Cambridge is no longer an island

I was a student at Cambridge University when the 1991 Gulf War broke out. The most irksome memories of my days were of the university campus...

I was a student at Cambridge University when the 1991 Gulf War broke out. The most irksome memories of my days were of the university campus in those troubled times. As US airplanes rained bombs on Iraqi targets the students in the common room watched the show live on TV as if it were a cricket match. They cheered at each successful US attack and discussed the precision of Scud missiles. There was alarm sometimes when an odd Scud hit Israel targets. But there were no protests. Nobody talked about the war. Cambridge was an island. No war could disrupt the rhythms of its intellectual life.

Ten years after that war, I am back in Cambridge. Now there is talk of a Gulf War II. Once more the US invasion of Iraq looms large. There are many similarities in the political climate that is distinctly pro-war. But the social reception of this reality is nowhere comparable to the callousness and indifference I witnessed in 1991.

At the formal hall dinner last week, a young German scientist launched a scathing critique of the war lobby that soon had many sedate British professors involved in an animated discussion. These are certainly not the kind of discussions one is used to at high table dinners here. A large number of Cambridge students attended the anti-war rally in London last month. There is in student fora lively discussion on the global war against terrorism, where foreign policies of the US and its allies are under critical scrutiny. The ‘new’ Labour Party of Tony Blair is very often the butt of ridicule in student circuits. Cambridge has definitely changed.

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Academic life has at last found room for an engagement with politics that threatens the non-European’s basic right to live. The British press has had a key role to play in building this mood. Even the dastardly terrorist attack at Bali last month was analysed in terms of the US policy on the Middle East. This is new. In the recent past no terrorist attack has been analysed the day after with a plea to review foreign policies.

Indeed, some British newspapers went to the extent of blaming the US war plans on Iraq for the Bali massacre. If the UK press has been particularly introspective, the Australian press was not far behind. Australian PM John Howard was openly criticised in editorials for siding with the US and thus bringing terror on to Australians; German and French editorials have been very vocal in their pleas to understand why terrorist attacks take place.

In a way, the discernible change in public mood is because the theatre of war has shifted from the wilds of Iraq to New York. The close encounter with violence and the emotional stresses that it generated has made Europe try and understand the cause of this unrelenting mayhem. As the intellectual and public mood gets into the causation of international terrorism the foreign policy hawks appear more alienated from the public. This is all too obvious in Europe now. The lively political awakening I witness here is symptomatic of the churning all over Europe and the US. Cambridge is no longer an isolated island. It is a microcosm of the turmoil all over the continent.

(The writer is the Smuts Visiting Fellow at Cambridge, UK)

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