A Guide to Staying in Power

This book is not available on Amazon. There is no ebook version to download. The authors don’t put their names on the spine or the cover. Yet as events in the Middle East and elsewhere have demonstrated, the Official Killers Handbook surfaces behind the news stories on the Internet, newspapers and TV. Take the case of the CIA operative in Pakistan who, turning to Chapter 8: How to Shoot People You’ve Identified as Bad Guys When You Are Driving a Car. Raymond Davis, the operative, shot and killed two men with a Glock handgun.

The Americans say he has diplomatic immunity and want him released from prison. The Pakistani position is that Davis wasn’t entitled to immunity. Besides, they say you can’t just go around shooting people in a busy street, holster your Glock and go back to work as if you are Dirty Harry making the city saver for the common folk. The Americans say the Pakistanis just don’t get it. And they are leaning on the Pakistanis, threatening to cut off a bunch of aid that already has pre-designed cuts assigned. It’s like the transcript from a messy divorce discovery proceeding.

The Handbook makes it perfectly clear that a Pakistani operative attached to the Pakistan Embassy who takes out his Glock and shoots two Americans in Washington, D.C. is dealt with according to Chapter 9: There Are No Circumstances Where Foreign Operatives Are Permitted to Kill Americans. Any President agreeing to diplomatic immunity and sending the killer back to Pakistan would have about as much popularity as his counterpart in Pakistan, should the Pakistani leader cave in to the Americans.

What this case shows is that Official Killers Handbook is written by the most powerful countries and its law has the bite of Predators, Gitmo, water boarding, air craft carriers, renditions, special forces and Fox TV among other ways of ensuring that all chapters are fully complied with by the small fry, which includes every other country but America.

This doesn’t stop other countries from writing their own local Official Killers Handbook. But there is a big difference. The small fry countries don’t suffer the delusion that how they officially murder people can be carried out on America soil. It’s doubtful they’d even attempt to make that argument stick. Libya has gone straight to the heavy arms chapter (that’s Chapter 2) which says that when the population starts to stream into the streets demanding that the leaders step down, then there is no choice but to bring in mercenaries, machine-guns, and fighter planes to murder enough of the protestors that the others lose heart and go home. Press the emergency button and stand back because incoming is going to rearrange the DNA structure of a lot of people.

Libya is only one example. Scratch the surface in any country and you’ll uncover evidence that such Official Killers Handbook exists but is circulated among only a few people on a need-to-know basis. The rest of us have to reconstruct the chapters from the evidence.

The first matter of evidence is the identity and number of those killed. Governments—as Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao have demonstrated—have the capacity to murder mind-numbing numbers of their own people. Of course, they never call it murder. It is reform or social reorganization to advance the betterment of the citizens. Maybe the best thing about the old warlords and Mafia strongmen was they were honest—they killed people to expand or protect their profit centers and eliminate competition. Governments are never that honest or straightforward. Politics as the struggle to maintain power is Raymond Davis on steroids on a mass, industrial scale; only it doesn’t happen in other places, it happens in your home. Note this applies if you live in the third world.

Immunity is one of those legal words that everyone wishes they had in their personal wallet on one of those plastic cards with your photograph, thumbprint, name and address. And every time you kill someone because you feel a threat, stand around and wait until the police arrive and show them your card. The police sigh, shake their head, and walk back to their cars and drive away. They radio in: “Suspect has the card.” It hasn’t expired. No need to lawyer up, no need to miss that important appointment for the suit fitting and lunch with friends. It is this kind of card that cops and military personnel carry in case someone objects to taking care of someone on The List (see Chapter 6).

Diplomatic immunity—one of those convenient 18th century ideas—that all governments despite the technological and social changes cling to the political skin of modern life like a hooker’s tattoo. This one has been in the Official Killers Handbook is crucial to popping (Chapter 7: Popular Synonyms for Murder) people in other countries, and there is an obvious market for such activity, that even postage-stamp-sized countries want their officials to have immunity if for no other reason they like to park wherever they want in New York City. Trading parking places for murder with the big boys is a glimpse into the world where countries are divided between gladiators and 99lb weaklings.

Another important chapter in the Handbook is devoted to explaining why all those dead people are lying in the street. Third hands, foreigners, terrorists, or unknown troublemakers are popular explanations. No novelist will ever reach the creative heights of a government that has killed its own people and then explained how it didn’t kill its own people but someone else did. Shift the blame on the protestors is a good strategy. There’s always going to be someone, in a large demonstration who throws a rock, a Molotov cocktail, or has a gun. Like with the Davis case, self-defense is something that always plays well to a crowd. Cold blood murder is off-putting. It doesn’t put the best face on the government and doesn’t help with the annual tourism promotion programs.

Proportionality is another factors covered in the Handbook. Shooting a rock thrower with a tank is not proportional. Not that this doesn’t happen, there are usually great attempts to turn the rock thrower into a terrorist and armed with a weapon of mass destruction. Thus the need for the tank to take him out. There’s no real agreement among governments as to what is proportionate response to demonstrations. Ordering your air force to bomb demonstrators might cause some of the pilots to fly and land in another country and seek sanctuary as happened in Libya. Not an unrealistic assumption that anyone giving such an order might well turn on you. And besides, those people in the street are your aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and neighbors, people that you went to school with. And bombing them isn’t exactly what the recruiting officer said would be your mission as a pilot.

As the governments in the Middle East topple and other governments around the world with restive populations look on, more and more people are asking questions about how they can get a copy of the Official Killers Handbook for their country. If you have to ask about the Handbook, you are probably on The List. The List is a technical term in Chapter 6 as to those who have alternative ideas about government, institutions, history, and culture—the whole ball of wax that keeps everyone inside the official line. And the official line is where the officials say the line is. That is something you need to check on from time to time as it has a habit of shifting. Those who turn out the killers to do their duty. The main thing to remember when traveling to another country, they have a Handbook that is probably different from your own. Things can go wrong. And fast.

America and Pakistan are comparing Handbooks as you reading this essay. Gaddafi may or may not be in Libya by the time this appears online. The world is an uncertain place, and those who understand that Chapter 1 of the Handbook boils down to a couple of fundamental yet simple points. What you must say and do to inspire the kind of fear that makes killing people unnecessary. The first choice, in other words, is not to kill people but to scare them so that there is no need to kill them. The other issue is to always keep a tight lid on competing narratives. Don’t let them leak inside your private pot. That only stirs up things. Throw out the foreign press. They are all pot stirs. Governments where might is right are careful to ensure there is only one narrative that explains the importance of power being retained by those who own the Handbook and anyone who would challenge that narrative or present a competing narrative is a Chapter 6 person: People to Be Put on The List. That chapter ends with the advice: Nib the bud before the flower blooms. Don’t blame me for mixing metaphors using vegetable and flowers to describe protestors as this was taken directly from Chapter 6 about The List.

The Greeks used stigma to signal slaves, criminals and traitors. It is a useful way of dealing with people on The List. It signals that they aren’t normal. Their deaths aren’t really important or of consequence. Remember Greece was a democracy so no one can complain when you tattoo a devil on the forehead of your opponents. And reinforces your message: Normal People are For Me; Devils are Against Me.

The problem for many rulers is the Handbook hasn’t been updated for centuries. Competing narratives are everywhere. Facebook and Twitter have spread them like pollen on the wind. Stopping people from discussions about political alternatives, fairness and justice is so 16th century. But there is a ray of hope in all of this gloom. For that, I invite you to turn to the last chapter of the Handbook, Chapter 29: Places to Escape with Your Fortune when the Military Stops Killing for You.

And there is the final page of the Handbook. It reads: “Don’t forget to leave this book open on your desk as a gift for your successor.” If it is any comfort, remember, it is only a matter of time before he works his way through the Handbook and, like you, finds himself concentrating on the fine points of Chapter 29.

Crime fiction may not be the first thing on the minds of the protesters taking to the streets for democracy across the Arab world. But one of the offshoots of the downfall of Arab dictators is sure to be an explosion of thrillers and mysteries.

Until now there has been almost no crime fiction written in Arabic. A couple of little-known writers in Egypt and Morocco have contributed old-fashioned Agatha Christie-style cosies (“One of the people at this oasis is the killer.”) The best Arab detective writer has been Yasmina Khadra, whose series about Inspector Llob is supremely gory and noirish. But Khadra writes in French from exile in France.

I believe Arabs have eschewed crime writing because it’s a democratic genre. One man wants to find out something that a big organization – the CIA, the mafia, the government – wants to keep secret. It’s easy to see why Hosni Mubarak probably wasn’t a fan of Raymond Chandler.

For people who live in democracies, it’s easy to find fiction credible that suggests a man can investigate – and once he fingers the bad guy, the bad guy will be punished. That’s why Scandinavian crime fiction by Henning Mankell et al is so popular: the Nordic societies have us all convinced that an eruption of violence, crime or murder, will soon enough be resolved and life can go back to its usual extreme orderliness.

Not so for the Arab world. Arabs have a deep sense of fatalism. Not only do they lack faith that the bad guy will be punished, they’re quite sure the bad guy will prosper. He’ll drive his Mercedes to his villa directly from the government offices or state-run companies where he rakes off his big take. The ordinary guy will be left to live on $2 a day.

When I came to write my series of Palestinian crime novels, one of the challenges was to make the format of the crime novel work in an environment where law and order didn’t really function or protect ordinary citizens. I did it by demonstrating that while my sleuth, Omar Yussef, might nail one bad guy at the end of the book, he would be left with an awareness that there were many other guilty men who had escaped him. As one German reader put it to me at a book festival, “I like your books because, in the end, everyone’s guilty.” The reason people across the Arab world are rising up is because they don’t want to share the guilt and shame of their broken, repressed societies any more.

These observations are true even for countries where there isn’t what we’d call a Western-style democracy – which I’d characterize as a democracy where corruption is either extremely well-hidden or disguised as a stock market in which all can supposedly participate. Take Russia, for example. Clearly not the democracy its people might dream of. But nonetheless one in which opposition journalists – at considerable risk to themselves – do function in the face of the state apparatus and its corrupt overlords.

The situation in the Arab world is changing now. Which shows that there’s a thirst for democracy, for accountability – and, therefore, for crime fiction.

I’ve been working on a scene this week that revolves around one character being given some bad news by another. Not easy to write without falling into the land of cliché, they are also hard from an emotional intelligence point of view too. In my opinion and experience, this is because when you impart bad news to someone, you never know how they are going to react.

Speaking for myself, I know that I have often thought I would know how I was going to react in certain adverse situations. Before my father died I always thought that news of his death would render me a screaming wreck of incomprehension. As it happened my first response was one of total and complete numbness. I don’t remember feeling anything apart from a vague surprise that I was still breathing. My heart didn’t pump, I didn’t have to struggle for breath and there didn’t seem to be a thought in my head. Later on I cried and that was uncontrollable. But for some reason I still don’t understand I had to lock myself away in the bathroom and switch the shower on in order to do that. My family are not the sort of people who hide their emotions and so there was no real need to lock myself away. But I did it because I was in the unknown country of grief where I now know that anything is possible.

It is true that grief may be expressed in different ways across different cultures. But there’s no absolute rule about this. For instance, in the past I’ve come across some of my fellow Brits who believe that Turkish people always give vent to great displays of emotion when they are faced with tragedy. Sometimes this is true, but sometimes that follows for British people too. Also there is a Turkish version of our own, and famous, ‘stiff upper lip’. Turkey as well as being an ex-Imperial power is also a nation of soldiers. The military, not just since the advent of Atatürk, but right back into the mists of the Ottoman Empire have always been respected, revered and in many cases loved. Their reputation for discipline and national pride is legendary. The guards that stand utterly motionless and smart as whips outside the Dolmabahçe Palace winter and summer are fine examples of this. The expression of emotion is not frowned upon in Turkey but neither is stoicism either. In my time in the country I have seen funeral processions where everyone weeps uncontrollably and others where people just quietly bow their heads and remember the deceased in silence. There’s no template for any of this.

Not that such musings take me any closer to sorting out how one of my characters may respond when he is given bad news. In line with what I know about him, his life experience, his personality and his age it is possible that he may break down and sob. However what he is being told about is an incident that happened many years ago and is also something that he can now do nothing about. He may be rendered numb as I was when my father died but then again he may also be angry too because now it is to late to even try to put what happened so many years ago right.

Weird stuff can happen around bad news. I’ve known people blame completely innocent parties for deaths they could never have caused and divorces they had absolutely no part in. People fall out when bad news comes just as easily, seemingly, as misery can bring others together. Sometimes things so ‘left field’ can happen it can take your breath away. People can sometimes immediately enter a complete stare of denial upon being told bad news. They can just carry on with whatever they are doing and completely change the subject. Some may even keep that up for days or weeks, maybe even longer.

I always think that these scenes that cause us to reflect about what we do with and to our characters in this particular situation are very valuable. Flinging them into crisis can illuminate things about them that maybe we haven’t considered before. As I was surprised by what happened to me when I was in grief, so I am continually surprised by what my characters do when bad news comes as well.

I wanted to write about death and dying this week. Death is central to crime fiction; making sense of death is its heart. There were two deaths that touched me this past week, one directly, one less so.

The first death was a good death.

My beloved old father-in-law died last Thursday in his own bed, in his sleep. At peace. A fine end, all things considered, to a fine life.

He joined up at eighteen and fought in the desert campaign in North Africa during the World War II. He was an active and lifelong member of the Gunners Association. A way, I imagine, of making sense of the deaths of so many young men killed in the Sahara in the early 1940s. The commemorations, the wreaths, the marches, the care for widows and indigent old veterans, were a way of honouring the dead and celebrating the brazen good luck of the living.

There is no material for a crime novel in that passing, unless one can find a way of writing about the cruel evolutionary joke that robs fine minds of their cohesion in old age. He had Alzheimer’s disease and I would happily pitch a bounty hunter of the Lee Child variety to go after that renegade gene that unravelled his personality and memory in the end.

But in the end, it was a release, a death that one could stitch into the fabric of a family.

The second death unravelled a family.

Two weeks ago a grandmother was reported missing from her home in Johannesburg. She was sixty-five years old. She was plump and jolly and loved, part of a wide network of friends and family.

After a frantic searches by her distraught family and the police her bludgeoned body was found near a railway track. Her car, a clapped out old vehicle, was spotted in various places and then the cops stopped it and the men (the woman’s killers) were arrested and charged. Her family have buried her and, if the slow and rickety wheels of the South African justice system turn, the men who murdered her will get life.

There is a bereaved family with an anguished loss of ordinariness, of the everydayness of life. There is no overarching evil, no plan, and no intrigue in her killers. It is numbing, the kind banal and everyday violence that leads to the death of old ladies.

There is the start of a crime novel in that. A hard one to write, I grant you. But a novelist could find a place in this story. There are places for heroism and honour. The reader, like the writer, always needs a place in which to locate herself. In this story the private investigator and the cops, after revenge or justice would be the place to start.

It might also be possible, hard but possible, to write this in a way that sketched out the adrenalined machismo that cuts men loose for morality, enabling them to kill old ladies without a twitch of a conscience.

These were the thoughts I had about writing about death, the differences between a natural death and a criminal one.

And then troops in Bahrain opened fire on unarmed civilians going to a funeral. This lead to more funerals, which led to more shootings, which led to more funerals.

A spiral of rage and violence, part of the same whirlwind that ousted Hosni Mubarak and which is threatening autocratic and corrupt governments across North Africa and the Middle East.

In Libya hundreds are dead. How many no one is sure. The country is closed, the Internet links cut. Nevertheless spiky, blurred clips appear on YouTube as troops open fire on their own citizens.

Men wail.

Blood pools on cracked, dusty pavements.

And I think how would one write this crime?

Muammar Gaddafi, clown and madman, a despot who has clung to power for forty-two years. Mubarak for thirty. These, like the other autocrats that have pillaged, repressed and impoverished their citizens for decades, do not fit easily into a crime novel.

These are crimes that are of such a huge scale that they can only be committed in plain view. But that is often the best place to hide a particularly outrageous wrong. The collusion with these men, to give an example, by countries that claim democracy at home but for whom repression serves other purposes abroad.

How would one write a novel about the crime that is the massacre of two hundred people or more heaped amongst broken olive trees?

How does one write a novel of a crime perpetrated for so long with such impunity? A crime that counts its victims in the millions?

Two hundred people mowed down by automatic weapons in a city in eastern Libya. The scale of it is just too large to render.

A massacre is hard to conjure in the confines of a crime novel. It feels too grand, too large, too operatic.

Does this mean that murder – an old lady here, a little boy there is for the little people? That a massacre is for a tyrant?

But I want to find a way to write these tyrants. There has to be a way to do it, even as the terms of our world shift before us.

Because they are all as the common murderers in the end.

A Thai living in Boulder, Colorado was sent to jail for one year and a day for various criminal violations connected with his restaurant business. He was released on one million dollar bail and told to report to prison in 15 days.

It wasn’t one law that he broke in the United States. He managed to break a bunch of laws. And looking at the charges, knowing how things work in Thailand, I have a feeling this guy may not have seen all this bad news train coming at him. He may have suffered from a corporate cultural bias that blinkered him to the reality of the new culture where he was doing business.

He should have seen his bias left him vulnerable. That is true of all of us. We assume our cultural setting applies everywhere. They don’t. I have a couple of explanations as to why he may have been caught by surprise.

As every country has a distinct culture, the nature of crime is to cut out a cultural niche. Corporate culture comes from the underlying culture. Like Siamese twins they are joined. And the cultural aspect of business can be used to detect the kind of crimes that the authorities seek to deter, and the kind of criminal behavior that rarely attracts attention. Like a good wine, many of cultural aspects that are building blocks for our mental understanding of ‘wrong’ don’t travel well. In other words, commercial conduct or activity that might be overlooked in one culture becomes a major criminal investigation in another. The problem arises when someone from one culture carries on as if he remains in his home culture. That road leads to a criminal investigation, arrest, fines, prison sentence, and in this Thai man’s case, deportation.

When you come from a place where restaurants, factories, vendors and the like have a large number of illegal or undocumented workers, and this becomes part of how the economy functions, you can start to get the idea that exploiting workers is the normal way of doing business. As most everyone else is doing it, if you don’t, then your business competitors will eat you lunch, along with breakfast and dinner.

Cultural bias, like politics, is local.

The US authorities, however, take a dim view of worker exploitation. Saving exploited immigrants explored by other immigrants is one of those easy feel-good actions that almost everyone agrees is a good thing. There ought to be a sign in American international airports: Don’t exploit workers. Not that anyone would take such a message seriously as most people who work for a living feel exploited. However exploitation is legally defined in the States. There are laws and enforcement agencies looking to make examples. When a Thai businessman decides to set up a chain of restaurants, he’s likely going to staff and run it the best way he knows: and what he knows comes from having been immersed in Thai business culture.

Here’s what happened to the Thai in Denver, Colorado. He ran a string of Thai and Japanese restaurants in Boulder, Louisville, and Broomfield. The restaurants were called Siamese Plate, Sumidas, and Siamese Plate On The Go. What did he do wrong?

According to newspaper reports, Boulder restaurateur going to prison for exploiting illegal workers – The Denver Post the Thai restaurant owner filed false immigration applications and harbored illegal aliens, required all of his Thai workers to enter into two-year employment contracts. The contracts apparently included fees and monetary penalties, which allowed him to deduct thousands of dollars. He paid workers “under-the-table” and deducted fees from their checks.

He ordered his Thai employees to work between 26 and 32 hours of overtime weekly, without paying overtime wages, and kept two sets of payroll books to conceal records from the tax authorities. In other words, he was running his business as if he’d never left Thailand. There is little in this list of complaints that would surprise anyone who has looked at the restaurant businesses operating in Thailand. It seems almost normal. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in what he did in staffing his restaurants. Of course many Thai restaurants in Thailand aren’t exploiting their workers But let’s say there are a number of restaurants that likely have a record not too different from this Boulder operation.

As the workers came from Thailand, it is likely that most of them thought it was normal, too. They probably communicated in Thai, ate Thai food, watched pirated Thai soap operas from Thai TV in their spare time (didn’t seem to be much of that). The illusion must have been quite widespread that they were still mentally in Thailand. It must have been some meddling American good doer with a different sense of ‘normal’ that looked into the matter and convinced the Thai employees that they had been exploited. That they had a solid case against their employer.

“A what?”

“A legal case, a cause of action.”

“And that means what?”

“Testify against your boss and we’ll get you a green card and money in a lawsuit.”

“That would be dangerous.”

“He will throw him out of the country. You will be saved. He can’t touch you.”

This looks like an old battle waged between fear and greed. But it is tilted in favor of the employees. This wasn’t Bangkok. It was Boulder, Colorado. And hired thugs to convince disgruntled staff that they are causing a problem are more difficult to arrange. Or more likely, pressure by friends and family to stick out would have kept the employees in the kitchen and dining area. None of those factors appear in this case. That makes the fear and doubt far less and the temptation of going for the gold much greater. Employees in America simply operate under a different set of fears than those in Thailand.

The Thai business owner must have discovered that he lacked a patron to smooth over things with the authorities. His employees weren’t fearful. They weren’t going to accord him the traditional respect (fear and awe) of a boss. They were going to help a legal system. And apparently the owner saw the odds were stacked against him and copped a plea. Finally, it must have hit him that things don’t quite work in Denver the way they do in Bangkok.

With no patron to find a compromise and no reason why the workers should fear or respect him, the Thai owner pleaded guilty to multiple felony charges. He was sentenced in federal court to 366 days in prison for exploiting workers, harboring illegal aliens and failing to pay taxes. He will be kicked out the United States once he’s finished serving his sentence. It doesn’t quite end there. The convicted owner according to the Denver Post Boulder restaurateur going to prison for exploiting illegal workers – The Denver Post had to hand over cash and property. What had he done to rain down such punishment? According the reports, he’d ordered Thai employees to work between 26 and 32 hours of overtime weekly, without paying overtime wages, and he kept two sets of payroll books to conceal records from the IRS, the release said. That’s not the end of it. He also will forfeit two homes in Boulder worth about $766,000.

The Thai owner is forced out of America as a convicted felon with the shirt on his back for running his Thai business pretty much like it would be run in Thailand. The comments the article in the Denver Post are also revealing. Anti-immigrant rants commingled with anti-business bashing. If this were an American caught in the Thai legal system, such anti-foreign rants would also likely follow. Thailand is pro-business, especially pro-Thai business, and that makes it pretty much like every other country trying to prevent outsiders from coming in, setting up shop, and driving the locals into the poor house.

Let’s put the American case in some perspective by taking a cultural snapshot of what a legal immigrant worker in Thailand might confront when facing an abusive employer. The case involves a worker from Burma. This Burmese worker (with documentation required to work) was seriously injured at the workplace when a wall fell on him. He was taken to hospital and treated for ruptured intestine and a fractured thigh. The employer refused to pay for his medical expenses. The immigration and police were called and didn’t bother to check the worker’s papers. They ordered the worker to be physically chained to his hospital bed. A deportation order was also in the works. A legal action was brought on behalf of the worker. A Thai court intervened and awarded the worker $100.00 in compensation. The immigration department is considering appealing that order, which is among the first ever of such orders.

The moral of the story about workers in Denver and Bangkok is that what makes people fearful in one culture doesn’t necessarily travel to another culture. The Thai workers attitudes in America had lost the fear edge honed in Thailand. America may have its version of a patronage culture at the top of the food chain, but those heavy weighs aren’t going to help an immigrant Thai fix his case. So next time you are dining in a Thai restaurant outside of Thailand, you are probably eating a version of Thai food edited for local taste, cooked and served by Thais who know that once you change the ingredients in food every other aspect of the culture is open to change, too.

It’s always encouraging to meet well-adjusted teenagers (mainly because I wasn’t one.) When they’re Middle Eastern teenagers, it’s inspiring.

I met a group of just over a dozen 15-year-olds (some of them may have been older than that, so I hope they aren’t offended when they read this, but when you get as old as me even a 25-year-old is a kid), half of them from a Palestinian school just inside the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City and the other half from an Israeli school on the campus of the Hebrew University. They’ve been coming together for some years at infrequent intervals to discuss books they read in English. This time, they read my Palestinian crime novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN.

I was happy to be the first author who’d come along to meet the group, and was doubly pleased with the intelligence and perception they showed.

That’s not only because they all seemed to have really liked my book. Though that, of course, does show great perception. Their group aims to go beyond the politics of the region, to find common ground in literature. Even as journalists exult at the political mobilization of the Arab world, they ought to remember that all this political activity is intended to lead not to some goal that can be summed up in a simple nut-graph (which is what journalists call the “here’s what the story’s all about paragraph,” usually the third one in the story). It’s heading toward the personal fulfillment of every Arab in myriad ambitions and desires – something that’s probably beyond the stereotypical charactertizations and analyses of journalism to contend with.

One of the most impressive elements of the long discussion I had with the kids in a restaurant overlooking the walls of the Old City was that politics was entirely absent. It demonstrates, for me, that if Israelis and Palestinians have some other basis on which to meet – rather than the mutual claims of victimization on which their politicians thrive – they find a great deal in common.

Of course, what I’ve aimed for with my four Palestinian crime novels is an approach that transcends the political clichés of the region where I find myself. So I was pleased that the kids picked up on that, too.

One of them won my heart by telling me that when my Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef and other characters spoke she felt she was listening to real Palestinians speak. It’s quite the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me about my books, because I’ve tried to capture the rhythms and formalities of Arab speech in the novels.

Our discussion turned to the events across the region. I pointed out that Omar Yussef was ahead of the game when, in THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, he chided the Arab nations and the US for failing to back Arab democracy.

That was as close to politics as we got. Unlike my meetings with journalists who often want to discuss present Middle Eastern diplomacy with me, rather than my novels, the kids asked fascinating questions about the actual writing of a book, the plotting and characterization. Clearly more than a few of them, Israeli and Palestinian, are budding writers. I look forward to seeing them on the shelves. (Well, they’re young, so maybe I’ll see them on a Kindle…)

Some people see the Middle East only through a political prism filled with simplistic slogans and obstructive literalism. My books defy that. They’re meant to be instructive, but entertaining — they’re crime novels, after all. These kids showed that they — like the characters in my books – don’t want to be defined and stereotyped by their often-devastating politics. They want to be real, too. And they’re smart enough to understand that fiction, strangely, can help lead them there.

Here’s a tip for a new and exciting crime fiction series of the future. Publishers are always on the lookout for the next ‘big thing’, well maybe this is it.

There’s been a lot of publicity here in the UK lately about the so called ‘Super Rich’. These are a group of people who are so wealthy they don’t actually belong anywhere. They don’t have homes, in the accepted sense, because having a home would mean paying tax to whatever country the home is in. Minted even beyond Robbie Williams’ wildest dreams, they drift around the world on a sea of cash and privilege, having no real base or allegiances to anything or anyone except themselves. Over here they and their ilk have become the elephant in the room. While our government close down libraries and cut organisations that provide services to the sick and the needy the Super Rich are allowed to slip in out of their tax loopholes at will.

Our politicians don’t want to talk about them. But then so many of them are millionaires, that’s not surprising. We however, the great unwashed, do want to talk about them more and more. Just little snippets like the fact that a famous industrialist’s secretary actually pays more tax than her billionaire boss. I expect I probably pay more tax than he does which is a bit much when you consider that he’s swanning around in Saville Row suits while I’m still wearing the same overcoat I’ve had for the last ten years. Even trying to content myself with the notion that he probably couldn’t fit into any of his clothes from ten years ago, doesn’t help. Nowhere people take and do not give and in a time of recession (or whatever the government chooses to call it this week) is unacceptable.

That said, of course, nothing will change this. All sorts of specious arguments will be advanced about how much ‘worth’ these people bring to our shores, all the myriad jobs they go about creating, blah, blah, blah. Our (in)glorious leaders will continue to shove Champagne and caviar down their fat necks in company with these people and the good ship UK will continue on its way with its usual compliment of lumpen proletariat and over-privileged arse-holes. These people are quite untouchable, shielded as they are by legions of sycophantic wannabes who just want to wait about for a few crumbs from their tables. Pitiful. Pitiful. Pitiful.

But that said, you do have to laugh, mainly because it’s all you can do. The state may be able to do a lot of things to curb and shape our behaviour, but they can’t prevent us from poking fun. I think that a new crime fiction series set in the world of the stateless super rich would be hilarious. How’s this?

Oligarch Pyotr Ripoff’s mother is found dead with the Koh-I-Noor diamond stuck in her throat. There are some signs of a struggle but the old woman managed to hang on to that diamond even in death. The age of the corpse is impossible to ascertain because old Ma Ripoff at her demise, consisted mainly of body-parts obtained from so many different sources she was more like a patchwork quilt than a human being. But because no police force in the world can be made to take this crime on, enter the Premier League Avenger, super hero crime fighter and massive fan of ‘Police’ sunglasses. Pausing only to restyle his hair, play half a game of football for the Ulan Bator Mega Yaks (at a cost of $250,000 a day), retire with a hamstring injury and then shag all blonde women in Torquay, the Avenger sets to work. After carefully placing the Koh-I-Noor on the anorexic finger of his wife (or was it her thigh?) he sets off to interview the suspects.

The Avenger knows that Prince Irrelevant is due to marry Miss Sloan very soon and so he might have wanted to snaffle the diamond in order to sell it so that he could pay off his wine merchant. Then there’s Mr Banker. Such a measly bonus (just a paltry £1,000,000) this year and so many people to entertain! The cabinet minister, the Rt Hon Millicent ‘Iron Knickers’ Tankdriver could also be in the frame too. She hated old Ma Ripoff, in fact she hated and hates all foreigners. And finally there’s little Brainless Pink, glamour model, serial marrier, celebrity chef and icon. Insisting on only having her nails done at a place in Beverly Hills that costs the equivalent of a whole years salary for a hospital cleaner, is eating away at her fortune. That diamond, had she managed to get hold of it, would have bought her a hell of a lot of quality nail technician time. But who actually did kill the old woman and who cares anyway? Certainly not Pyotr who is very happy to have inherited the jewel himself. Also he won’t have to pay for any more of his mother’s pesky plastic surgery now! Everybody’s happy. Prince Irrelevant and Miss Sloan marry while the Rt Hon Tankdriver looks on all misty eyed. Mr Banker and the Avenger get very, very drunk together, rub a pearl and lark spittle masque over their faces (for health and beauty) and then have sex and possibly marry, Brainless Pink.

All of the above of course, happens while the rest of us hunt about in skips for furniture while performing the odd amputation of one or more of our own gangrenous limbs. Hello, good evening and welcome to the new Middle Ages, era of warring nations, massive privilege for the few and the Black Death!

Two months ago a woman I have known all my life was hacked to death in her garden. Ann was seventy-two, a retired schoolteacher. A gentle woman with a soft, enveloping body. She was a mother, and a grandmother. My father was best man at their wedding.

They spent every Christmas with us on the farm, us children watching in delight as the adults got tipsy and told the same jokes and sang the same songs. Each year we exchanged gifts. I have some of them still. She was an invisible stitch in the fabric if my childhood.

This is how I picture it.

In the ritual of so many South African households, she would have taken a cup of tea and a sandwich out at mid-morning.

I ask some questions.

That day her husband went to work. He came home for lunch but no food was cooked. He went to look for her. He found her outside. She had been hacked to death. There was no sign of the gardener.

The police came. The house was searched. A firearm was missing. Two days later the gardener was arrested with the gun in his possession.

I ask some more questions. There is only this to tell. There had been words between the gardener and his employers.

I try to make sense of her death, to find an explanation for the brutal slaying of an old lady.

I have been in that garden.

The lawn is mowed, the edges trimmed, the dahlias staked, the white daisies bob in the summer breeze. It is neat, clipped, suburban, like countless others spread through the suburbs of South Africa.

On this day something tripped the fuse that runs through the dynamics of class and race and gender that hold South Africa in a deadly grip.

But what does it mean?

It is something that Randolph Roth, the author of a fascinating book called AMERICAN HOMICIDE, has addressed. He points out in his preface something that South Africans, citizens of one of the most murderous countries on earth, are all to familiar with.

‘The blunt truth,’ writes Roth, ‘is that homicide is hard to deter even under the best circumstances.’

His book presents analysis of the high homicide rates in the United States. It is, after all, statistically the most murderous of all the advanced democracies.

The meaning of murder, and its history, is as absorbing a subject in South Africa as it is in the United States. There are differences, of course, but the rates of murder are arresting in both countries. The questions raised by Roth could usefully be asked of South Africa.

‘What,’ asks Roth, ‘causes men to be so alienated that they can kill passersby for money or sex? What causes men to view every encounter with another man as having the potential to be a life-and-death struggle for supremacy or self-preservation?’

Because it does not happen everywhere. In most places in the world a woman and a gardener would resolve a disagreement about pay or working hours or tasks to be done by talking to each other.

‘The predisposition to violence is not rooted in objective social conditions,’ argues Roth. ‘Men who are poor, oppressed, or unemployed can be disposed to violence in one historical situation and to nonviolence in another. The same is true of men who have every advantage.’

So where does it lie then?

‘The predisposition to violence is rooted in feelings and beliefs, and the key to explaining it lies in charting the historical fluctuations in unrelated-adult homicide rates and in identifying both the feelings and beliefs that accompanied those fluctuations and the circumstances that fostered changes in them.’

Roth makes a cogent and complex argument for his case, but there was one belief that he emphasized that correlated with a drop in murder rates. That is ‘the belief that the social hierarchy is legitimate, that one’s position in society is or can be satisfactory and that one can command the respect of others without resorting to violence.

A belief was nowhere to be found on that sunny morning when a young man killed a defenceless old woman.

Such murders are not uncommon here, but they are hard to read. Why does a simple dispute over money or time off or tasks not completed result so frequently in violence?

It is not difficult to understand, given South Africa’s history, why these tranquil-looking places came to be the place where violence and fear and rage have lodged themselves. But one needs to stretch one’s mind and one’s heart to think of ways in which this breach in the social order can be healed.

[AMERICAN HOMICIDE Randolph Roth, The Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2009]

Last time I was pulled over at the elevated highway tollbooth on my way to Chon Buri province outside of Bangkok, I was asked two questions: where was I going and who was I going to see? First he checked the make, model and age of my car. And the important scan of the windscreen to see if the necessary stickers have expired. Also, the windscreen will display—for the well-connected—a status signal: it might be military, police, an elite club, etc. Decals, small bronze fender icons, and other artistic displays of power connections are important visual cues as to the relationship of power to the person seated behind the wheel. These details are digested at the point of contact with the police officer who wants to know whom he’s dealing with before getting to the issue of law.

In a patronage culture those are two quite sensible questions to ask. I will hear foreigners talking about Thailand not having laws. That isn’t true. Thailand has many laws and regulations. The issue is how to square law enforcement with the patronage system. At its heart, patronage works to provide an umbrella of protection to those who need to shade from the bright lights of laws and regulations.

Politicians are fond of saying that the government supports the rule of law. It would be a pretty strange government that went on record as not being in favor of the rule of law. The question breaks down into two parts. What is the rule? And what is the law? The “rule” in a patronage system is complex. I was a law professor for ten years and I can’t ever remember giving a lecture on how you involve your patron in the legal process.

What I’ve learnt in a quarter of century living in Thailand, is there is an invisible process—invisible to foreigners that is—where off-stage exchanges are being made. At the same time, it’s not automatically a given that just because you are friends with an influential person that you will escape the consequence of your breach of a law or regulation. I told you it was complex.

Inside the patronage system many factors are processed: Did you damage the property or injure someone with status? Has your violation been picked up by the press and received wide spread public coverage? Were you caught red-handed and the video footage is in other hands beyond your influential person’s reach? The rule is your patron can help in many cases but not in every case. It is not a foolproof system in other words.

The second part of rule of law is the law itself. Some laws simply are immune from the intervention of patrons. Lèse majesté for example is one. Sexual crimes involving children is another one that most patrons wouldn’t try to fix. Killing and dismembering of your wife (or husband) is another. Bribery, violation of building codes, licenses, pollution, careless or recklessness whether in driving, construction of buildings, bridges, roads, discos or ammo dumps are places where inserting a powerful patron comes in handy.

People charged with assault, fraud, murder and rape—especially if the victim is a foreigner—are difficult to ‘fix’ but finding a compromise is sometimes found and the victim and his/her family accepts money as compensation. In the case of foreigners who are victims, the patronage system is less of an issue. Criminals without patrons have an advantage if the victim is a foreigner. Given the lengthy delays in the legal system a crime against a foreigner, especially a tourist, is not likely to go very far as the victim wants to return home. Hanging around for a couple of years to testify in court isn’t anyone’s idea of a happy holiday memory and except for the most serious crimes.

It is difficult to maintain a patronage system without corruption. You don’t want to roam around patron-free for years on end inside a patronage system. Holidays are fine. The free flow of money by the patron to those inside the system is the essence of influence at work. It distorts policy, influences outcomes, and favors the wealthy. It makes the legal system when it does arrest, try and convict someone appear repressive.

Recently in an ABAC poll, “According to the Poll director, Noppadol Kannikar, the survey was conducted among 3,971 persons in 28 provinces nationwide to determine their perspective whether they could accept corruption in the government. Results showed that Thais who can accept government corruption still remains high at 64 percent.”

I would offer the opinion that the reason such a high percentage of Thai “accept corruption” is that they “accept the patronage system.” It is their wild card when they get in trouble or need something from the system. It may be that like 40% of Americans believe they are in the top 10% of income earners, 64% of Thais may feel they are in the top percentage of people with the ‘get out of jail’ card. The thing with patronage is that it does trickle down, and does provide comfort to those against state authorities whose resources are primarily aimed at those who lack patrons. It would be hazardous to guess the percentage of Thais who would say, if asked, “Do you have a patron that you would go to and would help you if you were in trouble with the police?” I would suggest it would be a reasonably high percentage.

The patronage system isn’t just about avoiding the law. It also plays an important role in allocation of resources and benefits, including license and concessions. Patrons are powerful regional players. They have men with guns. They have blocks of voters. They accumulate wealth, hand out favors, show up with gifts at birthdays, weddings and funerals, all towards building and maintaining a power base. Patrons, unless they run afoul of someone even more powerful and influential, are difficult to dislodge.

Patronage is a system much older than democracy and courts. The problem with patronage is that it is difficult to modernize. As long as most people believe that corruption is acceptable, patrons can rest easy in their beds, knowing that tomorrow, they will continue to play an essential role determining the application of the rules, and providing shields to the less powerful as a way to signal there own authority which trumps the law. The patronage system is also the root cause of the ‘double’ standard or inequality of justice that many Thais complain about. That, of course, is the collateral damage of the patronage system. Corruption and double standards belch out of the patronage system like dark clouds of black smoke from one of the old city buses.

People rail against the pollution making buses. But as the ABAC poll reveals, railing against the consequence isn’t enough to make most people believe that corruption isn’t acceptable. They’d rather live with the fumes and feel that despite the damage to their nose and lungs they are safer riding inside the big black smoke then trying to out run the bus barreling straight towards them.

Like most people on the planet I have been watching events unfold in Egypt with a mixture of fear, horror and trepidation. That people should feel so completely ignored by their government is appalling. To a much lesser extent this is how miners and their families in the north of England felt back in the 1980s. The Thatcher government had decided that the pits were closing and that those people’s jobs were going to be sacrificed and that was that. Bitterness that stems from that time still taints some ex-pit communities in the north to this day. To be ignored and sometimes brutalised by your own government is unacceptable.

What will happen if and when President Mubarak falls, nobody knows. But one thing that struck me about the demonstrators in Cairo and Alexandria was their lack of fear. With soldiers in tanks all around and military jets screaming overhead, a man interviewed by the BBC said that his fear had gone. The army and the President could do what they liked, he was no longer afraid.

Last year the Iranian regime was in trouble. President Ahmedinejad apparently won the General Election there and suddenly the streets were full of people calling ‘foul’. Hundreds of thousands demonstrated and Internet sites were abuzz with protest for weeks. Ultimately it all came to nothing and in fact the Iranian security forces used the Internet themselves to track down and arrest movers and shakers of the abortive rebellion. Though determined, the people were defeated and I don’t remember even one person on any of the news reports I heard or read about, saying that he or she had ‘lost’ their fear.

This is only a theory from an old psychology graduate but I do have an idea about why this difference could exist. Rebellion in Iran has an added dimension that rebellion in Egypt does not. Hosni Mubarak is an ex-military man who rules Egypt with his generals in line with a template set up by President Nasser in the 1950s. Like Nasser, Mubarak rules as a military secular leader. He may attend mosque on a Friday but he is not a cleric and he does not involve himself in religious affairs. Ahmedinejad on the other hand, does. His rule is heavily sanctioned by the Ayatollahs and he is a very overtly observant person.

As I have said many times before, personally I am a fuzzy agnostic. But like everyone except the most devout and hard-line atheists, I do have a sympathy with religion. In a way I quite envy those who have the comfort and the certainty of religion in their lives. I’m sure they’re less stressed than the ‘don’t knows’ like me. However, just because I don’t have a faith, doesn’t mean that I am not affected by it. To stand up against a regime that purports to represent divine authority on earth is a hard thing to do even for a ‘don’t know’. Had I been an Iranian agnostic demonstrating on the streets of Tehran last year, I know that the rhetoric from my government would have given me pause. It would only have slowed me down for a moment, but that moment would have been significant. To stand up against a human being is one thing, but to take on God is quite another.

And even if you know or you believe that those people who say they represent God are lying to you, your personal conditioning as well as the accumulated beliefs of your ancestors over hundreds of years cry out for you to stop what you’re doing and conform. I am sure that many of the Iranian demonstrators from 2010 are still angry, dissatisfied and aggrieved. But, although this is just a theory on my part, I do think that part of the reason why the rebellion failed was because of what lay very deeply embedded inside people’s heads. To take on those who claim to represent God is a vast psychological step. It goes way beyond physical or psychological risk to oneself and one’s family. If God’s representatives are correct and you are wrong you are going to find yourself on the wrong side of the afterlife. Even though he took that step anyway, something like this must have passed through Martin Luther’s mind when he basically told the Pope and Rome to take a hike. It can’t have been easy and it certainly wasn’t lightly done.

So, although this is just a notion, I think that to take on a theocracy, any theocracy, carries an extra dimension of risk. The demonstrators in Cairo know that if they do succeed in toppling Mubarak ‘only’ their physical safety and psychological well being are at risk. The afterlife is not at issue and so, on one very significant level at least, it is possible to ‘lose’ fear.

Whether this theory will eventually be bourn out by a victory for the protestors, I don’t know. I just hope that whatever happens the bloodshed stops and that things improve for the Egyptian people. One thing that is not a theory is that people all over the world are getting sick of the sight of a few very wealthy and powerful people controlling those further down the food chain. And that applies just as much here in the UK as it does in Egypt, Iran, Tunisia, you name it.