"Nicht in unserem Namen ..." dem geplanten
Irak-Krieg gehört die Aufmerksamkeit.
In einem Land, in dem sonst die Medien keinerlei
Zurückhaltung kennen, sind auf einmal auch ganz feine,
zarte und einfühlsame Töne zu vernehmen.
Egal ob Ratlosigkeit oder Fairness, jedenfalls
interessant zu lesen.
G.W.


Gefunden unter
http://www.mirror.co.uk/cassandra/


TIME TO FORGIVE THESE LOST BOYS

WHEN I was about 10, I used to walk home from school
with a boy called Richard. We would talk about all sorts. We once had a fight about whether a day was 12 or 24 hours.

We went on to different schools and never saw each other again. Last year, I found him on the Friends Reunited website and sent him a friendly email. I asked if he remembered our bust-up.

He did, vaguely. But his reply was a bit sarky. He was still hurt about something I had said once, about me going to the grammar school and him to the secondary modern. Richard even recalled the spiteful words I'd used.

I had no recall of the conversation. The phrase burned into his memory just wasn't the kind of thing I'd have said. But he insisted, I said sorry if it really was me and we left it there.

It was strange being confronted with a nasty incident from childhood that you can't remember, or even recognise the nice kid you thought you were.

The thing is that a child of 10 is a work in progress, a site under construction. Experts say your brain is only 40 per cent working at that age. You are not yet, you might say, quite yourself.

I thought about my stand-off with Richard last week when I went to Liverpool to retread the steps a decade ago this week of two other 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables.

Their walk, however, was to become one of the most infamous in criminal history. For there was a third child with them - James Bulger, aged three.

Like most people, parents especially, I have always been baffled and horrified by the events of February 12, 1993. The thought of what happened to James and his family can still make you feel sick.

Just try and put yourself in their place - it practically short-circuits your mind, like trying to imagine infinity and eternity.

But as I walked those homely, decent streets of Bootle and Walton, trying to make sense of what went on 10 years ago, trying to put what James suffered and Venables and Thompson did into terms I could understand, a new thought came into my mind.

I hope it doesn't offend the people of Liverpool, who are the best in the world, who genuinely felt James's was a death in the family. I hope it won't upset James's parents, although I'm afraid it will. And the last thing I want is to sound like some wet vicar.

But I think the time has come to forgive Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, wherever they are now, whoever they are.

Refusing to forgive them will drive us all insane. You will go mad if you spend your life hating two men whose identities you will never know for something they did as children.

And that I doubt they can even remember in anything more than fleeting, ghostly images and snatches of half-remembered conversations.

It was the aimless - but grimly purposeful - path that the boys took that strikes you most forcefully at this distance in time.

In their twists and turns, you can almost feel the childish panic, the sense of having dared themselves to steal a small child, but not knowing what to do with him.

And somehow cooking up between the two of them the most terrible, utterly stupid plan for solving the "problem" they had brought upon themselves.

Yes, they must have known as they sneaked down quiet streets that they were descending into a pit of unimaginable trouble as fast as miners down a shaft.

As they played with a laughing James off Breeze Hill, as they told a lady in a subway that they had "found" the little boy and were taking him to the police station.

But what you also sense from their meandering path is that murder is unlikely to have been on their minds. Not REAL murder.

The most poignant spot was where they came out of a scabrous, cobbled alley off Elphin Grove and walked along the fence of the railway that would be the site of James's death.

As you come out on to Walton Lane, suddenly there's the big, modern police station. And right by it, back then, a hole in the fence. What to do?

Go to the police, concoct a story about the little lad you "found" and hope you get away with it, maybe even get a reward? Or go through the hole in the fence?

Who knows what they thought, singly or together? I'm damned sure they don't.

Who knows if they would have done the same again if they had taken James in? Or, God forbid, murdered another child if they got away with this one?

I can't see it. I am certain they were just frightened, overwhelmed, daft, nasty little boys trying to extricate themselves from a disastrous prank.

That if there was one thing these young men would happily relive the last 10 years for it would be for the chance to un-murder James, to have turned right instead of left, to have taken him not to the railway, but to the police and risked facing the music.

THEIR lives have been ruined, not like James's and the Bulger parents.

But think again of the incredible burden they carry for something they probably don't even remember. Like the rest of the story, it's akin to something from a Shakespeare tragedy.

They can, surely, never marry. If they confess to the girl, she will run a mile and tell the world. If they don't admit who they are, they will have to live a lie so profound it's impossible to comprehend.

They are said to have restyled themselves in their new life as orphans, cutting off all contact with their families. Imagine that.

We must forgive them, not showily, not on some future TV show and let's not even think of inviting them back to Liverpool. The forgiveness will only help us if it's in our hearts.

And they too must forgive themselves and do their best in a life that will be tougher than most of us could bear. I wish them luck.



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