Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

8
transnational existence is assured, from
Fallujah in Iraq to the edge of Syrian
Aleppo, from Nigeria to Niger and Chad.
It can thus degrade the economy of each
country it moves through, blowing up a
Russian airliner leaving Sharm el-Sheikh,
attacking the Bardo museum in Tunis
or the beaches of Sousse. There was a
time – when Islamists attacked the Jewish
synagogue on Djerba island in Tunisia in
2002, for example, killing 19 people –
when tourism could continue. But that was
when Libya still existed. In those days, Ben
Ali’s security police were able to control the
internal security of Tunisia; the army was left
weak so that it could not stage a coup. So
today, of course, the near-impotent army of
Tunisia cannot defend its frontiers.
Isis’s understanding of this new
phenomenon preceded our own. But Isis’s
realisation that frontiers were essentially
defenceless in the modern age coincided
with the popular Arab disillusion with their
own invented nations. Most of the millions
of Syrian and Afghan refugees who have
flooded into Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan
and then north into Europe do not intend
to return – ever – to states that have failed
them as surely as they no longer – in the
minds of the refugees – exist. These are
not “failed states” so much as imaginary
nations that no longer have any purpose.
I only began to understand this when,
back in July, covering the Greek economic
crisis, I travelled to the Greek-Macedonian
border with Médecins Sans Frontières. This
was long before the story of Arab refugees
entering Europe had seized the attention
of the EU or the media, although the
Mediterranean drownings had long been a
regular tragedy on television screens. Aylan
Kurdi, the little boy who would be washed
up on a Turkish beach, still had another
two months to live. But in the fields along
the Macedonian border were thousands of
Syrians and Afghans. They were coming
in their hundreds through the cornfields,
an army of tramping paupers who might
have been fleeing the Hundred Years War,
women with their feet burned by exploded
gas cookers, men with bruises over their
bodies from the blows of frontier guards.
Two of them I even knew, brothers from
Aleppo whom I had met two years earlier
in Syria. And when they spoke, I suddenly
realised they were talking of Syria in the
past tense. They talked about “back there”
and “what was home”. They didn’t believe
in Syria any more. They didn’t believe in
frontiers.
Our support for an Israel that has not told
us the location of its eastern border runs
logically alongside our own refusal to
recognise – unless it suits us – the frontiers
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER ELEVEN