Trafika Europe 9/10 - UK in Europe

Bakhtiyar Ali

after the 1991 uprising. So much so that we speak about the ‘Golden Age of the Files’, an era that will go down in history as the start of the worship and disclosure of files, an era in which the line between truth and lies became so blurred that the two could barely be separated. The aggrieved colleague who spirited the files from the locker in the security department’s basement happened to be a close friend of Shibr, the handsome, blond man we shall come across many times in these pages, a man you will certainly like and will want to meet after reading this book. What Shibr then passed on to us was a muddled bundle of papers, audio cassettes and documents – thousands of pages the cunning man had written

in different styles of handwriting in order to mislead and deceive. Now, after organising the stories in such a way that we understand where everything began, we have begun classifying the myriad papers and documents at our disposal so that they make sense. We have compressed, abridged, organised and, as far as possible, dated them. In places where we felt the truth had not fully emerged, we have done our own research. Because retaining the complex and opaque language in which the entire report is written would be confusing for everyone, we first needed to refine the language of the ill-intentioned report writer and to neutralise his tones, which are so equivocal and oblique that

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