Ten years after 9/11, what has happened to the world? Capitalism seems to be in meltdown but only as a theory. Otherwise, things go on much as they have done forever. Forever being however long the oldest among us can remember. How could we possibly imagine anything else? What did we expect? Or not us exactly - but America. We have aligned ourselves with America, it seems to be a place that might understand us, for we have had terrorism for quite a bit longer, courtesy of our Irish cousins. But then that wasn't proper terrorism, was it? It wasn't a strike at the land of the free. It was a campaign by the disaffected against their overlords, or it was certainly portrayed as such by the British press. But against Bin Laden's provocation the answer came from the throats of America, who disregarded the Geneva Convention, by which rules two World Wars had been fought, and used torture on its enemies. We - the British - were said to have acquiesced in the movement of victims to places where torture was carried out. But we don't get to know about that. It's too sensitive. It's MI5, or 6, or anyway, something like that.
The targets for America's response were people from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or born in Britain, even in America, but anyway, alienated from their country of birth. Muslim, anyway, that strange (to us) religion so much like Christianity, yet bent to such fearful and terrifying ends. Their crimes were unproven, overwhelmingly so in the case of those imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Some of those imprisoned will never be free, and will never stand trial either. But none of this, or very little, is addressed by the writers of this issue. Instead it obliquely tackles the subject through the experience of refugees, American soldiers, the story of a Tunisian man who, goaded beyond endurance after he refused to pay money to be allowed to sell vegetables on the street, burned himself to death. The story of Libya's graffiti artists, one of whom was shot, photographs from the Tunisian refugee camp (hardly any women are visible), some, from Nigeria, are double refugees who fled to Libya, and then to Tunisia. Bangladeshi's and Egyptians, Sudanese, Filipinos, Ghanians, all immigrant workers, are similarly represented in this camp.
It seems to me best that this subject, the world ten years on from 9/11, should not be graced by any sort of attempt at overarching explanations. The story is not over. The suffering goes on and looks likely to go on for more than just another ten years.
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