Distant Voices (67 page)

Unlike the Cubans, the Sandinistas left most of the economy in private hands (and were attacked from the left for doing so). They held the country's first democratic elections in 1984; and in all their programmes designed to end hunger, preventable sickness and literacy, they maintained an ‘option for the poor'.

They offered to their neighbours, all of them suffering under murderous Washington-sponsored tyrannies, a clear demonstration of regional nationalism at last succeeding in abolishing
pobreterria.
Consequently, they represented a threat. During the second half of the 1980s, they were attacked by the United States, using a Contra army funded, equipped and trained by the CIA, often secretly and illegally, whose speciality was the terrorising and murder of civilians. Today, only the United States stands condemned by the World Court for the ‘unlawful use of force' against another, sovereign state – Nicaragua.

The result was the devastation of the frail Nicaraguan economy. Last year, the Sandinistas narrowly lost the country's second election (they remain the largest single party). In hindsight, one can view that as inevitable. They were much too confident of their base and some had become arrogant; above all, people wanted the blockade to end and Washington off their backs; many queued to receive their $40 each for voting for Violetta Chamorra – an irresistible bribe if you have an income of less than $200 a year.

I was reminded of this last Saturday evening when I was invited to the celebration of a remarkable project in London. More than seven years ago a young man called Robert Todd – Todd to his friends – was moved by a documentary film
Nicaragua
, made by Alan Lowery, Elizabeth Nash and myself and shown on ITV. Todd decided to ‘do something'. He began by buying for £18,000 a derelict house – actually little more than a shopfront – in Vauxhall. He then drew together a network of craftsmen and women, artisans, carpenters, electricians, most of them amateurs.

They set about building a house, which would be sold and the money given to Nicaragua. The house is mostly of wood, the result of inspired scrounging: the stairs are of mahogany and there are magnificent handmade parquet floors; doors are from the floor of Battersea power station; window frames from the laboratory desks at local schools; stairs from British Rail desks, much of it acquired during judicious raids on skips. There are fine skylights, stained-glass windows, and murals drawn by local children.

It is not just a beautiful house, but a symbol of the conversion of the obsolete and the abandoned to new life, and of the energy of commitment. Less than £9,000 was spent on materials, and all the labour was given free. A year ago the house may have been worth a quarter of a million pounds. ‘It's been a race against the collapse of capitalism!' says Todd, now with an anxious eye to the falling property market. Certainly the house is worth a great deal of money and, when it is sold, this will help restore Nicaragua: perhaps to
build again well-baby clinics and to restore agricultural cooperatives now bereft of resources.

For me, the achievement represented by the house built by Todd and Sarah, Mick and Tim, and many others, reinforces the notion that while luck, always ephemeral and capricious, will depart, people will wait, their hope never lost. Nicaragua's revolution, and its ‘threat', remain pending.

March 29, 1991

WHEN THE MIDDLE
East peace conference opened in Madrid last week, I remembered Ahmed Hamzeh, a street entertainer, and his young son. I met them in a Palestinian refugee camp on the occupied West Bank twenty-three years ago. It was a bitterly cold and wet Easter and the wind spun off the bare side of the valley and carried the stench of a sewer that overflowed and merged with mud.

Some 3,000 Palestinians lived in huts here, prisoners in their own land. Water trickled brown, if at all, from communal taps; and there were communal illnesses, such as gastroenteritis, blindness and madness. There was no
intifada
then. The young were simply sick and passive. They went to a United Nations school; but mostly, like the adults, they went nowhere. They ambled up and down the camp's one street, through dust or mud. Or they huddled outside the administration block, where the melancholic voice of Oum Kalhoum, the beloved ‘Star of the Orient', washed over them.

Ahmed Hamzeh had been born in Haifa and his son in Jerusalem. Their Haifa home had long been appropriated by the State of Israel. In the stampede during the 1967 Six Day War the family had lost each other; the mother had been killed accidentally and a daughter had died from untreated pneumonia. Ahmed Hamzeh, who spoke good English, bought a monkey to survive. ‘You will forgive me,' he said, ‘if after all these years . . . 20 years I have been in this place . . . if I look like a peasant. I used to think I was an artist, not a beggar. Maybe I am not even a peasant now.'

When I walked away from him, I noticed he was leading
his son, who was about eight years old. I asked a UN man why the boy stumbled. ‘It's trachoma,' he said. ‘In the early days it blinded hundreds of children in the camps.' I remembered this moment when I read President Bush's opening remarks to the Madrid conference. ‘We have seen too many generations of children', he said, ‘whose haunted eyes show only fear . . . too many funerals for brothers and sisters, the mothers and fathers who died too soon; too much hatred.'
¹²
Here was the President of the United States seeking to touch those of us who regard children as a precious resource and who believe that the interests and rights of children ought to lie beyond cynical manipulation. And here was the president at the same time demonstrating his benign neutrality, speaking of hope, not complicity. Unfortunately, the former was absent from this hymn of statesmanship.

The Palestinian writer Edward Said got it right. ‘US policies', he wrote,

are on trial at Madrid. The US has supported Israel politically and financially for the past two decades in complete violation not only of UN resolutions, but also of US laws and political principles. The US sent 650,000 troops to restore a corrupt and medieval Kuwaiti royal family, and has subsidised the Israeli military occupation of Arab territories to the tune of over $4 billion a year, and a total since 1967 of £77 billion.
¹³

The Madrid conference is not as it is being represented: a coming together of intractables, with George Bush and his secretary of state in the middle ‘knocking heads together'. The United States, regardless of James Baker's much publicised ‘impatience' with the Shamir regime, is firmly on one side – the side of American, Israeli and Saudi power in the region. Edward Said is close to the truth when he says, ‘My fear is that the US wishes to produce a cosmetic and “pragmatic” track of negotiating proposals that will either give us nothing real or force us to abandon the forum.'
¹⁴

The other night the BBC showed a remarkable film,
Do
They Feel My Shadow
? made by Nicholas Claxton and Cherry Farrow.
¹⁵
It was set in Gaza where the
intifada
began in December 1987. A sliver of land between Israel and Egypt, Gaza is home to 750,000 Palestinians, none of whom, says Claxton in his commentary, ‘can have an identity . . . where to sing a Palestinian song or to raise a Palestinian flag can lead to arrest and imprisonment.'

And a great deal more. Mahoud Al-Ashkar is 11 years old. He was shot in the eye with an Israeli plastic bullet. His eye came out in his hand. Another eleven-year-old, Mahmoud Al-Hissi, was beaten so badly by Israeli soldiers that both his wrists sustained multiple fractures and an elbow was dislocated. The boy told UN relief officials he was stripped and hung up by his feet and clubbed. He was then taken to the roof of the building where the soldiers threatened to throw him to his death.

These are common cases. An official of the Swedish Save the Children Fund describes research conducted over two years with 14,000 cases of child injuries. She said the shooting of children was contrary to ‘official military orders', but there was a ‘second set of orders, understood by the soldiers'. An Israeli colonel replied that the children who threw stones were dangerous in a way ‘that is inconceivable to the Western mind'. He said his soldiers never aimed to kill children and, anyway, only shot at them as a last resort.

This was contradicted by the Swedish report, which concluded that only a quarter of the children shot dead were anywhere near a stone-throwing demonstration. Thousands of injured children were under the age of ten; hundreds were under five. ‘Most of them', said the Swedish researcher, ‘had been beaten on their hands and upper bodies. A third suffered broken bones, including multiple fractures.'

Claxton quoted a UN report that put the number of children shot dead in the past three and a half years at fifty-six. Almost all died as a result of direct fire,
not
of random shots or ricochet. Not a single Israeli soldier had been imprisoned for the killing of a Palestinian child.

A boy called Jihad, who was himself beaten, described
how his father was beaten to death by Israeli soldiers in front of him, his mother and two sisters. On the day the soldiers came to his home, he said, ‘My father took us into a room and locked the door . . . but they broke it down . . . the soldiers would take his head and hit it against the wall . . . The other soldier broke his truncheon on him. Then he said, “Bring me a knife . . . he has to die.”' Later, Jihad saw his father's body and described it as ‘all dissected, his arms and his stomach'. Four soldiers were tried, convicted of manslaughter and pardoned. The family has had no compensation.

Lulu is eight years old. A rubber bullet hit her in the brain. She is now a pretty vegetable whose family hug and kiss her, hoping in vain for a reaction. Apart from rubber and plastic bullets ‘like marble', the Israelis also have a stone-throwing machine that hurls 600 stones a minute. ‘It's our own
intifada
on wheels,' said an officer.

Children in the Claxton film speak movingly, yet with a curious detachment. ‘We no longer fear,' they said; and that life was a simple matter of ‘killing or getting killed'. A Palestinian psychiatrist said the effect was that ‘the children take authority into their own hands. Their parents try to protect them, but no one can stop them.'

In Gaza there is, as on the West Bank, an illegal Israeli settlement, including recent arrivals from the Soviet Union. Encouraged by the extremist policies of the Shamir Government and funded mostly from abroad, they live behind barbed-wire fences in what is described as ‘a location for the rebirth of pioneering Zionism'. One of the children, thirteen-year-old Esther, was asked by Claxton if she had any contact with Palestinian children. ‘No,' she replied, ‘sometimes when I go on the bus I see them going to school, but I never saw them particularly. I never talk to them.'

June 28, 1991 to November 8, 1991

WHEN I WENT
to report and live in the United States in the sixties, I was fortunate to make friends with some of the finest people I have known. They, and their work, left a lasting impression on me. Martha Gellhorn once described them as ‘the people with a wakeful conscience, the best of America's citizens; they can be counted on, they are always there. Though the Government tried viciously, it could not silence them.'
¹⁶

It is often difficult to see these people, and their achievements, through the façades of America today. When I first knew them, their influence was being felt in the political process, the courts and the media. They had pushed American liberalism to its limits and made real change seem possible. Much of this was illusion; but their glory was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year.

I saw a great deal of America then, especially the old Confederacy. My travelling companion was often Matt Herron, who, with his wife Jeannine, had been on the first ‘freedom rides' that brought young people from the North to support the black emancipation movement in the South. Matt was a photo-journalist whose picture essays of struggle and outrage appeared in
Life, Look
and Hugh Cudlipp's
Daily Mirror
and were to become a distinguished chronicle of the decade. Based in Mississippi, the Herrons and their comrades lived in fear of their lives; three of them were murdered. The murder of blacks was, of course, routine.

When President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill, it was
a programme devised by Jeannine Herron that brought the first organised pre-schooling to some 5,000 children in Mississippi. Yet she and Matt remained circumspect in their celebration. ‘One victory', they wrote to me, ‘doesn't mean it can't be taken away by other means.'

A cornerstone of the Civil Rights Act is the statute that makes job discrimination illegal. In 1971, the Supreme Court determined that blacks and other minorities could still be victimised by the imposition of impossible job qualifications. In passing judgement on what became known as the Griggs case, the court placed the burden of responsibility on an employer to demonstrate that the required qualification was an occupational necessity. This decision probably deserves more credit for integrating America's workplace than any other.

During the years that followed, notably the Reagan era, the political character of the Supreme Court changed by design. In 1989, the Supreme Court overruled the Griggs decision and reversed the burden of proof. Employers no longer have to prove that the qualifications they demand have anything to do with the job on offer. This has had, wrote Anthony Lewis in the
New York Times,
‘a drastic effect . . . it made it almost impossible for victims of alleged job discrimination to win lawsuits'.
¹⁷
Lewis cited a common case: a fifty-year-old black man who had held a caretaker's job at the same factory for fifteen years. When the factory closed, he applied for the same job elsewhere. He came with references praising his honesty and hard work. He failed to get the job because he did not have a secondary school certificate.