Since the dawn of the present millennium in 2000, we have been living in a most dangerous world characterized by unprecedented violence, destruction and loss of innocent human lives on a massive scale. During the last two decades of the previous millennium, I was an avid student, reader and writer (recall the weekly Gobata essays in Cameroon newspapers) but, within these first two decades of the current millennium, I have been almost completely intellectually paralyzed by despair. During the 1990s I used to write about and even dramatize in theatre performances the looming problems of the time with the optimism that positive change was just around the corner and that the world was evolving, thanks to the process of globalization, towards a point where democracy, good governance, health, peace and prosperity would be flourishing all over the globe.
But, to begin from home in Cameroon, the third millennium arrived when none of the looming problems which had preoccupied my time and attention had found even the hint of a solution: poverty at the grassroots had instead intensified, side by side with the arrogant, opulent lifestyle of the political elite; epidemics (HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Tuberculosis, Meningitis, Cholera) were ravaging among the population; the dictatorship had consolidated its grip on power to the extent that aligning with it to chant its eternal praises became a defensible option for both individuals and communities looking for survival. HEALTH FOR ALL BY THE YEAR 2000, which had been chanted for over two decades previously, proved to have been a mirage. The MILLENNIUM SUMMIT in South Africa, which might have laid the solid foundation of a new world order, got boycotted by the most powerful nation on earth for the flimsy reason that it had on its agenda items about discussing reparation and compensation for the transatlantic slave trade as well as a discussion of the Palestinian/Israeli problem.
Then there was the shock of 09/11, swiftly and blindly followed by the war on Iraq and other ‘wars on terror’. You don’t need a sledge hammer to kill a mosquito! For heaven’s sake let’s have a sense of proportion!! In any case, in spite of the wars on terror, the enemy seems ever to be increasing and multiplying: Alcaeda, Talaban, Alshebab, Boko-Haram,etc., and is proving beyond reasonable doubt that the Geneva Convention is a daydream of utopian idealism. It would be easier, and it makes much more sense, to draw up a Convention for the abolition of all wars than trying to enforce good rules for doing war. War is the greatest of human evils. There is no such thing as a decent war. All wars constitute a complete breakdown in human rationality and morality. War is not something that rationally, cool and level headedly could be engaged in. We should be catapulted or maneuvered into war besides ourselves and against our better judgment because in war we will certainly do harm and evil, whether we want to or not, and the consequences will always be unforeseeable, unpredictable. And, if war can be likened to brutal rape, civil war would be brutal incestuous rape. Encouraging civil war in any situation, through ‘arming the rebels’, for instance, is a monumental mistake and evil. Such were my thoughts in the case of the war in Iraq, even if the reasons for going to war had been honest, cogent and valid. Well, it is nearly a decade since that war ended and the unforeseen consequences are still unfolding, the worst being the civil war that has been engendered in that country. The Iraq war, together with other wars and sundry violent atrocities without formal declaration of war around the world, are the reason for the alarming situation we are facing today.
There is far too much senseless violence in the world and it seems to be spreading everywhere. Terrorism seems to have imposed itself as a normal occurrence in today’s world – in the USA, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Tunisia, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Rwanda, Uganda, Mali, Nigeria, Kenya - and where not? I feel like a fool when I recall that, scarcely two decades ago, on the occasion of a suicide bombing in Israel, I wondered in writing about the mindset that could lead a human being to commit such an horrendous act and I felt certain then that Africans, if I knew them, were so earthly and loved life so much, that no amount of indoctrination or promise of immediate post-mortem Paradise could bring any of them to contemplate doing such a thing. On another occasion towards the late 1990s, following bloody conflicts between Christians and Moslems in the Jos Plateau of Nigeria, I called on Nigerians to remember that Paganism is the true Religion of their forefathers and to stop killing and dying on behalf of foreign religious dogmas they had likely not yet digested sufficiently well enough to claim ownership of. Today Africa is increasingly the favourite theatre of religious extremism and violence or, in any case, religiously-anchored mass murders.
We have reached a stage where sleeping school children are murdered en masse in their beds; where people as mixed and diverse as can be imagined, shopping, jollying, relaxing, in a public place, are indiscriminately gunned down in their numbers. In the name of what, to make what point, to what effect? Nothing short of sheer lunacy could explain this state of affairs and I suspect that mass lunacy has become an attribute of human beings in our epoch. Should it persist and continue, it is doubtful that the human species will survive the first century of the third millennium, and planet Earth will probably be exclusively inhabited by insects, microbes and viruses. How on earth did we get to where we are today and what ever happened to our dreams of a peaceful and prosperous world? My explanatory guess is as follows.
The world has not yet recovered from the traumas of the Second World War – the most sophisticated, most brutal war in living memory; a war in which the highest capabilities of the human mind and its achievements in science and technology were fully mobilized and utilized in the service of warfare. Perhaps the best things that happened after the war were the formation of the United Nations Organization (UNO), replacing the previous League of Nations, and the adoption of various solemn declarations and proclamations – the Nuremberg Code, the Geneva Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Helsinki Declaration – all calculated to ensure that such a war and its inevitable corollaries would never again occur in human history. The problem, however, is that the nations which jointly defeated Germany and its allies in the Second World War – the United States of America, Great Britain, France, Russia, and their other allies – have insisted on drawing the full benefits of war victors and ensuring, moreover, that they would remain victorious in the event of any other war. Such attitude is not a prescription for the abolition of World Wars but rather an incentive for rivalry and the near-certainty of eventual future wars on a large scale. The numerous and increasing incidents of suicide terrorism around the globe are a rehearsal on a small scale of such an eventual war.
My proposed solution is the following. The UNO is a very good idea but it must be reformed, developed, revamped and enhanced in many ways, some of which are as follows. The UNO should be the organization of the global international community and not, as one would have the impression today, of the most powerful nations on earth. The UNO can have a Security Council and other Councils but no member of the organization should have Veto Powers on the council. All decisions of the UNO or of any of its Councils should be by consensus and, if they do not reach consensus on any issue, they should continue discussing until they reach consensus. On a relatively small scale, many African systems prove that, with goodwill and determination, consensus can be reached on the most divisive or polarizing of issues. The main and most urgent tasks of the UNO of our historical epoch are: the abolition of all wars, the destruction, once for all times, of all weapons of mass destruction – chemical, biological, nuclear – in all countries of the world, the abolition of the manufacture and distribution of all weapons on earth. This is a tall order but it is achievable with the good will and cooperation of all nations of the world. This may sound like a mid-summer night’s dream but that is the dream I have dreamed and I will continue to reflect on the details to show that it not only is realistic but realizable.
Meanwhile, it is instructive to note that countries which have voluntarily given up their weapons of mass destruction (South Africa, for example) have done so most securely and believably. Other countries having these weapons can rationally be persuaded to abandon and destroy them. Syria is an ongoing case in point and here it is further instructive to note that, in the global debate on the Syrian crisis, Russia’s voice stood out as the voice of reason and moderation while some of the other powerful nations of the world demonstrated an indomitable and inflexible extreme posture hardly compatible with the search for a peaceful solution. Countries and people amass weapons, conventional or otherwise, out of the fear that they would be attacked, scarcely out of a desire to attack. The assurance that they would not be attacked would be a great boost to their voluntarily giving up and destroying those weapons under suitable rational persuasion. The most powerful nation on earth, the United States of America, is overly concerned about its national security, on behalf of which it rationalizes its ubiquity and hyperactivity around the globe, going as far as spying on a massive scale, including listening systematically to even private conversations around the globe. But the greatest threats to American security are arguably the internal ones, attributable to madness or otherwise.
It is highly desirable for the USA and the other powerful nations of the world to develop a truly global mindset which sees global security, peace and prosperity as equivalent to their own security, peace and prosperity. Given such a mindset, none of the formidable problems now facing the world with go without a solution.
Gobata, Yaounde, Cameroon, 07/10/2013.
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