34 V2 Wednesday December 22 2021 | the times
Comment
popular dollop of West Country
humour — though I noticed that
jokes about Weston-super-Mare
evinced a quiet sucking of teeth from
an evident coach party of out-of-
towners among the audience. The
show runs until January 2, so if
you’re anywhere near Bristol (and
feel that you haven’t quite had your
fill of pantomime from Downing
Street), go!The social seven
B
ut it was the dwarfs I wanted to
tell you about. I met all seven in
the street after the show. At
least, I assumed it was them: one
couldn’t be sure because onstage
the dwarfs were played by
normal-height chaps who by a
clever contrivance stowed their real
legs behind tiny legs. But now I
thought I recognised them
and was about to say
“Hello, are you the seven
dwarfs?” when it struck me
that this might be a
dangerous way of starting
a conversation with
young men just after
closing time. Quick
thinking produced the
answer. “You’re the seven,
aren’t you?” — which, if
indeed they were, would
be understood, and if they
weren’t would simply be
dismissed as the ravings ofa sad old man. They were. Socialising
off-stage as well as on.
A question teased me, though.
Why not employ real dwarfs and
give work to a minority group? Or
would genuine little people feel
insulted by being invited to act
comical roles based on their
dwarfism? So I did a bit of research
about a group I’ve felt drawn to ever
since, in the mountains of Colombia,
we hired an expert dwarf man to
clamber up the slopes and take us to
some pre-Colombian underground
tombs, enjoying a beer with him and
his tiny wife afterwards. They told
us how lonely it was to be the
only little people in a remote
rural community, and how
much the internet meant to
them, as they’d made virtual
friendships among a
worldwide community.
I’ve only dipped a toe
into this, but been
surprised to learn that
many little people have
no qualms about taking
advantage of their
curiosity value, and
indeed may resent the
“cultural appropriation”
of being played onstage by
normal-height men and
women. Myself, I don’t (for
instance) mind
heterosexuals playing gays
if gays, equally, can playW
hat better time of year
for a disquisition on
little people, because
though I don’t believe
in Santa’s elves, I’ve
just met seven dwarfs. It happened in
Bristol, where we went to see our
friend Rob Rinder in Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs at the city’s vast
and splendid Hippodrome theatre.
Rob (aka “Judge” Rinder of TV fame
and of Strictly) plays the Mirror,
dispensing an all-too-candid verdict
on the wicked queen’s appeal
(Regina v Regina?) to be judged the
fairest of them all.
Rinder was fantastic (I would say
that, wouldn’t I, but really he was)
though he faces stiff competition in
Lesley Joseph’s magnificent Queen
Dragonella. Joseph (whom many will
remember in Birds of a Feather)
somehow manages to be imperious,
evil and lovable at the same time;
and local hero Andy Ford (playing
Muddles) treats the audience to a
Drugs bring power and cash to failed states
Assad is turning Syria into a narco-state, while the Taliban controls much of the world’s heroin
still haven’t worked out who paid for
the hit but the message was clear:
many fragile states are held captive
by the narcotics trade. They will
become a source of instability unless
checked at national crime agency
level and by the G20.
The intelligence services track
illegal money flows but too often
don’t connect the numbers with
crises that are lurking just around
the corner.
When the Myanmar military
forced hundreds of thousands of
Rohingya Muslims out of their
homes they were herded into
cramped, soggy refugee camps in
Bangladesh.
In Cox’s Bazar there are 900,000
living cheek by jowl. Increasingly,
young males sent by the military
are entering the camps from
Myanmar and giving supplies of
yaba to refugees. These are
methamphetamine pills,
manufactured in northeast
Myanmar, in southeast Asia’s golden
triangle with Laos and Thailand.
The refugees become dealers and
deliver the pills for sale in Dhaka, the
capital. Result? The Bangladeshis are
losing patience with the refugees and
some Myanmar generals are growing
rich from their crimes. It won’t end
well.
The intermingling of the drug
business with failing states and
greedy rulers has fallen beneath the
radar of western democracies, but
understanding these networks is
essential if the West is to arm itself
against future ambush. Not all
foreign policy threats stem from
chest-thumping great powers with
an itch to invade their neighbours.pills, hidden in tomato paste tubes or
inside rubber tyres, have been seized
globally this year. That’s only a
fraction of production. There have
been seizures in Italy, Greece,
Jordan and Egypt as well as in
Jeddah and Dubai.
Narco-states become brazen after
a while, growing dependent on illicit
money flows. Afghanistan accounts
for 80 per cent of the world’s supply
of opium poppy and heroin products.
A UN report suggested that the
Taliban had control over the whole
process: plantation, extraction,
taxation of farmers, trading, building
labs. Give that up, says the West,
otherwise we can’t begin to treat you
as a normal state. Give it up, think
the Taliban, and we lose leverage.
There are countries such as
Mexico and Colombia where, helped
by massive North American demand
for cocaine and other substances,
cartels were able to buy influence in
the political establishment and police
forces. There are narco-transit lands
like Venezuela which, though ruined
and abused by the dictatorship of
President Maduro, turned itself into
part of a cocaine superhighway
through the Caribbean towards the
big cities of western Africa.
What links these players is a sense
that they have developed their own
crude narco-statecraft. When the
president of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse,
decided this year to shake off the
grip on his island of the global drug
warlords, he started to collaborate
with the US Drug Enforcement
Administration. That put a target on
his back. Colombian mercenaries flew
in, stormed his palace and killed him.
Five months on, the authoritiesS
trange shadow games are
being played out in President
Assad’s Syria. At one level of
secrecy, the Assad regime is
being courted by powerful
Arab countries that once backed
his opponents. They are convinced
there is money to be made in the
reconstruction of Syria but also hope
the Assads, back in the Arab fold,
could start to restrain Iranian
influence in the region.
A second clandestine operation is
under way too, one that highlights
the risks of dealing with a
kleptocracy as if it were a normal
geopolitical equal: the Assads and
their cronies have set themselves up
as significant suppliers of illegal
amphetamines to the playboy
children and bored courtiers of the
Gulf states. Syria, on the brink of
rehabilitation by its neighbours, is
shaping up to be the major narco-
state in the Middle East.
How risky is that? A regime that
plunged the region into a decade of
war, that is associated with more
than half a million deaths, desperate
for respectability, is now enriching
itself by making and peddling illegal
substances to its putative allies.
Ending the pariah status of the
Assads — accepting the legitimacy of
the stooge kept in place by Russian
and Iranian brute force — would be
tantamount to giving up on anyone
in the region who wants to bring
about democratic change. And it
would provide a fillip to rogue
leaders who, having wrecked their
states, now want to turn their
floundering regimes into out-and-
out criminal enterprises. There are
plenty of them.
By some estimates Syria is already
earning more from the sale of the
drug captagon than any other of its
exports. The production centres for
the amphetamine are in Latakia
province, handy for the port. It is
also the safe zone for the Assad
family, where they escape the
summer heat of Damascus, and the
headquarters of the fourth armoureddivision of the Syrian army
commanded by the president’s
youngest brother, Maher. Nothing
happens in Latakia, it is said, without
Maher’s knowledge.
Captagon used to be made in
Lebanon, becoming a fighter’s drug
for the Hezbollah and others on the
shifting front lines of the Syrian war.
In its legal form it was said to help
children with attention deficit
disorder; long-distance truck drivers
took it, so did students in an exam
crisis. By the time that Syria had
taken over production it was being
sold as an illegal party drug. It cost
about $1 a pill in Damascus,
$14 a pill by the time it reached
Saudi Arabia. More than 240 millionRogue leaders want to
turn their regimes into
criminal enterprises
heterosexuals; but that reciprocity
isn’t open to little people. I started
this inquiry in facetious mood but
see that these are not easy issues.Dark side of the mind
W
hy does memory go dark,
looking back before the age
of about three? I’m
convinced we do remember but
cannot retrieve. Staring idly at a
black-and-white mantelpiece photo
of my brother and me when I was
two, all at once the colour of my
toddler’s romper-suit came to me
from somewhere. It was yellow, with
chocolate-brown collars, cuffs and
pocket; and the brown was a
different, velvety cloth. And I
remembered I liked it! Perhaps
elemental memories, primitive, non-
narrative and unarticulated, may be
plucked from the darkness that
covers the rest?A lazy convenience
B
BC radio news bulletins have
taken to speaking of “the four
nations” as a shorthand for the
constituent parts of our United
Kingdom. Wales, England and
Scotland are arguably nations.
Northern Ireland is most
emphatically not: it’s a province,
inhabited (if you like) by two
nationhoods. “Four nations” may be
convenient but it’s lazy, and a
distortion of cultural history.Matthew Parris Notebook
A seasonal
gift staged
by Bristol’s
little people
A teacher’s sacking
amounts to trial
by social media
Jawad Iqbal
A
ll it took was a 20-second
video posted online to
ruin the career and
reputation of Sarah
Moulds, a primary school
teacher. The video clip appeared to
show her kicking and slapping her
horse while out with the Cottesmore
Hunt in Leicestershire. It has been
viewed millions of times, sparking
widespread anger and
condemnation.
Cruelty towards animals is
indefensible but it is just one of many
wrongs in this case. It was just as
wrong to issue death threats against
Moulds, at one point forcing her to
go into hiding; wrong for social
media bullies under the shield of
online anonymity to spread vile
verbal abuse; and most certainly
wrong of her employers to sack
her from her teaching job, even
though she has not been charged
with any offence.
Moulds was initially suspended by
the Mowbray Education Trust. After
a short investigation it dismissed her,
citing some weasel words about
“ensuring the best standard ofeducation for all of our young
people”. What has this filmed
incident to do with her job, abilities
or performance as a teacher?
Her sacking amounts to nothing
less than trial and verdict by social
media. Will everyone suspected of
animal cruelty now face the threat of
the sack from their day jobs?
The disturbing footage of Moulds
was filmed last month by the anti-
hunt group Hertfordshire Hunt
Saboteurs. It apparently uses “non-
violent direct action to save wildlife”.
Anti-hunt protesters released video
of a fox hunt last week which
appeared to show a rider hitting his
horse hard. They claimed other
footage contained “death threats and
animal abuse”. All this forms the
backdrop to increasingly ugly
confrontations between pro and anti-
hunting groups and helps to explain
some of the furore over the Sarah
Moulds video.
No one is seeking to condone her
actions but it is for the RSPCA or the
police to decide what, if any, charges
she might face. Even so, what has
happened to Moulds is shameful and
out of all proportion to her alleged
crime. The behaviour of those online
who abused and threatened her
requires equal condemnation. Why
should she be in fear of her life over
this incident?
It is more than enough that Moulds
has been publicly shamed and has no
doubt learnt her lesson. She should
have been allowed to keep her job.Jawad Iqbal is a freelance writerWill anyone suspected
of cruelty to animals
now face the sack?
Roger
B oyes@rogerboyes