Human Tragedy? Take Your Pick
In Pakistan, villagers living in remote mountain areas which were so hard struck by a devastating earthquake a scant few months ago are facing dreadfully uncertain futures. Winter is upon these poor people who still have not received adequate shelter to face the season; their food and water supplies are still uncertain, despite the herculean and ongoing efforts of relief agencies. Children and adults are beginning to suffer medical and health conditions related to their miserable, untenable living conditions, and overall it is a human tragedy on an inhuman scale. The world responded with generosity in the immediate fallout but relief is slow and their futures irremediably compromised.In Iraq ordinary citizens, anxious to resume some semblance of normal life, hopeful against all odds for the future and their children's futures, are facing dreadful realities that we in our controlled and safe societies would never dream of living through. Although the world's attention is focused on the plight of a handful of western-based Christian Peacemaker Teams volunteers who have come to the area for the purpose of offering moral and religious support, and who were subsequently abducted by an insurgent/terrorist (take your pick) group for a ransom of prisoner release, most Iraqis face the potential of abduction and murder daily. Iraqi men, women and children are being murdered on a daily basis by suicide bombers, they are also abducted and killed by merciless functionaries intent on establishing an Islamist state against the wishes of most Iraqis.
In Darfur African farmers continue to be hunted, displaced, raped and murdered by the Janjaweed, Muslims who have long coveted the land farmed by the Sudanese, and with whom for generations an uneasy truce with the Muslims had worked. Nothing now satisfies the Muslim-Sudanese component of the country but to move the farmers and their families out of their land by any and all means, including mass murder, so that they alone will now control that land. Even huddled within refugee camps the Sudanese, ostensibly with the protection of aid agencies, are continuing to be hounded, the women raped.
In Africa a number of countries have been unable to bring in harvest sufficient to feed their people. In some countries, like Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, the lack of food is directly related to the dictator's land grab in illegally shoving out its population of white farmers so that the farmland which had been formerly efficiently operated and generously productive enabling the population to be properly fed, no longer exists as it once did. Many of its white farmers have been murdered, and their land taken by former soldiers in a land re-distribution effort by the government whose only true interest was in ridding the country of its white farm owners. The fallout has been that hundreds of thousands of black farm workers who had laboured in white-owned farms are now without work. The former soldiers who have claimed the farm land have no idea how to farm it, nor do many appear to be interested in farming the land. The result being a famine of horrendous proportions.
The people of Afghanistan are still struggling to make themselves a working country, with the assistance of the United States with its NATO coalition members who drove the Taliban out of the major cities and whose troops, along with those of Britain, Canada and others have their work cut out for them trying to track down and disarm the scattered Taliban, those fundamentalists who made of Afghanistan a centre of Islamic intolerance. The women of Afghanistan suffered miserably under the iron grip of the fanatical Muslims who used Islam for their own purposes, to create a country living in constant fear, whose women were never to be seen in public without a male escort, whose women and girl children were always in danger of rape and murder, where music and dancing were strictly forbidden as works of the devil. There is hope in the future for Afghans, however tenuous it might seem, with young Afghan girls now being able to attend school, women free now to go about in public and hopes that the state will now be able to administer the country to offer its people a reasonable hope for the future.
Then there is the vast numbers of refugees from cities and communities around the U.S. Gulf States in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and later Rita. People, mostly black and poor, although certainly not confined to that category, are still without homes and without much hope for their immediate future. Thousands of displaced people are housed in hotel rooms, community centres, living a life which is far from normal; common in third-world countries in the wake of major catastrophies, but certainly nothing one would connect with life in the wealthy United States of America. People are waiting to resume their lives, and fearing for their futures. FEMA has informed these people that their rent will be paid only up to February, and while the refugees are desperately searching out permanent accommodations, scant few are to be found. People wishing to re-build their former homes now have to face new, and perhaps long-overdue restrictions on building in flood plains, restrictions which should have been in place in their municipalities long ago, but whose imposition at this time has created another disaster for the desperate and the homeless.
The spirit which originally moved people to attempt to assist wherever they could to ameliorate the brutal conditions which all of these world-wide disaster scenarios occasisoned, has been muted, as memory of these world-shattering events fade, and people turn to go on with their own lives. A reflection of the human condition writ large.
posted by Pieface @ Monday, December 12, 2005
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