On the anniversary of the fall of Twin Towers

Today on the anniversary of 9/11 people will be remembering where they were when they heard the terrible news.

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Last week I was chatting on the phone to my mate Lauren about progress on the photography book we are working on, when I absent-mindedly turned on the TV and saw a plane flying into the World Trade Centre in New York. Twenty minutes later Lauren and her boyfriend (who had no electricity in their own home due to the daily black-outs), were sitting on our sofa watching the carnage going on in America as if it were the latest Bruce Willis action movie – it somehow didn’t seem real. We silently sipped cold beers as our generator belched black smoke and provided a background roar for the disturbing images of the deaths of thousands as the Twin Towers collapsed before our very eyes. Next we saw the smashed Pentagon and dusty, fraught American civil servants in blind panic.

Theories are bouncing around, but America seemed to have made up its mind pretty much straight away. Islamic Fundamentalists. I suppose when you have the
likes of Bin Laden threatening to crush The West almost on a weekly basis, it is not surprising that he may be a chief suspect. And with people like Mr S Hussein
allegedly saying “jolly good job, whoever did it” and the media showing pictures of Palestinians throwing a party in Jerusalem to celebrate (even though the pictures were allegedly taken a few years ago for another occasion), the world seems quite happy to blame Muslims. Something inside me hopes that they are wrong. I hope that it was American white supremacists, perhaps put out by the interracial nature of the Big Apple. Or that it was school kids from Texas who
masterminded this mass murder after a lifetime of being bullied and collecting guns. I have to take my hat off to the organisation of it; it’s quite an achievement to get two large passenger jets to crash into one specific spot in the heart of New York. It puts the recent Tamil Tiger attack on the airport here in the shade. But alas whoever did it has not owned up to it, which to me is the absolute evil of evils. I might get it if you have a cause to highlight, if you are fighting FOR something, if you give a reason for attacking your so-called enemy, however harsh. But the only reason for this seems to be just “wanting people dead”. I don’t think it will harm the economy so much, if that was the plan. If the plan was
to polarise America and drag out fundamentalist evil in the USA, then that seems to be working. They are demanding blood. I honestly don’t think that the death of Bin Laden would be enough for the people from the land of plenty. I think they honestly want to see a few thousand innocent civilians dead in the same way that they have suffered. And Mr Bush is massing his troops and planes and boats and missiles and aiming them at Afghanistan, which surely has little left to bomb really. I am sure that they will miss Bin Laden who is probably
sitting in a James Bond style underground cavern of steel or floating above us in a space ship quietly chuckling, in his leather chair, stroking his pussy cat with
a scarred hand – if he even exists at all.

In the 1990’s the hip-hop song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” by KRS-One was a favourite of mine. How wrong they were, it is unavoidable today. The
suffering of the American people is being pumped into our heads every second of the day via CNN, World Service and good old tabloid Sky News who are desperate to keep the momentum going on this story and wishing Mr Bush would hurry up and attack the Afghans now so their audience figures are maintained. And via the internet, alternative stories are being circulated; that of media misrepresentation (of the Palestinian people), that of the plight of the Afghan people, and of the ego of Mr Bush. I wonder if we would think the world a different place if other disasters were as personalised as this? With face to face accounts from Kurdish refugees or accounts from those who rescued people with their bare hands from the rubble of an Iranian earthquake? What is clear and what almost seems to be desired by many is world war three – the West versus Islam.

Some Sri Lankans here are going mad about Nostradamus and I can’t tell you the number of extracts from that drunken madman’s ramblings that have ended
up in my email inbox this week. Odd that a country which won’t make a move unless the stars are auspiciously aligned, has spent the last 19 years in civil war. And they, like the Israelis, align themselves with the Americans and say that they have personal experience with similar terrorist attacks. But no, actually this is very, very different. The terrorism they have known has a voice, a voice which comes from poverty, violence, and oppression and – on a day-to-day level –
from a lack of respect and lack of tolerance of diversity. America’s crime has been arrogance. It’s like the smart, strong, rich kid at school getting a good kicking by a
handful of misfits. But it is still just wrong.

Everyone’s emotions have been highly charged. I wonder how our one member of staff who is a Muslim feels having the finger pointed at her, as part of the global Islamic Nation. I certainly feel no differently towards the many Muslim visa applicants who this week have produced more forged documents than you could wave a stick at, but do I detect a note of condemnation in my colleague’s voices?

The day after we saw “US UNDER ATTACK” on our TVs, a man broke into the High Commission grounds and – with tears in his eyes – attempted to lower our flag to half mast. We do, of course, like with everything, have to wait for authority from Her Majesty to lower a flag, but he did not understand. It was only after Big John the Visa Manager had wrestled him to the ground that we learned that he was the Methodist minister from the church down the street. The US Embassy next door lowered their flag soon after this incident and on getting
the flash telegram from London we did the same to ours, to the Minister’s relief.

In the days following the September 11 th attack, it was clear to me that something equally nasty would befall, well, Afghanistan, clearly. And so it did. But that is another tale for another time.

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25 years on and the world is a different place. Afghanistan was taken. Many lives lost, as I had suspected, and then she was sadly handed back to the Taliban. Bin Laden was discovered in Pakistan and a million conspiracy theories were born around that.

A few months after 9/11 my youngest child was born. And five years later I found myself serving in Iraq as Head of Press & Public Affairs at the British Consulate in Basra. I left diplomacy 9 years after 9/11 – and I chose to study a Masters in Fine Art. My creative practice focussed on conspiracy and the media and I became fascinated by the work of French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard. He had lots to say about 9/11 and “media-packaged moments” (as well as the Gulf War). He is definitely worth looking up on a day like today.