Emails from the Edge Read Online Free
Author: Ken Haley
flaunting it.
While none of this altered the attitude of my fault-finding immediate superior, and I remained on notice that my work must improve or I would be for the high jump, those days did engender a greater feeling among the staff of âweâre all in this togetherâ and that fed into a heightened sense of our workâs importance. I think each of us knew that these were defining days for Bahrain, the Gulf and the whole Middle East. Cliché though it is, we were living through history.
But this was one story you couldnât confine to a box or leave at work. Outside, everyone was talking about it constantly, in tones of subdued fear. I recall more than one dinner spoilt that month by hearing restaurant staff, Indians who invariably had other sideline businesses to run (video shops, often enough), bemoan the invasionâs ruinous impact on their livelihoods.
What did the locals fear might happen? That Kuwait might be just the opening skirmish in a rolling campaign that would proceed, like some unstoppable machine, wiping out more emirates as it gathered pace. At work we had a map on the wall, and anyone could see Bahrain was the next object in the juggernautâs path.
There was an element of overreaction in this, certainly, but the fear was regularly fed by Saddamâs broadcasts from Baghdad which called on the Shia populations (70 per cent of Bahrainis are Shia) to rise up and overthrow their âeffete rulersâ, as Saddam termed them, in Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. It was a fear that we who worked at the newspaper knew had the Bahraini authorities worried. Within a week of the invasion, the Ministry of Information had installed censors in our offices, and every scrap of copy had to be vetted to ensure it gave Saddam no pretext for extending his destructive war to this tiny island.
Our cocoon of invulnerability to the events that made up our daily news diet had been violated. The outside came streaming in, and no one could ignore for long the fact that our neighbourhood was now the focus of an anxious worldâs attention.
Ever since my schooldays I had thought of myself as lacking in physical courage. Schoolyard fights fascinated me, but only as an onlooker: the idea of participation and, yes, fear of the pain of being punched senseless were repugnant to me. I would run a mile.
Here and now, for the first time in my life, fleeing offended my sense of moral courage and even my sense of professional duty. After all, whatever passed, my winding road had brought me to the brink of events that had a mesmerising effect on the mind, an irresistible attraction for the inquisitive intellect. The thought dawned only slowly that sitting this close to the fire of history might singe me, might cost me life itself.
For the first few days after the invasion, the tension between staying and doing my professional duty (strained as relations with the increasingly distant and preoccupied management were) and fleeing was no contest at all. Staying won hands down.
This was the first all-consuming emergency of my life. I can see that now; all I knew then was that, instead of disengaging myself from an obvious source of rising anxiety, I was indulging my inner ânews junkieâ, watching and listening to developments from all the available media eighteen hours a day. The obsessive seemed rational: the more one knew, the better protected one would be against irrational fear, I told myself. What I failed to take into account was rational fear, what must follow when the mind could no longer pretend this was happening only to others. I was being brought face to face with the prospect that I might be caught up in the drama myself, with all that could mean: invading and merciless troops, violence, capture, enslavement. My mind began to race, like an overheated car radiator, and I found that in these most abnormal of times the cost of being a loner is that just when you most need a support
While none of this altered the attitude of my fault-finding immediate superior, and I remained on notice that my work must improve or I would be for the high jump, those days did engender a greater feeling among the staff of âweâre all in this togetherâ and that fed into a heightened sense of our workâs importance. I think each of us knew that these were defining days for Bahrain, the Gulf and the whole Middle East. Cliché though it is, we were living through history.
But this was one story you couldnât confine to a box or leave at work. Outside, everyone was talking about it constantly, in tones of subdued fear. I recall more than one dinner spoilt that month by hearing restaurant staff, Indians who invariably had other sideline businesses to run (video shops, often enough), bemoan the invasionâs ruinous impact on their livelihoods.
What did the locals fear might happen? That Kuwait might be just the opening skirmish in a rolling campaign that would proceed, like some unstoppable machine, wiping out more emirates as it gathered pace. At work we had a map on the wall, and anyone could see Bahrain was the next object in the juggernautâs path.
There was an element of overreaction in this, certainly, but the fear was regularly fed by Saddamâs broadcasts from Baghdad which called on the Shia populations (70 per cent of Bahrainis are Shia) to rise up and overthrow their âeffete rulersâ, as Saddam termed them, in Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. It was a fear that we who worked at the newspaper knew had the Bahraini authorities worried. Within a week of the invasion, the Ministry of Information had installed censors in our offices, and every scrap of copy had to be vetted to ensure it gave Saddam no pretext for extending his destructive war to this tiny island.
Our cocoon of invulnerability to the events that made up our daily news diet had been violated. The outside came streaming in, and no one could ignore for long the fact that our neighbourhood was now the focus of an anxious worldâs attention.
Ever since my schooldays I had thought of myself as lacking in physical courage. Schoolyard fights fascinated me, but only as an onlooker: the idea of participation and, yes, fear of the pain of being punched senseless were repugnant to me. I would run a mile.
Here and now, for the first time in my life, fleeing offended my sense of moral courage and even my sense of professional duty. After all, whatever passed, my winding road had brought me to the brink of events that had a mesmerising effect on the mind, an irresistible attraction for the inquisitive intellect. The thought dawned only slowly that sitting this close to the fire of history might singe me, might cost me life itself.
For the first few days after the invasion, the tension between staying and doing my professional duty (strained as relations with the increasingly distant and preoccupied management were) and fleeing was no contest at all. Staying won hands down.
This was the first all-consuming emergency of my life. I can see that now; all I knew then was that, instead of disengaging myself from an obvious source of rising anxiety, I was indulging my inner ânews junkieâ, watching and listening to developments from all the available media eighteen hours a day. The obsessive seemed rational: the more one knew, the better protected one would be against irrational fear, I told myself. What I failed to take into account was rational fear, what must follow when the mind could no longer pretend this was happening only to others. I was being brought face to face with the prospect that I might be caught up in the drama myself, with all that could mean: invading and merciless troops, violence, capture, enslavement. My mind began to race, like an overheated car radiator, and I found that in these most abnormal of times the cost of being a loner is that just when you most need a support
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