Land of Marvels: A Novel by Barry Unsworth (Hutchinson, £18.99)

JOHN Somerville is an English archaeologist working in the deserts of Mesopotamia on the brink of the First World War. After years of disappointment in the subterranean world of history, he is pinning his hopes on this latest excavation.

His funds are running out and time isn’t on his side. He is hoping for fame but is braced for disaster. This is his last chance.

The German-funded Baghdad railway linking Constantinople to the Persian Gulf is getting inexorably nearer. Its route looks likely to smash through the ancient mound of mud and rock that holds the key to Somerville’s future.

Another man keeping a beady eye on proceedings is Jehar, an unscrupulous Bedouin in the archaeologist’s pay. He, too, hopes to make his fortune, with which he will be able to pay the elusive bride-price of 100 pounds demanded by the uncle of Ninanna, a beautiful Circassian girl.

Somerville’s wife Edith, deeply conventional yet unfulfilled, wonders about the future of her marriage in the stultifying heat of the desert.

Into the fray steps Alex Elliott, a breezy American geologist-cum-corporate sleuth posing as an archaeologist, ostensibly working for British interests on a top-secret mission from the cynical financier Lord Rampling while concealing his own darker motives. In Edith’s eyes, at least, Elliott brings with him a refreshing whiff of glamour and excitement.

After a midnight, moonlit ride out into the desert, she succumbs to the romance of the setting and the enigmatic stranger, and the two embark on a fleeting affair.

While Britain, France, Germany and the United States plot to carve up the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, Somerville’s dig starts to take on greater significance.

The hitherto unremarkable mound starts to reveal itself as something infinitely more history-making. It looks like an ancient Assyrian palace containing a wholly unexpected royal tomb. As the archaeological prize grows by the day, promising to launch Somerville into international stardom, the railway continues to approach and the Englishman unaware of his wife’s night-time wanderings with the American impostor feels his own impending doom.

Outside Mesopotamia questions begin to be asked about Elliott. Suspicions as to his true intentions are raised. Is he working for the Germans? For Lord Rampling, the American’s reports on oil in the desert represent the prospect of a personal financial windfall and a patriotic triumph for Britain. They cannot be jeopardised for one moment. The American has to be assassinated.

Tensions mount in the desert as spies and assassins join the cast of soldiers and archaeologists, and the story hurtles on towards its fiery denouement.

Unsworth’s novel abounds with parallels between pre-war Mesopotamia and present-day Iraq. In Rampling’s words, “What was it Churchill had said…? Mastery itself is the prize. Prophetic words. He who owns the oil will own the world, he will rule the sea and the land, he will rule his fellow men.

The day will come when oil will be more desired, more sought after than gold.” Who said history never repeats itself ?

JUSTIN MAROZZI FROM YPRES
December 2008

Just past midnight on 11 November, the Menin Gate of Ypres is quiet and still. Even the rain, a constant companion on any winter visit to Flanders, falls silently. The peace is disturbed only by an occasional passer-by trotting past, collar upturned against the weather, or a car slipping quickly through the gate, wipers working overtime.

The heart of the night is a good time to arrive at one of the greatest memorials of the Great War. In a few hours, it will be impossible to get close as the town commemorates the 90th anniversary of the Armistice.
Although officially this is a gate, it is so broad many visitors consider it a tunnel. The reason the Menin Gate is so deep is to accommodate the names of 54,896 missing British and Commonwealth soldiers who lost their lives in the Ypres Salient, a Dantean hell of noise, mud, blood and slaughter from 1914-1918.

The missing men remembered here are a small fraction of the several hundred thousand killed in this corner of Belgium. They came from a very different Britain, from long-vanished regiments like the 57th Wilde’s Rifles, Lord Strathcona’s Horse and the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, augmented by imperial forces from India such as the 35th Sikhs, 40th Pathans and the 9th Bhopal Infantry.

Flanders Fields Museum, a stone’s throw from the Menin Gate in the vast Grote Markt square, gives a disturbing picture of what it was like to live and fight in the Ypres Salient in this “war to end all wars”. Paul Nash, the English war artist, called it “one huge grave”: “unspeakable, godless, hopeless”. “I am a messenger who will bring back the word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever,” he wrote in 1917. “Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.”

By mid-morning, the crowds are lining Meensestraat several deep to get a glimpse of the veterans’ parade and service beneath the Gate. Joining the townsfolk and the largely British visitors are the immaculately turned out veterans. Hundreds of bereted Brits, Belgians, Kiwis and Canadians, as well as Indians in yellow turbans. Medals glimmer and helmets shine in the oozing rain. Waxed moustaches bristle to attention. Those unable to get near the Gate gather under umbrellas in front of a giant screen in Grote Markt.

Benoît Mottrie is chairman of the Last Post Association, which organises the town’s daily honouring of the war dead. Every evening at 8 o’clock, the traffic is stopped beneath the Menin Gate to allow the buglers to sound their mournful tribute.

The clock sounds 11 o’clock. Mottrie gives a moving speech in which he rebuffs recent suggestions that with the Great War receding from personal experience into distant history, it may be time to review the daily act of remembrance. They have sounded the Last Post 27,569 times since 1928, he reminds the crowds. Were they to sound it for every life lost, they would be busy until 2610.

“It is only right and proper that sacrifice on this scale should be remembered,” he says. “Our debt of honour to the past has not yet been paid.” It will be properly discharged “only when people learn to resolve their differences peaceably”.

One by one, suited dignitaries lay wreaths in the heart of the memorial. The Gate is flanked by an expanse of sodden, scarlet poppies, a “Flanders Field” organised by the Royal British Legion. The famous lines from Laurence Binyon’s Ode to the Fallen – “At the going down of the sun, and in the morning / We will remember them” – are written on the petals, with messages of support on the back. “May we never forget your sacrifice and hope that men soon cease to wage war,” a typical one reads.

Back at the St George’s Church Hall, the British veterans are tucking into post-parade beers. The room is filled with a strong sense of British decency and dignity. Most veterans see remembrance at Ypres as an essential way of honouring both those who have served this country and those who serve in distant wars today. “To us as ex-servicemen, Ypres is where the whole tradition of remembrance begins,” says Eddie Hefferman, a trustee of the Royal British Legion.

Yet one can wonder where, if anywhere, remembrance takes us, beyond the simple honouring of the war dead. Siegfried Sassoon despised the Menin Gate and what it represented. “Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime / Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime,” he wrote.

Another veteran in the church hall admits he has “mixed feelings” about remembrance. “You see people laying wreaths while our soldiers are being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. We just never seem to learn. I don’t think we’re doing enough to frighten the younger generation away from war.”

Remembrance alone can never curb man’s instinct for war. It is as inherent as his need to defecate. Without memory, though, we would be even worse at restraining this primeval urge to fight. One takes away a sense of “never again” defiance, however futile, from the many memorials and oceans of white headstones in Flanders. Perhaps, as Benoît Mottrie suggests, collective remembrance becomes more, rather than less, important as those who fought in the Great War pass away.

Several miles north-east of Ypres, Tyne Cot Cemetery marks the final resting place of a further 35,000 British and New Zealand soldiers, most of them killed in the nightmarish Passchendaele Offensive around Ypres. One of the headstones is particularly striking. It belongs to Second-Lieutenant Arthur Conway Young, of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, killed on 16 August, 1917, at the age of 26. He was, says the inscription, “sacrificed to the fallacy that war can end war”.

So, you thought the Grand Tour was an 18th-century phenomenon? The preserve of languid young aristocrats milording it through Europe, swanning across Paris and Geneva, cutting a dash in Turin, Florence, Rome and Venice, before hightailing it to Innsbruck, Heidelberg and Potsdam? Think again.

The Greeks were at it well before that. Two millennia, in fact. And you’d struggle to find a better, more dashing Grand Tourer than Herodotus, the fifth-century father of history, whose gallivanting expeditions across North Africa, the Aegean and the Middle East form the perfect itinerary for the traveller of today. He did it over the course of a lifetime, admittedly, but it’s perfectly possible to squeeze the highlights into two or three weeks. Much as we’d love to visit Babylon, we’ll leave Iraq to one side for now and concentrate on Turkey, Egypt and Greece.

Let’s begin in the resort town of Bodrum, Herodotus’s home town of Halicarnassus on Turkey’s Aegean coast. There’s little left of the Mausoleum, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, but the 16th-century Castle of St Peter is magnificent and the sailing in island-studded turquoise seas is superb. History buffs can immerse themselves in the faded glory of Ephesus, Priene and Pergamum, leaving the dedicated clubbers to enjoy Halikarnas, which describes itself as the most beautiful disco in the world.

From the ruins of Turkey, it’s off to Egypt, which completely mesmerised our Greek traveller. As he wrote in The Histories, his one-volume masterpiece, “more monuments which beggar description are to be found there than anywhere else in the world”. No surprise to find the sky-grazing pyramids on the itinerary. No Egyptian monument is quite as magical, especially at dawn and dusk, when the crowds have disappeared. Guides told Herodotus no end of nonsense about the pyramids. Someone told him that the pharaoh Cheops, running out of money while he was building the Great Pyramid, decided to send his daughter to a brothel, where she charged her customers one block of stone – think 2.5 tons of limestone – per romp.

Next we take to the Nile to visit many-templed Luxor, the Thebes of old, where monumental overload is a distinct possibility. Apart from the sublime Temple of Hatshepsut, my own favourite, a stone’s throw from the rather impersonal royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, are the deliciously informal – and much less visited – Tombs of the Nobles, a riot of colour, everyday life and romance. Then we’re off again further south to Aswan – a spot of luxury at the Old Cataract Hotel never hurt anyone – and Kom Ombo where the ancient Egyptians once worshipped the snout-faced crocodile-god Sobek.

When you’ve had enough of the Nile, the Sahara beckons, and there are few more evocative spots amid its sandy wastes than the oasis of Siwa, which Herodotus visited a century before Alexander the Great arrived in February 331BC to consult the famous oracle of Ammon. Standing in Alexander’s footsteps in the crumbling ruins of the temple is an unforgettable experience not to be missed. To the north, the sun-singed escarpment of limestone, folded in shadow; to the east, the flashing jewel of Lake Aghurmi; Jebel al-Mawta, mountain of the dead, to the west and, beyond it, the incomprehensibly vast mirror of Lake Siwa; to the south, the snub-nosed mountain Jebel Dakrur, the whole panorama overwhelmed by a floating sea of feathery palms that melt eventually into the crashing ocean of dunes, wave upon glittering wave, of the Great Sand Sea.

Where else but Greece should our Herodotean odyssey end. In Athens we must make the obligatory pilgrimage to the Parthenon, beacon of democracy and pinnacle of Greek classical art. Impossible to miss the Archaeological Museum, even if museums aren’t your thing. This is one of the world’s greatest. We leave the city on a day trip to the sacred site of Delphi, scattered across terraces beneath twin fangs of rock and the lower slopes of Mount Parnassus. The setting of the Pleistos Valley, studded with olive trees and cypresses, is preternaturally beautiful – precisely why the Greeks chose it as a place in which to honour Apollo and Dionysus and consult the Oracle.

Then, with a final flourish, it’s off the beaten track to Samos, a wonderful, whale-shaped island perched off Turkey’s Aegean coast. Herodotus was wowed by three spectacular monuments on the island, and if the Temple of Hera and the Polycrates harbour breakwater don’t do it for you, you’ll still be captivated by the most exciting of the trio, the sixth-century BC Eupalinos Tunnel that slices through Mount Kastro with aplomb. Failing that, tuck into large quantities of the sweet Samian wine that Byron, among others, recommended.

By now, you’re probably reeling from all these tumbledown tombs and temples. You’ve had your fill of sylvan groves and scattered columns and pyramids, and you just want to kick back with a sundowner. So, without further ado, we sail overnight from Samos to Thessaloniki and hotfoot it to Kavala to stay in the incomparable Imaret, which is as much monument as unspeakably magnificent hotel – an award-winning conversion of a 19th-century school, baths, prayer hall and soup kitchen.

Enjoy the luxury. Herodotus would have approved.

It is sad and strange to watch Greece go up in flames. Particularly from Baghdad, where Iraqis, daring to believe that the worst is finally over after five nightmarish years, struggle to understand why Greeks are setting their country alight.

“We don’t know why they are doing this,” my friend Hussam said while we were watching the news last night. “They have everything. They have democracy, human rights and a good economy, but still they are destroying their country.” Put aside for a moment the irony of an Iraqi commenting on civil strife and bloodshed in a Western democracy. Part of that analysis is spot on. For many onlookers from the developing world, Greece has it all. An admirable standard of living, a decent economy, a shipping industry that is the envy of the world, a sybaritic climate and celebrated cuisine, membership of the EU and precious few enemies.

One thing missing from the Iraqi analysis, however, is a sense of history. As is so often the case with events in Greece, we’ve been here before.

Athens first went up in smoke in 480BC, when the Persian army of Great King Xerxes, King of Kings, Lord of Light, fresh from what would prove a pyrrhic victory over King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, thundered south across the plains of Attica and put the city to the sword, then to the fire. The Acropolis was burnt, the 5th-centuryBC Greek historian Herodotus recording the damage to the defining symbol of Athens, “which the Persian fire had scorched”. As Tom Holland writes in his history of the Persian Wars: “The great storehouse of Athenian memories, accumulated over centuries – the city’s very past – was wiped out in a couple of hours.” Greek protesters are doing their best to wipe out a lot more this time. The thing about the Greeks – proud democrats that they are – is that they strike and take to the streets at the drop of a hat. Take the annual November 17 march, ostensibly in memory of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising against the military junta of George Papadopoulos. Few outsiders recall that the confrontation, which led to more than 20 deaths, started with a strike. Only in Greece could students strike. With the self-dramatising flamboyance of youth, they called themselves the “Free Besieged”, in honour of the poem of the same name written by the 19th-century

Greek national poet Dionysios Solomos, a tribute to the Siege of Missolonghi, cornerstone of the Greek fight for independence.

The student strike rapidly grew into a tense stand-off until the tanks rolled in and bloodshed ensued. The confrontation set in motion a series of events that led, via the calamitous Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, to the collapse of the junta, the return of a former Prime Minister,

Constantine Karamanlis, and parliamentary elections later that year. Democracy was restored.

Karamanlis, incidentally, was the uncle of the current Greek Prime Minister, Kostas Karamanlis. The political class likes to keep it in the family.

At times, Greek democracy appears to consist of little more than the Karamanlis and Mitsotakis dynasties taking it in turns to hold power.

This, together with the corruption that tends to follow in its wake, is one of the country’s enduring problems.

The November 17 march offers some powerful insights into the violence of the past week. Join the demonstration, as I did a couple of years ago, and it doesn’t take long to realise that it is just as much an anti-American, anti-capitalism protest as a commemoration of the student uprising. Surrounded by thugs with motorbike helmets under their arms and cudgels disguised as flags, we snaked through Athens until reaching the American Embassy when the rioters donned their helmets, hurled petrol bombs and charged the lines of riot police. Within moments the streets were full of teargas and broken glass. Anarchy is an essential component of Greek democracy.

Kostas Karamanlis might regard the protesters as “enemies of democracy”, but those on the streets consider it their fundamental democratic right to run amok.

Ask students why they march – and strike – today and they tell you that it’s for “bread, freedom and democracy”.

I remember one young woman telling me that Greek students were starving. The Government was forcing them to pay for their studies, and they now had to find work to support their studies. To say that they lacked a bit of get-upand-go was an understatement. Haven’t they heard of holiday jobs? The students had been on strike for months, occupying universities and refusing to let anyone in. High-school students caught the strike bug and joined in, too. It was a free-for-all for Greek lazies, not unlike the current student-led spectacle.

One aspect of my Iraqi friend’s analysis of the Greek riots is off the mark. It is no coincidence that the violence ripping across the world’s oldest democracy is happening at a time when the economy is in the doldrums and youth unemployment is extremely high. Instinctively anti- American as a nation, Greece has had little appetite for globalisation. A large number of Greeks are fundamentally anti-business, among them the hardcore of several hundred anarchists in Athens. The current confrontation can be viewed at one level as a contest between a deeply unpopular, reforming government and defenders of the status quo. In the flames and carnage convulsing the nation there are shades of the unrest that occurred in Britain when Margaret Thatcher took on the miners. Greek unions, for now at least, are strong.

One wonders what the astute Herodotus would have made of the mayhem. Perhaps he would have considered it as nemesis arising from the hubris of the political class. In which case, we must hope, just like the Ancient Greeks, that catharsis is just around the corner. 6 Justin Marozzi is author of The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus, published by John Murray

Justin Marozzi finds time to salsa amid the sirens and window-rattling helicopters of Baghdad…

Plenty of interrupted nights in Baghdad this week. I’ve been startled out of sleep by early-morning prayers from a nearby mosque, wailing police sirens, window-rattling Black Hawk helicopters thundering overhead and volleys of gunfire from the shooting range. It could be worse. Last summer it was mortars, the one before that car bombs – one threw me out of bed – so on a sliding scale of violence things are definitely looking up. It also makes a change from waking up to Jim Naughtie on the Today programme.

*Having spent the past five years travelling around the ancient world with Herodotus, researching The Man Who Invented History, I have become slightly obsessive-compulsive about him, to the point where it is now difficult not to spot echoes of the great man everywhere, especially in Iraq. His warnings against imperial overstretch, the caution that hubris invariably leads to nemesis, his call to respect other people’s customs, traditions and religion, and the portrait of a clash of civilisations between East and West all have a powerful resonance here.

He even has something instructive to say about the financial crisis. “Often enough God gives man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him.” Hedge-fund types take note.

*On Tuesday, switching from travel writer to security consultant, I nip into town to speak to some Baghdadi businessmen. The security situation has improved beyond recognition post-surge but it’s still a good adrenaline boost. The streets bristle with moustachioed policemen and soldiers, and checkpoints every few hundred yards. Traffic is often at a standstill and you can’t help wondering whether you’re going to be blown up. Amazing that many people here still refer to

the Red Zone. How about calling

it Iraq?

*Thursday night is Pizza Party at the Italian embassy. My Italian cousins lend a burst of colour and glamour to an otherwise drab world of concrete blast walls, khakis and beige cargo pants, sorry, trousers. Needless to say, they also have the best uniforms. Goateed carabinieri strut around in black summer kit with red piping (paramilitary chic, brought to you by Giorgio Armani), gazed at by hopelessly smitten young women from the State Department. The DJ plays thumping salsa. Then the Italian peacocks take their pick of the prettiest girls and hit the dance-floor. They may not be the most formidable soldiers in the world but the Italians know how to party in a war zone.

*Or should that be post-conflict environment? Assessing where Iraq is these days remains as intensely political as the decision to go to war. If you opposed the conflict, it’s all disaster – Iraq is doomed to a downward spiral of sectarian fighting and disintegration. If you were an ardent supporter, the surge has worked wonders and Iraq is now a bastion of freedom and the biggest commercial opportunity in the world.

Justin Marozzi is the author of ‘The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus’, published by
John Murray.

The genocide publicised by movie stars is over, says Justin Marozzi. What must now be resolved is a civil war with unlimited breakaway factions – and Hollywood cannot help…

It wasn’t the gleaming black helicopter parked on Second Avenue that raised eyebrows. New Yorkers barely blink at such a routine form of transport.

No, passersby were more taken by the improbable banner hanging from its tail: ‘SEND ME TO DARFUR’.

Last week’s publicity stunt in Manhattan, in which a Robinson R44 helicopter was symbolically presented to the United Nations, was organised by the Save Darfur Coalition, the organisation that has done more than any other to keep the issue of Darfur alive. The event marked the first anniversary of UN Security Council resolution 1769, which created the joint UN-African Union peacekeeping mission Unamid, and coincided with a report revealing how the international community has betrayed it by failing to provide the manpower and materiel it needs.

The Darfur lobby has heavyweight support.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, President Jimmy Carter and Graça Machel, among others, have all supported this latest report, endorsed by more than 30 human rights groups, think tanks and NGOs, including the ubiquitous Save Darfur Coalition.

George Clooney, the most bankable Hollywood star of his generation, is also big on Darfur. ‘Many governments have offered expressions of concern, but few have offered the most basic tools necessary to keep civilians safe and for peacekeepers to do their job, ‘ he says. ‘It is time for governments to put their helicopters where their mouths are.’ He’s quite right. Unamid needs helicopters, not to mention another 16,000 peacekeepers.

The failure of the international community to live up to its promises is shameful. The problem is, Darfur has become an emotive campaign in which awkward truths – not least that the genocide is over – have become hostage to a more superficially exciting story.

There are few causes more hip than Darfur these days. Darfur is to the Noughties what HIV was to the Eighties and rainforests were to the Nineties. Inevitably, Hollywood is in on the act, adding its inimitable mélange of glamour, outrage and oversimplification.

Earlier this year, Steven Spielberg, having warned the Chinese president of his concern over the government of Sudan’s policy in Darfur ‘which is best described as genocide’, withdrew as an artistic adviser to the Beijing Olympics. Apart from Clooney, other stars such as Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Matt Damon, Bono and Mia Farrow have all made commendable efforts to draw the world’s attention to Darfur, publicising a stark and heart-rending narrative. The problem is, the narrative they are peddling is five years old.

The conflict has moved on.

The mass slaughter took place in 2003-2004, when the conflict was superficially explained as Arab nomad versus black African farmer, a fight for land and water. This was when we first heard about the Janjaweed, the governmentsupported assassins on horseback responsible for the killings, burnings and rapes. The UN has estimated that 300,000 Darfurians may have died as a result of the conflict. Khartoum claims an implausible 10,000.

The relative simplicity of those days has long gone. In 2006, there were two main rebel movements sitting at the negotiating table in Abuja: the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM). Today, in a development wearily familiar to Monty Python fans (think all-out fight between the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front, the Judean Popular People’s Front and the Romans), they have split into as many as 30.

Take your pick from SLM-Minni, SLMUnity, SLM-Mother, SLM-Free Will, SLMPeace, the United Revolutionary Front, JEM, JEM-Peace, JEM-Unity, to name only the better known. Apart from government versus rebels, the conflict now pits Arab versus Arab, African versus African, rebel versus rebel, bandits versus civilians and aid workers, Janjaweed versus peacekeepers, Sudan versus Chad. In short, the rebels have become a major part of the problem, but Hollywood and the Darfur lobby don’t seem to have caught on. Their story is a lot simpler: nasty government versus good-guy rebels.

Given that we live in an age when information has never been so readily and widely available, the level of misinformation about Darfur in 2008 is little short of extraordinary. When I met the correspondent of a highly respected American newspaper during a three-month stint in Khartoum and Darfur this summer, I was amazed when he told me his editor had asked him blithely to ‘Give us an update on how the genocide is going’. The Save Darfur Coalition homepage includes a button asking ‘Is your mutual fund funding genocide?’ The question is posed by Divest for Darfur, a campaign targeting ‘companies that help fund genocide in Darfur’. No one appears to have told any of these people that the genocide is over. What remains is a highly complicated, extremely brutal, low-intensity civil war.

It is arguable that rather than help end this hideous conflict, groups like the Save Darfur Coalition and GenocideInDarfur. net (‘Learn How YOU Can STOP the Violence Complete Anti-Genocide Directory’) have unwittingly helped prolong it.

The exclusive focus on bashing the government has emboldened the rebels, encouraging them to keep up the fight and shun the negotiating table. The peace process, as a result, has collapsed. Though uncontroversial among seasoned Sudan watchers, such a view is politically incorrect in the West, where the debate has been held in the shadows of a glossy campaign long on sentiment and outrage, short on measured analysis.

As Julie Flint, co-author of Darfur: A New History of a Long War, writes on the excellent blog Making Sense of Darfur, ‘In the current hyper-moralized debate over Sudan, anyone who questions Sudan’s critics risks being called an apologist for Khartoum.’ You don’t have to be a fan of Khartoum to ask whether Hollywood has got it wrong.

Personally, I think the government of President Omar al Bashir stinks. I watched a Sudanese official from the infamous Humanitarian Aid Commission (HAC) respond to charges that rape has been used as official policy by saying that rape was a Western concept. HAC falls under the brief of Ahmed Harun, minister of state for humanitarian affairs. Last year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Harun on 42 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In June, I listened to the straight-faced governor of North Darfur tell a visiting Security Council delegation to Al Fasher that the humanitarian situation was ‘very stable’. Never mind about the additional 150,000 refugees created in the first four months of 2008. Forget the World Food Programme having to cut by 50 per cent its food distribution to refugees because of the deteriorating security situation. It was all a Western conspiracy against Sudan.

Although the Darfur lobby has run one of the slickest media campaigns of modern times, there is a chance, however slim, that the ICC prosecutor’s move last month to indict the Sudanese president for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide will succeed where several years of Hollywood-led advocacy has failed. Reports from Khartoum indicate that with his back to the wall, the president may throw himself into finding a solution to this intractable conflict to stave off a full-blown indictment. Weirdly, against all the odds, it may yet be Bashir, the would-be war criminal, who brings peace to Darfur.

Incidentally, the Robinson R44 helicopter would be completely useless in Darfur. Unamid needs gunships, not four-seater civilian runarounds, but don’t let the facts spoil a good Hollywood drama.

We take it for granted that the state should have a monopoly on the use of violence. Previous generations, however, were more relaxed about private-sector involvement in the bloody business of war.

‘Persians, Greeks and Romans all relied on hired muscle, to the extent that the Persian victory over Egypt at the Battle of Pelusium in 525 BC saw both sides field armies largely consisting of Greek mercenaries,’ Stephen Armstrong writes in this breezy canter through the recent history of guns for hire.

For much of the Middle Ages, European battlefields were the playgrounds of condottieri, puffed-up mercenary captains such as Sir John Hawkwood and Sigismondo Malatesta hired by Italian city-states to wage war.

The tradition persisted into the 19th century. Many of the troops Wellington mustered at Waterloo in 1815 were mercenaries.

Armstrong kicks off his story with the mercenary renaissance of the 1960s and the story of dashing David Stirling, founder of the Special Air Service.

Had it not been for Stirling and the British Mercenary Organisation, royalist forces in Aden would likely have collapsed under the onslaught of Nasser’s invasion in 1962.

In 1967, having embarked on a profitable business connection with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Stirling founded Watchguard International, the world’s first private security company. The Brits have been well represented in private security ever since.

Fast-forward to the second Gulf War in 2003. Much of the battlefield was by now a privatised business.

KBR (Kellogg Brown and Root), formerly a subsidiary of the Halliburton corporation, provides everything from accommodation, laundry and linens to vehicle maintenance, military canteens and convoys.

Private-security companies, most of them British and American, mushroom to fill the sudden demand for convoy protection, bodyguarding and armoured taxi services. Some are good. Others, such as Custer Battles and Triple Canopy at the cowboy end of the market, are not.

By the end of Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure as Secretary of Defense in 2006, there were 100,000 contractors in Iraq, a ratio of one to one with American troops.

With 14,000 personnel in uniform in early 2008, the British security company Erinys has more men in Iraq than the British Army. The work is dangerous, but the money is good.

From an Iraqi perspective, the arrival of large numbers of pumped-up young men with goatee beards who look as though they are dressed for a paramilitary catwalk, has been an unwelcome development.

Armstrong quotes an eyewitness describing the deployment of a security team from Blackwater, the American company awarded a $27.7 million no-bid contract to provide security for the American viceroy Paul Bremer.

‘The guards were chiselled like bodybuilders and wore tacky, wraparound sunglasses. Many wore goatees and dressed in all-khaki uniform with ammo vests or Blackwater T-shirts with the company’s trademark bear claw in the cross hairs, sleeves rolled up.

“Their haircuts were short, and they sported security earpieces and lightweight machine guns. They bossed around journalists and ran Iraqi cars off the roads.’

And, he might have added, hurled mineral water bottles into the windscreens of innocent Iraqi drivers and screamed, ‘F—ING BACK OFF!’

It is this sort of behaviour and character – physically ludicrous, overconfident, culturally insensitive and intellectually challenged – that gives the private security industry such a poor reputation.

Armstrong’s original inspiration for this book came from the disgraceful shooting by a Blackwater team of 16 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad last September.

Blanket immunity, guaranteed by Bremer in one of his last acts in Iraq, is not the best way to deal with this problem of perception.

Armstrong quotes lengthy conversations with Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, founder of the British group Aegis, which at one point had the world’s largest security contract in Iraq.

The story of Aegis, for whom this reviewer established a nationwide civil affairs programme in Iraq, demonstrates how effective a modern private security company can be in a dangerous environment where aid agencies and humanitarian organisations are simply unable to operate.

Whatever one thinks about it, Spicer argues the private security industry is here to stay and there is little reason to doubt it.

Darfur crops up repeatedly here. Frustrated at the unwillingness and inability of sovereign states to supply sufficient troops to the UN/African Union peacekeeping mission, the actress Mia Farrow recently called for a private-sector response, suggesting that Blackwater should intervene.

Spicer envisages a future conflict in a failed state when the UN will debate interminably while the bodies pile up, the international community will wring its hands and eventually a private company will be legally contracted to assist.

As he puts it, ‘Which is worse? Dead babies or a private company?’

Far-fetched? Perhaps not. In 2005, Blackstone launched Greystone, a subsidiary company designed to put a military force into the field – quickly.

In the company’s own words: ‘The Greystone peacekeeping solution provides a flexible force with the ability to provide a properly trained force in a short period of time. The force provides a light infantry solution that is self-contained and self-sufficient. The Greystone peacekeeping programme leverages efficiency of private resources to provide a complete cost-effective security solution.’

Given Khartoum’s hostility to the West, tackling Darfur might be a little optimistic at this stage. Providing a ‘solution’ to lazy corporate jargon would be a good start.