No money for lifeboats

Syria is dying. As we speak the death toll has risen to 93,000 and the UN says that this is just a rough estimate and it is probable that there are many more, men, women and, especially, children who have died in this terrible conflict while the world watches helplessly unable, both politically and financially, to police the situation as it has been doing as best it can since 9/11.

The USA and the EU are bankrupt

The USA and the EU are bankrupt. As we have seen with Muammar Gaddafi, no sooner have we lopped off the head of one tyrant than another dozen materialise just like the mythological Hydra.

The world hotspots North Korea, Syria and, now, Turkey are today continually in the news along with Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and, of course, the always volatile Middle East with the eternal thorn of Israel placed like the proverbial pork pie in a synagogue in the midst of the Islamic bedrock, caught between Sunni and Shiite conflicts and having to, like their patriarch King David, to contend with Goliaths on all sides.

Then we forget Afghanistan, wherein the British troops have been deployed since 2003 at humongous cost. And what about Myanmar? We have forgotten those brave Buddhists who, a couple of years ago, tried to achieve freedom of thought let alone other freedoms.

The focus of the world has turned away from places like Tibet and Chechnya. We can do absolutely nothing about them and it is because of them that the UN is held back from intervening, like it did in Libya, in places like Syria. There is no way that Russia and China will ever allow another Libya-type intervention without the UN falling apart. We cannot risk that.

So as Syria dies a horrible painful death we can do nothing but watch helplessly.

An Italian photographer called Sebastiano Nino Fezza posts harrowing photos daily on Facebook to the extent that I just cannot look at them anymore: children burnt and maimed or, even worse, falling from their parents’ arms like limp rag dolls in the superfluity of death while their fathers and mothers, each and every one of them, go through the incomparably unspeakable anguish that is epitomised in Michelangelo’s Pietà.

Looking at these earth-shattering images every day makes me feel helpless and petty. Who am I to be privileged enough to be living in a country like ours, which, although far from being perfect, is not experiencing this ruthless decimation, this total self-annihilation and, hopefully, never will?

We grumble and moan, for that is our nature, and, yet, have never experienced tear gas and grenades. Our children run around safe in the streets without the risk of being caught by snipers while we go about our daily business without sirens and explosions shattering our nerves at every turn.

All this is because of this man Bashar al-Assad whose austere and scholarly looks belie his innate ferocity and his inexorability. This is the man who has once again turned this land of caliphs and crusaders into a land of death and destruction where Bellona and the Grim Reaper ride alongside in an orgy of blood and fire.

I cannot look at Fezza’s photos anymore. Mind you, we have become almost immune to images of blood and fire to the extent that we can munch through our TV suppers without our digestive systems being disrupted while watching the most horrendous of newsreels.

It has been like this since the advent of TV. I remember my childhood being full of a Vietnamese and a Congolese Greek chorus. The daily churn-out of news about war and insurrection, massacres and assassinations becoming an unimpressive repetition protected as we are by the distance of cyberspace. I sometimes ask myself whether it is real and whether while I was happily preparing laħam fuq il fwar (steamed beef), children are dying of starvation in Africa.

We may be living in a Fools’ Paradise. How can a total economic collapse be avoided? Watching this very alarming programme of BBC last week about the cost of British presence in Afghanistan was indicative that we, in the west, cannot afford to intervene anymore and, sooner or later, these people will have to be left to their own devices.

No doubt, tyrants and despots like Kim Jung Un and Assad know this and so does the latest in the series of political brutes, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. With the protests in Turkey being savagely suppressed, the unrest has been brought to Europe’s doorstep.

Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul, city of the world’s desire, a city that epitomises Roman and Islamic cultures and secularised by the great Ataturk is under threat.

The very idea of Turkey joining the EU under these dire circumstances is out of the question and it is now patently obvious that there is no way that Erdogan’s government wants this to become a reality. This is why people of all walks of life and of every creed and political allegiance are protesting on Taksim Square.

Maybe the protesters are trying to convince us in the West that the thirst for democracy and social justice among the people of Turkey is very much alive and kicking and that it is up to the EU to intervene and save the day.

It is, sadly, too late.