Ok this was meant to be a weekly blog about small conflicts of the 20th century, but I missed my deadline and failed to write about the 20th century.
I missed the deadline because I’m poorly organised. And the reason I couldn’t jauntily write about stuff in the past this week was because of this (http://youtu.be/kO7i8ontM58) video. It’s a horrific clip, purporting to show dead bodies in a field hospital – it’s as disturbing as it sounds, so please don’t watch it if you think you shouldn’t. It lasts for about a minute. In it a man called Danny Abdul Dayem orders the camera to show the bodies, and ends the video saying “We’re not animals, we’re human beings and we’re asking for help.” Danny is speaking from Homs, Syria, which is becoming the next exciting media sensation conflict location, and just in time too – it’s been a while since that whole Libyan thing ended.
Danny Abdul Dayem
Let’s talk about how Russia and China have vetoed the UN resolution thing. Aren’t they bad, Russia and China? China does all that sinister neo-imperialism stuff in Africa (so much worse than Imperialism) and Russia – well – Putin. Thank the Lord that we are better than them. What? We’re not? But look what we did in Libya. Evil dictator, an oppressed people, we help out, he is overthrown, a new dawn: ‘Liberal Interventionism Vindicated!’ as a slightly, err, over-enthusiastic Facebook acquaintance of mine statused after Tripoli was captured. Those awkward rumours of Gaddaffi Loyalists still knocking about in Libya notwithstanding, the situation was clearly more complicated than all that. More complicated than you and I can comprehend by reading a few Guardian articles.
But you and I can still build facile, generalised moral viewpoints about world events by reading a few Guardian articles, and so we shall. I kind of think that sending planes into Libya was the right decision, and indeed, how the hell can I say that Danny Abdul Dayem shouldn’t get the help he needs because of Iraq-induced left wing nerves about foreign ‘intervention’. Well I can’t. Partly because I have no power over the matter, but mainly because any person with an ounce of human feeling in them can’t fail to feel the same. We – the West, mostly Britain and America, but also France, NATO, whoever you want to include in this net – we did so much to create the situation in Libya, where a tyrannical leader killed people who didn’t want to be ruled by him. So when William Hague stands up and says that what happened to Gaddafi is a warning to tyrants all over the world it makes me want to throw up, preferably all over him so that he really gets my point, but sadly my only option is to vomit into a bin whilst writing Varsity Blog posts which neither he nor many other people will read.
What exactly is the warning sent to Tyrants by our noble Mr. Hague? Be media friendly. Do bad stuff, but keep it quiet. A large part of the reason we got involved in Libya is because of Gaddaffi’s eccentricity. As a mad dictator he managed to capture the public imagination – he looks weird, he does weird things, he has fruity female body guards, he lives in a tent, he murders his own people. How quaint. Bomb him. And Hague’s up there grandstanding and not mentioning how genuinely and thoroughly implicated Britain is in the whole affair. Fine, we did a good thing (ish). It doesn’t make us good, and it even tips us back towards bad if we start trying ignore the fact that the thing was our fault in the first place. There’s a difference between being pragmatic and being a downright deplorable hypocrite.
'Do bad stuff, keep it quiet.'
So Gaddafi – victim of his own kookiness. Unfortunately for the Syrian people, Syria has the decidedly unkooky Assad, who looks and acts like a medical professional who was accidentally forced to become a tyrant. Funnily enough he is actually a medical professional who was forced to become a tyrant, when his tyrant-in-training brother died in a car crash. Luckily he seems to have a real aptitude for brutally crushing dissent and political freedom. We all have hidden talents. Assad’s calm, Pooter-ish demeanour is part of why Danny hasn’t yet got the help he needs. Another part of it is China and Russia’s involvement – just as we take a large portion of the blame for how Libya ended up, they too take a large portion of blame for Syria.
Russia and China should learn from our model. They should allow the world to help the Free Syrian Army, just as Britain and America got involved in Libya. They should do it because it seems to be the right thing to do, as far as we know, at this moment. Of course, that’s not why we got involved in Libya, as much as Hague blusters (god I want to vomit on him). We got involved mostly because it was politically and economically expedient at that time. Hopefully it will likewise become politically and economically expedient for Russia and China to stop vetoing and then after a while maybe things will be done and eventually people will stop killing people in Syria.
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