jeudi, janvier 06, 2005 I read this very evocative excerpt from a blog once:From The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuscinski. One day I was wandering around the market in Kampala [capital of Uganda]. It was somewhat empty, many stalls were broken, abandoned. Amin had stripped and ruined the country. There was no traffic in the streets, and the shops, which Amin had earlier confiscated from their Indian owners, gaped with musty emptiness or were simply boarded up with wooden planks, plywood, or sheets of tin. Suddenly, a band of chilren came up the street that led up from the lake, calling, "Samaki! Samaki!" (fish in Swahili). People gathered, joyful at the prospect that there would be something to eat. The fishermen threw their catch onto a table, and when the onlookers saw it, they grew still and silent. The fish was fat, enormous. These waters never used to yield such monstrously proportioned, overfed specimens. Everyone knew that for a long time now Amin's henchmen had been dumping the bodies of their victims into the lake, and that crocodiles and meat-eating fish must have been feasting on them. The crowd remained quiet. Then, a military vehicle happened by. The soldiers saw the gathering, as well as the fish on the table, and stopped. They spoke for a moment among themselves, then backed up to the table, jumped down, and opened the tailgate. Those of us who were standing nearby could see the corpse of a man lying on the truck bed. We saw the soldiers heave the fish onto the truck, throw the dead, barefoot man onto the table for us, and quickly drove away. And we heard their coarse, lunatic laughter.
Someone once told me that Sri Lankan crabs were huge because they fed on the flesh of dead men water-buried from the Ganges River in India. I thought of the crabs again after the tsunami - and then remembered this passage after today's reports on human trafficking in Indonesia. The darkness of these reports rival the warm, fuzzy feeling you get after seeing the outpouring of money and aid from all over the world - it's almost as if some force has to balance the goodness of this past week's actions with evil. The religious boundary has been overlooked to give aid to Indonesia - one of the region's hotbeds for terrorist breeding programmes, the political gauntlet has been lowered by the Tamil Tigers who have sort of stepped away from bothering the Sri Lankan government until this mess was semi-sorted out (I suspect that someone will get trigger happy before long though, but for now I'll take what I can get) - so if religion and politics can be laid aside for a while, why can't economics? People are worth money. Children are worth money. The sex trade lives - and by extension (or is it the other way around?) the slave trade exists, and there is money to be made in the adoption circuits. But to take advantage of a total tragedy, to pose as aid workers or parents - that is simply abominable. To pretend to be the face of a trusted person, when instead you are the devil... to be able to put aside your scruples, your principles, hell - to be able to put aside your HUMANITY and kidnap AND/OR BUY lost/orphaned children for your own material gain - this is the state of mankind today. We're in bad shape, people. [Tsunami #2 - We eat our own] |
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