comments in the latter
include: “Language is extremely im-
portant in literature.”
No matter how powerful, it seems
there is one thing that no despot can
ever have: an honest editor.
Leo Benedictus
Martial arts for
mid-air combat

mechanical chatter of keyboards,
the ting of bells and the saw-like
rasp and slap of carriages as they are
whipped back hastily for the next
line of copy.
New technologies naturally push
old ones aside for any number of
reasons – from practicality to the
promise of new functions and ef-
ficiencies. And yet, just as photog-
raphers still find uses for Polaroid
cameras, musicians retain a fond-
ness for vinyl, and steam locomo-
The protein that the cell produces
in response will form a second
comprehensible poem.
This is not the first time someone
has married art and microbiology. In
2003, US scientists inserted a DNA
translation of the song It’s a Small
World into D radiodurans to show
that the bacterium could be used as
a means of information storage in
the event of a nuclear catastrophe.
Killian Fox Observer
because we do have some items pro-
hibited for shipment.”
Indeed they do. Among them
“packages that emit an odour of any
kind” and “dead animals or animals
that have been mounted”.
Glad that’s sorted. Tom Meltzer
A brief guide
to dictator lit
N
ext time you’re flying in
or out of Hong Kong, you
may want to think twice
about ordering that third
gin and tonic. Hong Kong Airlines
has begun training cabin crew in the
ancient martial art of wing chun – a
branch of kung fu – as a means of re-
straining unruly passengers.
According to the airline, wing
chun is ideal for in-flight combat
because it employs short, swift

tives attract crowds of fans when
they appear on main lines billowing
between the latest electric trains,
the typewriter may rattle through
many a dark and stormy night yet.
C
Where FedEx olonel Gaddafi is a man of
movements and can be practised in
a confined space. “Normally, female
draws the line eccentricities. There is his
bodyguard of “revolution-
cabin crew can’t handle a fat guy,
especially if he’s drunk,” Eva Chan,
ary nuns”, the armed young a spokeswoman for the airline, ex-

T
Jonathan Glancey women who follow him at all times. plained with admirable candour,
wenty-five thousand sea There are flamboyant interviews and “but because of the training, she can

A poem that’ll turtle eggs, a rhino and a

Black Hawk helicopter: is
dotty gestures, such as a recent an-
nouncement that all Libya’s soldiers
handle it quite easily.”
Mark Phillips, director of the Lon-

live for ever thing FedEx won’t

ny
there any-
n’t
y a d policemen
and po c had
been simultane-
don Wing Chun Academy, explains
some of the basic moves.
deliver? The list ous promoted.
ously 1) A flight attendant could use the

M
of bizarre items Then there chi sau (“sticky hands”) technique
any artists seek to transported ar his stories.
are to prevent a passenger from hitting.
attain immortality by the courier Ye Gaddafi
Yes, “The idea,” Phillips explains, “is to
through their art, but service grows is a writer. block and control a person’s arms by
few would expect their longer every Though
Th best linking your arms with theirs.”
work to outlast the human race year, with the kn
known for his 2) Next, split the assailant’s arms.
and live on for billions of years. As latest addition political tract
pol Here, the flight attendant raises his
Canadian poet Christian Bök has being breast milk k The Green Book, left arm, and makes contact with
realised, it all comes down to the du- n’’s
for Sir Elton John’s the Lib
Libyan leader his opponent’s chest, while holding
rability of your materials. son Zachary. The e branched out in the back the arm with his right hand.
Bök has written a poem, The singer explained d that
t Es
90s with Escape to Hell 3) The flight attendant now traps
Xenotext, which he is inserting Ex
he has milk FedExed xed St
and Other Stories, which the assailant’s arms, leaving his
into the DNA of a form of bacteria, over from the surrogate
urrrogate flits between allegorical right arm free to land a restraining
Deinococcus radiodurans. This ex- mother. Intrigued,edd, we fiction and po
political essay. punch. Though, as Phillips points
tremophile bacterium can survive asked what the co ompany
company In The Astrona
Astronaut’s Suicide, out, “It wouldn’t be a very good idea
exposure to cold, dehydration, acid might deliver forr us:
u we read about a man who for a cabin crew member to hit a
and vacuums, meaning it could live First, a lung? “FFedEx does
“FedEx returns to Earth af
after a period passenger.” Laura Barnett
32 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11

Science

Gazelles wiped out

by ancient hunters
Middle East’s brutally efficient stone corrals led
to decline of the species, reports Brian Vastag

T
he unsustainable harvesting of wild
animals has an ancient history. About
5,000 years ago in the Middle East,
hunters drove a species of gazelle to
the edge of extinction by funnelling
entire herds into stone corrals, where
the animals were easy prey.
That’s the theory of Smithsonian Institution ar-
chaeologist Melinda Zeder and two of her colleagues,
who report stunning evidence of such a mass kill in
modern Syria.
“It must have been one heck of a barbecue,” Zeder
said. “The scale of it is really quite staggering.”
The people living in the Middle East 5,000 years
ago subsisted on goats and sheep while developing
early agriculture. But every spring, herds of Persian
gazelle thundered from breeding grounds in the
south, near the Arabian peninsula, to the lush green
steppe in the north, where the animals gave birth. In
August, the herds roared back south.
The migrations presented two annual opportuni-
ties for the crafty ancients. So they invented new
hunting technology: stone corrals that flared out
into two long, low walls, which acted as funnels.
Hundreds of these structures – called kites, for
their shape as seen from the air – dot the entire
Levant, from Arabia up through northern Syria.
Zeder said the kites invariably appear in low spots
ideal for channelling herds of animals.
For decades, archaeologists debated the kites’
function. The discovery of ancient rock art nearby
some of the kites provided a firm clue. The paintings
show what look like human figures driving horned
animals into circular pens. But until now, no hard ev-
idence of a mass kill of the gazelles had surfaced.
Zeder said she and her colleagues have found
“the smoking arrowhead”– a pile of 3,000 gazelle
toe bones found in a thin layer just a few kilometres
from still-standing kites.
Carbon dating pegged the bone pile at between
5,100 and 5,500 years old. Zeder and colleagues
then carefully analysed each bone, determining how
many animals were present as well as their sex and
age. “It was a whole herd,” said Zeder, whose find-
ings were published last month in the journal the
Proceedings of the National Academies.
Deep-cutting scars on the toe bones suggests ini-
tial butchering occurred after rigor mortis had set
in, she said, meaning the animals had probably been
transported to the butchering site – the nearby kites
being the prime suspects for killing zones.
Zeder also reports the baby teeth of three-month-
old gazelles in the bone pile. Given that the gazelles
birthed in the north in June, that clue led her and col-
leagues to think the herd had been migrating south
– as they once did every August.
The operation must have been impressive, said
Natalie Munro, an archaeologist at the University of
Connecticut, who studies the ancient gazelles.
“You have people doing the driving, the runners,
making noise, then you have individuals doing the
dispatching, killing those animals, transporting
them,” she said. “It entailed a lot of organisation and
many people doing different tasks, different jobs.
“You just run out there once a year and you can
get 100 animals,” Munro said.
But the feasts carried a toll. About 1,000 years
after the slaughter Zeder documented, the gazelles
began to peter out.
Now, just a few Persian gazelles roam the Middle
East, but they don’t migrate as they once did.
The lesson is obvious, Zeder said. “Wiping out the
ability of that herd to regenerate is the thing that’s
most significant. Wholesale slaughter of animals just
isn’t sustainable.” Washington Post
Just watch out for the humans ... a herd of wary
gazelles in Africa Tony Karumba/Getty Images

Roman high street reopens in Herculaneum

John Hooper Rome
The archaeologist Andrew Wallace-Hadrill calls it
“one of those places where you step into a time ma-
chine” – the high street of a town that disappeared
1,932 years ago under ash and mud 20 metres deep.
At one end of the Decumanus Maximus at Her-
culaneum, near Naples, is a triumphal arch. Along
its length stand archaeological treasures such as the
House of the Double Porticos, which retains original,
though carbonised, wooden beams and shutters.
For more than 20 years the Decumanus Maximus
has been closed to visitors. But at a ceremony at the
site it was returned to the public.
“Most of Herculaneum as experienced by tourists
consists of little narrow streets where people could
virtually lean across from balcony to balcony and
touch hands,” Wallace-Hadrill said. “But the
Decumanus Maximus is a big public space. It’s
impressive.”
Its reopening marks the latest stage in the steady
recovery and restoration of a settlement less well-
known but in some respects more fascinating than
Pompeii. Both were preserved by the eruption of
Vesuvius in AD79.
Herculaneum was rediscovered by chance
in the early 18th century. By 2001, when the
Herculaneum Conservation Project (HCP) was
launched, the partially excavated site was in a piti-
ful condition: two-thirds of its area was closed to
visitors for reasons of either safety or conservation.
By the end of next year the HCP hopes to have
reduced that proportion by half. The project has con-
solidated the escarpment that towers over the town,
stabilised all but a handful of the ancient buildings,
repaired most of the existing roofing and reinstated
the original Roman drainage system, providing an
outlet for water that once accumulated on the site
and threatened to destroy it.
The contrast with developments at Pompeii,
where part of a 2,000-year-old house fell down last
year, could scarcely be starker.
The HCP was set up by a US non-profit founda-
tion, the Packard Humanities Institute, and also
involves the local office of Italy’s heritage ministry

Past wonders ... a mosaic from Herculaneum
Dispatches
and the British School at Rome. Wallace-Hadrill, the
project’s director, said its success is largely due to
an emphasis on unglamorous maintenance, inter-
disciplinary co-ordination and “low-cost, sustain-
able, practical solutions”.
“The miracle of [David W] Packard’s sponsor-
ship is his willingness to fund the mundane”, he
said. This has led to some exciting archaeological
discoveries.
Searching for the outlet of the drainage system,
his team happened upon a magnificently decorated
ceiling, with all the Roman craftsmanship still in-
tact, and what Wallace-Hadrill called an “unspeak-
able amount of human waste which has given us a
fascinating insight into the ancient Roman diet”.
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 33
Fire ants form float
when flooding strikes
When flood waters threaten their un-
derground nests, fire ants grab hold of
one another, making a living raft that
can sail for months. The extraordinary
survival tactic, which can involve entire
colonies of more than 100,000 ants, has
been captured on film by US engineers.
Time-lapse film of the ants in action
reveals that pockets of air get trapped
around their bodies, helping them
breathe if the raft is pushed under the
water. In normal circumstances the ants
lock legs, and sometimes mandibles,
to form a floating mat. “Even the ones
at the bottom remain dry and able to
breathe because they are not actually
under the water,” said Nathan Mlot,
a PhD student at Georgia Institute of
Technology in Atlanta.
Repairing with light
Imagine a product that would let you
repair scratches in car doors, glasses or
varnished furniture with nothing more
than a 30-second dose of ultraviolet
light. That’s the coating engineers hope
to develop from a polymer described
in a study published last month in the
journal Nature. “What we’re trying
to do is create a material that if it gets
damaged, scratched or cut in any way,
you can basically reheal it and get the
same material back using light,” said
Stuart Rowan, a molecular engineering
professor at Cleveland’s Case Western
Reserve University and the study’s lead
author. Washington Post
Antihelium observed
Scientists in the US produced a clutch
of antihelium particles, the antimatter
equivalents of the helium nucleus, after
smashing gold ions together nearly 1bn
times at close to the speed of light. The
discovery of antihelium at the Relativ-
istic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven
national laboratory in New York will
aid the search for exotic phenomena
in the distant universe, including
antimatter versions of stars and even
galaxies. Researchers at the US labora-
tory recorded 18 antihelium particles
that survived for about 10 billionths of
a second before they crashed into the
collider’s detector and vanished in the
tiniest of fireballs.
Pharaoh statue found
Archaeologists have unearthed one of
the largest statues found to date of a
powerful ancient Egyptian pharaoh at
his mortuary temple in the southern
city of Luxor, the country’s antiquities
authority announced. The 13-metre tall
statue of Amenhotep III was one of a
pair that flanked the northern entrance
to the grand funerary temple on the
west bank of the Nile that is currently
the focus of a major excavation.
34 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
Culture
Sex and spirit,
earth and sky
Though Joan Miró said he wanted to assassinate
painting, no other artist made it seem more alive.
Adrian Searle revels in the paradoxes of his work
Art
W
henever I have been to the
Joan Miró Foundation in Bar-
celona – and I have visited
Josep Lluís Sert’s lovely
building on Montjuïc many
times over the last quarter-
century – I try to see Miró’s great 1968 triptych Paint-
ing on White Background for the Cell of a Recluse.
It isn’t always on display. There’s nothing much to
the three white canvases. No colour, no forms. Each
enormous canvas is painted with a single black line
over an unevenly primed white ground. You can
tell where the slender brush has run out of paint, is
recharged, then continues on its way with the same
unknowable purpose, like the passage of an ant or
a bird in flight, or the journey the eye makes along
a horizon. Or like a long hair lost in the bedsheets, a
memory of something or someone.
The recluse of the title might be the artist him-
self, painting one afternoon with the shutters closed
against the brightness of the day in his studio on
the island of Mallorca, during the month that the
students rioted in Paris and General Franco still
ruled Spain. It is a daft idea, to paint just a skinny
wandering line across such a big canvas. How could it
possibly work? But it does. There is a palpable differ-
ence between a line that’s alive and tense and some-
how natural, and one that dies like a bum note. You
can feel the vitality of Miró’s line from your head to
your toes, your hand clenching and unclenching in
your pocket, somehow feeling in your own body the
artist’s concentration – the tensing of his wrist, the
movement of his hand – as you follow the line on its
way to nowhere. I imagine Miró holding his breath
as he draws, and I hold mine too as I look.
This work, along with three other late, large trip-
tychs, is now being shown in two beautifully installed
octagonal rooms towards the end of a new retrospec-
tive at Tate Modern. Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape
brings us his art not just in its most characteristic
guises – playful, childlike, direct – but attempts to
bring out Miró the “international Catalan” and inter-
nal exile in Franco’s Spain; Miró the political artist;
and the avant-garde surrealist and modernist who
wanted – so he once said – to assassinate painting.
Miró never did succeed in killing painting, that
walking corpse that still refuses to lie down and take
it quietly. He had a brush in his hand, not a stake. He
also wanted his art to be useful. In 1979, four years
after Franco’s death, he said in a speech at Barce-
lona University that “being able to say something,
when the majority of people do not have the option
of expressing themselves, obliges this voice to be in
some way prophetic … When an artist speaks in an
environment in which freedom is difficult, he must
turn each of his works into a negation of the nega-
tions, in an untying of all oppressions, all prejudices,
and all the false established values.”
Today this sort of talk sounds quaint. We have al-
most lost our faith in the redemptive powers of art.
In Spain’s newly emerging democracy, Miró’s art felt
symbolic, both of resistance to Franco’s state and of
the new freedoms that were coming into being. With
the best of his work, I too feel genuinely lifted, en-
ergised, though I just feel deadened looking at his
murals and public sculptures, the endless prints, that
jolly logo he devised for the La Caixa savings bank.
Whatever formal and sometimes theatrical
murders Miró perpetrated on his art – at one point
dousing paintings in kerosene and setting fire to
them, just like Yves Klein – you feel Miró’s heart
wasn’t entirely in it. He could never escape his
wit and energy and ribaldry, though at times this
was mixed with a profound anger. In his Barce-
lona series of lithographs, conceived around 1940
but only printed in 1944, Miró depicts buffoonish,
highly sexualised but impotent ogres menacing
innocents across a suite of 50 prints. They’re based
on playwright Alfred Jarry’s cowardly dictator Pére
Ubu as much as Franco and his generals.
A series of copper panels from 1936 sees exquisitely
nasty, lurid figures squirm and gesticulate, show off
their sex organs and pontificate in arid landscapes
(in one case, in front of a pile of excrement), filled
with disgust and a loathsome sexuality. Later, in the
1974 triptych The Hope of a Condemned Man, Miró
alluded to the execution of the young Catalan anar-
chist Salvador Puig Antich, garrotted in prison that
same year. The three-part painting is dominated by
a line that sighs and falls with faltering resignation,
percussive scribbles of colour like memories about to
pass, and a thin rain of flicked paint. One cannot but
think of the artist contemplating his own passing,
though he was to live on until Christmas Day 1983,
dying at 90, having seen the first socialist govern-
ment come into power since the civil war.
Miró was never cut out to be a total iconoclast,
and in his art the ghosts of Jan Brueghel, Hiero-
nymus Bosch and the anonymous masters of the
Romanesque frescoes that once decorated churches
through the Catalan Pyrenees, collide with his fertile
imagination. They make themselves felt alongside
the influences of his friends Picasso and Masson, and
works by Gorky, Rothko and Pollock he encountered
in his trips to New York in the late 1940s and 50s.
Influence is one thing. What Miró found in his fore-
bears and contemporaries, as much as in the world
about him, were formal openings and opportunities,
mental spaces as much as physical forms, that he
could inhabit. Miró was always Miró. Whether he
was painting donkeys and vegetable patches and
a carob tree, in paintings as detailed as The Farm
(bought by Ernest Hemingway), or in paintings as

Fertile imagination … Joan Miró’s style was
unique, as in The Farm, 1921-22, above; or, left,
from the top, The Escape Ladder, 1940; and Still
Life with Old Shoe, 1937
emptied-out as his schematic portraits of Catalan
peasants, or his triptychs and late abstractions, the
drive is all his own.
There’s just too much life in his art, even if it is
sometimes of an alarming sort. Here, even empti-
ness pulses with energy. Paul Klee famously talked
of taking a line for a walk. Miró could draw a line
across galaxies or from the breast to the hip; along an
entire horizon or into an all-engulfing void. Sexual
energy pulses through his work, along with scato-
logical Catalan humour and earthiness, a love of
nature, and nostalgia for the rural life.
Miró’s art was colourful and dirty, life-affirming
and nasty, musical and jarring, lyrical and ejacu-
latory and excremental. There are penises and
vulvas, breasts and balls, lips and eyes and tongues
everywhere, even in the 1940-41 Constellations
series, which jangles with heads and stars, birds
and bullseyes, monsters, fish, a bestiary of madness
and teeming thoughts, all related in some strange
and almost astrological way to war, and to Johann
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 35
Political powerhouse? How art
influenced marriage in Tudor times
blogs.guardian.co.uk/arts
As simple as
On science writing
possible, but
not simpler
Tim Radford
S
cience writing would be
easy if it were not for two
problems: the ideas and the
words. The ideas are often
counterintuitive, unimagin-
able or just very difficult (think special
relativity, cosmic inflation, dark matter,
quantum states, epigenetics, or almost
anything to do with cell biology) and
the words are unfamiliar, misleading
or simply hostile: how many non-
scientists instantly understand what
you mean by an alpha particle, a sodium
ion channel, a phenotype or Mesozoic?
The ideas, however, are also part
of the delight. Science writers get the
chance to compose sentences that
have never been written before. But
the words really are a problem. In the
first place, there are an awful lot of
scientific terms. According to a casual
aside in a Nature review two years ago,
biology alone has added 60,000 new
words to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Shakespeare composed all his sonnets,
plays and poems with a lexicon of little
more than 30,000 words.
Some scientific words are coinages,
some of them are existing words with
new meanings, and some of them
represent ideas that are as freshly
minted as the words themselves: that
is, they are not in a dictionary at all.
So a science writer has at some point
to become a translator; to convert
science into journalism without, if
possible, using journalese; to take big,
Sebastian Bach. How at once lovely and unsettling wonderful and startling ideas and make
these are; they rock the mind as well as the eye. them comprehensible with help from
Miró kept the paradoxes going. He insisted on his metaphor, analogy and imagery.
Catalan name – Joan not Juan – but titled his works A science writer has to deliver
in French. His art – and he would insist his soul – was something that does not necessarily
rooted in Catalonia, but also in surrealism, and in induce apoplexy in their scientifically
postwar American painting. He continued to live in trained readership, but at the same time
Mallorca, and show internationally, while refusing keeps the lay reader glued to the text.
the honours of Franco’s government or to partici- Bloggers have the luxury of the optional
pate as an official Spanish artist in biennale. Unlike hyperlink, but they too must write
Dalí, he made few accommodations to the state, just something that will bring their fans
as he had earlier refused to become a social realist back to the web page.
or a communist, or to toe the surrealist line. This is Alas, science journalism is not a take-
why Miró became so important a figure for a younger it-or-leave it activity. Science is funded
generation of Catalan artists, such as Antoni Tàpies by the public, for the public good:
and the visual poet and playwright Joan Brossa. journalists have an obligation to report
Hardly any retrospectives are complete. There on scientific advance, however baffling.
is always something missing – either absent works So the hapless hack must decide what
or the artist’s spirit, which can easily be destroyed the story is, and then write it.
by bad curatorship. The last big Miró retrospective I As Albert Einstein is supposed
saw, in New York in 1987, missed so much of the Miró to have said, in what I have always
present here, a deeply complex artist, political and imagined was advice to science
playful, full of sex and spirit, earth and sky. journalists: “Everything should be made
as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape is at Tate Modern, Thanks Albert. You’ve been a really
London, until 11 September 2011 big help.
36 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
Culture
Reviews
Classical/Dance
The Rite of Spring in 3D
Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Perhaps Klaus Obermaier’s digitised presentation
of Stravinsky’s ballet seemed more innovative in
2007 than it does now that 3D movies have become
commonplace. Obermaier’s concept places a single
dancer, Julia Mach, in a “black box” to the side of the
orchestra. From there, manipulated 3D images of her
are projected in real time on to a giant screen hang-
ing above the players, where they are juxtaposed
with the abstract effects that Obermaier generates
around her.
For the first quarter of an hour or so, it’s com-
pelling – the novelty of the 3D images is strong if
transient, and there is at least a semblance of con-
nection between what one sees through the stere-
oscopic glasses spinning in space around the orches-
tra – Mach menaced by a circle of arcane symbols
and shapes in brilliant scarlet – and the strong nar-
rative impulse of the score. But in the second half,
Obermaier’s treatment becomes more diffuse and
pretentious. The images of the writhing Mach are
fragmented into autonomous body parts and pix-
els, and all connections with the music are broken.
Jettisoning the ballet’s original scenario may be one
thing, but replacing it with just a series of grids and
patterns for the climactic sacrificial dance utterly
fails to match some of the most physically powerful
music ever written.
It is the account of the music, though, that proves
to be the show’s saving grace. It is quite superbly
played by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orches-
tra under Ilan Volkov, and their hour-long programme
begins with two more 20th-century classics. Varèse’s
Tuning Up is a riff on the ritual of orchestral tuning,
with snatches of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony
and Yankee Doodle Dandy. Volkov conducts it with
the same care and detailed precision he lavishes on
the ravishingly svelte surfaces of Ligeti’s Lontano. In
both works, as well as in The Rite, it was the orches-
tra’s vivid playing that really grabbed the attention.
Andrew Clements
Film
How I Ended This Summer
Directed by Alexei Popogrebsky
Alexei Popogrebsky’s How I Ended This Summer is a
harsh tale set on an Arctic island in Chukotka, at the
extreme north-east tip of Russia. It is like a gulag de-
signed for two, stuck on the edge of the world, and it
has a pared-down quality that virtually compels the
viewer to see it as some kind of allegory. One of the
two characters appears to be a student performing
unfamiliar tasks on an isolated meteorological sta-
tion. He’s the good-looking Pavel Danilov (Grigory
Dobrygin), aged around 20, with a silver ring in his
left ear and carrying a rifle. We first see him tak-
ing readings of various instruments that measure
weather and radioactivity (this is evidently a con-
taminated area) as the wind whips around him.
He then returns to the shabby hut he shares with
Sergei Gulybin (Sergei Puskepalis), an experienced
meteorologist some 30 years his senior. There is
tension between them, first expressed by Sergei
revealing that the younger man has forgotten to take
Two faces of Putin’s Russia … Grigory Dobrygin and Sergei Puskepalis in How I Ended This Summer
cartridges for his gun. In 1984, he tells him, a hydrog-
rapher was killed by a bear just a few steps from the
hut. To Sergei, this temporary assistant is a frivolous,
unreliable figure who plays violent video games
that pit him against snipers. Pavel comes across as a
playful figure, swinging on an abandoned radar dish
and jumping along a row of oil drums. Sergei, on the
other hand, is a stolid figure whose sole pastime is
fishing for Arctic trout out at sea. They almost seem
like the last survivors in a post-apocalyptic world
and, in a sense, they are.
But every hour or so they communicate with
some distant base on a crackling, scarcely audible
radio link. Their equipment is antiquated and failing,
their food terrible, the place ill-furnished, unpainted
and falling apart. This emphasises the feeling of de-
spair and pointlessness induced by the work, while
the savage grandeur of the surrounding mountains,
the snow-covered tundra and relentlessly pound-
ing sea comment ironically upon it. As the weather
suddenly deteriorates, cabin fever gives way to le-
thal enmity, a cat-and-mouse game ensues and the
movie turns into a thriller.
Eight years ago, Popogrebsky made his directorial
debut with Roads to Koktebel, a road movie reminis-
cent of Tarkovsky and De Sica. In the earlier film one
suspected a lurking allegory about contemporary
Russia. Here it is unavoidable. I find it impossible
not to see Sergei and Pavel as representing different
sides of Putin’s Russia, one shaped by older tradi-
tional ways, the other struggling to discover a new
set of values. Philip French Observer
Theatre
Jerusalem
Music Box Theatre, New York
The opening of Jez Butterworth’s remarkable Jeru-
salem solidifies what looks to be the most competi-
tive Tony race for best play in years. Joining such
other potential nominees as War Horse, Good People
and The Motherfucker With the Hat, Broadway can
boast a packed stable of satisfyingly original Ameri-
can and British plays – each a bona fide possibility as
the trophy winner. How gratifying it is that “new”
– not “revival” – will be the most important word on
prognosticators’ tongues in the run-up to the June
awards ceremony. Butterworth’s rousing play at the
Music Box Theatre is an extremely funny and, ulti-
mately, surprisingly profound contemplation of a
fading time in western civilisation when iconoclastic
giants walked among us.
At the miraculous hub of the sprawling play – it
clocks in at roughly three hours – is the Falstaffian
performance of Mark Rylance, delivering his sec-
ond steamroller turn of the Broadway season, after
his portrayal of the showboating vulgarian Valere
in the droll if unbalanced La Bete. Now, he’s the
hyper-dynamic force of nature once again, playing
a burned-out onetime professional daredevil who
lives a debauched life out of a trailer on the edge of
the English countryside.
Never mind that Rylance’s stoned and sunburned
Johnny Byron, sporting tattoos and earrings and act-
ing like a grizzled 13-year-old, dispenses drugs to mi-
nors and neglects the son he has left in the care of
the boy’s mother (Geraldine Hughes).
In a sense, Jerusalem is a tribute to the nobility of
a nation’s past, of a spirit tied to the land. It’s not so
much that Jerusalem glorifies Johnny; it recognises
in telling glimpses what he represents in the national
character and how that character has changed.
Though his trailer – brought to life in all its deco-
rous shabbiness by set designer Ultz – is parked on
what he claims to be the ancestral land, the residents
of the adjacent housing development want him and
his noisy cocaine and weed parties out.
Butterworth allows us to see why Johnny is so
irresistible to the band of “educationally subnormal
outcasts” who gather at his encampment. He’s a relic
of old England, and yet he’s also the embodiment of
eternal youth, an uber-rebel: pirate, biker and rocker
rolled into one. Of course, Johnny’s completely in-
effectual, too. He’s all pointless bravado, his quests
poignantly quixotic. “Beloved spongers,” Johnny
cries, “We are going to behead the mayor, imprison
the Rotary Club!”
The piece started at London’s Royal Court
Theatre, and American audiences may strug-
gle with Jerusalem’s Englishness. Then again,
there is nothing the tiniest bit obscure in what
Rylance is creating on the stage . A great per-
formance establishes its own universal lexicon.
Peter Marks Washington Post

Obituaries
Osama bin
Laden
The al-Qaida mastermind who
became the most sought-after
terrorist in the wake of 9/11
T
o his enemies, he was a religious
fanatic, a terrorist with the blood of
thousands on his hands. To his sup-
porters, whose numbers peaked in
the few years after the attacks of 11
September 2001 in America that he
masterminded, he was a visionary fighting both
western aggression against Muslims and his co-
religionists’ lack of faith and rigour. For both, Os-
ama bin Laden, who has been killed by US special
forces at the age of 54, was one of those rare fig-
ures whose actions changed the course of history.
His life was one of contradictions. Born to great
wealth, he lived in relative poverty. A graduate
of civil engineering, he assumed the mantle of a
religious scholar. A gifted propagandist who had
little experience of battle, he projected himself as
a mujahid, a holy warrior.
Bin Laden’s story started in the poor, deeply
conservative Hadhramawt region of south-east
Yemen, from where his father, Mohammed bin
Awad bin Laden, set out for the Saudi city of Jed-
dah to seek his fortune around 1930. By the time
Osama was born there, 17th of 52 children, his
father was a rich construction magnate. Osama’s
mother was an educated Syrian who shunned the
veil in favour of Chanel suits. Raised in a palace in
Jeddah, Osama grew up polite, diligent and pious.
In 1974 he married the 14-year-old Najwa
Ghanem, his mother’s niece, and enrolled in the
economics and management faculty of King Abdul
Aziz University, Jeddah. Though he graduated in
civil engineering and spent a short period in the
family company, his true interests lay elsewhere.
The year of his graduation, 1979, was a tumul-
tuous one in the Islamic world. In February, Aya-
tollah Khomeini created the Islamic republic in
Iran. In November rebels took over the mosques
in Mecca and demanded a return to true Islamic
rule. When soldiers killed the ringleaders, Bin
Laden saw the assault as an atrocity committed on
the holiest soil in Islam. A month later came the
third defining event of the year: the invasion of
Afghanistan by the Soviet Union.
Despite his later boasts, Bin Laden did not
immediately travel to Peshawar, the Pakistani
frontier town 30km from Afghanistan. Arriving
in early 1981, he was to spend the next few years
making trips between the city and Saudi Arabia
before finally basing himself there from around
1986. Bin Laden’s role in the Afghan war in the
1980s has been grossly exaggerated. His military
contribution was negligible. He spent most of the
first half of the 1980s as a fundraiser and aide to
senior figures among the Arabs in Peshawar.
It was during this period that he began co-op-
erating more closely with an older Egyptian mili-
tant, a former doctor called Ayman al-Zawahiri.
In 1988 al-Qaida, often translated as “the base”,
was founded by Bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and 14
associates in a series of meetings in Peshawar. Its
campaign would take two main forms: guerrilla
Agent of change ... Osama bin Laden Rex Features
wars and a series of spectacular, violent actions
that would radicalise and mobilise all those who
had hitherto shunned the call to arms, eventually
provoking a mass uprising that would lead to a
new era for the world’s Muslims.
Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in late 1989.
By January 1991, some 300,000 foreign troops
were stationed on Saudi territory. Bin Laden ac-
cused the Americans of “desecrating holy Arab
soil”. Placed under house arrest, he slipped out
of Saudi Arabia, eventually reaching Khartoum
in Sudan, where the Islamist ideologue Hassan
Turabi was offering protection and facilities to a
wide variety of Islamic militant groups. For the
next five years, Bin Laden tried to make progress
with the al-Qaida project. He was linked to a bomb
explosion in Yemen in 1992. But operations in
the Balkans or the Caucasus brought limited suc-
cess. Attempts to reach out to other groups were
rebuffed. There was a sense he had lost his way.
Nonetheless, he was on the radar of security serv-
ices. In April 1994 the Saudi government stripped
Bin Laden of his citizenship and his family dis-
owned his actions. In 1996, Sudan succumbed to
US pressure and expelled its controversial guest.
Bin Laden accepted an offer of protection from
three anti-Taliban Afghan warlords and flew to
Jalalabad. The next years finally saw al-Qaida
finally become the “base” or “foundation”. Bin
Laden and al-Zawahiri set up or appropriated
dozens of training camps, guesthouses and other
facilities that provided them with a pool of volun-
teers. They sent emissaries to groups throughout
the Islamic world offering cash and technical help.
Bin Laden’s keen eye for public relations – and an
understanding of the still new technology of satel-
lite television — led to exclusive interviews with
select journalists. He also began to issue his own
“fatwas” or religious opinions. The first, in August
1996, promised to drive US troops out of the Gulf,
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 37
overthrow the Saudi government and liberate
Muslim shrines in Palestine. In February 1998, as
he announced an alliance between al-Qaida and
four other groups from Bangladesh, Egypt and
Pakistan, Bin Laden issued a second fatwa, which
called on all Muslims to kill Americans, including
civilians, “wherever you find them”. Bin Laden
organised a successful attack on US embassies in
Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998. Presi-
dent Clinton retaliated with cruise missile raids on
alleged Bin Laden facilities in Sudan and Afghani-
stan. A Saudi deal with the Taliban for the expul-
sion of Bin Laden fell through.
The idea for the 11 September 2001 attacks
came from Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, a Kuwait-
born Pakistani militant. The ambitious plans for
hijacking aircraft to strike US targets was initially
rejected by Bin Laden, but then finally accepted
after a series of meetings of al-Qaida’s leadership
in spring 1999. Many militants feared a backlash;
Bin Laden, convinced the US was a nation of
decadent cowards, pressed ahead. The CIA, now
running a Bin Laden unit, placed a $5m bounty on
the fugitive’s head. In October 2000 a dinghy with
explosives was driven into a US warship off Aden
killing its own crew and 17 sailors. But targeting
Bin Laden was difficult. US agencies squabbled
and the raw intelligence did not exist.
Though Bin Laden’s relationship with the Tali-
ban involved suspicion and disdain on both sides,
his financial help and the military aid provided by
his Chechen, Arab, Pakistani and Uzbekistani re-
cruits led to the formation of elite units attached
to the Pashtun Taliban forces, consolidating links.
Bin Laden moved often between Kabul and
Kandahar as well as a base near the Tora Bora
mountain range in eastern Afghanistan, south
of Jalalabad. Listening to a shortwave radio, he
learned of the success of the attacks in the US.
Faced with a US ultimatum, the Taliban again
refused to surrender Bin Laden, a decision that led
to invasion and the toppling of the regime. The
2001 campaign saw many leading al-Qaida figures
killed and the physical “base” destroyed. But al-
Qaida’s leaders escaped from Tora Bora and Bin
Laden found a new base in the restive Pakistani
tribal agencies. There were major bomb attacks in
Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, elsewhere in the Mid-
dle East, in Africa and in the far east.
In 2004 came an attack in Madrid which,
though it did not have a direct link with al-Qaida,
appeared to indicate that their ideology was hav-
ing an impact. One thing was still lacking: any
evidence of mass radicalisation. Evidence from
polls proved the growing disgust that many in
the Islamic world felt for the extremists. Despite
attempts to exploit new issues such as climate
change, there was a sense that Bin Laden, and
al-Qaida, was drifting away from the principal
position he had once occupied in the landscape of
Islamic militancy. The events of the Arab spring of
2011 merely emphasised that marginalisation.
Bin Laden’s ideology had been a response to
the failure of many previous utopian projects in
the Islamic world. But most Muslims always knew
something essential was missing: the notion of
Allah al-rahman w’al-rakhim — God the merciful
and beneficent. Bin Laden once claimed: “It is our
duty to bring light to the world.” Yet behind his
rhetoric of righteousness, divine justice and retri-
bution, there was nothing but darkness.
He is survived by four wives and 19 children.
Jason Burke and Lawrence Joffe
Osama bin Laden, terrorist, born 10 March 1957;
died 1 May 2011
38 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
Books
Red scares and rebel rousers
Richard Gott enjoys a forthright
account of the cold war’s effects
on the US and its neighbours
Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder
and the Cold War in the Caribbean
Alex von Tunzelmann
Simon & Schuster 528pp £25
For the British, the Caribbean summons up the
beaches of innumerable ex-colonies, now Com-
monwealth countries. Americans remember a dif-
ferent bunch of their very own ex-colonies: the
ever-troubled islands of Hispaniola and Cuba. All
too often, the histories of these once American-
controlled islands are told separately, but Alex von
Tunzelmann, making a name for herself as a popular
historian of the recent past, has had the clever idea
of telling their joint story during the crucial decade
between 1957 and 1967.
The impact and legacy of the Cuban revolution of
1959 is a familiar tale, and here it forms the framework
of the book, but an intertwined account of the more
frightening developments in neighbouring Haiti and
the Dominican Republic, superimposed on the strate-
gic cold war battle between Washington and Moscow,
brings many events into unusual and fruitful focus.
From today’s perspective, when Latin America
has largely disappeared from the screen – regarded
by the US at best with benign neglect – it is salutary
to recall a time when the region in general, and the
Caribbean in particular, was the central preoccupa-
tion of western policy. It is also refreshing to have
the view of a writer who is unaffected by personal
reminiscence. For Von Tunzelmann this is history,
not current affairs, and as she wades energetically
through the archives and the huge library of pub-
lished works, she cannot help but be amazed by what
she finds. Her conclusions are forthright.
“The secret war in the Caribbean destroyed any
hope of freedom and democracy in Cuba, Haiti and
the Dominican Republic,” she writes. “It toppled
democracies. It supported dictators. It licensed those
dictators’ worst excesses. It financed terrorism. It set
up death squads. It turned Cuba communist, and
kept it communist for half a century. It did massive
and permanent damage to the international repu-
tation of the United States. It nearly triggered a
nuclear holocaust.”
So how did this disastrous chain of events come
about? The Americans, in this account, are the chief
protagonists and chiefly to blame. Long before the
success of Castro’s revolution in Cuba in January
1959, US policy was motivated by an irrational and
distorting fear of communism. The Soviet Union
in those days had no interest in Latin America, and
communists in the continent were hard to locate.
Anti-Americans were there in spades, but genuine
communists were few and far between. Where they
did not exist, the local dictators were happy to in-
vent them, ensuring for themselves a steady supply
of US financial and military support as a result. Men
like Rafael Trujillo and Fulgencio Batista, autocratic
rulers of the Dominican Republic and Cuba since the
1930s, off and on, were past masters at this tactic.
They were joined in 1957 by François Duvalier, the
evil genius of Haiti.
Concern about “human rights” was not much in
evidence at that time, but several US diplomats were
worried by the ferocity of the Caribbean dictators. In
June 1958 the US ambassador in Port-au-Prince op-
posed Duvalier’s request for a US military mission,
writing that he was “repelled by the thought of a mis-
sion here when the jails are crammed with political
prisoners”. Washington took no notice, and 50 US
marines arrived at the end of the month to bolster
Papa Doc’s regime. Five years later, when sections of
the state department eventually concluded that Du-
valier was a dangerous psychopath, an invasion force
was prepared and then just as suddenly called off.
Much of Von Tunzelmann’s story concentrates on
the peculiar nature of Caribbean politics, and she
highlights the contradictions in the US approach,
contrasting the different strategies towards each
country elaborated by the local US embassy, the

Product of paranoia … Papa Doc Duvalier, Haiti’s
evil genius, in 1962 Robert Lerner/Getty Images
operatives of the CIA, and the Pentagon back in
Washington. Rarely did they work in concert or see
eye-to-eye, and successive US presidents made deci-
sions by zigzagging unhappily between them.
Ill-prepared guerrilla expeditions to overthrow
dictators, as well as invasions and assassinations,
were among the techniques of the times. Castro’s
expedition was one of several that peppered the
Caribbean in this period. His victory encouraged
others to repeat the experiment, invariably with
tragic results. Washington was eventually faced by
a real communist whom they had created through
their own ineptitude, backed by a communist su-
perpower armed with nuclear weapons. Terrified,
the US lashed out in all directions, stepping up its
secret war against Castro and invading the Domini-
can Republic to crush a perfectly inoffensive rebel-
lion, all to no purpose. Anti-American sentiment, the
only real threat to the US , grew by leaps and bounds
– and has continued to this day.
Assassination was also considered a permissible
weapon. The CIA wanted to kill Castro but their efforts
failed. They succeeded in 1961 with Rafael Trujillo,
and in November 1963 their own president became
the victim of a pointless murder. The rough justice
meted out in the Caribbean struck home. Observer
More of the same
dulls the pain
The Pale King
by David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown 548pp $27.99
Jeff Turrentine
Washington Post
After David Foster Wallace took his life
in 2008, his editor, Michael Pietsch,
went through his unpublished writ-
ing to see what kind of shape it was
in. It would have been surprising had
the prolific Wallace – who wrote es-
says, short stories and journalism in
addition to novels, and whose previ-
ous novel, Infinite Jest (1996), was more than 1,000
pages long – not left something behind.
As it happened, before he died Wallace had placed
on his desk a neatly stacked manuscript: one dozen
chapters of a work in progress. Pietsch took those
chapters (along with others that were eventually dis-
covered) back to New York, as well as hundreds of
pages of “notes and false starts, lists of names, plot
ideas” and other relevant material. Wallace’s pub-
lisher, Little, Brown, organised and edited it into a
548-page book that is being billed as Wallace’s “un-
finished novel”.
Given that Wallace was working on this material
at the time of his suicide, it’s difficult for a reader to
avoid indulging in what critics call “the biographical
fallacy”, – the unfounded conviction that the ideas,
emotions and beliefs present in a literary work are
necessarily held by the author. But it seems highly
unlikely that a story set among Internal Revenue
Service employees at a regional examination centre
– chronicling the tax-collecting agency’s shift from
hand-processing data to increased automation in the
mid-1980s – could offer anything resembling pro-
found insight into the human condition, much less
into existential conundrums. In Wallace’s hands,
however, this tale of nervous bureaucrats becomes
a potent extended metaphor for how we’re able to
withstand the crushing tedium of modern life and
still derive meaning from it.
It’s a little unfair to speak of the “plot” of an unfin-
ished novel whose action unfolds so disjointedly that
the notion of story takes a back seat to mood, tone and
ideas. But based on what we have, we can deduce that
The Pale King was to have followed the battle over con-
trol of the Peoria REC between two titanic and philo-
sophically opposed senior bureaucrats. One views
the IRS as a collection of virtuous public servants;
the other wants to remake the agency in the mould
of a value-neutral, for-profit corporation. These men
make brief appearances, but for the most part their
ideological battle is waged by subordinates.
Chapters that may have been little more than ex-
tended character studies vary, not surprisingly, in
their effectiveness and the best of them tend to be
self-contained vignettes. And then there are chap-
ters recounting the picaresque IRS adventures of
the author, who pops in from time to time to assure
readers that the book he has written is not a novel
but a memoir – one that his timid publisher, for legal
reasons, has insisted be marketed as “fiction”. Here
we find Wallace at his loosest and funniest, as he
writes of the circumstances that got him kicked out
of school and of his strange first day on the job.
But even these broadly comic chapters are haunted
by a poignant refrain, what must surely qualify as the
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 39
whole point of this whole sadly unfinished business.
Each of these characters operates in a workday uni-
verse of almost unbearable monotony “Maybe dull-
ness is associated with psychic pain,” Wallace writes,
“because something that’s dull or opaque fails to
provide enough stimulation to distract people from
some other, deeper type of pain that is always there,
if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most
of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to
distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feel-
ing directly or with our full attention.”
The American author who will surely be remem-
bered as one of our era’s most distinct literary voices
knew that all the noise of modern life, including its
literature, is really just our attempt to stave off “this
terror of silence”. “I can’t think anyone really believes
that today’s so-called information society is just
about information,” Wallace wrote in the last novel
that would be published under his name. “Everyone
knows it’s about something else, way down.”
It all adds up
Mathematics of Life:
Unlocking the Secrets of Existence
by Ian Stewart
Profile 358pp £20
Alex Bellos
Did you hear about the farmer who
hired some mathematicians to help
him increase his milk yield? Their
report began: “Consider a spherical
cow …”
This is a famous old joke about the
disconnect between mathematics,
the language of clear abstractions,
and the life sciences, the domain of messy organic
forms. For much of the history of science, biology
and maths have barely been on speaking terms. Ian
Stewart says this is changing. He claims that for the
next century the driving force behind mathematics
will be biology, and that this marks a fundamental,
and exciting, shift in how the sciences interrelate.
“Mathematicians like nothing better than a rich
source of new questions,” he writes. “Biologists,
rightly, will be impressed only by the answers.”
Stewart is Britain’s most brilliant and prolific
populariser of mathematics, the author of at least
30 books, as well as academic texts and influential
research papers. His recent collections of playful
miscellany, Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathe-
matical Curiosities and Hoard of Mathematical
Treasures, have been bestsellers. Mathematics of
Life is a much more serious book. Through mathe-
matical eyes, Stewart chronicles the major advances
of biology, from the invention of the microscope
three centuries ago to the discovery in 1953 by Crick
and Watson of the structure of DNA. He shows just
what maths has done to explain elements of life, and
where research is taking us next.
One reason why biology is now attracting mathe-
maticians is because much of the subject has been
reduced to physics and chemistry. Neurons can be
understood in terms of networks, nerves as cables
transmitting electricity and DNA as strings of differ-
ent chemicals. A variety of mathematical fields are
applicable to biology. Knot theory is used in the anal-
ysis of tangles of DNA. Abstract geometry in four,
five or more dimensions can tell us a lot about real vi-
ruses in three dimensions. Alan Turing’s “reaction-
diffusion” equations help Continued on page 40≥
40 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
Books
≤Continued from page 39 us understand stripes and
dapples on animals. Stewart mentions his own work
on types of animal gait based on a simple circuit in
the nervous system called a central pattern genera-
tor. Neuroscience is particularly maths-friendly: for
example, equations can explain why you see spirals
when you take hallucinogenic drugs. (It’s because of
the arrangement of neurons on the visual cortex.)
If mathematicians are learning to love biology, then
biologists need to take on board the peculiarities of
mathematics. Stewart returns to the joke in the open-
ing paragraph, which he says is not really a joke at all.
Spherical cows may be useless for determining milk
yields, but they might be a useful approximation for
problems such as the spread of bovine skin disease.
Mathematics of Life is dense with information,
written with Stewart’s characteristic lightness of
touch and will please the dedicated maths reader.
I would like to think it will also appeal to a wider
audience since it is a testament to the versatility of
maths and how it is shaping our understanding of
the world.
Unhealthy pursuit
The Sugar Barons:
Family, Corruption, Empire and War
by Matthew Parker
Hutchinson 446pp £25
Ian Thomson
In Jamaica recently, I was invited to
lunch at a Restoration-era planta-
tion house. The sound of crushed ice
clinking against glass greeted me, as
bow-tied waiters served guests at a
long table draped in linen. The top
brass of the island’s sugar industry
was there. For three centuries the
plantation’s slave-grown sugar had satisfied the Brit-
ish craving for cakes, confections and the popular
version of coffee and tea (that “blood-sweetened
beverage”, the abolitionist poet Southey called it).
Modern Britain, according to Matthew Parker, was
built on sugar. There is hardly a manufacturing town
in the UK that was not in some way connected to
the “Africa trade”. The glittering prosperity of slave
ports such as Bristol and Liverpool was derived in
large part from commerce with Africa. In the heyday
of the British slave trade, from 1700 to 1808, West
Indians (as white sugar barons were then known)
became conspicuous by their new wealth. A popular
melodrama of 1771, Richard Cumberland’s The West
Indian, satirised them as boorish creatures who had
settled in n the Caribbean to acquire
acq a fortune and a
social status
atus they would have been denied at home.
In The he Sugar Barons, Parker provides a glittery
history of the e British impresarios, heiresses and
remittancence memenen involved in Caribbean slavery.
Typically they
ly the y cast Jamaica
or Barbadosados aside
a like a
sucked orangorange ge in
order to frit fritter
ter
their p pro
r o f itt s
back home
i n E ng l a n d .
Outside de of
Georgian an
London, n,
the great-eat-
est concen-
cen-
t rat i o n o f
retired West Indians was in the Bristol suburb of
Clifton. There, in their cocked hats and fashion-
ably buckled shoes, the new men of capital were
disliked for their ostentation. George III, the story
goes, was peeved to encounter a West Indian in the
seaside resort of Weymouth whose coach was more
resplendent than his own. “Sugar, sugar, hey? – all
that sugar!” the king complained loudly.
In this racy, well-researched history, Parker con-
centrates on such egregiously cruel sugar barons as
Thomas Thistlewood, who ran a slave plantation in
west Jamaica between 1750 and 1786. By his own
precise account, Thistlewood had sexual intercourse
on 3,852 occasions throughout his 40-year Caribbean
rampage. His strenuous licentiousness, chronicled in
schoolboy Latin in a diary he kept (“About 2am, cum
Negro girls”), makes it clear that sex was important
to Britain’s imperial project: the empire gave planters
such as Thistlewood the licence to abuse their cap-
tive women and indulge a predatory nature.
Needless to say, sugar barons had no scruple
about the brutality of the “Negro trade”. At Drax Hall
estate in north Jamaica, slaves were flogged virtually
into the grave in order to speed up cane-cutting and
crushing (the Drax family gave its name to the fiend-
ish Sir Hugo Drax in Ian Fleming’s 007 extravaganza
Moonraker).
Since the West Indies were riddled with dis-
ease, insects and reptiles, British planters became
absentee landlords if they could, or else they
liquidated their tropical holdings outright. Others
never set foot in the West Indies at all. The Gothic
novelist William Beckford’s sole attempt, in 1787,
to visit his father’s property, Drax Hall, took him no
further than Lisbon: sea-sickness, combined with a
fear of shipboard cockroaches, detained him.
The few planters who did settle aimed to send
their children “home” to England for their educa-
tion. Tobias Smollett, the 18th-century Scottish nov-
elist, having married a “home-comer” from Jamaica,
appointed a London agent to oversee the sale and
purchase of his wife’s slaves. Typically, funds were
slow to arrive as British slaving agents were ineffi-
cient and, often as not, drunk. “That cursed Ship
from Jamaica”, Smollett complained in a letter of
1756, “is at last arrived without Letter or Remit-
tance.” Smollett and his wife could hope to earn
$130 for each “Negro man” sold on their behalf – a
considerable sum in those days.
To judge by Parker’s account, sugar was the
only reason for the British Caribbean’s existence.
Barbados society was notably created from slavery
Barbadian customs and culture were fashioned
by slavery. The effects of slavery are moreover
plain to see in the island’s class and racial divides
today. Though African complicity in the British
slave trade can hardly be ignored, Parker makes
nothing of it. The African side of transatlantic slav-
ery was exemplified by the slave castles the Brit-
ish operated along the Gold Coast unt until the slave
trade’s abolition in 1807, and which served
serv as hold-
ing centres for Africans captu
captured by and
sold into servitude by fello
fellow
ow Africans.
Conceivably, the forebear
forebears rs of British
Jamaicans today passed through
th
hr these
warehouse-dungeons. T The Sugar
Barons
Baron n provides
eloquent
eloq q testi-
mony
mon n to the mer-
cantile
cann greed of
a few
f and the
manifest
m mis-
ery
err endured
byy millions in
the
h pursuit of
th
sweetness.
sw
we
When the snow melts
The Silent Land
by Graham Joyce
Doubleday 262pp $23.95
Jeff VanderMeer
Washington Post
In the brave and heartbreaking The
Silent Land, a young married couple
trapped in a deserted Alpine village
must come to terms with strange
events that test the strength of their
relationship. In its melding of the
bizarre and the personal, Graham
Joyce’s novel invites comparison to
the work of Haruki Murakami and Ian McEwan.
When an avalanche strikes during a ski run, Jake
and Zoe must dig their way out. The scene is so per-
fectly rendered that it leaves the reader with the
ghost-sensation of being buried alive. They return to
the hotel Saint-Bernard-en-Haut to find it deserted,
with every sign of swift departures by staff and fel-
low guests. But their attempts to leave the village
end in failure. Even more alarming, they observe odd
phenomena, including candles that never burn down
and meat in the hotel kitchen that never goes bad.
Joyce’s skill at conveying the creepiness of these
inexplicable events creates undeniable tension. The
novel is encased, like the village, in a veil of ice and
mystery. A frozen stream is a “thin, twisted bolt of
silk, mysterious and beautiful in the fairy-tale dark-
ness”, while rocks covered in snow form “jagged,
rotten-coloured teeth”.
Joyce juxtaposes the surreal events in and around
the hotel with Jake and Zoe’s memories of their dead
fathers. Thinking about Archie, a “retired engineer
from Dundee, working-class boy made good”, Zoe
recalls his admonition to “hold on to the moment”.
But what, she wonders, in one of the novel’s most
exquisite passages, was the moment? “Spindrift on
the back of a sunlit wave? A fox’s tail as it disappears
through the hedgerow? A meteorite as it flares in the
August night sky?”
In contrast to this mournful serenity, the story
of Jake’s father, Peter, and his losing fight against
cancer is filled with the gritty horror of sickness.
Even though lost in a fog of confusion and profan-
ity, Peter inadvertently gives Jake the insight into
the past needed for a late reconciliation. These short,
evocative scenes give added weight to Zoe’s observa-
tion that now “every detail [of my life], every word,
seems intense and packed with significance”. But
these realisations also make the couple’s predica-
ment seem even more ominous.
Eventually, the candles begin to burn down, the
meat in the kitchen to rot, and it appears that the
new anxiety entering Jake and Zoe’s lives will be an
all-too-familiar fear of impending mortality, in a win-
ter wonderland where they had been alone but not
lonely. However, apparitions soon appear, the phone
rings, and strange men in the snow vanish when ap-
proached. Every evening becomes more ominous
than the next, until twilight feels “like a mantle, a
quiet invasion, a horde of creeping creatures sur-
rounding the hotel”.
The novel’s conclusion is both beautiful and dev-
astating with its insight into the lives of two decent
people. Few times while reading fiction have I been
so overcome by how remembering the past and living
in the moment combine to form the core of our exist-
ence. In The Silent Land Joyce’s abiding gift is to make
the reader feel this truth fiercely and protectively.
 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 41

Books
Never forget that
memory matters
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and
Science of Remembering Everything
by Joshua Foer
Allen Lane 320pp £14.99

Oliver Burkeman

When I really put my mind to it, I can

recall precisely eight telephone num-
bers in full, including that of Radio
York, a station I haven’t listened to in
years, and not including those of
several of my closest friends. This
causes me very few problems. The
numbers I need are stored in my
phone, while similar technological crutches exist for
almost every imaginable form of data.
Being able to recite the kings and queens of
England means little, surely, compared with
knowing where to find that information online in
a matter of seconds, along with all the presidents
of America, 30 recipes for spaghetti carbonara, the
full text of Paradise Lost, and pretty much anything
else. To invest precious time and energy enhancing
my capacity for rote learning would seem eccentric.
But such eccentrics do exist. The most talented
(and, apparently, the most eccentric) spend their
lives on the competitive memorisation circuit, the
endearingly geeky world that Joshua Foer sets out to
explore in this witty and revelatory book.
“Anyone could do it, really,” Ben Pridmore, thrice
winner of the World Memory Championships,
observes in the opening pages, referring to his ability
to memorise the order of a shuffled deck of cards in
32 seconds, and to recite pi to 50,000 decimal places.
Foer decides to put that claim to the test, and to his
own astonishment ends up winning the US National Mental snapshot … is the ability to memorise an essential human trait? Innis McAllister
Memory Championships. (This is not a spoiler: the
book’s jacket reveals it.) Perhaps anyone can do it, Schiffer swimming in [a] tub of cottage cheese…” ultimately catapults Foer to his surprise victory in
then – or at least the sharp-brained, Yale-educated Sexual images are more memorable. “If you wish to the US competition. Foer advances to the world
younger brother of the novelist Jonathan Safran remember quickly, dispose the images of the most championships, but performs poorly. Neither the
Foer can. But the deeper question animating his beautiful virgins into memory places,” advised Peter victory nor the defeat seem to bother him much
adventure is why anyone would want to. Is this all of Ravenna, a 15th-century writer on the topic. either way, and this sense that he’s not especially
just party tricks? Or in losing the ability to memorise, The secret to an amazing memory, then, is essen- committed to the competitive memorisation lark is
are we losing something essential to being human? tially a trick. (The book’s title refers to another vivid his book’s only significant fault. But it is a minor one
That worry dates back to the invention of one of image Foer concocted for a similar exercise.) Truly – his broader journey certainly demonstrates how
the very first memory crutches: writing. “Socrates photographic memories – Lisbeth Salander from much memory matters. Apart from anything else,
feared that writing would lead the culture down a Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series notwithstanding filling up our mental storehouses in the right way
treacherous path of intellectual and moral decay,” – are now largely considered to be a myth. The key can make life feel longer. “Creating new memories
Foer explains. “Because even while the quantity of is to link what we’re poor at remembering (words, stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our
knowledge available to people might increase, they numbers) to what we’re good at remembering perception of our lives,” Foer explains. This is why
themselves would come to resemble empty vessels.” (environments). To those of us who can’t remember it’s important to travel to new locations and try new
The key technique still used by today’s memory phone numbers but who can recall almost perfectly activities, and it makes intuitive sense that a well-ex-
champions, known as the “memory palace”, is the floor plan of the infant school we attended, this ercised memory, practised at retaining information,
ancient, too. Credited to the Greek poet Simonides makes eminent sense. might be able to maximise that lengthening effect.
of Ceos, it involves remembering sequences of In itself, however, the act of memorising things Memorisation has a bad reputation in education
words by imagining objects placed around a physi- does not provide limitless journalistic colour, and it today, dismissed as antithetical to creativity. But we
cal setting you know well, such as your home. is Foer’s detours down other side-streets of memory don’t need to choose between abandoning it entirely,
“The thing to understand, Josh, is that humans that make for some of the book’s most compelling or retreating into calls for a return to the old days of
are very, very good at learning spaces,” says Ed moments. In California, he meets the retired lab chanting British monarchs by rote. The truth lies
Cooke, the ebullient British memory grandmaster technician known in the psychological literature in the middle: a supple memory provides the basis
who becomes Foer’s coach, talking him through as EP, a victim of such catastrophic amnesia that for retaining the information from which creative
the exercise in order to remember a shopping list he forgets almost everything almost immediately new ideas can then be forged. Besides, Foer adds,
featuring such items as pickled garlic and cottage – including, of course, the fact of his forgetting. “what I had really trained my brain to do, as much
cheese. “For your first memory palace, I’d like you EP is as focused on the present as any Zen monk, as to memorise, was to be more mindful, and to pay
to use the house you grew up in … I want you to close and seems happy enough. But rich human relation- attention to the world around me. Remembering can
your eyes and try to visualise in as much detail as ships are fundamentally beyond his reach: they are only happen if you decide to take notice.”
possible a large bottle of pickled garlic standing right built on shared memory and, as Foer puts it, cannot It is a point that lingers in the memory, along-
where the car should be parked.” Then, proceeding sustain themselves solely in the present tense. side the image of Claudia Schiffer in a tub of
to the front door: “I want you to imagine Claudia Studious practice under Cooke’s guidance cottage cheese.
42 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
Diversions
Notes & Queries
The thing with feathers
that perches on the soul
Where does hope come from and
how do we keep it?
From the eternal springs we live in.
Judy Kellaway, Mount Stuart,
Tasmania, Australia
• Where does hope come from?
Pandora’s box. And how do we keep
it? With foolhardy determination
and wilful optimism.
Stephenie Cahalan, Hobart,
Tasmania, Australia
• I don’t know; it’s a mystery. But
it is there; we, as individuals, may
lose it from time to time, but hope
itself never dies. As the protagonist
Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), in a
letter to fellow inmate Red (Morgan
Freeman), comments at the close
of that wonderful Frank Darabont
movie, The Shawshank Redemption:
“Hope is a good thing, and a good
thing never dies.”
James Stevens, Volos, Greece
• I believe it springs eternal in a
woman’s breast.
Adrian Cooper, Queens Park,
NSW, Australia
I hate being snored at
Why is snoring such a disturbing
sound as opposed to laughter?
The judgment of the sound of both
snoring and laughter is in the ear of
the hearer. Snoring can be a pleas-
ant sound if a sick insomniac has
dropped into a deep sleep, whereas
laughter can be an unpleasant one if
you are being laughed at.
Other bodily expulsions of air are
equally variant: belching is accepted
in some countries as an appreciation
of food given, whereas in others it
Nature watch Wenlock Edge
The amphibious face looked out
from dark water; its impervious
gaze scanned minute horizons be-
tween the worlds of water and air. I
couldn’t tell what it saw or thought,
but felt its expressionless expres-
sion spanned aeons through which
evolution had changed much be-
tween the newt and me.
A palmate newt scrambled out of
a bucket. It had been accidentally
raked up in algae from a pond and
wriggled free. The algae looked like
flowing green hair in water but was
drying into a lump of nylon stuffing
in the bucket. The almost instant
change when aquatic things are
dragged from the water is always a
disappointment; they lose a kind of
Hope ... Andy in Shawshank Redemption
is unseemly behaviour. Breaking
wind can be an amusing diversion in
a classroom, whereas doing so in a
lift accompanied by only one other
person can be an embarrassment.
Dick Hedges, Nairobi, Kenya
• Laughter comes in spontaneous
bursts; it expresses amusement that
is usually shared with others, and it
is therefore normally an enjoyable,
sociable sound.
Snoring is a continuous, solitary,
unsociable activity; its sound is
enjoyed by neither the perpetra-
tor, who is not awake to hear it,
nor by the involuntary listener,
who hears it only too well. It
becomes increasingly irritating
until the sleeper wakes up, either
spontaneously or with a sharp poke
in the ribs.
Joan Dawson, Halifax, NS, Canada
• Duration.
Donna Samoyloff, Toronto, Canada
• The answer turns on the listener’s
own level of consciousness.
Philip Stigger, Burnaby, BC, Canada
magic in our savage air. Like waking
from a dream, they have to make
sense in our terrestrial reality. Simi-
larly, things of dry land that end up
underwater seem to gain a strange
sense of otherness. Amphibians
move in both directions and bring
their ancient strangeness with them.
First I only noticed movement,
a kind of awkward bending like
those squidgy plastic toys that stick
• You never know what they’re
snoring at.
Alan Gabbey, New York City, US
• Ask any stand-up comedian.
Mark Hainge, Canberra, Australia
Let’s stick it to the Man
When it is said, “they can’t take that
away from you”, who are “they”?
Certainly not the tax man at Canada
Revenue Agency.
Art Hunter, Napanee,
Ontario, Canada
• The Man.
David Fenderson,
Canberra, Australia
• The racists, homophobes, snide
critics and bullies of every variety,
who exist simply to test our mettle.
Richard Orlando,
Montreal, Canada
Is it well in your sole?
Why do cockroaches die on
their backs?
To save their soles.
Jim Neilan, Dunedin,
New Zealand
Any answers?
Why are some orders tall and others
short?
Elizabeth Quance, Almonte, Ontario,
Canada
Why are only three months of the
year girls’ names?
Edward Black, Sydney, Australia
Send answers to weekly.n&q@
guardian.co.uk or Guardian Weekly,
Kings Place, 90 York Way, London
N1 9GU, UK
to glass. With the consistency of
jellied tongue, the newt appeared
to be made of stuff from mucky
ponds. I put it on a marsh marigold
leaf. There was a tiny dragon, 6cm
long with a low dorsal ridge down
its back, a wide spotted tail and
darkly webbed back feet. This was
its breeding time, only possible in its
original state, and returning it to its
pond felt like an acknowledgment
of a debt owed to water life. The
newt stared from its between world.
Around it, orange-tip butterflies
sought cuckoo flowers. The newt
slid under the meniscus of the pond,
without changing, still staring, even
down in the watery dark, watching.
Paul Evans
Maslanka puzzles
1 “One has to work out will it work,”
was the contribution of a merchan-
dising expert discussing a strategy
on our flagship radio station. Why
did Pedanticus turn off ?
2 They are
chess-mad
in Slabo-
dia. At the
border, 7
immigration
guards re-
quire you to
divide this
board into 7
equal pieces with a knife and a ruler.
What’s the trick?
3 Nowadays more teachers are
scared of their charges than vice
versa. Progress! One poor teacher
tries to propitiate his pupils by buy-
ing each of them as many eggs as he
has pupils. But a new boy arrives,
so he decides to distribute the eggs
equally (including himself and the
new boy). How many eggs are left
over?
4 The sum of which 5 consecutive
squares equals 5455?
5 A resident of the No Rest Home for
the Wicked alleviates the boredom
by ascending the little wooden stairs
to Bedfordshire by going up 7 and
down 3. His 37th step finds him on
the landing. How many stairs?
email: guardian@puzzlemaster.co.uk
Wordplay
Wordpool
Find the correct definition:
ARISTOLOGY
a) study of toads
b) science of dining
c) study of goodness and superiority
d) study of etiquette
Same Difference
Identify these words that differ only
in the letters shown:
****** (transport)
VOL****** (they may blow their tops)
Cryptic
Care about – run of the mill? (4)
Missing Links
Find a word that follows the first
word in the clue and precedes the
second, in each case making a fresh
word or phrase. Eg the answer to fish
mix could be cake (fishcake & cake
mix)...
a) text easy b) wild works
c) climate over d) chocolate magnet
e) side start f) strata stone
©CMM2011 For solutions see opposite page
 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 43

Diversions
Quick crossword Cryptic crossword by Paul
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Across 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

1 Kansas City, I note, in

Washington (7)
5 Composer’s caught 9 10
8 9 out by ursine philoso-
pher, Gilbert character
(4-3)
9 Article accompanying 11 12
10 11 thank you letter from
Corfu (5) 13
10 Happily roam, daring
12
to trap one skein of 14 15
geese? (9)
13 14 15 11 Something stale in the 16 17
fridge? Bad luck (4,6)
16 12 During trip I saw a 18
listed building here?
17 18 19 (4) 19 20
14 Armpit slit on woolly
jumper (12) 21 22 23
20
18 Suggested gibe? No!
24
21 22 23
(1,3,2,6)
21 Word of consent
25 26
translated in ancient
Hindu (4)
22 Bird’s man struggling
24 with trouser zip? (10) 27 28
25 Cocktail that’s mixed
in later, though not
finished (9)
1 In reality it’s more so! 7 16th US state (9) 26 Nosy neighbours of Conservative, reach- S T R I P P E R S L A P U P
(2,3,3,5) 10 Act in a silly way (4,5) central America left ing a capital city (8) A E E N O A O
8 Rickety old vehicle (7) 12 Orange – language (8) (5) 8 Frying in these? T O L E R A T E M A R M O T
9 Torn apart (5) 15 African language (7) 27 Wave aboard cutter (7) About time for brief
garment (3,5)
I E S E I D P S
10 Wound by scratching and 16 Saucer under this? (6) 28 Be cool and calm R A N G E R E N A S C E N T
tearing (4) 13 I’d turned European
18 Orange – port (5) when hot in lilac, E T V P R R I
11 Melt (8) against supposed art
20 Compass point (4) unfortunately getting
G E O R G E O R W E L L
13 Strip of fabric worn round cross (7) lovers (10)
23 Toothed wheel (3) 15 See 24 L A R I T E D L
the neck (6)
16 Actor who carried on E X P R E S S T R A I N
14 Those invited (6)
17 Declared (8) First published in the Guardian
Down stuffing faces with I O I O N A U
1 How do you do two food (3,5) N O S T R I N G S F I N I S
19 Informal restaurant (4) 29 April 2011, No 12,782
17 Drink an indefinite
bananas before tea? S T A G P O T U
21 Tender (5) Last week’s solution, No 12,774 quantity in lager, as
(6) T O L E D O S E A R C H E R
22 Relating to the abdomen – 2 Red revolutionary, novice (8)
ice cola (anag) (7) 19 Man’s locked in prison E E O C C E E
revolutionary leader
24 1966 film based on a novel over revolutionary room, not entirely R E S E N T S T R E A M E R
by Irvine Welsh (13) extremists (6) chipper (6) Last week’s solution, No 25,302
3 Cain slaughtered 20 Expert uses tongue in
Down man of God, which is conversation, being
1 Smoker’s black deposit (3) wrong (10) wordy (6)
4 Fish’s point of view (5) 23 Hardened soul starts
2 Orange – type of pottery (7)
5 Finish – or add finish? to call your name, if
3 Egg yellow (4) confronted (5)
4 Addictive drug (6) (6,3)
6 State “I’m surprised, 24,15 Fancy lad and me
5 Mediterranean plant of the tied knot! (4,9)
over the moon” (4)
buttercup family (8)
7 Supporter overcoming
6 Block on which metal can be element that’s less First published in the Guardian
hammered (5) 29 April 2011, No 25,309

Maslanka solutions Sudoku classic Hard

f) strata/gem/stone 5x2 + 1 + 4 + 4 + 1 = 5x2 + 10 =
e) side/kick/start (x - 1)2 + x2 + (x + 1)2 + (x + 2)2 = Fill in the grid so that every row,
d) chocolate/bar/magnet 4 31-35 inclusive. [(x - 2)2 + every column and every 3x3 box 1 5 3
contains the numbers 1 to 9. We will
c) climate/change/over c2 - (c + 2)(c - 2) = 4.]
b) wild/fire/works
a) text/speak/easy
3 4. [For c little terrors and c2 eggs:
matically on track. [See right] publish the solution next week. 3 5
8 9 4
Missing Links leftmost 7 X 7 and you will be auto-
Cryptic RACE the lower and Free puzzles at guardian.co.uk/sudoku ≥
VOLCANOES on the edge of
Same Difference CANOES, with these dots Last week’s solution 6 9 7
Wordpool b) your ruler up
5 3 8 6 1 2 7 4 9
Babe and should give him $2, not $4.
last fence: Abe had $4 more than
board; so line
divide a 7 X 7 1 6 9 4 5 7 3 2 8 5 3 1
4 7 2 9 8 3 6 5 1
Pyrgic No 7 the solution fell at the
Hares of Correction In last week’s
matter to
2 It is a trivial 8 5 7 3 9 4 1 6 2 7 1 8
work.”
3 2 1 5 6 8 9 7 4
plus 7 = 19 stairs.
4 steps up. So we have 4 X 3 = 12,
cycles of 10 steps, each moving one
say: “One wonders whether it will
yesterday when we were wont to 9 4 6 7 2 1 5 8 3
2 8 6
up. The 30 steps before consist of 3 than an ice shelf. Why it seems only 7 9 4 2 3 6 8 1 5 8 1
5 The last upthrust takes one 7 steps rect question are collapsing faster
6 1 5 8 4 9 2 3 7
5455; so x2 = 1089.] 1 The quaint olden ways of the indi-
2 8 3 1 7 5 4 9 6 6 7 9
44 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
Appointments & Courses

UCL-Q, Qatar

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First-class facilities, small class sizes, and a stunning location
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• have the knowledge and technical ability to assess and advise on carbon management.
Why study here?
• Excellent range of integrated work placements with high-profile organisations
• Bursaries and scholarships available
• Dumfries Campus location – close to natural carbon sinks and great access to the rural
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To find out more, visit:
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The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401.
www.glasgow.ac.uk
University College London, working in partnership with the Qatar
Foundation and the Qatar Museums Authority, is creating UCL-Q,
a world-class research-led facility, focusing on the cultures and
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UCL-Q will provide:
• An internationally significant research centre housing research,
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• Outreach to Qatari schools and community groups
We are seeking to appoint to the following key posts, which will be based
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• Ref: 1185720 Finance Director. A highly experienced individual is
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To find out more about this role please visit www.ucl.ac.uk/hr/jobs and
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We particularly welcome female applicants and those from an ethnic
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Engineering
3D scores the winner for academics
Was it a goal? University
researchers may have
the answer for fans
Lucy Tobin
Ever since Frank Lampard’s should-
have-been-a-goal shot bounced be-
hind the line before being disallowed
at the England v Germany World Cup
tie last summer, fans have condemned
the organising body, Fifa, for its tech-
nophobia. Some 45 years earlier,
England benefited from a linesman’s
decision to allow Geoff Hurst’s dubi-
ous goal against West Germany at
Wembley and won the tournament.
But the difference was that by 2010
Fifa could have invested in various
types of goal-line technology.
Whether or not the football body
takes action before the next World
Cup, technology experts are feverishly
working on new-generation devices.
But much of that research does not
happen in media powerhouses or big
sport clubs – it is done by academics.
And some of the leading experts are
based on British campuses.
The University of Surrey’s visual
media research group is headed by
Professor Adrian Hilton and works
with broadcasters such as the BBC, as
well as big film studios, to develop 3D
techniques and graphics. One of Sur-
rey’s big areas of recent research was
its collaboration with the BBC for its
Good sport … a ball made by Adidas signals where it is on the field Getty
“iview” project, which allows sports
pundits to analyse matches from a
huge array of angles.
“When they’re talking about a par-
ticular instant in, say, a football game,
they can view it from the sideline, or
the referee’s perspective, or the goal-
ie’s – even if there wasn’t a camera
there,” says Hilton.
It’s not all about football, however.
The Surrey team is working with the
BBC on technology for athletics fans,
measuring athletes’ movements using
footage from just one broadcast cam-
era. “There’s a big push for 3D broad-
casting, but it normally needs a lot of
extra cameras in order to create that
all-round experience,” Hilton says.
“Using our 3D reconstruction technol-
ogy it’s possible to make footage from
a single camera into 3D afterwards. It’s
much cheaper.”
Hilton’s interest in 3D imaging be-
gan with his PhD in mechanical engi-
neering. “I became interested in arti-
ficial intelligence and how people un-
derstand and navigate the real world
through seeing and hearing,” he says.
He took up a research post in the com-
puter vision group at Surrey, where he
first created “hand-held” 3D capture
technology, allowing users to meas-
ure 3D objects by running laser light
across their surfaces. “The technology
was commercialised, and used for au-
tomotive design and in entertainment
The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 45
industries,” he says. Animators, in-
cluding those behind the BBC series
Walking with Dinosaurs, paid Surrey
a licence fee to use the technology.
Next, Hilton worked on a way to
capture 3D models of people from
photographs, eventually developing
another spin-off company, AvatarMe.
That was involved in making 3D
avatars of real people to “walk into”
popular video games. It was also used
to create 3D avatars for visitors to the
Millennium Dome exhibition.
Many of the blockbuster effects on
films and TV are also a product of uni-
versities. “Most special effects in films
probably have their origins in aca-
demic research,” says Hilton, who is
now working on ways to create digital
“doubles” of actors. “It’s extremely
challenging – the visual effects have to
be ‘photo-realistic’ on the big screen,
and the technologies have to work
with existing production tools.”
Hilton predicts more applications
for his 3D model-making technology
will emerge, perhaps including better-
fitting jeans. “We’re working with the
London College of Fashion to make a
low-cost recognition of 3D body shape
to improve clothing shape design,” he
says. The Surrey academics are also
in talks with the UK games industry,
looking at a way to create ever more
realistic animated interactive charac-
ters. The UK’s “very strong creative
industries ensure we are collaborating
on challenging problems that make a
real difference in industry”.
46 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11
International development
Money for the other half
Head of UN body says
she wants to see more
funding to aid women
Jane Martinson
Michelle Bachelet, the former Chil-
ean president, is taking on the super-
human challenge of redressing gender
inequality. Relatively little is known
about Bachelet outside her native
Chile and the corridors of international
diplomacy. And more than 100 days
after it was set up, there are still sig-
nificant questions about UN Women:
what exactly will it do, what are its
powers, and how it will be financed?
The body takes over from four exist-
ing, underfunded and relatively pow-
erless institutions devoted to women’s
rights, which the UN general council
voted to replace after Kofi Annan,
former UN secretary general, pointed
out “study after study has taught us
that there is no tool for development
more effective than the empowerment
of women”. Bachelet, who was Chile’s
first female head of state, will report
directly to the secretary general and
should command a start-up budget
of $500m by 2013, double what was
available previously – though only
about 1.6% of total UN funding. But
just three months in, there are already
disappointing signs of foot-dragging
by major donors, including the UK.
UN watchers believe Bachelet may
have a better chance than most to
cajole and bully her way through UN
diplomacy. The daughter of an army
general who died after months of tor-
ture by Augusto Pinochet’s forces,
she was herself tortured before being
exiled. She then trained as a doctor
and returned to Chile. An atheist, her
achievements in office include a de-
cree allowing the morning-after pill to
be distributed to those older than 14
years of age without parental consent,
policies to abolish shanty towns, and
daycare for poor children.
In person, this former paediatrician
is the opposite of a dry UN bureaucrat.
In her first interview with a British
newspaper since taking office, she rat-
tles off a list of priorities, ranging from
political and economic empowerment
to the ending of sexual violence.
Speaking in her fast-paced, heavily
accented English, she is charming and
voluble. Bachelet is credited with get-
ting her own way while making rela-
tively few enemies in her home coun-
try. (Her approval rating was 84% when
she stood down after the maximum
two terms in March 2010.) She will need
all her skills of persuasion to convince
member states to help her department,
Gender mender … Michelle Bachelet at an Apec summit Tom Hanson/AP
some of which place a very low national
priority on women’s rights.
“I am an optimist,” she laughs
when asked about the snail-like
pace of funding. “My main issue is to
have enough arguments to convince
[member states] to build capacity.”
Given such underfunding, she will
not be focusing on saving money, but
increasing her budget. “We have had
scarce investment in women … One
of my tasks is that everyone spends
much more on women.”
A woman who took herself off to
study military strategy before being
elected head of state, her arguments
are backed by a wealth of relevant
data. In the same breath, she manages
to refer to a gender study by the World
Economic Forum that found greater
productivity in countries where
women achieved senior positions,
and the benefits of a $3m programme
in Liberia to improve conditions for
women market traders.
“Just 19% of parliamentarians are
women, and we are more than half
of humanity,” she says. “There are
19 female head of states in 192 mem-
ber states. And just 15 of Fortune 500
chief executives are women. You see
we have a problem. Gender equality
will only be reached if we are able to
empower women.”
Sixteen years after a Beijing con-
ference on women set a target of 30%
women in national parliaments, only
28 countries meet this target. Most
of these (23) did so after introducing
quotas. “I am in favour of affirmative
action when there is exclusion,” she
says.
Economic empowerment is high on
her agenda and she lays out the huge
financial benefit of ending violence
against women. “In the US, violence
against women costs $5.8bn a year in
terms of medical costs, loss of pro-
ductivity and childcare. In Australia
they estimated that it cost $14.5bn a
year, more than the $10.7bn they spent
stimulating the economy.”
Perhaps the easiest way to under-
stand the five priorities of UN Women
– expanding women’s leadership,
enhancing women’s economic em-
powerment, ending violence against
women and girls, bringing women to
the centre of the peace and security
agenda, focusing national plans and
budgets on gender equality – is to
think of all the things not necessarily
covered by larger organisations, such
as health (WHO) and children (Unicef).
However, the new body will also help
co-ordinate gender policies at those
organisations and, perhaps more im-
portant, improve accountability. “We
have accountability but we’re not go-
ing to be the gender police,” she says.
Yet there is work to be done closer
to home. UN Women research last year
suggested that women made up less
than 8% of negotiating teams in 24
peace processes over the past two dec-
ades, and she believes women’s issues
are missing from peace agreements as
a result. A survey of 300 peace agree-
ments in 45 conflicts since the end
of the cold war found only 18
mentioning sexual and gender vio-
lence – even though this has become a
problem in modern conflicts.
So Bachelet wants more female
peacekeepers and policewomen,
pointing out not only that female vic-
tims of sexual violence are happier
speaking to other women but that
“when they [the perpetrators] see
women, strong, with arms, they know
also that women are not weak”.
As she is keen to start up local out-
posts, the issue comes back to whether
and when donor states are going to
cough up. This month, Bachelet is due
to visit London for talks with the gov-
ernment. The Department for Inter-
national Development was expected
to announce its funding commitment
earlier this year, but has delayed any
announcement until the UN Women’s
strategic plan is unveiled in June.
The charity VSO was among those to
condemn the move, calling for funding
to be announced to help UN Women,
“a once-in-a-generation opportunity
to end the discrimination and violence
that prevents many women worldwide
from earning an income, holding po-
litical office or giving birth safely”.
Zohra Moosa, ActionAid UK wom-
en’s rights adviser, describes the situ-
ation as a catch-22 – the money won’t
be committed until the plans are
made, but UN Women needs to know
the plans can be paid for. So far, only
Spain and Norway of the major donor
countries have pledged a significant
amount. “[The UN] may have a great
ambition but where is the matching
resource?” asks Moosa.
Bachelet is not going to criticise any
countries just a few months into the
job. “The real owners [of the UN] are
the member states. For me, it is easier
to understand as I was head of govern-
ment and I wouldn’t have liked to see
an agency come to my country and do
what they liked.”
It has been more than 30 years since
the UN first adopted the Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women, and
some would argue that inequality has
grown worse. Yet Bachelet, in arguing
for positive discrimination, believes
real change could come: “Maybe one
day UN Women won’t be necessary
because women won’t be discrimi-
nated against and will be in power.
Until then, we need special measures
to level the playing field.”
≥
guardian.co.uk/weekly
≥ Read more Follow the Global
Development link under ‘Weekly
coverage’ on our website, or go to
guardian.co.uk/global-development
 The Guardian Weekly 06.05.11 47
Sports online
Sport Find more coverage and news at
guardian.co.uk/sport ≥

Let’s drink Roundup Barney Ronay

to cricket’s Chelsea gain ground to set

up Premier League decider
Higgins is king of the baize

decaf bowlers The Premier League season still

refuses to stop Charleston-ing about
He might sound like a preppy
American actor of the 1980s, but
21-year-old Bristolian Judd Trump
the place and grow old gracefully. announced himself at the World
The title race has now essentially Championships as the most exciting
boiled down to Sunday’s tectonic thing to happen to snooker since
Sport blog
collision between Manchester whenever it was another exciting
Harry Pearson United and Chelsea at Old Traf- thing happened to snooker.
ford. Defeat for United at Arsenal Trump became the second-
left them three points ahead of the youngest-ever finalist after beating
In an age when the word “iconic” resurgent champions, whose finger- Ding Junhui 17-15 in a thrilling semi-
has become a synonym for “vaguely nails will leave some nasty marks on final, before losing to John Higgins
familiar if you’re particularly inter- that trophy if they’re persuaded to 18-16 in the final. It was Higgins’
ested in that sort of thing”, teenage let it go. At the bottom, West Ham fourth world title – but all the talk
Reece Topley’s start to the County continued to blow both bubbles and will be of the tyro Trump.
Championship season is already only their own future prospects with a On cue ... world champion John Higgins
a couple of wickets short of being 2-1 defeat at Man City that left them Passing of a boxing legend
“totally unforgettable”. three points from safety. suggested afterwards. Elsewhere
This is good news indeed, and not bad news for fans of muscle-bound- The week saw the death aged 76 of
only for those of us who have been Rugby awaits Euro champs pseudo-science and inspirational one of Britain’s most popular sports
following the Essex youngster’s business jargon: Clive Woodward personalities. Sir Henry Cooper’s
career ever since he was rushed to Northampton and Leinster will will probably not be returning to record may have been modest: 40
A&E after being beaned by Kevin contest rugby unions’ Euro glamour- manage England. “These [reports] wins from 55 bouts, the stand-out
Pietersen during a net practice at fest, the Heineken Cup final. North- are based on rumour and specula- moment almost flooring Cassius
Loughborough when he was 15. ampton steamrollered Perpignan tion,” said a spokesman from the Clay, later Muhammad Ali, in 1963
Because Reece is the son of Don in their semi-final, Ben Foden and RFU, English rugby union’s govern- (“he hit me so hard my ancestors in
Topley, and therefore has the DNA of Jon Clarke scoring tries. “It doesn’t ing body, in the process trampling Africa felt it”, Ali may or may not
just the sort of medium-pace, doing- get any bigger than Leinster in Car- over the glorious history of almost have said). But Cooper commanded
a-bit-off-the-seam fans of traditional diff,” Northampton’s Phil Dowson all sports journalism everywhere. a unique depth of affection.
English cricket are always on the
lookout for.
Admittedly, I didn’t always
feel that way. Indeed there times
when I failed fully to celebrate
the endeavours of JCJ Dye and JD
Inchmore (the D stood for Darling,
incidentally), and may even have
voiced the opinion that K Higgs was
boring.
But I am older now, and a good
trundler is something you only
come to appreciate later in life – like
comfort-fit slacks.
The summer game has moved on.
New competitions and styles of play
have made the sort of decaf cricket
offered up by RFMers like Teesside
icon (in the modern sense) Chris Old,
a man who appeared permanently
on the verge of a nosebleed, a thing
of the past.
Glenn McGrath, very much “The
Prince of Trundlers” – an antipo-
dean Mike Hendrick with peroxide
and a big gob – has left the scene,
Matthew Hoggard and Dominic Cork
limp on, their obvious talents as
medium-pacers somewhat tarnished
by diverting private lives. Their
successors are different.
These days fast-medium men are
not content with hitting the seam in
good areas, but are determined to re-
verse swing the cherry and all sorts
of other fancy stuff. Let’s just hope
that should young Reece Topley look
in danger of falling into that trap his
dad will have a word.
Britain is currently choc-a-bloc
with stars and legends. Journeymen,
however, are in short supply.
 Guardian News and Media Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Guardian News and Media Ltd.,
Centurion House, 129 Deansgate, Manchester M3 3WR, UK
Editor: Natalie Bennett. Le Monde translation: Harry Forster.
Printed by GPC. Registered as a newspaper at the Post Office.

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Written off ?
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Shortcuts, page 31

Sport

A blueprint for Total Football

England urged to follow the Dutch strategy for grassroots development
Football
Jamie Jackson
From the Netherlands sprung Total
Football, the theory that an outfield
player can take over the role of any
other player in a team. Since 2002
it has also been the home of an in-
tegrated professional and amateur
network of 2,700 clubs that last week
Uefa, European football’s governing
body, stated should be the model that
English football adopts.
Stars such as Johan Cruyff have
helped Holland to three World Cup
finals and victory at Euro 88; England
have contested only one World Cup
and two European Championship
semi-finals since lifting the World
Cup in 1966. Last week William Gail-
lard, the adviser to Uefa’s president,
Michel Platini, highlighted the fac-
tional nature and lack of significant
funding that blight English football.
Gaillard told a British parliamen-
tary select committee that the Eng-
lish Football Association should look
to the Netherlands to address the ma-
laise in player development. He said:
“There is no doubt that turf wars have
damaged English football, and the FA
is probably in a weaker spot than any
other in Europe. Holland is an excel-
lent grassroots model.”
A tour around amateur clubs in
the Amsterdam area showed the
stark difference in facilities between
the Netherlands and England. Clubs
boast floodlit grass and artificial
pitches, dedicated medical centres,
warm changing rooms, hot showers,
spacious clubhouses and adequate car
parking and bicycle ports – all of which
placed the clubs at the centre of their
local communities.
Their structure is also more profes-
sional than amateur. Dennis van Soest,
who runs the commercial affairs of the
Legmeervogels club, says: “Legmeer
has 1,250 members. The owners are
the members. Control and manage-
ment is executed by the board of direc-
tors, which consists of 10 persons, of
which five are part of the daily board.
Forward thinking ... Dutch football emphasises fun coaching Rob de Jong
We have a chairman who is responsi-
ble for the youth department.
“Daily maintenance is done by our
facilities’ managers. We have around
200 active volunteers and 120 com-
panies that sponsor our association.
Membership costs on average €180
[$300] per year.”
Broadly, this model has been in
place for nine years. Louis van Gaal,
then the national coach, integrated the
sport across six regions on behalf of
the Dutch FA, the KNVB. This pyramid
consists of the 2,700 clubs governed by
a single body, the KNVB, with €1bn a
year invested in the amateur game.
The KNVB has around 1.2 million
members (7% of the Dutch popula-
tion), with local authorities contribut-
ing 90% of the €1bn investment and
the government the remainder. In
England, an ongoing dispute between
several governing bodies has resulted
in inferior funding for the amateur
game. Last year the FA’s contribution
was only $20m. The Premier League
– the country’s top division – contrib-
uted $72m, less than 5% of its latest
$5bn TV rights deal.
In the Netherlands the key ethos is
that all age-group teams should play
the same 4-3-3 formation and that
coaching sessions should be fun. Com-
petitive youth football is also played
between professional and amateur
clubs, which means standards be-
tween the two strands are closer.
In England winning has tradition-
ally been the goal. And it would be
unheard of for a youth side from Man-
chester United to play amateurs.
Former Holland striker Bryan Roy
is a coach at the Jong Ajax academy,
which is a renowned conveyer belt
of fresh talent. “Until the age of 14
our teams from professional clubs
still play against teams from amateur
clubs,” he says. “Holland’s overall
football philosophy is to always focus
on ball possession to create opportuni-
ties. This is also true at amateur clubs.
In the youth they always think in an
attacking way.”
In 2008 one enlightened English
father, Steve Lawrence, decided to
move his family to Amsterdam so that
his then 16-year-old son, Jamie, could
improve his football development af-
ter stints at Arsenal and Queens Park
Rangers. Jamie is now at Ajax. His fa-
ther was the architect of the original
feasibility study and master plan for
the London 2012 Olympic Games.
He submitted written evidence to
the same parliamentary select com-
mittee that Gaillard addressed. “I’ve
visited about 60 or 70 amateur football
clubs [in the Netherlands]. On average
they have around €3-4m of facilities
[in] land and buildings. That’s about
€10bn in total. Effectively, they’re all
better than the standard academies
in England so Holland has 2,700 acad-
emies. It’s no surprise that Holland is
No 2 in the world rankings.”
While the two nations have an al-
most identical population density,
they are on very different points on
the development scale. Roy states that
Holland is intent on becoming more
successful on the field. “We tend to
focus more on tactics instead of tech-
nical improvements – that’s the next
step,” he says.
English football’s dream is to have
only this concern.