Every day,
worldwide, around 200,000 people die. Last weekend, hundreds of these were in Somalia and Ethiopia ,
or in the camps in northern Kenya
where more and more starving refugees are turning up, looking for food. It’s
been noticed and reported on by the world media, but it’s not up there in the
headlines with the Greek bailout or the American budget crisis.
76 people
died in Norway
on Friday, killed by Anders Brehving Breivik. The bombing and shooting carried
out by one right-wing fanatic dominated the world headlines.
Until
Saturday, when the death of Amy Winehouse, a twenty-seven year old singer,
addicted to alcohol and other drugs, took the top place in many newspapers and
TV news reports.
The death
of one person is experienced as a tragedy. The sudden, violent death of many is
seen as a catastrophe. The deaths of thousands are perceived as a statistic,
part of the way of the world.
Yet there
are other differences between the deaths of Amy Winehouse and the massacre in Oslo and Utøya on the one hand, and the daily dying going
on in East Africa on the other.
In the
first place, there was little anyone could do to avoid the first two. Amy
Winehouse was a tragic addict and addiction, particularly the polytoximanic form
with which she was afflicted, is generally fatal unless the sufferer him or
herself finally faces the consequences and takes that first necessary step –
the admittance of one’s own powerlessness and the sincere decision to seek and accept
help. Amy, unfortunately hadn’t reached that point before her body – in common
with others such as Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin or Brian Jones, at the age of 27
– finally gave up under the strain of diverse poisons.
Anders
Breivik, according to all the accounts up to now, seems to have been a solitary
psychopath. While there has been, and will be, all kinds of speculation about
what could have been done to realise how close this particular psychopath was to finally unleashing his particular
version of horror on society, it remains a sad fact of life that a free society
will always remain marginally vulnerable to such risks – as was the case with
Thomas Hamilton in Dunblane, Scotland in 1996, or with Ted Kaczynski, the
Unabomber. Difficult though it may be for us to accept, the very freedom which
we regard as a fundament of our society gives rise to the space in which such
perverted personalities can find room to develop and plan their atrocities. Most
of them are, thankfully, too stupid or too obviously weird to allow them to
carry through their planning and execution before they are discovered and
stopped, but we will probably never be able to protect ourselves completely
from the cleverest and luckiest of them; not without abandoning our basic
principles of freedom and decency in favour of totalitarian state control (even
if it worked, which it doesn’t).
The famine
in Somalia (and, to a lesser extent, in Ethiopia and Kenya), in contrast, has
been a tragedy which is twenty years in the making and which many of those
familiar with the area have been foretelling for years. There has been no
effective government in the country since 1991. The current crisis is the
result of a combination of failing rains (something which frequently occurs in
this region), the longer-term consequences of overgrazing and deforestation by
subsistence farmers who have had no other choice it they wish to survive from day
to day and political failure and corruption, ideological idiocy and a series of
supremely hypocritical and morally bankrupt policies followed by all the local,
regional and global powers who have ever been involved with the place – from the
local Islamicist criminals controlling large areas of the country to the
various world powers whose only basic interest is the protection of their
shipping interests through naval patrols from desperate pirates operating from
this wreck of a former country.
In the
West, we bear a large part of the responsibility for what is happening in Somalia now. Our
interests in getting fuel from the Persian Gulf and cars and consumer
electronics from Asia securely to our markets mean that we are prepared to send
warships to the Indian Ocean before the Somali
coast without ever asking why desperate men decide to attack cargo ships in the
first place. Because their country has been wrecked by colonialism and
post-colonialism and, following the end of the proxy wars carried out worldwide
between the US
and Soviet Empires up to the end of the 80s, been left in chaos as easy booty
for gangs, criminals and religious fanatics. If your whole society is
controlled by criminals and offers you no security for yourself and your family,
what should dissuade you from being criminal yourself, if that’s the only way
to survive? The west is responsible at other levels too. The cost of food has
been rising steeply for the past couple of years, partly because we have been
prepared to pay more for renewable fuels to feed our greed for energy and thus
encouraged farmers to grow cash crops for fuel rather than food. And this is
only the tip of a rotten iceberg which also includes monoculture,
agri-combines, gene patenting, subventions, big business, a hunger for ever
more meat rather than vegetables and grains, etc. The wonderful results of a
markets-driven global economy which leaves the poorest unable to afford to pay the
current market price for subsistence food, even if it were available where it
was needed.
It has happened before and we were warned that it would
happen again if there weren’t substantial changes in the way we do things. And, like in 1985 with Live Aid and
all the other reactions that time to the famine in Ethiopia, we will see
reports of starving children on TV and will donate to the various NGOs and
semi-official agencies, from the Red Cross and Crescent, to the FAO, to Médecins Sans Frontières. And some of
that help will actually get to those who need it, despite administrative costs,
and bungling, and corruption, and politics, and robbery. And next year or the
year after the rains will come again and Somalia will fade once more from
our public collective consciousness – until the next time.
The
aftermath of the death of Amy Winehouse and the massacres in Norway may even
bring positive results. If Amy’s death focuses more attention on the plight of
addicts and some serious public discussion of the diseases of alcohol and
substance addiction, then that will do some good. Norwegian public society has
already spontaneously reacted to Breivik’s madness by spontaneously reiterating
its commitment to the values of a liberal, humanistic, democratic society. The
very horror evoked by the massacre – and the dangerous, crazy ideas which
provoked it – will hopefully cause many in Western Europe
to look again at their flirtation with the simplistic exclusivist racist
pseudo-solutions offered by right-wing populists whose following has been
increasing in the past decade. To realise that their societies have become irrevocably
multicultural in the past quarter of a century and to see the future in
dialogue and integration rather than exclusion and discrimination. To once more
assert and affirm their commitment to pluralism and tolerance – and, in this
context, to challenge sub-cultures (like the various Islamic-ethnic ones
throughout Europe) to affirm their commitment to these values as well, without
demanding that they give up their identities.
But I see
little hope for any real change as a result of the calamity emerging in the
Horn of Africa. Thousands will die, many more will suffer, some will be saved
as a result of aid. But, unless we start to look at the way we run our world (or
allow it to be run for us) on a much deeper level, it will happen again and
again.
Globalisation has become an accepted fact in the past twenty
years. But it means more than just being able to buy a cheap TV or smartphone,
assembled from parts bought all over the world on the other side of the globe,
being able to buy flowers cut yesterday in Kenya or eat strawberries in
January. It also means that we are all interconnected, in all sorts of ways,
with everybody else. And that means
that we too are, at some level, responsible for the fact that those children
are starving in Somalia .
And that won’t change unless we realise that responsibility and do something
about it.
Like
demanding of our politicians and public representatives that they apply the
principles they so often praise in our own societies to our international
doings world-wide. Like looking at the values which really drive us as opposed
to those which we profess. Like accepting – individually and communally – that we
are responsible for the consequences of our actions and our inactions.
I’m not all
that very hopeful.
Pictures
retrieved from: