but favoured none. Religion became facultative, a personal affair, it was the object of a free choice, protected and guarantied by a neutral state.”
“And this is the law in Algharb today?”
“Yes, but strangely not in France!”
“I know, they’ve gone backwards.”
“Exactly, le Martel with his ideas. There’s nothing new in politics, men always seem to come back to the same old formulas.”
Disenchantment
You see,” said Abdelhamid pointing to a small group of young men, “they’re everywhere in the Old Town of Medina Hurriya, they spend the best time of the day leaning against the walls, as though they were part of the scenery. They watch life going by, dreaming of a job, any job, which does not exist, or perhaps the impossible idea of finding a girlfriend? We call them hittistes.”
“What?”
“Hittistes!” he said with a sad smile, “that comes from Arabic, it means they hold up the walls.”
“I imagine it must be very hard for those young people.”
“Every year schools, which have long been blighted, send more than tens of thousand of new hittistes onto the streets. Only a small number of them, more by their family connections than by luck, benefit from one or two years in a training centre. After that like the others they return to the street. It’s a long time since there has been any work to offer them.”
“How do they live, I mean with what, money?”
“To dress themselves, buy a coffee or a piece of zelta, they sometimes find an odd job,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders.
“What’s zelta?”
“It’s cannabis that can be chewed.”
“Drugs and Islam don’t go together well!”
“You’re naive or what! It’s everywhere today, though it’s not legal like in certain countries of the Federation.”
“I suppose so.”
“Youngsters of sixteen or seventeen, some have already been two or three years on the streets, they start by selling newspapers – they’re still quite popular here, most people can’t afford virtual subscriptions - they make a twenty cents for every copy sold, with luck they find a good spot and with a bit of audacity some can sell two or three hundred a day, the trouble is that their older brothers muscle in and take over, forcing them out. They then make the rounds of the bars and cafés selling cigarettes and peanuts. Finally they end up selling zelta and other stuff. The little money they earn helps them to survive, help their mothers, who often live alone with their younger brothers and sisters.”
“I suppose the proportion of young people is very high?”
“Seventy percent of the population is under thirty, a problem for the city. The young no longer believe in the government of Hassan bin Ibrani. They see no hope in the future and expect nothing.”
The South was ‘free’. In reality it was isolated behind an impenetrable border, cut off by three hundred kilometres of concrete posts and razor wire. Cameras, armed patrols, spotlights and observation towers, surveyed the fifty metre wide no-mans-land. The citizens of Algharb and their neighbours lived in two totally separate worlds. Though the armies of ragged Clodos seemed to cross the border at will, taking refuge in Algharb whenever threatened, which saw them as a lever to bring pressure to bear on the French leader, Charles d'Albignac, called le Martel.
The Clodos were the feared new age travellers with the gangs of drug addicts and alcoholics who followed in their wake. They were loyal to no government with a nebulous structure dedicated to a life of stealing and scrounging. A sub-culture composed of society’s rejects and dropouts, whose vast hordes moved from region to region like locusts ravaging the countryside.
On one side of the barrier was a society that was rich and egoistic that had created the Clodos and to the other side an Arabo-African enclave who looked down on the Clodos as a caste lower than themselves.
The only regular authorized movements across the frontier were the buses transporting temporary workers from, or deportees to, Algharb. Under the regime of le Martel, officially the ‘Premier Magistrat de la Nation de France’, all non-Gallos found guilty of a crime, real or fictive, were automatically expulsed to Algharb, where their joined the forced workers in the plants recycling automobiles, household goods and other rejects from the affluent European countries.
The recycling of old gasoline or diesel powered motor vehicles arrived by train from all over Europe forming one of the country’s profitable industries. Those better vehicles were reconditioned and exported to Africa. Europe had to a great extent abandoned the automobile, especially in its great cities, in favour of mass transport for urban and inter-urban connections, whilst Africa, without the means to finance the necessary infrastructure, had no choice but to continue with traditional road transport, which was affordable, but highly polluting.
As they strolled through the streets they passed by a group of youths playing football in the middle of a narrow street between the odd car that passed from time to time. Others played street basketball with nets tied to street lamps. The kids resembled those of the black ghettos of Chicago or Pittsburgh.
On turning the corner of a street they saw a tourist bus; it was modern, one of the latest versions. Its load of tourists spilled out over the pavement as its air conditioning set at full power continued to function for the comfort of the driver and to ensure the passengers comfort when they returned. They were Americans carrying cameras that recorded and transmitted over their satellite link unforgettable images directly to their friends and families in New York.
The tourists crowded around the door of a building that appeared to be a factory, perhaps a carpet factory Ennis thought. He made a sign to Abdelhamid and they discretely attached themselves to the line and followed the tourists through the door. Once inside Ennis saw that it was not a factory: they were in a courtyard which resembled that of a school, on the walls were somewhat faded inscriptions which at first glance he took to be Arabic. Trying to decipher the words he realised they were not Arabic but Hebrew, there was a translation in French in smaller letters, Beth Hanna. It was a Hasidic school of the Jewish Lubavitch movement.
The guide pointed to the inscription proudly informing to his tourists of the religious tolerance of Algharb, a secular state, where each and every citizen was free to practice his religion.
“We are proud to have received the Jews of France and Europe who have fled neo-fascists regimes.”
Only the whirr and clicking of the cameras, which captured every word and gesture, broke the uncomfortable silence.
“Now let us visit the classrooms.”
After the Jerusalem War and the integration of Israel into the Turkish Greater Levant, many Jews of recent European origin joined the Sephardic Jews who immigrated to the new Republic of Algharb.
Israel had been abandoned America after decades of unconditional political and economic assistance. The relative decline of the Jewish-American political lobby, eclipsed by the needs of a massively enlarged Hispanic community, had coincided with the decline of America’s dependence on Middle East oil. Israel was sacrificed on the altar of American real politik and its relative retreat as a leading actor and decider in world affairs, turning inwards, sure of its strength born of the technology that ensured all of its vital needs.
The Jewish arrivals in Algharb were of all social classes and backgrounds, but above all those who could afford the deposit of fifty thousand euros per person in the state bank to guarantee their needs in their new country.
Tired by the heat of the afternoon they called a taxi. The taxis system was not unlike that he had seen in Casablanca, Petit Taxis and Grand Taxis. In both cases they were equally worn out. As the driver manoeuvred his way through the traffic he complained of the difficulty of earning a living in Medina Hurriya, explaining that the administration was totally corrupt and how, to obtain the least paper, it was necessary to pay baksheesh.
“It was not like that with the French,” he sighed wistfully.
&n
bsp; The Federation
The Federation with its thirty member states had become highly polarised. The countries of the north and east leaned towards Germany, turning their backs to the radicalisation of France and the problems of the Mediterranean. The Latin countries looked towards Paris, where the strong right wing government offered them an alternative path to the future.
Nova Rossiya, had sunk back into the political tradition of its past, its oil and gas riches had been depleted, squandered on an unachieved renaissance of Soviet glory. To the south they were threatened by the demographic growth of the newly rich Central Asian countries, ex-members of the long defunct Soviet Union, whilst to the east the Chinese Peoples Republic was a constant threat to the Pacific provinces of Russia.
The development of the countries of Central Asia had been driven by the exploitation of their huge reserves of oil and gas and the development of relations between countries that shared a common language and religion, more open and tolerant than the traditionalist and fundamentalist version preferred by the Arab world.
In France, the right wing political movements had manipulated public opinion over the years, brandishing fear and the consequences of settlement, linked to an ever-growing rate of crime and violence.
The French population was glued to the TS vision nightly news, living in fear of another upheaval in the Caliphate