Bear-baiting: NATO’s scurvy reboot of a long-reviled blood sport

In the midst of last month’s soaring temperatures, BBC Radio 4’s early evening news programme carried a salutary reminiscence from Allan Little. He was in France during the long hot summer of 2003.

“The dazzling light bounced off the pale bleached walls of the Paris boulevards, and the air rose from sticky molten tarmac in visible thermal currents. The mercury pushed above 40 degrees Celsius every day for a week. By the end of July, A&E doctors were screaming for help. The elderly were dying, they said, while many health professionals were on annual leave. The Health Minister said it simply wasn’t true, refused to recall staff, and like everyone else, went on holiday. The old and infirm can withstand punishing temperatures during the day, if there is some relief at night, when the body can recuperate during a good night’s sleep. But in early August there were three consecutive nights when the temperature didn’t fall below 26 degrees. It was catastrophic. We saw people stretchered into crowded hospitals, packed in ice, from shoulder to thigh. Refrigerated marquees were erected to store bodies because the undertakers couldn’t cope. Many remained unclaimed for weeks because younger relatives were still on holiday. Finally the government declared a public health crisis. Too late. On the day the plan came into force, the weather broke. The temperature plummeted, and Paris breathed again. And when they did the sums, they found that more than 12,000 French citizens had been killed by the heat.”

Clearly, this doesn’t show French politicians to their best advantage; though unlike their US and British counterparts of the time, at least their hands weren’t caked in the blood of untold tens of thousands of dead and maimed Iraqi civilians. Be that as it may however, it’s useful to be reminded of Allan Little’s reporting flair. He was one of the few western correspondents who took a more than superficial interest in Moscow’s reaction to the Kosovo crisis in the spring and summer of 1999.

“The Russian role… was absolutely vital to the ending of the war. I think by the end of April the NATO allies understood the importance of getting the Russians on board. They completely disregarded Russian objections at the UN Security Council… [emphasis added]”[1]

No biggie, but NATO’s humanitarian killing spree was therefore illegal, in contravention of its own Atlantic Charter and international law. Acceptance of Kosovo independence claims in 2008 also trampled on the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, enshrining the sovereignty and territorial integrity of European states. Returning though to Little’s analysis:

“…they disregarded Russian objections at Rambouillet, but by the end of April they realised that they couldn’t do it really without the Russians. They invited the Russians back in. The Russians opened up a new diplomatic channel and a secret back channel which we talked about in our programme. The result was that the signal went unambiguously to Milosevic that he couldn’t expect Russia to come to his aid and it was because of that signal, I believe, that Milosevic ended the war.

“What was most interesting to me was the nature of the deal that was done in Moscow between Yeltsin’s people, the political leadership, and the military. I don’t know the answer to that but there was clearly a deal at the end of May. Yeltsin in some way bought off the military. They were very unhappy with what was happening in Kosovo, public opinion was extremely unhappy, it’s clear that Yeltsin felt very threatened and challenged both by the rising tide of public anger and by the strength that this gave the military, and he did something to strike a deal with the Russian military. The price that the Russian military paid was to send the signal to Milosevic that they weren’t going to come to his aid. What the military got in exchange is not clear. There is all sorts of speculation in Moscow but it is only that as far as I know.”

The nuts and bolts of Yeltsin’s relationship with his top brass, as the bombing intensified and the range of targets widened, is potentially a fascinating topic for discussion. However the purpose of this article is rather to highlight the anger generated by NATO’s unprovoked murder rampage in Russia as a whole. Polling revealed that it was opposed by 94% of the population.[2] In November last year, onetime US diplomat and GOP Senate foreign policy advisor Jim Jatras tweeted an excellent summary of the situation:

“I remember Russians telling me afterwards, “You know, we never believed all that Soviet propaganda about ‘aggressive NATO’ because we knew what liars communists are. But then you attacked Serbia and we saw that everything we thought was lies about you was all true.””[3]

It’s quite likely this reflected the thinking of Boris Nikolayevich himself. Evidence that in the early days of his presidency he was little if at all exercised about NATO comes from former senior UK emissary Charles Crawford:

“In 1993 Russia’s President Yeltsin met Poland’s President Lech Wałesa in Warsaw during a visit to mark the final withdrawal of Russian forces from (formerly Warsaw Pact) Poland. Yeltsin was asked point-blank by Wałesa whether Poland could join NATO. He replied to the effect that as a free nation in a now undivided Europe, Poland could do what it liked. Yeltsin also issued a communiqué expressing ‘understanding’ for Poland’s NATO ambitions.

“Years later as UK Ambassador to Warsaw I asked Lech Wałesa about this momentous meeting and Yeltsin’s apparently affable acceptance of Poland’s NATO aspirations. Had the Russian President been, perhaps, over-infused with Polish vodka? Wałesa said no: Yeltsin had genuinely not been bothered, one way or the other.”[4]

But that was then. Kosovo represented a seismic shift. Not that there weren’t signs of disillusionment well before it hit the headlines. In a June 1997 article entitled ‘Adversaries or Allies?’, Irina Zhinkina of Moscow’s Institute for US and Canadian Studies asked:

“How is it that the new Russia, which has cast off its former ideology, remembered God, sworn loyalty to the new ideals of democracy and fallen into the embrace of its recent ‘probable adversaries’ is not accepted by western civilisation? What else must it do?”[5]

March 1999 though was the watershed moment. By throwing its weight around in the Balkans, NATO demonstrated it was precisely a law unto itself.

“NATO has proved that more or less it can do what it wants, where it wants, indeed when it wants.”[6]

This again provides necessary context for a claim made recently by Chinese Defence Ministry spokesperson Wu Qian:

“NATO is a war machine, a military tool in furtherance of US hegemony, and a systemic threat to world peace and stability.”[7]

Yet influential figures like former US State Dept mandarin Mike McFaul affect incredulity at the idea that Putin is genuinely concerned about NATO at all. Referring to the Kremlin leader’s rhetoric in February of this year, Obama’s Moscow ambassador would have us believe there was some tremendous significance in the fact that

“In [his] 7000-word speech, the first 4628 he doesn’t mention NATO once”.[8]

As if the way a speech is structured has any bearing on the importance of a particular theme (and no matter that once Putin got on to Ukraine NATO membership, he described it as being “like a knife to Russia’s throat”). In addition, McFaul has a mantra which he repeats ad nauseam:

“NATO is not a threat to Russia!”

That might have some kind of quasi legitimacy if Washington and Moscow agreed on what is and what is not Russia. Since the re-unification of Crimea in 2014 however, they don’t. In the words of distinguished IR specialist Prof John Mearsheimer:

“It’s really quite remarkable, when you listen to people in the Administration speak, and when you read editorials in the Washington Post, words like this are spoken: “This has absolutely nothing to do with NATO expansion”. I don’t know how anybody can say that. The Russians have been saying since April 2008, that this is all about NATO expansion, that NATO expansion into Ukraine is an existential threat to them.”[9]

In a helpful 2020 interview, Britain’s former ambassador to Moscow Sir Roderic Lyne (who always tended to be quite critical of the Kremlin) covered similar ground:

“And then we arrive to the 2008 Bucharest summit of NATO, which was a massive mistake on the Western side trying to push Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. It was stupid on every level at that time. If you want to start a war with Russia, that’s the best way of doing it […] The final compromise communiqué, to me, is one of the most stupid documents in modern diplomacy. The paragraph in the Bucharest communiqué about Georgia and Ukraine should be framed and put on the wall of every Western diplomat as an example of what not to do. It combines the worst of both worlds: it upsets the Georgians and the Ukrainians by not giving them a Membership Action Programme and it upsets the Russians by saying someday these guys are going to join NATO.”[10]

“But Americans simply refuse to believe that. [Mearsheimer again.] And instead what they have done, is they have created a story, that it’s not American policy, it’s not NATO expansion that’s driving this train. Instead it’s Vladimir Putin, and it’s that Vladimir Putin is either bent on recreating the Soviet Union, or he’s interested in creating a Greater Russia. But whichever one of those two outcomes you take, he is ultimately an expansionist. He is on the march. And thank God we expanded NATO, because if we hadn’t expanded NATO he’d probably be in Berlin by now, if not Paris. This is the basic argument. But of course we had to invent the story after the crisis broke out, so that we weren’t blamed for what happened. We had to blame the Russians, so we created this story.”[11]

Compounding everything over the past several years has been Ukraine’s disdainful attitude to the 2014-15 Minsk agreements; directly analogous to Britain’s contempt for the Northern Ireland Protocol in fact. Both governments were insisting the texts were unworkable before the ink had even dried. Kiev simply decided to use these agreements as an opportunity to carry out a slow-motion pogrom against the civilian population of Donetsk, with US/UK connivance.

What follows is a transcript of part of a CER (Centre for European Reform) podcast dated 13-07-2022.

Rosie Giorgi: “Charles Crawford in the UK asked:

“How far if at all do you think Russia can reasonably feel humiliated or cheated as such, by the new security and economic arrangements that emerged in Europe following the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union?””

Ian Bond: “Well, thanks very much Rosie, and thanks very much Charles. I mean, full disclosure, Charles was my boss in the British embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s, so he and I saw many of the relevant events at that time, unrolling before our very eyes, and you could write a book about why things turned out the way they did and whose fault it was, and in fact, quite a few people have written such books. But here is my less than book-length answer, which is that the narrative of humiliation is one that Putin and those around him in the Russian leadership have chosen for themselves. It wasn’t an inevitable outcome of western actions. In fact in those early post-Cold War years, the West made enormous efforts to try to give Russia a higher status internationally than its post-Soviet condition really justified. So despite the fact that its economy was a basket case, it became a member of the G8 group of leading industrial countries. I mean, by no stretch of the imagination was 1990s Russia a leading industrial country, but it became part of that group. It was invited to join the major western powers in the so-called Contact Group, trying to bring peace to former Yugoslavia, and actually I could say it played quite a constructive role in that. And although it wasn’t invited to apply for NATO membership, it was given a special relationship with NATO through the NATO-Russia Founding Act. I mean, arguably more influence than any other third country had with NATO at the time. And it signed a partnership and cooperation agreement with the EU which gave it various trade benefits, and it joined the Council of Europe, the main European human rights organisation, even though its human rights record was still quite poor. So it got quite a lot in that early post-Cold War period. But what nobody could do, or what nobody was prepared to do, was to give Russia the kind of sphere of influence that the Soviet Union had had, in central and eastern Europe. And that’s because no western country could impose the kind of limits on the foreign policies of now-independent states in central and eastern Europe, that Russia wanted them to impose.”

The implication here is that all you had was a straight choice between the carving up of Europe at Yalta in February 1945, and the Helsinki Accords of 1975. A dumbed-down perspective surely, which doesn’t in any case take account of the coach and horses driven through Helsinki’s picturesque townscape by recognition of Kosovo independence.  

Rosie G: “And then so to ask Charles’s follow-up question: Did let’s say key western capitals get it wrong in terms of their perspectives, or drafting the arrangements, or in bringing Russia into the fold, or has Russia itself been unable to adapt, or a combination of both?”

Ian B: “Yes, so I think the West made some mistakes at the very beginning. So when the Soviet Union broke up at the end of 1991, the West could have done more to help democrats in Russia, and there were a lot of them around at that time. And in particular I would single out two areas where I think we didn’t do enough. One was in terms of helping Russia’s democrats to reduce the role of the former KGB and its officers, like Putin, because they were allowed to move from, you know, the KGB, a pretty brutal organisation, into positions of influence in Russia. That was problematic, and it became more problematic over time.”

What Ian Bond omits to mention here is that although Putin was a KGB officer, he resigned as soon as he heard about the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev. On top of that, as an associate of reforming St Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak from 1990 to 1996, he had a decent claim to be one of the “democrats in Russia” deemed worthy of western help. This finds support in deeply unfashionable but nonetheless insightful remarks made by former BBC Moscow correspondent Martin Sixsmith in May 2012:

“If you take the presidential elections [of March that year] I thought there was a bit of disingenuousness about the way they were reported in Britain… When I was reading reports of the presidential election which he won with 56 percent or 60 whatever percent; the first line of every article, and even on the BBC which broadly is sort of objective about these things, was “Western election observers report that the elections were skewed towards Vladimir Putin”, and then they report that he got 65 percent of the vote. And actually the real story is that he got a majority which a western politician would give his right arm for. And even if there had been no vote-rigging – there was definitely vote-rigging, I know because I’ve spoken to people who were involved in the electoral process – even if there hadn’t been any vote-rigging, he still would have won a fantastic majority. Maybe not 65 percent – maybe 60, 59, 58 percent. And that’s the story I’m afraid. You know, the story is that he won a very big majority.”[12]

If Sixsmith is right, the Kremlin’s highest profile occupants had authentic democratic mandates from 1992 until at least 2018. Which isn’t to suggest the system is perfect. But Russia can be considered to be at least as democratic as South Africa, where the ANC has held power since 1994. Bond continues however…

“Secondly I think the West could have done more to help Russia establish the rule of law, rather than helping Russian oligarchs launder their money in the West. And that’s a process that began really in the 1990s, and we got that quite badly wrong. But fundamentally, we are where we are today, because of the choices that Russian leaders have made since then. Basically you get a choice over the sort of history that you tell yourself is your history. And Russia could have chosen to say, and it would have been justified in some respects to say, that its people were the heroes who had thrown off the yoke of Soviet totalitarianism after the 1991 coup, when Soviet hardliners tried to roll back the kind of democratic reforms that were coming in in the Soviet Union. So they could have said, you know, our people were the heroes who overthrew the Soviet dictatorship, and now we want to become a normal European democracy, and we recognise that we have some bridges to build with our neighbours who’ve suffered under the Soviet dictatorship for the last fifty years. And that would have been a bit like West Germany after the Second World War. But instead, particularly after Putin came into power, Russia chose, or the Russian authorities chose to blame the collapse of the USSR on the evil devious West, and then to try to reassert control over parts of the old empire as it were.

“And I guess what I would say, and I know Charles is a keen football fan, so I think he’ll recognise this; but I would say that basically, the Russian leadership under Putin has made a choice, that it is happy to be the Millwall of international relations. So Millwall are famous… Millwall supporters are famous for their chant: “Nobody [sic] likes us, we don’t care”, and that’s been Putin’s approach to the rest of the world since he came to power.”

Perhaps the author should declare an interest, as someone who taught English in the late 1990s to at least one future employee of the Russian MFA. But there’s no shortage of sound reasons to be sceptical of Ian B’s take, which isn’t even consistent with his own words. Unless he believes Putin transformed Russia into a “leading industrial nation”, its G8 membership remained an anomaly well into the twenty-first century. Yet this privileged status was at the same time almost entirely uncontroversial. There were no serious calls for Russia to be expelled until 2014, when relations came under an intolerable strain thanks to the US/EU-backed overthrow of Victor Yanukovych in Kiev.

In reality, the tale of Russia’s foreign policy in the Putin era has primarily been one of a constant search for customers for its oil and gas. And for instance there’s also this vignette from former head of the UK diplomatic service Lord McDonald of Salford:

“However difficult the political relationship, it is striking how the diplomats on the spot, the diplomats who have to work with each other every day, manage to keep their personal relationships going. And again an anecdote, from when our last ambassador to the United Nations in New York left, it was Karen Pierce, who is now our ambassador in Washington. She’d been in New York a couple of years, she left at the beginning of last year. The warmest tribute paid to Karen at the Security Council table, was from the Russian ambassador, which might surprise the audience.”[13]

It’s safe to assume Russia’s envoy didn’t suddenly remember basic principles of diplomacy forgotten since the Yeltsin era.

This was never in fact about Russian indifference to western interests. On the contrary, it’s always been about western scornfulness for what Russia sees as its core strategic interests. Joe Biden himself knows this far better than most. Two years before the bombing of Serbia, there’s footage of him giving a broad-gauge account of the damage likely to be done to US-Russian ties by NATO expansion:

“I think the one place, where the greatest consternation will be caused in the short term, for admission – having nothing to do with the merit, the preparedness of the country to come in – would be to admit the Baltic States now in terms of NATO-Russian, US-Russian relations. And if there was ever anything that was going to tip the balance were it to be tipped, in terms of a vigorous and a hostile reaction – I don’t mean military – in Russia, it would be that.”[14]

More recently, in an address last month in Langley, Virginia to mark the CIA’s 75^th anniversary, Biden raised the issue of US exceptionalism.

“We’re the most unique nation in the history of the world. That’s not hyperbole.”

Professor Mearsheimer dealt with this in a podcast interview he gave in 2020.

“Our elites, and the vast majority of the American public believes that the United States is an exceptional country. This is this whole notion of American exceptionalism. And when they say that we’re an exceptional country, what they mean is that we are morally an exceptional country, we are morally good in the extreme. And if we do something wrong-headed, it’s not because we didn’t have good intentions, because of course we always have good intentions. But this story that we tell ourselves bears little resemblance to reality. The United States is one of the most ruthless great powers that’s ever walked the planet. The number of people that we’ve killed over time is truly remarkable. All you have to do is look at the firebombing of Japan in WWII. Most people focus on the dropping of two nuclear weapons in August of 1945, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the fact is the first night we firebombed Tokyo we killed more people than we killed in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And we were burning Japanese cities to the ground by the time we dropped those two nuclear weapons. Look at what we did in Germany, involving cities like Hamburg or Dresden. Look at the bombing of North Korea during the Korean war! Most people know hardly anything about this. There are some estimates that we killed twenty percent of the North Korean population. We bombed like crazy in Vietnam. We have a rich history of overthrowing governments. And just go back to how the US was created. It’s a story of conquest on a large scale. We murdered huge numbers of native Americans, stole their land. What's now the South-West of the US we stole from Mexico. I mean if you really look carefully at American history over time and the various wars we fought, it’s not a pretty picture! But this is not what Americans believe and it’s not what our elites believe.”[15]

Towards the end of his speech in Langley, Biden said:

“I know that you will continue to honor and uphold the highest traditions of the CIA and the highest values of this nation for the next 75 years and beyond.”

The CIA “upholds the highest values of the nation”. It’s just staggering that the POTUS can say this with a straight face. It would be no more ridiculous if he said the same about Hunter Biden.

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[1] Allan Little’s Kosovo Forum, bbc.co.uk 15-03-2000

[2] Cited in ‘Oh What a Lovely War!’, Economist, 24-04-1999

[3] 29-11-2021

[4] ‘European Insecurity’, Charles Crawford, Diplomat Magazine August 2022

[5] «Противники или союзники? (партнерство США и России, НАТО)» (‘Adversaries or Allies? US-Russia partnership, NATO’), НВО (Независимое военное обозрение – Independent Military Review) 21 (48) 14-06-97. Cited in Stanley Kober, ‘Russia’s Search for Identity’; Ted Galen Carpenter and Barbara Corny, eds. NATO Enlargement: Illusions and Reality. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1998.

[6] Sky News correspondent Tim Marshall reporting from Belgrade, April 1999

[7] ‘Chinese spokesperson slams NATO for strategic concept referring to China’, China Daily, 29-07-2022

[8] Munk Debate: Russia-Ukraine War | Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer v Michael McFaul, Radosław Sikorski, 12-05-2022

[9] Committee for the Republic, ‘Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine Salon’| Ray McGovern, John Mearsheimer, 02-03-2022

[10] University Consortium Interview Series: Sir Roderic Lyne. Interview by Nikita Gryazin, December 2020

[11] Committee for the Republic, op cit. 

[12] Former BBC Moscow correspondent Martin Sixsmith discussing Russia’s 2012 presidential elections, Watershed Bristol, 20 May 2012. He shared a stage with Guardian journalist Luke Harding, who got himself expelled from Russia in 2011. According to prevailing orthodoxy, this is something he should be proud of. In reality, his obnoxious antics simply made the world a slightly more dangerous place.

[13] Zoom lecture hosted by Keele University, “Statecraft and Diplomacy: Coping with the 21st Century”, 04-11-2021. The tribute paid to Karen Pierce in New York on 12-03-2020 was as follows: Mr. Safronkov (in Russian): “I too would like to express our sincere wishes for the success and future professional achievements of Ambassador Pierce. She has done a great deal personally and as a diplomat to ensure the productive work of the Security Council. We will certainly miss her.”

[14] Address to the Atlantic Council, Washington, 18-06-1997

[15] ‘Manifold’ podcast interview with John Mearsheimer, conducted in 2020 with Corey Washington and Steve Hsu. Exact date unspecified.

Winning Run of the Rovers

What is the chemical formula of the gas, nitric oxide, understood to help brain cells transmit messages to each other? And is this related to the term ‘gashead’, applied to Bristol Rovers fans? The answer to both questions is NO. Followers of Bristol’s more cerebral football team acquired their nickname in the 1960s because Eastville Stadium was in shouting distance of a gas works.

Eastville’s proximity to Stottbury Road, Horfield, also explained the Blue and Whites’ strong claim on the loyalties of St Thomas More’s RC Secondary School pupils. St Tom’s fifty-year life span, until its closure in 2005, corresponded more or less to that of St Thomas Becket Catholic High School in Huyton, Merseyside. Although St Tom B’s intake was never quite so captivated by the blue side of Liverpool, gifted student Joey Barton dreamed of playing for Everton.

Mind you, Joseph Anthony Barton had a tough childhood. As a result, his career has been punctuated by numerous contretemps and bust-ups, and he’s served time in prison. One might say this-or-that individual was dealt a similar or worse hand in life, yet was never such a turbulent character. Maybe so; but if others – including some of those who judge Barton – had had to contend with the disadvantages he faced, they might have gone off the rails even more than he did.

So let’s not go there. Barton was a tenacious and hardworking midfielder. One of his finest moments came in the second half of a UEFA Europa League match between Olympique Marseille and Borussia Mönchengladbach in November 2012. He scored directly from a corner to equalise for the Olympians, whose fans voted him their best player of the following month. Only Paris Saint-Germain prevented Élie Baup’s side from capturing the 2012-13 Ligue 1 title.

From its HQ in Dalmally, Argyll, Mary’s Meals provides nutritious meals every school day to 2,279,941 of the world’s poorest children. The story of the charity’s rapid expansion, and its origins in an aid agency called Scottish International Relief (SIR), is told in a bestselling book by founder Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, The Shed That Fed Two Million Children. Among many prominent celebrities who’ve lent support, Real Madrid playmaker Luka Modrić used his profile to promote an outstanding film called Child 31 (now available on YouTube). As a refugee with his family in the Croatian city of Zadar in the mid-1990s, the future Ballon d’Or winner was a beneficiary of humanitarian aid from SIR.

I had this in mind last December when I decided to send Joey Barton a bright blue and white Mary’s Meals Christmas card, adorned with a snowbound image of Dalmally’s famous shed. Inside, underneath the festive greeting I wrote a message which went something like:

“A few months after you were born, on 20 November 1982 I attended my first ever football match; an FA Cup tie between Chester City and Northwich Victoria at Sealand Road. It finished 1-1 and Northwich won the replay. They went on to reach the FA Trophy final at Wembley, as I’m sure you know.”

Joey Barton’s Dad, another Joseph, played semi-professionally for Northwich Vics and is likely to have featured in the Chester game.

“Come on you Blues!”

On New Year’s Day Bristol Rovers languished in 18th place, just a handful of points above the drop zone. January however turned out to be an excellent month, in which they recorded three wins and a draw. While a lot of the credit for the transformation in the Pirates’ fortunes is laid at the door of loan-signing Elliot Anderson, he didn’t make his debut until February. Besides, it was no doubt important that Rovers were on a bit of a roll when the Geordie starlet was enticed to tear himself away from St James’s Park.

Saturday 7th May, the climax of the 2021-22 season, will always have a special place in Rovers folklore. In order to pip Northampton Town to the last automatic promotion place, Barton’s protégés knew they were likely to need a cricket score against Scunthorpe. At the interval they were only 2-0 up, but moved to 6-0 on 79 minutes. In the 85th, Anderson headed home goal number seven. The scenes which followed can only be described as pandemonium.

We may never know if Barton’s Mary’s Meals Christmas card made a difference, but stranger things have happened. Leicester’s rise from the bottom to the top of the Premiership in 2015-16 had nothing to do with the arrival of a new manager or any particular player. Incontrovertibly, the timing of the Foxes’ turnaround coincided precisely with the boost to civic pride generated by the re-interment of Richard III in Leicester Cathedral. When LCFC were crowned champions, fans waving banners of England’s last Yorkist king knew what they were doing. York City, whose burgesses had tried but failed to have Richard’s relics translated to their own famous Minster, were banished to the Conference a few days before.

With last season’s stunning finale still fresh in the memory, Joey Barton has now been sent a DVD of Child 31. Maybe it’ll inspire him to take his charges to the Championship, or a Wembley final. One thing every intelligent Rovers fan knows, is that it’s high time we were back on level terms with our south Bristol rivals who shall remain nameless.

The "cavorting charlatan" whose record has been ignored

One important difference between Donald Trump and Boris Johnson is that Trump was a political outsider, who made a great play of his promise to ‘drain the swamp’. By contrast, Johnson is very much a ‘swamp creature’. For this reason his record in high office deserves far more rigorous scrutiny than it’s had up to now.

A student of UK media output in recent weeks might conclude that during his two-year stint as Foreign Secretary, the only blot on Johnson’s copybook was his mishandling of the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Certainly, giving the authorities in Tehran an excuse to prolong the Iranian-British national’s imprisonment was stupid and thoughtless. However to pretend that this was his worst offence is like fulminating against Al Capone for his failure to pay income tax.

In early 2017 a top British diplomat told the BBC’s John Simpson:

“I feel deeply let down by Boris. The FCO used to be the best in the world. Now he’s made it absurd.”

It isn’t just that by persisting in the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, Johnson knowingly implicated himself in war crimes in Yemen, as serious as that is. Nor is it solely that his resignation in July last year enabled him to duck responsibility for hosting a long-planned Balkans summit, leaving senior dignitaries including the German and Austrian chancellors in the lurch. The real nadir arguably came barely two months after he took office, when he authorised UK participation in a textbook war crime in Syria.

A key part of the difficulty in discussing this dates back to the initial phase of the Arab Spring. In early 2011 it was an article of faith among western elites that we were witnessing a sort of re-run of the fall of communism. Democracy would sweep through the Middle East and North Africa, just as it did in central and eastern Europe twenty years before.

As happened with Tunisia, Egypt, Libya etc, when the movement to depose Assad began in Syria, British journalists were handed a hymn-sheet. All too many remain to this day anxious to avoid the damage to their reputations which would follow from admitting they’ve been singing crass, Whitehall-vetted nursery rhymes ever since.

For instance, western news organisations relied heavily for their coverage of the conflict on the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Astute observers had known for some time that the SOHR was actually nothing more than a lone anti-Assad émigré with a mobile phone, living in Coventry.

In May last year though, Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday went a stage further, exposing Rami Abdulrahman as a UK government employee. Yet the mainstream media establishment responded by closing its eyes and putting its hands over its ears. This is the truth-allergic environment which has allowed Johnson to get away with murder.

Deir ez-Zour is a city in eastern Syria, on the banks of the Euphrates. Islamist terror group Jabhat al-Nusra had its headquarters here from 2012 until 2014, when it was displaced by ISIS-Daesh. Damascus however retained control of a military base on the outskirts, supplied by air from more secure government-held areas further west.

On 17 September 2016, this base came under sustained attack (lasting about an hour) from warplanes and drones belonging to the US, UK, Australia and Denmark. 106 Syrian troops are believed to have been killed, with over a hundred wounded. The official line from the countries involved (none of whom had any legal entitlement to undertake military operations in Syria) was that the bombing was a “mistake”. Before accepting this narrative at face value, it’s worth trying to get a clearer picture of the immediate context.

A week earlier, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov announced they had agreed a ceasefire after 16 hours of talks, to come into force two days later. Details of the agreement were kept under wraps, but it was subsequently revealed that Washington had been obliged to disengage the so-called moderate opposition from known terror groups.

If it had held for a week and adequate progress had been made as it were in ‘detoxifying’ the opposition, the agreement called for the commencement of joint US-Russian air operations against hard-line Islamist groups such as al-Nusra and ISIS-Daesh. Deir ez-Zour’s “accidental” bombing came less than 48 hours before this part of the agreement was due to be put into effect.

The brutal massacre of Syrians defending their own country from ISIS terrorists was in fact calculated to mortally wound a ceasefire which hawks like Johnson in western capitals couldn’t stomach. Two days after it took place, a horrifying assault on a UN aid convoy near Aleppo (in the presence of forces on the ground with a vital stake in consigning the ceasefire to history) was the coup de grace.

In 1986 Tam Dalyell MP was so exercised by an aspect of the Westland Affair, he launched into a tirade against then PM Margaret Thatcher which some people thought went too far:

“The prime minister is a sustained, brazen deceiver, now hiding behind cynical performances. She is a bounder, a liar, a deceiver, a cheat, a crook and a disgrace to the House of Commons”.

An irony of today’s politics is that more or less the same litany is considered by many, including some of his most adoring fans, to be “priced in” when assessing Johnson’s suitability for the top job. The ‘scary clown’ whose gratuitous Russia-bashing made a mockery of genuine diplomacy, a ‘nasty piece of work’ (in Eddie Mair’s memorable phrase) and an inveterate dealer in falsehood, Boris Johnson is also a war criminal. He’s the bullet we can’t afford not to dodge.

Top Marks

Martyred ca. 303AD during the same Diocletianic persecution in which SS George and Vitus also died, St Philoterius was a Roman of noble birth from Nicomedia (Izmit). Besides being his feast-day, 19 May in Turkey is officially the Commemoration of Atatürk, often called Youth and Sports Day. 

In 1980 the run-up to this holiday in the northern city of Çorum was marked by fierce public denunciations of allegedly un-Islamic attire worn in rehearsals by female Alevi[1] students. In reality, locally powerful MHP (fascist) functionaries and their Grey Wolves attack dogs were deliberately stoking sectarian tensions, in league with certain shadowy figures who emerged at intervals from the US embassy in Ankara. Just before these happenings, Çorum’s police chief Hasan Uyar was removed along with nearly 40 fellow officers, as well as school administrators and teachers; Uyar’s replacement was parachuted in from Tunceli, more than 400 kms away.[2] Conforming to a pattern seen elsewhere in Turkey over the previous few years, the dirty tricks culminated in a pogrom, known as the Çorum Massacre, which claimed the lives of 57 mostly Alevi civilians between the end of May and July. This turmoil furnished the military with a pretext to stage another anti-democratic putsch, on 12 September 1980. During the interval of a performance of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, US President Jimmy Carter received news of this coup de théâtre by means of a note which read: 

“Our boys have done it!”[3]

[1] Alevism is a large minority Shia sect (comprising perhaps as much as 15% or more of the population) with Kurdish as well as ethnically Turkish adherents. Alevis however are distinct not only from the Sunni Muslims who predominate in Turkey, but also from the ethnically Arab Alawites with populations in the far south and in Syria. 

[2] Parliamentary Research Commission Report, published by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, November 2012, p.860 

This finds clear echoes in the way senior police officers were reshuffled immediately prior to last year's notorious poisoning incident in Salisbury. Mike Veale, Chief Constable of Wiltshire Police, was prematurely shunted from his position as per an announcement on 24 January. His replacement, Assistant Chief Constable Kier Pritchard, took up his new role on Monday 5th March – one day after the elaborately staged chemical attack on the Skripals, on Sunday 4th March. And on 9th January it was announced that Sir Mark Rowley, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and Britain’s lead counter terrorism officer, would be “retiring” on 21 March, though in some quarters this was reported as a resignation. Rowley’s exact age isn’t easy to pin down, but he started his degree in 1983, making it unlikely he was even within five years of 60, the compulsory retirement age for police. Moreover, if he’d been due to retire, why did he apply for the job of Met Commissioner in 2017? Theoretically he could actually be younger than HMG's 'superman' Sir Mark Sedwill, who’s hardly likely to be drawing his pension any time soon. An “alumnus of MI6” (according to the Skripal book written by BBC Newsnight's diplomatic editor Mark Urban), Sedwill currently combines three roles – Cabinet Secretary, Head of the Civil Service and National Security Advisor – which until 2014 were the work of three separate very senior Whitehall mandarins. Meanwhile the announcement of Neil Basu’s appointment as Rowley’s successor was also made on 5th March, the day after Salisbury. Mark Rowley didn’t formally begin to enjoy the benefits of whatever golden handshake he was offered until 21 March; but then it wasn’t until several weeks after that, that there was any indication the Skripals would emerge miraculously unharmed from the "military grade nerve agent attack" they'd been targeted by. 

[3] See e.g. Ece Temelkuran, 'Yet again, Turkey's children have awoken to darkness at dawn', The Guardian, 17-07-2016
Fehmi Koru, ‘Never miss an opportunity to show your sympathy’, Today’s Zaman, 10-01-2008

Pilgrimage on the Coast

St Columba with St Martin's Cross (not to scale)

Depicted in an icon of St Columba by Maria Elchaninova-Struve, St Martin’s Cross was installed in its present location on Iona in about the year 800 AD. Martin is distinguished among other things by the fact that the word ‘chapel’ derives from his costly scarlet cape, which he cut in two with his sword to give half to a shivering beggar. A relic of this cape was later housed in a small church, which became known as a ‘capella’, hence ‘chapel’. Not that many people, even Christians, know that; and indeed it’s safe to assume there are even folks surnamed Chappell or Chapple who are none the wiser.

In a similar way perhaps, neither Sir Arthur Conan Doyle nor his great uncle and godfather, Michael Conan, appear to have been particularly conscious of their 7^th century namesake, St Conan. A follower of St Columba, Conan’s missionary endeavours were concentrated on Argyll and the Isles, and he became Bishop of the Isle of Man. His name is recalled in ‘Innis Chonan’, an island in Loch Awe on the Coast of the Gaels (Argyll’s original meaning). In this connexion, the name ‘Innes’ given to Arthur’s younger brother is a less helpful clue than it might seem, since ‘Conan’ was conferred exclusively on the older sibling. Yet it is nonetheless a singular coincidence that Conan Doyle should have finished his first Sherlock Holmes mystery, ‘A Study in Scarlet’, in 1886. Walter Douglas Campbell completed the construction of St Conan’s Kirk, a delightful Romanesque Revival gem on the northern shore of Loch Awe, in the same year. In other words, the first appearance of the greatest of all crime-fighting masterminds coincided with an unprecedented flowering of interest in St Conan, in one of the last places in the world where deerstalker caps have never gone out of fashion. 

St Conan’s Pilgrim Way, the brainchild of Calum (Columba) MacFarlane-Barrow, is a trail of evidence, as it were, leading from Dalmally at the north-eastern extremity of Loch Awe, to Iona. It was established in 2015 to mark twenty-five years of the Craig Lodge Community, which gives young people an opportunity to spend a ‘spiritual gap year’ in the service of Our Lord and His Mother, amid the extraordinary natural surroundings of that part of Scotland.

Curiously however, the pilgrimage also has a political dimension, and one which can’t easily be brushed aside. This is because Dalmally was the birthplace in 1938 of John Smith, leader of the Labour Party from 1992 until his death in 1994. In accordance with his wishes, Smith was buried in St Oran’s cemetery on Iona – but not only that. The Craig Lodge Community sprang into life on 14 September 1990, the feast of the Triumph of the Cross. However, the 2015 celebration took place on Sunday 13^th September, which would have been John Smith’s 77^th birthday (and happened also to be the day after Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader).

For St Conan’s Pilgrim Wayfarers, the chief significance of all this lies in the fact that Smith was a Christian in public life who not only talked the talk, but walked the walk. Paying tribute to her late colleague in the House of Commons, Margaret Beckett quoted him as asking:

“Why would anyone bother to go into politics, unless it's to speak up for people who can't speak up for themselves?”

Besides having the courage to vote to protect the lives of unborn children, he also opposed moves to make divorce easier, changes to the law on Sunday trading, and deregulation of drinking and gambling. His understanding of what lawmakers can and cannot do, and what they should and should not do, was second to none. If he had lived to be PM, as was expected at the time of his death, Britain would almost certainly be in a markedly healthier state, both politically and morally, than it is today.

With marching orders to tackle St Conan’s Pilgrim Way over the next five days, a dozen pedestrians from different walks of life gathered at Craig Lodge on Monday 23^rd April 2018. In the evening, after praying the Divine Office and Rosary in the chapel, a member of the Craig Lodge Community called George was congratulated on his saint’s day, and we sat down to the first of many enjoyable meals together. One of our number, Ollie, explained that he had chosen ‘Columba’ as his confirmation name because the great Irish monastic was party to the first recorded sighting of the Loch Ness monster.

Repairing to the sitting room, further invaluable historical details were provided by Craig Lodge spiritual director Canon William Fraser. Columba was exiled from Ireland as punishment for his part in an outbreak of savage violence, arising from his sense of injury at having to surrender a copy of a Psalter he’d made, to the ‘copyright owner’. In fact it’s sobering to reflect that he almost certainly would have been excommunicated, if St Brendan of Birr hadn’t spoken up on his behalf. Redounding perhaps more to Columba’s credit though, we also heard about the exquisite artistry of the Book of Kells, long associated with Iona and believed to have been dedicated to his memory. Calum then produced a map and gave us a preview of the next day’s walk. A rumour that heavy rain was forecast was dismissed as ‘fake news’.   

In seemingly faraway Liverpool however, a dismal story of obscene institutional presumption was reaching its sorrowful denouement. 23-month old Alfie Evans had been granted Italian citizenship, in an eleventh hour bid to facilitate his transfer from Liverpool’s Alder Hey Hospital to the Bambino Gesù hospital in Rome. Yet Britain’s courts and the Alder Hey authorities remained resolute in their determination to override the wishes of the child’s imploring parents. At 9pm that evening, Alfie’s ventilator was switched off. Over the previous year, although his condition was never diagnosed and it was acknowledged that he was not in pain, doctors and judges laid repeated emphasis on Alfie’s so-called ‘semi-vegetative state’. The weight of legal and medical opinion therefore held that the parents’ love for their little boy blinded them to the hard reality, that he was as much a plant as a human. And what was worse, their ‘lack of objectivity’ meant they couldn’t see when the time had come for their baby to be weeded out.   

On Tuesday 24^th, after Morning Prayer, breakfast and a group photo we set forth along the B8077, passing a spot where Columba may have founded a monastery. Guided by Wes and Alistair, in spite of frequent squally showers the mood was bullish as we climbed up and over the Lairig Noe pass. Having seen the table-like rock where McIntyre clansmen once held their parliaments, in the afternoon we encountered stags and frogs on the way down to the shore of Loch Etive, from where we ambled to Taynuilt.   

At the Church of the Visitation there, for a donation one could pick up a DVD of ‘Generation Hope’, the film (now available online) inspired by bestselling 2015 book ‘The Shed That Fed A Million Children’. Written by Calum’s son Magnus and telling the story of school-feeding charity Mary’s Meals, The Shed That Fed qualifies as a must-read, both on account of the importance of its subject matter, and for its riveting twists and turns. Mind you, it omits to mention a parliament of the MacFarlane-Barrow clan in around 1998 or 1999, at which the author of this article was a fly on the wall. The consensus then seemed to be that Magnus would call time on his humanitarian relief efforts and return to salmon-farming.

Expertly driving the Craig Lodge minibus, Calum returned us to the same quarters we’d enjoyed on the previous night, where the aforementioned Shed could be seen as we had supper. After that however, this pilgrim decided to make his way to the top of the hill behind Craig Lodge, in the hope of finding a less celebrated but almost equally legendary outhouse. The ‘beehive cell’ built by Calum around ten years before is a sort of stone igloo, invisible from space by dint of the turf on its roof. To spend a night inside is to get a taste of the seclusion, self-containment, simplicity and silence experienced by the monks of St Columba’s time.

   

After breakfast on the morning of Wednesday 25 April we drove back to Taynuilt to attend Mass for the feast of St Mark, celebrated by Canon Fraser. The all-but empty road leading from there through picturesque Glen Lonan is understood to have formed part of a traditional pilgrim thoroughfare, way-marked in the Middle Ages by stone crosses. After a picnic lunch near some even older though less meaningful obelisks, at Glencruitten House the Evangelical Christian community kindly gave us tea and coffee. Leaving there, some members of our cohort should have known better than to be sceptical of qualified solicitor Annabel’s assertion that Mull, our next port of call, was an ‘Inner Hebride’. With the question settled in her favour, we sauntered into Oban in plenty of time to catch a mid-afternoon ferry. At Craignure we each bagged bunks at a shiny new hostel, where we would spend the following two nights.

   

Back in Liverpool meanwhile, having confounded doctors by his ability to breathe unaided for as long as he had, this was the day when Alfie Evans was at last given nourishment for the first time in the 36 hours since his life-support was withdrawn. He would later express his appreciation with an unmistakable smile, captured in a photograph taken by his father. Echoing the sentiments of millions of others around the world, Polish President Andrzej Duda tweeted his support. However, that afternoon a court in Manchester threw out the last appeal to allow Alfie to be moved. The death sentence was not to be overturned.

   

Around lunchtime on Thursday 26 April we reached Lochbouie on Mull’s southern shore, whose Episcopal Church of St Kilda has a fine mediaeval cross above its porch. In increasingly perfect sunshine, from there we clambered, clawed and cleft our way along the shoreline to Carsaig, where the minibus was once again on hand to shuttle us back to base-camp.

   

Friday 27 April 2018 saw Britain reach the baleful milestone of fifty years since the implementation of the Abortion Act. There was a bitter irony in the fact that it was also Alfie Evans’ last full day of life, inasmuch as the denial of his parents’ right to choose was dictated by an ideology which worships at the altar of ‘choice’ – when that choice is exercised at the expense of defenceless unborn children.

Setting off from Carsaig, a few of us made a spiritually regenerative detour to the Nuns’ Cave, a refuge for persecuted Christians over many centuries. Ollie read out the day’s Gospel, including the following:

“You know the way to the place where I am going.”

Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through Me.” John 14:4-6

Falling back into line then with our assembly’s main strength, a spectacular cliff-top path took us in the direction of the Ross of Mull and the tidal island of Erraid. It was here in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) that hero David Balfour mistakenly thinks he’s been marooned. On the wildlife front, alongside a possible sighting of a Peregrine Falcon, there was a pair of Golden Eagles, numerous red deer, a slow worm and an adder. Just as memorable, Susan, whose journey to Iona was really a homecoming, explained as we passed Malcolm’s Point that her mother grew up in the same Edinburgh house which was also John Smith's family home. Later on, ‘Free Entry – Bull May Charge’ was a sign on a gate pointed out to us by Calum as we drove from Bunessan to our new digs, just outside Fionnphort.

In the early hours of Saturday 28 April 2018, Alfie Evans died. His father Tom broke the news:

“My gladiator lay down his shield and gained his wings at 02:30. Absolutely heartbroken”

Throughout their ordeal, both he and Alfie’s mother Kate conducted themselves with formidable courage, dignity and restraint. Their son was sacrificed to the false deity of ‘choice’ and various other ideological golden calves, somehow deemed worthy of greater consideration than the right of parents to decide what is in their child’s best interests. Without doubt, humankind has made giant scientific and technological strides, even since the 19^th century, let alone the 6^th and 7^th centuries. But that doesn’t mean the likes of Columba, Conan and co would have been unable to recognise a case of cold-blooded murder when they saw one.

On another beautifully sunny day we resumed our walk from Bunessan. Abraham-like, Ron, a member of our troop with farming experience, scaled a fence and rescued a sheep whose horns were caught in a bush. The ten minute crossing of the turquoise Sound of Iona passed off without incident. After stepping ashore at Baile Mòr on the other side, a group of us made for Iona Abbey, where we were given complimentary pilgrim passes. Besides offering prayers of thanksgiving in St Mary’s Abbey Church, there was time to visit St Columba’s Chapel (long believed to have been built on his original burial site), St Martin’s Cross, and St Oran’s Chapel with its adjacent cemetery. John Smith’s epitaph is a quotation from Alexander Pope:

“An honest man’s the noblest work of God”

The Apostle James (the Greater) is the patron saint of pilgrims; lending a special piquancy to our rendezvous with Irish Dominican priest Fr James Claffey OP. He was also the ideal person to lead us in the ‘Rosary on the Coast’, anchored in the form of prayer revealed by Our Lady to the founder of his order, St Dominic. We said the five glorious mysteries on the beach at Martyrs’ Bay, named in honour of sixty-eight monks whose blood was spilled onto its white-washed sands by Vikings in AD 806. Foremost among our intentions was recognition for the sanctity of human life, as it was for many thousands of others on beaches, mudflats, jetties and marinas the length and breadth of the British Isles.

After commandeering another well-appointed dormitory we had a restful hour or so, before returning to the village for Mass in the chapel of the RC House of Prayer. A lone ruminant in a field outside the window brought to mind St Columba’s prophesy:

"In Iona that is my heart's desire,

Iona that is my love,

Instead of monks' voices

Shall be the lowing of cattle;

But ere the world comes to an end,

Iona shall be as it was."

Then in the evening we sat down to a terrific restaurant meal, with many of us opting to head down the ‘fish and chips’ route. Moira, one of a handful of islanders who joined us, explained how devotion to Our Lady had led her to make and organise scores of pilgrimages, including to diplomatically ticklish destinations like Ukraine and Russia, as well as to the Holy Land, Fatima and Medjugorje. Few, though, could have turned out much better than our journey to Iona.

On the morning of Sunday 29 April we bade farewell to Baile Mòr, drove on to Craignure, sailed to Oban and arrived back at Craig Lodge shortly before 3 o’clock. This was when the ‘Rosary on the Coast’ was actually scheduled to take place – we’d had to pray a day early because of work commitments etc. So anyway, those of us who were able went through to the chapel at Craig Lodge and prayed again. And Our Lady had it covered. No one picked up on it at the time, but being in Argyll we were as much ‘on the coast’ as anyone else.

All pilgrim names have been changed.

Serena Shim Identifies Her Killers

In late December 2012, Lebanese American journalist Serena Shim filed a report for Iran’s Press TV, ‘Turkey’s Pivotal Role in Syria’s Insurgency’. However by that time, US complicity in channelling weapons via Turkey into the hands of Syria-bound al-CIAda terrorists had already been publicised by the New York Times, no less. In June 2012, Eric Schmitt explicitly stated that

“A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey. …weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funnelled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.”[1]

Shim therefore was only providing a more detailed picture of an already well-documented situation when she informed her audience:

“The American air base located inside Turkey, Incirlik, has enabled the Turkish government to facilitate the movement of arms without facing public scrutiny. The base is located eight kilometres east of the Turkish city of Adana. Sources say when weaponry arrives it is given to two American and one Mexican man, who either distribute them among refugee camps, or across the border into Syria. Turkish military officials ensure the weapons are transferred swiftly and discreetly to Syria. […] the funds have been provided by Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Syria’s foreign ministry in a letter to the United Nations blamed Turkey along with Qatar and Saudi Arabia for sponsoring terrorists inside Syria.”

Even so, Shim's focus on the role of the Turkish government is likely to have incensed then Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his MIT (National Intelligence Organisation) henchmen; especially alongside her exposure of the use of World Food Programme trucks to ferry jihadists (nationals from a variety of Middle Eastern and North African countries) into Syria. In May 2015 upmarket daily Cumhuriyet published pictures of a January 2014 interception by the Turkish gendarmerie of a convoy of MIT-loaded trucks headed for Syria, containing arms and ammunition. Telling editor-in-chief Can Dundar he would “pay a heavy price”, Erdoğan accused both him and journalist Erdem Gul of “espionage”.[2] In December of that year, when MP Eren Erdem produced documentation showing Ankara had turned a blind eye to the transfer from Turkey to Syria of materials to make sarin gas, the “treason” accusations levelled at him were very similar.[3]

This helps to explain how it came to be that on 17 October 2014, having returned to Turkey earlier in the month, Serena Shim disclosed in a Press TV interview that she too stood accused of being a spy, by MIT.[4] Although she expressed her fear of arrest and imprisonment, it’s now clear Ankara had issued a fatwa, condemning her to death at the first available opportunity. So with their wealth of experience, MIT’s ‘road safety experts’ set to work; but automobiles are blunt instruments, making it difficult to contrive a fatal crash without detailed long-term preparation. It appears that neither Shim nor the driver of their rental car, her cousin and camera operator Judy Irish, were critically injured after an impact with a truck[5] on 19 October. Irish was treated at a nearby hospital and survived. Shim however was murdered, either at the crash-site or more likely at the medical facility she was taken to (reportedly in Turkey’s Hatay province nearly three hours drive away). There may be a precedent for this. In the aftermath of the undisputed pre-planned car crash at Susurluk[6] on 3^rd November 1996, the three people who died were said to be still alive until MIT's secret traffic police finished them off.

In 2016 Serena Shim’s mother clarified:

“There is no doubt in my mind that my daughter did not die in a car accident. There was not one single scratch on her there was no blood absolutely anywhere.”

Meanwhile the US government has never called for Serena Shim’s death to be properly investigated; and the next part of her mother’s testimony is a further indictment of their attitude:

“I have tried to contact the American Embassy in Turkey with the cell phone numbers they gave me originally when I was going to get my daughter. Absolutely no response from the American Embassy in Turkey, including via personal cell phones.”[7]

---

[1] Eric Schmitt, ‘C.I.A. Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition’, New York Times, 21-06-2012

[2] ‘Turkish president Erdoğan wants editor jailed for espionage in video row’, Reuters, 03-06-2015

Besides being jailed, Dundar survived an assassination attempt in the following year.

[3] ‘Sarin gas materials sent to Isis from Turkey, claims MP Eren Erdem’, Befast Telegraph, 14-12-2015

See also: Coleen Rowley, ‘Calling (Again) for Proof: 2013 Sarin Attack at Ghouta’, Huffington Post, 26-12-2015

“Small wonder President Erdogan has accused Erdem of “treason.” It was not Erdem’s first “offense.” Earlier, he exposed corruption by Erdogan family members, for which a government newspaper branded him an “American puppet, Israeli agent, a supporter of the terrorist PKK and the instigator of a coup.””

[4] Serena Shim’s sister Fatmeh later explained that she saw this television appearance in terms of a lesson their Lebanese father had taught them as children:

“He always said, ‘If you’re being attacked, scream.’ Because if you don’t scream, you die for any reason. But when you do scream, people are going to find out why you died. If she didn’t go on air, my sister would [just] have been “killed in a car accident”.”

Mark Mondalek, ‘Remember American Journalist Killed in Suspicious Car Crash in Turkey After Entering Erdoğan’s Crosshairs’, Mint Press News, 05-08-2016.

[5] The authorities subsequently put out a pre-fabricated story about a head-on collision with a cement-mixer.

[6] The scandal which erupted in the wake of the Susurluk incident was perhaps greater and more far-reaching than that which surfaced as a result of the Watergate break-in in the US.

[7] Eva Bartlett, ‘Killed in Turkey: No investigation two years after suspicious death of American journalist Serena Shim’, The Duran, 20-10-2016