Extreme investigative journalism part 1

Regular readers of mine would know that while I read a lot of books (actually not a lot, but more than 50 a year). Some people might think that non-fiction is quite dry, but it all depends on what you’d find interesting. I think maybe one reason I never really tried very hard to be an “interesting” person is because I can make some really “boring” things look really interesting to myself. Like formidable thick history tomes, obscure maths theories, even if I would draw the line at long meandering philosophical arguments.

But there are instances of extreme investigative journalism, where the author actually has been in extraordinary situations and gives a first person account of the event, and sometimes this can make the book as interesting as fiction, even though it is still non-fiction. In non-fiction, you can’t really put words into other people’s mouths, you can’t say what they are thinking (although you can speculate), you can will things to happen if they don’t happen. But the story can still be interesting.

One fairly famous example is a white man who went through a skin colouring operation to turn himself into a black man, in order to step into his shoes and learn what it was like to suffer the form of racial prejudice that they did. This was during the 60s, the civil rights era, where racial attitudes were, if not more prevalent, then at least more overt than it is today.

1. Islamist

This is the account of a British Muslim and his involvement with various Islamist groups in Britain. He talks about how they recruited him as a young boy, and planted ideas into his head about how they would create a new caliphate that would unite all the Arab countries under 1 Islamic government. (Islamism means not only Islam, but the formation of Islamic governments).

It’s a very interesting book, because it shows that a lot of organisations in the UK which are purportedly just “Islamic” are actually Islamist, support overthrow of Islamist governments, and maybe even 1 or 2 have affiliations to terrorist organisations. They are usually as well organised as the Communist parties of old were.

Reading the book I saw more than a few parallels between militant Islam and communism. Both of them dedicate themselves to the overthrow of governments and the founding of theocratic state. (Communism will deny that it is a religion, but on hindsight it is becoming more and more apparent than it is one in all but name.) Both of them exploit the liberal attitudes of liberal democratic countries, and work on stirring up people to be indignant at inequalities perpetuated in Western / Capitalist societies. Both of them demand unquestioned dedication and have very heavy elements of study groups which indoctrinate their followers with the party’s orthodoxy which they want to propagate. The tactics of battling police, distributing propaganda and fighting rival organisations are also similar.

We see the author conflicted between various interpretations of Islam and eventually he realises that these “Islamists” do not really follow the true spirit of Islam. After witnessing a murder at an Islamist event, he decides to leave the Islamist organisations.

He visits Syria, which he considers to be a fairly moderate Islamic society, and likes it. Although he finds, to his great consternation that he is more British than Syrian, he finds that Islam there is more permissive, and they do not require that the woman wears a hijab all the time. This would be in great contrast with the Bush administration’s standpoint that Syria is a grave threat to Middle Eastern peace.

However it is different in Saudi Arabia. Over there are enclaves where all the foreigners gather, and inside these enclaves life resembles a holiday resort, and you will get the permissiveness you find in most expatriate communities in most countries. Step outside there and then you will find that there is a caste system, where in some really wretched parts of the town, it is much worse than the infamous inner cities of American urban centres. There is a very uneasy alliance between the fundamentalist Wahabbism and the Saudi royal family, because the latter is quite close to the American government.

The author comes across as an earnest person, which is why he was so pious in the first place. What is surprising is how many otherwise polite and decent people would turn to Islamism – you usually have the image of terrorists as barbarous hate filled monsters, but some of them are just otherwise good decent people, or at least they bother to be polite and congenial, and they are just convinced that they are doing the right thing. This book should be a warning that the problems of radical Islam are probably underestimated in various parts of Europe today.

2. A long way gone

Another book making waves is the memoirs of a child soldier. Ishmael Bael was born in Sierra Leone, and, I’m guessing, probably had a fairly privileged childhood where his father was working for an American company, and he gets to learn English and listen to rap music and Bob Marley. However around the time he is 13 years old, anti-government rebels storm his village, and go on a rampage of murder and looting. Very early in his life, he is separated from his home, and has to fend for himself.

Some of the things he does is harmless, but there are a lot of close shaves, where he narrowly flees with his life with bullets flying all around him. He sometimes has to steal food, even from children. Many times he is mistaken for a rebel soldier, and gets captured by villagers, and miraculously manages to escape without being lynched or flogged. He is unflinching in describing the horrors visited upon villages set upon by the rebels: houses burnt down, food stolen, crops destroyed, women raped, people killed. That sort of stuff.

After being a wanderer for a very long period of time (and having to bear the heartbreak of seeing some of his fellow comrades die) he stumbles upon a village where the government recruits child soldiers. There he is trained to be a child soldier, and is a part of a deadly force where he is high on cocaine a lot of the time and thinks of nothing but taking over the next village and killing plenty of rebels. At first he just says “2 years pass by in a blur”, but later on the memories of what he had to endure, and murders he had to commit, surface. Conducting summary executions. Practicing how to slit throats properly (on real people of course.) He doesn’t talk about raping his victims but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did happen.

Later on, with the conflict winding down, he is sent to Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, for his rehabilitation, and trying to make him acclimatise to normal society. He’s quite lucky in this regard, finding an attractive nurse who takes an interest in his case, finding a long lost relative, a proper family, and even becoming an envoy to the United Nations for the purpose of highlighting his plight (and of those thousands similar to himself) to the rest of the world. (Of course he has some sarcastic words for officers in the American embassy who ask him to produce a bank account to show that they will return to Africa when the trip is over. Those idiots need to read this book.)

Ishmael Bael is a very lucky person. Not only did he survive his ordeal when probably more than 90% of those who have gone through what he did didn’t, he also got to relocate to the USA and attend Oberlin College and become a bestselling author. But it is truly remarkable that this book got written at all. (I read some reviews of this book which lamented that it didn’t have more literary merit. Please, it is enough that this book uses clear prose and presents a gripping and important story.) I thought that all I would ever hear about child soldiers would be through an article in the Economist or something. I wouldn’t have thought that one of them would actually be educated enough to write a fine book of his own experiences.

Part 2 to follow.