"To be violent is the ultimate laziness," Brook says. "War always seems
a great effort, but it is the easy way. And false non-violence is also
an idol." To him, the tolerance practised by the UN - with its muddy
compromises and horse trading, born of "old-fashioned English
liberalism" - is not tolerance. "It is not taking the bull by the horns
and saying from the start: whatever our differences, nothing is going to
be the cause of violence between our tribes. That is the most difficult
choice of all, and it is one that Tierno [Malian Muslim mystic, Tierno
Bokar] makes, knowing, like Martin Luther King, that he will have to pay
for it."