Violence - at Home and Abroad - is the Enemy

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

There were glimmers of hope in 2006 but on the whole it was not a very good year for the world. Bloody conflicts continued to take a heavy toll in terms of human suffering, and abundant resources that could have done so much good for humanity were poured the into the bottomless pits of wars and conflicts.

Nature itself seemed to cry out to heedless leaders with warnings that many years of abuse of the natural environment was approaching a tipping point beyond which there will be catastrophic and possibly irreversible consequences for the planet and its ability to sustain life.

After three years the Iraq war remained as intractable as ever and the bloodletting continued to mount. Estimates of Iraqi casualties ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands and the American people watched with horror as the death toll for their armed forces approached the three thousand mark.

The estimated cost to the US Treasury ran into the hundreds of billions and some say that by the time it is over it could be as high as a trillion dollars. The great tragedy is that this was from the beginning an unnecessary war based on ideological hubris and an elaborate web of deception.

Except for a stubborn minority, everybody came to acknowledge in 2006 that this war was a huge mistake and that the invasion and occupation were grossly misconceived and mismanaged from the beginning. According to the polls and the results of the November elections in the US, the American people now know that they were misled.

That was a glimmer of hope but still small comfort to those who saw the folly of it from the beginning and warned the invading coalition against it. The trouble is that acknowledging the truth does not provide a way out and many more people are going to die before it is finally over. As former US Secretary of State Colin Powell warned, “If you break it, you own it.”

So Iraq is quite broken, the volatile Middle East is more unstable than ever and the coalition is looking for a way out of a classic catch-22. Furthermore, the Iraq adventure undermined the legitimate war in Afghanistan and so the end of that campaign is also nowhere in sight.

In the middle of 2006 the Israelis, with the approval of the US and Britain, launched an invasion of Lebanon. The Israelis blockaded this democratic West-leaning country and mercilessly bombed population centres as well as the country’s infrastructure.

While a thousand Lebanese civilians were killed in the bombardment and many more were made refugees, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the Vatican condemned the attack, but for a whole month the coalition with stunning callousness did nothing to stop the carnage.

At the same time and with the same pretext (the capture of several Israeli soldiers) Israel unleashed an attack on the helpless population of the Palestinian Gaza Strip. The soldiers have not been retrieved but Lebanon lay in ruins and instability and the radical elements in Islam were strengthened.

There was a strong glimmer of hope as one courageous American, former President Jimmy Carter, published a book exposing to the American people the injustice being inflicted on the Palestinian people. This remains the most provocative issue in the Middle East.

Inevitably, Mr. Carter was accused of anti-Semitism but even as a debate got underway about his book, the Israelis were planning another illegal settlement on Palestinian land as they continued their brutal occupation and campaign of repression against the Palestinian people.

There are other glimmers of hope as more Jewish voices inside Israel and a few in the US are also speaking out. In a recent article in an American newspaper, Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, said:

“Now Jewish soldiers go out every day to make war on Palestinians, the vast majority of whom want nothing more than to live peaceful, ordinary lives in a tiny state of their own.”

Despite the world’s “never again” pledge after Hitler’s attempt to wipe out the Jews during World War II, the international community in 2006 remained largely impotent in the face of a genocidal campaign against the black African people of Darfur, a western province of Sudan.

With the apparent approval of the Sudanese Government in Khartoum, rampaging Arab militiamen known as the Janjaweed have in the last few years killed an estimated 400,000 people in Darfur, raped thousands and made refugees of over a million.

Mr. Annan has made passionate appeals to the international community for the commitment of resources to stop this continuing atrocity but the response has been feeble and any glimmer of hope in this situation is dim indeed.

As the year ended, another war broke out on the already war-torn continent of Africa as Ethiopian troops crossed into Somalia to support a weak provisional government and to prevent a coalition of Islamic courts from setting up a fundamentalist Muslim state on its border.

This intervention runs the risk of setting off a wider war in the region but there is a glimmer of hope that the international community will do what is necessary to help bring peace and unity to Somalia. It has known neither and been without an effective government for the last 15 years.

At the end of World War II 60 years ago, enlightened leaders got together to establish the United Nations because they recognized that the violent history of humankind had to end if civilization were to triumph.

But all over the world there are still too many people who do not understand that violence is an obstacle to the civilization movement and that human beings cannot achieve their higher destiny with guns and bombs.

One glimmer of hope in all this is that in the West the Iraq fiasco has put many advocates of violence and enemies of the United Nations to rout, but not all. There are still those who reject Winston Churchill’s advice that “it is better to jaw-jaw than war-war”. They prefer to drop bombs first rather than trying to reason with an enemy.

Here at home we have much to celebrate and be grateful for. The Bahamas has never descended into political or sectarian conflict and it appears that the Bahamian people are committed to conserving this rich and blessed heritage.

Our democracy has been a great deal less than perfect and sometimes quite messy. But it is a far better way to govern ourselves and to settle our political differences than resorting to violence.

This year that democratic process will once again be put to the test and there is every indication that the Bahamian people, along with their political leaders, will go about electing the next government in a peaceful and orderly fashion.

But wonderful though that is, it is not enough. Criminal violence plagued us throughout 2006 and resulted in the death of 60 persons. Furthermore, domestic violence, including the abuse of children, seems to be on the increase.

This has the potential not only to degrade our quality of life but to destroy everything we hold dear, including economic stability and prosperity.

We must resolve in this New Year and for many years to come to use all the spiritual, intellectual and material resources we can muster in a national campaign against all forms of violence in our society.

Comments

[sgsg]

can any1 send me a list of the bahamas allies and enamies