[AGL] Re: Rory Stewart 's diary, the man who walked across Afghanistan and Iran, insightful

[Michael Eisenstadt]

Carolyn,

This is a real fun read. We read all of it. It is better not to
enter an unknown village in Iran with a mule. I had not known
that and have made a note to self.

The first 4 pages of Rory Stewart's $8.40 paperback The
Places in Between can be read on one's computer at
amazon.com

Mike

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <globe at zipcon.net>
To: "survivors' reminiscences about Austin Ghetto Daze in the 60s" 
<austin-ghetto-list at pairlist.net>; "Michael Eisenstadt" 
<michaele at ando.pair.com>
Cc: <austin-ghetto-list at pairlist.net>
Sent: Saturday, August 05, 2006 5:15 PM
Subject: Rory Stewart 's diary, the man who walked across Afghanistan and 
Iran, insightful


> His book the places in between and the Prince of the Marshes are very
> insightful.  He repeats complicated anecdotes but has a simple good 
> solution to
> Iraq
> Carolyn
>
> Diary
>      Rory Stewart
>      All afternoon I watched three shadows moving beneath us. Mine in 
> front,
> Akbar's at the rear and between us the mule's: its shadow legs, twenty 
> feet
> long, jerking like a spider's over the glowing thorn scrub. I felt 
> happiest in
> the afternoons. The flat glare of noon had gone but the day was not yet 
> over.
> Staring at that shadow image of our motion and our isolation on the 
> 7000-foot
> ridgeline, I said: 'Isn't it beautiful?'
>
>      'Not for me.'
>
>      'Why?'
>
>      Akbar did not reply. He often didn't reply.
>
>      I hadn't imagined that I would have Akbar with me when I crossed 
> Iran. I
> planned to walk around the world, a journey which seemed to me to be very
> simple. I was able to explain it to my five-year-old godson and he said he
> would follow me on a map. I left my job and travelled on three dollars a 
> day,
> like a backpacker. But I thought that my slow pace and physical contact 
> with
> the ground would help me understand the Asian landscape better. Since I 
> would
> be moving at an archaic speed on old pilgrimage and trade routes, or 
> passes
> used by Alexander, and sleeping in remote villages, often inaccessible to 
> cars,
> I hoped to develop a different view of local cultures from other 
> travellers. I
> was also interested in what two years walking on my own would do to the 
> way I
> thought.
>
>      An Iranian official met me at the Turkish border and said: 'It is
> forbidden to walk across Iran.'
>
>      'But you can hitchhike, ride or cycle.'
>
>      'Yes, but you cannot walk.'
>
>      We debated the subject for a week and they finally agreed that I 
> could
> walk, on condition that I took a Government escort. Akbar is older than 
> me. He
> is half a civil servant and half a climber: he has reached the summit of
> Everest. But he was not a guide because he did not know the way and he was 
> not
> quite a companion because he walked a hundred yards in front of or behind 
> me. I
> suspect he hated the walk. His Iranian gym shoes, with the label 'Nike by 
> Ralph
> Lauren', rubbed his feet raw. He never complained but in the evenings I 
> saw him
> trying various homeopathic remedies. He soaked his feet in henna until 
> they were
> dyed purple. I can only guess why the Government wanted him with me but we 
> spent
> every night together and he shaped my understanding of the journey. He 
> often
> repeated the phrase: 'Iranians are famous for their hospitality and
> generosity.'
>
>      In the course of three months we were differently mistrusted almost 
> every
> night in every village. Villagers assumed that, as strangers on foot, we 
> were
> dangerous men. So did the police. Sometimes we concealed Akbar's 
> Government
> credentials, sometimes we emphasised them, but neither approach seemed to
> overcome the hostility. People often said that his identity card and my
> passport were forgeries. Nobody believed I was a foreigner. They thought I 
> was
> only pretending to speak bad Farsi. Their fears are a reflection of the
> violence of the Iranian countryside. A man from the north-east told us 
> that
> four hundred Afghans with automatic weapons had kidnapped his father from 
> his
> village a few months before and only released him for a ransom of a 
> thousand
> dollars.
>
>      Many villagers assumed that we were smuggling drugs. One man, who 
> offered
> us opium before dinner, said that in his village 70 per cent of the men 
> and
> women smoked between two and twelve grams a day. He blamed the problem on
> British sales of opium in the 19th century. The more aggressive aspects of 
> the
> Government's anti-narcotics campaign have terrified villagers and some 
> would
> not sell us bread because they were afraid they would be arrested for 
> aiding
> drug-smugglers.
>
>      What we were accused of most often was digging for archaeological
> treasures on a nearby tumulus, or in the village cemetery. A week after we 
> left
> one village our host was arrested and charged with helping us look for 
> ancient
> bronzes. This is a common activity. The last grave robbers in his village 
> had
> turned up in police uniform. South of Lake Ormieh we climbed through a 
> cave in
> which a Tehran gangster was found dead from methane asphyxiation earlier 
> in the
> year. He had been tunnelling in secret for ten months, hoping to find 
> Scythian
> gold.
>
>      In one cemetery we visited, every gravestone had been smashed. Among 
> the
> mounds of earth were large stone rams and tigers, lying on their sides. 
> One of
> the rams had a bow and a quiver of arrows carved on its back. 'These 
> probably
> date from before Islam,' I said to Akbar. There was a rifle carved on the 
> other
> side.
>
>      A group of four men had been slowly walking towards us and, as they
> reached us, the leader, eyes heavy with opium, shouted in Farsi: 'You have 
> come
> here to rob the graves. You are grave robbers. I will not let you take 
> this
> gold. It is for us. If anyone digs here it is us. I will call the police. 
> Give
> me your ID card.'
>
>      We ignored them and went back to get the mule before leaving the 
> village.
> The men followed us shouting for a hundred yards and then disappeared. As 
> we
> walked up the mud-slurry of the village streets, people stopped talking. I 
> saw
> women staring at us through half-closed courtyard doors. One by one, they
> slammed the metal gates shut as we approached. A group of young men, 
> pressing
> themselves against a wall as the mule and the saddlebags squeezed past, 
> stared
> into my eyes unblinking. When I was ten yards down the street one 
> muttered:
> 'Kurdish smugglers, bringing things from Iraq.'
>
>      It is not the pessimism of these assumptions, or even what follows 
> from
> them, that I found unsettling. It is particularly hard to define yourself 
> when
> you have no fixed relationships. To be an Afghan drug dealer one day and a
> Kurdish freedom fighter the next (not just in idle fantasy but all the way 
> to
> the police station) troubled me.
>
>      Akbar told me not to speak when we arrived in a village. He concealed 
> the
> fact that he is a Kurd and Sunni. He would bring out his mobile phone. A
> reticent man, he would be forced by the situation to say, while pulling 
> out a
> pile of substantiating documents: 'We are mountain climbers. I am an 
> official
> of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, studying for an MA in Tehran, and I 
> have
> climbed to the summit of Everest.'
>
>      He did not want to be thought a smuggler. He was enraged to find that 
> no
> one believed he was an official. He was sure that if we lost the mule and
> changed our clothing our walking would be accepted as a modern sport. 
> Dress was
> the key because, he said, villagers see 'proper' clothes as proof of good
> character. He made me buy new clothes every fortnight and after two months 
> of
> argument I agreed to dispose of my hat and stick ('villagers have seen 
> that
> kind of stick in films - it looks very sinister'). Akbar believed the 
> ideal
> appearance was his own clean-shaven face over a bright blue Gore-Tex 
> jacket and
> jeans. With this he hoped to pre-empt the roles which others might assign 
> him.
> The clothing did have some effect. I twice saw him pulled out of crowds 
> for
> police questioning, while I and others like me in drabber clothes were 
> ignored.
> But no costume provoked a favourable reaction from the villagers.
>
>      Perhaps our objective was confused by our aspirations: travellers in
> disguise often choose the role they have always wanted to play - when 
> Lawrence
> dressed as an Arab he wore prince's clothes. The arguments Akbar used to
> justify disposing of the mule were the same as I used to justify walking 
> in an
> Islamic cloak with a tall staff. I no longer believe that anything stops
> villagers being suspicious of strangers on foot.
>
>      I felt anchored to the journey when I had the mule's reins in my 
> hand. I
> had become aware of his vulnerability when in the cold rain I had to 
> tighten
> the slippery leather of his girth strap or, in the desert, when he drank 
> three
> gallons from the bucket then looked up at me, dribbling the last water 
> onto the
> sand. Calming him when the approach of wolves sent him into a frenzy at 
> night,
> or checking his feet in the morning, often felt like a spectacle put on 
> for the
> large village audience, but it was necessary. And finding slopes through 
> the
> mountains which I could drag him up, unloading him when he sank up to his 
> hocks
> on the salt flats, having him as a marker to return to when forced to take 
> a
> side-trip by police car, had all added a sense of seriousness to the 
> route. He
> linked me to the ancient caravan paths and to the historical travellers 
> who
> could not go long distances in winter without a pack animal.
>
>      For Akbar, however, the mule was an unnecessary, incongruous and
> embarrassing companion and a troublesome responsibility. Once, when we had 
> just
> climbed out of a gorge where the leaves of the willows and walnut and 
> birch were
> all different shades of yellow, we saw, ahead of us on the path, a broad 
> comb
> and arching spine glistening in the sunlight - the branch of a coconut 
> palm,
> you might have thought. It was the neck and ribcage of a donkey. A yard 
> further
> on, two of its hooves were laid neatly beside each other, attached to most 
> of
> its hide. I put my arm round the mule's neck to calm him, but he seemed 
> quite
> unperturbed, only sighing grumpily at the gradient. We followed the wolf's
> prints (deep and widely spaced, they suggested he was a big animal) up to 
> the
> scentless air of the ridgeline.
>
>      As I was admiring our long shadows Akbar said: 'The mule is a big 
> problem
> for us. The mule makes problems with the police . . . He is like a 
> centipede:
> every evening the centipede takes off his two hundred shoes to go to bed, 
> and
> when he has finished, he has to start putting them on again for the 
> morning.
> Loading and unloading the mule is like that centipede . . . In the desert 
> we
> cannot find food and water for him. The villagers say that white mark on 
> his
> nose will bring bad luck. It will make us die.'
>
>      'But you are not superstitious.'
>
>      'No I'm not. We will be more free without the mule. You do not 
> understand
> Iran. If people see us without the mule, they will treat us better.'
>
>      We saw a man coming towards us, leading a donkey to which he had tied 
> two
> thin trees.
>
>      'You're going the wrong way,' the man said. 'You're two hours off 
> your
> path. What are you selling?'
>
>      'Nothing, we're walking for fun.'
>
>      He laughed. 'With a mule? You're smuggling from Iraq - what have you 
> got
> in the saddlebags?'
>
>      We gave the mule away a week later. Perhaps it was the loss of the 
> mule
> that later made me feel so insubstantial: the routines of walking, the
> repetitive diet, the hours without interruption, underscored by the steady 
> beat
> of my feet, seemed to emphasise the fragile, unstable and irregular 
> changes in
> my thoughts and muscles. I was without books, and unable to write or talk 
> for
> eight hours a day, since Akbar preferred to walk in silence. My thoughts
> meandered in daydreams.
>
>      I wondered what different impressions Akbar, as an Iranian, had of 
> the
> landscape and the villages. In the desert there are no trees to deliver 
> variety
> of height and colour and texture. Gravel and sand do not alter with the 
> seasons
> but emphasise the marks made by humans on the landscape. The only vertical
> lines are formed by pylons or houses. The only animals, apart from the 
> drab
> eagles and the sparrows on the electricity wires, are domesticated flocks. 
> The
> only marks in the soil are made by the plough. I find things so obvious 
> and so
> uniform difficult to interpret.
>
>      When we walked into the village of Goz Hasle by the Turkish border 
> and had
> spent half an hour answering the familiar questions we were invited into
> Masawali's house. As we sat down on the acrylic blankets a dust storm rose 
> and
> Masawali closed the window through which the chickens had just been 
> chased. The
> flies seemed to congregate around my dark jacket. I could smell the 
> cow-dung
> which had been piled up to dry for winter fuel and through the doorway I 
> could
> see the shadows of veiled women moving in the kitchen. Masawali left us 
> alone
> to go and organise some food.
>
>      The only piece of furniture in the room was a glass-fronted 
> television
> cabinet, containing a porcelain blonde princess, a gnome and some china
> teacups. But we were drinking tea from glasses and there was no 
> television. We
> sat on a woollen rug, woven by Masawali's mother on a narrow nomad's loom, 
> and
> on a machine-made acrylic blanket with a red tiger pattern. There was a 
> small
> photograph of our host on the wall and a chubby blonde doll in a short 
> skirt
> hung by her neck from the ceiling.
>
>      An old man came in and we stood up to greet him. Instead of wearing
> European trousers, a form of dress obligatory under the Shah's 
> modernisation
> campaign and still almost universal, he had on a pair of Kurdish 
> bell-bottoms.
> Akbar addressed him in Kurdish, but they spoke quite different dialects 
> and
> could not understand each other. The man left and we sat down again. 
> Something
> uncomfortable was lodged behind my cushion. I reached back and pulled out 
> a
> dirty single-barrelled shotgun, its butt bound with yellow tape, and a
> bandolier of empty cartridges. Masawali came back in.
>
>      'Goz Hasle is a very old village, God be praised,' he said, sitting 
> down
> and refusing to take the place of precedence furthest from the door. 'My 
> father
> was born here and my grandfather was born here. We were always here.'
>
>      'What does Goz Hasle mean?' I asked.
>
>      'It means "cross-wearing girl".'
>
>      'So it was an Armenian Christian village?'
>
>      'No. My grandparents did not live alongside Armenians. The Armenians 
> left
> a very, very long time ago.'
>
>      'When?'
>
>      'When my father was a child.'
>
>      Faced with these contradictions I assumed, perhaps unfairly, that his
> family had helped the Ottomans drive the Armenians out.
>
>      'Where was the Armenian church?'
>
>      'I don't know.'
>
>      Masawali's stable was a long building with a vast door, a base of 
> neatly
> dressed masonry and a wooden roof that soared thirty feet high. In the 
> south
> side was the trace of an arched window.
>
>      Three hundred miles further on, we stayed with Ali Reza in Sefid Han.
> 'This is a very poor home,' Akbar said to me when we reached the unlit 
> sloping
> courtyard. Two goats were kept in an old cave beneath the house.
>
>      Ali Reza took us into a small white-washed room. Here, too, the only 
> piece
> of furniture was a television cabinet. Again, there was no television. 
> Again, we
> sat on folded acrylic blankets with red tiger patterns, looking at a 
> blonde doll
> suspended from the ceiling. Ali Reza was due to play his mandolin that 
> evening
> at a wedding ceremony so he sat with his old nine-string instrument on his 
> lap,
> sticking strips of gold paper over the mother of pearl inlay. He talked to 
> Akbar
> in Turkish rather than Farsi and I couldn't follow.
>
>      'Please ask him about the history of the village,' I said to Akbar.
>
>      'He doesn't know.'
>
>      'Please ask him.'
>
>      Akbar asked. 'He says this is the oldest village in the region, that 
> there
> is a very old graveyard on the hill, that when a tractor was working in 
> the
> next-door field, it turned up three levels of settlement going back 
> thousands
> of years. That the villagers have got very rich from gold they have found 
> in
> the grave-mounds. There was an inscribed stone stele on the graveyard 
> hill,
> which they broke up for building material.'
>
>      'What else did he say?'
>
>      'I don't care.'
>
>      The architectural traces of an Armenian past and the trousers of the 
> Kurd
> were the only things that seemed visibly to differentiate Masawali's house 
> at
> Goz Hasle from Ali Reza's house at Sefid Han. One man was a Kurd, the 
> other a
> Shahsevan Turk, one spoke an Indo-European language, the other an Altaic
> language. But Masawali's house had the same television cabinet, with the 
> same
> stickers, saying 'Sony', stuck on the glass, the same clock ('Sieko 
> Quarts')
> with plastic flowers in its case and a photograph of the host. Both 
> families
> were weaving $2000 carpets to a Tabriz design for the Saudi market. Inside
> sixty village houses belonging to different ethnic groups (Bakhtiari, 
> Qashgai,
> Kurd, Azeri-Turk, Lur and Fars) spread over a thousand-mile area, I 
> observed a
> bewildering similarity in manners, clothing, interior decoration and food. 
> This
> was not my experience of walking in Pakistan, Indonesia or China.
>
>      In every house people were very concerned with who entered first and 
> who
> sat furthest from the door and with standing up when a man entered but not 
> when
> a woman came in. Every host served bread in the same way from a folded
> tablecloth on the ground and was thanked with precisely the same 
> expressions
> translated word for word into Farsi, Kurdish and Turkish: 'Strength to 
> your
> arm, God be praised, long life to you, may you not be tired.'
>
>      I can't explain this uniformity. I assume that blonde dolls may be 
> popular
> as decoration because they are the only available legal depiction of 
> unveiled
> women. (Though I'm not certain that the doll's short skirt is more 
> significant
> than the noose round her neck.) In a middle-class house I saw a poster
> depicting houris reclining on tiger skins, and wondered if the tiger on 
> the
> acrylic blankets was a reference to the archetypal rug, long after the 
> last
> Caspian tiger had been shot. That repetitive spartan interiors could be 
> the
> result of the combined pressures of mass production, a closed economy, 
> pastoral
> migrations, poverty, religious distaste for ostentation and social 
> conformity
> was conceivable. But nothing quite explained that particular glass-fronted
> plastic television cabinet.
>
>      I found it stranger still that so much was made of differences 
> between
> local popular cultures in Iran. President Khatami claims to be fighting
> American influences to preserve them. This is in part why pop music, 
> Hollywood
> films and McDonald's are banned. (So too, until recently, were billiards 
> and
> Nietzsche.) The current rulers are opposed to their predecessors' 
> enthusiasm
> for alien cultural forms. It's as though Iran's most significant frontier 
> is
> with America. A country marked by its physical centrality has turned into 
> one
> of the most marginalised in the world: diplomatically, culturally and
> economically.
>
>      Kurdish villages around Goz Hasle, despite their superficial 
> resemblance
> to the Azeri villages, do have very different religious and political
> attitudes. Many Sunni Kurds did not fight in the Iran-Iraq war (a war that
> played a key part in creating the new political culture) and continue to 
> fight
> the state and Azeri militia. They are poorer. The Government does not give 
> them
> substantial subsidies or senior jobs and they are not provided with 
> automatic
> weapons such as the Kalashnikov I found behind a cushion in an Azeri 
> village
> near Hamadan. My host was the weapons instructor for the village militia, 
> which
> had fought for the Government in Iraq and Kurdistan. The state repaid his
> loyalty with subsidies and investment in the village and senior positions 
> for
> Azeris in business and the civil service.
>
>      After two months we reached Gilli, a hundred miles north-west of 
> Isfahan.
> We had been following pylons through the desert, carrying everything 
> ourselves.
> The fog was so low that we couldn't see the cables and we were cold and 
> tired. I
> was hoping to be welcomed, to meet some people over a meal, to find a safe 
> place
> to sleep.
>
>      Just before dusk we walked down an avenue of bare, pollarded willows. 
> Two
> women were staring at us over a mud wall.
>
>      'Salaam aleikum,' we shouted. They did not reply.
>
>      We turned down empty lanes between blank courtyard walls. It was a 
> small
> village. We found the mosque unlocked and went in, leaving our boots at 
> the
> door, dragging our backpacks with us. Five old men in woollen hats were 
> warming
> themselves at a big iron stove and we walked over to sit beside them on 
> the
> carpet. One man shook our hands. His were wet from religious ablutions. To 
> my
> surprise he did not say anything. The others ignored us entirely and 
> continued
> to discuss the price of sheep. Akbar and I waited in silence. Occasionally 
> I
> saw one of them glance in our direction. Along the gallery was a row of 
> black
> and white photographs of young men. They had all died fighting in the Iraq 
> war
> and they were numbered from one to 26. Among them was a ten-year-old boy.
>
>      'Excuse me. Who was that boy?' I said to the man with wet hands.
>
>      'My nephew. He wasn't that age when he died - it was just the last 
> picture
> we had of him.'
>
>      'How old was he when he was killed?'
>
>      'Fourteen. Excuse me.'
>
>      The sun had set and the call to evening prayers began. The men moved 
> away
> from the stove. There were now about thirty old men in the mosque and they 
> all
> began to pray, but not in unison, kneeling and standing-up again, 
> grumbling and
> whispering. An eighty-year-old was studying us sideways between his
> prostrations. He was looking at two men in wet clothes, with stinking feet 
> and
> large, clumsy rucksacks beside them, leaning their backs against the wall 
> to
> recover from the last hurried miles. But when he stood, he kept his eyes
> forward, his chin up and his shoulders back as though he were standing to
> attention at a remembrance parade. Through the thin green curtain of the
> women's section I watched the silent white shrouds, rising and falling. 
> For the
> next half-hour no one spoke to us.
>
>      But when the old man had finished his prayers, he came over, shook 
> our
> hands and said: 'Hello. May God bless you. I hope you are well. Where have 
> you
> come from?'
>
>      We started to explain about the journey. There was a pause, then the 
> man
> sounded more troubled: 'Why have you come here? . . . Where are you going? 
> . .
> . How did you come here? . . . But why don't you have a car? . . . Have 
> you
> spoken to the police?' He seemed hardly to hear our answers. A crowd 
> gathered
> round him, whispering. From the medley of muttered words, I could hear: 
> 'grave
> robbers', 'PKK', 'walking to avoid the checkpoints on the roads',
> 'drug-dealers', 'rape', 'whisky'.
>
>      Men pressed forward and shouted questions that we had already 
> answered.
> For half an hour we said the same things over and over again, showing our
> documents to different people. We kept telling them we were walking across 
> Iran
> as tourists. Nobody believed us. To have walked two thousand miles sounded
> absurd to them.
>
>      'You cannot sleep here,' the old man concluded.
>
>      'Where can we sleep?'
>
>      'Anywhere except here.'
>
>      The headman entered. He was wearing a rust-stained yellow jumper 
> beneath
> his jacket and his pinstripe trousers were torn at the thigh. He held 
> Akbar's
> Government identity card in front of him while a teenager read out what it
> said. 'What is your name?' the head man asked when the boy had finished.
>
>      'Isn't it written on my identity card?' Akbar asked.
>
>      'No.'
>
>      'Are you sure?'
>
>      'You must go to the police.'
>
>      We refused.
>
>      A little later a Government pick-up truck was driven fast into the 
> square.
> One policeman remained in the car revving the engine, the other ran to the
> doorway and shouted at us to come to the station. In the superintendent's
> overheated office, listening to his loud jokes, I half-admired the clear 
> image
> that the policemen seemed to have of themselves. They had entered the 
> police
> station as though they were humming the theme tune of a cop film and 
> jumped
> down the front steps as if just abreast of a crisis. When the 
> superintendent
> tired of us he let us go.
>
>      By day, I sometimes experienced a fragile coincidence of mind, 
> landscape
> and muscle which made me feel more substantial. I might look back at a 
> peak I
> had crossed three days before. My footsteps left prints in the earth 
> behind me,
> stretching back over the thousand miles I had walked in the past months. 
> The
> lack of music, sex, conversation, literature, alcohol, or much food beyond
> bread and goat's cheese, seemed irrelevant or even beneficial. I was aware 
> of
> the breadth of the sky, the angle of the ridges falling away. I looked at 
> the
> geometry of a desert thorn curling in on itself like a wicker ball, or the
> trace of bright cobbles beneath the white salt surface of the soil. Akbar 
> was
> forgotten. Inaccessibility and solitude became a delight. My vast, vague 
> shadow
> on a desolate Iranian hillside seemed almost to resemble that of a hero. 
> But
> that conceit vanished by the mosque stove. There, questions began that
> expressed and refined the roles that others gave me - roles that were 
> never
> heroic. Spending a lot of time on my own, I was unsettled by the 
> inconsistency
> and instability of the identities which others gave me. As a stranger,
> confronting this every evening, I worried that the only way to compensate 
> for
> the narratives that other people created for me was to invent my own. 
> Perhaps
> this is why travel writers always lie.
>
>      Rory Stewart's The Places in Between describes his walk across 
> Afghanistan
> in 2001. He has worked for the British government in Indonesia, the 
> Balkans and
> Iraq, and is now a fellow of the Carr Centre at Harvard.
>
>      From the LRB letters page: [ 20 September 2001 ] Bachman Reza [ 18 
> October
> 2001 ] Robert Wilson.
>
>
>      Other articles available from the 6 September 2001 issue
>
>      Oh, Andrea Dworkin
>      Jenny Diski on Misogyny: The Male Malady by David Gilmore
>
>      Nuremberg Rally, Invasion of Poland, Dunkirk . . .
>      James Meek considers the never-ending wish to write about the Second 
> World
> War
>
>      At the Musée Galliera
>      Peter Campbell : Children's clothes
>
>      Short Cuts
>      John Sturrock at the Test Match
>
>
>
>      From the archive
>
>      Bitter Chill of Winter
>      Tariq Ali : Kashmir
>
>      The 'People's War'
>      Pankaj Mishra on the Maoists of Nepal
>
>      Japan goes Dutch
>      Murray Sayle on Japan's economic troubles
>
>      Out of the Hadhramaut
>      Michael Gilsenan on Being 'Arab'
>
>      In North Korea
>      Jon Cannon visits the Chinese - North Korean border
>
>      'Comrade Jiang Zemin does indeed seem a proper choice'
>      Jasper Becker : Tiananmen Square
>
>
>
>
>
>      Other articles by this contributor:
>
>      Degrees of Not Knowing
>      Rory Stewart: Does anyone know how to govern Iraq?
>
>
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