Robert Kirby CHANNELVISION
Recently BBC World ran a documentary that I sincerely wish someone would shove down the throats of Mr Ronnie Kasrils, Mr Jeremy Cronin and any other latter-day commies they can find.
Called Mission to Moldova, the documentary told the story of a voluntary United Kingdom charity aid convoy bringing three large pantechnicons of donated food, medicine, clothing, bedding and much else to an orphanage in Moldova. Here they were to encounter a leftover gulag, a crucible of adamant brutality. To clarify the alimony of communism, inspect its loving estate. The orphanage inmates numbered 197 young girls – from about three or four to early teens – mostly of some physical or mental disablement. These were the children of a Belsen: gaunt, terrified into mute submission, coughing and dying. Ranks of them, left to lie in their own faeces, huddled in groups against the ferocious cold of an East European winter.
Food was a daily plate of thin gruel and a few grains of boiled rice. The children actually licked clean their metal plates. Clothed in rags, their heads shaven against lice, their beds rotted. Nor light nor heating. The aid convoy was greeted with deep suspicion and hostility by the pig-eyed director of the orphanage. He had the donated food, clothing and medical supplies immediately locked away in storerooms, insisting that it could not be distributed until such time as he and his staff had made a proper inventory of it. The inventory was never done. Instead the food and clothing were being smuggled out of the orphanage at night to be sold in the local marketplace. No pleas or bargainings were of avail. The director was implacable. To force the director’s hand the charity organisers dragged out all the putrefied mattresses and burnt them. The same was done with the filthy clothing. There was no option but to release the new clothing and bedding. Round one to the charity.
The director retaliated by having two government inspectors call. At first solidly in support of their fellow commissar, these two were persuaded by the charity workers to take a proper look. Secret storerooms were found containing the food, clothing and medicines of two previous convoys – kept there for over two years. The ending was happy, the parable obvious. Supplying benefice isn’t nearly enough. The process needs constant insulation against bureaucratic indifference and corruption. The orphanage is now regularly visited and inspected. But it took over two years, and a personal visit by the charity workers to the president of Moldova, to have pig-eye sacked. It is not the function of television columnists to suggest what should be broadcast, but I don’t hesitate to recommend this one, to the SABC in particular. It would be a welcome change to programmes celebrating drag artists. Not that the SABC really needs proof of administrative insensibility at its most savage: it gives the dreaded Plans-Are-Under-Way Syndrome methodical airing. On the same Sunday there was a lengthy Newsmaker interview, given over to matter of pending legislation, cooked up by the law commission and designed to address the problem of juvenile offenders.
Its creator-proponent was one Ann Skelton, wittering on about the brand new five-department Kafkaesque monstrosity she is busy assembling. Now I don’t know a darn thing about Ann Skelton but, for all her impeccable intentions, I have to say she gave an excellent demonstration of the quasi-religious state of high bureaucratic ecstasy. A nudge from her interviewer and out burst a glum swill of lightless drivel, unstoppable boils of distended nomenclature: the need for a culture of communal offender-victim interfaciation, the urgency for adequate people-emphatic diversionary tactics and yes, yes, the critically overdue challenge for independently structured interdepartmental monitoring and prosecutorial counselling …
“Will you just listen at her vanity,” cried my dog, Hopkins. “She’s that Moldovan director and his inventories all over again.” I tried to disagree but up came those recent television images of racked young boys, three to a filthy bed in Pollsmoor, scraping at their scabies. That same television day a South African Department of Health official was to say that they still haven’t made up their minds about the possible side-effects of a single injection of Neverapine. Another image. This time of suffocating babies. As I modestly suggest, the grim Moldova saga should be broadcast locally, if only that it might lend global let and comfort to Ann, Manto et al. They are not alone.