Kenneth Roy Eck’s literary luvvies Jim Swire An…

15.03.12
No. 527

The Cafe 2

I read in what I can’t think was the best item ever published in Scottish Review the bald averral that persons who might be called non-nationalists:
     ‘…sincerely believe they are not anti-Scottish, just as the vain person sincerely rejects accusations of vanity as he checks his profile in the mirror for the nth time; but they are anti-Scottish all the same and their other words and deeds reveal them to be so.’
     I can match that assertion: ‘naw, they urnae; and their ither words and deeds dinnae’.      The issue is simply one of what arrangements for government and administration, given the actual individual human beings available, able to maintain, apply and scrutinise these, will be the most productive, of benefit for the human and sundry other inhabitants of Scotland.
     It is all too easily conceivable, and for some even imaginable, that the only party calling itself nationalist could be quite as bad for quite as many residents of Scotland as avowed non-nationalists have claimed for years the actual SNP would be. I mean a hypothetical nationalist party, not Ms Sturgeon and co. 
     Would it be anti-Scottish to oppose such a party, promising say a North Britain approximating to North Korea?
     Saunders Lewis, poet and playwright, and scholar, is generally regarded as the father of Welsh nationalism. The greatest enemy of Wales, he said and wrote more than once ‘is nationalism’. It is not obligatory to be a nationalist to be a supporter of the SNP (N for ‘National’) or even in favour of the establishment of an independent self-governing Scottish state.
     The real question of independent statehood for Scotland is a specific practical political one. It has nothing to do with believing something general about far-off countries of which one does not know enough to speak. Or equal generalisations about the territory you happen to live in.
     It should never be confused with a programme for mass psychotherapy or fostering the sort of confused self-confidence which metaphorically keeps people looking in mirrors and which can turn them into tools of a prevailing ignorance and confusion. 
     John Macmurray wisely observed long ago that deciding who to vote for should have a lot in common with deciding which tradesman to engage to work on your house.

Robert R Calder

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Creel, Isle of Mull
Photograph by
Islay McLeod

A woman from the human

rights office disappeared.

Because of me? Maybe

John Forsyth

Listening to the separate BBC radio interviews last weekend of Sunday Times photographer, Paul Conroy, and his wife, Kate, I felt for them not just in every expression of shock and barely expressible gratitude at the lives that had been sacrificed in smuggling him out of the Babr Amr hell, but also their determination to continue to ‘be witness’ to the attrocities of recent weeks. It was all they could do and it was what they owed.

     I know some of the journalists and peacekeepers who experienced the same personal turmoil of gratitude, admiration, guilt, anger and inadequacy in Bosnia. My own experience of all of these emotions was brought back to the surface by those interviews.
     In 1982 I was head of the press office of Oxfam. The cold war was being fought out in Central America – ‘America’s backyard’. Ronald Reagan was in the White House and determined to stop the march of the evil empire to the last drop of someone else’s blood. It was difficult for anyone to tell the difference between spontaneous rebellion against repressive, corrupt regimes and ideologically-inspired, externally supported insurrection. In Central America as, I guess in Syria, it was a mixture of both.
     US policy was to fight a war by proxy pouring millions of dollars of arms and cash into the rogues’ gallery of dictators and by funding the Contras, the mercenaries. The men, women and children caught in the crossfire, of course, were just as dead whether it was a proxy bullet or fully authorised and certificated.
     I recall a sharp reply from one of Oxfam’s Central American staff to a telex from Oxford asking him to list the main health problems in his area. ‘Lead poisoning’ rattled back on the machine.
     Thirty years ago this month elections were scheduled to be held in El Salvador. Massive world media attention focused on the ballot as a marker in this wider conflict. The US state department provided overt and covert support for Napoleon Duarte, then head of the revolutionary government Junta, that had been engaged for over a year in a violent civil war with the FMLN, the Faribundo Marti Liberation Front, in front of them and the death squads associated with Major Roberto D’Aubuisson’s ARENA party at their back.
     There was massive repression of the civilian population with refugees treking over the borders of neighbouring countries but many more ‘internally displaced’ in makeshift camps in church grounds and ‘safe’ areas of countryside. Journalists were killed and there was worldwide revulsion at the murder of church men and women including, in 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero in his one of his own churches and three American nuns and a lay sister who were kidnapped, raped and killed.
     Oxfam had supported a number of low-level projects in El Salvador and throughout Central America and, with other agencies, tried to support some of the camps for the internal ‘refugees’. As the election approached the world media camped in El Salvador. Satellite uplinks were new and for the first time were flashing news pictures around the world in a way that has become commonplace since.

But it was a hard burden to bear. I heard later, back in Oxford, that at least one of the women from the human rights office had disappeared. Because of me? Maybe. Maybe not.

     Some of the groups in contact with Oxfam said the death squads were being relatively restrained due to the presence of the international media. They asked if someone could come who would be able to ‘be witness’ to what they feared would be an unleashing of mayhem after the elections were over and the mainstream media had packed up and gone home. While owning up to working for Oxfam was a guarantee of safe passage in most parts of the world, I was advised it might be the opposite in El Salvador. I agreed press accreditation with the Glasgow Herald and turned up in the Camino Reale hotel, the media base in San Salvador as the votes were being counted. I was under no illusion that the guys in uniform guarding the entrance to the hotel in daylight might not be so amiable if any of us bumped into them after dark.
     I was also aware of the risks the volunteers from the local human rights office were taking when they made contact. They explained to me that there was so much killing, kidnapping and torture that they had reduced their activities to the most basic possible. Every morning their duty was to go round the dumping sites for the previous night’s murder victims. ‘All we can do is collect the bodies and keep a record,’ it was explained to me. It was a dedication to duty that was hard to comprehend.
     The first morning I went out with them to the lava fields on the edge of San Salvador we shooed away the vultures from six dismembered bodies, men and women, and placed them in plastic bags. I had never seen a dead body before but I was ashamed to show shock in the face of the resolution of my companions. I discussed with them the risks they were taking in being seen with me. There was no point in trying to be surreptitious because there were watching eyes everywhere. They explained, to my great discomfort, that they understood the risks perfectly well but it was important to them that there should be a witness who could speak up for them and it was their duty to help me to be as good a witness as possible.
     A few days later I stayed with some Irish priests in their home in a town called San Francisco Gotera, in Morazan province. It was a market town, the size of Forfar or Hawick. With a military barracks it belonged to the government by day and often the guerrillas at night. I have just looked it up and have mixed feelings about being able to see it now on Google Maps.
     I explained my concerns to the priests, principally that I feared these brave men and women were making their calculations on a ludicrously unrealistic notion of the effect my ‘witness’ would have even within Oxfam never mind among the hard-nosed policy madarins of Whitehall or Washington. That was not my responsibility, they explained to me. ‘If you don’t respect their judgement then you are giving them nothing.’
     But it was a hard burden to bear. I heard later, back in Oxford, that at least one of the women from the human rights office had disappeared. Because of me? Maybe. Maybe not.
     I can tell Paul Conroy that it will be tough. Maybe that’s why it has taken me 30 years to write it down.
     Napoleon Duarte didn’t exactly win the election but remained on the inside track with the USA, eventually playing his part in the Central American peace plan devised initially by President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica in 1986. The nearest I got to Duarte was discovering that I was just about treading on his heels on the way into the football stadium to watch El Salvador play Honduras in preparation for the 1982 World Cup finals. I should have noticed I was the only one for 50 metres not wearing dark glasses and sporting a machine gun.

John Forsyth has worked for BBC Radio and TV in London and ran his own independent production company in Scotland for 10 years, supplying programmes to BBC Radio 2, 3 4, 5 Live, Radio Scotland and the World Service. He’s a former political editor of Scotland on Sunday and is now a freelance journalist and editorial consultant.