Republic or Death! (29 page)

Most Iraqis believe it was Paul Bremer, the suave, heavily side-parted American who governed the country immediately after the invasion. He attended a ‘culture evening' not long after taking charge, they say, where ‘Mawtini' was played. Bremer enjoyed its jaunty rhythm and looked around at the audience to gauge their reactions. He saw a few Iraqis crying and so immediately decided, ‘That'll do.' It became the anthem the very next day. It's a story that seems so believable, filled with the arrogance and insensitivity most Iraqis associate with America's rule of their country; and it's no surprise that it regularly pops up in newspapers there and is plastered across the internet. The one problem with it is that Bremer insists it's not true. ‘I have no idea where the assertion comes from that I chose it,' he told me by email. ‘From day one, I made clear to the Iraqis that the anthem was a matter for them to decide.' He does remember the culture evening, though – actually the first concert by Iraq's re-formed National Symphony Orchestra. ‘There were many Iraqis in tears at hearing this song that had apparently long been banned under Saddam,' he says, ‘and I was impressed and moved.' Around that time, he asked Iraq's governing council to set up a commission for a new anthem. They didn't do it, he says, like they didn't do much else, too busy carving out personal fiefdoms. But, a few months later, Bremer wrote to his wife saying ‘Mawtini' ‘seemed to be becoming like a national anthem' and that he was trying to learn its words. He had no comment to make about what's happened to the song since he left the country – for over ten years now, the Iraqis have been trying unsuccessfully to replace it, most recently in 2012, when the country's parliament announced that a poem called ‘Peace on the Hills of Iraq' would become the anthem. It was written by Muhammad al-Jawahiri, ‘the Iraqi Shakespeare', a man who fought against practically every government that ran his country to the point he once had to go into exile in Prague. It was a choice no one could disagree with; he was a friend of all ethnicities. But then Iraq's Kurds demanded a verse in their language. And its Assyrians did too. Then so did its Turkmen. And the initiative collapsed into another squabble.

Okay, so Iraq's not really a good example of how to use anthems to forge national unity, but it does give an idea of what else could have happened in Bosnia: any of the country's High Representatives over the past twenty years could have simply ignored the ethnic bickering and forced some words to be adopted, just as one forced the music on the country having realised it was the only approach that would get results (that man, Carlos Westendorp, unfortunately left the job a year later). In other words, they could have acted just like Iraqis believe Paul Bremer did. Forcing words on people may ultimately do little to change their feelings of belonging to the country, but they would at least give people something to sing at football matches, meaning that the next time Bosniak fanatics tried singing ‘Jedna si Jedina' over the top of Dušan's music, they wouldn't be heard, and for once they wouldn't be able to remind everyone just how split this country still is. It might not sound like much, but in Bosnia, it would be progress.

*

It's been over three years since I met Dušan Šesti
ć
, and he's been stuck in my mind ever since. Of all the people I've met while researching this book, he's the most memorable, though sadly for all the wrong reasons – he seemed so utterly beaten down, so weary and defeated, evidence of all the problems anthems can cause. So one January, I decided to go back to Bosnia to see how he was doing. I didn't expect to find him. He hadn't been answering his phone and his daughter wasn't responding to emails. And sitting on a bus from Sarajevo to Banja Luka, I feel sure I'm going to arrive to be met only by rumours: ‘I heard he became a hermit and is living in a cave'; ‘He just grabbed his violin one day and left town'; ‘The old composer? My grandmother said he killed himself and now haunts anyone who plays his anthem.' But just outside the city, passing through a snow-covered gorge, I get a phone call from my interpreter, Dragan, saying he's somehow found Dušan and he's agreed to meet us at exactly the same slick bar as before.

We wait outside as we did last time, speculating about what he's going to look like, expecting a melancholy figure to come skulking towards us, hunched over, even more dejected than before. But the Dušan who appears is nothing like either of our memories or expectations. He's still old, yes. But he has a broad smile on his face and is dressed all in orange, a scarf louchely tossed over a shoulder; his white hair, which last time was shaved almost to stubble, is now long, sparkling with melting snow. He doesn't look like the composer of a failed anthem, more like the leader of a cult, or perhaps a Hare Krishna member about to pull out a tambourine and start dancing down the street. There are enthusiastic greetings – ‘It's been too long!' ‘You look well' – and it's a while before we're settled and I can ask what's changed.

‘Not much,' he laughs, before outlining exactly how little: how the politics here are still crippled (‘People think our politicians are incapable, but they're not, and that's the problem'); how his anthem's still ‘just another currency' for people to gain from; how the plagiarism scandal has flared up again; and how he still hasn't been paid for the words he once wrote for the anthem (‘I'm thinking of suing'). He also reminisces a lot about Yugoslavia and how that country, which ‘was a paradise – really', has been ‘sacrificed'. It is, in other words, the exact same story as the first time we met, it's just now he sounds … well, ‘happy' is probably the wrong word, but he's certainly defiant, laughing at the absurdity of the situation he's found himself in rather than weighed down by it. Practically every remark this time comes with a knowing smile and a shrug afterwards, as if to say, ‘You couldn't make this up.'

It's such a transformation I feel like a therapist bumping into a recovered former patient. ‘What happened to you?' I feel the need to ask.

‘At the height of my problems, I had a stroke,' he says. ‘Not a heart stroke, but in the brain, whatever you call it. And it ended up pretty good. I'm alive! I'm here! And I decided that God loves me, takes care of me and keeps me for some reason. And I also decided that a man shouldn't pay attention to all the details. I accept more things than I did before. Where I can, I still bark at a tree, but where it doesn't make sense, I look past this life.' Oh, and he's retired, he adds. That's helped a lot. ‘Now I just smoke, listen to music and paint.' He gets through seven cigarettes in our ninety minutes together, proving he's at least enjoying the first of those three things. ‘My doctor told me not to, but …' He waves a hand dismissively.

His new-found outlook even seems to have affected his opinion of his anthem. We go back to the time he wrote it and he almost tries to rewrite history in front of me. He says he was really proud to have written it back then and that it was written with good intentions. Not national pride, obviously, but in the spirit of ‘Let's make people come together as much as they can.' At one point he claims he didn't even need the money and I think of saying, ‘Look, you're going too far with your revisionism,' but decide not to break the mood and so just ask about the fact his song's still wordless.

Adding lyrics would be a ‘good, practical thing to do,' he says, ‘a first stepping stone for bigger things later on, because if we can't solve this, who knows what else we can't solve.' A few inspiring lines might even increase people's feelings towards the country, he adds, although not in Republika Srpska, where we are. ‘As far as I hear – and, as a musician, I've learned how to listen – most of the people would still like to separate. This bad memory of the war will not pass easily, even after twenty years.' I ask what he expects to happen to his song. He half expects it to be dropped, he says. If there's another war – something he bleakly doesn't want to rule out – it definitely will be. But then he says something so optimistic it seems to show exactly how much his personality has changed. ‘I'm hoping for a victory of minds,' he says. ‘The anthem's not really important. It's just a symbol like this.' He points to the Nike swoosh on his woolly hat. ‘The hat's important; the emblem's not. You're going to wear it either way.'

 

ON 4 DECEMBER
2013, a Wednesday, a song was uploaded to YouTube. It was tagged to its ‘how to and lifestyle' section, a somewhat strange choice given its content. But anyone who stumbled across it that day – perhaps while searching for a clip explaining how to descale a kettle – would have felt at first like they couldn't have been luckier, as if they'd found an intensely beautiful piece of music.

Little more than an Arabic chant, it's sung by a man whose voice seems so relaxed you expect him to drift off halfway through, but he sounds timeless, the sort of singer who immediately makes you wonder how you've never heard him before. His melody has a gentle swing to it too, something you could easily imagine a jazz drummer playing behind to give it some oomph, and he soon starts multitracking his voice so it sounds like a whole choir's jumped in to trade lines, the song's impact only growing as the voices multiply.

But then, after two minutes and fifty-three seconds, some sound effects drop in.

There's the ring of a sword being unsheathed, the
stomp-stomp-stomp
of soldiers' feet, and some stuttering gunfire. And it's probably about this point that any of the people who did stumble across it twigged what they were actually listening to. The song uploaded that day is called ‘Dawlat al-Islam Qamat', or, to give it its English title, ‘My Ummah, Dawn Has Appeared'. It is one of the most popular songs in the Islamic State, and it is, arguably, the world's newest national anthem. ‘The Islamic State has arisen by the blood of the righteous,' it goes. ‘The Islamic State has arisen by the jihad of the pious / … For victory will not return except by the blood of martyrs.'

Ever since that song was uploaded, it has made appearances in dozens of the Islamic State's videos: booming out of cars in towns they control as if they are using it to demarcate territory; blasting from PA systems at recruitment events; creeping out of mobile phones on battlefields. It became so associated with the group that rival jihadists banned it from being played in areas they controlled, notably al-Shabaab in Somalia. Then, in January
2015
, Boko Haram – the Nigerian terrorist group – used it to open and close one of their propaganda clips and instantly the song stopped simply being the anthem of a few tens of thousands of jihadists in Syria and Iraq; it became the anthem of a self-proclaimed caliphate, its territories
4
,
000
miles apart.

*

If there were one type of society you'd think could do without anthems, it would be Islamist ones. Anthems are meant to be about praising countries, after all – and in many of them God, when he features at all, is relegated to the second or third verse, simply asked to ‘Spare [a nation] conflict and tribulation' and bring it ‘Peace. / Rain. / Prosperity' (to take words straight from Lesotho's). Anthems like that instinctively don't feel halal, as if they're turning the country itself into an idol to be worshipped. Who needs paradise above when you have it here on earth? (Several anthems actually call their country a paradise, notably the Czech Republic's ‘Where is My Home?' and Wales's ‘Land of My Fathers', which, if you've ever been to Merthyr Tydfil, feels a bit of a stretch.) Islamist thinking also doesn't seem to sit neatly with the idea of a nation state, due to the belief that all Muslims are ultimately a single community (the
ummah
, as spoken of in the Qur'an) and that their goal should be to unite. In that sense, an Islamist group with an anthem almost seems to be admitting that goal is unachievable.

There's also a bigger reason why many people wouldn't expect anthems to be at the heart of any radical Islamic society: the perception that many Islamist scholars despise music, viewing it as a distraction from studying the Qur'an, and warning people to keep away from it as if dancing to a four-to-the-floor beat is a stepping stone to depravity. There has, it's true, been a long-running debate between Islamic scholars of all hues about music's status – some saying it should be avoided at all costs; others effectively saying, ‘Don't be silly,' pointing out it's just a ‘means of entertainment that may comfort the soul'.

However, the Western perception that Islamists reject music is mostly to do with one man: Ayatollah Khomeini, the stern yet charismatic leader of the Iranian revolution.