9/11 OMAGH... WHO IS REALLY STILL GRIEVING
9/11,Omagh... who is really still grieving?
I'm writing this piece on September 11. It's 19 minutes past seven in the morning. Outside, I can hear helicopters and police sirens. The President is in town and New Yorkers are getting ready for the biggest act of remembrance in US history since 2002.
Five years ago, passengers on American Airlines flight 11, the first of the two aircraft that would crash into the World Trade Center, were boarded and ready to go.
The hijackers were no doubt fastening their seatbelts for takeoff.
Those booked onto the second aircraft, United Airlines 175, were meanwhile gathered by the departure gate at Boston's Logan airport, waiting to be called. They drank coffee, bought newspapers or maybe just sat around yawning.
The hijackers would have been preoccupied. They had a lot on their minds. But I doubt they forgot to read a verse or two from the Holy Koran.
That was then. We all know what happened next. The world changed. But today, five years on, we have to ask, has it in any way changed for the better?
As you read these words, it is most likely September 13, two days on from the day of remembrance. You know - which I don't - how things went and what the President said and who promised what on the never-ending War on Terror.
All I know is that none of it alters the facts.
Two realities strike me. The first is that New York is divided into those, few in number, who regard 9/11 as the most sacred day in the calendar, and those, growing in numbers by the day, who weren't here on the day it happened and only know about it because of TV and the internet.
The second reality is that because of the terror unleashed that day, resulting in nearly 3,000 deaths, America declared Jihad on its enemies across the world. Afghanistan, the heartland of Al-Qaida, was occupied, but not subjugated. Then Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks, was invaded.
In both cases, nothing worthwhile was achieved. Afghanistan - as British forces have cause to know - remains a hotbed of resistance. The Taliban are back with a vengeance and winning support throughout the country. At the same time, Iraq has become chaotic and ungovernable - a perfect storm of civil unrest, in which some 150,000 people have perished since 2003.
If the cause was tragic, what about the effect? And when and how will it all end?
I have no answers to these questions. If I did, I would be a multimillionaire consultant in Washington. More to the point, nobody has the answers. Nobody. The war has achieved its own terrible momentum, without rhyme or reason, and those in charge blunder on, waiting for the day when they can pass on the baton to a new Administration.
But back to that first reality. I have written before about the 'families' - the wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters and cousins of those who died on 9/11. There are thousands of family members, and for them New York is a mausoleum, a living monument to their loved ones, and should remain so, possibly for ever.
On Monday, the names of those killed were due to be read out at a ceremony at the Ground Zero site, but I can't help feeling that the same list is recycled endlessly in the heads of the families. For them, the world has stood still since that day, five years ago, when the terrorists struck.
But then there is a second group of New Yorkers who weren't around for 9/11. I don't mean children five years old and younger; I mean the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals into the city from all over the world.
New York changes by the day. Hispanics stumble, exhausted, off coaches from Texas and points south; immigrants land at JFK from as far away as Eastern Europe, Russia and India.
Here in Brooklyn Heights, we are having our kitchen renovated - a task that is likely to last a month or more.
The two men from Mexico who removed our old cabinets and took away our mouldering appliances were living in Los Angeles in 2001, having recently crossed the border into the United States.
The two electricians who should arrive any moment now are from Poland and Serbia. They were still living in Warsaw and Belgrade when the Twin Towers fell.
For them, the sense of connection is not there. They can empathise, in the way that perhaps you, in Belfast, or Derry, or Portadown can empathise. But they weren't here; they didn't actually experience the horror.
It must be the same, on an infinitely smaller scale, in, say, Omagh, or Greysteel, or the Shankill Road. Omagh's outward scars are almost entirely gone. For the families of the 29 people killed by the Real IRA bomb, the pain continues to be deeply felt, but already a new generation is growing up for whom the outrage is merely a part of an unknown and unknowable past.
The memorial to the victims will always command respect, just as memorials to the dead of the two world wars command respect. But it is only families and friends who harbour the actual grief.
This is how it should be - how it must be. Life has to go on, and that means looking to the future more than to the past. It is one thing to demand justice.
That seems an absolute right. But to pretend that the future can only be determined by reference to the worst of the past leads invariably to a dead end.
America's War on Terror seems to me such a dead end. President George W Bush appears still to believe, against all the evidence, that he can somehow extirpate terrorism and remove his country's enemies from the face of the Earth.
It does not occur to him that new enemies will always arise so long as they continue to believe they have a cause worth dying for.
In Northern Ireland, we have at least begun to learn that lesson. There is talk, I believe, of a central memorial to the dead of the Troubles, which is right and proper. But, in spite of the inanities of the Orange Order and the Blanket Men, there is no deep-seated cult of commemoration.
To that extent, we have begun to liberate ourselves.
It is the same, apparently, in Serbia, where my electrician friend, who has just turned up. says that the fifth anniversary of the Nato bombing of Belgrade was marked on page three of the newspapers.
But in America, the old Irish adage, to hell with the future, let's get on with the past, has acquired a dangerous potency. Bush's War on Terror has become an obsession, with no end in sight.
It is one thing to be vigilant and look after your citizens, it is something else when that struggle for security takes on the qualities of Jihad.
So let us read the names of the dead and then let them rest in peace.
I'm writing this piece on September 11. It's 19 minutes past seven in the morning. Outside, I can hear helicopters and police sirens. The President is in town and New Yorkers are getting ready for the biggest act of remembrance in US history since 2002.
Five years ago, passengers on American Airlines flight 11, the first of the two aircraft that would crash into the World Trade Center, were boarded and ready to go.
The hijackers were no doubt fastening their seatbelts for takeoff.
Those booked onto the second aircraft, United Airlines 175, were meanwhile gathered by the departure gate at Boston's Logan airport, waiting to be called. They drank coffee, bought newspapers or maybe just sat around yawning.
The hijackers would have been preoccupied. They had a lot on their minds. But I doubt they forgot to read a verse or two from the Holy Koran.
That was then. We all know what happened next. The world changed. But today, five years on, we have to ask, has it in any way changed for the better?
As you read these words, it is most likely September 13, two days on from the day of remembrance. You know - which I don't - how things went and what the President said and who promised what on the never-ending War on Terror.
All I know is that none of it alters the facts.
Two realities strike me. The first is that New York is divided into those, few in number, who regard 9/11 as the most sacred day in the calendar, and those, growing in numbers by the day, who weren't here on the day it happened and only know about it because of TV and the internet.
The second reality is that because of the terror unleashed that day, resulting in nearly 3,000 deaths, America declared Jihad on its enemies across the world. Afghanistan, the heartland of Al-Qaida, was occupied, but not subjugated. Then Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks, was invaded.
In both cases, nothing worthwhile was achieved. Afghanistan - as British forces have cause to know - remains a hotbed of resistance. The Taliban are back with a vengeance and winning support throughout the country. At the same time, Iraq has become chaotic and ungovernable - a perfect storm of civil unrest, in which some 150,000 people have perished since 2003.
If the cause was tragic, what about the effect? And when and how will it all end?
I have no answers to these questions. If I did, I would be a multimillionaire consultant in Washington. More to the point, nobody has the answers. Nobody. The war has achieved its own terrible momentum, without rhyme or reason, and those in charge blunder on, waiting for the day when they can pass on the baton to a new Administration.
But back to that first reality. I have written before about the 'families' - the wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters and cousins of those who died on 9/11. There are thousands of family members, and for them New York is a mausoleum, a living monument to their loved ones, and should remain so, possibly for ever.
On Monday, the names of those killed were due to be read out at a ceremony at the Ground Zero site, but I can't help feeling that the same list is recycled endlessly in the heads of the families. For them, the world has stood still since that day, five years ago, when the terrorists struck.
But then there is a second group of New Yorkers who weren't around for 9/11. I don't mean children five years old and younger; I mean the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals into the city from all over the world.
New York changes by the day. Hispanics stumble, exhausted, off coaches from Texas and points south; immigrants land at JFK from as far away as Eastern Europe, Russia and India.
Here in Brooklyn Heights, we are having our kitchen renovated - a task that is likely to last a month or more.
The two men from Mexico who removed our old cabinets and took away our mouldering appliances were living in Los Angeles in 2001, having recently crossed the border into the United States.
The two electricians who should arrive any moment now are from Poland and Serbia. They were still living in Warsaw and Belgrade when the Twin Towers fell.
For them, the sense of connection is not there. They can empathise, in the way that perhaps you, in Belfast, or Derry, or Portadown can empathise. But they weren't here; they didn't actually experience the horror.
It must be the same, on an infinitely smaller scale, in, say, Omagh, or Greysteel, or the Shankill Road. Omagh's outward scars are almost entirely gone. For the families of the 29 people killed by the Real IRA bomb, the pain continues to be deeply felt, but already a new generation is growing up for whom the outrage is merely a part of an unknown and unknowable past.
The memorial to the victims will always command respect, just as memorials to the dead of the two world wars command respect. But it is only families and friends who harbour the actual grief.
This is how it should be - how it must be. Life has to go on, and that means looking to the future more than to the past. It is one thing to demand justice.
That seems an absolute right. But to pretend that the future can only be determined by reference to the worst of the past leads invariably to a dead end.
America's War on Terror seems to me such a dead end. President George W Bush appears still to believe, against all the evidence, that he can somehow extirpate terrorism and remove his country's enemies from the face of the Earth.
It does not occur to him that new enemies will always arise so long as they continue to believe they have a cause worth dying for.
In Northern Ireland, we have at least begun to learn that lesson. There is talk, I believe, of a central memorial to the dead of the Troubles, which is right and proper. But, in spite of the inanities of the Orange Order and the Blanket Men, there is no deep-seated cult of commemoration.
To that extent, we have begun to liberate ourselves.
It is the same, apparently, in Serbia, where my electrician friend, who has just turned up. says that the fifth anniversary of the Nato bombing of Belgrade was marked on page three of the newspapers.
But in America, the old Irish adage, to hell with the future, let's get on with the past, has acquired a dangerous potency. Bush's War on Terror has become an obsession, with no end in sight.
It is one thing to be vigilant and look after your citizens, it is something else when that struggle for security takes on the qualities of Jihad.
So let us read the names of the dead and then let them rest in peace.
Further Information
Publisher: BELFAST TELEGRAPH
Ref: BT/1016
Published Date: 13-Sep-06
Related Images
There have been no images archived for this article.