After the stabbing of author Salman Rushdie on Friday, questions have been raised about his protection. This author received death threats from a “fatwa” from Iran in 1989, a year after the publication of the satanic versesbut several testimonies indicate that he had raised his guard in recent years.
As Reuters reports, he wanted to live more freely and had insisted on not being constantly watched and protected by security guards.
“Since I’ve been living in the United States I no longer have any problems (…) My life is normal again,” said the writer, a few days before the attack, in an interview that will be published in the German magazine. Stern. He later said that he was “optimistic” despite “daily death threats”.
Life under protection, “is not a life”
“He doesn’t want protection around him, his choice was freedom, the fight against Islamic fundamentalists”, declares on BFMTV Roberto Saviano, writer, author of Gomorrahthreatened by the mafia since 2006.
He himself has been under protection for 15 years and describes his day to day life as “a shitty life” explaining that “he is always under pressure”. “And so one day [Salman Rushdie] decided to live free”, launches the writer. “Perhaps with an escort [l’attaque] would not have happened, but he would not have loved as he loved, traveled as he traveled, written as he wrote” in recent years, according to him.
Jean-Claude Zylberstein, Salman Rushdie’s former lawyer, also says on our antenna that he understands this need to reduce security: “I understand how much a man’s privacy weighs, his freedom to come and go, it is a terrible weight. Poor Salman knowing this for decades, it is understandable that he could have a very strong desire to breathe as he pleased”, he declares on our antenna.
At the beginning, Salman Rushdie “spent three to five terrible years in which he had to constantly change his residence, his address, he had many gendarmes around him. I know what this life is like, it is not a life,” says Roberto Saviano. .
There is no need to “relax the police and the social protection of threatened people”
The former Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot, questioned on this issue this Sunday on BFMTV, also said she “understands the fatigue” of this perpetually watched life. “He is a condemned man who spends his life on death row, we can understand the desire for release.”
However, he recalls the scope of a fatwa that is not “a symbolic stigma, it is a call to murder” that also affects the members of the affected person’s environment. In 1991, when Salman Rushdie began to reappear in public, his Japanese translator was stabbed to death and his Italian and Norwegian counterparts were assaulted.
“Democracies must not relax police and social protection of threatened people, even for decades, and although some politicians complain about the cost”, maintains the former member of the government, “it is terrible, but if we do not provide this protection, if we do not we convince him to protect himself, in the end we shake hands with his murderers”.
Salman Rushdie remains hospitalized on Sunday but is no longer on life support and was able to say a few words, according to his agent. This attack could cause him to return to tighter protection.
Source: BFM TV
