Brats do become ‘elders’, by and by
We
all know that death is inevitable. Benigno ‘Ninoy’ Aquino, the
Philippine Senator murdered at the Manila International Airport upon
returning home from exile in the United States, an assassination that
catapulted his wife Corazon to the Presidency following the overthrow of
Ferdinand Marcos, put it nicely: ‘Each moment following our birth we
move closer to death; what a paradox, living is dying’.
Living/dying is a process of decay, this we know. Jathi (birth),
jaraa (decay) and marana (death) is the ultimate process of
equalization, of all beings and all things, including ideas.
This is why when we look at an infant, we could imagine the old man
trapped within him/her, and when we look at the aged, see a young
person, a teenager, a child and an infant. The elderly, then, were at
some point infants, at some point even brats.
An elder
I am thinking of ‘an elder’ right now. His name is Martti Ahtisaari,
Nobel Laureate and former President of Finland. He is an ‘Elder’, i.e. a
member of the club that has tried to rap Sri Lanka’s knuckles (while
looking the other way when the USA and its allies use knuckle dusters to
pummel decency, civilization, culture etc., not to mention millions of
innocent people into dust, literally).
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Martti
Ahtisaari |
Ahtisaari is hailed as ‘peace maker’. He was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize largely on account of his role in the ‘diplomatic’ end to NATO’s
1999 war against Yugoslavia.
Ahtisaari’s claim to greatness however is not related to ‘peace’ but
the imposition of a ‘peace’ preferred by key players in the conflict.
NATO wanted ‘an independent Kosovo’ and Ahtisaari delivered this. Sad to
say, all things considered, there is nothing to celebrate in what he
did.
Ahtisaari’s ‘achievement’ did not fall from the sky. Before he
entered the equation, NATO had bombed Yugoslavia to no avail. The
Yugoslav troops had emerged unscathed despite US General Wesley Clark
having got ‘the maximum violence’ he had demanded. Sustained terror
bombing saw purely residential areas flattened; cluster bombs struck
hospitals, schools, apartment complexes, factories, bridges and office
buildings. Ahtisaari’s task was to articulate NATO’s final terms to
President Milosevic. This is how the drama unfolded.
Ahtisaari set the stage with the conclusive, ‘we are not here to
discuss or negotiate’. Apparently Milosevic had asked about the
possibility of modifying the ‘plan’. After reading ‘the plan’, he had
asked, ‘what will happen if I do not sign’.
Ahtisaari had made a gesture on the table and then moved aside the
flower centerpiece: ‘Belgrade will be like this table; we will
immediately begin carpet-bombing Belgrade’.
He had repeated the gesture; that of sweeping everything off the
table: ‘This is what we will do to Belgrade’. By way of driving home the
point, he added, for good measure, ‘There will be half a million dead
within a week’.
Being brats
The rest, as they say, is history. NATO violated this ‘peace’
agreement, allowing the Kosovo Liberation Army to go on a rampage,
looting and burning houses, murdering and expelling thousands of Serbs,
Roma, Turks, Slavic Muslims, Gorans, Egyptians, Croats and pro-Yugoslav
Albanians. Even after NATO troops entered Kosovo, they engaged in
thumb-twiddling, letting the KLA run riot.
Ahtisaari’s elevation to ‘peace-maker’ and Nobel Laureate, then,
appears as minutely scripted as the monumental crimes against humanity
that NATO perpetrated in Yugoslavia.
Today, this butchery-advocating and butchery-facilitating thug is an
‘Elder’. He gets his name read out in the same breath as that of Nelson
Mandela. Mandela pau machang (pity Mandela!) someone said.
If this is how brats become elders, then there’s something really
wrong about the world. It is far better to grow onions or something and
not be conferred with titles.
Ahtisaari won’t do much with the bunch of confused and clearly
ill-informed old people calling themselves ‘The Elders’, no disrespect
intended of course.
It is good to know that peace making is a business and is scripted to
deliver particular outcomes.
Don’t take my word for it. Read Gregory Elich’s Strange Liberators:
Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit.
We are all born, we age and we perish. We are different only in the
place of birth, the pathways towards death and the location where we
give the earth our final sigh.
There are many ways to travel, many ways of being ‘brats’ and many
ways to be ‘elderly’. If Ahtisaari is an exemplary ‘elder’, I think I
would plan to grow onions in my last years.
And I believe I would remain in constant wonderment at how people
like Desmond Tutu found novel ways of insulting Nelson Mandela (by
inducting into a club he, Mandela, founded a butcher like Ahtisaari).
Indeed, I am beginning to wonder about Nelson himself. [email protected]
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