Step Across This Line (31 page)

If I’m right that Iran has begun to get the message, then this is the time to increase the pressure. The public support of Presidents Havel and Soares therefore matters a great deal, which is why the sudden jadedness of the British media is so worrying. As the mullahs’ little cartoon contest shows, the problem has not gone away just because I’ve been getting out more. It won’t go away until Iran backs down. If news editors are getting bored, that boredom plays into the hands of the terrorist censors.

Three years ago, Vaclav Havel came to Britain on a state visit and asked to meet me. The British government prevented the meeting, fearing, perhaps, for the British hostages in Lebanon. Havel had wished to make a major gesture of solidarity in front of the world’s press but was restricted to speaking to me on the phone. How ironic that the meeting should finally take place with the support of the British ambassador in Prague and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office back home, and then be ignored by the press!

There is a problem of news values here that goes far beyond my own case. It seems that nasty stories are news but constructive developments are not. When religious bigots recently burned thirty-six Turkish intellectuals and artists to death in the town of Sivas, the event was widely—and inaccurately—reported in our papers. When, days later, literally hundreds of thousands of Turks marched peacefully through the streets in defense of secularism and tolerance, their deeds were ignored. In this case and in others, it seems as if an old cliché is being inverted—it is not the terrorists who are being starved of the oxygen of publicity but their adversaries. It is unsettling to find the processes and values of our editorial decision-makers becoming—to use a Czech analogy—so Kafkaesque.

[
From the
Daily Mail
, September 1993
]

May I congratulate the
Daily Mail
on its consistency? Mary Kenny’s spiteful piece, in which I am called bad-mannered, sullen, graceless, silly, curmudgeonly, unattractive, small-minded, arrogant, and egocentric—she apparently doesn’t see how funny it is to insist so sourly that someone else should “try a little sweetness”—is, after all, only the latest in your long campaign to make me the villain of the so-called Rushdie affair.

Regarding the expense of my protection, I question Kenny’s figures
*22
but have expressed my gratitude for that protection publicly on many, many occasions—you don’t seem to have been listening—and have also done so privately, to the police and prime minister. I
am
grateful for it. It has, in all probability, saved my life. But it’s not only my freedom that is being defended but also British sovereignty—the right of British citizens not to be assassinated by a foreign power—and principles of free speech. This is a fight against state terrorism. My death would mean that Iran had won the battle. Is the defeat of terrorism and the preservation of free speech and national integrity worth so little to you that you must so frequently carp about the cost?

The thrust of Mary Kenny’s attack on me is that I have made criticisms of aspects of British society, and that I do not vote Conservative. She derides me for having pointed to elements of racism in Britain; in the week of the horrific attack on young Quddus Ali, can the existence of that racism really be denied? She blames me for having criticized the police in the past—does she really believe, after the recent flood of reversed convictions and discoveries of widespread police malpractice, that I have no right to do so? I have always given credit where it’s due, and the Special Branch officers who guard me know very well how deeply I appreciate their work.

Kenny also sneers at my 1983 general election essay about “Nanny-Britain”; but wasn’t it the Tory Party who gave Mrs. Thatcher the ultimate bad review by dumping her so unceremoniously? It’s true that I am not a Tory voter; after recent by-election results, how many Britons still are? The Conservative Party is not the State. To vote Labour is not an act of treason. (Not that I am able to vote; one of the deprivations of a life at an “unknown address” is that I cannot register. Does Mary Kenny care that I have been deprived of the most basic democratic right?)

Kenny goes on to suggest that I have “special social responsibilities”—but were I to suggest the same, she would no doubt instantly scream about my “arrogance.” She demands that I “turn my attention to healing the rifts between mankind.” I would describe the writer’s role a little more modestly than that myself, but in recent weeks and months I have spoken out for justice in Bosnia, supported the fragile PLO-Israeli pact, criticized the growth of religious sectarianism that is endangering India’s secular constitution, demanded the world’s attention for progressive, democratic voices throughout the Muslim and Arab world, and tried repeatedly to draw attention to the crimes against such people—the murders and persecutions of journalists, writers, and artists in Turkey, Algeria, Sharjah, Egypt, and Pakistan, to say nothing of my old friend the Islamic Republic of Iran. None of these efforts were reported in the
Daily Mail.

As for Prince Charles, his attack on me and my protection has been reported in the French, Spanish, and British press.
*23
It has been confirmed to me by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who was present when the Prince of Wales’s remarks were made. This is why I treat Buckingham Palace’s denials with a degree of skepticism. And yes, it’s true, I did poke fun at him in return; am I—even after Camillagate—the only Briton to be denied the right to join in this national pastime?

Let me be very clear: I do not attack the country that protects me. All countries are many countries, and there are many Britains that I love and admire; why else would I have chosen to live here for the last thirty-two years? However, I have the same right as any other citizen—the same right as the
Daily Mail
—to say what it is about this society and its leadership that I dislike. I will give up that right only (to coin a phrase) over my dead body. The real arrogance lies in assuming, as the
Daily Mail
and its columnists assume, that their view of this country, “their Britain,” is the only legitimate one; the real bad-mannered behavior is that of a paper which daily reviles and bullies all those who don’t fit into its narrow-minded, complacent worldview.

Mary Kenny is right to say that, in the Rushdie affair, freedom of speech is something we are all paying for. I am fighting with all my might to bring about the day when the financial burden can be lifted. In the meanwhile, it would be absurd—would it not?—to give up that very freedom. So I shall continue to speak my mind, and you at the
Daily Mail
will, I’m sure, continue to speak yours.

[
From a statement in the Swedish newspaper
Expressen,
October 1993
]

Your newspaper’s decision to campaign against the continued political, economic, and cultural involvement of the civilized world with the Iranian terror-state is very important, and I welcome it. No intelligence experts doubt that the hand of Iran was behind the cowardly attack on my distinguished Norwegian publisher and dear friend William Nygaard, an attack which he survived only by a kind of miracle. Iran’s is also the hidden hand behind the killing of more than twenty Iranian dissidents in Europe during the presidency of the so-called moderate Rafsanjani, who also sits on the National Security Council, in which such decisions are made.

How many more murders and assaults on innocent men and women will the Free World tolerate? If we go on reacting to violence with a shrug and a cry of “business as usual,” then are we not collaborating in terrorism by turning a blind eye to it? Of course Iran uses “cut-out” mechanisms and smoke screens to conceal its role; but the UN has condemned Iran’s human-rights violations and use of terrorism; the United States has named it the world’s major sponsor of terrorism; the EC has insisted that it improve its record in these matters before relations with it can improve. Yet this past week Germany welcomed Iran’s secret service head as an honored guest—the very man, Fallahian, who is behind all the Iranian assassination teams at work around the world! This is an almost laughably cynical act.

The Nordic countries have always supported my campaign against the Iranian terrorist regime; I have long been grateful for that support. Now the terrorists have attempted revenge, by shooting an unarmed man in the back. This time they must not be permitted to get away with it. I ask that Sweden, Norway, the other Nordic countries, and all the free nations of Europe cast Iran into the outer darkness where it belongs. I ask for an instant and complete break in all political, economic, financial, and cultural links. Let the evildoers be isolated. If they seek to destroy our fragile but precious freedoms, then they themselves are asking to be destroyed. And make no mistake: tyrannical as they are, cruel as they are, murderous as they are, their hated and feared regime is fragile, too. Without the support of the West, it will fall.

Does the West wish to be responsible for keeping the fanatical mullahs of Iran in power? It is time to make a choice in this matter; not for my sake, not only for William Nygaard’s sake, but for the sake of freedom itself.

[
From the introduction to a documentary film on television
]

Tahar Djaout was one of the most eloquent voices in the struggle against bigotry now being waged throughout the Muslim world. He was killed because he fought against the new Islamic inquisition, which is every bit as vicious as the old Christian one. We should feel his death as a wound in our own world. The battle between progressive and regressive elements in Muslim culture—between, as Djaout says, those who move forward and those who go back, who recoil—is of immense importance to us all. Its outcome may shape the next age of human history.

Tahar Djaout wrote in French, which gave him an international as well as a national voice, and earned him the hatred of the fanatics, for it is in the nature of fanatics to be parochial. I feel close to his plurality of self as well as tongue, and to his vulnerability. Those who embrace difference are always in danger from the apostles of purity. Ideas of purity—racial purity, cultural purity, religious purity—lead directly to horrors: to the gas oven, to ethnic cleansing, to the rack.

I introduce this film tonight, even though there is a danger that the endorsement of one as demonized as myself may give the mullahs a rhetorical weapon, because I believe that the killings will be stopped only when the world community cries out in outrage, and forces the Thought Police to desist. After all, the weapon that killed Tahar Djaout was not rhetorical. It was a gun.

No religion justifies murder. If assassins disguise themselves by putting on the cloak of faith, we must not be fooled. Islamic fundamentalism is not a religious movement but a political one. Let us, in Djaout’s memory, at least learn to call tyranny by its true name.

[
A statement read out at an evening for Sarajevo in New York, November 1993
]

There is a Sarajevo of the mind, an imagined Sarajevo whose present ruination and torment exiles us all. That Sarajevo represented something like an ideal, a city in which the values of pluralism, tolerance, and coexistence have created a unique and resilient culture. In that Sarajevo there actually exists that secularist Islam for which so many people are fighting elsewhere in the world. The people of that Sarajevo do not define themselves by faith or tribe but simply, and honorably, as citizens. If that city is lost, then we are all its refugees. If the culture of Sarajevo dies, then we are all its orphans. The writers and artists of Sarajevo are therefore fighting for us as well as for themselves. On the airwaves of Radio Zid, or in the sessions of the recent Sarajevo Film Festival—what an achievement, to stage a festival of over a hundred movies in the midst of such a war!—the candle is kept burning.

To define the people of Sarajevo simply as entities in need of basic supplies would be to visit upon them a second privation: by reducing them to mere statistical victimhood, it would deny them their personalities, their individuality, their idiosyncrasies—in short, their humanity. So, whatever the world’s governments and the UN protection force may say, let us insist that culture is as important to Sarajevo as medicines or food; that the people of Bosnia need cultural convoys, too. Let us insist that in wartime, when the forces of inhumanity are at their height, culture is not a luxury; and that the fight for the survival of the unique culture of Sarajevo is also a fight for what matters most to us about our own.

[
Written for the International Parliament of Writers, February 1994
]

A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Writers are citizens of many countries: the finite and frontiered country of observable reality and everyday life, the boundless kingdom of the imagination, the half-lost land of memory, the federations of the heart which are both hot and cold, the united states of the mind (calm and turbulent, broad and narrow, ordered and deranged), the celestial and infernal nations of desire, and—perhaps the most important of all our habitations—the unfettered republic of the tongue. These are the countries that our Parliament of Writers can claim, truthfully and with both humility and pride, to represent. Together they comprise a greater territory than that governed by any worldly power; yet their defenses against that power can seem very weak.

The art of literature requires, as an essential condition, that the writer be free to move between his many countries as he chooses, needing no passport or visa, making what he will of them and of himself. We are miners and jewelers, truth-tellers and liars, jesters and commanders, mongrels and bastards, parents and lovers, architects and demolition men. The creative spirit, of its very nature, resists frontiers and limiting points, denies the authority of censors and taboos. For this reason it all too frequently is treated as an enemy by those mighty or petty potentates who resent the power of art to build pictures of the world that quarrel with, or undermine, their own simpler and less openhearted views.