The newspaper headlines today record that Armenia and Azerbaijan are continuing
their hostilities over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, each claiming to have
ceased fire, and each claiming that the other side is carrying on firing.
Their previous war finished without resolution in
1994, in the early years of the breakup of the Soviet Union, and it happens
that yesterday I read an amazing chapter in a book by Ryszard Kapuscinski about
how he entered the region during that first war when hostilities were at their
height. (The book is Imperium, first
published in 1993, a tale of his travels through Russia and its empire).
Before leaving Moscow he was able to contact an
Armenian member of the Supreme Soviet, Galina Staravoytova, who said she would
meet him in Yerevan, the Armenian capital. “Maybe we will be able to help you,
but I don’t know. We will see,” she said enigmatically.
Azerbaijan is a Moslem country, Armenia Christian,
and Nagorno-Karabakh is a Christian enclave in Azerbaijan that was insisting on
joining Armenia. The region was completely sealed off from outside by the Red
Army and local militias (“they guarded all passages, highways tracks and paths,
guarded the rocky clefts and faults, the passes, precipices and peaks. There
was absolutely no question of forcing one’s way through this vigilant, tightly
woven net.”) It would be no easier by air, for people had been camping out in
the airport in Yerevan for weeks hoping to get on to a plane to Stepanakert,
the capital of the enclave. This seemed
an equally hopeless task to Kapuscinski, because to buy a ticket required a
Soviet passport with proof of residence in the enclave, or a permit from the general
army staff in Moscow, neither of which he had prospect of obtaining. He waited
all day in his hotel hoping to hear from his contact who eventually phoned to
tell him, even more enigmatically. “Wait patiently until a young man comes to
you.”
This, it turned out, was the instruction he
received from then on as he was handed from one young man to another, given a Soviet
passport taken from a dead soldier, and shuffled
into backrooms, little bigger than cupboards, where he was fitted out, in the
utmost secrecy, in the uniform of an
Aeroflot pilot, which got him on to a plane along with Starovoytova, but with
instructions that he must not betray he had ever met her.
Typically, this amazing observer and journalist,
Kapuscinski uses his experience of this bizarre war to generalize its meaning
in such a way as to make it relevant to the lives of everyone of us.
“Three plagues, three contagions,
threaten the world,” he writes.
“The first tis the plague
of nationalism.
“The second is the plague
of racism.
“The third is the plague of
religious fundamentalism
“All three share one
trait, a common denominator --- an aggressive, al-powerful irrationality. Anyone
stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred
pyre that awaits only its sacrificial victims. Every attempt at calm
conversation will fail. He doesn’t want a conversation, but a declaration that
you agree with him, admit that he is right, join the cause. Otherwise you have
no significance in his eyes, you do not exist, for you count only if you are a
tool, an instrument, a weapon. There are
no people --- there is only the cause.
“A mind touched by such a
contagion is a closed mind, one-dimensional, monothematic, spinning around one
subject only --- its enemy. Thinking a bout our enemy sustains us, allows us to
exist. That is why the enemy is always present, is always with us.”
And
he adds, further down the page, that the Armenians and Azerbaijanis are to be
envied, because they “are not beset by worries abut the complexity of the world
or about the fact that human destiny is uncertain and fragile.” Theirs is a
world of
“an unambiguous law of exclusivity,” and he concludes, rather sadly,
that “they never ask themselves, am I right?.... They need to be left in peace
so as to thrash each other all the more thoroughly.”
We are a quarter of a century on from when
those words were written, and the world today makes them seem like prophecies.
Certain militia, inflamed by religious fundamentalism, are carrying out
barbarities that were recorded 2500 years ago, and before, suggesting that
human nature has never changed or improved. But even the modern nations, armed to the
teeth as we are, wrapped in our science and advanced knowledge, trapped by the
same plagues of nationalism and racism (and others that he didn’t mention,
pride, greed, cruelty) even we are using
our science and sophisticated knowledge
to introduce new barbarities, executing every day, at the push of a button, people
who are thousands of miles away from their executioners, and who have never
been given any hearing, any trial, and against whom any proof that might exist
is entirely circumstantial.
What is this terror to kill that so besets us?
How can it be that the United States, often referred to as the wealthiest nation
that has ever existed, spends such a disproportionate amount of its income on
preparing to kill, and then actually killing? How does it happen that this very subject is one of those about which
it seems impossible to hold a conversation, is beyond discussion?
I remember I started out as an idealistic youth
wanting to work for the United Nations, to bring peace to the world, a dream
from which I was rudely awakened as I saw how the United Nations was
manipulated by the wealth-owners in their own interests. So now, in my sere
years, my work done, with little left to do, I find myself signing petitions,
one after the other, presented to me by eager young activists determined to
change the course of human affairs.
Hope springs eternal, goes the old saying. Might
one even hope that we can eventually open a conversation with those entombed in
their certainties?
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