To Realise Modest Dreams: Law, policy and decent work

Posted on May 30, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Remarks to Committee on Decent Work in Global Supply Chains, International Labour Conference, Geneva, 30 May 2016

Many thanks for the opportunity of speaking here today.

This is a timely discussion. It occurs, of course, in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular Goal 8 to, “Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all”. This includes a clear target for an end to slavery and child labour.

The deliberations of this Committee are therefore the first substantive international consideration of what practical measures may be put in place to help achieve the ideals of that particular goal.

I believe that the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, give us the clearest guidance on how these deliberations should proceed. They state that businesses have the responsibility to respect workers’ human rights while governments have the responsibility to protect those rights. Of course it is desperately difficult for businesses to uphold their responsibilities when states are failing so abjectly in theirs.

That is a reality of the contemporary global political economy. Certain countries have sought to establish competitive advantage by scrapping the most basic of human rights protections for those who quite legitimately seek work in those countries.

This cannot go on. And this Committee now has an opportunity to lead on how it should end.

Decent work in international supply chains requires a number of quite basic protections in law and policy. It requires freedom of association. It requires an end to discrimination. It requires an end to tied visas and recruitment fees. It requires honest and sufficient systems of labour inspections to ensure that unscrupulous employers are not exploiting or enslaving vulnerable workers. It requires honest and sufficient systems of health and safety inspections so that poor people do not have to live with the threat that their working days may end by being burned to death, or crushed by collapsing concrete, as they toil to satisfy Northern hemisphere demands for cheap goods.

As a board member of the Ethical Trading Initiative in the UK I know that many business leaders, like all people of conscience, crave governments to put in place measures such as these to level the playing field by compelling unscrupulous employers to act with a modicum of decency.

So I respectfully but strongly suggest that this Committee must act to advance Sustainable Development Goal 8 by entering into a standard setting process on decent work in global supply chains to establish an international framework within which systemic risks and abuses can be addressed.

If it fails to do so then we will have failed at the first on the promise of a better world that these Development Goals make. And vulnerable workers will, for years to come, pay for that failure with the destruction of their hopes and loss of their lives.

Aspiration and Reality: How caste-blindness undermines UK anti-slavery efforts

Posted on May 25, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Speech to All-Party Group for Dalits, and Parliamentary Human Rights Group, Westminster, 24 May 2016

As director of Anti-Slavery International it is, from time to time, heartening to hear from senior members of the U.K. Government their intent that the UK should be a world leader against slavery.

Unfortunately these fine sentiments are hampered, possibly fatally, from the outset by some fundamental failures in domestic and international policy, most notably the failure to recognise the issue of caste as fundamental to both poverty and slavery for hundreds of millions of people in South Asia.

There is a lazy trope that is sometimes wheeled out in discussions of slavery, that anybody can be enslaved. Technically this is true, particularly if people are caught up in the cataclysm of war. But this disguises a much more fundamental truth: that generally those who are enslaved are from discriminated against groups: indigenous people in South America; migrants and refugees in Western Europe; Dalits and Adavasi in South Asia.

We have already heard in this meeting of the failure in British Government to confront the issue of caste in the UK itself. This is also a failure in UK’s development policy as exemplified by the Department for International Development’s withdrawal of aid from India on the presumption that the evolution of the Indian economy will lead to a it lifting all out of poverty.

Dr B R Ambedkar

This is a forlorn expectation in a society that Dr Ambedkar recognised was one where “Caste restricts opportunities. Restricted opportunity constricts ability. Constricted ability further restricts opportunity. Where caste prevails, opportunity and ability are restricted to ever narrowing circles of people”. In other words caste is not a recipe for economic justice let alone an end to slavery, in a region where the largest number of enslaved people reside.

The American historian, David Blight noted how in the pre-Civil War South of the United States even poor whites opposed the abolition of slavery because of the aristocratic privilege that it gave them. Dr Ambedkar identified that same aristocratic privilege in India when he recognised that the “caste system is not merely as division of labour, but a division of labourers”. And the sense of “aristocratic privilege” which emerges from this division of labourers facilitates the denial of rights to millions of Dalits.

In general slavery, poverty and injustice are systemic, not individual issues. This is never more true than when they are underpinned by caste. And this goes to the heart of the matter of slavery: Its elimination is a profoundly political issue. It is about power and exclusion from power. Those who are enslaved are excluded from power in part so they can be enslaved.

The attainment of civil rights and social justice that lead to an end to slavery are not inevitable achievements of economic development. They are often not even economically rational issues, particularly when those excluded from justice are from marginalised and discriminated-against groups.

Hatred and prejudice are irrational and visceral but they are not unconquerable. Proper law and policy can counteract them over time if properly implemented. But of course caste prejudice limits the implementation and the impact of decent law and policy.

We see this in India, for example, where there is much decent anti-poverty and anti-slavery law. Yet, corrupt police forces and overburdened court systems mean that such law is meaningless for those, such as Dalits and Adavasi, most vulnerable to slavery.

Child slaves in an Indian brick kiln, 2014

Prime Minister Modi’s stated intent to encourage inward investment by reducing factory inspections and permitting child labour, amongst other so-called labour market reforms, will of course reinforce the caste system and increase the risks of forced and child labour across India. This will, in turn, increase the likelihood that any goods or commodities produced there are tainted by slavery-like practices.

A short while ago Sir Simon McDonald, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, said that human rights is no longer a priority in the Foreign Office, and instead was supplanted by the”prosperity” agenda.

We see that reflected in the warm embrace the British government has given to Prime Minister Modi and the prospect of trade deals with an India whose supply chains are rife with forced and child labour.

In the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt effectively ended child labour in the United States by banning it in interstate commerce. To introduce comparable measures into international trade, as President Obama has just done in the United States, would give pause to those who currently profit across South Asia from the exploitation and enslavement of others that is enabled by the caste system.

If the UK truly wanted to be a world leader against slavery could begin by following President Obama’s suit and leading the European Union to similarly empower public officials to exclude the products of slavery from our markets.

Today there are many politicians and a few philanthropists who crave the title “the new Wilberforce”. But few demonstrate the most fundamental qualifications for that title: That is the moral courage and clarity of thought to challenge the vested interests and the national and international political-economic structures, such as caste, that enable so much contemporary injustice.

Until that happens the struggle to end slavery will remain unfinished, and that to end poverty will be a piecemeal affair, scarred by inequality and discrimination.

Early Autumn, by Robert B Parker

Posted on May 23, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Spenser is hired to find a kid who has become a bit of a ping-pong ball in a bitter divorce. What starts as a routine case is complicated by Spenser’s realisation that neither parent actually cares about their son. Always a bit of a softy, Spenser decides to take the kid under his wing to teach him to build, box, cook and the rudiments of feminism.

Early Autumn is a similarly themed book to Sixkill, the last Spenser novel written by Robert B Parker. It is about mentoring, perhaps even fatherhood, and how boys learn to become men. This leads to much of Spenser’s trade-mark philosophising and wry observations on life.

This being Spenser, of course, his chivalrous act upsets some nasty Boston hoodlums and so Spenser and his buddy Hawk are compelled to show these gangsters the errors of their ways.

In other words this is another fine chapter in the chronicles of Spenser – an efficient and thoughtful thriller without a word wasted.

Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent

Posted on May 20, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Agnes Magnusdottir has been condemned to death for her involvement in the murder of two men, one of them her lover. As she awaits confirmation of her sentence she recounts the events leading up to these deaths to a young priest, appointed as her spiritual advisor, and the members of the family she has been billeted with.

Burial Rites is a sort of a Nordic “Crime and Punishment”. It is beautifully written and desperately sad, a story of both the physical violence that destroys lives, and the violence of poverty that destroys hope as well.

It is a very rich book – a portrait of a poor rural community on the edge of the world in northern Iceland at the beginning of the 19th Century; a whodunnit; a book about the redemptive power of decency.

At the heart of the story is Agnes – a fiercely intelligent woman cursed by the bad luck of her birth – finally finding a place in a family and a community as a sword of Damocles, in this case an executioner’s axe, hangs over her.

It is a fine work, extraordinary also that it is Hannah Kent’s first novel.

An Evil Eye, by Jason Goodwin

Posted on April 19, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

An Evil Eye is the fourth book in Jason Goodwin’s series about Yashim, an official in the Ottoman Court of the 19th Century with a particular penchant for investigation. A eunuch, butchered as a teenager by the enemies of his father, his status means he is privileged access to the harem as well as the city and so is frequently entrusted with some of the Court’s more sensitive enquiries.

In this book a body is found in the water tank of an Orthodox monastery outside of Istanbul bringing with it the suspicion that perfidious Christians have murdered a Muslim. Yashim is sent to investigate and hopefully stave off an ugly incident. Of course the body is merely the tip of a much more dangerous and labyrinthine plot that threatens the entire stability of the Ottoman State.

Jason Goodwin is an historian. He has written an earlier history of the Ottoman Empire, and so knows his stuff. This is one of the greatest pleasures of his books – he transports the reader to bustle of 19th Century Istanbul and Yashim is an elegant and erudite guide through its diversity. Yashim is not only a man of action but also a polyglot and cook – I was inspired, with modest success, to attempt three of his culinary efforts over the course of reading this book.

In his investigations Yashim is assisted by his close friend Palewski, the Polish Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Of course at the time in which the book is set Poland doesn’t exist, subsumed by the empires of the “Great Powers”. But the Ottoman Empire insists on maintaining the embassy of its old enemy. At the very least it annoys the Russians. Palewski also has one of the best lines I’ve come across in while: “If you go on saying and believing the same things for long enough, the world will eventually come around.” That should be a motto for anyone who has ever strived for a more humane world.

I must confess that for the fourth time reading one of Yashim’s adventures I am still not very clear on what happened. I think this, to an extent, is a result of quite complex plots with a myriad of characters and various strands running from the harems to the Court, to the international embassies and their spies and diplomats, to the back streets and waterfronts of Istanbul. Perhaps I should simply be paying closer attention to the final pages of the book.

In spite of these reservations I will be picking up the next instalment of the adventures of Yashim and Palewski. They are tales of escapism like few others.

Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor, by Adrian Goldsworthy

Posted on April 3, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Caius Octavius, son of Caius, was born on 23 Sept 63 BCE to a decent but hardly spectacular family of the Roman aristocracy. When he died as Augustus in 14 CE he was the most powerful man in the world, the first Roman Emperor, hailed as “Father of his Country”.

Part of the reason for this spectacular career arose from his relationship with his maternal uncle, one Julius Caesar who, at the time of Octavius birth, had just been elected Rome’s most senior priest, Pontifex Maximus. Julius Caesar adopted Octavius shortly before his own assassination. But in the chaotic aftermath of the Ides of March, this bequest could easily have proven lethal rather than beneficial. Nevertheless, while still not yet 20, Octavius not only decided to embrace Caesar’s legacy, but to take up where his uncle/adoptive father had left off and become the most powerful man in Rome.

Goldsworthy notes a number of difficulties with Augustus, principally how to make sense of the way that the vicious warlord of his youth seemed to give way to the sober statesman of later years; how the organiser of the death squads for the proscriptions (“These many, then, shall die; their names are prick’d”) became, after Actium and the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, a patron of the arts and restorer of Rome.

Goldsworthy contrasts the magnanimity of Julius Caesar during the Civil Wars with the ruthlessness of Octavius. But of course, while Julius Caesar drew the line at using indiscriminate violence against Roman citizens, he had used ruthless terrorism during the Gallic Wars and this had contributed to the conquest and pacification of Gaul. In his own resort to terrorism perhaps Octavius was thinking about this as well as Sulla’s bloody coup in Rome, during which Julius Caesar himself almost lost his life. Octavius certainly had no intention of following Julius Caesar’s precedent of being murdered by the very enemies that he pardoned.

Goldsworthy tries to resolve the apparent contradictions in the career of Augustus within the structure of a narrative biography. But while the overall book is both elegant and erudite, Augustus still seems somewhat unknowable. This is perhaps intrinsic to Augustus. On the surface he tried to live his life simply as “Princeps”, first among equals with his fellow senators. But this was mere façade. The truth was almost absolute power and this colours all of Augustus’ utterances. Was Virgil flattered by the joking letters that Augustus sent him enquiringly about his work? Or was he frightened and uneasy by the interest shown him by someone who had in the past shed the blood of so many citizens, and still held the power to do so with impunity?

The Head of Augustus, excavated in Sudan, on display in British Museum

The official depictions of Augustus, on coins and in statuary, such as the one on the cover of this book (above), tend to show Augustus as regal and youthful, every inch the ideal of Roman fatherhood and generalship. But there is another image of Augustus, excavated from Sudan where it had been taken after its capture in Egypt by Ethiopian troops. To my mind it is the image of an altogether more haunted figure.

Goldsworthy notes that if there is one theme in the life of Augustus it is that he got better as he got older. While still able to summon moments of murder and ruthlessness right through his life, perhaps some of his later moderation grew from his own horror at what he had once been.

Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, by Charles Townshend

Posted on March 25, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: “The rebels who went out to do battle on Easter Monday morning may have been marching into the unknown, but they shared one expectation: that the British military response would be rapid and hard.”

On Easter Monday, 24th April, 1916, a group of armed Irish rebels occupied the General Post Office (GPO) and other major buildings across the city of Dublin. It was the beginning of the Irish War of Independence that would last with varying degrees of political and military intensity until 1921.

The O’Rahilly

The troops who occupied these strongpoints were members of the Irish Volunteers, a force assembled to defend the Home Rule promised Ireland by the British Government, and the Irish Citizen Army, a force organised by the trade union movement to protect workers from the police. But it was neither an Irish Volunteer nor Citizen Army rebellion so much as an Irish Republican Brotherhood one. The IRB was a highly secretive revolutionary organisation, and with the rebellion they were in fact trying to organise a coup on the leadership of the Volunteers including Eoin MacNeill, the Chief of Staff, and Michael “The” O’Rahilly, Director of Arms.

When MacNeill learned of the IRB plan, to use proposed training exercises on Easter Sunday 1916 to stage a rebellion, he countermanded the order. Consequently instead of tens of thousands rising up all over Ireland, less that two thousand mobilized in Dublin alone.

The remote chances of success were further dented by a considerable quantity of bad luck. The great Irish anti-slavery activist and revolutionary Roger Casement was captured with the huge quantity of German arms he was trying to smuggle into Ireland for the rebellion.

Added to this, from the start there were gaping flaws in the plan. The strong points taken by the rebels were disconnected and hence unable to provide mutual support. They failed to take Dublin Castle, which was virtually undefended because of the Easter holidays. They could have made better use of guerrilla tactics. Where they did, at Mount Street Bridge, a handful of intensely brave Irish soldiers inflicted tragic and devastating losses on the young Sherwood Foresters they fought there.

After six days it was over, crushed by the might of the British Empire that overwhelmed them with troops and heavy guns. The O’Rahilly, despite his opposition to the rebellion, ultimately felt duty bound to participate, and was killed towards the end leading an attack on a British machine gun position to give cover to the withdrawal from the GPO. As The O’Rahilly himself had put it in a phrase later taken up by Yeats, the man who had helped wind the clock came to hear it strike.

Charles Townshend, a distinguished English historian of Ireland, published this exceptionally fine account of the origins, course and consequences of the 1916 Easter rebellion in 2005. It is, therefore, the product of a life of scholarship rather than a rush for centenary sales. It is both an accessible starting point for those who wish to learn more as well as a valuable contribution to the ongoing conversations about and considerations of the Rising.

It has been argued that the 1916 Rebellion could never be classified as a just war, given the hopelessness of the cause and that the use of violence could not have been viewed as a last resort. The Easter Rising also casts something of a shadow between unionist and nationalist communities to this day: unionists regard it as a stab in the back of those who were serving and dying in the British Army in the defence of “small nations”.

By the standards of the First World War this was a trifling affair. In the blood bath of the Somme that would begin a few weeks later thousands of Irishmen, nationalist and unionist alike, were pointlessly butchered alongside English, Scots, and Welsh, in the name of Empire.

But one cannot deny the extraordinary courage and idealism of those who went out to fight: Grace and Malone at Mount Street Bridge; The O’Rahilly in the retreat from the GPO; Ned Daly in the Four Courts. These were people who displayed enormous grace under pressure in the face of overwhelming odds, in the name of an unquestionably just cause, if, perhaps, not in a just war.

Yeats was perhaps never more prescient, both politically and historically, than when he finally published his view of the Rising: “A terrible beauty is born”.

Not Peace but the Sword: Remarks to the Global Sustainability Network Forum

Posted on March 18, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Vatican City, 18 Mar 2016

The first thing we must recognise is that slavery is a profoundly political issue: it is about power and exclusion from power. Consequently anti-slavery work must, by its very nature, be contentious.

Slavery is sometimes a result of the cataclysm of war. We see that in the tragic histories of Sudan, Syria and Nigeria. But slavery also exists because of the way we have chosen to establish national and international laws, policies and customs relating to development, employment, trade and business. It is in the opportunities provided by these systems that slavery flourishes.

For example child labour and child slavery, including early marriage, are a global affliction because we have failed as a human society to establish a decent system of education. There are too few schools, and where there are schools, amongst other failings, the curriculum is often poor, ignoring girls needs, and with no provision for decent vocational and entrepreneurial education.

Alternatively in South Asia there is such limited rule of law that factory owners can with impunity enslave girls and young women to produce the very garments that many of us are wearing this morning.

Migrant construction workers in Qatar

The Qatar 2022 World Cup is being prepared by forced labour. Across the entire Arabian peninsula domestic workers are routinely enslaved. At the root of these systems of slavery is the Kafala system. This provides a legal prohibition on workers escaping even the most abusive of employment relationships.

It is a cynical system to legally facilitate medieval levels of exploitation and enslavement.

Britain Migrant Workers It is also essentially the same system that the UK government has in place for overseas domestic workers. The reforms that that government is currently proposing are cosmetic. They will do little to alter this de facto legalisation of trafficking for domestic servitude of many who are mothers sacrificing their lives and freedom in the hope of a better life for their children.

Jesus said, “I bring not peace but the sword”, because no system of injustice has ever been ended without conflict, and perhaps the greatest sin in the face of injustice is silence. Thus will it be with slavery. It will entail confrontation with those who selfishly guard the rules and resources that underpin it.

Dalit woman enslaved as a “manual scavenger”

Towards this end we must renew the struggle to obtain decent education for all, particularly girls, particularly Dalits and Adavasi, and the children of refugees and migrants.

We must loudly and publicly repudiate the sin of caste based apartheid which scars not only Hinduism, but also Islam and Christianity and underpins slavery in South Asia.

Business must stand with civil society to repudiate law and policy that eliminates the most basic protections for vulnerable workers and increases their risks of enslavement.

President Obama’s recent move to empower public officials to exclude slavery tainted goods from the US market is a significant one. It represents an extension of the rule of human rights law into the realm of international trade. As a result it threatens consequences to those that have tolerated, or worse, facilitated, slavery as a foundational element in their economic policies.

Europe should follow suit and put in place similar powers. Again this is something which ethical business leaders should demand if they truly want to prove themselves against slavery.

It is important for government, business and civil society to work together against slavery. But, paradoxically, if that work is not painful and thankless it will probably be worthless. We must seek empowerment for those enslaved, not mere superficial changes to unjust systems. But, if we have the courage to grasp that challenge, we may also transform a moment of history for vulnerable people across the world.

Splendid Isolation? North Korean slavery – not as distant as you might think

Posted on February 22, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

There is much international human rights law in the world, and in its midst there is a significant body of law on slavery.

But in spite of all this slavery is still widespread across the world. This is so for a number of reasons. First slavery is still in many places legal.

It is effectively legal in Saudi Arabia. In Qatar and United Arab Emirates the Kafalah system provides a legal underpinning for the enslavement by migrant workers by private individuals. In Uzbekistan and Tajikistan state-sponsored forced labour, particular in the cotton harvest, is used for the enrichment of the elites. In the United Kingdom trafficking of overseas domestic workers has de facto been legalised.

Slavery is also deeply institutionalised in North Korea, and as with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, it is used to sustain the privilege and power of that country’s elite.
But, while the world often sees North Korea as an isolated place, consideration of the issue of North Korean slavery shows that it is not nearly so much an isolated thing.

The 2015 United States Trafficking in Persons report notes that, “Chinese authorities continued to forcibly repatriate some North Korean refugees by treating them as illegal economic migrants, despite reports some North Korean female refugees in China were trafficking victims. The government detained and deported such refugees to North Korea, where they may face severe punishment, even death, including in North Korean forced labor camps. The Chinese government did not provide North Korean trafficking victims with legal alternatives to repatriation. The government continued to bar [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] access to North Koreans in northeast China; the lack of access to UNHCR assistance and forced repatriation by Chinese authorities left North Koreans vulnerable to traffickers. Chinese authorities sometimes detained and prosecuted citizens who assisted North Korean refugees and trafficking victims, as well as those who facilitated illegal border crossings”.

All of this is contrary to China’s obligations to protect victims of trafficking under the Palermo Protocol of which they are a signatory. China’s failure provides means for Chinese traffickers to coerce their victims with the threat of denunciation to the Chinese authorities. It further sustains the institutional practices of slavery in which North Korea indulges, by effectively enforcing North Korea’s policies beyond its borders.

I would caution the rest of the world from getting too judgemental about this too quickly though. Here we see China indulging in something that the rest of the world also does: erasing an inconvenient slavery problem by the simple assertion, made with great conviction, that it is not actually a problem of slavery. Suggest to any Home Office minister or official that the UK’s overseas domestic worker visa is a license to traffick, and you will see this process in action here.

And of course the complicity with North Korean slavery is not restricted to China. In November 2014 the journalist Pete Pattisson exposed in the Guardian how North Korea trafficked construction workers to Qatar for work on the diverse building projects there.

As I noted at the outset Qatar has legal mechanisms in place to facilitate the enslavement of vulnerable workers by private individuals. One of the consequences of this is that the 2022 World Cup is likely to be the bloodiest sporting event since Julius Caesar’s funeral games. That fact has not caused the repudiation of Qatar in any international forums.

What Pete’s journalism exposed however is one of the sources of hard currency that props up the North Korean dictatorship is from North Korea’s sale of its people internationally. And that again has not caused any sort of repudiation of Qatar or those countries which also avail of the cheap labour of trafficked North Koreans. In October 2015 the UN Special Rapportuer on Human Rights in North Korea estimates that 50,000 North Korean workers are employed in foreign countries, mainly in the mining, logging, textile and construction industries and that the number is rising.

The UN Special Rapporteur estimated that the vast majority are working in China and Russia but others are reportedly employed in countries including Algeria, Angola, Cambodia, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nigeria, Oman, Poland, United Arab Emirates and, of course, Qatar. If North Korea obtains only $10,000 per worker per annum this traffick in human beings would be worth half a billion annually to the dictatorship.

A fundamental issue that we see in many slavery cases, and exemplified in relation to North Korea, is that it is an international issue and needs therefore to be tackled internationally. The importance of international law, and international rule of law is exemplified in relation to North Korea. I suspect that like the UK China’s equivalent of the ministerial code has no mention of international law and so ministers considering their policy in relation to North Korean refugees and victims of trafficking are able to lightly dismiss their human rights obligations and those under the Palermo protocol.

The case of North Korea also shows that slavery must become a central issue of diplomacy. The easy acquiescence that the international community has in the slavery practices of other countries, aside from its moral bankruptcy, is also now a security risk. If the North Korean elite were not obtaining hard currency from the international trafficking of its citizens it would be that much more difficult for the dictatorship to cling to power.

I wonder do many consumers consider the risk of North Korean forced labour in garments that they purchase from China. Whether they do or not again the issue of the enslavement of North Korean exposes the need for new international law. Franklin Roosevelt effectively ended child labour in the United States by banning its use in inter-state commerce. President Obama has taken a leaf from Roosevelt’s book in introducing powers to exclude slavery tainted sea-food from the US.

The European Union should follow suite and establish similar general powers that could be used against the import or any goods manufactured with the use of forced labour, including that for trafficked North Koreans. Such a measure would have repercussions through the entire global political economy by causing real economic threat to those countries that have come to routinely use forced labour of vulnerable workers.

We see much that is horrible and distressing when we look at the institutions of slavery in North Korea, including our own reflection: that of the rest of the world at best standing idly by, at worst benefiting.

That needs to come to an end, not merely with fine words, but with robust and clear sighted international action. I hope the UK, for as long as it is part of Europe, will begin to provide proper leadership on this and bring the authority of the world’s largest single market to bear on this vital human rights issue.

Watching the Door: Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast, by Kevin Myers

Posted on February 8, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: The Troubles through the prism of Kevin Myers’ favourite subject – himself

Kevin Myers is one of the finest writers of his generation. An exquisite prose stylist, he is the author of some of the most compelling and elegantly written journalism of the past 40 years.

He is also an arsehole of the first order: If the Oxford English Dictionary is considering a pictorial edition they would probably include a picture of Myers to illustrate the term “West Brit”. Since the events covered in this book Myers has transformed himself into a smart-arsed apologist of the establishment, frequently economical with the facts where they may conflict with his opinions. Indeed, if there is an entry for “Smart-Arsed Apologist of the Establishment” in the Oxford Pictionary, Myers photo would probably be there too.

Given all the aforementioned, I deliberately bought this book in a charity shop in the hope that this would deny Myers any financial benefit from my purchase. As Myers is a voluble opponent of international aid this purchase therefore represented something of a double-whammy.

Watching the Door is a memoir of Myers time as a young journalist in Belfast in the early 1970s. It displays a considerably higher degree of self-awareness than I expected. Myers, it seems, has always known he was an arsehole, and a foolhardy one at that.

A former housemate of mine once almost got himself very badly hurt by a frankly stupid disregard for the dangers posed by a Belfast city centre car bomb. This prompted a house meeting with one item only on the agenda: whether we should kick his shite out for being such a stupid fecker. (We didn’t… even though he was.)

Myers does not appear to have had any housemates to slap him around for his reckless behaviour. Even had he not been so reckless the daily grind of reporting one of the most brutal periods of the Troubles would have resulted in profound post-traumatic stress.

Myers now appears repelled by his youthful self, and the portrait he presents of himself as a youth is repellent. The 180 degree transformation that he has fashioned of himself is also repellent. So in that at least he is consistent.

But he is still an exquisite writer and this is an important subject as the horrors of the 1970s begin to be overlaid by romantic hues and preposterous myths: one article I read recently by an American journalist seriously reported the inspiration that Gerry Adams claimed to take from Martin Luther King, the same Adams whose first appearance in these pages relates to his instruction to an IRA minion on how to deal with a local thug: “Shoot him.” On another occasion, when questioned by a journalist about the disappearance and murder by the IRA of Jean McConville, a single mother, on the trumped up charge of informing, Adams glibly asserted “These things happen in wars.” Indeed they do. They are called war crimes.

Sean O’Callaghan, an Irish Police informer in the IRA, also alleges that Adams contemplated at one stage assassinating John Hume, the most passionate of King’s disciples ever to walk the island of Ireland. John Hume only makes a fleeting appearance in this book. The Peace People are mentioned a couple of times. Seamus Mallon not at all. It may be that they rarely encroached upon Myers consciousness in the midst of his alcoholic stupor from the considerable time spent in late night drinking dens with murderous Loyalist and so-called “Republican” paramilitaries. However their exclusion may be simply to bolster a dubious thesis in this book: that no matter how horrific the paramilitary actions became, and to his credit Myers details many atrocities the former paramilitaries would like to forget, they were never condemned or repudiated by their communities. Hume and Mallon became hoarse in their condemnations of the atrocities of all sides, including the British who Myers, to my mind, soft pedals on, and the SDLP consistently outpolled Sinn Fein by a ratio of 2 to 1 during the period that the Provos waged their illegal war.

The repudiation of sectarianism and violence by many ordinary people in the North was also illustrated in two of the most horrific incidents of the Troubles, which Myers choses to skate over in this book: the Miami Showband and the Kingsmills Massacres. To be fair after the litany of bloodshed which he has already recounted he may have felt exhausted at having to confront these atrocities as well. But there are important details.

The Miami Showband was non-sectarian and religiously mixed. According to Stephen Travers, the band’s bassist and one of the survivors, his best friend in the band, trumpeter Brian McCoy, a Protestant from a Unionist background in County Tyrone, understood the rest of the band’s concern at having been stopped by the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). McCoy whispered to Travers that he could stop worrying when a British officer showed up. That did not protect them unfortunately when the bomb the UDR was trying to plant in the band’s bus went off and killed two of these British armed and directed terrorists. The UDR soldiers, whose dual membership in the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force had not been a barrier to their entry into the British Army, then started butchering this group of defenceless musicians who represented the best of society of the whole island of Ireland.

The Protestant victims of the IRA’s Kingsmill massacre also showed a impressive anti-sectarian heroism as they tried to protect their Catholic colleagues from what they initially thought was a similar UDR/UVF attack, before the horrendous realisation that the war criminals in question on this occasion had come to butcher them.

So in spite of the author’s arseholeism, and the exaggerations, evasions and distortions that pepper this account of war and his, sometimes quite bizarre, sexual adventures, this book is an important one. As many of those who directed war crimes in the course of this illegal war attain high office in both parts of Ireland it reminds us just how horrendous and shameful the Troubles actually were.

For this reason I can only hope many more charity bookshops will benefit from the sale of this book in the years to come.

aidanjmcquade

Musings, mostly on books

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