Twenty years after the London bombings, one of the episodes of the war on terror

LondonIn a half-hidden corner of southeastern Hyde Park, between Lovers Walk and Park Lane, fifty-two 3.5-meter-high stainless steel columns stand firm, surrounded, a few meters away, by some of the most common trees in this lung of the lung of India, elms…

The columns evoke, in a sober way, the attacks of London, July 7, 2005 and the 52 lives they destroyed. Some of the pillars—polished at the top, each with a different roughness, to represent the exceptional nature of each life cut short—represent the location and time of the explosions. Three on the London Underground network—Edgware Road station (6 dead), King's Cross station (26 dead), and Aldgate station (7 dead), at 8:50 a.m.; and one in Tavistock Square, almost an hour later on a number 30 bus, where 13 people died. In addition, more than 700 were injured.

Last Thursday, a pair of workers from The Royal Parks were working around this memorial in Hyde Park. Clifford, one of them, was applying wax to the plaque bearing the names of the victims; Martin, the other, was using a pressure washer to clean the ground on which the monoliths were erected. What they have no chance of dignifying for the memorial service taking place this Monday morning, the 20th anniversary, is the grass surrounding the space. It's parched. As is the memory of the attacks and their significance in relation to more recent history.

The Hyde Park memorial is the first memorial erected in the United Kingdom in memory of the victims of a peacetime bomb attack. But there are many plaques, nonetheless. They commemorate, for example, IRA attacks. But according to Charlotte Heath-Kelly, a terrorism specialist and professor of international relations at the University of Warwick, the July 7 memorial "marked a shift in the way we remember the victims of political violence" in the United Kingdom.

It was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building "that ushered in the era of grand memorials," Heath-Kelly explains. After the 9/11 attacks, that culture only grew. In Oklahoma City (168 dead), a vast memorial plaza and museum were built on the site of the attack, valued at $29 million. In Manhattan, nearly $1 billion was allocated for permanent symbols of mourning, tragedy, and resilience. London's memorial lacks the scale and pretensions of these two, and is related, in a diminished way, to the spirit of Berlin's great Holocaust memorial.

In London, however, a column of another life annihilated on July 7 is missing. That of a collateral victim—a generalized term of the war on terror—who lacks official memory. This is the life of Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian electrician who was murdered in cold blood on July 22, 2005, by police inside a subway car at Stockwell station. The officers fired seven shots to the head and once to the shoulder as part of an anti-terrorist operation. They mistook him for a suspected Islamist terrorist linked to the public transport attacks and the attempted attacks of July 21, when four other terrorists tried to carry out another bloodbath. But their devices failed: the police released photographs of the suspects from the subway's security cameras, launched a relentless manhunt, and the next day believed Menezes was one of them. They didn't give him a chance.

The testimony of C2 officer

The investigation revealed numerous failures in coordination and communication between the officers involved. The fatal lapse occurred after one of the terrorists was linked to the same block of flats in Tulse Hill, south London, where Menezes lived. The 53rd victim of that July of jihadist terror was carrying neither weapons nor explosives when he was executed; nor did he offer any resistance. No officer has ever been criminally prosecuted.

A newly released Netflix documentary explores the attacks and their significance, as well as the subsequent murder of De Menezes. And one of the two officers involved in the death, known as C2, is speaking out, though he is withholding his identity. The officer, who followed the "shoot to kill" motto, states in the interview that it would probably be the only time he would ever speak about it, rather than taking it to his grave. He expresses concern about the conduct of the operation and its handling by senior commanders. What would he say to the young Brazilian's family? They asked him: "I would say I'm sorry. That another officer and I were put in a situation that led to us killing your son. I would do anything to turn back time and make the circumstances different until this happened. It shouldn't have happened."

Of the four suicide bombers on July 7, three were born in the United Kingdom. The group's leader, Mohamed Sidique Khan, 30, was born in Leeds; Shehzad Tanweer, 22, was born in Bradford; and Hasib Hussain, 18, was born in Leeds. All three had family roots in Pakistan. The fourth, Germaine Lindsay, 19, was born in Jamaica but moved to the British Isles with her mother when she was eleven months old. Of the four failed bombers on July 21—all four remain in prison serving a minimum of 40 years—two were born in Somalia, one in Ethiopia, and one in Eritrea. They were aged between 23 and 27 at the time of their attempted massacre.

The United Kingdom has since suffered further attacks—most notably in 2017, in Manchester and in London repeatedly–, but those of July 2005 marked a turning point. "Plaques, so common in the UK until 2005, are no longer sufficient to commemorate events of global significance. Instead, designs are commissioned with imagery from the never-ending war on terror, in which the victims are reimagined as heroic losses in an eternal struggle between good and evil.

Twenty years later, in the aforementioned corner of Hyde Park, the stainless steel columns seem sterile, providing no context. But following Walter Benjamin's 9th Thesis on History, a relatively discreet memorial like this one cannot and will not hide either the war on terror or the episodes before or after it. Nor the thousands or millions of victims it caused. Almost all of them collateral. This Monday, at the mass at Saint Paul's Cathedral, only 52 will be remembered, not even the 53rd victim.