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LIFE AFTER BLASTS

London did not deserve it

Inam Ahmed, From London
Breda looks down at the undulated land below, from 35,000 feet it looks acrid, barren and rocky, a place no one would want to waste a minute about. Yet many are wanting it, and yet it is moving events thousands of miles apart, at least that is what many like Breda of South London tend to believe.
"It is Iraq," Breda in her late 40s says in her soft tone as the plane flies over the border, the map on the TV screen shows on one side is Iran
and we are supposed to slightly cut over Iraq. "It is greed. It is Palestine. Those 56 people should not have been killed." On June 7 when the terrible bombings occurred in Lonon, Breda was in London.
She takes a moment's pause and then adds: "Who knows if it will occur again. When it begins, it goes on."
At a restaurant near Euston Underground, the four of us take SEE PAGE 19 COL 7 FROM PAGE 20
dinner Evan, his girlfriend Stepheny, David and I, all my old friends in Leeds. After a few light moments of reminiscing the university days, the talks palpably switch back to the 7/7 and beyond; the Labour's foreign policy, the race tension and all. I notice the stiff upper lips in them of fears and anxieties.
Evan, who now works in a computer firm, says he and his girlfriend will never go on the Tube together; they love each other too much to be separated in a suicide bombing. At first we laugh, then we look down at the table. For some, life might be like that from now on.
In the quite upper class neighbourhood of Flodden Road of Oval, the quaint appearance of the detached house draped in the shade of oak and frilled by rosemary only reveals the cosyinside and not the tension.
In the drawing room graced with Victorian time furniture blacked huge oak tables and book shelves, a very old Bible cut out with pictures in hard and thick paper on the side table Lord Eric Evebury and his wife sip on tea.
"It's not like the Second World War," the lord says, reflecting on his long past. "It's not like the IRA era. It's new to London." He takes a pause to, maybe, call up the memory and find the exact words.
"First of all, you don't have an enemy now," he says finally. "We are up against a faceless enemy without a single point of existence. We knew the Nazis, now we don't know who they are or where they are. They are not geographically existing. We had a bomb falling just behind my house during the war and we were not really scared."
Mark, an unemployed self-made leftist who does not support the Labour, feels very much the same way and even more. His eyes burn, his voice pitches high and his thin body moves to and fro as he argues: "It's not Iraq, nor Palestine. It's just that these people hate the Western way of life, it's just that they want the whole world to become Muslims. That is why 9/11 happened."
The British whites, the Englishmen as we call them, are today in a deep trauma and soul-searching. The uncertainty that has gripped their lives is likely to stay for quite a long time, if not forever. The black Thursdays and then the finds of more bombs and then the extensiveness of the whole terror network and then the constant media coverage these are making life nervous. Londoners now ask: How do we live with all this?
Britain that has gone through the blitzkrieg and IRA bombings are faced with a new kind of violence it has not
witnessed before. "It is this aspect of suicide bombing that makes the situation so alarming," says Dr Charles Tannock, a member of the European Parliament. "Europe has witnessed terrorism and bomb blasts before, but not suicide bombings."
And the reaction to the outrageous behaviour is mostly unified fight them out in a united way as Ken Livingstone said immediately after the 7/7 : "They seek to divide the Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other. Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly act. They will stand togetherin solidarity."
There are some gung-ho calls, very small in number and often overlooked by the Englishman, at least outwardly. The mainstream media have focused on the need for tackling the terrorism and talked about what to do about the asylum seekers and hate preachers as the identify of the 12/7 would-be bombers' identity has shown they came to this country as refugees. Pictures of clerics such as Omar Bakri are there and invariably, pictures of hijam decked women protesting the attacks have been blown up on all pages. The tabloids have been restrained, unlike anytime before, in saying what they say, not hurting the Muslims although inside page banners sometimes read : If you don't like us, go away from here.
The outward angry and hateful reactions to the Muslims are sometimes manifested as I found out at Bekash Restaurant at Wickford at Essex. An angry Englishman told the waiter: "F***k the hell out of here, you Pakis. Why you make your money here to blow us apart? Don't make us Londonistan."
"We're brought up on certainties and now we have none," the agitated man's girlfriend tries to reason. "You see when the IRA used to blast in London, they used to call the police and the press before doing that so that people could be evacuated. They wanted to blow up installations, not rip through the guts of innocent people. Now, these people want to draw blood."
Outside in the drizzle of the sad afternoon, red double-deckers roll by and a weary Londoner skates through the afternoon crowd unheedful of the fume inside the restaurant.
"We did not deserve it," says another customer. "London did not deserve it. We organised the largest protest in the world over Iraq. Why did they do it then?"
Sitting in the window of the hotel, I suddenly wish I was not sitting there.