The Spanish have shown us the way

Just about everyone I've spoken to in the past couple of days, since the enormity of the attacks became apparent, has wanted to talk about the Madrid bombings. Some friends have been close to tears, stunned by the staggering number of casualties. Most of us feel impotent in the face of such events, so the initial reaction of the centre-right Spanish prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, was striking. In a televised address within hours of the murders, Aznar was angry but controlled, in marked contrast with the stumbling performance of George Bush after the suicide bombings of 11 September 2001. For the most part, Aznar avoided the trite rhetoric of the "war on terror", condemning the bombers as criminals and promising that the perpetrators, when caught, would spend the rest of their lives in prison. (Spain, unlike the US, has abolished the death penalty.)

He also called for massive demonstrations on the streets against the murders. Such public outpourings of grief are unusual in Anglo-Saxon countries, but an estimated 11 million people responded with dignified rallies in Spanish cities on Friday evening, recalling a similar event in 1997, when six million people poured on to the streets to condemn the kidnap and murder by ETA of a Basque councillor. Politicians from other EU countries joined in, visibly relieved to have something to do, and their presence suggested that a new sense of European solidarity might be one of the few good things to emerge from the tragedy. The sight of so many people coming together in mourning was intensely moving, providing relief from the pictures of blood-streaked faces and twisted metal which had dominated the news. Horrible as those images were, we knew that they had been edited and the reality was far worse, as the testimony of survivors demonstrated: people talked of seeing bodies incinerated in their seats, of children torn apart and of strangers dying in their arms.

There is a moral dilemma here, for no one wants to strip the dead of their dignity and prurient curiosity is to be avoided at all costs. Yet it seems paradoxical that cultures with a taste for violence in movies and music are shielded from the dreadful consequences of bombs in the centres of their own cities, allowing some people - a minority, but they do exist - to go on being equivocal about terrorism. There has never been any excuse for supporting ETA, a bunch of thugs who had murdered about 800 people before last week's atrocities, but the same condemnation should be extended to Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel and the misguided young Muslims who volunteer for jihad in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Anyone who has ever seen the effects of a terrorist attack close up will never forget it, and each time an atrocity happens somewhere - New York, Bali, Istanbul, Madrid - I have flashbacks to the bombing I witnessed in Soho in 1999. I was not hurt, although the bar I was in was shaken by the blast, and I hurried towards the site of the explosion with some foolish notion that I might be able to help. I was confronted with utter devastation: clouds of dust, shattered glass, a man staring in astonishment at his arms as they ran with blood.

The mind cannot process such scenes. They remain somewhere, undigested, and return with astonishing force whenever there is another terrorist outrage. There is not much to be done about it, other than to recognise the effects - bouts of weeping, nightmares, an aversion to sudden noises - and wait for them to recede. But as the grim toll of this century's terrorist atrocities continues to rise, it seems likely that more people will have such experiences, and a need for the kind of mourning rituals that took place in Spain last week. By yesterday morning, there were reports that the public mood was changing - one of Aznar's ministers was prevented from speaking at a rally in Barcelona on Friday evening - as suspicions grew about a possible link between the bombings and the Spanish government's support for the conflict in Iraq. But that rising tide of anger should not obscure the demonstrators' achievement in defying the terrorists, standing up for democracy and reminding us all of our shared humanity.