I remember seeing Scottish compassion at a Hearts game against Rangers.
These aren’t the primeval clashes of tribal loyalty you get at Celtic-Rangers or Hibs-Hearts fixtures where gangs from the same city vent pseudo-religious spite at each other. But there was still a bit of a capital-vs-biggest city niggle.
I was standing among the Hearts fans with my non-Scottish mouth firmly closed when one drunken Rangers fan staggered in from somewhere. In those days, fans could walk about the terraces, but were supposed to be segregated at opposite ends of the pitch.
The Rangers supporter proceeded to say things about Hearts which, as far as my rudimentary Glaswegian could understand, were not exactly complimentary. There was a moment of disbelieving silence while the drunk slurred variations on “gi’e’s a figh’”. And then they gave him one. They knocked his legs away and it took only a few minutes of boot work to turn his face into a bloody pulp.
And here’s where the compassion comes in. The St John’s ambulance lads knew better than to wade into Scottish football crowds so the form was to call for their services by waving handkerchiefs. Which the compassionate Hearts fans did. The stretcher-bearers sprinted round to the front of the terracing and the now unconscious body was passed over the heads of the crowd. A blood-bespattered crowd in this case.
Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill (a devoted football supporter) repeatedly referred to compassion as the mainspring for his decision to release Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the only person convicted for causing the explosion on board Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, killing 270 people. Megrahi has terminal prostate cancer in, in accordance with Scottish procedures for prisoners diagnosed with less than 3 month to live, qualified for compassionate release.
The decision received a mixed reaction in the UK but almost universal condemnation in the US. An open letter from the FBI Director, Robert S. Mueller III, was particularly outraged. Mueller had been involved in the investigation and collection of evidence. The decision to release Megrahi, he said, ‘makes a mockery of the rule of law’ and ‘gives comfort to terrorists around the world’, or at least those lucky enough to contract a terminal illness.
Muller’s outrage might be more convincing were it not for the fact that FBI behaviour in the case has been so extraordinary that one person described their investigation room as itself a crime scene.
There were two important pieces of evidence that convicted Megrahi (his co-accused was found not guilty).
One was the testimony of a Maltese shopkeeper who said he had sold clothing to Megrahi, who he picked out at an identity parade. This clothing was traced to the suitcase that had contained the bomb, a suitcase that had travelled from Malta (Megrahi was head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines) to Frankfurt, then via a feeder flight to Heathrow, and finally into Pan Am 103’s cargo hold.
Except that before fingering Megrahi, the shopkeeper had seen his picture in the papers, and after giving evidence was paid a $2m ‘reward’. Not bad for a witness described by a former Lord Advocate as ‘an apple short of a picnic’.
Another offer, this time of $4m, was made by the FBI to the owner of a Swiss company that made circuit boards that had been sold to the Libyan military. A piece of a circuit board was presented at Megrahi’s trial, though it was never proven to have come from the plane and there is a frustrating diversity of stories about how it was found. The Swiss company owner refused the money and was not called to testify.
But an employee of his company did testify, apparently cementing a link between the bomb and Libyan security forces. And in 2007 this same employee made a deposition that he had lied at the trial, had stolen a circuit board of the kind supplied to Libya and given it to an “official person investigating the Lockerbie case”.
But if Megrahi didn’t do it, who did? Well, it now appears that two documents from a foreign intelligence agency that may exonerate Megrahi were shown to the prosecution in Megrahi’s trial but kept from the defence. The Scottish legal authorities up to and including the Lord Advocate, who has seen these documents, had no objection to them being used in court in Megrahi’s second attempt to appeal his conviction (his first was thrown out).
However, the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, told the courts that he would not allow this because of the danger it creates for British intelligence-sharing agreements with other countries. This is the same David Miliband who found the ‘carnival’ of ‘mass murderer’ Megrahi’s arrival in Tripoli ‘deeply distressing’ and who maintained a deafening silence on the decision to release.
Megrahi dropped his appeal before he was let out of Scotland amid some confusion about whether this was a precondition, so there will now be no hearing in which to re-examine this and any other worrying evidence. There could still be an inquiry and many sceptical relatives of victims will continue to push for this or some other way of finding out the truth.
But my money is on continued outrage against Scottish compassion while the problem quietly goes away.
About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).
