IWPR Journalist in Thick of London Riots

Daniella Peled

Managing Editor

Thursday, 11 August, 2011

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Daniella Peled
IWPR editor

It was a bit hard to understand what the gang of youths were saying. I wanted to get a better idea of why they were embroiled in a 2am stand-off with police near my home in Camden, north London.

But the scarves masking their faces muffled their responses too much to be audible. Eventually, one teenager pulled his bandanna to the side and blurted, “Why don’t you ask them?” gesturing to the police advancing down the high street, riot shields at the ready.

That was all I got before a vanload of police in full riot gear screeched up. The youths ran off.

The last time I was in a city where angry young men roamed the streets and smoke rose above burning buildings was in Cairo, during the revolution.

There, too, intoxicated by their new-found power and organised through social media, normal rules no longer applied and the youth on the street felt they had nothing to lose.

There was a similar energy, an absence of fear, the feeling that, as part of a crowd, the weak suddenly become strong.

But this lot didn’t have a political agenda. They just wanted new trainers.

One hooded youth by the underground station said he had simply got a Blackberry message to say that something was happening in Camden town and to come down.

“Why should I move on?” shouted another gangly teen at a police officer waving him away with his baton. “You’re not my mother. You’re not my father. It’s my right to be on the street, you don’t own it.”

It’s ironic covering conflict as an IWPR editor and then being confronted with violence when you step out of your front door.

Working for IWPR, and especially running their Arab Spring project, dealing with stories about aggression and anger is a daily part of my job. I’ve also reported from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and in the last two years travelled to Iraq and Afghanistan.

But these stories were all about conflict in other people’s lives – not my own.

When I’d left my house an hour earlier, it was to see some two dozen youths sweep by, laughing, hurling rubbish bins and crowd barriers into the street. A handful began picking up rocks and trying to smash the windows of the police office opposite, before being chased away by a police car roaring up the street.

The road was strewn with debris, bewildered residents peering out of their windows and a handful of tourists, who’d come to experience Camden’s famous nightlife, still wandering the streets in a daze.

The landlord of my local pub was outside, sweeping up piles of broken glass in the vandal’s wake.

“They are definitely, definitely not from round here,” he sniffed.

Indeed, when I approached another youngster, being held at bay by an approaching squad of police dog handlers, their German Shepherds barking furiously, he told me he was from Willesden, a good eight kilometres across town.

“So what are you doing here?” he asked accusatorily. When I said I lived in Camden, he grinned and said good-naturedly, “Oh, I suppose it’s a bit too noisy here to get to sleep tonight.”

I’m not sure it seemed any more real to him than it did to me - like being in the middle of some bizarre video game, with gangs of hoodies, rather than zombies, drifting through streets strewn with rubbish and broken glass.

There’s a huge disconnect when you witness familiar and domestic scenes suddenly transformed into something approaching an urban battleground.

Rumours and misinformation circulated; Camden market was on fire, a bus driver leapt from his vehicle to warn a group of shop owners in front of their shuttered premises that there was “a big gang coming up this way”.

One earnest eyewitness even swore to me that he had seen a police dog rip a rioter to shreds.

But that’s in the nature of conflict; and when the media talks about a city being under lockdown, it’s usually only a few streets the world is seeing.

“I feel old and middle-class that the worst thing that happened in my neighbourhood is the local gastro pub closed early,” said a friend who lives a couple of kilometres away.

In Camden, we escaped the worst of the violence and by the morning, the clean-up was well underway. That too reminded me of Tahrir Square in January, when crowds gathered with bin-liners to clear up rubbish in - a particularly poignant gesture in what must usually be one of the dirtiest capitals in the world.

"We are showing that this is our city, our nation, and we take pride in it, that's why we are cleaning the square," I was told over and over again by the Cairo residents.

And that was our powerful, if also symbolic, gesture in London, where the number of Camden volunteers was far, far greater than the amount of debris to clean up.

We reclaimed the streets with brooms and bin-liners. And now we have to work out what went wrong in the first place.

Daniella Peled is an IWPR editor.

The views expressed in this article are not necessarily the views of IWPR.