Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

I’m sorry I haven’t been blogging for a while. In truth, I’m too exhausted to write much; even an e-mail seems to take it out of me. Anyway I’ve got the feeling that nothing I say matters much. The world continues turning, war and distress multiply and I seem to earn nothing but the smirks of Cavan’s corner-boys.

In Somalia the ship MV Fain that was taken hostage by pirates is being released by its captors, no doubt after the payment of a huge ransom. Anyway what were the pirates going to do with the cargo? You can’t really get rid of dozens of tanks on the “black market”. A new president has been elected but whether he can make a reality of the Somali state, ruled by anarchy for nearly two decades, is anyone’s guess.

In Guinea Dadis Camara seems to be pursuing a policy of questioning the way in which the country’s wealth has been siphoned off, usually into the pockets of multinational mining companies who throw some baksheesh to local officials who ferret the sums away in foreign bank accounts.

And in Zimbabwe a national unity government has finally been agreed between the autumnal patriarch Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai. The country is fucked, there’s 90 per cent unemployment and a major cholera outbreak. What’s more inflation has rendered the national currency into a joke. The perpetrators of political violence still walk tall and their directors are sitting down at last with their victims. The decision by Mugabe to grant Tsvangirai the job of Prime Minister is a little like an offer of a lift in someone’s broken down car.

There are so many wars and conflicts. We all know of the genocide in Gaza, but other wars go unrecorded, such as that in Sri Lanka, which sees the civilian population often made into unwilling human shields by either the Sri Lankan government or the ever more desperate Tamil Tigers.

In the borderlands of Uganda and the Not-So-Democratic Republic of Congo (NDRSC), the grim antics of the Lord’s Resistance Army, has spread from its original nursery bed in the north of Uganda the northeast of the NSDRC. This leaves in its wake burned villages and massacres of church-goers. The LRA has a “no-frills” approach to recruiting soldiers; no one can accuse them of ageism – the younger the better. Indeed their approach to winning friends and influencing people is basic – after seeing your loved ones raped and chopped into pieces, you’ve got two choices – join us or join them.

And as for events closer to home all I can say is that they’re just like a demented pantomime. But then everyone knows this. I don’t know whether anyone else has noticed how incredibly well-fed the pantomime managers are. Our Minister for Finance, for example, who may well tell everyone else to tighten their belts, but can he without giving himself a hernia? The same is true of our prime minister. None of them are showing any signs of the financial squeeze – far from it. A few weeks’ ago there was an edition of RTE’s rural programme Ear to the Ground, in which it was mentioned that the present financial straits affecting many people had led to greater demand from Irish butchers for cheaper cuts of meat. I was glad to see a restaurant critic who said that many of these cuts have a far better taste than the more expensive joints. But something tells me that none of our senior politicians or civil servants are tucking in to oxtail stew. And as for our minister for health! Look, no more nudge-nudge, wink-win, sexist jokes about fatsoes. But the fact is she is obese. Obesity is a medical condition which can be alleviated, but what’s she doing about it? And then there’s her husband, the man who was for so long implicated in the exorbitantly costly mix of Hi-De-Hi and Absolutely Fabulous which was FAS. They were supposed to be finding jobs and training opportunities for the unemployed, but I feel that if Mr Harney had ever been told that he might meet an unemployed youth, maybe from “the wrong side of the tracks”, his response would have been “Heaven forbid.”

Our rulers try to look statesman-like, but they always come across as at best incompetent idiots, at worse as three-card cheats. There was a particularly heart-wrenching interview with a senior banker today in which he revealed that due to the economic downturn his “disclosed” renumeration package would probably be less than 2 million euro this year. Think of it – less than 50 thousand euro a week, ten thousand a day. How can anyone survive on that? Picture his poor children, his desperate spouse no doubt tearing her false blond hair from its roots as all of them have to wrestle with the indignity of approaching the local Vincent de Paul. And with everybody in a bind there is no possibility of picking up some week-end work mowing grass, while the little chizzlers will look in vain for any paper rounds.

This world is such a sad place; who’d want to go on for yet another awful year on it?

Over Christmas it is estimated that 400 innocent people have been massacred by Lord’s Resistance Army rebels in the north east of Congo. The LRA, incidentally, claim to be fighting to create a state based on The Ten Commandments.

There has also been heavy fighting in Somalia, but perhaps the most egregious example of evil this Christmas is in Gaza. Those poor innocents slaughtered in a Congolese church died at the hands of crazed madmen with weapons, no doubt pumped full of drugs, whereas those who have died in Gaza have perished at the hands of a state which is allowed to belong to the international community. I’m no anti Semite but the state of Israel is a terrorist state, which belongs on that hypocrite George W. Bush’s axis of evil as much as Iran or North Korea.

You hear Israeli spokespeople trying to defend what they’re doing and you ask yourself: Is this the blackest of comedies? Do they really believe their own crap? Yesterday the Israeli foreign minister blamed Hamas for civilian deaths, because Hamas had their offices and buildings in civilian areas. Hold on now Tzipi Livni, who’s dropping the bombs? Is it not Israeli artillery which is blowing people up? Such a statement might be used in a court of law by the defence as evidence of the defendant’s insanity and how far they were affected by a disease of the mind. Let’s take the argument out of Israel to, well, anywhere with a bank. It is held up by a group of robbers who, intent on getting their hands on the money decide to shoot their way in, killing customers who just happen to be there, or maybe they decide to use explosives. The results are the same: a high body-count. The robbers are caught charged with robbery, but no less so with the murder of the innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The robbers deny murder, claiming that it wasn’t their fault that the people were killed but rather the bank’s for having civilians in the building.

Reasoning of a sort – the reasoning of terrorism.

As the world’s leaders comfortably ponder what to do about the situation in the east of the NSDR Congo (Not-so-Democratic Republic) of Congo, hundreds of thousands of people are stuck without access to shelter, clean water, food, and security. Strange that the largest UN mission in the world, MONUC, is already based in the area, and seems incapable of doing anything. Even if they had more realisitic terms of engagement it is hard to see what they can do apart from protecting aid convoys and important installations.

If the world’s leaders wanted to put a stop to events like those unfulding in Nord Kivu they would do well to remember that “General” Laurent Nkunda, the head of the rebels who have supposedly started the problem, does not fight with bows and arrows, but with state-of-the art weaponry supplied by, well, who is supplying the weapons? Shouldn”t such merchants of misery be stopped in their tracks and presented as the pariahs they are? This is unlikely to happen, especially as arms dealers are such generous contributors to the warchests of western politicians.

Some of you may have heard the story of the exchange between God and St Peter who was a little upset when God was making Africa. “Hey, you’re making a place that’s so beautiful. But aren’t you shooting yourself in the foot, because with such a paradise on earth no one’ll want to come up here.”

“Be patient Peter” answered God. “I haven’t populated it yet”.

This came to mind as I hear about the dreadful catastrophe unfolding in the eastern Nord Kivu province of the (not very) Dermocratic Republic of Congo, which some of us of a certain age called Zaire.