The portents over the West Asian sky are getting increasingly ominous. The piety associated with Ramadan and all the exhortations/injunctions to the faithful about striving for peace and harmony have failed to check or control the latest brand of marauders reminiscent of the medieval times unleashing mayhem and indulging in fratricidal warfare.
Massive killings and destruction is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan — there are several other conflict zones around the world that are dangerous and act as killing fields.
These fighters have little patience for anything; let alone sitting across tables for negotiating terms of settlement; on the other hand the rulers of these territories are as a general rule incompetent at best and ruthless maniacs at worst, which does not help the situation either. The militiamen are dreaded as fierce combatants who shoot before they talk. The world is watching this engulfing anarchy with awe, trepidation and concern, while blood flows all around without regard to the identity of persons, combatant or non-combatant, young, old, child or women. But this gloomy scenario has an analogy to the ‘chicken and egg story’, which should make us pause and think.
Unemployment, run-away inflation, destruction of infrastructure in the war-ravaged cities, the barrenness of vast swathes of land, scarcity of basic essentials, goods and services, and the overall social and economic distress have made the populace of these countries weak, chauvinistic, xenophobic and vulnerable to all types of maleficence. But those are still the symptoms, the problem lies much deeper.
Whether it were the mujahideen fighting Russian occupation of Afghanistan then or several other outfits since then, conceived, created and pressed into service by superpowers for serving their interest, or various overt or covert activities carried out under the aegis of power politics or simply for politico-economic domination, the trail of evidence available through academic
writings and well researched books give the most wretched story of worst manipulation of the weak by the strong. These are not without consequences.
It is the bad boys who started it, or they were goaded by the good boys into doing thisIJ The theory of causation has thus, to be relied upon for seeking the reasons behind the imbroglio. There are lessons in history. We must not forget that foreign rule invariably left the subjugated countries and communities badly divided and who would know this better than we Indians. It will be difficult to think of a country that was under colonial rule to have remained politically and socially united within after the accursed regime lifted its shackles.
The world imperialism of 19th and 20th centuries sowed the seeds of strife, acrimony, and animosity within the body-politic of subjugated nationalities, so much so that these traits have entered their DNA and keep resurfacing horizontally across the communities and vertically through generations. We continue to harvest the crops that are yielded as the embedded seeds are not lost in antiquity but lie in hibernation and breathe back to life through incubation and warmer climes provided by our leading Superpower.
We know now the reality about WMDs through various sources, including American scholars themselves — more will keep coming out over the succeeding decades as it happens of the times of lyndon Johnson, Nixon and Kissinger. But the world map would have irreversibly, considerably altered at the cost of millions of lives who unfortunately, in number, do not merit attention or compare to couple of body bags of the privileged ones. The worst indictment came from the Brazilian diplomat, Jose Mauricio Bustani as OPCW’s Director General who should have been the best authority to establish the evidence of WMDs in Iraq and who denied such existence on the basis of his findings but was shunted out under pressure from USA. And the damage was done; we soon started learning new lingo such as ‘smoking out’, ‘regime change’ etc.
The war machines and ammunitions are anthropophagus. They survive on exporting and outsourcing deaths across poorer and weaker nations and claim human lives as fodder. According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute study, America corners 30 per cent of the global arms sales, followed by Russia 23 per cent, Germany, France and UK together holding 22 per cent (five nations, 75 per cent share) and corporations eventually sell them. Whether it is a State or a corporation, the cannibalistic traits have been endemic but they are not tried for war crimes. While the world serenades on massive misinformation doses, leading to acquiescence and slumber induced by lullabies, the same pushes the victims of such propaganda into deeper morass, with the last resort to dark age rectifuse — withdrawals, armed resistance, aggression, mindless violence and deaths. The baying warriors out on the streets to give and take lives would be less in number and less lethal if greed was capped.