This Really Gets My Goat

As the outcry against the Pakistani governments plan to mine the Durand Line grows, I am reminded of the title of a Ray Bradbury novel published in 1985, Death Is A Lonely Business. Death is a lonely business. Step on an anti-personnel landmine, and it’ll be a random and gory one too.

As the Adopt a Minefield website points out, landmines are ‘indiscriminate’ killers that ‘last forever’. In other words, they don’t care who they kill (landmines laid in WW2 are still killing people) and they will never biodegrade into a puddle of organic mush (that latter bit will presumably be the victim’s job). At the beginning of the 20th century, 80% of landmine victims were military personnel; today 90% of landmine victims are civilians. Exploding landmines have been used in conflict since the 14th or 15th century, when the Ming Dynasty got bored with vases and decided to do something really useful with ceramics.

Anti-personnel landmines were commonly used by armies, mercenaries and other merchants of death till the last quarter of the 20th century, when a concerted effort by human rights activists led to the ratification of the Ottawa treaty against the development, manufacturing, stockpiling and trading of anti-personnel landmines by 122 signatories. Today, there are 155 signatories. Pakistan is not one of them. Our army reserves the right to not only use but also export this ‘cheap’ way to restrict and control movement- cheap for those who don’t happen to pay with their lives or limbs anyway.

UNICEF estimates that up to 40% of landmine victims are children under the age of 15. The mortality rate of female victims is also higher than that of adult males, since women have less access to prompt medical attention or artificial limbs. Landmines impact the environment too, damaging soil, reducing forest cover, polluting water with heavy metals and affecting the food chain. The young, the weak, the disenfranchised, the disregarded, these then will be the ones most impacted by the mining of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Such visionary, Machiavellian brilliance, I’m surprised no one thought of it earlier. I suggest the geniuses behind it go play a quick game of mine Frisbee while the rest of us prepare a suitable snack for them-energetic little boys need lots of fuel you know. Something light with mayo and Tiger Fugu, perhaps.

Some people have difficulty understanding why weapons like anti-personnel landmines, nerve gases, Kalashnikovs, nuclear weapons, missiles etc continue to circulate and propagate. These are probably the same people who have difficulty understanding why we are cutting down trees instead of planting them, erecting power plants rather than windmills or solar panels, and having leisurely baths as opposed to agitating for potable water. To these people I say ‘hai baicharay’ and ‘follow the money stupid’. The arms industry is a global behemoth, accounting for over 900 billion dollars in trade per year. Bradbury didn’t just rightly peg Death as lonely, he also called it a business. This is the age of business. Big business, little business, show business, the only way to weather it with sanity seems to be making sure it’s none of your business.

In the poem Five Ways to Kill A Man, written shortly after the second world war, British poet Edwin Brock (1927-1997) examined the loss of humanity facilitated by military conflict, filleting the arbitrary, cruel nature of modern ways to take life in five effortless stanzas. He began with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, moved to jousting in medieval times, nerve gas in the trenches of the first world war and the atom bombs dropped in the second before ending with “These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man./Simpler, direct, and much more neat/ is to see that he lives somewhere in the middle/ of the twentieth century, and leave him there.” As the distance between killer and victim continues to grow, our humanity continues to be dimished by it. Pointless, violent death is now just something that happens to other people, like wisdom teeth, only more permanent.
Death at a distance is not just a human to human exchange. A friend told me yesterday about a site called www.ebakra.com. Pious Muslims without easy access to a goat or the stomach for trawling slaughter markets can avail of the services offered by Qureshi frozen foods ‘online convinience store’, browsing their pictures of bakra and dunba hopefuls before selecting one to be delivered (alive and kicking) to them on Eid-ul-Azha. Moving away from the headshots of assorted beribboned and dyed livestock with code, weight, price SOLD tagged below them, the eyes are dragged to the banner proclaiming ‘Slaughtering Services coming soon.’ How will that work? Will it be taped and webcast ala AlQaeda executions? Sent as an email attachment? Bounced from cell phone to cell phone? How long before someone photoshops George Bush’s head onto a dunba?

So livestock is now being peddled online with headshots and vital stats displayed, like shaadi online except with hairier candidates, and people are being kept in cages. And it isn’t just at Gunatanamo. Over the last few days the Human Rights Commision of Pakistan and the government have traded accusations about the manner of detention of ex Balochistan Chief Minister Akhtar Mengal, currently being tried in Karachi Central Prison. When a government spokesman dismissed reports in the press that an HRCP representative had found Mengal being tried in a ‘cage’, HRCP chairperson Asma Jehangir issued a statement saying “The bar metal structure in which Mengal was placed in the jail courtroom could not be described as less than a ‘cage’ and is shocking. “He was not allowed to meet his lawyer and small son, who were waiting outside the courtroom.”

American human rights activist and minister Martin Luther King (awarded the Nobel peace prize for tireless, inspired advocacy of nonviolence and equality) wrote in Strength to Love “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

Good thing none of the above is happening to me and hence is none of my business.