Not about sympathy for the devil
While the Maltese Parliament was “busy” debating the divorce referendum question – on a matter which should have been sorted out with the introduction of civil marriage nearly four decades ago, had Dom Mintoff not worried too much on the implications...
While the Maltese Parliament was “busy” debating the divorce referendum question – on a matter which should have been sorted out with the introduction of civil marriage nearly four decades ago, had Dom Mintoff not worried too much on the implications it would have had on housing – the epicentre of world news shifted from North Africa and the Middle East to another side of the globe. We went to sleep believing the massacres in Libya and Bahrain – incidentally, we don’t hear much condemnation for the latter country’s unelected tyrant, double standards? – were the worst news stories of the month, to wake up to the exorbitant death count in the Japan earthquake and tsunami devastation. The world’s top journalists packed their bags and moved on to Japan. Libya’s population of six million and Bahrain’s million pale to insignificance next to Japan’s 100 million.
Only a natural disaster of these proportions could eclipse the horrors of Libya and Bahrain. And there it was, giving the dictatorial regimes enough time to charge in on the opposition while the world’s cameras were focused elsewhere. And if the world media doesn’t cover it, it isn’t really happening.
Surely, the catastrophe the Japanese people are experiencing deserves all the news coverage it is getting. We all felt powerless as we watched – in real time – thousands of lives swept away overnight. Still, the Libya and Bahrain problems won’t go away just because they have been relegated to items number three or four on the world news stage, until last Thursday night that is.
But unlike the case of the loss of life of people carried away by the fierce waters, we have no reason to feel just as helpless in the face of the destruction unfolding in our neighbourhood where human beings are being killed for daring to rise against their oppressors.
Some days ago I had the opportunity to meet again – after many years – and work with, my former conflict resolution professor, Richard Rubenstein, who was in Malta lecturing in the MSc in conflict analysis and resolution and the MA in conflict resolution and Mediterranean security international programme at our University. He strongly believes in the potential role of Malta in the Libya issue.
Prof. Rubenstein insists that first – hard as it is – we must start thinking out of the bad guy/good guy straitjacket. On March 11, he wrote in his blog www.reasonstokill.com: “With Gaddafi now pushing back, that nation is moving rapidly towards civil war. I’m convinced that a long, murderous struggle can be avoided and that the Libyan people can be empowered to solve their own problems without military intervention, provided that the simplistic good guy/bad guy narrative now being peddled by interventionists and their pet media is not allowed to dictate policy.”
While here, Prof. Rubenstein wrote a piece for The Times underlining that “even where one party was clearly at fault, using mass violence against him only weakened the society’s capacity for peaceful reconstruction”.
He explains how conflict resolution is about analysing “violence-producing” problems and cites, among others, the Mozambique peace process as one example of how peace can be achieved in this way. A civil war, where over one million Mozambicans died, ended with a general peace agreement in 1992 after the different parties were brought to a negotiated settlement of the conflict.
Prof. Rubenstein maintains that conflict resolution would work if there’s an organisation or a nation that is ready to take on a third-party role provided it remains impartial even when the “bad guys” are using violence against the “good guys”. He admits it is hard to stick to this impartiality but points out that using mass violence against the one party that is evidently at fault only debilitates that society’s capacity for peaceful rebuilding.
In the preface to his book Reasons To Kill (2010), Prof. Rubenstein says how “many people still perceive the 9/11 terrorists as devils, which removes them from the universe of historical causes and effects. Satanic figures do evil because they are evil, period. Talking about why they do what they do not only seems senseless but also exposes the speaker to the charge of ‘sympathy for the devil’”.
Many of us, understandably, are in this mindset; we haven’t been trained and we are not encouraged to think outside this particular box. This makes the situation all the more difficult to address. The interests of the Libyan and the Bahraini people struggling for human rights and democracy must be the major priority, but alas, it is hardly ever that way.
Dr Dalli is shadow minister for the public service and government investment.