After decades of analysis, Bernardo Bertolucci has a new take on his 1970 classic The Conformist.

One rainy night in Paris in 1970, Bernardo Bertolucci was standing outside the Drugstore Saint Germain. It was a quarter to midnight. He was waiting for his -mentor, the great New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, to arrive from the French premiere of the Italian’s new film, The Conformist. “I haven’t talked about this for dozens of years,” says Bertolucci, “but Godard was my real guru, you understand? I used to think there was cinema before Godard and cinema after - like before and after Christ. So what he thought about the film meant a great deal to me.”
The Conformist was an adaption of Alberto Moravia’s novel, about a 30-year-old Italian Marcello Clerici (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant), a repressed -upper-class intellectual who, during Mussolini’s rule, is hired by fascists to go to Paris and murder a dissident who was h is former philosophy teacher. It’s not just a politically engaged film, but also a stylish thriller complete with car chases, murders and sex that Bertolucci thought the Frenchman would like. At midnight, Godard arrived for the rendezvous.

Bertolucci, 37 years after the event, recalls exactly what happened next: “He doesn’t say anything to me. He just gives me a note and then he leaves. I take the note and there was a Chairman Mao portrait on it and with Jean-Luc’s writing that we know from the handwriting on his films. The note says: ‘You have to fight against individualism and capitalism.’ That was his reaction to my movie. I was so enraged that I crumpled it up and threw it under my feet. I’m so sorry I did that because I would love to have it now, to keep it as a relic.”

The Conformist, despite Godard’s contempt, has proved to be one of the most -influential postwar films. With it, Bertolucci looked back at Italy’s fascist past, finding psychosexual dysfunction at its heart. It is a film, with its bleak vision of human motivation, that was evidently made in the aftermath of 1968’s failed utopian dreams, and yet one so visually daring and structurally sophisticated that without it such subsequent masterpieces as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now would have been unimaginable.

Why do you think Godard didn’t like The Conformist, I ask Bertolucci. It was, after all, partly a trenchant diagnosis of a fascistic mentality. “I had finished the period in which to be able to communicate would be considered a mortal sin. He had not.”

But there might be another reason Godard didn’t like the film. In it, Clerici asks for his doomed teacher’s phone number and address. “The number was Jean-Luc’s and the address was his on Rue Saint Jacques. So you can see that I was the conformist wanting to kill the radical.”

Indeed, Bertolucci takes evident delight in the fact that, for all Godard’s Maoist contempt for The Conformist, a rising generation of film-makers saw his picture as a revelation. “What always made me proud - almost blushing with pride - is that Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg all told me that The Conformist is their first modern influence.” What did they find inspiring in the film? Its complex flashback structure, the symbolic colour-coded photography of Bertolucci’s director of photography Vittorio Storaro (whom Coppola would later lure to Philippines to bring his talents to bear on the Apocalypse Now shoot) and several of its virtuosic showpiece scenes find echoes in many later films.

But The Conformist deserves to be appreciated not for prefiguring future cinematic masterpieces, but for itself. The chaotic hand-held camera as fascist hitmen chase the central figure’s lover through the woods. The chilly framing of iconic fascist buildings such as EUR in Rome and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The expressionist angles when the conformist visits his dotty mother. And, perhaps best of all, the ingenious sequence in a Parisian cafe in which Clerici’s reluctance to participate in a forandarole dance leads him to being surrounded by an ever–tightening spiral of dancers, the whole thing shot -ingeniously from above. Rarely has -cinema been so poetic, so daring or freighted. Its sexual politics (of which more later) don’t bear much scrutiny, but otherwise, this film will be a revelation for cinemagoers who only know Bertolucci for his later, relatively stodgy films such as The Last Emperor, Stealing Beauty or The Sheltering Sky.

So what is at the heart of The Conformist? Marcello is a weak-willed man seeking to blend into the crowd. He chooses to become a fascist killer and to marry a materialistic petit bourgeois wife (whom he describes as “good in bed, good in the kitchen”) - not out of political commitment, nor out of lust, but because he has an (ostensibly) shameful secret. His desire to conform, he discovers in the film’s last shot, is because of an adolescent incident in which his gay chauffeur tried to seduce him and whom (he thinks) he shot dead.

Bertolucci elaborates on the theme: “The conformist understands that the reason of his desperate look for conformism is that he realises he is different and that he never accepted his difference. In that last scene, he understands why he became a fascist - even the worst fascist of all - because he wanted to hide and forget what he feels are his differences in his deep, deep consciousness. It’s like realising that even fascists have a sub-consciousness.”

Significantly, it was during the making of The Conformist that Bertolucci went deeply into Freudian analysis. Up to that point, his earlier films such as Before the Revolution, The Spider’s Stratagem and even The Grim Reaper, had been made under Godard’s influence. Do you feel you grew up in making The Conformist? “Completely. At a certain moment I had to be careful not to be imitating, not to be a forger, to do Godard fakes. I think it’s not only my experience but the experience of a lot of people of my generation.”

One early result of going into analysis was that Bertolucci was impelled to symbolically destroy his leading mentors. Not just Godard, but his father, the great -Italian poet Attilio Bertolucci. “With Freudian analysis I realised that making movies is my way to kill my father. In a way I make movies for - how can I say - the pleasure of guilt. I have accept it at a certain moment, my father too had to accept that he was killed every movie. The funny line he gave me once was: ‘You’re very smart. You have killed me many times without going to jail.’”

What did your father think of The Conformist? “He loved all my movies for a simple reason - he felt as if he had done them. He loved his puppet, which is me, because I was very good at doing his movies. He thought he had taught me everything, which is true.” What a monstrous egotist, I say. So in a sense, whatever you did, you couldn’t kill your father, or eradicate his influence from your work completely? “That’s true. My movies are always in the same field as my father. They occupy a certain kind of cultural area - the same as from Parma.” It is from this little Italian city that the Bertolucci family hailed, and significantly, Bernardo’s 1967 film Before the Revolution is a loose adaptation of Stendhal’s novel The Charterhouse of Parma.

Attilio was not just a poet, but also a film critic who was friends with Pier Paolo Pasolini. (Indeed, Bernardo’s first job in the movies was as an assistant on the great director’s film Accatone). The father was obsessed by the cinematic -medium and so keen that his sons Bernardo and Giuseppe should share his love that he took them along to screenings and gave them a camera. They both became film directors, Bernardo going on to become one of Italy’s most famous and the winner of two Oscars.

One of Attilo’s poems is called The Cableway, with the dedication “To B. with an eight millimetre cine camera”. It includes this fond memory of his already cinema-addled adolescent son filming the Bertolucci family as they walk in the Apennines:

“But your adolescence sweetens, matures/ in the subtle craftsman’s patience/ with which you shoot from below/ and from behind the ragged hedge, so weaving/ its real time of berries, thorns and leaves/ into the story pulsating in the furtive steps of the children.”

It’s hard not to read into this Attilio’s delight in his 14-year-old son’s directorial apprenticeship.

Fifteen years later, Bernardo was still obsessed with his shots. The Conformist’s assassination scene was virtuosically shot in the snowy Piedmontese hills. (”We had never done action movies before. So when we shot the scene in which we stabbed the man, we said ‘My God! What have we done?”) Bertolucci rewrote the novel so that Clerici is a spectator of the murder. In the novel, Clerici doesn’t even witness the murder - he is in Rome at the time. “I told Moravia before starting: ‘In order to be faithful to your book, I must betray it.’ He said: ‘I completely agree with you.’ After he saw the film, Moravia paid me the great compliment, saying that there were only two adaptations of his books he liked. One was The Conformist.” (For the record, the other was Godard’s brilliant 1962 film Contempt, with Jack Palance and Brigitte Bardot.)

Bertolucci made another, even more bravura, even more treacherous change to Moravia’s story. It comes at the end. “In the novel,” says Bertolucci, “after the fall of Mussolini, the Conformist is fleeing Rome with his family. An aeroplane comes down and machine-guns the Conformist and his family, and that’s the end. I thought it was too moralistic, like the hand of God punishing the guilty one.” Bertolucci’s ending is more disturbing. One night Clerici wanders into the Colosseum and there finds the aged chauffeur who he wrongly thought he had killed when he was an adolescent. The chauffeur is trying to seduce a beautiful young boy. Clerici loudly denounces the chauffeur, yelling that he is a fascist. But that isn’t the end: the last shot has Clerici alone with the boy. The camera tracks over the boy’s naked buttocks to Clerici who looks at the camera. What are we supposed to make of that, I ask Bertolucci - that they had just had sex? “It’s very possible. The boy is naked and has the slow movement of after love in a way - so you’re right.” But that is a troubling idea, suggesting that fascism can be linked with repressed homosexual desire, particularly when Bertolucci adds that it is only at this moment that Clerici truly understands who he is and why he was a fascist.

If that is the case, though, Bertolucci refuses to take the rap for this homophobic denouement. “With all my old movies I feel I am no more responsible - read: guilty - for them. The person who made these films is so distant from me.” You don’t feel responsible even for the film you made immediately after The Conformist, namely Last Tango in Paris, with its notorious sex scenes? “Least of all that film.” However, Bertolucci feels sufficiently connected to Last Tango to defend one of its stars, Marlon Brando. “When I wanted Brando for that film, the head of Paramount said to me ‘Not that old fart!’ And yet Brando was the greatest thing in that film.”

His most recent film was The Dreamers, an adaptation of Gilbert Adair’s novel set amid the student riots of Paris 1968. That was made five years ago. Why nothing since - after all you’re only 66? “My back. I had an operation three years ago which went badly and so for three years I’ve been really punished badly with pain and I can’t walk well and I couldn’t be working.” He has had to set aside two plans: a long-cherished project to direct a film on the life of Gesualdo da Venosa, the 16th-century Neapolitan composer who brutally murdered his wife, Maria d’Avalos, after catching her in flagrante delicto; and an adaptation of Bel Canto, Ann Patchett’s novel about a group of terrorists and their hostages living in a house together. “I have to find a solution for my back,” says the 66-year-old director. “And then I will direct again.”

Is it really true that you won’t see your old movies or is it just a misleading story for journalists? “I can’t see them - I feel embarrassed.” Oh, Bernardo, surely not! “It’s true! To see what today I think is wrong, mistakes, pathetic things that maybe -nobody sees but I do.” So it wouldn’t give you straightforward pleasure to see The Conformist after all this time. No! But maybe when a movie is so far away I can forgive it.” Here, Bertolucci sounds like a priest forgiving the sins of his earlier self.

As a result of this irresponsibility, it’s strange to talk to Bertolucci about his early work. The man who felt so outraged by Godard’s gnomic note no longer -exists. “I feel something for this old film and that old me, but I don’t feel the weight, the responsibility. For the artist, that is a relief.”

It’s four decades since director Ken Loach’s tough portrayal of homelessness, ‘Cathy Come Home’, revolutionised the way social problems were tackled on TV – and he’s not given up trying to change the world. Andy McSmith hears why

Published: Independent 24 September 2007

Meeting Ken Loach is a shock. His reputation is fearsome, yet his manner is almost diffident. He works out of a sparse, two-room office above a spicy chicken café in Soho. He dresses plainly, speaks very quietly and listens carefully. Actually, he has to listen carefully, because, at the age of 71, he has a touch of deafness. His staff tease him about him without mercy. Yet this elderly man, who is hard of hearing and would not look out of place in a northern working men’s club, has lost none of his lifelong talent for provoking outrage. He may not look or act like anyone’s idea of a famous film director but he has been at the top of an ego-heavy profession for more than 40 years.

Loach rose to fame in 1966 as the young director of the seminal television play, Cathy Come Home – a cry of rage against homelessness. It was watched by 12 million people and added rocket fuel to the launch of the charity, Shelter, that month.

On Channel 4 tonight, there will be another disturbing Loach drama showing people with nowhere decent to live. The title, It’s A Free World, is ironic. The play, written by Loach’s long-term collaborator Paul Laverty, is an exposé of how the free market operates for East European migrants and illegal immigrants trying to survive in the sludge at the bottom of the job market.

It shows that, while Loach’s politics have not altered in four decades, his choice of subjects has moved with the times, to a subject that is now in the news almost daily. Since 2002, more than 2.5 million foreign workers, nearly a third of them Poles, have applied for national insurance numbers in Britain. Last week, the Chief Constable of Cambridge, Julie Spence, warned that the numbers were putting a strain on her officers.

Loach’s reply is not, of course, that the incomers should be sent home but that they should have exactly the same employment rights as British employees, so they cannot be used by employers to push down wages and working conditions. Unlike any other film Loach has directed, this story is not visualised through the eyes of the exploited. The main character, Angie – played by a relative newcomer, Kierston Wareing – runs a recruitment agency. The drama opens with her being sacked from her previous job after throwing drink in the face of the boss who tries to grope her. Anyone unfamiliar with Loach’s socialism might sit back expecting a conventional feminist drama about a put-upon single mother proving her mettle in a male world. But, although he likes tough women characters, feminism is not Loach’s top tune. “Through the 1980s, it was the soft option to take up this cause, particularly on Channel 4. They were very good at it.” he says.

Actually, as the story unfolds, Angie’s determination to succeed makes her more and more hard-bitten, callous and, finally, downright dishonest. It is the first time Loach has delved this far into the mindset of someone who makes money exploiting those who are worse off.

“What we wanted to do was take the audience on a journey, seeing the process through Angie’s eyes,” he says. “She starts as a woman who is sexually harassed at work and unfairly dismissed, so you are on her side. She’s a funny, smart, feisty, sexy woman who is great company and good fun. She is very likeable. Well, I hope she is.

“Then you follow the logic of what she has done within the environment in which she is working. The Sun had a big story in the last few days about immigrants taking our taxes and benefits. One line they used was that we have become a haven for scroungers from eastern Europe. Well, what a contemptible thing to write. But that’s the context in which Angie is working. In those lights, she is doing what society approves of. I hope, at the end, you think that is abhorrent and you can’t tolerate it.”

Born in Nuneaton, the son of a self-educated electrician, Loach consolidated his reputation in the 1960s and 1970s through a series of realistic, left-wing television dramas such as The Price Of Coal, about a mining accident in Yorkshire, and the six-part Days Of Hope, set in the 1920s. He also directed documentaries and films for cinema. His first successful foray into the cinema in 1969 was Kes the story of a boy from a mining village whose unhappy life is redeemed by his kestrel. His most recent film, The Wind That Shakes The Barley, released in 2006, provoked a now famous outburst from one commentator who likened Loach to a Nazi. The film described an episode during the Irish War of Independence in which the role of the British Army fell somewhere short of glorious. Simon Heffer, writing in The Daily Telegraph was enraged when this “poisonous” work by a “bigoted Marxist” won the Palme d’Or prize at Cannes. “No, I haven’t seen it,” Heffer admitted, “any more than I need to read Mein Kampf to know what a louse Hitler was.”

It has not always been the Tory right who were most offended by Loach’s work, however. The nadir of his career, which almost ended his connection with British television, came early in the Thatcher era, when he attempted to make a four-part documentary, Questions Of Leadership. He interviewed trade union activists eager to take on the Government but suspected that their own leaders and the Labour Party did not have the stomach for a fight. The project suffered what Loach calls “death by a thousand cuts” before being dropped, unshown. He named the people behind the ban. Most are dead and therefore cannot give their side of the story but the interesting point, politically, is that they were all luminaries of the Labour Party, such as the union leaders Terry Duffy and Frank Chapple, the newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell and the former Attorney-General, Sam Silkin.

Loach was himself a Labour member back then. “Although, obviously, I hated everything that Kinnock and the rest of them stood for, there was still a left in the Labour Party in those years. Obviously, I was constantly debating whether I should actually be in it or not. And then they decided they were going to switch their method of collecting subscriptions – from someone who came round who you spoke to, to taking your Visa number without any human contact. I said to them ‘no, you’re not having my Visa number. I won’t subsidise you any longer’.” More recently, he took the unusual step of standing as a candidate for George Galloway’s Respect Party in the European elections, though he knew “there was never any danger of me being elected”.

The serious old Marxist film director and the exhibitionist politician do not sound like a natural combination, and Loach does not rush to defend the two notorious episodes in Galloway’s life – his homage to Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, and his cat impersonation on Celebrity Big Brother. Instead, he says: “Fair play to him. He is the only Labour MP who has left the party over the question of Iraq, and he is the first left of Labour MP to get into the House of Commons for many, many years. And he has been absolutely principled on the war and on privatisation. He deserves to be remembered for that.”

After the trough of the 1980s, Loach made a comeback with films like the Spanish civil war epic Land And Freedom (1995), Carla’s Song (1996) – about the impact of the Nicaraguan war – and Sweet Sixteen (2002), in which a teenager is drawn into a life of crime. His last television drama before tonight’s play was The Navigators (2001), about rail privatisation.

It may be six years since Loach qualified for a bus pass but he has no intention of hanging up his cloth cap. He plans to make a documentary and another film with Laverty but refuses to discuss either for fear that it might jeopardise the projects. Whatever the subject matter, you can be sure both will be true to Loach’s uncompromising socialism. With four decades at the top of his profession, Ken Loach is still very angry after all these years.

Life through a lens: the gritty vision of Ken Loach

Cathy Come Home (1966)

Perhaps the most celebrated one-off drama shown by the BBC in its ‘Wednesday Play’ slot during the 1960s. It attracted 12 million viewers and was an enormous boost to the homeless charity Shelter, launched 10 days later.

Poor Cow (1967)

Loach’s cinematic debut tells the story of an 18 year old who runs away from home to marry a thief, has his child, is abused and ends up working as a prostitute. It stars Terence Stamp. Malcolm McDowell is credited in the cast list but he is not seen on screen.

Kes (1969)

The film of a novel by Barry Hines, who wrote the screenplay, tells the story of a Barnsley lad who is doing badly at school and hates the prospect of becoming a miner. He finds solace by befriending and training a kestrel.

Days Of Hope (1975)

Four feature-length television plays charting the experiences of a mining family between the First World War the General Strike of 1926, written by a former miner, Jim Allen. The former Blairite Cabinet minister, Alan Milburn, once worked in a radical bookshop named after the series.

The Price Of Coal (1977)

Two linked dramas, written by Barry Hines, featuring the same characters. The first is a comedy, about a visit by Prince Charles to a Yorkshire coal pit. The second is a tragedy about a mine disaster.

Land And Freedom (1995)

Loach’s award-winning film about a jobless Liverpudlian who fights in the Spanish Civil War.

Carla’s Song (1996)

The story of a Glasgow bus driver (Robert Carlyle) and a Nicaraguan woman living in exile.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006)

Loach’s controversial account of the Irish War of Independence in the 1920s won the Palme d’Or.

It’s a Free World (2007)

An unscrupulous female employment agency owner uses cheap labour from eastern Europe.

by Robert Fisk

2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient Mesopotamia to strip them of their artefacts and wealth. The near total destruction of Iraq’s historic past - the very cradle of human civilisation - has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of our disastrous occupation.

Evidence amassed by archaeologists shows that even those Iraqis who trained as archaeological workers in Saddam Hussein’s regime are now using their knowledge to join the looters in digging through the ancient cities, destroying thousands of priceless jars, bottles and other artefacts in their search for gold and other treasures.

In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, armies of looters moved in on the desert cities of southern Iraq and at least 13 Iraqi museums were plundered. Today, almost every archaeological site in southern Iraq is under the control of looters.

In a long and devastating appraisal to be published in December, Lebanese archaeologist Joanne Farchakh says that armies of looters have not spared “one metre of these Sumerian capitals that have been buried under the sand for thousands of years.

“They systematically destroyed the remains of this civilisation in their tireless search for sellable artefacts: ancient cities, covering an estimated surface area of 20 square kilometres, which - if properly excavated - could have provided extensive new information concerning the development of the human race.

“Humankind is losing its past for a cuneiform tablet or a sculpture or piece of jewellery that the dealer buys and pays for in cash in a country devastated by war. Humankind is losing its history for the pleasure of private collectors living safely in their luxurious houses and ordering specific objects for their collection.”

Ms Farchakh, who helped with the original investigation into stolen treasures from the Baghdad Archaeological Museum in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, says Iraq may soon end up with no history.

“There are 10,000 archaeological sites in the country. In the Nassariyah area alone, there are about 840 Sumerian sites; they have all been systematically looted. Even when Alexander the Great destroyed a city, he would always build another. But now the robbers are destroying everything because they are going down to bedrock. What’s new is that the looters are becoming more and more organised with, apparently, lots of money.

“Quite apart from this, military operations are damaging these sites forever. There’s been a US base in Ur for five years and the walls are cracking because of the weight of military vehicles. It’s like putting an archaeological site under a continuous earthquake.”

Of all the ancient cities of present-day Iraq, Ur is regarded as the most important in the history of man-kind. Mentioned in the Old Testament - and believed by many to be the home of the Prophet Abraham - it also features in the works of Arab historians and geographers where its name is Qamirnah, The City of the Moon.

Founded in about 4,000 BC, its Sumerian people established the principles of irrigation, developed agriculture and metal-working. Fifteen hundred years later - in what has become known as “the age of the deluge” - Ur produced some of the first examples of writing, seal inscriptions and construction. In neighbouring Larsa, baked clay bricks were used as money orders - the world’s first cheques - the depth of finger indentations in the clay marking the amount of money to be transferred. The royal tombs of Ur contained jewellery, daggers, gold, azurite cylindrical seals and sometimes the remains of slaves.

US officers have repeatedly said a large American base built at Babylon was to protect the site but Iraqi archaeologist Zainab Bah-rani, a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, says this “beggars belief”. In an analysis of the city, she says: “The damage done to Babylon is both extensive and irreparable, and even if US forces had wanted to protect it, placing guards round the site would have been far more sensible than bulldozing it and setting up the largest coalition military headquarters in the region.”

Air strikes in 2003 left historical monuments undamaged, but Professor Bahrani, says: “The occupation has resulted in a tremendous destruction of history well beyond the museums and libraries looted and destroyed at the fall of Baghdad. At least seven historical sites have been used in this way by US and coalition forces since April 2003, one of them being the historical heart of Samarra, where the Askari shrine built by Nasr al Din Shah was bombed in 2006.”

The use of heritage sites as military bases is a breach of the Hague Convention and Protocol of 1954 (chapter 1, article 5) which covers periods of occupation; although the US did not ratify the Convention, Italy, Poland, Australia and Holland, all of whom sent forces to Iraq, are contracting parties.

Ms Farchakh notes that as religious parties gain influence in all the Iraqi pro-vinces, archaeological sites are also falling under their control. She tells of Abdulamir Hamdani, the director of antiquities for Di Qar province in the south who desperately - but vainly - tried to prevent the destruction of the buried cities during the occupation. Dr Hamdani himself wrote that he can do little to prevent “the disaster we are all witnessing and observing”.

In 2006, he says: “We recruited 200 police officers because we were trying to stop the looting by patrolling the sites as often as possible. Our equipment was not enough for this mission because we only had eight cars, some guns and other weapons and a few radio transmitters for the entire province where 800 archaeological sites have been inventoried.

“Of course, this is not enough but we were trying to establish some order until money restrictions within the government meant that we could no longer pay for the fuel to patrol the sites. So we ended up in our offices trying to fight the looting, but that was also before the religious parties took over southern Iraq.”

Last year, Dr Hamdani’s antiquities department received notice from the local authorities, approving the creation of mud-brick factories in areas surrounding Sumerian archaeological sites. But it quickly became apparent that the factory owners intended to buy the land from the Iraqi government because it covered several Sumerian capitals and other archaeological sites. The new landlord would “dig” the archaeological site, dissolve the “old mud brick” to form the new one for the market and sell the unearthed finds to antiquity traders.

Dr Hamdani bravely refused to sign the dossier. Ms Farchakh says: “His rejection had rapid consequences. The religious parties controlling Nassariyah sent the police to see him with orders to jail him on corruption charges. He was imprisoned for three months, awaiting trial. The State Board of Antiquities and Heritage defended him during his trial, as did his powerful tribe. He was released and regained his position. The mud-brick factories are ‘frozen projects’, but reports have surfaced of a similar strategy being employed in other cities and in nearby archaeological sites such as the Aqarakouf Ziggarat near Baghdad. For how long can Iraqi archaeologists maintain order? This is a question only Iraqi politicians affiliated to the different religious parties can answer, since they approve these projects.”

Police efforts to break the power of the looters, now with a well-organised support structure helped by tribal leaders, have proved lethal. In 2005, the Iraqi customs arrested - with the help of Western troops - several antiquities dealers in the town of Al Fajr, near Nasseriyah. They seized hundreds of artefacts and decided to take them to the museum in Baghdad. It was a fatal mistake.

The convoy was stopped a few miles from Baghdad, eight of the customs agents were murdered, and their bodies burnt and left to rot in the desert. The artefacts disappeared. “It was a clear message from the antiquities dealers to the world,” Ms Farchakh says.

The legions of antiquities looters work within a smooth mass-smuggling organisation. Trucks, cars, planes and boats take Iraq’s historical plunder to Europe, the US, to the United Arab Emirates and to Japan. The archaeologists say an ever-growing number of internet websites offer Mesopotamian artefacts, objects anywhere up to 7,000 years old.

The farmers of southern Iraq are now professional looters, knowing how to outline the walls of buried buildings and able to break directly into rooms and tombs. The archaeologists’ report says: “They have been trained in how to rob the world of its past and they have been making significant profit from it. They know the value of each object and it is difficult to see why they would stop looting.”

After the 1991 Gulf War, archaeologists hired the previous looters as workers and promised them government salaries. This system worked as long as the archaeologists remained on the sites, but it was one of the main reasons for the later destruction; people now knew how to excavate and what they could find.

Ms Farchakh adds: “The longer Iraq finds itself in a state of war, the more the cradle of civilisation is threatened. It may not even last for our grandchildren to learn from.”

A land with fields of ancient pottery

By Joanne Farchakh, archaeologist

Iraq’s rural societies are very different to our own. Their concept of ancient civilisations and heritage does not match the standards set by our own scholars. History is limited to the stories and glories of your direct ancestors and your tribe. So for them, the “cradle of civilisation” is nothing more than desert land with “fields” of pottery that they have the right to take advantage of because, after all, they are the lords of the land and, as a result, the owners of its possessions. In the same way, if they had been able, these people would not have hesitated to take control of the oil fields, because this is “their land”. Because life in the desert is hard and because they have been “forgotten” by all the governments, their “revenge” for this reality is to monitor, and take, every single money-making opportunity. A cylinder seal, a sculpture or a cuneiform tablet earns $50 (£25) and that’s half the monthly salary of an average government employee in Iraq. The looters have been told by the traders that if an object is worth anything at all, it must have an inscription on it. In Iraq, the farmers consider their “looting” activities to be part of a normal working day.

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent.

© 2007 The Independent

Victory celebrations are dominating the Lebanese airwaves for the foreseeable future and presidential election “campaigns” here are in full swing. The issue of reconstructing the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp will never see the light of day in any of the Lebanese media outlets, whether pro-government or opposition — just like the humanitarian crisis at Baddawi refugee camp has failed to capture any front page headlines over the past three months. The sole exception being when the disgruntled double-refugees attempted to return home, only to find themselves accused of attacking the Lebanese army. Shots from unidentified sources resulted in the death of three returning Palestinian refugees. Apparently human suffering with no potential political gain is not newsworthy.

Living conditions in the Palestinian refugee camps have never been easy. Lack of basic amenities, sub-par health care, and overcrowded schools are the common denominators between all the camps on Lebanese territory. None of the densely populated camps are in a condition to host a sudden influx of tens of thousands of twice-displaced refugees. Naturally, the overflowing Baddawi will not be a viable home for the Nahr al-Bared residents who will move back to their homes (reconstructed or not). The skeletons of buildings will be patched up, most likely by the refugees themselves with the help of the handful of activists that still care about the plight of Palestinians. These death-infested, bomb-riddled structures will make for a more dignified living than the pre-fabricated cardboard boxes, designed for nuclear families rather than traditional Palestinian extended ones, that have surfaced as alternative homes courtesy of some generous donors. Of course, the sea-front strip of the camp will be kept off-limits by the Lebanese army for questionable future development.

Hopes for real aid materializing from the Lebanese or other Arab governments for the reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared are delusional. The precedent was set by the snail-paced reconstruction of south Lebanon following the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon. And unlike the residents of south Lebanon, the Palestinian refugees do not enjoy the strong political backing of any major Lebanese or regional power. No propaganda machines will be mobilized for their sake. History shows that media coverage of the camps only occurs when it means casting Palestinians in a negative light. Never has a media campaign been dedicated to addressing the cyclical victimhood of the residents of the camps. They are on their own and at the mercy of often failed, albeit generous, promises.

Sadly, the repopulation without proper reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared would not lead to standards of living much different than those in Ein al-Hilwe or Sabra. The lack of utilities and infrastructure will not be missed much as the residents of Nahr al-Bared faced the same problems even before the birth of Fatah al-Islam and the destruction of the camp. Over the years, Palestinian refugee camps have been decked with a constant dose of heavy artillery of Lebanese government, Arab, and international neglect. Neglect as ravaging as the half-ton bombs airlifted from the US and other third-party allies like Jordan to be dropped on Nahr al-Bared. The attention given to Nahr al-Bared will rapidly wane, and as always none of the humanitarian or political issues associated with the Palestinian camps will be addressed. Meanwhile, a new generation of Palestinians can now claim their own painful memories of the ongoing struggle for existence. The refugees from Nahr al-Bared and elsewhere are left, until further notice, with only hopes and prayers that the next incident involving one of their camps will not be as bloody and devastating as previous episodes.

Jamal Ghosn is a 28-year-old strategy consultant from Beirut. He has covered Lebanese affairs on his blog (http://jamalghosn.blogspot.com) for over two years.

Published on Saturday, June 16, 2007 by The Independent/UK

How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today “Palestine” - and let’s keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.

Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn’t like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.

No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of “Palestine” still left to negotiate over ?

And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the “moderate” (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word “occupation”, who always referred to Israeli “redeployment” rather than “withdrawal”, a “leader” we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn’t vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas’s bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas’s Fatah and the rotten nature of the “Palestinian Authority”.

I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls had just been punctured by an Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck me were the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps - or variations of them - were what cost Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer “Palestine” EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people?

All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our “war on terror” in the wastelands of Helmand province).

We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal.

We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair’s recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a “statesman” by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose “democracy” is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the “war on terror”.

Yes, and we love King Abdullah’s unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn’t like The Independent’s coverage of what he quaintly calls “the Middle East”. If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the “Middle East” would be to control.

For that is what it is about - control - and that is why we hold out, and withdraw, favours from their leaders. Now Gaza belongs to Hamas, what will our own elected leaders do? Will our pontificators in the EU, the UN, Washington and Moscow now have to talk to these wretched, ungrateful people (fear not, for they will not be able to shake hands) or will they have to acknowledge the West Bank version of Palestine (Abbas, the safe pair of hands) while ignoring the elected, militarily successful Hamas in Gaza?

It’s easy, of course, to call down a curse on both their houses. But that’s what we say about the whole Middle East. If only Bashar al-Assad wasn’t President of Syria (heaven knows what the alternative would be) or if the cracked President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wasn’t in control of Iran (even if he doesn’t actually know one end of a nuclear missile from the other).

If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don’t behave like us civilised Westerners.

So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don’t deserve our sacrifice and our love.

How do we deal with a coup d’état by an elected government?

© 2007 The Independent

1 June 2007

I have been to the Baddawi camp twice now. It is swarming with people and has more than doubled in population. The future of the camp is bleak and according to the World Health Organization the likelihood of disease is high, and there is limited water and electricity. The number of civilian deaths in the Nahr al-Bared camp is difficult to determine due to a media blackout; my last check saw a range between 17 and 40, but today’s indiscriminate bombing from land and sea has certainly increased this figure. In the Lebanese daily An-Nahar, on 31 May, there was a single story that only reported the details of the deaths of Lebanese soldiers. The official number from the Lebanese army over last weekend was a resounding one civilian death.

By denying Palestinian civilian deaths we effectively commit a double crime: The first is the indiscriminate death of the victim; the second is the denial of this original crime. I suppose the victim is meant to carry a camera and document her own death to truly confirm it in the public’s eyes.

I felt this as I stood in front of two Palestine Red Crescent Society volunteers in the Baddawi camp while they argued about the number of victims and how the army was making it difficult to document the deaths and the situation in the camp. I stood as they tried to prove to me, hoping I would get the word out, that there was more than one death. It mattered so much to them; it mattered more than the world that there was more than one death. In my mind I caught a glimpse of the idealist romantic in me and thought of how the world should react to even one death; that it was not in the numbers, it was in the act itself. But I caught myself and came back to the ways of this world: the numbers do matter; the proof of dead bodies is required, and the media needs pictures, names, time and cause of death before it will believe the story of the victim over that of the state. As it stands, the Palestinian is killed and then denied the recognition of her unjust death. With no recognition of injustice how can people deal with their loss?

And it is not the first injustice denied to these people. It begins with the denial of their right to return to Palestine. Standing in an overcrowded Baddawi camp, I found myself making conversation by asking one man a question about his origins; a painful question for a Palestinian refugee.

To be Palestinian in Lebanon is to be wished a thousand deaths and hunted a million times.

And the man’s reply was that his family was originally from a village outside of Haifa. His grandfather fled to Tel al-Zaatar; any Lebanese can tell you about the massacre there in 1976. After which they fled to Chatilla; any Lebanese can tell you about the massacre there in 1982. And so after that they fled to Nahr al-Bared; few Lebanese will tell you what is happening there now or call it a massacre. He is now in the Baddawi camp hoping to return, but if the curse of Palestinian return is any indication, it might be decades before this man, Nasser, returns to anywhere but the UNRWA school he resides in now. And that is probably the real reason why there are still about 10,000 people in Nahr al-Bared who refuse to leave what they now call their homes. They already have experience from the last time they left.

Mona, a woman from the Nahr al-Bared camp, reinforces this idea. She speaks to me passionately: “I care deeply about the camp. It is the symbol of my refuge; it is the place from where I will defend my cause and from where I struggle for my right to return to Palestine.” She continued: “If they remove all civilians from Nahr al-Bared the army will completely demolish the camp. I need to defend the camp. In a few days we will all return if there is no solution. People want the civilians out but we will return. We are thinking of this option now if things stay as they are.”

She reminds me of the Lebanese in the war this summer speaking in relation to the South: how they wanted to return and how the men did not want to leave. People here value home as an extension of their lives and their bodies. They want to remain because escaping into the uncertain world is an infringement on their humanity and perhaps equal, at that moment of departure, to the finality of death. For some reason the Lebanese expect the Palestinians to just desert their homes as if they were meaningless when they themselves would not and have a history of staying their ground.

At the camp, one of the guys there tells me that in recent years there has been more intermixing between Palestinians and Lebanese, and that this was new. He said this with enthusiasm to show a common ground between us, and that he thought better times were ahead. I suppose the idea is that marriage brings two tribes together, so why not two nations. It doesn’t seem to work that way though. No matter how many mixed national marriages there are between the Lebanese and Palestinians or Lebanese and Syrians, the people still fight. Kinship and nation-state politics don’t really work in the same way as kinship does with tribal politics. Somehow the relationships don’t have meaning in state diplomacy, and it is perhaps because of the firm detachment between the family and the state. So we can intermarry from here till next century but to no avail. The state will adamantly privilege the general population over the family and the general population will remain “purely Lebanese” — whatever that means.

The Lebanese army is committing crimes in the Nahr al-Bared camp and the Lebanese are silent. Perhaps the Lebanese should imagine the camp was a Beirut neighborhood and Fatah al-Islam was hiding, lets say, in Ashrafieh or the Hamra area. They should then ask themselves if they would be calling on the army to use the same methods to get rid of the group.

Agreed, terrorists should not hide behind civilians, but when they do, state armies also have a responsibility to not destroy the civilian population. Remember, the civilians are victims and now the army is killing the victim. The Palestinians of Nahr al-Bared are hostages. The army is killing the hostage and destroying his town and home. Is there logic to this?

The Palestinians cannot be punished for their leadership’s incompetence. Otherwise, we should ask if the Lebanese people should be punished for their leadership’s incompetence. The Lebanese army can take a stand but it needs to do so within the rules of war. If it cannot, then it should not fight a battle it cannot win.

Here is where the Lebanese people and government are to fault. The people are to fault for their silence and the government for its unaccountable behavior, its inability to govern its own affairs and then blaming it on everyone else, and its direct or indirect complicity in the arming of Fatah al-Islam. Again, I call for a full investigation of the recent events and into the dealings of the top politicians (Opposition and March 14) in the country. With no accountability there will always be political space for militias to harvest.

Note: In the meantime, tonight we are beginning to hear that things in the Ein al-Hilweh camp in the South are starting to flare up. None of this is making sense; something is definitely not right!

Sami Hermez is a doctoral student of anthropology at Princeton University researching violence and armed resistance in Lebanon and has been active in relief and redevelopment projects in the south of Lebanon. Sami can be reached at shermez at princeton.edu.

1- As Arabs (or Arabic speaking people) it is time to change our
conservative, sectarian, tribal, mobbish, violent and inhuman mentality in dealing with problems, issues, crisis and challenges which are facing us.

2- Human and civil rights, rationalism, enlightenment, rule of law and institutions, citizenship and individual rights are fundamental principles of the new required mentality.

3- In principle the welfare and the security of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon is the legal responsibility of the Lebanese government and the moral responsibility of the Lebanese people.

4- As Lebanese we should acknowledge that our internal divisions and our sectarian political systems are the main factor of our troubles and periodic civil wars that have occurred for centuries, i.e. before the Palestinian cause and Assad’s regime in Syria. Our destructive internal divisions attracts and encourage, in a very opportunistic and deliberate way, external factors to be very effective and even dominant in our political life. Only in this perspective we can understand the “Palestinian Era” and the “Syrian Era” in Lebanon.

5- The continuous crisis in the Lebanese political system (with the
attraction of different external factors) and the political opportunism for decades are the main reasons behind not building a rational policy towards the Palestinian camps and refugees based on human rights and legal obligations towards the Lebanese sovereignty.

6- Based on this, disregarding Fateh Al Islam and its criminal acts and its supporters, we can’t at all tolerate the shelling and destroying of the Nahr El Bared Refugee camp which has resulted in the needless deaths of Palestinian civilians. This is a war crime and should stop immediately.

7- The response to the current crisis in north Lebanon should consist, in my opinion, of 3 main elements:

A- Imposing the law through the judiciary system, law enforcement agencies and intelligence against the criminals.

B- Thorough investigation by a trusted independent committee.

C- Introduction of a national policy towards Palestinian camps and refugees based, as I said before, on human rights and legal obligations towards the Lebanese sovereignty. A policy which also aims to segregate the Palestinian refugee tragedy from the political struggle and opportunism in Lebanon.

Ali Hamdan

ingredients:
faded blue jeans
red checked shirt
gleaming white stead
dark cattle

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2007/05/petropolitics-retropolitics.html

The hotel manager hesitated upon being asked to book a wake call at 4:30 am so that I could be back at the airport for my 6:00 am flight. I barely paid any attention to it at the time and I woke up at 3:15 am anyway. I thought perhaps it would be change over time, perhaps the taxi drivers would be swapping shifts and it would be difficult to get someone to pick me up. Then at exactly 4:00 am the morning call to prayer filled the city.
There is something totally sublime about human voices playing the city like an instrument. Reverberating through its streets, filling its arcades; words slip in and out of sync as they bounce of the concrete and stone and glass from the network of minarets across the city.

You cannot walk for 50m without walking into a sunglasses shop. Buying sunglasses is taken to another level here. Of course this is a practical measure at first, the sun here is so intense that your vision flattens into a hazy blur, but since traditional Islamic dress for both men and women narrows the opportunity for overt variation at the scale of the ‘type of outfit’, the variation is confined and intensified into the details.
The two most important details are jewellery and then sunglasses. In Bahrain city there are plenty of sunglass stores, but there are countless more jewellery stores. The gold jewellery in particular is of such an extraordinary quality, it is quite unlike anything I have seen before.

The malls here are gargantuan, Bahrain and other gulf countries have yet to fall out of love with the mall, as is claimed to be happening in some western cities, again the heat means that air conditioning is a necessity, even wandering around the shaded souks in summer can be oppressive because they are not air conditioned.
In fact the malls have grown so large that they have started to connect to each other, sometimes it feels like entire suburbs of malls sitting on 40ft of rock reclaimed from the sea by dragging millions of tonnes of fill and compacting it for ever more construction.
Its boring to say it but the coastline in the entire gulf is becoming increasingly plastic, elaborate tendrils curl into the sea where they hold new landmarks, skyscrapers and other architectural wonders built only partially by petrodollars on 24 hour work sites staffed by sub continent workers in sub human conditions.

Anybody who loves David Lynch would appreciate the hotel I stayed in. The mid sixties was a good time for my hotel, actually a lot of that goodness had clearly been absorbed by my carpet. The once were blood red but now heavily faded velour furnishings, the amber light fittings, the heavy dusty curtains and the worn out carpet, made it feel so precisely dated, especially because almost nothing had been renovated since. Anyway it was not so bad as my taxi driver finally informed me, ‘it was not as bad as some other hotels in the area that were reputedly filled with women and booze’, .