Demanding The Impossible: About Resistance

By Sylvia Lawson

Combining elements of fiction, history, reportage and analysis, Sylvia Lawson examines the way the spirit of wartime resistance resurfaced in Paris in the insurrection of May 1968, when a rare unity of intellectuals and industrial workers woke a complacent society.

She chronicles moments of resistance: the story of intrepid Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered for her opposition to the Russian oppression of Chechnya; the highly contentious Northern Territory Intervention and Aboriginal dispossession; East Timorese and West Papuan resistance to Indonesian domination.

Resistance is about more than protest in the streets; it's about writing and art-making, music and filming, and not least about the way ordinary people keep going.

As the Arab Spring unfolds and the Occupy Wall Street initiative has spread round the world, a resistant tradition has been actively inherited: the right to protest and rebel against greed and injustice, to claim public space, to recreate the active, convivial city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Feb 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780522860337

Book preview

Sylvia Lawson is one of Australia’s most acute and eloquent cultural and political essayists. Her work includes the prizewinning collection How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia, The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship and the novel The Outside Story, which is centred on the Sydney Opera House. She is currently film critic for the online and print journal Inside Story.

demanding the impossible title page.pdf

Soyons réalistes, demandons l’impossible

(Get real—demand the impossible)

Student poster, Paris, May 1968

For Frances Peters-Little

(of the Kamilaroi and Uralarai peoples)

who kept on telling me I should write it

Contents

At the Writers’ Festival, May 2006

From the Verandah

Summertime, Here

Then and There: Lessons from the Dark Years

Out There

East Timor: Questions of Intelligence

For Both Sides of the Arafura Sea

That Wild Democracy

At the Writers’ Festival, May 2007

Notes on Sources

Acknowledgements

At the Writers’ Festival, May 2006

Had she lived longer, would the memories of her few days in Sydney have been held so vividly? In fact yes, said those who met her at the time: ‘she was always special’, even in the framework of that festival’s crowded programme, with dissident writers thick on the ground. They were there from Iraq, from Nigeria, from Brazil, Indonesia and Israel, all with credible histories of writing in the teeth of censorship, against the dominant order. Writing under threat is a lot of what literary festivals are about; it’s not a matter of wheeling in Trojan horses, sheltering politics under literary cloaks. The political domain is everywhere, overhanging; the literary world must display its credentials.

Thus at that festival Anna Politkovskaya—a beautiful woman, broad-browed and open-eyed, very youthful at forty-eight—was highly in demand by the media. She wasn’t a literary novelist, and not even, in her own account, a journalist; insistently, she called herself a reporter: ‘I live in the present, noting down what I see’, but also: ‘My notes are written for the future. They are the testimony of the innocent victims of the new Chechen war, which is why I record all the detail I can.’ Without inhibition, the detail included her own emotional and ethical responses. Reportage turns into true stories and essays, and the reporter becomes, deservedly, a literary figure. As the West perceives her, she carries the inheritance of Solzhenitsyn and Grossmann.

And she had her own record as a resistant, even beyond her major role in reporting from the devastation in Chechnya. In 2002, she had played an honourable part as a negotiator in the siege of the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow; there she ran a gamut, ferrying food and drink for the hostages, facing down the Chechen gunmen. She would tell others later how she carried guilt for the many who died in the theatre, those she had been unable to save. In early September 2004, she was trying to reach Beslan, where hundreds of schoolchildren and their teachers were held hostage in a school, again by rebels. The Russian authorities did all they could to stop her from going; she got a flight on her third attempt, and then, en route, she was handed a cup of poisoned tea. After drinking it she collapsed into a coma, and was taken off the plane in Rostov-on-Don. Later, on one of her many visits to Chechnya, a group of Russian military officers held her for three days in a pit, without food or water, threatening her with rape. She got out, and made it to a conference of Reporters Without Borders in Vienna; there she insisted, as she did everywhere, that she wasn’t the only journalist under threat.

With all that in mind, she told Antony Loewenstein, in a long interview for the online journal New Matilda, that she hadn’t the slightest regret about choosing journalism, although—as she also told her audiences—her life was in danger in Moscow. She remained, he thought, ‘calm and determined’. She also told him that from the outset her parents had taught her that she must find a way of doing some good in the world, of seeking to make a difference; thus, for her, journalism was first and always an ethical path. (As it may well be for many Western practitioners, but with them it goes unspoken; for others, careerism supervenes.)

With four sessions in the festival programme, and interviews lined up, she had little time to spare in Sydney; but from her room at the Intercontinental, looking out over gardens and water, she said she was on holiday. She carried with her the tragedy of Chechnya, the gloom, poverty and corruption of the Russia she knew, but she also knew how to live; she could relax, talk easily about families and children and enjoy the place she was in. If, as some claimed later, she was somewhat righteous in her chosen obsessions, consciously superior in her separateness from other journalists, it didn’t show in Sydney. She went jogging in the gardens in the mornings, and one sunny day she was taken on a launch trip round the harbour. From the boat she looked at the waterside suburbs, and said ‘It must be wonderful to live in a decent country.’

Her English was hesitant; she spoke in Russian, with her interpreter Ludmila Stern translating. In the sessions it was a difficult job for Ludmila, experienced as she is; Anna’s thinking emerged in a stream of Russian, with constant, darting parentheses and tangents, and in the panel sessions it was also important to convey other speakers’ meanings to Anna. Across the language barrier she transmitted passion, energy and a total commitment; between the political and the personal there seemed to be no division. She was concerned mainly with telling us that despite all we might have heard of glasnost and perestroika from the Gorbachev period, Russia was nonetheless sinking back into Stalinism; that Putin, whatever his claims to democratic policy, is in fact an autocrat and a tyrant for whom ordinary citizens don’t count; that human rights are trampled, that corruption thrives: ‘We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it’s total servility to Putin.’

The Anna who spoke to us with all that urgency didn’t want the focus on herself, and she had made this clear each time she was given another prestigious award: the Participant in Battles Medal, the Lettre Ulysses Award, the Olof Palme Prize, the Golden Pen from the Russian Union of Journalists, the Freedom of Expression Award of the Index on Censorship among others. She sought above everything to make us, and the world, know of the unconscionable suffering in Chechnya, the reasons for the Dubrovka theatre siege and for the mass killing in Beslan. She said that Russia could not

wait for another thaw to come our way from the Kremlin, as happened under Gorbachev … and neither is the West going to help. It barely reacts to Putin’s ‘anti-terrorist’ policies, and finds much about today’s Russia entirely to its taste: the vodka, the caviar, the gas, the oil, the dancing bears …

In the prevailing climate, she argued, humble citizens had no rights. In the army, the officer class despised, trampled down and abandoned ordinary soldiers. Politkovskaya told stories like that of Nina Levurka—poor, heavy, old and ill—sitting day after day waiting to be told how she might retrieve the body of her soldier son Pavel, killed on a distant battlefront. No one brought her food or drink; no one would tell her anything, until finally she was shown a skull she could identify as Pavel’s. Reporting from Chechnya from July 1999 to January 2001, Politkovskaya worked with the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers and found scores of stories like Nina’s; there was no respect or concern for the disabled, no help for parents left to care indefinitely for crippled sons. Mothers and sisters everywhere lived out the myth of Antigone: waiting for news, looking for the bodies, finding them unburied, maimed, burnt, dishonoured. Young soldiers like Pavel, who had idealised the army, were treated like slaves; some killed themselves. Through the army and the much-hated Federal Security Bureau, successor to the KGB, Putin re-established autocracy.

The picture isn’t always worth a thousand words: in the micro-movies on YouTube you can glimpse the citizens of Grozny fleeing, the zooming helicopters, tanks, gutted buildings. In Politkovskaya’s reportage, and in her speech, we could find history, analysis, the atrocities unfolded in narrative and, more than anything, her passion to make things known. With Chechnya, she said, she lived in frustration because the world simply didn’t care; she had travelled Europe speaking on it, but everywhere she got ‘only polite Western applause’ when she told her audiences that people were continuing to die in Chechnya every day. It was, she said, an unbelievable worldwide betrayal: ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a little more than half a century old, has fallen in the second Chechen war.’

Pursuing that understanding, Politkovskaya walked a fine line alone; there was a sense in which she wasn’t taking sides. She found good men among the military, as she did among Chechen citizens; she dealt as she must with Putin’s own cohort; she acknowledged barbarous atrocities on the Chechnyan side as well. But in almost every report, she and Novaya Gazeta were uncovering the lies told by Moscow and the military chiefs: for example, the official story that certain aged and frail citizens had been moved to safety away from the firing lines, when they had in fact been abandoned, without food or medicine, in a vulnerable shelter. Stories like Nina Levurka’s, of destitute and powerless women in refugee camps where, if they had no money to pay bribes, they would get no heating and no food for their children. The reports make tough reading for Russia-watchers who had clung through twenty years to the hope that, post-Gorbachev, the clock could not be entirely wound back. And perhaps not—today the dissidents are abroad and active in organisations like Memorial—but one wonders that Politkovskaya stayed alive as long as she did.

Having barely heard until now of that small, landlocked Russian republic, her listeners tried to get clear, if clarity was possible, on the battles within and around it. They went home, took magnifying glasses to globes and atlases, and considered why imperial Russia wanted Chechnya as well—but Politkovskaya had told them that too: control of the oil pipeline running from the Caspian sea through to Georgia. They read about her on Wikipedia, discovered that she once wrote a thesis on the revolutionary poet Marina Tsvetaeva, and said: This girl was game for anything, taking on the most tortured of all literary lives, and poetry that was terrifying, like Dickinson’s and Rilke’s. Will anyone translate that thesis?

At the end of each session, she sat at the book table with Ludmila, signing copies of A Dirty War and Putin’s Russia. I was in the queue, when I was distracted by someone with a question for me; by the time that conversation was over, Anna and Ludmila had left. I bought the books, but they don’t carry her signature and I didn’t meet her even for a moment. Small, symbolic losses, but I regret them indefinitely.

She returned to Moscow and to her daughter Vera, who was then pregnant; Vera said later that in those months Anna had concentrated on family life, looking forward to her grandchild. But she came back also to Novaya Gazeta and the next piece of work, investigating the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, then on his way, with Putin’s backing, to the presidency of his republic. There were and are a multitude of charges against Kadyrov, a Muslim leader who forced women to wear the veil, supported honour killings and was said to have been involved in systematic brutality involving the frequent abduction, rape, torture and murder of his opponents. Some believe that he was involved in the pursuit of Politkovskaya, who was caught up again in the ruling anxiety which her Sydney listeners could barely believe in, a life in which her son Ilya had her car checked frequently for bombs; where her informants had to work through intermediaries in secret places.

She was urged to take on a bodyguard, but did not do so, relying on the security system in the apartment block. On 7 October 2006, it was breached; her killer knew the code. She had come in from shopping for herself and Vera; the supermarket cameras had registered two people following her as she moved through the store. She was found dead in the lift, killed by three gunshots to her body; then, dead already, she was shot in the head. The Makarov pistol, said to be the gun of choice for contract killings, and shell casings were left beside her.

There was immediate international outcry. Putin said nothing for three days, then condemned the crime, affirmed that the killer must be found and also claimed that despite her fame Politkovskaya’s influence had been ‘insignificant’. Mikhail Gorbachev—who, it’s said, was keeping his head down in those days—said the killing was ‘a strike against the democratic press, against the whole country, against all of us’. Flowers were massed outside the apartment building; at the funeral, more than a thousand people walked past the open coffin.

In May in Sydney, all that lay ahead. Then, Antony Loewenstein was particularly well placed to interview Politkovskaya. Following several anti-Zionist articles, and the appearance of his book My Israel Question, the young Jewish journalist did not face death threats, but he did get a whole flood of vitriolic hate mail for his criticism of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians and the occupation of the Palestinian territories. Like Anna, he was treading a fine line through a political minefield, working to show that acknowledgement of the Palestinian cause did not amount to anti-Semitism, or turn him and other anti-Zionists into ‘self-hating Jews’.

In their stories, as in those I have followed here, resistance has been powered by the journalistic obsession. Others, less privileged, become students, unaccredited detectives. Not counting themselves heroic, they too are resistants, driven by the most confused and uncomfortable of the citizen’s emotions: shame for one’s own country. Living with that, they must also meet the claims of everyday life; not with acquiescence, but in accommodation, as they called it once upon a time in France.

From the Verandah

September 2005

Going to Alice Springs, I always try for a window seat. An hour northwest of Sydney the checkerboard of paddocks—dark and lighter greens, tan, chocolate—begins yielding to great areas of changing reds and browns, no more fences. There are dark twisting veins, rivers with no gleam of water, straight threads of road crossing orange-coloured earth, then the sand-drifts curving away in long, parallel ridges.

When the trolley comes past, the woman next to me passes a water bottle and asks if I’m going to Alice for a holiday. ‘Just visiting,’ I say, and then she asks ‘You like Alice?’

Without thinking I say ‘Yes, I think it’s a pretty interesting place; how about you?’

‘I work there but nah, I don’t like it. Might be interesting but it’s a terrible angry town if you ask me. Too many murders.’

She’s right; it’s one a month, perhaps more. A beautiful town, a sad and angry town, with history visible, palpable on its streets. I remember night-time scenes in Todd Mall, people weaving about, a desperate woman pulling strings of wooden beads from round her own neck, calling out hopelessly, trying to sell them to anyone who passed. I think of an unkempt artist drifting into the immaculate spaces of the gallery where his paintings are sold, calling loudly for another bunch of dollars—which maybe they owe him, maybe not. I remember a gallery-owner going out of her way to assure me that in fact Aboriginal artists do better on percentages than white ones; ‘but you know,’ she said, ‘they can’t manage their money.’ In cream silk and pearls, she was like a city boutique manager, and there was clearly no point in trying to defend a culture of kinship and sharing. The splendid abstract I was looking at—too expensive for me, but probably undervalued on the world market—might buy the next short-lived, second-hand Toyota for the artist’s home community.

My neighbour reflects, and asks ‘So why’d you reckon it’s interesting?’

I don’t actually want to talk; I’ve got some reading to do. A bit recklessly, I say I think it’s not bad to have one tourist place in Australia where visitors see a lot of black faces as well as white ones on the street.

‘Yeah,’ she says equably enough, ‘but like, you couldn’t say the Aborigines and the white people really know each other.’ She doesn’t reckon they do, not really. It’s a case of parallel universes, she reckons, and I can’t do much but concur, low-key, and open my briefcase.

What she’s just said, wryly enough, is fully in line with my reading matter. My friend Dennis McDermott, an Aboriginal poet and psychologist, has handed over some of his unpublished essays, and the one I pick up first is about exactly that, the chasm of non-communication between black and white. He uses the confronting title ‘Abo-Proof Fence’, and discusses ‘the barbed wire that ran through Australian society for much of the last two hundred years’: a fence built of ignorance and amnesia.

It’s nearly forty years on from the landmark moments: the 1967 referendum which changed the Constitution in favour of Aborigines; then the legendary Stanner lectures of 1968, exposing and shattering what William Stanner called ‘the Great Australian Silence’. McDermott acknowledges that much in race relations has changed through those decades, but argues that the heavy penalties of dispossession ‘still take up little space in Australia’s collective memory’.

He wants a history, taught and circulated into general acceptance, which charts those penalties. He wants classroom-level knowledges to encompass the banal, everyday discriminations—

the rental property that vanished when they saw your face, the exclusion from school when a critical mass of parents objected, the forced removals of whole communities as late as the mining-mad sixties … the plethora of pass-laws, dog-tags and permits to travel, to marry across colour-lines, to scratch yourself …

Dennis wasn’t writing about Alice Springs, but ‘the plethora of pass-laws, dog-tags and permits’ was probably more punitive there than anywhere. The odd thing is that when you’re in Alice, listening to older An-aŋu people—elders guiding tours, telling stories to schoolkids—you won’t hear much, from people quite old enough to remember, about the weighty paraphernalia of prohibitions which ruled their lives into the 1960s and ’70s, times when designated ‘half-castes’ could enter the town, while ‘full-bloods’—often called ‘wards’ because of their alleged ignorance and incompetence—could not. But they still understand Alice Springs, Mparntwe, as a spread of sacred places, and you might hear how some of those have been honoured, some transgressed, like that place where Barrett Drive, on the eastern side, cut through