Paul Vallely: Forgotten side of the ledger

COMMENT

What is the life of a Frenchman worth? I hope that doesn't sound like a racist question, but we have to live in the real world, don't we?

We know how much blood money is acceptable for the life of an American.

That was fixed in agreement with Colonel Gaddafi when the Libyan leader agreed to pay US$2.7 billion ($4.75 billion) - as much as US$10 million ($17.6 million) to each of the families of the victims of the bombing of the Pan Am plane which came down on the little Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988.

That figure caused a stir in France. A few years ago, a French court decided that Gaddafi's agents were also responsible for the terror attack on UTA Flight 772, the French airliner which was blown up over the Sahara desert the year after Lockerbie.

The French convicted six Libyans of the crime, in absentia, and demanded US$33 million in compensation.

No wonder that the French threatened to block moves to end international sanctions on Libya unless Gaddafi raised the offer, which he has now done.

The exact amount is undisclosed, but the families were demanding a comparable US$2.2 billion.

A telling phrase in reports of the new deal said: "The UTA tragedy has often been forgotten amid the attention given to the fate of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie."

Indeed, but another terrible incident of an airliner blown out of the sky has been even more neglected.

On July 3, 1988, the American battle cruiser USS Vincennes, shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 people on board.

Ironic as it now seems, the warship was in the Gulf to support Saddam Hussein during his 1980-88 war against Iran.

Its captain said he thought he was being attacked by an Iranian F-14 fighter.

Washington later paid the victims' families US$300,000 each - or US$150,000 if the person who died was unemployed.

Which perhaps answers another question. What is a Muslim life worth?

You might say this is a provocative question. We're not really talking about religion, so much as power, and there is no equity in the distribution of that. And we have to live in the real world, after all.

The trouble is that the latest edition of the British newspaper Muslim News asks exactly that question, and revealingly so.

It is easy to forget that we see the world with eyes that focus through lenses ground by a very particular set of cultural assumptions.

Take those British Muslims detained in Guantanamo Bay. Depending on our political perspective, we might describe them as dangerous terrorists or as untried British citizens denied due process of justice.

But many Britons see them primarily as Muslims.

Pick up any of Britain's Islamic publications - or surf the net - and you will see that very clearly.

There is even a new website (www.prisonerofwest.org) dedicated to giving a face to the men the rest of us have seen only in orange boiler suits, hooded, drugged and shackled.

It is all too easy to demonise such figures, some of whom are almost certainly guilty, but others of whom, even the Americans admit, are probably innocent.

This week, an Indonesian court delivered its verdict on Abu Bakar Bashir, whose religious school in the Javan city of Solo is said to have provided recruits for an extremist group linked to Osama bin Laden.

He was found guilty of treason, having been accused of plotting the assassination of President Megawati Sukarnoputri and supporting the Bali and Jakarta bombings.

Bashir denied it all, but who would give him much credence after his pronouncement that "human beings without Islam are like cattle in the eyes of Allah" or his insistence that "a teenage boy should be thinking about martyrdom before thinking about women" or his warning to his trial judges that they would go to hell if they convicted him?

Yet we have to be careful not to fall into the black and white worldview of George Bush where everything divides simply into good and evil.

A striking counter-example of this was heard on the radio in Britain this week when Abdal Hakim Murad, the Muslim chaplain at Cambridge University, spoke of the difficulty of preaching in present times.

He said: "When the war began, I mounted the pulpit of my local mosque and preached the most difficult sermon of my career.

My congregation included many anti-war activists, but I could not quite ignore the Iraqi asylum-seekers who were also hearing my words.

"Some of them found the movements of the Muslim prayer difficult, thanks to the expertise of Saddam's torturers."

He was forced to see things through the perspective of the other. That way of looking can help us to address the complexity of the world, and the difficulty of finding solutions to seemingly intractable problems such as we now face in Iraq.

When we log the fact that daily violence in that country has killed 65 American and 11 British soldiers since the official end of combat, we need to keep in mind that someone somewhere is adding to the body count of the 6000 estimated to have been killed on the other side in the conflict.

What is an Iraqi life worth?

- INDEPENDENT