A bicycle’s complaint
My bicycle has started squeaking. I don’t know exactly which part of it the squeaking comes from, and for that it’s all the more unnerving. At least you know with squeaky brakes that they’re just thirsty for a squirt of lube – if that doesn’t sound too much like a line from a porn film. But my bicycle’s (never call a bicycle a bike, it will be offended) squeak seems to come from a need that is emotional as well as physical. Or so much the latter that it’s also the former. A place deep within its soul. I think in the frame, or perhaps around the crank that connects the pedals. Anyway, it’s the sound of something metal and neglected moving more often than it ought to; the kind of sound that could open a film version of Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Pit and the Pendulum. The screen would be completely dark, slowly gaining the texture of a dank wall as the camera pans down to reveal the source of the noise you’re hearing. There is a dungeon lit by flickering torchlight. And a feeble but effective torture instrument, working its point inexorably towards a bound victim whose face is the very definition of fear.
So, to sum up: we’re talking about quite an unnerving squeak here.
Going into the patient’s background, my bicycle comes under a lot of pressure. It’s my only mode of self-reliant transport beyond the perambulatory capacity that our ancestors came down from the trees with. It usually covers about four miles each day of the week, to my workplace and back. But that’s not so paltry when you consider the route is over some of the roughest terrain in Edinburgh’s New Town. Imagine cobbled streets where the cobbles are often as undulating as dunes in the Sahara’s Empty Quarter, and about as evenly spaced as the teeth of Shane McGowan. The Mercs and BMWs of bankers and lawyers’ rumble over them. My bicycle, with its thin racing wheels and dodgy frame, judders over them like an aged sewing machine. I can’t help but feel that if it could talk it would be protesting at my mistreatment of it, and probably threatening to report me to some sort of protection service, if one existed for bicycles. Luckily, the number of conditional clauses in that sentence protects me from any realistic prospect of an embarassing custody battle. Because everyone knows: bicycles don’t have feelings. Or do they?
TOAD’s take on a Russian classic
‘Drink’”…
Champions League: Why Milan Barca will mirror Silvio’s last stand
From Nyon, where Thursday’s Champions League Draw was made, you could almost hear the groans across the Alps in Milan. When the rossoneri were unscrewed from their starry little last 16 ball, it was to hand them football’s closest thing to Jim Bowen’s BFH . Yes Milan could come through a two legged tie with Barcelona, but there’s about as much reason for thinking so as there is for thinking Silvio Berlusconi will be returned as Prime Minister of Italy in the election on February 24.
Barca’s representative at the draw, Armador Bernabeu, was impeccably polite when asked about his team’s prospects against the Milanese. The reality is that defeat for the Catalans would be unthinkable. Milan scraped past Zenit St Petersburg and Anderlecht in a group coasted by Malaga. They are a shadow of the side of previous years and it’s nigh impossible to make a coherent case for them beating the best team in the world over two legs.
All of which leads to the reflection that never have the fortunes of the Milan club and their president mirrored each other as closely as they do now.
By curious coincidence, the Italian general election will be sandwiched between the two legs of the last sixteen knock out ties. And just like Milan, the man Italians call Il Cavaliere is in the fight, but has the odds stacked against him. His Liberty People party are currently lying at around 15 per cent in the polls. If he manages to turn that round in two months, forget Jerzy Dudek and Istanbul – this will be the greatest big game comeback of all time.
It was only two weeks ago that Berlusconi declared he would even stand at all. In the phrase used by Italians ‘ė disceso in campo’; literally, ‘he has come onto the field’. To seasoned Berlusconi-watchers, this came as no surprise. Never mind the fact that on October 26 a court in Milan sentenced him to four years in prison for tax fraud, a sentence he is now contesting; or that separate charges related to his relationship with a minor, Ruby ‘Rubacuori’, are ongoing.
In the past week, Italians have been treated to a Silvio comeback spectacular reminiscent of Sly Stallone in Rocky VI. The crowning moment was an interview last Sunday on Berlusconi’s own Channel Five TV station. His message – that he had been forced to return to save Italy from right wing fiscal austerity, and left wing fiscal irresponsibility – was overshadowed by a gaffe: as the programme cut to an advert break, viewers heard him address the presenter – an ex-glamour model – with what he though was an off-air comment: ‘ask me this’.
The gaffe – proof, as if it were needed, of the channel’s conflict of interest – was what the non-Berlusconi media picked up on. Predictably, he then accused them, as he had the judges who condemned him, of being institutionally biased. He has since gone on to lash out at the man who took over as Prime Minister when he was ousted in November 2011, Mario Monti. Hardly a Messi or an Iniesta, academic economist Monti has been every inch the technocrat Italy expected. The man they call il professore has been a political exponent of catenaccio, tying up public purse strings like old school Italian defenders did opposition flair players.
Monti has attracted Berlusconi’s ire as expectations grow that rather than stepping aside, he will announce his candidacy to stand on a centre right platform in February’s election. Having earned the trust of Italy and Europe’s business elite – including, coincidentally, Fiat and Juventus owners the Elkann family, Monti – if he stands – shows every sign of humiliating Il Cavaliere at the polls on February 24.
By that time Barcelona will have already returned from San Siro, and Milan will be preparing for the trip to Camp Nou. If Berlusconi has made it back to be Italy’s Prime Minister, then there’s no reasons why his team can’t overcome all the odds and dump out the tournament favourites in their own back yard.
Why MiFID II should be this winter’s big action blockbuster
‘Banker bashing’. That term seems passé these days. And so it should be. We should have refined our sensibilities to the financial system enough to know that ‘banker’ is a less-than-helpful term. ‘Market abuser bashing’, now that would be better.
But not as catchy. In fact that’s the trouble with campaigns to rein in the kind of casino trading where taxpayers ends up footing the bill. Too catchy and they risk sounding too leftist-populist and hence easy to dismiss (see the Robin Hood tax); too dry and nobody remembers them (see Robin Hood being AKA the Financial Transactions Tax).
Well done then to the World Development Movement, whose campaign to end ‘betting on food’ – or regulate trading on commodity derivatives – is specific and technical, but delivers the stark message that the poorest die because the richest gamble on the prices of food.
WDM, and plenty of others, say traders, especially investment banks, do this by causing sudden spikes in the price of basic foods like maize and wheat. In developing countries, where up to 90 per cent of income is spent on such foods, if they double in price – as happened in a matter of months to wheat and maize in 2008 – that can mean the difference between two meals a day and one; or nourishment and starvation.
WDM is calling for public pressure on George Osborne to ensure commodities trading cannot continue in its present form. Osborne will soon join the 26 other EU finance ministers to debate proposals drawn up by the European Commission. The regulation package known as MiFID II, though it sounds like a sci-fi action sequel is actually the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II. It’s Europe’s great white hope for regulating banking, equivalent to 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act in the USA.
MiFID II contains many proposals, but those WDM is calling on Osborne to support as a moral imperative relate to curbing the electronic Wild West that is modern commodity derivatives trading.
The European Commissioners have proposed two ways to do this: firstly by imposing position limits, meaning traders will be limited in how many derivatives of a single commodity they can possess; secondly by forcing them to reveal more information, such as announcing deals before they go through. Crucial to implementing both rules is the abolition of most over-the-counter or ‘dark’ trading, forcing not just commodity derivatives but many other types of deal onto organised trading facilities, where transparency can be guaranteed and limits enforced.
So will Osborne sign up to commodity derivative regulation when the EU finance ministers meet in November? Not a chance, the smart money says.
He’ll even have an excuse ready when voices like WDM’s accuse him of putting City profits ahead of developing world lives.
It’s a question of evidence, he’ll say. The link between commodities speculation and unpredictable price spikes is, to borrow Scots criminal law’s most controversial verdict, not proven.
He’ll have precedent on his side. It was long assumed that supply and demand was the first driver of commodity derivative prices. Logic said the derivatives market in futures and options followed shifts in supply and demand, not the other way round.
Making the case for regulation means showing that natural relationship has been turned on its head: that now the derivatives market leads where it used to follow, causing far greater spikes in actual commodity price than supply and demand fluctuations alone ever could.
Technical. Very technical. And therein lies the trouble. In the mysterious world of economics, pinning one effect down to one cause is well-nigh impossible. There’s always another fly in the ointment.
When MiFID II was proposed in 2011 by the European Commission, the UK government sent it to the House of Lords for scrutiny. The Lords’ EU committee considered it, calling on a series of expert witnesses to do so. While most of the witnesses broadly approved of the commodity derivative regulations proposed, one – an apparently neutral academic economist- said it couldn’t be proven that derivative trading was the main cause of market volatility. The report the Lords committee produced in July, with more than a hint of pro-City bias, fastened onto that academic’s view in its conclusion:
‘The Commission’s proposals will not eliminate the price volatility of markets such as those dealing in food commodities. Such volatility is dependent on a range of factors, and is in particular driven by supply and demand.’
So when Osborne plays hardball with MiFID II’s attempt to regulate commodity derivative trading, he can say to WDM and others: ‘what’s the point when even the experts think it won’t work’.
The truth is the experts aren’t sure. I contacted the one whose evidence the Lords had so eagerly seized upon. He is, of all nationalities, a Greek, Emilios Avgouleas, chair in international banking law and finance at my alma mater, the University of Edinburgh. He kindly explained to me his verdict of ‘not proven’. It was, he said, due to ‘the concurrent phenomenon of much higher living standards in a large number of emerging markets’. The fact that this happened at the same time as greater speculation on commodity derivatives meant that in his view it was not clear which factor had caused price volatility.
He was, in other words, displaying the intellectual rigour that would be expected from an academic of his reputation.
What he was not saying was that regulation of commodities speculation was a waste of time. In fact, he told me, if it could be conclusively proven that speculative trading caused food price spikes, then ‘other solutions will have to be considered, and not just at the European level, including suspensions of trading or, if necessary, even a ban.’
That didn’t sound very pro-City to me.
In fact Avgouleas’ concern was not so much that MiFID II would be destructive; more that it might not be enough to curb the market’s excesses:
‘MiFID’s disclosure and position limit requirements will merely make the market more transparent, and limit squeezes and other forms of market manipulation,’ he wrote to me.
That was a far-cry from the anti-MiFID voice he was made out to be in the Lords’ report, which George Osborne will surely carry in his back pocket when he flies to Brussels.
Still, you could hardly call it a ringing endorsement. So what to take from the whole thing? As someone angry at a financial system that seems to serve the interests only of a global super-rich, should I cheer for MiFID wholeheartedly? Or should I remember that it might not help the world’s poor as much as the World Development Movement hopes, and not be too disappointed if our chancellor helps to get it booted into the European long grass?
The question, it seems to me, comes down to two big philosophical arguments when it comes to thinking about the financial system.
Before a regulatory measure is implemented, does it need to be proven beyond reasonable doubt that it will have the desired effect?
And should we wait years and years for research studies to be carried out, so the legislation we create is nothing less than perfect?
I know where I stand. My marker pen has come out. I’m lining up in the MiFID corner.
The pro-MiFID campaign: still lacking focus?
Eritreans call for international action on human organ trade in a wintry George Square, Glasgow; Christmas shoppers walk past bemused (December 2011).
photo by Eva Barton
A fifty-strong contingent of Scotland’s Eritrean community assembled in Glasgow city centre yesterday (Saturday 10 December 2011) in a bid to win the attention of Scottish and UK politicians who they believe could contribute to ending the dark trade in human organs centred in Egypt’s Sinai desert; a trade whose primary victims are Eritrean refugees trying to reach Europe.
‘Our objective is to tell the international community to intervene to stop this crime,’ said Teklom, an Eritrean who now lives in Glasgow. ‘The Scottish government, and the UK government as well – the more pressure the better. We’re really shocked by this crime. We’re here to be a voice of the voiceless people.’
Teklom and the other Eritreans at Saturday’s protest are the lucky ones – they have made it to Europe without falling into the hands of the traffickers who harvest organs which are eventually sold for use in transplants in richer countries.
Eritrea is a nation of just over five million people in the Horn of Africa. It broke away from its southern neighbour Ethiopia in 1993 after a prolonged conflict. Hundreds of thousands of Eritreans have fled since independence, often citing an oppressive regime which forces young men into lifelong military servitude and permits no freedom of expression, a situation which saw Eritrea ranked bottom of the most recent World Press Freedom Index below even North Korea.
In 2008 when the World Cross Country Championships were held in Edinburgh, six members of the Eritrean team refused to return home, managing to make successful asylum claims to stay in Scotland.
For most the option to fly to Europe does not exist. Instead they have to pay people smugglers to get them through the deserts of North Africa. Until a few years ago the most common route was east through Sudan and Libya, from where they would try to make it to the Italian island of Lampedusa by boat. Since Italian government crackdowns and the conflict in Libya, the more favoured option has been north through Sudan and Egypt, then across the deserts of Sinai into Israel.
The Bedouin-controlled waste of Sinai is where the harvesting of organs happens. Bedouin tribesmen trick the refugees into believing they will be shown a safe route across the border. For this they pay 2,000 to 3,000 dollars, but far from being helped to a safe passage they are then sold on into the hands of traffickers with links to organised crime. These groups demand ransoms of up to 30,000 dollars from relatives of the refugees back in Eritrea, Sudan, or Ethiopia. If the family fails to produce the money then the hostage’s organs are harvested as payment. Death almost always follows – a recent CNN documentary showed gruesome footage of bodies being uncovered from shallow graves in the desert with gaping holes where their organs should be.
The footage has shocked Eritrean diaspora communities around the world. Last month saw a demonstration in Tel Aviv in Israel, while yesterday’s protest in Glasgow coincided with a larger gathering of US-based Eritrean emigres in front of the White House. The demonstrations on both sides of the Atlantic were designed to coincide with World Human Rights Day. Eritreans like Teklom want the international community to exert pressure to force the Egyptian authorities to police the Sinai more effectively.
But the issue is complicated by several factors. Aside from Egypt’s current political instability, Eritrea’s President Isaias Afewerki has shown little inclination to fight on his own people’s behalf.
Some of the demonstrators in Glasgow yesterday expressed anger against the man who has ruled Eritrea since independence, arguing that he has failed to even acknowledge the victims of organ harvesting.
‘He says they are not Eritrean,’ said Yohans, an Eritrean pastor in Glasgow. ‘It’s strange – they show him the names, the passports, but no… It’s because he knows what is happening but he’s covering up. Because if he says “yes, this is our people”, then everyone will know what is happening in Eritrea.’
Another man, Hassan, agreed: ‘The root of the problem is the Eritrean government. If the people were living well there, then they would never go to this kind of risk to escape. This is my personal view, but the organisers today come with their own view, that it’s better not to speak about this. There are so many people here who are panicked to talk about the Eritrean government.’
Agostino Desta, an ex-fighter in Eritrea’s independence movement who has lived in Scotland for 21 years and bitterly opposes President Afewerki’s rule, said the Eritrean community in Scotland, as in the rest of the UK, were divided in their attitudes to the regime: ‘There are some who are pro-government, some who are anti-government, and some who want to hide because they are too scared to speak. Today was a step forward. We got them to come out. Even if they didn’t talk about politics… it’s a step forward.’
Agostino Desta holds the flag of post-independence Eritrea in his right hand; in his left the flag of the current government (photo by Eva Barton)
Organ harvesting in Sinai: the facts
- Research was conducted by two human rights groups: the Egypt-based New Generation Foundation for Human Rights and the EveryOne Group based in Italy.
- Evidence included testimony from refugees in Israel who survived the journey through Sinai, as well as the bodies of victims.
- Torture and rape were also reported by the hostages
- Both New Generation and the EveryOne group reported that more than 600 hostages were released by the traffickers after the publicity created by the documentary.
This article was also published on the Eritrean news website Assenna
More Fabulous Animals (published in ‘Flight of the Turtle’, New Writing Scotland 29)
The Gambit
28 October 1998
Dear Doctor Velicka,
My name is Esperanza Whitman and I am a doctor at the Southern California Institute of Child Psychology in Los Angeles. I read your article about Jelik – the wolf boy of Dnestr – in the September issue of International Cortex Debates. Your piece made an enormous impression on me, for reasons which I will now recount.
Just over four years ago an extraordinary young girl entered our treatment program: a thirteen year old named Iris. Iris had been resident in the ‘city of angels’ since the day of her birth, in a run-down suburb not far from Beverley Hills. Nothing startling, until I tell you that Iris’s father kept her in a tiny locked room for her entire life. There was only a bed in the room. In the nights she was tied to it. In the day she was strapped to a potty. Apart from this, night and day were the same, because the room was sealed from natural light. She was brought food and water but no-one spoke to her. There was a mother and a brother too, but it was the man’s will that dominated. That is, until one day in 1992 when, after her husband beat her up, the mother fled to a police station with Iris, and the whole story came out.
When she first entered the Institute, Iris was unable to make a sound. She would crouch in corners looking at us with huge staring eyes (her eyes are a beautiful green). Gradually, through constant attention, she became receptive to human contact. She rapidly learnt words for things around her and appeared to be making great progress towards language. Nobody was prepared when her progress suddenly stopped and even went into regression. Despite her vocabulary the concepts of grammar and sentence formation would not come. She could not go beyond words as arbitrary sounds for things, tiny stepping stones too far apart to cross a river, never mind an ocean. So the capacity for developed language, the ‘greatest single sign of our humanity’ – seemed beyond her. A scan showed that her brain was stunted due to lack of stimulation of the frontal cortex. It was doubly devastating, because Iris, I am sure, was meant to be an intelligent girl. When I took her out on trips I could see her grasping at connections, trying to relate this thing in the ‘now’ to that thing in her memory. But the synapses were not there. Frustrated she would bang her head on walls and bite her arms. Believe me, it was hell to watch. Almost exactly a year ago she jumped from the first floor window of her dormitory, and it was only luck that a tree broke her fall.
Since then the situation has deteriorated much further. Iris’s mother, after divorcing the husband, had her removed from our care and returned to the family home – the site of her abuse – for a short period. When the mother was unable to cope, Iris was taken into a secure state mental institution under a different name. I had no way of knowing what had happened to her. This was very hard for me. During her care I had developed a strong emotional bond with Iris. I found it morally impossible to abandon her. After a long search I recently located her again. She was in a huge institution with hundreds of mental patients, kept in isolation and given one hour of therapy a week. This situation was intolerable to me, and I took steps to ensure it did not continue.
Doctor Velicka, I write to you because I see in your work with Jelik a source of hope where there was none. In all the publicity after she was found many people called Iris a feral child. But that was wrong. Your Jelik was a feral child. He was brought up with wild dogs in woods and parkland near a small town in Ukraine. You say how he dug holes in the earth to bury things, rubbed himself on rough tree bark, scavenged for food in bins, and barked like a dog in many different tones. There is no comparison between that and being strapped to a potty in a dark room in Los Angeles. It’s a question of stimulus. Iris had none, Jelik plenty, just not the kind we normally think of as ‘good’. But what is good other than being able to live with yourself? We were trying to start Iris in the wrong place – our place – where language is already alienated from the natural world. It wasn’t even our fault. As trained psychologists our only perspective was sophisticated communication as the ultimate goal. But I see now that she could never be happy, living in a world of language and ideas. Jelik was content was he not, even before he was ‘found’. That is my impression. Admittedly he knew no other possibility, but the life of the woods agreed with him. Do you know how many people are on anti-depressants in the United States today? How many in business suits yearn for the woods?
I know you are trying to teach Jelik to be fully human, and I am completely supportive of that aim. But Iris is different. Above all she must be taught that the world exists, that life is possible at a level deeper than language: a level of instinct and senses. I think there is only one person capable of teaching her that. Not me, and not you either. I mean Jelik himelf.
I am suggesting this: I bring Iris to the Ukraine. We introduce her to Jelik and the two spend time together – not pointing to animals in picture books, but in the wild, (in a controlled environment obviously) where Jelik shows her the first, raw life he led. I promise you if there is any sign of regression in his rehabilitation program, the project would be discontinued. But I firmly believe the opposite would be the case. As teacher, what better boost could Jelik have than knowing that his experience was helping another human being overcome trauma. It is said also, is it not, that the truest mark of our humanity is compassion?
I cannot convey to you how much this means to me. During our time together Iris became like a daughter to me, and I cannot bear the thought of her ending her days in misery.
Yours in faith
Esperanza Whitman
The reply
21 November 1998
Dear Esperanza,
I regret the content of my article may have give a wrong idea of my comfort in the English language. It was very corrected by a colleague who speak English. When I write this I am help only by the dictionary, so many mistakes.
Esperanza, I find hardship understanding everything you say in your letter. But I made a grand effort, and now I understand. You want to bring the girl, Iris, to Ukraine, where is my boy Jelik. You want that Jelik teach Iris the wild passages of childhood. I must to say, I do not know. I do not know if is a good idea.
In all circumstances, I have problems. University in Kyev will give a way less money next year to my work. We are not sure if it continues or not.
Esperanza, Andrei Velicka is not the asking species of person. It is not my manners, but this is a scientific thing. Your Institute of Southern California is rich yes. For fifty thousand American dollars I think I can help you. But I say again I do not know if Iris is helped by this. Jelik likes animals in books now. When he makes noises like a dog is to make the people near to him laugh. But I am a man of turning cards. You must do that you think best.
Yours in faith
Andrei Velicka
The reply to the reply
28 November 1998
Dear Andrei,
Thank you for your kind reply. It has not been easy but I have found the money you asked for. Tomorrow Iris and I will fly to Kiev, and then I think we can take a night train and arrive in Lvov the next morning. From there, travel plans are a little hazy but rest assured we will find you. Sorry to be so brief, but I don’t think there is much more that I can say that I haven’t already said.
Yours in faith
Esperanza Whitman
* * *
Extract from Esperanza Whitman’s diary: August 1999
I’ve been dipping into my book of Elizabeth Bishop poems a lot lately -so many about travel experience. One poem called The Map goes like this:
Norway’s hare runs south in agitation
Profiles investigate the sea, where land is
I don’t quite understand that last bit, but it’s a beautiful idea, and it gave me this idea for how to start the book.
The country of Ukraine is shaped like a dragon with a blunted horn and a stumpy wing. It is a dragon that is trying to tear itself free of Russia, with Moldova tucked under its chin and Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia balanced on its head like books on the head of a girl learning the etiquette of deportment. The city of Lvov, in the west, is the dragon’s eye, and to the South, a range of mountains runs across the snout like a muzzle. At the foot of the forested lower slopes of these mountains there is a small town whose main feature is a redundant aluminium plant where most of the men used to work. Unemployment is high, but not quite as high as it was, and lying around on benches drinking in the daytime is once again becoming a minority activity. It is a hot, dry continental summer and the ground in the park beneath the elm trees is baked and cracked. The streets are dusty and the massive wall of the old factory that was painted blue and yellow to celebrate independence is peeling away – like the skin of a great reptile. The youth of the town now think of going west into Germany, France, Italy. There is a burgeoning black market trade in fake EU passports. The existence of an unusual community in the woodland several miles to the south of the town has slipped back into forgetfulness. It came to wider attention on two separate occasions, both years ago now. Once, when a few of the first Chernobyl children born with deformities went there. And once again the following year, when it took in the famous wolf boy of Dnestr…
Yes, I think I could make it good. Well with the material I have to work from it should be. Not that it could ever be published. The only way would be to put it in a safe box with instructions ‘to be opened in a hundred years time’ or something like that. Publicity spoils everything. Andrei doesn’t even like me writing things in this diary. ’Oral is best’, he says. ’Tongue lies are not running so easy as the pen’. He favours the use of a Dictaphone.
Transcript of Dictaphone recordings, translated from the Ukrainian
Transcript 1: 21st August 1999
The set-up is this: the site of an ancient quarry has created a depression in the wooded landscape like a natural amphitheatre. In the depression the vegetation is particularly wild. A stream flows past its open end. A path runs right round the rim of this naturally enclosed area, and at the highest point of the path, at the head of the old quarry rock-face, there is the hide: a camouflaged observation point. You must not get the wrong the idea – the enclosure is entirely suggestive – there is no ten foot high electric fence. Andrei and Esperanza are not conducting some grotesque Big-Brother style experiment. The observed are free to come and go, just as are the observers.
Transcript 2: 25th August 1999
She was so cold when she arrived, poorly protected by cheap furs acquired in second hand costume shops – a foolish attempt to blend in. But now the temperature is sultry even at night, and she’s quite comfortable lying out here in the roofless ruined bunker we have made into a hide. If she rolls round onto her back she would see the stars make a ceiling more spectacular than any painter in history could create. But she doesn’t roll over. She nudges my baggy-jumpered, masculine form next to her, and gets me to pass the binoculars across. I whisper something and pat her bottom, rise and rootle in the rucksack for the cheesy snacks I always carry. Letting this female come from America was the best thing that could have happened, though I wasn’t sure at first. It has been a thrill to help her – both of them. She is watching our two proteges now through the infra-red binoculars. I know what they are doing: naked together, they are scratching each others’ backs with peeled strips of tree bark. Faintly I can hear the sound of them humming melodies too – one starts and then the other joins in harmony. Soon they will make love, like any other animals, and though I feel like a voyeur I will want to watch them anyway. As will she, ever eager to record things. We will end up fighting over the binoculars as usual.
Language barriers were a problem at first, but in the hide, under the night sky, watching, silence seems so much more logical. In the morning things will be different, less magical. I will be back in the classroom and she…what will she be doing? Will she join me, boosted by the confidence tonight gives her? Or will she go off into the run-down town again, voraciously photographing everything she sees? She is still riveted by the newness of the place, I can tell. Both the American women are. And yet they have changed things since they came. With their help, we have discovered things. We have all advanced immeasurably. But who other than Andrei Velicka could have seen that this was the way to do it?
I look at her now, slyly, and make a grab for the binoculars. Hissing at me she manages to hold on to the right ocular, and we grapple, each trying to loosen the other’s grip. This will not go into International Cortex Debates. I press her face into the ground hard and when she goes limp in submission I begin stroking her coarse American hair, putting the binoculars to my eyes with my free hand. I look down into the gulch.
Andrei and Esperanza are rubbing dirt into each others’ bodies now. The melodies have stopped and I can see their lips moving, forming words.
Island of Lost Souls (part two)
Part two of an investigation by the TOAD on Lampedusa in May 2011
The current Italian government is a coalition between Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party and the Lega Nord, a northern separatist movement who used to campaign on a mainly anti-southern platform but are now trying to spread their mix of xenophobia and federalism across the country. At the height of the 2011 crisis Lega leader, Umberto Bossi, came out with the soundbite immigrati fora dai ball, a northern dialect phrase which roughly translates as ‘Immigrants get the f*** out’. Berlusconi’s government depends on Lega support to pass legislation. In return the Lega has been able to exert a strong influence and obtain ministerial positions, including Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, and Minister for Simplification Roberto Calderoli, whose view on immigrants is that: “the door is always open for them to go back to the desert and talk to camels, to the jungle to talk to monkeys.” For Nicolini the desire to turn Lampedusa into an open prison came from the Lega. Its aim was not just to attract European help in dealing with immigration, but also to stir xenophobia across Italy.
“The Lega needed to show their voters in the north this monster of Lampedusa. It was a well-designed plan and from their point of view it worked perfectly. On an island it’s easy. It’s a sealed environment. You can truly do whatever you want.”
Pina Nicolini (by Eva Barton)
And yet two years earlier the Lega met fierce resistance when they tried to do the same thing. In 2009 the island was threatened by a similar crisis to the one that unfolded in 2011. Agreements with the dictators Ben Ali and Gaddafi had yet to be sealed. Lega pressure on Berlusconi to halt the flow of immigrants onto mainland Italy reached a head. On January 23 2009 Interior Minister Maroni announced that the ‘Welcome Centre’ on Lampedusa would henceforth operate alongside a ‘Centre for Identification and Expulsion’ (CIE). The Lega’s intentions were clear: they wanted to redefine Lampedusa not as a stepping stone but as a place where migrants could be kept until being sent back. With the Libya deal yet to be ratified by the Italian parliament and negotiations over a new agreement with Tunisia at a critical stage, there was an obvious benefit to creating a situation on Lampedusa that would sting previously reluctant hands into action. The pace of transfers off the island slowed and numbers in the Centre swelled far beyond its eight hundred capacity. On January 24 more than one thousand broke out of the gates and made their way peacefully to the town hall where a crowd of locals protesting against the planned CIE greeted them with cheers. It was a moment of solidarity; locals and migrants united in their refusal to allow Lampedusa to be turned into a prison island, and Bernardino De Rubeis was with them: “Lampedusa is not for sale. We find ourselves confronted with an all-powerful state that wants to impose its own choices and transform this island into a prison under the open sky.” He became the target for attacks from Lega Nord politicians including Minister Calderoli who accused him of deliberately seeking the spotlight and “throwing petrol on the fire”. When, in February 2009 Tunisians rioted and the Centre was almost destroyed in a fire that sent toxic fumes across to the nearby town, De Rubeis still reserved his ire for the government and the Lega’s influence within it: “They have turned the Centre into a concentration camp. The immigrants are at the end of their tether.”
But Maroni and Calderoli were not without allies on Lampedusa. One of the stranger features of the island’s recent history is that the Lega, with its northern separatist agenda, has successfully managed to implant itself there, on Italy’s southernmost point. Two of its candidates won council seats in the last local elections in 2007. One of them, Angela Maraventano, became De Rubeis’ deputy in a ‘centre-right’ coalition. De Rubeis himself was affiliated to the Movement for Autonomy – a southern-based party which campaigns for greater federalism but without the Lega’s intrinsic racism. The following year, still holding the post of deputy mayor, Maraventano was put forward in a northern seat for elections to the Senate, the second chamber of the Italian Parliament. Her successful election capped a speedy rise onto the national political stage. In return, the Lega expected her to take the battle to Lampedusa. To a backdrop of public abuse she spoke in defence of the government at the same January 2009 protest where De Rubeis delivered his message of defiance. The schism between mayor and deputy deepened in March when the government hurriedly converted a former NATO radar post into a Centre for Identification and Expulsion. Claiming Maraventano had gone behind his back, De Rubeis sacked her. Two months later the CIE was dismantled after the mayor led arguments that it had been constructed illegally. At this point there could be no doubt that if the Lega – and by extension the government – wanted to use Lampedusa as Italy’s immigration Alcatraz, they would find in Bernardino De Rubeis a genuine block of resistance.
That ceased abruptly on July 21 2009, when Italian finance police arrested him and took him by helicopter to prison on Sicily to face charges of bribery and corruption. From the beginning De Rubeis has denied these charges. Initially he claimed his arrest was a political plot by the government to punish him for his opposition. He was kept in jail for a month before being released pending trial. 2009 turned into 2010 and still the trial had not begun. In February 2010 he sent a letter to Interior Minister Maroni – a letter which subsequently became public – congratulating Maroni for the success of the respingimenti policy and offering one of the most humble political apologies that can surely ever have been tendered to a former enemy:
“from a stubborn man, but a man able to understand when the time is right to take one or more steps back, recognising the merit and courage of someone who, with a strong, decisive action, has pulled off a masterplan.”
Simultaneously he posted an official ordinance reinstating Maraventano as his deputy with special responsibility for immigration:
“ …in the hope that she will forgive an old friend guilty of not defending and supporting a woman who was able to foresee the grand political design which has saved our island.”
The sentiments in these letters are supported by the facts: since his prison release at the end of August 2009, De Rubeis’ intransigence on the question of immigration has been replaced by unswaying adherence to the government line.
“Someone easily blackmailable,” is Giuseppina Nicolini’s carefully worded assessment of the mayor. Not that she believes the charges against De Rubeis are trumped up: the Legambiente was one of several interest groups who recently presented a two hundred page dossier to the regional prosecutor detailing his alleged abuses of office. But there is more than a hint of sympathy in her voice when she says “in a way he is both victim and executioner in this affair: executioner of his subjects; victim of his superiors.”
When I ask De Rubeis about his trial, now finally being heard in sessions separated by long intervals in a courthouse on Sicily, he no longer holds the government responsible. On that score too he has changed his mind. The enemies now are closer to home: the bureaucratic classes who, for years, he says, have had their own way on Lampedusa:
“The problems start when someone wants to make changes – when there are monopolies, when it’s the white collars who decide things, and then a mayor comes in – a mayor of the people, the son of a fisherman.”
The ‘blue collar’ workers I speak to do identify with De Rubeis. “We grew up together. He’s not a bad guy. But he’s controlled by others,” fisherman Pasquale tells me. Angelo La Noce, a carpenter, agrees: “The problem is not so much Dino as the people around him.”
While these locals do not analyse as closely as Nicolini, they share her sense that their elected mayor has become a puppet figure.
But perhaps the most revealing piece of evidence comes from De Rubeis himself:
“Very often the people choose a man to govern them, and then this man who should be able to govern peacefully finds himself caught up in situations where he is forced into compromises which mean that he cannot do his duty and honour the faith the people placed in him.”
Is this an admission that his radical U-turn from opposition to support for government policy on Lampedusa is somehow connected to the events surrounding his arrest and trial? Or is it simply a general statement that it is impossible for a local leader to represent the interests of his people when the will of certain influential figures is against him? Either way it seems to summarise the deeper truth of Lampedusa’s woes. Behind a dramatic tableau of immigration crisis lies the faded scenery of local democracy eroded by the cold exercise of power.
Dino De Rubeis (by Eva Barton)
Island of Lost Souls (part one)
In the aftermath of revolution in North Africa an immigration crisis thrust the Italian island of Lampedusa into the international media spotlight. Eventually the situation was brought under control, but for some the question remained: who was really responsible for Lampedusa becoming Europe’s Island of Lost Souls? The TOAD’s investigation was from a visit to the island in May 2011.
By day they roamed the town on the bare rock that was their prison. By night they huddled in makeshift shelters against the cold air breezing in off the Mediterranean.
“An indelible, unforgettable shame” is how Giuseppina Nicolini, her voice harsh with emotion, describes the six week period in February and March when the number of Tunisian migrants on Lampedusa grew to exceed the resident population. “I could show you photos I took” she says, “but to be honest it’s the ones I couldn’t bring myself to take that I’ll remember forever.” Nicolini manages the Lampedusa office of Legambiente, an environmental body active across Italy. The scenes she recalls to me are no secret. The international media was there in force to record them. But Nicolini is convinced that even months on from its end, the truth about the invasion of Lampedusa has still not been told.
A refugee boast wrecked on the shore of Lampedusa (by Eva Barton)
To the mainstream media the immigration crisis was an unfortunate by-product of events in North Africa which caught the Italians, like most governments, unawares. As a result – so the accepted narrative goes – Italy had no space in any of its immigration detention facilities on the mainland, meaning the destitute Tunisians had to be kept on Lampedusa in such unprecedentedly large numbers that they could not be contained in the holding facility and instead spilled out among the local population. After seven weeks, with a state of emergency officially declared, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi arrived to announce that “within forty eight to sixty hours Lampedusa will be inhabited by no one but Lampedusans”. Following a further five day delay while the details of a repatriation deal with Tunisia’s interim government were hammered out, he delivered. Now most of the boats that continue to arrive on Lampedusa carry people coming from Libya – carefully defined as refugees – rather than Tunisians, who are defined without exception as ‘economic migrants’. As soon as the boats dock at the quayside the refugees are loaded into buses and taken to a holding centre where they are housed until their transfer to one of Italy’s mainland facilities, typically within forty eight hours. Today a visitor to Lampedusa would find a tranquil island scarcely disturbed by the continued arrivals from Africa. The point is an important one. In the last two decades Lampedusa’s economy has come to depend heavily on tourism. And while in reality the crisis may be over, locals are angry that the message is not getting through to potential visitors. They feel they are being made to pay twice: once with the trauma of the emergency itself, and now again with a summer of economic failure. In the minds of many the blame for this lies with the media who perpetuate a false image of an island unsuitable for tourism.
Not so in Nicolini’s eyes. For her and others the debate about Lampedusa’s current woe is skewed by a basic misconception. As she sees it, the ‘invasion’ can only be seriously discussed when it is accepted not as an inevitable effect of the Arab Spring, but as the result of a deliberate policy by the Italian government.
“At a certain point migrants kept arriving but they didn’t leave any more. If instead of taking them away you let them build up and build up it’s obvious that you’ll get to seven thousand.”
Nicolini rubbishes government claims that the scale of influx meant that immigration centres on the mainland reached full capacity.
“From spring to autumn 2008 migrants arrived at a comparable rate. Did anyone talk about a biblical emergency then? The government were quite explicit that they wanted to keep the Tunisians here until repatriation. When it was found out that the regions had space for 50,000 and there were 12,000 Tunisians – at that point 5,000 of them here – a Government senator was asked what they were waiting for to take those 5,000 off the island. And he replied ‘But the 50,000 places are for refugees. They’re Tunisians, they’re not refugees. They have to be repatriated. And so we’ll keep them on Lampedusa because from there they can’t escape.’”
Nicolini points out that 2011’s spike in arrivals is a result of the breakdown of deals Italy made in 2009 with the dictatorships in Libya and Tunisia. Berlusconi’s government agreed to pay Tunisia’s Ben Ali to immediately repatriate Tunisians arriving in Italy, while a joint policing deal with Gaddafi involved migrant boats being turned back to Libya on the high seas before they could make an asylum claim, a policy known as respingimenti, which violated Italy’s obligations under the Geneva Convention on Refugees. Rather than creating an unprecedented immigration emergency, the Arab Spring merely meant a sudden and exaggerated return to the conditions prior to these agreements. The key difference was that instead of migrants being kept in the detention centre and frequently transferred to the Italian mainland, transfers ceased and the separation from locals ensured by the Welcome Centre model was abandoned. For Nicolini this situation, and the hostility and indignity it caused, could not have happened without the acquiescence of Lampedusa’s mayor, Bernardino De Rubeis.
I interview the bearlike De Rubeis in his office in the town hall, asking him first if he is satisfied with the government’s response to the crisis. His response is surprising:
“I have to tell you, with great peace of mind, that the people of Lampedusa gave themselves to this humanitarian crisis, collaborating with central government, in order that this emergency could bring forth out of Lampedusa, but above all out of Italy, a strong message that all the member states of the European Union should absolutely be taking on board.
“If Lampedusa had not allowed itself to be invaded for about two months the problem would definitely not have got out. If you have 6,300 immigrants in a territory like that of Lampedusa, with a resident population of 5,800, it is very different from sending those 6,300 immigrants to Italy where nobody notices because Italy is big, and so, almost deliberately, a tragic moment was created so that Europe would wake up to the problem. I am convinced of this and I take responsibility for it, because the government, as it is doing today, and as it did after fifty eight days of the crisis, could have easily and quickly resolved the problem by transferring the immigrants to the various centres in Italy. Many are full, but they could have created more.”
In other words De Rubeis agrees with Nicolini that the emergency was artificially created, and that he collaborated in it: somewhat surprising for the mayor of an island which depends on tourism, given that Lampedusa’s image in the eyes of potential visitors was always likely to be ruined by the crisis. But De Rubeis argues that it was a necessary piece of propaganda to force the European Union to help Italy cope with immigration. And he is sure that Lampedusans will be recognised and rewarded for their sacrifice. “I’ll go to Rome to try to meet Berlusconi because what do the people here need? Or rather what does the tourism sector need? They need serious answers… a ten year run of credit, which can be given by the Sicilian region… and on the national level a block on taxes for at least six to seven months.”
Whether one agrees with this policy or not, at least it would appear that De Rubeis is being honest. However Nicolini disputes not only the ethics and wisdom of his decision. She, along with a number of other Lampedusans, believes that De Rubeis no longer has a will of his own – that he is nothing more than a puppet whose strings are held by dark forces at the opposite end of the long boot of Italy’s mainland.
Who can get paid for looking like a dim-witted rustic clown… and is there a price?
Being paid for doing next to nothing. That’s the dream isn’t it? Or maybe not. Not when that next to nothing involves appearing on an internet provider’s website looking like a dim-witted rustic clown. Sorry, I mean ‘ordinary bloke’. Because that’s what we’re supposed to look like now. Bug eyed and gormlessly grinning in one of those awful everyman check shirts while the world collapses in flames around us, but it’s fine because we’ve just had a few quid off our monthly internet bill. And all we had to do was sacrifice the concept of friendship, by harrying our so-called mates into joining the same provider as us just so we could close our sweaty mitts around a fistful of fivers. Or not even fivers: garishly-coloured discount cards that look suspiciously like the kind Michael Barrymore used to read questions off in the glory days of Strike it Lucky.
I wonder if I could sell my soul so easily, in the unlikely event a company wanted me to front their next ad campaign which required an ordinary bloke to look gormlessly happy on its website. By god I could do with the money, so it would be at least worth looking into – to see if they could do it with me drugged up to the eyeballs so I wouldn’t know what had happened until it was all over. But then again perhaps the so-called ‘ordinary bloke’ is no ordinary bloke at all. Perhaps he’s a professional actor, with an agent and everything; maybe he’s spent four years at drama college preparing to play the part of Hamlet. After all, a lot of Shakespeare’s plays had fools in them; he may even feel the role of ‘ordinary gormless bloke for website’ requires someone of his dramatic talents to do it justice.
The trouble with that theory is that Shakespeare’s fools were meaty parts because they were actually wise men in disguise. On the surface it was all cap and bells and hey nonny no, but behind that they knew they were the only ones who could mock the most powerful in the land – precisely because they’d convinced them they were harmless idiots. Well my man on Plusnet may have had a similarly subversive intention; he is apparently an up-and-coming comic of some renown called Craig Murray. Trouble is I’d never heard of him before I saw him grinning at me oafishly every time plusnet told me they’d stuck an extra fiver onto my next bill for using too many megabytes. And now I’m going to avoid him like a certain bubon-inducing infectious disease for the rest of my life. Sorry Craig. Trapped in the internet’s two dimensions, you’re doomed to be nothing to me but surface; just a collection of pixels arranged into the shape of a face stretched into the maximum degree of idiocy. For ever and ever. Amen.
But I don’t blame you. I would almost certainly do the same if I was offered the cash.
Driven insane by machines
I’ve just been filling in one of those long, formal online job applications, the kind that exist in the name of equal opportunities, but actually only succeed in giving everyone the equal opportunity to drive themselves stark-raving bonkers. You know the kind. You have to ‘register’ to enter the ‘application process’, which then proceeds across twelve different stages. Each time you complete a stage your percentage completion bar fills up a bit more, as if you’re Lara Croft using first aid kits in Tomb Raider, only this is the real world, and it’s nowhere near as much fun as running through tunnels shooting at bats.
Still, mind-numbing as it might have been, I was getting there. Education and prior employment were accounted for; one of those awful personal statements – surely the literary form from hell, bar none – had been written. All that remained were references, and I could apply, forget about it, and feel a little better spending the rest of my day watching Clint Eastwood talk to a chair.
Except then something went wrong. I clicked the ‘add reference’ button, but instead of moving me gently to the next stage and pushing my life bar up another notch towards full energy (Lara used to sigh ‘ahhhhhh’ when you did this), the screen went shadowy (always a worrying sign) and two boxes appeared with two choices: ‘leave page’ or ‘stay on page’. No ‘cancel’. No ‘stop this shit’. Choose one, sucker, they said. Alarm bells. So many details completed, so many words written (never mind they were mostly bullshit, they were necessary bullshit). And I was in danger of losing them. Because, yes – I HADN’T SAVED. Go on then, tell my I’m an idiot. Tell me every sensible person on earth would have saved, after an hour and a half of writing. Well I hadn’t. There you are. Slap me sideways and stick a dunce’s cap on me. It still shouldn’t have damn well mattered. If you click ‘stay on page’ you should legitimately expect to go back to what was on that page. I clicked ‘stay on page’ and the whole screen went terribly pale, as if it had just seen a ghost; and all it could jabber in its panic was the one word: ‘loading’, inside an ominously revolving wheel. Fair enough, it was in shock. I would give it time. I waited. I waited a bit more. I went to the kitchen to cut bacon into strips for a spaghetti carbonara. I came back. It was still in shock. I went to boil the kettle and beat an egg. I came back again. Loading. Knowing full well what would happen I clicked ‘back’ on my browser. And yes of course: I lost everything.
I was too dumb with disbelief to scream and beat my fists in fury on the keyboard. Instead, as I fried my strips of bacon, I began laughing in a dry demented way, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. I muttered strange vows to myself: that I would never apply for a job again, not as long as I lived. That I would take this as a sign, I was simply not meant to obtain a job through the online application process. Never mind that rules out most jobs in the modern world. I simply couldn’t, and shouldn’t go through with it, not unless I accept the purpose of my life is to be driven insane by machines.
Which it may well be.
