A month ago, leading pop stars were giving their services for a New York charity concert which honored the city’s firemen and police, not only the 265 who died in the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center but those of their colleagues who have worked ceaselessly at Ground Zero at the distressing task of recovering bodies.
Yesterday, however, some of those same honored firemen were before a New York court, charged with public order offenses. Meanwhile the city mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, the man who had praised these men to the echo, was describing their behavior as unacceptable. What has happened to change these men from heroes to zeroes in Giuliani’s view is that they have objected violently to his plans to scale down the recovery operation at Ground Zero. From now on, he wants to have earthmoving equipment clear away the rubble, so replacing the teams of firefighters who have been shifting and sifting through the wreckage manually.
Incensed, the firemen have protested that such treatment of the site is both insensitive and totally inappropriate. So angry were they that when police cordoned off the area, blocking firemen from continuing their tasks, the firefighters charged the police lines and in the ensuing fighting five policemen were injured, a large number of firemen were arrested and ten of them are now due to appear in court next month.
Giuliani, who had been thinking out aloud that maybe after the horrors of Sept. 11, the city constitution could be bent to allow him to have a third term in office has almost certainly made a serious error of judgment and, most likely, can say goodbye to any such hopes. He has claimed that machines alone should be working on the site because of the danger. This is hard to understand since Ground Zero is far less dangerous than when the rescue work first started.
The main reason really is that the manual clearance by the city firemen is running up a massive overtime bill. That this expense now seems unsustainable is made the harder to accept because of a significant recovery made at Ground Zero last week. Gold bullion, precious metal and gemstones were recovered from vaults beneath one of the buildings. This sensitive operation required all the skills that the manual searchers could provide. But now that treasure has been removed, it would appear that the New York authorities consider nothing precious to be left in the ruins. Giuliani may speak now of budgetary considerations, but this is the same Giuliani who vowed that nothing would stand in the way of the work at Ground Zero. There were to be no limits, certainly not in terms of money.
The World Trade Center wreckage is a hallowed site, not just for Americans but for all the other countries who lost nationals in the horror of Sept. 11. The feeling in America is that until the last piece of rubble has been moved and the final body recovered, it should be treated with the utmost respect. Mechanical earthmovers rapidly finishing off the work in which firefighters have invested such care in the past harrowing weeks cannot by any stretch of the imagination be deemed as sensitive.
Then, Giuliani, as we all in the Arab world know from recent headlines, has never been famous for sensitiveness.
