It is an increasingly horrible scenario. As we neared the fateful anniversary of the as yet unexplained suicide bombings by hijacked airliners that brought the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City crashing to the ground, with the loss of thousands of lives, the heavily hyped war on terrorism saw an increase in terrorist attacks across the world.
The lines of battle have reached a new pitch. More people have been killed in the past five years in politically inspired acts of aggression than over the previous several decades —leaving out genocides in previously obscure regions such as Liberia, Bosnia and Rwanda, to name but a few.
This week alone has seen an abominable atrocity in Beslan, a small town on the outskirts of the former Soviet Union, a new spate of suicide bombings in Israel, followed by the inevitable retaliation by the Israeli military on targets on the West Bank — more presumed combatants killed along with the easily explained ‘collateral damage” of civilians caught in the crossfire. Men, women and children reduced to ashes in a mounting list of revenge atrocities.
Along with this comes an escalating series of lethal kidnappings in American-occupied Iraq. Foreign civilians are tortured and executed, sometimes in macabre, videoed beheadings. More and more American soldiers are killed in a fateful series of clashes that are more to do with ill-defined moral positions than with the semi-normal niceties of civilised war. The rag-tag Mujahedin know why they are fighting and dying. The Americans don’t.
The dead American soldiers, shipped ‘home” in flag-draped coffins, become enviable, regrettable statistics. The tens of thousands of Iraqis who also die, or are maimed, widowed or otherwise pulverised in the conflagration, go unmourned, and generally unrecorded.
Analysis has been blown out of the water. Dialogue and introspection have died with the victims of this vicious cycle of incredibly expensive mayhem. Bombs and bullets are easier to come by than the physic of recovery in a world still plagued, in spite of the heavily touted advances of the information age, with crude sectionalism, the scourges of preventable poverty and disease, religious and political intolerance and naked greed.
All of these seemingly isolated incidents in an undeclared World War III are linked to one another. The ripples of one pebble of incontinent rage cast into a pond in Darfur in the southern Sudan rapidly expand to engulf oceans of life in Chad and Niger. Millions of nameless, faceless people die or are forced into a hopeless life of refugeedom and increasing despair. The vicious winds of the harmattan, whipping the desert sand into the lungs and eyes and brains of the peerless creation of the gods, become as nothing in the face of the relentless onslaught of human cruelty.
Who, indeed, was responsible for casting that first stone? And who gives enough of a damn to do anything about it?
The ripples of rage spread endlessly outwards. How can you separate the indignation of the most radical of the separatist Chechens from the brutal, Westernised wars that brought an end to the Ottoman Empire? How can you separate the hideous bombings on the Madrid express railway lines from the deeply buried sense of injustice and revenge against an equally vengeful Holy Roman Empire that finally, or perhaps only temporarily, drove the Saracens out of Spain, and brought the great civilisation of Islamic Granada to its knees? With all of the crucifixions, beheadings, amputations, tortures and mass dislocations that accompanied it?
And South Africa. I am reminded, as I write, that this is not merely an anniversary week for the atrocities at the World Trade Centre in New York. It is also the 27th anniversary of the brutal murder of Steve Bantu Biko in an act of state-sanctioned terrorism. Steve would have been hitting his stride now as a senior, principled (we hope) political leader in a new South Africa — a mere 57 years old, good enough to give any of us, especially our born-again leaders of politics and industry, a run for our money.
Those who caused his untimely demise, along with that of many thousands of others, have scarcely been brought to account. What kind of terrible retribution is still waiting in the wings?
The highly hyped war on terrorism takes scant account of the deeply ingrained origins of anger and despair — the breeding ground for descent into acts of unspeakable horror, but a horror that justifies itself on the basis of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and blood for blood.
We shed uncontrollable tears for the children and women and men, without distinction, who lost their lives and their loved ones in that fatal moment of atrocity in the gymnasium of a school in Beslan in southern Russia. We stand aside in horror at the fate of more than a million black Sudanese who are massacred, raped and held hostage at the whims of an undescribed series of militias, supposedly from the north, who ride roughshod over the living embers of one of the oldest human civilisations — including their own. We weep without depths to describe the well of tears for the lives torn apart in suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq.
But we shed unstoppable tears of anger, too, for the failure of political will and collective moral judgement that continues to make this an increasingly unstable world to be living in.