L.P. Hartley told us that the past is a foreign country, and that they do things differently there. The recent past is a strangely alien place, at once almost familiar and yet so very different. But in 1991, they weren't doing things that differently to us after all.
Gulf War
It was billed as the first war of the New World Order- a rogue state was fought by a coalition, under a UN mandate, to ensure that international justice was maintained. The war was fought with smart weapons, helping to ensure that casualties were kept to a minimum. The war was fought to the letter of the UN's authorisation, and not a moment longer.
This is all a bit neat. In reality, the high-tech violence unleashed against Iraq by the US-led coalition in 1991 was utterly brutal. Civilians were killed. The Atlantic Alliance had spent the last half a century devising weapons designed to be used in a final struggle with the Eastern Bloc. When these weapons were finally used, they turned out to be devastating. There are accounts of bodies melting and pooling as fat in facilities hit by the bombing. The Iraqi army was so weakened that, when the invasion came, the land war lasted only 100 hours. There are serious questions as to whether or not such disproportionate use of force constituted a war crime.
The Gulf War of 1991 still stands as an excellent example of multilateralism. George Bush Senior put together a very impressive coalition of diverse countries, under a UN banner, to maintain international order. They did the job the UN had given them, and then they went home.
But, the longer term effects cast a much darker shadow. The Gulf War marked a transitional point. Saddam Hussein's Iraq had been an ally of the West during the 1980s, a counterpoint against the Iranians. Now Saddam was an enemy. His actions were the concerns of the rest of the world. The road to 2003 was already open, even if it wasn't yet clear.
And, barely discernible at the time, it put the USA in serious danger. When Iraq first invaded Kuwait, the Saudi monarchy received an offer from a leader of the mujahideen, the Islamic-inspired rebels who had just fought the USSR in Afghanistan. He offered his men to defend the holy sites in Saudi Arabia, and expel Iraq from Kuwait. That way, no non-Muslims would set foot in the sacred lands of the Prophet. The Saudis, faced with this rabble or the world's sole remaining superpower, chose the USA. The mujahideen leader was outraged, and directed his anger at America. His name? Osama bin Laden.
Iraqi vehicles destroyed along the Highway of Death by Allied airstrikes
Uprisings Against Saddam
If the Gulf War was an example of multilateralism at its finest, then the actions of the world in the aftermath of the war are less good. With his armed forces shattered, and his authority severely reduced, Saddam was gravely weakened by the Gulf War. For those inside Iraq who had suffered during his reign, they saw this as their best chance to overthrow the wretched dictator who had made their lives a misery. Egged on by the Voice of America radio broadcasts, a strange collection of Shia Arabs, Kurds, left-wing dissidents, and disillusioned soldiers, all rose in revolt against Saddam.
At first it seemed like they had succeeded. Within a few days, the Iraqi government controlled only four of Iraq's 18 regions. Millions of Iraqis had abandoned the regime; even Saddam's secret police fired their weapons in joy at his presumed overthrow.
Saddam may have been down, but he was not out. The deal with the UN forces that had ended the Gulf War enabled the Iraqis to continue using helicopters. Officially, this was to transport personnel around, given that the Allied air attacks had crippled Iraq's ground infrastructure. But Saddam used those same helicopters to suppress the rebellions. He unleashed his crack Republican Guard troops against the rebels, crushing first the Shia, then the Marsh Arabs, before finally turning on the Kurds.
The Kurds were terrified; it was only three years since Saddam had killed 5000 Kurds with chemical weapons, at Halabja. Pretty much the entire population of Kurdistan fled into the mountains, and the peshmerga prepared to make a final stand against the advancing Iraqi army.
It never came. The West belatedly realised what it had done, and, under pressure from the UK, created no fly zones in northern and southern Iraq. The Kurds were saved, and ultimately created a stable, prosperous and democratic autonomous region.
But for the rest of Iraq, the uprisings cost them dear. Thousands were killed as Saddam reimposed control, and the ancient way of life of the Marsh Arabs was ended forever, with the draining of the marshes.
The Iraqi people took a clear message; the rest of the world was not interested in helping to rescue them from Saddam. So when in 2003, the Americans and British rolled in yet again, the population was not grateful. They remembered how the West had abandoned them in their hour of need. We are still reaping the effects of failing to depose Saddam when the Iraqis wanted, rather than when George W Bush wanted.
Iraqi Kurds fleeing into the mountains
Maastricht Treaty
In the winter of 1991, the leaders of the European Community went to the Dutch town of Maastricht. They were there to discuss fundamental changes to the institution that they belonged to. Since it's foundation in the 1950s, the EC had been focused primarily on economic integration. There were some political structures, such as the European Parliament. But it was primarily to do with trade. Not for nothing was it known in English as the Common Market.
At Maastricht, all that changed. The document which emerged from that meeting was the Treaty on European Union. It set out plans for the creation of a single European currency, and committed the signatories to work together to develop common approaches to law enforcement, foreign policy, criminal justice, and social policy. What emerged from Maastricht was the EU that, for better or for worse, we all know today.
Even at the time, there was a recognition by the UK government that this would not go down well with British voters. And so John Major, in an incredible bit of negotiating, was able to secure a UK opt-out from the single currency, and to make the social affairs part an entirely separate agreement, which the UK then refused to sign. But this was not enough. Getting the Treaty ratified in Parliament nearly destroyed the Conservative Party, and it looks years to recover in the eyes of the voters. But above all, Maastricht made the issue of Euroscepticism a mainstream, acceptable opinion in the UK. A host of groups emerged to oppose the Treaty. One, the Anti-Federalist League, later morphed into UKIP. Had the Conservative party not chosen to endorse the Treaty, maybe the young Nigel Farage would never have quit the party in favour of the AFL.
The EU as we know it was created in Maastricht in December 1991, but the seeds of Brexit were planted as well.
BBC News, during the Maastricht summit, Dec 1991
End of the USSR
I've already discussed this here, so I won't go into it too much. Anyway, it was the fall of the Berlin Wall, in November 1989, that marked the real end of the Cold War, and which ushered in the era of American geopolitical dominance that we are still living in (debatable, see below). But for neatness sake, the end of the Soviet Union should probably get a look in.
Rodney King arrest
It must have seemed like any other crime committed that night. Late on the evening of March 3rd, 1991, the California Highway Patrol tried to stop a vehicle. When the car failed to stop, police gave chase, at speeds of up to 115mph. When the car was eventually stopped, the occupants were arrested.
What happened next shocked the United States. The last man out of the car was the driver, Rodney King. He was tasered, and repeatedly beaten by five LAPD officers, even after he had clearly ceased to be any kind of threat. The entire incident was captured on a camcorder. The officers claimed that they believed King to be on PCP, but no trace of it was ever detected, and his behaviour didn't fit this claim. Even amongst law enforcement officers, there was outrage at the behaviour of the police.
In April 1992, the police officers were acquitted on charges of assault. This was the cue for an outbreak of severe rioting in Los Angeles. Over five days and nights, a total of 55 people died, as rioting, looting, and fire fights engulfed Los Angeles. 2000 people were injured, and more than 11,000 were injured. In desperation, the California National Guard, and parts of the regular US Army, were deployed on the streets to restore law and order.
In terms of civil rights, we have come a long way. But the Rodney King beatings, and subsequent riots, show just as clearly as Ferguson and all the other tragedies that we still have a long way to go.
Footage from the arrest of Rodney King
World Wide Web goes public
Tim Berners-Lee deserves that knighthood. In 1991, he transformed the world we lived in forever. Over the past decade, Berners-Lee, who worked at CERN, had been designing and building "a large hypertext database with typed links." By late 1990, he had built an internal version at CERN. And in January 1991, the first Web servers outside of CERN were switched on.
This was not the start of the internet; that had been in existence since the late 1960s. What Tim Berners-Lee was offering was a brand new interface for presenting, storing and accessing information on the internet. One of the early name proposals for the World Wide Web was The Information Mine. Which gives you a pretty good idea of what they were going for.
Pretty much every single way you interact with the internet is through the World Wide Web, from checking your bank account, checking Facebook, emails (often, I will give you this is the last major exception), checking the news, even reading this post.
In future, when historians look back at our age, I reckon they will focus on this moment as one of the major turning points in history. We cannot now go back to a Webless world. The world as it existed before January 1991 is gone forever, separated from us by the colossus of the World Wide Web.
First ever web server, located at CERN
Birmingham Six released
Terrorism is a horrific thing. It kills and maims indiscriminately. It brings fear and panic to the society that it seeks to undermine. It turns the state against its citizens, and people against each other.
On November 21st 1974, between 20:15 and 20:30, 21 people were murdered in Birmingham, when bombs detonated in two pubs in the city centre. 182 people were badly injured. In terms of fatalities, it was the worst attack on mainland Britain during the Troubles. The police had received a coded warning from the Provisional IRA, but it was far too vague, and far too late.
The police had an early breakthrough. Six men, all known to an IRA member who had died trying to plant a bomb in Coventry earlier in the year, were all arrested trying to leave Birmingham not long after the attacks. They were all Northern Irish, all Roman Catholic, and were actually travelling to the funeral of the man who had died in Coventry, a fact they did not mention to the police who questioned them in Morecambe. In 1975, they were all convicted on 21 counts of murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The problem was, they were innocent. All six had been subject to threats, beatings, threatened with dogs, and in one case forced into a mock execution. Under these circumstances, some had signed statements which had been written for them. The forensic evidence that they had handled explosives was extremely shaky.
As soon as they were imprisoned, the Birmingham Six began a long fight to clear their names. Their first attempt to appeal was rejected. In 1985, ITV's World in Action broadcast a documentary which seriously challenged the case against the men; as World in Action's Chris Mullin, later a Labour MP, claimed to have spoken to the actual bombers, it hardly seemed likely that the right people were in prison. Amazingly, this was not enough for the Court of Appeal, and in 1988 the men's convictions were upheld.
But the cat was out of the bag, and over the next three years momentum built behind the campaign to free the men. Eventually, in 1991 the case went back to the Court of Appeal. The Crown made the unprecedented step of not opposing the appeal, as it realised the convictions were clearly unsafe. The judges ruled that the men were free to leave.
As a result of this, and similar appalling miscarriages of justice, a Royal Commission was setup, which recommended the creation the Criminal Cases Review Commission, to examine convictions and appeals. But that is why this is not a significant moment.
The enduring significance of this event, and those like it, is the realisation that terrorism is a challenge we cannot get wrong. Six men, whose only crime was to have known a person who had broken the law, had spent 16 years in prison. But that reasoning, I know people who should be in prison. Myself included. They had been failed by the police and the judiciary. As they languished in their cells, the IRA's West Midlands unit was free to continue its attacks. And the trust between citizens and the state, which is crucial to defeat terrorism, was undermined, at least for some.
Today, we face the same challenges. There have been calls to give more powers to the Security Services to intrude on our lives, to allow longer detention without trial, to allow evidence and even whole trials to be heard in secret, or without a jury. Will that really help make us safer? In 1991, the answer was clear for all to see.
The Birmingham Six, along with MP Chris Mullin, outside the Court of Appeal after their convictions were overturned
Premier League is launched
Before 1991, if you'd used the words 'Premier League', people would have given you a strange look. Was it a type of beer?
English football was in a bit of a nadir in the early 1990s. The 1980s had seen the game blighted by hooliganism, falling attendances, static revenues. Many top players were moving abroad. What was even worse, in the eyes of the best clubs at least, was that the money acquired for the television broadcasts of the First Division was split evenly across the Football League.
As the 1991 season drew to a close, the five top clubs in the First Division (Arsenal, Manchester United, Spurs, Liverpool, and Everton) pounced. They signed an agreement that, after one more season of the Football League, they would break away and create a 'Premier League.' This was billed as an attempt to improve the quality of football, both in the top flight, and for the national team. The clubs in this Premier League would be able to keep all of the money from TV to themselves, instead of having to share it with clubs that no one had ever heard of.
In some respects, the Premier League succeeded spectacularly. The amount of money in football has increased dramatically, with clubs regularly trading players for hundreds of millions of pounds. Fit, young adults are now paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a week. People who had been stars beforehand were transformed into superstars, celebrities, whose actions off the pitch were as closely followed as those on it. At the same time, football was becoming more acceptable again. A game which had been associated with the working classes, and with violence, was being gentrified. Attendances rose, and so did ticket prices. Foreign investors became attracted at the sponsorship and ownership possibilities of English clubs. Soon, even previously minor English clubs had followers across the world, all supporting their favourite local Manchester United.
But, the much vaunted improvement in national football never followed. The English team continues to be the source of many jokes. Neither did it do much good for the teams that resigned en masse from the First Division; only nine of them are still in the Premier League (at the time of writing), and four of them have sunk to the third tier of English football.
Without the Premier League, most of this would doubtless have happened. But the cult of elite football was cemented by that decision.
The 1992-93 Premier League teams
US Presidential Longshot Bid Announced
Finally, it was in the autumn of 1991 that speculation began in earnest for the US presidential election in 1992. For the Republicans, their candidate was easy. George Bush had sky-high approval ratings over his handling of the Gulf War and the end of the Cold War.
This had an effect on the Democrats too. With Bush seemingly a shoo in for a second term, many high profile Democrats chose to bide their time. By 1996, the Republicans would have controlled the White House for 15 years. Whoever emerged as Bush's successor would be much easier to defeat. This meant that big names such as Mario Cuomo and Al Gore decided to sit the race out. But some decided to give it a shot in 1992. They were generally perceived as second rate candidates, people no one had heard of, who were entering to give the appearance of a contest.
One such man announced his bid in October 1991. There was little in his favour. He was the governor of a tiny Southern state, which hadn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976. He'd been in office there since 1979, with two years out; he was actually the Southern governor mentioned in Jimmy Carter's malaise speech. He'd given the keynote address to the 1988 Democratic convention. It had been long, rambling, and bored many delegates. When he finally said 'In conclusion,' he got a round of cheers. The governor was going to have been a candidate himself in 1988. However, at the last minute, he withdrew. Rumours swirled that his personal life contained past affairs and mistresses that would sink his candidacy.
But in 1991, Bill Clinton threw himself into the race many said he would never win. One of his biggest supporters, and best advisers, was his wife. Back in 2016, she is now a stone's throw away from sitting in the Oval Office herself. Truly, we are still living in 1991.
Hillary, Chelsea and Bill Clinton, as he announced his bid for the White House, October 1991
No comments:
Post a Comment