Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

In Chile a former conscript has been charged with the brutal murder of popular singer Victor Jara in the immediate aftermath of General Augusto Pinochet’s fascist putsch in 1973. Victor Jara, among with hundreds of others, was brought to Chile’s National stadium where he was subjected to an orgy of mindless thuggery and violence before being shot forty-four times.

And the man who masterminded the coup and who was the intellectual author of Jara’s murder and that of thousands of others sipped tea in the cosiest of tete-a-tetes with that rabid bitch Margaret Thatcher. He was also the darling of members of the Catholic right in England and Ireland, such Norman Lamont. I remember how I was told by a member of the Knights of Columanus that Pinochet had “rescued Chile from communism” and that most of those who were murdered by the military were communist sympathisers who deserved what they got.

I have learned that a good friend of mine, now sadly deceased, was the victim of a serious assault from a priest during his youth. It happened when he was a boarder in a diocesan secondary school. On his fifteenth birthday he received a present of some money – quite a large sum by the standards of the time. So excited was he that he began to jump up and down on his bed. He was observed by one of the priests who decided to offer some physical chastisement. So badly did he beat my friend that he needed hospital treatment. This would constitute an assault, but did the priest suffer for his actions? No, for no policeman would arrest him, no lawyer would prosecute him, and no judge would sentence him because he was a priest. But what sort of person beats up a child? He was certainly bigger than my friend at the time. What was more this coward could act in the full knowledge that his actions wouldn’t be resisted, for no one would hit a priest. To do so was to earn eternal damnation, not only for one’s self but possibly for one’s descendants.

My friend’s choice of career therefore, appears somewhat bizarre, for he trained to be a priest himself. Once ordained he was appointed to the teaching staff of the institution where he had been assaulted and indeed brutalised. Although I always found him to be the most harmless and inoffensive of men he had the reputation among students of being a “villain” and a “demon”. I have heard that he was given to outbursts of hysteria accompanied by physical violence towards students.

In later life he was appointed to a parish where he earned a reputation as a kindly pastor. In fact he tried to do the work of three men, even though his health wasn’t up to doing the work of one.

He was a most talented historian who has not received the recognition of those who have seized control of local history. Some of these people know all about silencing even the mere whisper of clerical abuse.

I don’t seek to lessen the evil acts of my friend or to call for understanding. Hr was a victim, firstly a direct victim of physical abuse, and secondly of a system which viewed physical violence by adults against adolescents as somehow acceptable. Like so many victims of systematic abuse he became a perpetrator.

The fires that have wrought such havoc in Victoria are truly horrific. History has been peppered by such blazes, such as the Great Fire of London of 1666. It seems incredible that with all our sophistication and technical wizardry humans can still be consumed by a force of nature.

But perhaps the most galling aspect is the knowledge that in Australia, that most destructive of media, fire, did not burst out by itself. Bush fires have been a phenomenon in Australia for thousands of years – from before the continent was inhabited. They erupted spontaneously, often spurred by a chance bolt of lightning. They had a role in the regeneration of forestry. Man understands the positive role that controlled fires have in ecology. When they are caused maliciously their impact can only be destructive, as witnessed by the devastation in Victoria. We do have to ask what type of people would do such a thing?

As we see in Australia arson is one of the most frightfully murderous of activities. The numbers who are killed and maimed can be enormous. It would be hard for someone to carry out such mass murder with conventional fire-arms. Apart from the difficulties occasioned by re-loading they might have to hear the screams and wails of their victims. The arsonist is more like the person who plants a bomb, but then that’s a risky business. It may go off in your hands. Some arsonists like to fool themselves that they are not insidious lunatics and claim that their pyrotechnics are motivated by a cause. They say that their objects are inanimate objects like buildings, but they cannot wash their hands of responsibility, as fire can spread, and then what about fire-crews who risk their lives in extinguishing fires?

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had equated arsonists with mass murderers, and anyone who deliberately sets anything alight shows no regard for human life. They may often have deeper-seated psychological issues and so they need psychiatric intervention. However, if there is such a thing as society, they should be shunned by it, or at least made to feel in no uncertain terms that society wishes to respond in the most negative terms to their actions. They should not be brought to society’s (even local society’s) bosom; they ought not be given titles which may further exacerbate their sense of self-importance; they shouldn’t be allowed to ingratiate themselves with local elites who in any case should be able to see through the base flattery they use towards this end; and what is more, no right-thinking person should give any heed to anything they say, especially when it involves character assassination of blameless people.

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.

Somalia is indeed a sad country, wracked by poverty and religious extremism. Quite recently has emerged the story of a 13 year-old girl who alleged she had been raped. When her father brought her before what passes for the authorities in that lawless country she was accused and convited of adultery and fornication and was sentenced to death by stoning. The girl, crying and begging for her life, was then placed in a hole on a football pitch which was then filled in with earth upto her neck. Fifty men then proceeded to throw large stones at her head. After about a quarter of an hour the authorities sent some nurses who dug her out. They stated that she was still alive, just; so they were ordered to put her back in the hole and replace the earth, until the sentence was fully carried out.

Such barbarism has no place in Islam, but before we start pointing a racist finger at the Islamic faith, let’s admit that such an atrocity could easily happen in the Christian west; instead of stones the hapless victim would be pelted with insinuations and calumny.

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.

Slavery is as old as human history, and if like so many blinkered historians we consider human history as only being as old as written records, well then it’s much older. It stems from a really nasty need to own and possess another human being, to control not only their waking moments but when they are asleep too.

Many people’s visions of slavery centre around stereotypes of the Deep South of the USA, maybe coloured by Gone With the Wind or Roots. It is far too easy to see slavery in simple racial terms: the abduction of black children to work for white people. But this is simplistic: slavery has existed within Africa for centuries, maybe millennia. What’s more the Roots stereotype whereby the young Kunta Kinteh was kidnapped by greedy white monsters and torn from his black brothers to enter a world of degradation and exploitation was not that common. It was far more common for the young black boys (and girls) to be captured in internecine conflicts and then sold to white slavers by local African rulers in return for money, weapons or often mere trinkets.

Most people assume that slavery was ended in the US by the Civil War. They also know that it was replaced by a culture of repression and discrimination of black people every bit as horrible as slavery. Some people will also have heard of Hull’s most famous son, William Wilberforce who persuaded the English government to turn its back on slavery in the early nineteenth century. Few people will be aware that slavery still exists; one of the regions where it seems endemic is in a belt of territory in Africa embracing the nations of Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.

These countries have outlawed slavery. Mauritania did so in the late ’70s, yet it is estimated that up to 18 per cent of its’ population live as slaves. Recently, a former slave has won compensation from her country’s government for its failure to resccue her from enslavement despite claimng to have outlawed the practice in its territory.

Hadijatou Mani was born in the impoverished nation of Niger twenty-four years’ ago. When she was twelve her family was compelled to sell her to a farmer for the equivalent of $500. She was raped and forced to bear her owner’s children. She was also beaten incessantly. All the while she had to work as an unpaid domestic and farm-worker performing tasks including carrying water and looking after animals. On numerous occasions she attempted to escape and flee back to her family, and each time they, no doubt reluctantly, brought her back to her “owner”. Two years’ ago he granted her a “certificate of liberation”, yet he insisted on viewing her as one of his wives and when she married another man she was charged with bigamy and jailed.

In 2003 the government of Niger formally outlawed slavery in its territory, though most observers (both inside and outisde the country) viewed this as mere window-dressing.  Hadijatou learned of the decree and also learned, even more importantly, that the status of being a slave she had been compelled to accept was unnatural and illegal. This year she brought a case against her government for failing to protect her from being treated as a slave and its failure to enforce its own ban on the practice, and this week a regional court found in her favour, granting her compensation. Significantly the government of Niger has accepted the judgement and has promised not to appeal it. Hadijatou has vowed to spend the money on building a house, buying land and sending her children to school  sp that they can gain the education she was denied during her youth.

The judgement was handed down by the court of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas). When this was set up there were many who felt it was no more than a joke, yet it has shown that it has the capacity to make real-life decisions that impact positively on the livest of the many million of mainly poor people who inhabit the ECOWAS territory.

Hadijatou Mani is a very brave young woman, yet there are many more young girls like her who are still in slavery. Some don’t even realise they are slaves and that their conditions are wrong. Hopefully Hadijatou’s victory will help them too.

I see that the leader of Chile’s notorious Caravan of Death, Gen Arellano Stark and five of his underlings have received jail sentences for the extra-judicial killing of people whose politics they didn’t like during the rule of Augusto Pinochet.

The Caravan of Death was like a mobile execution squad who went up and down the country seeking out victims whom the authorities were just too squeamish to wipe out themselves. Their actions were known to Pinochet, the man with whom the former British Prime Minister sipped tea and ate cake. If only she had been able to use the Caravan of Death against the miners, the Militant Tendency, Irish terrorists and their synpathisers in Eire and the CND.

Of course, here in leprechaun land General Pinochet had a considerable fan-club, especially amongst those who were on the way to doing God’ s work. True, he had murdered a democratically-elected president and murdered hundreds, if not thousands of innocent people, but hadn’t he saved Chile from “Godless communism?” The fact that Salvador Allende (pronounced Ayende or Azhende and not Allendy as some conservative politicans believed) was never a communist, or that he had the support of many members of the country’s hierarchy, is forgotten. Pinochet’s supporters point to the fact that when he survived a leftist assassination plot the bullets left the impiression of the Virgin Mary on the car window. They point to the extraordinary economic success enjoyed by Chile thanks to Pinochet, but that ignoramus knew nothing about economics; any economic success was the work of technocrats like Buchl the finance minister.