THE NEW YORK TIMES, 11/09/06
It has become grimly commonplace. While the horrific strikes in the United States are foremost in Americans’ minds, other parts of the world — as far away as Bali, but in large cities in particular — have also found themselves the targets of vicious attacks in recent years. The Op-Ed page asked writers who know some of these cities well to describe the events and consider their aftermath.
1) Madrid.
Hush, Memory.
By Antonio Muñoz-Molina, the author of "Sepharad".
A TALL structure, vaguely temple-shaped and covered with long sheets of canvas, stands on a busy intersection right by the Atocha railway station, in downtown Madrid, where bombs planted in commuter trains went off on the morning of March 11, 2004, killing 191 people. This memorial to the victims of that terrorist attack will undoubtedly be completed long before the one in New York for those killed on Sept. 11, 2001. Yet the actual memory of the Madrid dead seems to have faded from Spain’s public consciousness much faster than the sorrow and mourning for those who died in Lower Manhattan.
As a Spaniard living in Madrid and in New York, I must confess to a feeling of envy, a kind of civic melancholy. You will hardly find any stories about March 11 in Spanish newspapers, let alone in books or documentary films. The police and the judges here did their jobs with remarkable alacrity and efficiency, and most of the terrorists involved in the attacks have been in jail for some time now. And yet there seems to be a void at the center of the events of those days.
The truth is that March 11 is too disturbing a memory for either the Socialist or the Popular Parties to deal with comfortably. It turned the whole political landscape in Spain upside down. Politicians on both sides were more than ready to cash in on the tragedy: instead of a nation united in sorrow, Spain became a dismal battleground where lies and slander reached an appalling level of viciousness.
Even today, political partisanship has erased any chance of national agreement on remembrance, and both the government and the opposition are too busily engaged in their short-term skirmishes to remember the suffering of innocent victims and the courage of the heroes who rushed to their rescue.
Soon the memorial near the Atocha station will be completed and unveiled. But I am afraid it will not be long before it becomes one of those unappealing monuments people pass by without paying them much attention, without caring even to ask why it was erected in the first place.
2) London.
Carry On.
By William Boyd, the author of “Any Human Heart” and the forthcoming "Restless".
SOMETIMES it feels as if terrorism began on Sept. 11, 2001, but a second’s reflection reminds me that it’s been a near-constant factor in my adult life. I encountered human conflict early enough, living in Nigeria during that country’s civil war (1967-70), but terrorism arrived when I was in my late teens. A school friend was caught up in the multiple P.L.O. plane hijackings of Sept. 6, 1970 (he was unhurt). I happened to be in Munich in 1972 during the Olympic Games when the Israeli athletes were killed. And when I first visited London in the mid-1970’s, I remember walking past Walton’s restaurant in Chelsea, its windows still covered with chicken wire, grim testimony to its bombing in 1975 (two died).
We’ve forgotten the brutal wave of I.R.A. bombings and shootings in London at the end of 1975. When I moved to London in the early 1980’s, the terrorist threat we endured was all I.R.A.-driven. I knew a young journalist who was killed by the Harrods bomb on Christmas 1983. Then in 1988 a colleague of my wife died in the Pan Am 103 Lockerbie disaster. Terrorism had begun to touch the outer circle of our own existence.
It begins to blur. Each I.R.A. cease-fire would inaugurate a sense of relief, of near euphoria. Life could return to normal, the streets were reclaimed. Then would come another bomb — a building shattered, fatalities, innocent people in the wrong place at the wrong time — and one experienced a feeling of heaviness, awful resignation. It was dread, I suppose.
I was in a taxi going to a meeting at the BBC to talk about a film I was writing when the bombs went off on July 7 last year. The taxi driver got a cellphone call from his son: “They’ve blown up the Underground, Dad.” We nervously speculated that it must have been a fire, some huge electrical malfunction. In the meeting at the BBC we tried to talk but we kept a TV on, soundless, in the corner, and when we saw the images of the ravaged double-decker bus we knew it was something different.
Because suicide bombing changes everything. With the I.R.A. bombing campaigns, buildings were the targets, and warnings were given in most cases. The I.R.A. terrorists didn’t want to die. Today as you go about London you realize that the self-immolating terrorist makes every place a potential target. Suspicion waxes and wanes — it’s tiring being on your guard all the time.
London is not the Dante-esque hell of Baghdad, of course. People are fatalistic, stoical, warily feigning unconcern. What else can you do? We know that beneath the seemingly ordered surface of our daily existence all is chaos and uncertainty, anyway. But since the suicide bombs, life has just become that bit more unsettlingly chaotic, that bit more worryingly, lethally uncertain.
3) Mumbay, India.
In Whose Name, Exactly?
By Kiran Nagarkar, the author of "Cuckold".
IT took 13 years for the sequel. The first blasts in Mumbai took place in March 1993. As is often the case, the original was more powerful and more gory, and claimed more lives. But the sequel — on July 11 of this year — was just as well planned. Two hundred or so dead is not much of a tally compared to the number of victims of 9/11, but tragedy can never be measured in numbers. It is always personal and individual. It is about loss and pain and immeasurable suffering.
I was visiting friends in Silicon Valley when I first caught the news of the blasts on Mumbai’s overcrowded local trains. My head felt heavy and numb. I kept thinking that for some reason CNN had decided to run an old videotape from 1993. The newscast would report the occasional miraculous escape, someone who had called home on a cellphone from the platform at the last minute and just missed the train: “It was God, I tell you: I’m sure about it. God was personally taking care of me,” the man kept repeating.
Yes, I thought. But what about those who had died? Nobody mentioned that God must have personally taken care of them, too.
In Mexican mythology, the only way to maintain equilibrium and preserve peace was to offer the gods human sacrifices and blood. Jesus is the son of God and his greatest attribute is love. You never say Allah without mentioning that he is all-merciful and compassionate. Surely, then, nobody can kill in their names.
Which gods are we trying to pacify and appease today, and every day, in Iraq, India and Afghanistan, in the United States, Britain, Spain, Palestine, Lebanon, Israel, Sudan and a dozen other places, that we must ceaselessly spill blood and commit mass murder? Does anybody still know who the enemy is? Is the enemy no longer the other, or them, but us?
4) Istambul.
Don't Disconnect.
By Elif Shafak, the author of “The Flea Palace” and the forthcoming "Bastard of Istanbul".
WHEN New York was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, I happened to be in Istanbul, getting ready to go to America. Just as I turned around a corner on Istiklal Avenue, I overheard a chestnut vendor cry: “They bombed America!” The man had a tiny radio glued to his head. I joined a small group surrounding his stall: What was going on? And what did it mean to “bomb America”?
I called my best friend in America. Couldn’t reach her. I called another friend but couldn’t reach him, either. I called the university where I was about to go teach. What was I going to say? “Are you O.K., New York?”
Today, knowledge is a free-floating commodity — a street vendor can get information from another part of the world in no time. And yet it has lost its cutting edge. The grim news from New York was immediately heard in Istanbul, but how genuinely was New Yorkers’ pain felt by Istanbulites? How deep did the pain of the other cut through one’s own skin?
When Istanbul was attacked on Nov. 20, 2003, I happened to be in New York, getting ready to go back to Turkey. I ducked into a deli, where people were glued to a TV: Terrorist attack in Istanbul. British Consulate and HSBC buildings destroyed. Familiar streets and places, now covered in blood and shattered glass, filled the screen. I stood frozen, once more trying to tear a sense of reality out of free-floating information.
I called my husband in Istanbul. Couldn’t reach him. I called my mother. Couldn’t reach her. In need of hearing a voice, any voice, from Turkey, I called my publishing house and left a message: “Are you O.K., Istanbul?” I watched the faces of the deli customers. The grim news from Istanbul was immediately heard in New York, but how genuinely was Istanbulites’ pain felt by New Yorkers? How deep did the pain of the other cut through one’s own skin?
New York and Istanbul are kindred spirits: slightly crazy, cosmopolitan, chaotic, chock-full mega-cities throbbing with life. There is no “us” and “them.” In the post-9/11 world, we need to say: Your pain is my pain.
5) Nairobi, Kenya.
The Bus Stopped There.
By Mutuma Mathiu, the editor of The Sunday Nation newspaper.
ON Aug. 7, 1998, the day a Qaeda bomb murdered more than 200 people here, I was late for work. The bus route to my office goes right past the American Embassy in central Nairobi. Had I been on time, the bus I would have taken would probably have been the one destroyed in the blast as the driver waited for a light outside the embassy. Instead, I was two miles away.
I walked to my office, seemingly the only person headed for the heart of the city. The rest of Nairobi’s millions, it appeared, were getting out of it. The first wave was in panic but largely unhurt. Then came the bleeding multitude, confused, angry and wounded, followed by the bad cases, white with mortar dust, barely able to walk.
When I visited the scene of the destruction, hundreds of volunteers, oblivious to their own safety, were digging with their hands for survivors. I learned that day that the power of communities — in New York, in Nairobi and in Dar es Salaam, the Tanzanian city that Al Qaeda bombed the same day — to fight and survive terrorism lay not just in law enforcement and emergency services, but in each individual’s selfless willingness to help.
Days later, I saw the bus I never took. It was sagging and looked in need of a tow truck. Mechanics fiddled with the junk and, to the amazement of a curious crowd, started it and drove it away, creaking and weaving. We smiled for the first time in a long time. It was a metaphor for our community: battered, damaged, defiant, but with life in us yet.