‘Sour, hungry and hostile to foreigners’
SIR ALAN DONALD, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
REPUBLIC OF INDONESIA, JULY 1984
BRITISH EMBASSY
JAKARTA
31 July 1984
The Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey Howe QC MP
LONDON
Sir
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF INDONESIA
Although this is my first posting to Jakarta, I have visited Indonesia before: for a week in 1959, three days in 1982 and an unforgettable 24 hours in 1983.
My first experience of Jakarta 25 years ago was depressing. The public utilities were hopeless: nothing seemed to work. The city seemed to be a patchwork of kampongs. Some pretentious public buildings were linked by a few main roads. One winced (as now) at the Soviet-inspired statues. It was the time of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and empty slogans. The people in the streets looked sour, hungry and hostile to foreigners. No-one had much good to say about the economy or the will of the people to work. I privately hoped that I would not have to set foot in Indonesia again.
The second (post-Sukarno) visit was quite different. As one of Lord Carrington’s party on his official visit to Indonesia in January 1982, I had a completely new picture. I saw a bustling, thriving community in a capital which had already acquired some of the outward appearances and certainly the traffic of modern cities like Bangkok and Singapore. The organisation of the visit was excellent: the leaders we met were intelligent and confident – men who knew where they and their country were going.
The following year, in March 1983, I arrived 24 hours late (travelling on the national airline) only to be caught up in a riot which swept through the streets of Jakarta. The campaign for the presidential election had opened that afternoon with the burning of the platform on which the Government spokesman was addressing a large crowd. After my business at the Foreign Ministry, it took me nearly three hours to get through to the airport with a colonel and an armed military escort in an army jeep, weaving our way through burning motorcars and a mass of excited youths. I missed the plane, but I saw the problems of security and public order in a country where there is no trained civil police force and where the choice often lies between the absence of control and calling the army in with full force. To my astonishment, the Indonesian papers the next day made no mention of any disorder and the campaign was enthusiastically described as having got off to a good and quiet start.
Since I presented my Credentials 10 weeks ago, I have heard of a fire which destroyed a district in the north of Jakarta making 20,000 people homeless. It was said to have been started by a bunch of torchbearing tearaways on motorcycles acting on the instructions of a rich Chinese Indonesian businessman (alleged to have good contacts with the President) who wanted to acquire and develop the site as a commercial property. One of the arsonists was caught by the locals who cut off his hand. There has been no mention in the press of the incident. The bland way in which the street disorder in 1983 was treated and the cover up of the big fire illustrate quite well the difficulties of a foreign observer getting a true perspective on this complex country, which has the fifth largest population in the world and stretches in an archipelagic chain for 3,500 miles. By way of comparison this is the same distance roughly as from Paris to Ottawa or Peking to Moscow or Tokyo to Darwin. The people living on the over 6,000 habitable islands are drawn from over 300 ethnic groups and practice forms of all the world’s major religions. Thus I cannot after only ten weeks make any reliable judgement of Indonesia …
‘Nothing is said directly’
SIR ROBIN CHRISTOPHER, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
REPUBLIC OF INDONESIA, 1999
Consensus rules in Java. Nothing is said directly, explicit disagreement or criticism is culturally offensive and confrontation is almost unthinkable. At a personal level, as a new arrival I am constantly aware, in every conversation, of the search for underlying agreement – with a smile. When Soeharto showed Soekarno the door in 1966 he did so with the words ‘Father, I always wished to respect you but you would not let me.’ On my second day here I read a speech given by the Commander of the Armed Forces at the Military Academy on the dangers of ‘egocentric assertiveness’ during the forthcoming elections. Only at the end of the lecture did it occur to me what he meant: he was instructing his troops not to shoot on sight.
‘First impressions here could be guaranteed to mislead’
DAVID GILLMORE, HM HIGH COMMISSIONER TO
MALAYSIA, DECEMBER 1983The High Commission in Kuala Lumpur was a stepping stone for Gillmore, whose career was to take him on to higher things. In 1990 he became Permanent Under-Secretary of the FCO, the UK’s most senior diplomat. He was elevated to the House of Lords in 1996, as Baron Gillmore of Thamesfield.
MALAYSIA: EARLY IMPRESSIONS
From my office window I look down on a bustling city sprouting skyscrapers, some of them elegant and original in design, where traffic moves smoothly on newly-built urban motorways between well-tended gardens. All in all, it does not look much like the third world. The Malaysian middle classes are sophisticated and well-to-do. A small but growing proportion of the bourgeoisie enjoying the new affluence is Malay; not long ago it was almost entirely Chinese. There are complaints about the bureaucracy; but by most third world standards, public administration is conducted with commendable efficiency.
To the casual visitor, therefore Kuala Lumpur, if not the rest of this country, offers a prospect reassuring in its Western-ness and stimulating in its apparent energy and dynamism. But it is not, I suspect, quite as simple as that. Beneath the surface of Malaysian society there are contradictions and tensions. It is for this reason that I have entitled this despatch ‘Early Impressions’; I would guess that first impressions here could be guaranteed to mislead.
… Any generalisation about Malaysian society could probably be countered by its opposite. The considerable affluence of the Kuala Lumpur middle class can be set against the poverty of the kampongs; the sophistication of the bourgeoisie against the superstition and backwardness of the bumiputra peasant class; the Westernised manners of the educated classes against the Malaysianness (in its diverse racial forms) of the rest. These contradictions would be of little importance if they did not tug at the fabric of society itself. The contrast between wealth and poverty, sophistication and backwardness is mirrored in the contrast between what is visible on the surface or said in public and the reality beneath …
Perhaps nowhere are double standards more visible than in the government’s attitude to Islam. The government is clearly concerned that fundamentalist Islamic views are infiltrating among the young. In an effort to cut the ground from under the Islamic opposition, the government has made considerable efforts to convey an appearance of Islamic respectability. Malaysia now has an Islamic bank as well as an Islamic university. But when it comes to individuals the double standards are sometimes painfully apparent. A senior Malaysian official, in recent negotiations with the Australians over the RAAF base at Butterworth, insisted that messing for Malaysian and Australian officers should be separate since the former were obliged to eat meat which was not ‘halal’. He brushed aside the fact that things had been this way for the last 20 years and had never caused a problem. But once the formal negotiations were over, he was quite unembarrassed to be seen in private consuming several large whiskies with his Australian counterpart. Public performance and private behaviour are no longer easy bedfellows.
‘Analogies with the lower deck of the Royal Navy’
JOHN FAWCETT, HM AMBASSADOR AT HANOI, MAY 1974
All countries may be equal within the United Nations General Assembly, but as the setting for notable despatches, some stand taller than others. For our purposes, the hierarchy among countries is in fact the inverse of the usual world order. By and large, diplomats representing HMG in the capitals of superpowers and great trading nations wrote less remarkable despatches than those toiling away in obscure backwaters.
Having researched two volumes of these despatches we have learned that if it is striking description, droll national stereotyping and general eccentricity you’re after, then the places to turn to are Africa, the (then) banana republics of South America and – looking east – to Vietnam. Indochina seems to have exerted a curious grip on the imaginations of those serving there.
As one of the despatches below by John Stewart attests, diplomats were rotated in and out of ‘hardship’ posts like Hanoi rather frequently. They were nevertheless still expected to write the customary First Impressions and Valedictory Despatch on arrival and departure. Each one was filed away in the Foreign Office archive, building up over time into a vivid record of what was obviously a challenging post (see also Daphne Park’s remarkable valedictory on pp. 365–75). Robert Tesh, representing HMG in rat-infested Hanoi in the late 1970s, asserted simply that ‘most foreigners in Vietnam, diplomats or not, are on the verge of insanity’ (see Parting Shots, p. 320).
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | Hanoi |
16 May, 1974.
Sir,
I have the honour to report that North Viet-Nam is a puzzling sort of place – particularly for someone who has never studied Marxism-Leninism nor lived in any other Communist country.
After a while, I began to cast about for something in my own experience which in any way resembled life under the system here; and to see analogies with the lower deck of the Royal Navy in the years 1947–49. There is the same minority who, for one reason or another, co-operate fully with the authorities; and the same majority who manage, most of the time, to stay out of trouble but whose object, now the war is over, is to get along as comfortably as they can. Other points of resemblance are overcrowding; low pay; a taste for beer and the cinema; ‘fiddles’ of every kind; readiness to do ‘rabbit jobs’ – i.e. private jobs in public time and with public materials; and the general feeling (amongst the unenthusiastic majority) that life is a long haul, things stay much the same and energy should be conserved.
The differences, however, are instructive. The Naval Discipline Act, as then interpreted, pales before the sanctions available to the authorities here: the prisons have a bad reputation, as do the labour camps, even though the object of the penal system is not so much punishment as re-education in dutiful Communist thought and behaviour. The definition of subversion is wide and the treatment it attracts is harsh. In the navy, there was always plenty to eat. Here, there is no starvation; but the rations are low, ‘free-market’ supplements to them are expensive and most people look rather under-fed. In the messdecks, overcrowding of men without their families didn’t greatly matter. Here, the shortage of urban housing is a major source of misery – my houseboy and his wife and three children share one small room with ten other people now the police will no longer let him and his family live in our house. The lower deck was tolerant towards ‘intellectuals’. Here, in a society with its full share of highly talented people, intellectuals must keep strictly to the party line.
Much though I like the North Viet-Namese, I should hate to live as one of them under their present system. It is not, I am told, as repressive as the Chinese one, let alone the North Korean. Nevertheless, in my book it is a tyranny, founded on class-hatred and maintained by indoctrination, propaganda, isolation, surveillance, fear and force …
I remain a soi-disant1 Ambassador, prevented from presenting his credentials. I have considered putting up a brass plate reading ‘H.E. (Hanoi) failed’. Such, however, is the courtesy of the Viet-Namese, and of my diplomatic colleagues, that the situation has for the most part proved more interesting than painful. We now hear that ‘a decision has been taken in principle’ – whatever that may portend. Mr Barrington, in his Despatch ‘First and Last Impressions of Hanoi’, addressed to your predecessor, has given an admirable account of the sights and sounds and feel of this post. I like it here; and enjoy bicycling about (a privilege denied to my predecessors) and living in our oddly-shaped but quiet and airy house. We are also seeing as much as we can of the country, for example, by driving to Do Son, the former French beach resort outside Haiphong where Rule No. 6 (English version) reads ‘Visitors will be advised not to drink too much until they are drunk’. The Viet-Namese themselves are interesting people to deal with; and the Diplomatic Corps is full of vitality and information, reliable and unreliable. I incline to place in the former category the view of the Egyptian Embassy that Ho Chi Minh has not been well embalmed.
‘The worst climate in the world’
JOHN STEWART, HM CONSUL-GENERAL AT HANOI, MAY
1975
RESTRICTED
BRITISH EMBASSY,
1/1 HANOI,
26 May 1975
The Rt Hon James Callaghan
MP etc etc
Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
Sir,
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF HANOI
I have the honour to report that after three months in Hanoi I am still baffled, infuriated and fascinated by these peculiar people. Later in this despatch I shall try to expand on and explain these reactions but I have opened with these words because they, the Vietnamese, are so different from any people I have encountered before and because my reactions to them and their exoticism must permeate what I write.
Writing of one’s first impressions of Hanoi and its people has a difficulty peculiar to this place. The circumstances of the post during the past 20 years have meant that there has been a complete change of staff almost every twelve months since 1954. I am, I believe, the 17th Head of Post to occupy this seat in 20 years. As a result of this coming and going, a first impressions despatch has landed on the desks in your Department with the inevitable regularity of an income tax demand. I have read the despatches of my distinguished predecessors and have been impressed and awed by the clarity and humour with which they have described so accurately and completely Hanoi and its people. The only trouble with this magnificent series is that they have left me very little to write about that is new or significant. I do however have one great advantage denied to my predecessors which will not be reflected here, but will I trust show up in later writing. Just one month after my arrival the Communists opened their blitzkrieg in the South and so I have had not only the interest of discovering a completely new country and people but also the fascination of following the last few days of a 30 years war. I shall be the first of H M Representatives here to see Vietnam at peace.
‘Vivid, unstable, sensitive, imaginative, passionate, full of laughter, impulsive and unconcerned, malleable, deceitful, vain, generous and turbulent,’ so wrote a Frenchman who had been closely associated with them for some 20 years. After less than 20 weeks here I agree completely with his epithets but I would add one further which is, I believe, a better encapsulation of the Vietnamese and Vietnam and better suited to give some understanding of their character and recent history: ‘stubbornness’. It is this characteristic which has allowed them to prosecute the war for Communism against overwhelming odds and at a terrible cost in men, resources and standard of living. This national trait can be shown by two vignettes from the behaviour of my staff. My driver cannot accept a delay caused by the frequent traffic jams in this town. When he comes to a street completely jammed by vehicles, a jam furthermore which shows every indication of extending right to our destination, he will not wait for the jam to clear. He will try and wriggle his car through the jam; he will try and drive through spaces clearly too small for the car; he will back out and try another route. Until the block is cleared he will not cease his furious activity. If I tell him there is no hurry, that the block will clear in time and nothing he can do will speed our progress, he ignores me. He knows best! This too is a national characteristic. My domestic servants demonstrate everyday this extreme pigheadedness and arrogant assumption of superiority. I have a mild preference for drinks without ice; but when I told my steward this, he looked at me with pity and contempt and continued to put ice into everything I drank. When I sent him back to the kitchen to remove the ice, he argued that it was better for me to have ice, and in the end it took almost two months to impose my will over this ridiculous matter. To me this blind assertion of determination is the clue to the success of the North Vietnamese in achieving what logically was an impossible victory over the whole might of the United States and what was in many ways a stronger society in the South.
They are an egocentric people, filled with the knowledge that they are the torch-bearers of the revolutionary fight and that the centre of the world is at Hanoi. Their feelings towards the outside world mirror almost exactly what I have read of the way the Chinese received foreign traders and Ambassadors in the 18th and early 19th century. Yes, the barbarians from outside may have more modern toys than we, but it is here in Hanoi that the Holy Grail of truth is known and guarded …
Many of my predecessors here have noted that the Vietnamese are improvisers rather than innovators or organisers. I can only echo this. The waste of time due to too much bureaucracy and lack of management has to be seen to be believed. A perfect example of this occurred in the streets around the mission and my house at the end of April where a convoy of trucks loaded with goods for the relief of the South sat complete with their crews for three weeks before finally taking off. I have had a gang of electricians working in my house now for not quite two months. In these two months they have succeeded in rewiring 4 rooms and the hallway; a similar job on my house in England, which is slightly larger, took 5 days for the whole house.
Why are these people as they are? The clues must be sought and can be found in interdependent factors of geography, climate and history. The Vietnamese people, during the whole of their expansion into Indo-China, have been cut off from the rest of Asia by the still fearsome barrier of the Annamese chain of mountains. To the west of this chain the influences are almost solely Indian; to the east, Chinese. It is the Annamese chain too which determines the climate of the Red River delta, surely one of the worst climates in the world, which must have its effect on their character … All to the east of the chain is shut off under a damp, impermeable ceiling under which one is cold and wet in the winter or hot and very wet in the summer.
‘A unique pot pourri in the world of diplomacy’
JOHN LLOYD, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE KINGDOM OF
LAOS, AUGUST 1970
The neutralist flavour prevailing in Vientiane can always be readily tasted at diplomatic and Government receptions when there are assembled together representatives of the Royal Lao Government … of the U.S.S.R., of China, of North Vietnam, of Poland and the representatives of Japan, South Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, India, Burma and Indonesia, and of some of the Western powers including Canada. This may be quite a unique pot pourri in the world of diplomacy. Not all are on speaking terms with each other and the Chinese, who never say anything of political importance in conversation, can be rude to the point of literally turning their backs on the Americans, allowing their deeds to speak louder than words. The Pathet Lao representative sometimes gets animated in conversation and refers periodically to lackeys and running dogs; while the Soviet Military Attaché, who cannot stand any Chinese for reasons best known to himself, shuns his Chinese colleague – who holds the nominal rank of Colonel in the rankless People’s Liberation Army and is a jovial character – as if he had the bubonic plague (‘I never speak to ’im’ he told me with pride as we walked past the Chinese Colonel on leaving the French Embassy Fourteenth of July Reception). Sometimes the Lao taste for neutrality takes on a humorous twist as, for example, when the Soviet Ambassador approached the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications last June to ask him to issue some Lenin anniversary stamps and to organise a Soviet stamp exhibition for the anniversary. The Minister did not feel inclined to organise an exhibition of Soviet stamps as the town of Saravane in the South had just been captured by Communist forces. But he agreed to issue some Lenin anniversary stamps, though he told the Ambassador that to keep the balance he would issue a stamp to commemorate Franklin D. Roosevelt at the same time. When the issues duly appeared shortly afterwards, Lenin had two stamps worth 30 and 70 kip respectively, but Roosevelt had one stamp worth 120 kip; a subtle Lao way of saying that one Roosevelt is worth more than two Lenin.
‘Perhaps nearer to being omnivorous than any other people’
ALAN DAVIDSON, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE KINGDOM OF
LAOS, NOVEMBER 1973Before Laos, Alan Davidson was sent by the Foreign Office to Tunisia, where he took up an interest that was eventually to eclipse his diplomatic career: cookery-writing. Unable to find good fish dishes in Tunis, Davidson set about writing his own book of seafood recipes. In Laos the newly promoted ambassador juggled his duties representing HMG with writing three more cookbooks on the local cuisine, which were published in Britain to growing acclaim.
Davidson stood out in Vientiane, driving through the streets of the capital in an imported vintage Bentley, and attending official functions wearing a plumed helmet. After Laos, Davidson took early retirement aged just fifty-one (his wife and daughters had jokingly warned that he would become ‘insufferably pompous if he had another ambassadorial post’). Leaving diplomacy behind, Davidson made a huge success of his true calling, writing more than a dozen books including his 1999 opus, The Oxford Companion to Food, which took him twenty years to complete.
CONFIDENTIAL
FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE
DIPLOMATIC REPORT No. 511/73
| FAL 1/7 | General Distribution |
LAOS
9 November, 1973
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LAOS
Her Majesty’s Ambassador at Vientiane to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | Vientiane, |
9 November, 1973
Sir,
My first impressions of Laos were disconcerting. Standing on the Thai bank of the Mékong soon after dawn on 20 August I listened to a transistor crackling in a nearby café. Smiling informants told us the news: a military coup was taking place in Vientiane on the other bank. Shortly afterwards, half way across the Mékong, I crossed the frontier into Laos. The Phi, or spirits which influence events in this country, did not fail to mark the occasion. The engine of the little motor-boat failed and the seat on which I was perched in it collapsed backwards.
Thus my initial impression was one of being adrift, in an uncomfortable posture, in opaque and swirling cross-currents. The symbolism was apt for a new Ambassador with no previous experience of Laotian affairs. It was also instructive to discover how quickly an unpromising situation could take a turn for the better. The seat was righted, the motor started up again, we clambered up to be greeted on the muddy bank by the reception party; and soon after we arrived at the Embassy the attempted coup petered out.
Vientiane has a population of less than 200,000 but it takes up a lot of space, straggling along the Mékong for 10 kilometres. Most of the buildings, which range from traditional Lao wooden houses on stilts through French colonial architecture to modern concrete buildings, are lower than the trees. The general effect is shabby but quite pleasing. There is at present no public transport and motorcars are still so few that the town can function with hardly any traffic lights or parking regulations …
I met one American on the eve of his departure from Laos after several years here. He was an USAID man, although he had a CIA face and physique. He told me that he had wanted to write a book about Laos. But he had only written the title; it was to be called ‘You Must Be Kidding’. All within ear-shot chuckled their assent; they were unanimous in feeling that what goes on in Laos strains credulity. This is so, in some ways; but the proposition needs analysis.
There is nothing intrinsically incredible about Laos or its people. There is plenty to astonish the newcomer, but that is a different matter. The eyes of the young British doctor working at Paksane widen when he enters the hospital and sees what the local sorcerer, crouched by a bed, is doing to one of his patients. The newly arrived wife starts back when she sees some of the creatures and concoctions offered for sale in the market; for the Lao are perhaps nearer to being omnivorous than any other people. The tourist blinks when, admiring the huge triumphal arch at the end of Vientiane’s only wide street, he is told that this is what the Lao fashioned out of cement given to them for a new airport runway. Everyone who comes here is taken aback by some or many aspects of the country, just as everyone is attracted by the amiability of the Lao.
But the surprises are the sort of surprises which are to be expected in a remote and primitive country. What really is extraordinary is the impact on this little kingdom of contemporary great Power politics. The country is too small and too primitive to carry the traffic of international animosities and rivalries which have been discharged through it during the last two decades. Earlier this year, Laos was harbouring up to 80,000 North Viet-Namese troops, 30,000 Chinese troops and army road builders, 20,000 Thai irregulars and shrouded numbers of American para-military forces. On top of that a quarter of the population have become refugees; and the economy and the armed forces have been subjected to massive injections of aid, as though a mouse was being given shots designed for a water-buffalo. The effects of all this on a young and weak country and a simple people are indeed sometimes hard to credit …
Thanks to our little Beaver aircraft, I and members of my staff are able to travel widely … seeing the country in this way dispels some illusions. Laos is no longer ‘the land of a million elephants’, but the land of fewer than a thousand. Not many of the great beasts had remained wild; and most of these, disturbed by the gunfire and bombing, have now splashed their way across the Mekong into Thailand. Nor are the remoter parts of the country as untouched as one would suppose. It certainly looks wild enough towards the Burmese and Chinese frontiers; but little of the original rain-forest has survived the ‘slash and burn’ agriculture practised by the hill-tribes. The people too, in these parts, have lost their virginity to the 20th century. I met a USAID official in the north-west who had once met a man who had never seen a wheel. It is doubtful whether any such could be found now. Only the butterflies and orchids seem unchanged.
‘A travesty of its former self’
TERENCE O’BRIEN, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE SOCIALIST
REPUBLIC OF THE UNION OF BURMA, OCTOBER 1974Shortly after arriving in Rangoon, Terence O’Brien wrote the Foreign Office an ordinary despatch in the traditional letter form. But these impressionistic notes, which were also sent back to London, make for better reading.
NOTES
A. Appearances
1. First reaction to Rangoon was one of deep physical shock.
2. I have seen and lived in far worse conditions elsewhere in Asia; what is different about Rangoon is the oppressive, brooding atmosphere, a sullen cheerless city.
3. The Burmese appear far cleaner, better fed, better clothed than their counterparts in any South Asian city; but what an unsmiling, silent and withdrawn people they appear.
4. The streets and public parks are models of hygiene and civic care after the insanitary squalor of those in India, Pakistan or Nepal; but they breathe no light or life, only a drab, tired dullness of a regulated Society that has sapped the animation out of its people’s public behaviour.
5. Rangoon has no particular historic or cultural significance (Shwedagon Pagoda excepted). It was built by foreigners as a commercial capital, the hub of Asia’s rice trade and the world centre of the teak business. Perhaps this is why the Burmese seem so indifferent toward Rangoon.
6. The architecture a bit unimaginative; but the solid imposing buildings bespeak the former mercantile wealth of an imperial British past and a once thriving shopping centre that vied with Singapore, Penang and Colombo. Today the city is a travesty of its former self.
7. The best buildings have been taken over by the new public Corporations. The latter have improvised all manner of make-shift adaptations giving the buildings the sorry appearance of our war-time Rationing Centres. Other buildings have become workers’ hostels and now look like requisitioned barrack accommodation. Others again have been half occupied by gimcrack private businesses, half unoccupied and now largely derelict.
8. The purely residential area around Inya Lake is in much better shape.
9. But beyond that, the industrial belt of Rangoon is an untidy, sprawling shanty-town world where decay and neglect seem the salient features.
10. The water front is an equally pitiable memorial to former days of bustling prosperity. The ferry Journey to Syriam across the river is an excursion through a graveyard of rotting unseaworthy hulks.
11. Admittedly Burma was not looking its best when I arrived. The monsoon was in full swing and the civilian population were still frightened by what had happened in early June and resentful of the Government’s recourse to force.1 Nevertheless part of their sullen apathy must stem from the depressed conditions that have been allowed to overtake Rangoon.
‘As different from others as dogs from cats’
SIR JOHN PILCHER, HM AMBASSADOR TO
JAPAN, FEBRUARY 1968‘The last of the scholar-diplomats’ was how one of Sir John Pilcher’s successors at the Tokyo Embassy, Hugh Cortazzi, described him. It’s amusing to note that these meticulously considered thoughts were addressed to a drunken buffoon of a politician, George Brown. Pilcher’s First Impressions takes the form of a learned, encyclopaedic treatise on the Japanese people, covering everything from their ancient imperial history to their metaphysics (the ‘sadness of matter’). In Whitehall it was received with warmth and even veneration. ‘The ambassador has painted his picture with a broad brush and in bright colours,’ wrote James Murray, head of the Far Eastern Department. ‘A detail here and there may perhaps as a result have been over-emphasised, but the result is a “first impressions” despatch of unusual interest and value,’ meaning ‘writes interestingly and well but eccentric in focus’.
Sir John’s courtesy was legendary. He had a policy (says one commentator) of offering
champagne to anyone who called on him regardless of the hour of the day or night. He once visited a provincial [Japanese] town to be greeted with banners saying ‘Welcome to the French Ambassador’. He was such a tactful, diplomatic person – and so keen to avoid causing loss of face – that he proceeded to speak in English with a French accent and pretended throughout his day-long visit that he was the French Ambassador … spending the day praising the country to the north of his temporarily adopted one.
True or not in its detail, the story gives a flavour of the Ambassador’s reluctance to offend.
Not so Lady Pilcher. Sir John was accompanied to Japan by his equally formidable wife, an old-school ambassadress who could sometimes come across as rather superior. It was said in the Office that Lady Pilcher (who as a gracious Patroness of the Japanese Ikebana Society reputedly complained privately that the art form seemed to consist mostly in gravel and dried sticks) had remarked to her daughter, on hearing that she wanted to marry a young financier and live with him in Barnes Common: ‘Barnes Common? Barnes Common? But if a gel wants to change her gloves in the middle of the day, she can’t go all the way back to Barnes Common.’
Sir John notes elsewhere in this abridged despatch how the ‘entire nation’ had been hit by an ‘insatiable thirst for consumer goods’. Today, we are accustomed to the neon sheen of Tokyo, and to the global success of Sony, Toyota and other capitalist icons – and latterly, perhaps, to the doldrums into which the great economic power has fallen in middle age. But in the 1960s consumerism was still something of a novelty for the Japanese. The Ambassador was much taken with the question of how long mere economic success would satisfy a people for whom militarism was a more familiar source and token of national pride.
In the final analysis it was not a return by Japan to military aggression that worried Pilcher, however. Rather, the Ambassador feared ‘the pull of China’. Japan’s classless, ascetic society, he thought, could all too easily be turned Communist. The friendship extended by Britain, the United States and others since the Second World War has, indeed, been motivated in large part by the desire to keep Japan ‘anchored in the West’. In the event Japan plumped firmly for the West, but the choice is still there, still as stark as Pilcher found it, and still troubling for Japanese foreign policymakers.
Pilcher’s opinions on the Japanese hardened over the course of his posting. Departing Tokyo in 1972 the ambassador wrote a valedictory despatch calling them ‘narrow-minded and egotistic, lacking an international outlook and barren of philosophy’. Pilcher also feared, quite wrongly, that they might secretly be building nuclear weapons.
To set into context the almost anthropological tone of Sir John’s report – as from an explorer visiting a parallel world or another age – we append beneath this despatch another British diplomat’s account from the same country, written almost a century to the day earlier: our then Second Secretary’s description of the ceremony of hara-kiri.
CONFIDENTIAL
THIS DOCUMENT IS THE PROPERTY OF HER BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT
| FJ 1/6 | Foreign Office and Whitehall Distribution |
JAPAN
19 FEBRUARY, 1968
SECTION 1
IMPRESSIONS OF CONTEMPORARY JAPAN
Sir John Pilcher to Mr Brown. (Received 19 February)
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | Tokyo, |
12 February, 1968
Sir,
I have the honour to offer some reflections on contemporary Japan as I find it after an absence of some 30 years and four months in the country now.
The monk, painter and poet Basho, visiting the battlefield of Sekigahara, on which the fate of Japan for several vital centuries had been decided, felt moved to address to the empty, green plain the ‘haiku’: ‘Oh grass of summer, you are all that remains of the dreams of warriors!’ Were he able to revisit his country now, after its recovery from the unprecedented devastation of the last war, and were he to take the famous Bullet train, the sight of the unending factories springing up all along the 300 miles from Tokyo to Osaka might well inspire in him the same reflection as the lush grass on that plain. Into this all too flourishing industrial development (with its lamentable hideosity) have gone the devotion to duty, the energy and the idealism of the ‘kamikaze’ pilots. The dark, satanic mills seem to embody now the aspirations of a race of warriors. The question is for how long.
The Japanese in the course of their history have veered in different directions, always seemingly at the behest of their ruling family. Under Prince Shotoku in the seventh century they swallowed the civilisation and religion of T’ang China. The Emperor Meiji, after his restoration to the position his ancestors held in the remote past, appeared to sponsor the Westernisation of his country and its opening to the world exactly 100 years ago. It was the present Emperor, who, in the spirit of his reign title ‘Showa’ meaning ‘radiant peace’ (which had hitherto sounded so ironically in Japanese ears), brought the last war to an end by his heroic and dramatic broadcast. He thus in popular estimation saved his country and his people from total annihilation. For this he is accorded unending gratitude.
The Japanese of course, are as hypocritical as others have found us. They know well how to cloak their mundane ambitions in the full panoply of the highest moral obligations. In the 1930s the military – in line with long-established tradition – had got the Emperor, the theoretical source of all power, into their hands. They interpreted his will to be the aggrandisement of his empire … When this ‘mission’ did not succeed and the very existence of the Japanese State was threatened, it was obvious to all that the military had not only failed to carry out their interpretation of the will of the Emperor, but also that they had misled him. Far from the prestige of the Emperor suffering from the great humiliation of the first national defeat known to Japanese history, by his courageous broadcast he emerged as the saviour of his country and as a man to whom the military had done a great wrong. To the awe his position traditionally inspires are therefore now added sympathy and affection.
It is to me of the greatest significance that the Emperor remains at the apex of the Japanese edifice. Without this keystone, the whole structure might well have collapsed (as indeed happened in China in 1911). Japanese morale is based on an excessive sense of nationalism, born of their geographical remoteness from the Asian mainland; they are situated 80 miles off Korea – as though we lay at the same distance off Norway. They tend to think of themselves as being as different from others as dogs from cats. To a dog presumably the highest living dog is The Supreme Dog. They emerged from the mists of the past grouped round their Emperor, whom they regarded as on a par with the divinities or heroes of rock, stream, waterfall or grove and with the historic or legendary figures of their past.
This abnormal cohesion was given a solid Confucian structure under the ascendancy of the Tokugawa Shoguns (which followed the battle of Sekigahara) and was further accentuated by the policy of isolation (1636–1868) imposed upon the country. No people has ever been so regimented probably as under the ‘military government’ of the Tokugawas. Every detail of life was prescribed, from the dress permitted to each age and profession, to the proportions of rooms. Frugality and austerity were enjoined on all: ostentation was the nadir of vulgarity. Loyalty was the supreme virtue, before which every other consideration had to give way. The sacrifice of self, wife, child and family to further the interests of the superior to whom loyalty was due is the very stuff of Japanese drama to this day …
The military in the 1930s exaggerated the pattern. Self-sacrifice became a fetish, to die for the Emperor an end in itself. ‘Thought-control’ saw to it that ‘the heartless legalism of the West’ and its enervating individualism were kept at bay. To be seen with a golf club meant censure for a man, while women with permanently waved hair were summoned to the police station for a severe talking to. In the end the excessive exclusivity inculcated defeated the purposes of the ‘divine mission’. The Japanese soldier proved incapable of understanding the outlook of others or of treating them as comparable human beings. From this springs the cruelty that astonished and shocked the world …
Observing this from afar, I thought that defeat would teach the lesson to the Japanese that they are as other men are. This alone, together with the discomfiture of the military, I thought, should make the Japanese reasonably normal, without necessarily destroying their cohesive structure, upon which their successful national life depends. This has proved to be the case. Exclusivity has gone, even to the point of neutralism and voluntary dependence on others advocated by the Left of Centre. On the other hand, cohesion has become so rooted in the national psychology as to seem virtually indestructible; it has become part of Japanese physique. The individual Japanese never seems quite fully developed until ripe old age. Alone, he is all too often diffident, inconclusive and awkward; he finds fulfilment in the group. This cohesive, ‘holistic’ tendency of the Japanese means that the group is stronger than the sum of its members. From an individual, no startling decisions can be expected; a group may plan a Pearl Harbour or an economic miracle.
Again, the Japanese are not an intellectual race; they rely upon intuition and in a group upon the insensible friction of mind upon mind to find decisions almost instinctively (just as they prefer an object of art to appear to be ‘born’ rather than ‘made’). In this they are vastly encouraged by the typically Japanese development of Zen Buddhism, which holds that enlightenment can never be attained by the intellect through reason, but only by a flash of intuitive perception. The military deduced from this that the reflex action of the warrior in severing a head with a sword, rather than risk pausing to reason with its owner, was morally justifiable. However admirable the effects of Zen on aesthetics, its anti-rational influence on the national psychology has been of questionable value …
In their world there is no barrier between man and the rest of creation. Man is a stone among stones, a bird among birds. Other animate and inanimate things have a greater intrinsic significance to them than to us. The fact that portions of the human personality regroup with others on the same plane of spiritual development and move up and down the scale of objects and beings means that for them a table or a plant is closer to the human being. Man is considered in his cosmic setting. He is viewed as a drop in a stream; a passing phenomenon, here one moment and gone the next. The transience of existence, the evanescence of all things and the ‘sadness of matter’ are the inevitable commonplace sighs of Japanese conversation and literature. Moreover the world is an illusion: the Calderon-like cry ‘since I am convinced that reality is in no sense real, how can I admit that dreams are dreams?’1 haunts their senses – and offers only a poetic escape.
Many assume that because they are modern, they must be ‘Westernised’. This is far from the case. They were influenced by the post-Christian idealism and humanity shown by the American conquerors, but fundamentally they approach the 20th century in fact from different premises to our own. Loyalty and cohesion have stood them in immensely good stead. They are loyal to their ministry or firm with almost the fervour of religion. Once they enter an organisation, they offer themselves to it for life. The web of obligations sees to it that their superiors – theoretically, but usually – look after them for life. Yearly increments of salary are paid to all. Housing is commonly provided. Even wives or husbands might be found by the employers, if requested. Education is often completed by them. Habit demands that civil servants should retire early (just as Emperors in the past retired to a Buddhist retreat, where as monks they ruled the country from behind the ‘screens’). They move into industry, while retaining their sense of loyalty to their former ministry. Hence the ease with which the Government can influence or even direct industry through a vastly extended ‘old boy net’.
Their holistic tendencies fit well into the bureaucratic life of the age. They present baffling problems to foreigners. Under their system nothing can be done in a hurry. Prior notice must be given of a point, which will then be studied endlessly by the relevant group, before any decision can be reached. Moreover, generally, the foreigner must himself show an awareness of the principles of loyalty, if he is to make headway. Once the Japanese are ‘engaged’ their sense of loyalty comes into play; they are therefore unwilling to engage themselves, unless they are sure of the other side. It becomes almost a question of making friends, before successful business deals on any scale can be achieved. This is time-consuming and entails frequent visits to Japan, and great patience is required …
The Japanese are an awkward mixture of Prussian respect for order, combined with an Italian sensibility (but without the Italian genius for improvisation). They have been nurtured and sustained on ideals. The war turned many of their ideals into shattered illusions. They have in consequence been content to adopt a low posture, to turn in on themselves, to set their house in order and to seek economic prosperity …
They need a greater trading space. A kind of common market with China is the obvious answer, but the shape and compatibility of the China to come are not yet visible and may not become so for a very long time … These problems, which obsess every thinking Japanese, clearly admit of no militaristic solution. The temptation in the long run for Japan will rather be to make common cause with China. Whether they succumb to that or not will depend on how China shapes and how firmly they are anchored in the West. Let us not forget, however, that between the Confucian ideal of achieving harmony here and now in this world and the Communist hopes of building a Utopian, classless society, the difference is relatively small. Apart from the national institution of the Imperial Family, Japan is now virtually a classless society. Land reform has eliminated any territorial wealth. ‘Fun’ is exclusively on expense accounts. In my opinion, based on so short a view of contemporary Japan, future danger may well lie in the pull of China.
For the time-being, however, I think Basho, were he living, would have been right to conclude that the teeming factories have canalised and made constructive the aftermath of the dreams of the warriors, who led Japan so terribly astray only 30 years ago and whose teachings and antics in Japan and China remain so vividly present to my mind …
I have, &c.
J. PILCHER.
‘A dead silence followed …it was horrible’
BERTIE MITFORD, SECOND SECRETARY AT
HM LEGATION TOKYO, MARCH 1868Mitford, later created Lord Redesdale and the grandfather of the famous Mitford sisters, penned the following account for the FO to satisfy British curiosity about the infamous hara-kiri ritual. During an incident in the civil war of 1868, some foreign representatives were fired on by one of the warring factions. The officer responsible was sentenced to die by hara-kiri, a sort of hybrid of suicide and beheading, though the relief granted by a swift decapitation is somewhat diluted by the disembowelling which precedes it. Mitford, who does not spare the details, seems satisfied that the rigid formality with which the execution is conducted renders it a noble, just punishment.
I was last night sent officially to witness the execution by harakiri (harakiri from hara the belly and kiri root form of kiru to cut) (self-immolation through disembowelling) of Taki Zenzaburo, the officer of the Prince of Bizen. He it was who gave the order to fire upon the foreign settlement at Hyo¯go on the 4th of last month (February) … As the harakiri is one of the customs of this country which has excited the greatest curiosity in Europe, although owing to the fact that it had never hitherto been witnessed by foreigners it has seemed little better than a matter of fable, I will tell you what occurred.
The ceremony, which was ordered by the Mikado himself, took place at 10:30 at night in the temple of Seifukuji … A witness was sent from each of the foreign legations. We were seven foreigners in all.
After an interval of a few moments of anxious suspense, Taki Zenzaburo, a stalwart man 32 years of age, with a noble air, walked into the hall, attired in his dress of ceremony with the peculiar hempen cloth wings which are worn on great occasions. He was accompanied by a kaishaku and three officers who wore the jimbaori or war-surcoat with gold tissue facings. The word kaishaku, it should be observed, is one to which our word executioner is no equivalent term. The office is that of a gentleman; in many cases it is performed by a kinsman or friend of the condemned, and the relation between them is rather that of principal and second than that of victim and executioner. In this instance the kaishaku was a pupil of Taki Zenzaburo, and was selected by the friends of the latter from among their own number for his skill in swordsmanship.
With the kaishaku on his left hand, Taki Zenzaburo advanced slowly towards the Japanese witnesses and the two bowed before them; then drawing near to the foreigners they saluted in the same way – perhaps even with more deference. In each case the salutation was ceremoniously returned. Slowly and with great dignity the condemned man mounted on to the raised floor, prostrated himself before the high altar twice and seated himself on the felt carpet with his back to the high altar, the kaishaku crouching on his left-hand side. One of the attendant officers came forward bearing a stand of the kind used in temples for offerings, on which wrapped in paper lay the wakizashi, the short sword or dirk of the Japanese, nine inches and a half in length, with a point and an edge as sharp as a razor’s. This he handed, prostrating himself, to the condemned man who received it reverently, raised it to his head with both hands, and placed it in front of himself.
After another profound obeisance, Taki Zenzaburo, in a voice which betrayed just so much emotion and hesitation as might be expected from a man who is making a painful confession, but with no sign of either in his face or manner, spoke as follows:
‘I, and I alone, unwarrantably gave the order to fire on the foreigners at Kobe, and again as they tried to escape, on the 11th of last month (4th February 1868). For this crime I disembowel myself, and I beg you who are present to do me the honour of witnessing the act.’
Bowing once more, the speaker allowed his upper garments to slip down to his girdle, and remained naked to the waist. Carefully, according to custom, he tucked his sleeves under his knees to prevent himself from falling backwards; for a noble Japanese gentleman should die falling forwards. Deliberately, with a steady hand, he took the dirk that lay before him – he looked at it wistfully, almost affectionately – for a moment he seemed to collect his thoughts for the last time, and then stabbing himself deeply below the waist on the left-hand side, he drew the dirk slowly across to the right side, and, turning it in the wound, gave a slight cut upwards: during this sickeningly painful operation he never moved a muscle of his face. When he drew out the dirk, he leaned forward and stretched out his neck – an expression of pain for the first time crossed his face, but he uttered no sound. At that moment the kaishaku, who, still crouching by his side, had been keenly watching his every movement, sprang to his feet, poised his sword for a second in the air – there was a flash – a heavy, ugly thud, a crashing fall – with one blow the head had been severed from the body.
A dead silence followed – broken only by the hideous noise of the blood throbbing out of the inert heap before us which but a moment before had been a brave and chivalrous man. It was horrible.
The kaishaku made a low bow, wiped his sword with a piece of rice paper which he had ready for the purpose, and retired from the raised floor, and the stained dirk was solemnly borne away, a bloody proof of the execution.
The two representatives of the Mikado then left their places and crossing over to where the foreign witnesses sat called us to witness that the sentence of death upon Taki Zenzaburo had been faithfully carried out. The ceremony being at an end we left the temple. The ceremony, to which the place and the hour gave an additional solemnity, was characterized throughout by that extreme dignity and punctiliousness which are the distinctive marks of the proceedings of Japanese gentlemen of rank; and it is important to note this fact, because it carries with it the conviction that the dead man was indeed the officer who had committed the crime, and no substitute. While profoundly impressed by the terrible scene it was impossible at the same time not to be filled with admiration of the firm and manly bearing of the sufferer, and of the nerve with which the kaishaku performed his last duty to his master …
‘Little more than a jerry-built slum’
IAN MACKENZIE, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE REPUBLIC OF
KOREA, AUGUST 1967
| (No. 15. Confidential and Guard) | Seoul, |
25 July, 1967
Sir,
After pacifist, neutral, affluent, Socialist, birth-controlled Sweden, Korea presents an extreme contrast. Magpies are about the only thing the two countries have in common. By comparison with Stockholm, Seoul, three-quarters destroyed during the war, is little better than a jerry-built slum full of jeeps and Japanese-built cars jostling with buses and army trucks to jump the queue. I find it pleasant enough to live in nevertheless.
Coming to Korea is like entering a war camp, with the whiff of a police state to boot. A curfew is enforced for four hours every night. Military and school uniforms abound. A Central Intelligence Agency actively rounds up alleged spies, and militias are being got ready to deal with the threat of guerrillas. An anti-Communist law circumscribes the activities of writers and Opposition politicians alike. Far from wanting the Viet-Nam War to end, the South Koreans would be near bankruptcy tomorrow if it did. With memories of their own war against Communism, kept alive by frequent incidents along the Armistice Line, most of them believe in armed resistance to the Communists anywhere.
‘They need a friend’
SIR OLIVER WRIGHT, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA, SEPTEMBER 1982
BRITISH EMBASSY,
WASHINGTON D.C. 20008
TELEPHONE: (202) 462-1340,
30 September 1982
FROM THE AMBASSADOR
The Right Honourable
Francis Pym MC MP
Dear Secretary of State,
THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP
Now that I have completed my first calls here – at the White House, on the Administration and up the Hill – I thought you might like to know how I have found things before the complexities of daily business confuse the general picture. The overwhelming impression is one of great friendliness: Britain’s reputation here … is high: and her Majesty’s Government, despite steel1 and pipeline,2 is in very good standing.
The Evidence. The President, in his speech of reply when I presented my credentials, himself mentioned ‘the special relationship’. Subsequent experience so far everywhere in Washington has convinced me that it represents the declared attitude of the present US Administration to Britain and its Government …
Blessed with a condign quantity of professional scepticism, I have naturally asked myself whether all this was just flattery for a newcomer; and whether this is what they may be saying to the other boys. I do not think so. On the contrary, I believe that the Reagan Administration wishes to have a special relationship with us … And I think it wishes to have it for a number of different but interlocking reasons.
First, I think the Administration wants it for reasons which are no less valid for being clichés of many years standing: a common language, common thought processes, common values, common heritage and a variety of shared interests. More particularly, they consider the philosophies of our two governments to be compatible … We do not go out of our way to be awkward when our interests diverge and indeed, tend to apply our minds to overcome problems when inevitably they arise.
But the most important reason, in my view, is that the Americans experience keenly the loneliness of being the Western super power. They need a friend whose opinions they value and whom they can trust. They accept our commitment to Europe but think, as we do, that, this should reinforce not weaken the trans-Atlantic relationship …
They value the cross check we can provide on their own analyses and the second opinion on their own policies. They need, in short, someone to talk to, and find in us someone worth talking to. They may not always take our advice, but they will take it into consideration when, as is their prerogative, they make up their own minds.
‘The result this time could well be yes to secession’
SIR ANTHONY GOODENOUGH, HM HIGH COMMISSIONER
TO CANADA, JULY 1996For much of the 1990s, Canada appeared to be on the edge of break-up. Demands by the French-speaking eastern province of Quebec for greater autonomy culminated in a 1995 referendum, and the closeness of the result stunned the world. The federalists, led by the Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, carried the day with 50.6 per cent of the votes, against 49.4 per cent wanting independence.
Quebec had opted to remain part of Canada. And yet, the tide towards independence was still strong. So strong that just nine months later, Britain’s newly appointed High Commissioner in Ottawa was cabling London with a fresh warning about secession. The Canadian federation, feared Anthony Goodenough, might not even last out the decade.
In fact, what Goodenough was seeing was the high-water mark of the Québécois sovereignty movement (the high-water mark so far, that is to say – we do not want to be caught out making any unnecessary predictions of our own). In 2003 the same electorate who in 1995 nearly cast Quebec asunder from Canada ejected the pro-independence Parti Québécois from the provincial government, voting in to office the centre-right Liberal party instead, on a federalist platform. A poll taken in Quebec in April 2011 showed support for independence had sunk to 41 per cent, with 59 per cent supporting the status quo.
It is interesting to speculate on what foreign ambassadors posted to London today are reporting on Scotland’s debate about independence; and to note that, at least in the case of Quebec, it can be a mistake to assume that a trend in one direction will never turn.
Canada is faced with three significant internal political problems of which one, the Quebec issue, threatens Canada’s survival as a nation. The other two, the growing alienation of the Western provinces and the aboriginal issue, are less serious … In a nutshell, the threat of Quebec’s secession remains real. Opinion among the hundreds of Canadians with whom I have discussed the question here and in London is divided pretty equally between those who believe a united Canada will continue somehow to muddle through and those who fear the worst.
M. Chrétien is an optimist. He told you in May that he expects an eventual solution. He does not believe the majority of Quebecois really want to separate, but to negotiate a better deal for themselves. He has made clear that he will not accept a UDI.1 If the separatists win a referendum, Quebec will have to negotiate its independence with Ottawa.
Many Canadians believe Chrétien is over optimistic and criticise the Federal Government for inactivity. I share their concern. I see a risk that M. Bouchard, Premier of Quebec, will call a provincial election unexpectedly early, win and use the momentum to hold a referendum in which the result this time could well be yes to secession. Events could still go either way. But we should not exclude the possibility of secession. This could happen before 2000.
Western alienation is not an immediate threat to Canadian unity. But, both in Alberta and British Columbia, I encountered resentment against Quebec and frustration with the Federal Government for its failure to deal firmly with Quebec and its alleged insensitivity to Western concerns. Calgary has a distinctly American feel about its admirable enthusiasm for free enterprise and individual initiative. And the strong Chinese immigrant influence in British Columbia, where for example half the primary school children in the Vancouver area are said to have English as their second rather than their mother tongue, is weakening its links with Canada East of the Rockies …
Many Canadians I meet worry that they lack a recognisable national identity and that this too, along with the Quebec issue, Western alienation and aboriginal dissatisfaction, will weaken the ties that bind the nation together. So much is heard about the Canadian mosaic of peoples (compared with the American melting pot) that I had expected to find greater identity differences between the Canadians I have met in my travels across the country. Instead I find that even Canadians of widely differing ethnic origins share common characteristics: civic mindedness, tolerance, lack of stridency, seriousness of purpose.
‘Like the United States … if the South had won the Civil War’
SIR JOHN RUSSELL, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE FEDERATIVE
REPUBLIC OF BRAZIL, MAY 1967In 1967, senior clerks gave Sir John Russell’s First Impressions from Brazil wide distribution, labelling it ‘very long, but magnificent’.
Correspondence alongside it in the archives shows just how seriously diplomats took their amateur literary efforts. After the Office had his despatch formally printed, Russell had a subordinate write from Rio to point out a spelling mistake. The word ‘tartarugan’ – meaning ‘shaped like a turtle-shell’, which the ambassador used to describe the theatre in Brasilia – was rendered incorrectly. An inquiry traced the error to ‘misplaced erudition’ by a clerk in the Stationery Office, who late on a Saturday night consulted five dictionaries before deciding the ambassador must have meant the Miltonian ‘tartarean’, meaning the ‘lower levels of hell’.
There are two more despatches from Russell on pp. 64–71 and 71–82.
THIS DOCUMENT IS THE PROPERTY OF HER BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT
| AB 1\9 | Foreign Office and whitehall Distribution |
BRAZIL
23 MAY, 1967
SECTION 1
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BRAZIL
Sir John Russell to Mr Brown. (Received 23 May)
| (No 21. Confidential and Guard) | Rio de Janeiro, |
18 May 1967
Sir,
My first impressions of Rio de Janeiro are overdue: and mixed.
The startling natural beauty of the city’s setting is soon eclipsed for the struggling resident by the heat, the humidity, the noise and the abysmal incommodity of the town. Rio is ill-designed and overcrowded; it is provincial, badly run, uncomfortable and shabby. Its architecture is of an unexampled mediocrity. Like the surface of the moon Rio is short of water, covered in dust and pocked with deep holes. Rio’s telephones do not work and its light regularly goes off without warning: its murderous traffic serves only to winnow the quick from the dead: whilst its domestic servants are, hands down, the worst in the world. Its weather is vile for six months of the year: and the torrential summer rains, which fall regularly every Christmas, as regularly put the improvident city clean out of action. Its administration is capable of improvement in almost every respect. Rio in fact is a far cry from the tourist paradise that it has so long been cracked up to be. ‘The Paris of Latin America’ indeed! No lotus-land this: and its demystification is long overdue.
Brazil to-day makes you speculate rather on what the United States would have been like if the South had won the Civil War. And the comparison is not all that unfair when you reflect that Colombus only discovered America eight years before Cabral stumbled upon Brazil. What explains the enormous difference? The Portuguese character, I suppose, allied to a tropical climate and 300 years of slavery …
If my introduction, Sir, smacks a trifle sour, it is that it reflects the appalling frustrations of daily life here, the time and nerve-eroding struggle against the active hostility of allegedly inanimate objects. But the Bay of Rio is one of the great sights of nature and when it emerges through the steam-heat you cannot fail to be enchanted. The people too are gay and friendly.
Meanwhile I owe the Department this conventional despatch. After six months the native hue of first impression is already a little sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. So, for better or for worse, to paper: otherwise this despatch will no longer be what the title professes – an essentially subjective account of how the country first strikes the writer, in my case a happily virgin newcomer to the subcontinent.
Brazilian society, it appears, has changed greatly in the last 25 years, turning progressively inwards upon itself; and you must on arrival dismiss your preconceived ideas of a sophisticated European sort of world. To-day it is a very local breed educated in Brazil, essentially Latin American: mainly monoglot, increasingly self-sufficient, and rather parochial … Assimilation is a single-generation process here: and Brazil has the gastric juices of a python.
The first Portuguese settlers came to Brazil with a powerful strain of Moorish (and Jewish) blood already running in their veins. (The northern frontier of Africa is in effect the Pyrenees.) They lived by slave labour: and did much of their colonising in bed. The result is a pleasant enough race of an equable temperament and a rich burnt-honey colour. Brazilians say proudly that they have no colour bar: but I have yet to see a black general, a black Minister, Senator, Deputy, Ambassador or professor. As Sammy Davis, Jr., said of his recent visit: ‘Sure I saw niggers riding in Cadillacs in Brazil: and they were all chauffeurs.’ Of course there is a colour bar: money, education, hence opportunity – all these are denied to the blacks …
The people of Brazil cover a wide range. At one extreme you have the predominating Portuguese, Italian, German and Scandinavian stock: the prosperous Asiatics, mainly Lebanese and Japanese: then the poor whites and up-country Portuguese/Indian ‘caboclos’: then the great bulk of Portuguese-negro mestizo, which infuses every stratum of society: and at the other extreme the plain West African negro, the shiny blue-black descendant of slaves emancipated a bare 80 years ago. A ‘pure’ African is almost as rare in Brazil to-day as a ‘pure’ Portuguese. But all are Brazilian: most are Catholic: all are integrated: most are happy. And the Indian? Lo, the poor Indian, he left little behind him in Brazil – no art, no architecture, no written language, nothing of Aztec or Inca glory. But he has two kindly and innocent inventions to his credit, the hammock and the bouncing rubber ball.
Abhorring all forms of violence, relaxed, easy-going and fatalistically cheerful the Brazilians are, on the debit side, feckless and inconstant, not very truthful, not very forceful, undisciplined and sadly lacking in sustained endeavour. Punctuality is a solecism, exactitude a reproach, contracts are unburdened by sanctity, intrigue is a substitute for organisation. It is a race agreeably lacking the ferocious moral rectitude of the Angry-Saxon …
The national character is nowhere so intensively displayed as right here in Rio de Janeiro which, for my prime purpose, is Brazil. (Like the Derby of 1769: ‘Eclipse first, the rest nowhere.’) Rio is a city of over 4 million people, a few of whom live in extravagant luxury, many in equally extravagant poverty, all of them under a provincial administration of quite staggering mediocrity. The clue to their apparently limitless docility lies, I suggest, in three elements, three safety-valves.
First – the beaches. Imagine, Sir, a great warm blue ocean pounding on white sand from Euston to Shepherd’s Bush, and the inhabitants of Bloomsbury and Marylebone and Paddington and Notting Hill wandering happily down through the streets in their bathing-suits under a blazing sun to their daily swim. Then you have something of the permanent holiday atmosphere which goes so far to make the discomforts of this city tolerable to its swarming population. The beaches are the main substitute for revolution. (They also drown a lot of people daily.)
Then football. Even the bold, blasphemous Beatles might feel a salutary qualm of humility before the continental renown of a black god like Pelé. For the masses ‘futébol’ has replaced religion. It is a national obsession. And I am daily grateful that it was not we who put Brazil out of the World Cup.
Then carnival. And the greatest of these is carnival. It is the mass escape, open for four delirious days of every year. But I have already dealt with carnival in a recent despatch: so no more of it here.
I also dealt there with that terrible but essential element of this city, the element in which carnival has its roots – the ‘favelas’, the shanty-towns that hang precariously on the steep face of the hills which hem Rio in against the sea. Here three-quarters of a million blacks eke out voodoo-ridden lives of poverty, filth, disease and crime unrivalled in any bidonville of Africa. Without carnival they could hardly fail to erupt.
Behind these three safety-valves there is another even stronger force of conservatism and restraint – the family. Affection, pride, community of welfare, mutual protection, pooled earnings – all these make of the Brazilian family the country’s strongest bastion against despair.
Of the rest of the country, so far I can speak at first hand of four other cities only.
São Paulo is Milan to Rio’s Rome, Dusseldorf or Manchester to Rio’s Marseilles. São Paulo is the cigarette skyline of downtown New York superimposed overnight on Welwyn Garden City – rich, hard, pushful and undisciplined, the centre of Brazil’s booming industry, a city of over 5 million expanding by 250,000 every year; brash, self-sufficient and self-centred, painfully plain: a vulgar city-come-lately still in its shirtsleeves. You have to see São Paulo to understand the material growth of this country and its new economic chauvinism. Its automobile industry produced 200,000 vehicles last year; and this year they say they are going to double it. Everything you can do, São Paulo can do better.
Brasilia. A spiky fringe of green glass skyscrapers cuts up from the virgin green crust of the scrub-savannah to lay bare a red murram soil like that of Tanganyika. ‘Cité de l’espoir’ André Malraux1 called it. And there it sits – or rather there it springs! – the embryo of the Pure City. Founded on the three pillars of Legislature, Judicature and Executive; soon to house all the Federal Ministries: already boasting a university, a subterranean Crown-of-Thorns cathedral and a huge, blind, tartarean theatre: the supporting cast deliberately limited to half a million souls. Divorced from the pressures of Rio – from its slums, its commerce, its international high life, its appalling communications, all its old chaos and corrupting charm – this new federal abstraction rises Phoenix-like from the clean, high bush-veld, the dream of Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa:2 a city without a traffic light or a factory chimney. Like Jerusalem in the psalm, Brasilia is built as a city that is at unity with itself.
Petropolis. Ah, Petropolis, if only in parenthesis; and our charming old summer Embassy up there. The little forlorn villas: the florid Garibaldian statuary in the Jardim Publico: the imperial palms, the flamboyants, the plumbago and the cannas; all heavy with the homely but ill-requited benevolence of Dom Pedro II.3 Something of Boudin’s Trouville,4 something of Homburg under King Edward VII,5 something of Leamington Spa in early Betjeman: all the slow, green charm of a late empire ville d’eau.
And, fourthly, Bahia. Two hundred of the best baroque churches anywhere: an upper town of fine Portuguese colonial streets wide, tree-lined, commodious: a lower town, down in the harbour, full of a Moby Dick romance – negroes and sailors, and brothels and bars and chapels, the bows of the ships leaning in over the market stalls. A city of prostitutes and painters and priests, and writers and sea captains. Huge trees and wonderful beaches. The whole perfumed with that intoxicating blend of sweat and salt, and tar and timber, and drains and donkeys, frangipani and frankincense.
This great rambling disparate country, the size of Europe, is presently governed by a revolutionary regime, which came in three years ago and which, by Latin American standards, is good. Arbitrary, yes: but not oppressive: disciplined, responsible, devoted to a rather humourless ideal of administrative improvement …
Above all, the revolutionary regime is trying to bring some semblance of honesty to the Administration of a country by tradition extravagantly and entirely corrupt. The last Persian Ambassador here, a jolly rogue by the name of Abdy Hamzavi, said to me in London last summer – ‘My dear boy, after a few weeks in Brazil you will realise that in the arts of corruption, deceit and fraudulent bankruptcy we Persians are in our infancy.’ In the interest of a resumption, one day, of British business in this country I hope to be able in due course to convince the Department that this sufism no longer holds good …
This brings me directly to the question of the British material interest in Brazil. In the 19th century we owned this country in all but name; and Brazil was effectively a British mercantile colony. We monopolised the country’s trade; then we built its ports and roads and railways. In the 20th century we sold out, to pay for two world wars: or were taken over. Now we are a pale shadow of our former self. Can we recover any of our old position? Do we in fact want to? …
The Brazilians, I believe, want us back. They are hurt by our apparent indifference of recent years. They find it hard to believe that it is the harsh economic facts of modern life in a small island which alone can have turned away from them the face of the power which so recently dominated the South Atlantic – the England of Nelson and of Maitland, of Castlereagh, Cochrane and Canning, the England that brought the Portuguese Royal Family to Brazil, that beat Napoleon and ghosted the Monroe Doctrine and abolished the slave trade and won the Battle of the River Plate. They want us back, if only to save them from the suffocating embrace of their North American benefactors.
The dear, good, kind, quixotic Americans – here somehow they manage to appear overwhelming, crude, carpet-bagging and proprietary. Throughout the sub-continent the Alliance for Progress yields a terrifying harvest of corn-fed ingratitude. But under the plastic horror of the ‘American way of life’ the Brazilian has yet preserved a shame-faced nostalgia for the vanished dignity and independence of his European heritage. The mind boggles at the charity–unpopularity ratio which the Americans have achieved. Last fall I even found the Brazilians wanly celebrating Thanksgiving: now why? Could they not have been spared at least that indignity?
Reading back through this enormous despatch I find that I have still missed so many of the really important things – early morning on Copacabana beach: the flamboyants and the orchids and the huge butterflies in their gaudy club colours: my chers but invisible colleagues: the liberal reforming Church: the ill-chanced Governor of Guanabara State (‘Avec moi le deluge’): the tumbling rocks and condemned apartment houses: Rio’s third-rate ‘international’ airport: the Brazilian Foreign Service, supposedly a model of its kind to South America: the vast unexplored interior of the country which has swallowed up Colonel Fawcett6 and Martin Bormann7 and Che Guevara:8 the startling political amorality of ex-Governor Lacerda: this great handsome fake of an Embassy, much admired by all Brazilians: the extreme elegance of the ladies: Peter Fleming’s fountain: the oddities of the vernacular (– Brazil’s secret weapon ‘uisque nacional’: girls in ‘décotés’ drinking ‘cotels’ in a ‘lanchanet’ and listening to ‘os Bitles’; the ‘futébolista nocauteado’ – how sad, for he was the ‘lider’ of his ‘tim’!): then Avenida Haddock Lobo (now who on earth was he? and who Enrique Dodsworth?): Russel Square, honouring my (almost) namesake who built Rio’s first (and actual) sewers nearly a century ago: the great Cristo lit up at night on the Corcovado 2,000 feet above us: the voodoo drums beating nightly in our ‘favela’: the few old Portuguese houses still surviving like stumps of decayed teeth in the rows of concrete skyscrapers: the twilit British nostalgia of Rio Cricket Club slowly dying across the Bay in Niteroi: and in the Maracanã Stadium a football crowd of 200,000 packed in like some great windblown herbaceous border: the little constant cups of coffee, black and sweet as sin: the nightly flowers and candles set out along the beaches to the distant gods of Dahomey and the Slave Coast: the rich oriental smells, the blacks and the pretty girls, the football on the beaches: the leisure, the poverty, the gaiety – all this is Rio.
But to wind up my cyclorama: and to my Conclusion.
The Brazilians say that their country grows at night whilst the Government is asleep. Brazil is a young country, of enormous size: such animals mature slowly and Brazil’s present failings are the failings of immaturity. But in the long run, united by a single language, a crucible of blending cultures, her chequered, intelligent population expanding at startling speed, endowed with every gift known to nature, how can Brazil reasonably fail the call to greatness?
I have, &c.
JOHN RUSSELL.
‘A marvellous mechanical achievement and a sad human failure’
DUGALD MALCOLM, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE REPUBLIC
OF PANAMA, MARCH 1971
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | Panama City, |
25 March, 1971
Sir,
To place in proper perspective my first impressions of this post, I must record the – so to say – advance impressions which I received in London while preparing to come here. I quote from the post report ‘ … walking is not agreeable (or, particularly for female staff, safe) … there are attractive beaches … but it takes two hours to get to them … Sharks are a hazard and it is as well to keep within one’s depth … Humidity, average 89.2 per cent … termites … Ladies’ teas’; from the personal security report ‘ … The Residence is a large rambling house with many entrances. I cannot see what can be done to protect it’; from the front page of the inventory supplied by the Department of the Environment ‘ … Items on pages 35–37 should be deleted as they were destroyed on the orders of the municipal health authorities following the death of the occupant from purulent meningitis’; and more in the same vein from conversations and letters. Against this background first impressions were almost bound to be favourable, and so indeed they were.
The city is an agglomeration of tumbledown wooden relics of canal-building days, with a bustling market and commercial area spreading out into a modern section of fine American-style office and hotel buildings and large areas of pleasant villas each in a colourful garden. There is a great air of activity and development …
What now of the Canal, which is the mainspring of the country, and of the Zone which encloses it? As I pass from the town to the Zone – from a seething tenement area across a six-lane highway and through an 8-foot wire barrier – I have a slightly James Bond feeling of passing from a human untidy world into an almost unreal Dr. No territory, where everything is done electrically and hygienically by switches, and controlled by very large guards dressed like ‘The Lone Ranger’. It is all a marvellous mechanical achievement and a sad human failure. Panamanians are bound to recognise that a large proportion of their wealth comes directly or indirectly from the Canal, but they would be superhuman if they did not feel a fierce resentment towards the Zone. This resentment is all too evident. Whatever the original Treaty1 or President Roosevelt may have said the Zone is plainly a colony. Apart from the troops necessary for local defence there are installations which in other countries would be the subject of military base agreements. There are shops, banks and places of entertainment which, in Panamanian eyes should be contributing to their economy, and there are civilian inhabitants, including Panamanian nationals who pay taxes to neither Government. There is also much unused space. The Zone itself is pressed so close up against the limits of the two main cities, Panama and Colon, that both are denied their natural areas of expansion, so that both are investigating highly costly schemes of reclaiming land out to sea.
‘Latin American David to the Gringo Goliath’
JOHN GALSWORTHY, HM AMBASSADOR TO MEXICO,
NOVEMBER 1972
The Mexicans have an almost pathetic yearning for economic independence and, though most of them realise in their hearts that this is a chimera, their public utterances on the theme of foreigners and super Powers are apt to sound somewhat shrill in non-Mexican ears.
But it is really all meant for Big Brother north of the Rio Grande. A newcomer is struck by the fact that it is the Americans who are foreigners here, not the Europeans or the Japanese. This is especially, but by no means exclusively, true with the younger generation of Mexicans. I was disbelieving when my German colleague warned me that outside places like Mexico City, Acapulco or the other main tourist centres, it was wiser to be heard talking in a foreign tongue which could not be mistaken for American. But I now know what he meant: the attitude changes instantaneously when you identify yourself as an Englishman or other European.
Whose fault is it? I award (this is a first impressions despatch) eight points of blame to the Americans and two to the Mexicans. The latter for their excessive vanity and their irrepressible relish for playing Latin American David to the Gringo Goliath up north, regardless of the basic facts of their economic life: 70 per cent of Mexican foreign trade is with the US, the heavy tourist income which helps to correct the imbalance in their current account is overwhelmingly American and the US is by far the largest source of foreign capital. But having said that, the American profile here strikes a newcomer (and certainly one conditioned by 10 years in Western Europe) as provocative to say the least. For the Americans Mexico is their backyard, and that is just the way a large proportion of them behave here. They patronise to an alarming degree. I had my first taste of it when I flew in here from New York. A young American businessman (admittedly after four double brandies and several dry Martinis) was talking to an older Mexican sitting beside him in the ’plane: ‘Why don’t you just treat us like normal friends and pay a little attention to our weaknesses and characteristics?’ asked the Mexican. He got the reply: ‘We don’t need to: we are rich and powerful.’
‘Any excuse for a party’
RONALD BAILEY, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
REPUBLIC OF BOLIVIA, OCTOBER 1967
The Indians believe in any excuse for a party. Once upon a time it must have been provided by the Inca gods. Now each locally favoured Saint on his or her day of the calendar provides the occasion. A German supplier of aspirin has shrewdly produced elaborate illustrated Saints calendars, to be seen in village shops throughout the country. On feast days the people dress up in the most elaborate, embroidered costumes hired for the occasion. The Archangel Gabriel in shining silver and armed with his short broadsword keeps order among the vast crowd of masked devils and bears. Often there will be a hundred or more at a time dancing the same monotonous rhythms to the sound of a brass band. Most of the substance of the poorer classes is spent in this way. A gardener or a peasant will spend a whole month’s income for this brief day of glory. Both men and women drink chicha. This is made by the older women who spit partly masticated millet into a pot. When water is added it quickly brews a heady alcoholic gruel and with this good cheer inside, they dance late into the night. A friend of ours asked her maid who was the father of her child. She said she could not see his face, but he was such a handsome ‘devil’! I should have added that included in the hire of the costume are the services of a boy to put the hirer to bed when he is too inebriated to continue dancing and take the costume back in good order to the owner!
JOHN TAHOURDIN, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
REPUBLIC OF BOLIVIA, MARCH 1972Just occasionally a reader familiar with a country described in these despatches will feel the ambassador has completely missed the point or the spirit of a place. There is nothing wrong with Mr Tahourdin’s first impressions of Bolivia – all the criticisms are fair – except for what they miss. If you don’t see the magic of this high Andean fastness, if you don’t feel what’s addictive about its sharp light, bleached plains, glittering lakes and awesome peaks, and if you don’t soften at all towards its impassive, wary, stoical native people with their blank expressions and amazing capacity to endure, then what’s left is admittedly frustrating and tiresome. But Tahourdin’s despatch is worth reading for its joke (told by Bolivians against themselves) alone. As for the rest – he should have got out more. The potential immigrants who never (as he points out) got as far as Bolivia, are the losers: and so is he.
We also include (on pp. 250–53) Tahourdin’s despatch from Senegal: an account which makes only the most cursory (and imperceptive) references to the landscape, the indigenous people or the atmosphere outside French-influenced high society.
30 March, 1972.
Sir,
I have the honour to submit some first impressions of Bolivia.
The first view of La Paz – particularly on arrival by train at night – is spectacular. An immense cluster of lights in a huge bowl. By day the mighty Andes, with peaks over 21,000 ft. high encircling the city in a majestic embrace, produce a scenic effect of such splendour beside which the Swiss Alps resemble a toy model.
The Bolivians, who possess a disarming capacity for self-criticism, are fond of telling the story that when the Almighty at the Creation was apportioning the world’s riches, someone intervened to say that what was one day to be Bolivia was being unduly favoured. This objection was swept aside with the retort: ‘Wait until you see the kind of people I am going to put there.’ The human material could indeed hardly have been more unpromising: a nation part Spanish, part Indian. From Spain she inherited characteristics which include so strong a streak of personal ambition, self-seeking acquisitiveness and violence, alternating with indolence. The other half, consisting in part of a race twice enslaved (once by the Incas and once by the Spaniards), was cowed, ignorant, with a physique enfeebled by centuries of living in almost unendurably hard climatic conditions.
Following independence from Spain, Bolivia had a territory which made it the third largest country in Latin America … as a result of a series of disastrous wars, Bolivia proceeded to lose to her neighbours one-half of her territory, including her entire Pacific coastline. She is, however, still fifth in the league.
Things might not have been so bad if the Spanish/Indian combination had been leavened over the years, as in Brazil, Argentina or Chile, with a vigorous stream of subsequent immigration from Europe – Italians, Germans and British. But the facts of geography worked against this. With Bolivia deprived of her sea ports and faced with the consequent difficulty of access – until the advent of the jet – the would-be immigrants turned elsewhere.
‘Strangely-named terrorists’
SIR GEOFFREY JACKSON, HM AMBASSADOR TO
URUGUAY, SEPTEMBER 1969‘Set piece reports from Montevideo at the commencement and termination of Ambassadorial missions tend to follow a predictable pattern,’ a senior clerk in the American Department minuted on this despatch, ‘and Mr Jackson’s First Impressions is no exception.’
This rather jaded response was prompted by the extended metaphor of Uruguay as an ageing beauty queen which the ambassador used to frame his despatch. Sir Geoffrey Jackson’s tone is certainly rather whimsical.
Living in Montevideo rekindled the ambassador’s passion for Uruguay. But this love affair was to end very badly. A year after penning his first impressions Jackson was kidnapped by the Tupamaros, a violent band of urban guerrillas. For eight months the ambassador was held captive underground in a cage made from chicken wire, guarded by trigger-happy revolutionaries.
As the despatch shows, with kidnappings a common occurrence at the time in South America, Jackson was aware of the threat from the outset. He later described the feeling:
… [E]arly in 1970 … I began to sense that accumulation of recurrently anomalous situations which the late Ian Fleming defined so neatly. His James Bond says somewhere that ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action.’ When, after a relatively quiet life, nocturnal telephone-calls begin to proliferate; when one’s hitherto pleasantly solitary walks along beaches and sand-dunes and in pine-forests begin to bristle with horizon-marching silhouettes and sudden encounters with the courting young in unlikely trio formation … when for the third time one’s path is crossed by professional violence literally on one’s doorstep – by this time the least perceptive of mortals begins to grasp that, however much the world around him may be changing, his own private life is changing still more.
Early on in Montevideo the ambassador had made contingency plans, instructing his wife, Evelyn, that in the event of his capture there should be no ransom paid, nor any negotiations or publicity. Jackson owed his release in September 1971 to Edward Heath, the Prime Minister, who overrode the ambassador’s wishes and arranged for a ransom payment of £42,000.
Jackson was knighted on his release and retired from the Diplomatic Service two years later. We append an extract from his later account of the kidnapping in his book People’s Prison (1973): a passage in which, though Sir Geoffrey was not quite a García Márquez, its author shows (as does so much diplomatic writing) some of the signs of the novelist manqué.
After democracy was restored to Uruguay in 1985 the Tupamaros began a slow march into the political mainstream. As part of the Broad Front coalition, the political wing of the Tupamaros won the 2009 parliamentary elections, and in 2010 one of their number – a former armed guerrilla, José Mujica – became President of Uruguay.
This First Impressions is worth reading not least for the irony of what was to follow.
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | Montevideo, |
17 September, 1969.
Sir,
To meet a childhood sweetheart again after much of a lifetime can, by all accounts, come as quite a jolt. Admittedly my own long-standing fondness for Uruguay had been essentially a courtship by correspondence and proxy, from the Latin American desk of the then Foreign Office, and later from Assembly Delegations at the United Nations. Even so, I felt on my arrival last July that the photographs the lady had sent me had perhaps been somewhat overtaken by the years.
Her Administration – and her capital – were in evident need of a face-lift. Her economy has lost its figure, though laudably she has taken of late to remedial exercises. Politically she is not sure whether she prefers the ostrich feather boas of her Edwardian ‘belle époque’ or the miniskirt of today; neither really suits her style, and the combination of both even less. But she retains the ruins of a lovely face, and her heart is still in the right place; so I needed only briefly to compose my expression, and was not really disappointed. And after these few weeks I have concluded that the pretty girl of long ago still survives inside a somewhat weathered fausse jeune, who has also perhaps gained in personality what she has lost in glamour.
Even with dethroned beauty queens vital statistics remain a point of reference. Uruguay’s exports and imports are £64 million and £58 million, and her population 2,590,158 …
[I]t is hard – though nowadays possible – to starve in Uruguay. She produces a superabundance of good food – beef, lamb, game, fish, vegetables, salads, fruits, wines – in the valediction of Henry King, ‘all the human frame requires’. Lest even so ‘her wretched trade expires’ is President Pacheco’s present concern … The social unease provoked by such paradoxes is reflected in incessant strikes … And lurking behind, though legally unmentionable, are the mysterious and no longer preposterous ‘Tupamaros’. These strangely-named terrorists – most inappropriately so in a land with no admitted Indian heritage – have lost their political innocence since their first overt murder last August, and yet more so since the United States Ambassador to Brazil was kidnapped by comparable, and doubtless allied, forces in that neighbouring country. Since starting this despatch they have kidnapped a key employers’ negotiator in the bank strike, who is still missing and unheard of.
Yet nothing is ever hopeless in this paradoxical country … It is therefore possible, even probable, that the Uruguayan back is at last against the wall, that her people see, with final authentic fear, the true jeopardy to their three good meals a day, to their increasingly shabby empire-style mansions, parks, public buildings, hospitals and monuments, to their scratch fleet of miraculously-preserved vintage private motor cars, to their whole economic box of well-saved combings …
I – like many predecessors – must draw attention to a continuing and major invisible British asset in this country, itself conversely an enduring asset to Uruguay’s own democracy. A few days ago, at the annual Caledonian Ball in Montevideo, I watched 450 participants, mainly all-Uruguayan, and young Uruguayan at that, battle till dawn for space to perform, with competence and evident enthusiasm, everything from an eightsome reel to the Dashing White Sargeant. The idol of all the girls was a statuesquely handsome and impeccably kilted pipe-major of pure Italian extraction, to my joy quite authentically named Macucci. In the gallery were numerous – and influential – admiring parents, and several tables had been commandeered by the Government and municipality. The reflection occurred to me that there are in Montevideo several Missions whose Governments would pay – and by all accounts do pay – many millions of dollars a year to achieve the very position of confidence and acceptance which Britain has no need to buy, but needs only to maintain and preserve …
To revert to my initial image, Britain’s fidelity to Uruguay’s once endearing young charms is staunchly reciprocated, and at a time when Britain’s, too, might to many seem faded. Small attentions can ensure the persistence of this regard while Uruguay’s house and estate are put in order. And she may be a rich widow yet, and platonically appreciative of enduring friendships – even though she could one day of course marry one of the gentlemen next door.
But the relations of Uruguay with the Argentine and Brazil are another, and less predictable, story.
I am sending copies of this despatch to Her Majesty’s Ambassadors in Washington, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro.
I have, &c.
G. H. S. JACKSON.
From People’s Prison (1973) by Geoffrey Jackson
As always, I was relieved when we turned in from the open corniche into the narrow and crowded side-streets leading to my office, and I was joking with my driver as we edged slowly along the single lane left by the vehicles parked on either side. We were at a point where virtually every day we had to wait for delivery-trucks to finish unloading at one or other of the wayside stores, so I did not pay especial attention to a large red van – certainly of three, possibly of five tons – until it edged out from the curb as we drew level. There was little room for my driver to swerve, but ample time for the truck-driver to realize and correct his mistake. I knew however that frequently they did not do so until after impact, and was not really surprised when, despite my driver’s signals, he bored relentlessly into our left wing. With a philosophical shrug, and obvious resignation to a coachwork job and some ineffectual insurance activity, Hugo opened his door to climb out and take particulars.
Instead, as the cab-door opened and the truck-driver leapt down, a young man stepped out from nowhere and struck Hugo savagely over the head. Simultaneously there was a violent rattle of automatic weapons which continued for what to me seemed an endless time; one of its main constituents originated from a sub-machine-gun concealed in a basket of fruit carried by an apparently innocuous bystander – my captors were very proud of this refinement, of which I was told repeatedly afterwards.
The driver of the truck climbed into my chauffeur’s seat, and opened the opposite door for a second young man. A third put his arm around the door-pillar and expertly unlocked the back door from the inside … My attackers were not masked – the last human faces I was to see for a long time. They were thoroughly conversant with the idiosyncrasies of the Daimler – its gear-shift, with some rather exotic characteristics from Montevideo; the door-locks; and the power steering; I found my mind formulating the many circumstances in which this familiarity could have been acquired.
Our driver, whom I could see clearly in the mirror, was, as I have said, a face I had met recently. He had blunt features, a moustache half-way Zapata-style and, again, this rictus of tension, concentration or – I would not blame them – sheer fright. Three of the four I would recognize again instantly, were I to live to be a centenarian …
‘Images of Britain as a Victorian sweatshop economy and haven for Islamic terrorists die hard’
SIR JOHN HOLMES, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
FRENCH REPUBLIC, OCTOBER 2001
FM PARIS
TO PRIORITY FCO
SUBJECT: FRANCE: FIRST/SECOND IMPRESSIONS
A couple of months in Paris is as good a time as any to attempt a few impressions – second more than first in my case since I spent four years in Paris in the mid-1980s … My strongest impression this time is one of continuity. The place feels the same, as does the administration/bureaucracy. France seems to have changed less than its big European neighbours, particularly Britain. The main political contenders for the forthcoming Presidential election were at the top of politics 15 years ago too. The shift of generation evident in Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain and elsewhere has not so far operated here. This frustrates the younger politicians, insofar as any of stature have been allowed to develop, and bores the voters …
The political/intellectual climate has not apparently changed much either. Much of it is still dominated by a peculiarly French view of the world, where shades of anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism and anti-globalisation remain fashionable, or at least politically correct …
Not an original insight, maybe, but I am still struck by how conservative France remains. The attitude of what you have, you protect remains fundamental for many. Keeping existing jobs has greater priority than creating new ones. Acquired rights are almost sacred. Innovation is to be resisted, not embraced. The attachment to la France profonde continues to give French farmers clout far beyond their economic weight …
We wonder why the French don’t seem to suffer more for apparently flouting today’s economic rules. Maybe one day they will. The 35-hour week’s1 daftness is bound to show through sometime. It may be that the French only get away with present policies now because of the country’s other advantages, including hugely improved infrastructure and a formidably clever and effective administrative (as opposed to political) class – and because the rigidity of the country’s labour and tax laws is matched only by the ingenuity of companies in getting round them …
Meanwhile the big change I do notice is in attitudes to Britain. Rivalry and stereotyping have not gone away. Images of Britain as a Victorian sweatshop economy and haven for Islamic terrorists die hard. Infrastructure and health service comparisons favourable to France are two a penny. Snide comments sprinkle the pages. (Nothing as vitriolic as the British press about the French of course.)
‘An oasis of sanity in a stupid world’
SIR OLIVER WRIGHT, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
KINGDOM OF DENMARK, JANUARY 1967Sir Oliver Wright found little to dislike in the Danish system. Of course it would be a mistake to assume that Denmark is not a very different country from Sweden, but his despatch makes for an interesting comparison with one that Sir Jeffrey Petersen wrote thirteen years later upon departing Stockholm (see pp. 352–5). Where Wright saw Scandinavian social democracy as a kind of utopia, Petersen saw ‘The Swedish Model’ as essentially broken.
| CONFIDENTIAL | British Embassy, |
| (1011/5) | Copenhagen, |
| Despatch No. 5 | 9 January, 1967. |
Sir,
Arriving in Denmark after six months of commuting between London and Salisbury, I was struck by a local concern about the Rhodesian problem, quite disproportionate to the extent of any Danish interests involved. The reason for this concern, given to me by the editor of Copenhagen’s leading morning newspaper, will serve as my text for the customary despatch on first impressions. ‘There is,’ he said, ‘no poverty or injustice in Denmark today, so that there is little for us to quarrel about at home. But human beings must have an outlet for their idealism; and since we have very few interests at stake there, Africa provides as safe an outlet as any’ …
In the countryside, as in the towns, there is order, comfort, well-being, without ostentation or waste. The streets are filled with small and family-sized cars; sports models and limousines alike drive infrequently past. The pavements are thronged with citizens attractively but modestly suited, shod and shampooed: boys with ringlets down to their shoulders and women over-expensively furred and perfumed are alike comparatively rare. The shops are filled with well-made merchandise and with shoppers with well-lined pockets, but Strøget is no Bond Street. Policemen are seldom needed and therefore seldom seen, since it would be wasteful to spend good money on what is not necessary; the most hostile looks and words are reserved for those, generally foreigners, who cross the street against the lights … Even weekend picnickers take their litter home to their own dust-bins. The Danes, descendants of the Viking conquerors of Britain a thousand years ago, have thoroughly domesticated Nature and disciplined their own natures …
Puritans may object that my editor friend’s words are cynical and shocking. They may well be both; but there is also a refreshing honesty about them. If the heroic virtues are at a discount in Denmark, so are hypocrisy and cant. The way Danish society is organised may well provide too little scope for men’s aggressive instincts, although the Socialist People’s Party provides a vehicle for political, and suicide an outlet for social protest; but there is compensation in the clear-eyed candour about what makes human beings tick, in the tolerant respect for the other man’s view and interest, and in the unashamed delight in material pleasures which informs the whole Danish attitude to life. The ease and naturalness of everyday relations between men and women in Denmark are the most attractive I have so far encountered in twenty-one years of globe-trotting at the tax payer’s expense.
It seems to me, therefore, that, by and large, Danish hearts are in the right place, although they might perhaps, with advantage, beat a little faster; and that Danish heads are screwed on the right way, although they might perhaps, with advantage, calculate a little less furiously. This is a satisfied – even, the envious would say – a self-satisfied society; but, given the experience of the human race over the past few thousand years, one ought not to turn up one’s nose at the achievement of a polity in which practically the only legitimate complaint is that there is nothing to complain about … Like the Hippo Valley Estates in the Rhodesian low veldt, Denmark seems like an oasis of sanity in a stupid world. It will be interesting to see what I feel like when the time comes for me to write my valedictory despatch, when I know the place properly, and when the spectacles of the new arrival have lost their rubescence.
I am sending a copy of this despatch to Her Majesty’s Ambassadors in Stockholm, Oslo and Helsinki; to the United Kingdom Mission at Geneva, and to the United Kingdom Delegation to the European Economic Community at Brussels.
With the highest respect,
Your obedient Servant,
Oliver Wright
‘Hitler could hardly have been anything but an Austrian’
SIR ANTHONY RUMBOLD, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
REPUBLIC OF AUSTRIA, MAY 1968Among diplomats of the old school, and when it came to making incredibly offensive sweeping generalizations about foreigners, Sir Anthony Rumbold was in a class of his own. He arrived in Vienna in 1968 on something of a roll in this regard, having signed off from Bangkok the previous year with an uproarious valedictory despatch. ‘The average intelligence of the Thais is rather low,’ he wrote, before venturing that ‘licentiousness was the main pleasure’ among leading Thais, and suggesting that the country’s Foreign Minister might be insane.
Compared with what he made of Austria, below, we can only conclude that Rumbold actually rather liked Thailand. While venting his spleen about Vienna the ambassador did however manage to get at least one thing significantly wrong in terms of predicting the future. The Austrian capital, which Rumbold thought had not the ‘remotest possibility’ of becoming ‘the headquarters of any kind of international grouping, whether political or economic’, is today home to several of the world’s biggest non-governmental organizations, including the oil producers’ cartel OPEC and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
CONFIDENTIAL
THIS DOCUMENT IS THE PROPERTY OF HER BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT
| CA 1/12 | Foreign Office and Whitehall Distribution |
AUSTRIA
20 May, 1968
Section 1
A VIEW OF AUSTRIA
Sir Anthony Rumbold to Mr. Stewart (Received 20 May)
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | Vienna, |
14 May, 1968
Sir,
No European can be entirely objective about a European country (least of all about his own). His views are influenced by his upbringing, his circumstances and his age-group. My children think of Austria as an agreeable place in which to go ski-ing. Music-lovers or those with musical pretensions think of it in terms of the Salzburg festivals and the Vienna Opera. My own view of Austria is coloured by my recollection of the prominent and enthusiastic part played by so many Austrians in the Nazi movement. Moreover the few months I have now been professionally engaged in Vienna have not weakened my loyalty to the school which I joined in early youth and which regards Austrians as ‘wet Germans’ (the ‘best’ Germans according to this school being the Berliners). The Austrian writer Ferdinand Kürnberger uses the following untranslate-able words to express this about the character of his countrymen: ‘Feig ist es, schlaff, schrottig, waschlappig, mattherzig, schwachmütig, kraftlos, nervlos, energielos, widerstandlos’.1 There are some who trace this back to the experiences of the counter-Reformation, particularly in Vienna, when the Protestant and libertarian mass movement was thoroughly defeated, leaving behind a thick sediment of cynicism and opportunism. But whatever the reason it seems to me that Hitler could hardly have been anything but an Austrian and that A. J. P. Taylor, the only English historian to have unravelled the fall of the Empire, is right in considering Hitler to have been Austria’s revenge for Königgrätz.2 I think it as well to declare my prejudice at the outset.
Austria is a small country in terms of population, area and ‘gross national product’. But it is as complex as it is small. Clemenceau3 defined Austria within its present boundaries as le reste, in other words what was left after the non-German parts of the old Empire had been taken away. The inhabitants of this rump all speak German of a kind (with the exception of some insignificant Slovene and Hungarian minorities) but they are not united by their common language. They are divided by historical, geographical and human factors … A typical self-conscious Tyrolese is about as attached to Inner Austria as a modern Scottish Nationalist is to England … [T]here are fewer organic connections between Vienna now and other parts of modern Austria than there are between London and other parts of England (let alone Scotland). Austrians from the western provinces rarely come to Vienna. They do their business at home, they spend their holidays among their own mountains or, if they can afford it, on the Mediterranean, and if they want bright lights they go to Munich. Salzburg was an independent archbishopric until 1803. It is now the playground of would-be sophisticates of all nations and lives on the sound of music. Burgenland was Hungarian until 1921 and it looks as if it still were. There is nothing in common between the Burgenland paprika-grower who gazes eastwards across the great plain and the prosperous Vorarlberg watchmaker whose father wanted in 1919 to join Switzerland from whose inhabitants he was indistinguishable as regards both race and outlook …
The impression of aimlessness is particularly strong among the Viennese, whose city is only a capital in a formal sense. Between the wars, although too big to be the capital of such a small country, there was still a touch of universalism about Vienna which gave it some sort of point. Ten or fifteen per cent of the population were Jews; it was still possible to think about a Danubian federation of which it might be the centre, and it was a prize for the possession of which the rival ideologies thought it worth fighting. Now the Jews have nearly all disappeared, mostly murdered by the Nazis; there is not the remotest possibility of its becoming the headquarters of any kind of international grouping, whether political or economic; and its place in the new ideological or Great Power contest was fixed once and for all by the settlement of 19554 which, short of a cataclysm, is not likely to be upset or questioned by anybody. There is therefore no longer much raison d’être about Vienna, particularly since the rest of Austria cares so little about what goes on in it. To the small extent that it still exhibits a smiling countenance it is, as Hofmannsthal5 said, because it no longer has any muscles in its face. There has indeed always been something feminine about Vienna, perhaps because of the strong Slav elements in its population, and the combination of aimlessness and femininity has unfortunate results. It makes it a sad and rather mean town. The people seem to lack charity towards each other. They rather enjoy denouncing each other for minor breaches of the regulations. They give vent to explosions of rage when inconvenienced in small ways. They cling to what they think of as their old traditions, treacly and anaemic though these were for the most part. Cheerful modern trends are disapproved of. The unhappy young go away when they can, mostly to Germany where they can make money and enjoy themselves. Nearly half the population draws some sort of pension. The dowdy clothes, the grim municipal tenement buildings and the general grubbiness make Vienna at certain times of the year look more like an Iron-curtain town than one which belongs to the West. Indeed the inhabitants of Prague and of Budapest seem to me to walk with a jauntier step than do the Viennese. There is certainly no more depressing sight than that of the self-conscious crowds of businessmen and their ladies at the famous opera ball, supposedly the glittering climax of a brilliant carnival season. Austria has the highest published suicide-rate of any country in the world and Vienna makes a disproportionate contribution to this record …
If they think about such things at all, the Austrians ought to be eternally grateful for the miracle by which they recovered their independence in 1955, except for the fact that they have always regarded themselves as entitled to specially generous allowances of good luck. If the Russians had not decided to make Austria neutral in the hope of Germany following suit, the country would presumably still have been divided and most of the population would have been materially much worse off. As it is they are both free and prosperous, at least relatively to what most of them have ever been before. Even for the Viennese it is a novel experience to be able to lead their private lives without pressure from external insecurity. It is true that the Austrians are far down the list in all the European economic league tables and that their standards of housing and hygiene are low. But they have plenty of money in their pockets to spend on what they enjoy, chiefly food and drink. There are no starvelings or ‘criminals of want’ to be seen among the bourgeois-looking May-day demonstrators. There are no extremists in modern Austria. Not even the students show signs of much restiveness. So long as conditions in the rest of Europe remain more or less stable we are not going to have any trouble from the Austrians. But they do not have reliable characters and are not to be counted upon in time of danger.
I have, &c.
A. RUMBOLD.
‘A wonderful island … Warts and all’
DONALD GORDON, HM HIGH COMMISSIONER TO
CYPRUS, DECEMBER 1975The Southern European Department wrote a note of thanks to Donald Gordon upon receiving his report, which they considered an exemplar of ‘the classic impressionistic first despatch style’.
‘The political and historical complexities are indeed legion,’ the note continued, ‘but much also depends on the three leading personalities, Makarios, Clerides and Denktash, their actions, reactions and interactions. You have painted a vivid picture of them.’
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | Nicosia, |
4 December, 1975.
Sir,
I doubt that further first-hand acquaintance with the complexities of the Cyprus situation is going to make the picture clearer: it may indeed well have the opposite effect. I propose therefore, Sir, to offer you my first impressions while these are still fresh.
The location of the High Commission offices serves to demonstrate that even-handedness as between the two communities which we strive to achieve. They are literally on the Green Line, in no-man’s land. There is free access from the Greek Cypriot side and every day as I drive to the Office, past the battered houses that suffered in last year’s fighting, the soldiers of the National Guard at their checkpoint give me a smart salute, or sometimes an amiable wave. They are not, to the casual observer, a smartly turned out or highly disciplined force: but some units fought with gallantry last year against heavy odds. There is no direct exit on the other side through the Turkish Cypriot front line some 150 yards away, but looking from our windows over the now deserted golf course, we see men of the Turkish Cypriot Fighters, who man the Nicosia sector of the Line, shouldering their muskets and going about other soldierly pursuits: and through my window come ‘gung-ho’ noises (to use an Americanism once fashionable in South Viet-Nam) as they take part in lusty martial singing. In this, as in other respects, the Turkish Army is somewhat reminiscent of the old Wehrmacht: full marks for toughness and fortitude, but a bit short on independent thinking.
From my window too I can see the hills of the Kyrenia Range silhouetted against the sky, a constant reminder of the small British colony (200–300 people) on the other side whose pleasant retirement in the sun was rudely disrupted by the Turkish invasion last year. They have shown courage in standing their ground, but they are worried about the future and understandably edgy about their position. We are in regular contact and they are always glad to see me and other visitors from this High Commission; but as they on their side lift their eyes to the hills, they are not always persuaded that the promise of the psalmist has been entirely borne out.
On my first day in Nicosia, the Director-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, having flinched from sending a representative to meet my wife and myself on our arrival at Limassol at 7 o’clock in the morning, called on me instead of awaiting my call on him in order to make it clear that no discourtesy was intended. He told me with honesty that I could expect to be shown much kindness by Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots alike. He was right. Unfortunately an ability to speak without bias is comparatively rare in Cyprus. Both parties to the dispute sorely exasperate their friends by their readiness to rake over the past and score facile debating points. They are quick to blame anyone – the other community in the island, the UN, the British – other than themselves for their present plight and show an unhappy ability to rock a boat which, in all conscience, is unstable enough already.
The essential problem is easy enough to identify. The earliest settlers in Cyprus, the Mycenaean Greeks and the Phoenicians, eventually blended to form the basic stock of the present inhabitants. Subsequent arrivals – Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Crusaders, Venetians, Turks and British – came and governed, but with the exception of the Turks, eventually left when their period of rule came to an end. The Turks, however, left behind a minority on the island who do not appear susceptible of assimilation but are too numerous to be ejected or dominated. They have lived for years in fear of a continuing Greek Cypriot attempt to do just that, and now that they hold most, if not all, of the cards, have every intention of ensuring that this will never happen again.
If both sides accept the realities of the situation, a workable arrangement is not inconceivable. Partition has since the days of Solomon represented the ultimate resort, and if Greeks and Turks cannot live together then they may have to live apart – not in separate sovereign States, for this would raise a whole crop of new problems, but under some bi-zonal arrangement. Both sides will have to accept that this is the best they are going to get. But the Turkish Cypriots doubt whether the other side really admit that Cyprus will have to be a Greco-Turk island and the Greek Cypriots hesitate to concede publicly bi-zonalism with all the sacrifices it must imply. One almost suspects at times that they have lived with tragedy so long – and it is in their tradition – that it has become for them a condition of mind to which they have formed a perverse attachment. There is also a body of opinion which believes that it might be better to soldier on rather than accept an unsatisfactory settlement …
Three figures stand out against the Cyprus scene: Archbishop Makarios, President of the Republic; Clerides, President of the House of Representatives and the Greek Cypriot negotiator in the inter-communal talks; and Denktash, Vice-President of the Republic, President of the so-called Turkish Federated State of Cyprus, and the Turkish Cypriot negotiator.
Makarios is the present manifestation of the long association of the Orthodox Church in Cyprus with the political life of the Greek Cypriots, a small neat figure in his azure vestments with a thousand years of Byzantine sophistry in his bland smile. A highly experienced tactician, he has shown great skill in trimming his sails in the prevailing political winds so as to ensure his continuing tenure of office. Whether he regards this as essential to the protection of Greek Cypriot interests as he sees them, or as an end in itself, is debatable. There must be a question mark over his qualities as a statesman. His failure to effect a settlement with the Turkish Cypriots over the 14 years when he held nearly all the cards is in large measure responsible for the present unhappy plight of the island. To the Turkish Cypriots ‘His Byzantine Beatitude’ as Denktash refers to him, is anathema and it is difficult to see a solution so long as he remains President. But, equally, it is difficult to see a solution without him, and he is quite capable of unobtrusively sabotaging a prospective settlement if it involves his giving up office.
Clerides has to cope not only with Denktash but with the Archbishop, and in this has shown both flexibility and realism. He looks like a prosperous lawyer with a taste for good living. It may therefore be relevant to recall that he baled out over Germany, escaped from a prisoner of war camp at the third attempt and made his way across the country to join up eventually with Tito’s partisans. He has put his political future as leader of the Centre-Right at stake, knowing that Makarios will sell him out without hesitation if it suits his purposes and that there are political groupings, of the extreme Right and extreme Left, who have no wish to see a settlement in Cyprus and may try to take pre-emptive action if one appears a real possibility.
Denktash, an amiable extrovert, is a less subtle figure than Clerides. Where Clerides looks over his shoulder at Makarios, Denktash looks to the Turkish Army and Ankara who wield the real power. But although he often chooses to act the enfant terrible, it would be a mistake to underestimate his political skills.
My Turkish colleague, with some feeling, maintains that Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots are incapable of ever reaching a settlement on their own, but are like children squabbling on the street who need a grown-up to come along and tell them to stop it. Mr Inhan is in no position to be sanctimonious, but he is right in that it will certainly take a concerted effort to achieve and enforce any settlement. Apart from anything else, the two parties on the island will have to learn that it is possible to have a dividing line without living in a continuous state of eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation …
People keep assuring me, nostalgically, that ‘before the trouble’ this was a wonderful island. It is arguable that the seeds of its destruction are sown in its own past history. But the Cypriots have a remarkable capacity for survival, born of considerable past experience – if only they can be induced to draw the right lessons. I hope they do. Warts and all, it is still an island of much charm.
I am copying this despatch to Her Majesty’s Ambassadors at Ankara, Athens, Washington, the UK Delegation to NATO and the UK Mission, New York; to the UK Representative, Brussels and to CBFNE.
I have, etc.,
D. McD. GORDON.