Predicting a Riot

As you might have guessed from Friday’s entry, when I said that Bob Geldof’s “million people” descending on Edinburgh during the G8 would translate to half of what we see during the Fringe, I was expecting G8 Week in Edinburgh to be a bit of a fizzer—not the Make Poverty History march, so much as the days before and during the summit itself. I should have gone with my first impulse to say a tenth, because if anything the population has gone down this week, if you leave out the hordes of cops. The streets have been a strange blend of almost-deserted and occasionally packed (in places where the public has been herded away from trouble).

Locals have been warned for weeks not to come into town unless necessary, and every second shop on the Royal Mile and Princes Street has boards over its windows, yet it was clear that the lack of focus of the anti-G8 campaign was going to limit the numbers we could expect to hang around for a full week after the march. Even I didn’t expect how much, though. Yesterday I caught the number 10 into town at lunchtime and had to get off blocks away from its usual route, because a march had blocked off Lothian Road and Princes Street—as it turned out, by being hemmed in by the cops at the intersection of the two. There can’t have been more than a few hundred people involved.

Princes Street was empty of traffic again as a result, but most of the shops were open—except the very one I wanted to go to. Dammit, Boots, you’ve got my holiday photos, and that’s twice you’ve closed your doors with handwritten “Temporarily Closed” signs because of a few protestors three blocks away. What are you afraid of? Being singled out for special attention as a tentacle of the pharmaceutical octopus? Running out of vegetarian sandwiches?

There was a second demo nearby, though. Two, possibly three dozen people were sitting in the middle of Princes Street near the Gallery, surrounded by yet more cops. One was sticky-taping herself to the road.

Still, I survived this outrageous disruption to public order and global trade and made it into uni, where a few hours later we were advised to leave the building because The Protestors were marching down the Royal Mile towards the Scottish Parliament, and St Mary’s Street had been closed off. I was about to leave anyway, so I gave J. a call to tell her what was happening. That’s funny, she said—she was walking down the Cowgate (parallel to the Mile) at that very moment and couldn’t see or hear anything. When I met her outside we walked up to the Royal Mile and saw... nothing. Business as usual. Tourists wandering past, not being assaulted by anarchists armed with sticky-tape.

Meanwhile, dozens of fluorescent-jacketed cops were milling about on the edge of Calton Hill on the other side of the train tracks, just in case. You never know when a hippy might storm the US Consulate and sellotape their door shut.

I know, the police are just doing their job; and I certainly wouldn’t like to have rubbish bins chucked at me, as the cops had on Monday. But if most people hadn’t been kept out of the city centre all week by the general air of dread, would a few dozen noisy protestors even have been noticed? Would the huge police presence really have been necessary?

 

If I seem too cynical about it all, it’s because I can’t help thinking about the only time I’ve been caught up in a real riot. Back in 1998, J. and I won—won!—an all-expenses-paid trip to Kuala Lumpur to see the Commonwealth Games, thanks to Hardy’s Wines. (That’s Hardy’s, purveyors of delicious wines and free trips to Malaysia, for all your delicious-wine and free-Malaysian-trip needs.) We spent a delightful few days basking in tropical humidity, eating banana pancakes at the Petronas Towers, and attending various events at the Games, where we even saw a fuzzy pink blob in the distance that was purportedly the Queen.

One day we skipped the free tickets and wandered around town to soak up some of the local culture, ending up at the city’s textile museum. A large crowd was gathered in a square opposite, protesting about the imprisonment of a local politician.

The museum was fairly quiet, and as we wandered around taking in the intricate needlework, it got quieter. Too quiet. Well, maybe it’s normal in textile museums to be able to hear a pin drop, we thought... until we heard the screams. From outside. Probably a good idea to stay in here and study the batik until they stopped, we decided. Then the museum attendants started indicating that we should leave the room—now, please—and follow them down the stairs, and along the hall... towards the front door, where the screaming was. And go out the front door, please. Um, can’t we stay? No, you go, please.

And so we found ourselves standing in the street, metres away from a crowd of Anwar Ibrahim supporters being sprayed with water cannons. Anwar Ibrahim being the deputy prime minister and popular challenger to Mahathir who had just been arrested on dubious charges of corruption and sodomy.

This was clearly not a good place to be, particularly when one of you is a foot taller than the average Malay and the other is wearing a lurid orange T-shirt of the Petronas Towers purchased the day before and still at 100% unwashed luridity.

We walked cautiously around the edge of the building, back the way we came, trying to keep as much distance as possible between us and the row of riot police with plastic shields and guns—not rubber batons—who were marching down the middle of the street next to us. I admired the chutzpah of the journalist who ran up in front of them to take photos, but I wasn’t about to pull out my own camera and join him; at that particular moment I just wanted to be somewhere else as soon as possible. Especially when one of the kids standing next to us started chucking rocks at the cops, and we had to run like hell with them and the rest of the crowd away from those same cops, hoping that their aim wouldn’t wander in our orange-shirted and 6’2” direction. We didn’t feel safe until we ran into a crowded indoor market and hid among the stalls selling Wira the Games Mascot Orangutans.

That evening, at the very ceremony where we saw the pink-suited Queen, we were sitting in the biggest crowd we’d ever been in, watching the procession of the teams. It was an amazing experience—until they reached S, and a hundred thousand Malaysians started booing Singapore’s team for whatever the grudge of the week was. After the day’s earlier events we didn’t feel like hanging around during that, so took the opportunity to visit the food tent. Ten minutes later, in mid-curry, we heard explosions—and everyone hit the floor. It took a good thirty seconds to realise that the closing fireworks had started.

 

Of course, the real bombs going off around the world in all the years since have made our minor fright seem pretty trivial. And now there are more bombs in London, only hours after the city was celebrating getting a games of its own. I don’t know if having all of those fluorescent-jacketed police back down there would have made any difference, but it sure makes the media and security focus on the handful of protestors up here seem even more pointless.

Even with guns pointed my way that day in KL, I could be fairly confident that being such an obvious tourist made me safer than most. Those people in the tube and on that bus had no such reassurance, and I can only imagine how terrifying it must have been for them. But we don’t have to imagine how distressing it is for the city and its friends—not after New York, Bali, and Madrid. If you live in London or have friends and family there, I hope you and yours are safe.

7 July 2005 · Events

Added by Rory on 7 July 2005.