THERE is a poignant moment in Shakespeare’s Scottish play where Macbeth, the blood on his hands still fresh, wonders: “But wherefore could I not pronounce ‘Amen’? I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’ stuck in my throat.”
Likewise, there are occasions when the traditional turn-of-the-year greeting sticks in the throat. When there are too many places where the reservoirs of peace and goodwill have almost been depleted.
Would “happy new year” have much resonance, for instance, in the world’s youngest nation, South Sudan, where the Grim Reaper has been afoot of late? Or in Syria, which may have been spared the carnage that Western military intervention would inevitably have entailed, but where any light there may be at the end of the tunnel is too dim to be perceived? Or, for that matter, in the city once known as Stalingrad?
The freshly dug mass graves in South Sudan are perhaps the most striking reminder of humankind’s capacity for inhumanity. Arguably, they also demonstrate the folly of investing too much hope in inadequately thought-out innovations.
The emergence of one or more new nations is also considered an eventual possibility in the Syrian context, but should that eventually turn out to be the case, what are the chances that the wheels of progress won’t be clogged with the coagulated blood from the appalling conflict that continues to unfold?
One can meanwhile hazard the conjecture that there is a symbiotic relationship of sorts between some of the worst transgressors in Syria and the perpetrators of carnage in Volgograd, the Russian city that recently experienced a pair of heinous suicide bombings. The terrorist attacks are assumed to be a warning in the context of next month’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, quite possibly aimed at dissuading prospective international participants from venturing thither.
The killers may also have intended to undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent PR offensive, in which he sought to airbrush his image as an intolerant authoritarian via an amnesty for activists who ought not to have been incarcerated in the first place. Chances are the atrocities are also not unrelated to the ruthless policies Putin has pursued in Chechnya.
That does not make them any less unconscionable, however. And one of the consequences of the bombings will be to guarantee that many of those who may previously have anticipated with some pleasure the prospect of Putin ending up with some egg on his face will now be hoping that nothing goes terribly wrong at the Games in Sochi — where security will undoubtedly be much tighter than it has hitherto been in distant Volgograd.
Long before then, though, there will be other areas of concern as 2014 kicks off — notably in Bangladesh, where elections scheduled for next Sunday are being boycotted by the opposition, with predictably troubling consequences.
The boycott is based on Prime Minister Hasina Wajed’s refusal to revert to the previous norm of a caretaker administration in the run-up to elections — although she offered the opposition half the seats in her cabinet as recompense. Bangladesh has been beset in the past year by divisions over war crimes trials for those who evidently collaborated with the Pakistani military in the 1971 genocide — and the manner in which this trend has generally resonated in Pakistan points to a continued refusal to budge from a perversely distorted perception of the past.
Bangladeshis for the most part have few illusions about what transpired four-plus decades ago, but the Awami League no longer holds sway the way it did in 1970, and effectively uncontested polls will have unpleasant repercussions.
A vaguely comparable situation has emerged in Thailand, where the protests that followed Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s attempt to amnesty her exiled brother, Thaksin, prompted the government to pledge early elections, now scheduled for Feb 2. But the opposition intends to boycott them, not least because it has no hope of scoring a win; instead, it has been calling for an unelected council to alter the political set-up before any further democratic exercise is permitted.
It’s no coincidence that the opposition represents the outnumbered, largely urban elites, while the Shinawatra-led party commands the allegiance of most of the rural poor.
These two controversial elections will serve only as the starting point for a year that marks the centenary of the industrial-scale conflict that was billed as the war to end all wars, but the slaughter it entailed on a then unprecedented scale turned out merely to be the precursor for even worse to come.
It is far from clear that humanity has learned all that much in the intervening century, notwithstanding the progress in so many spheres.
It would be insincere to apologise for beginning the year on such a sombre note, but I do hope to be proved wrong on every count.
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