Climate of Fear
The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World
by
Wole Soyinka
Also by Wole Soyinka
The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka
Aké: The Years of Childhood
The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis
The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness
Myth, Literature and the African World
The Interpreters
Season of Anomy
The Swamp Dwellers
The Lion and the Jewel
The Trial of Brother Jero
A Dance of the Forests
Kongi’s Harvest
Madmen and Specialists
The Strong Breed
The Road
Death and the King’s Horseman
The Bacchae of Euripides
Opera Wonyosi
A Play of Giants
Requiem for a Futurologist
Idanre and Other Poems
Poems from Prison
A Shuttle in the Crypt
Ogun Abibiman
Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems
Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known
Preface
King Basayev and the Massacre of Innocents
The sacred — including the infant crèche — appears to diminish by the day…
The above line, an admission of my fears for an emerging pattern, appears in “ ‘I Am Right; You Are Dead,’ ” the last of the five Reith lectures published in this volume. Those fears would be hideously realized in Belsan, in the Russian Federation, through the agency of no less an individual than the warrior Shamil Basayev, to whom I called attention in 2000, after his invasion of Dagestan. Regarding his exploits and pronouncements, I wrote:
Let me take your minds back to an incident in the Chechnyan war that you may all have forgotten, since that episode has long become subsumed under the culture of competitive atrocities that has marked the war between the Chechnyan nationalists and the Russian state. I was quite sympathetic to the aspirations of Chechnya for some form of self-determination. I still am, but I could not help taking apprehensive note of this minor episode; it was illustrative of much of the conditioning that goes with certain wars of liberation whose declarations warn one, in advance, of the oppressive transformation that would inevitably take place after the phase of liberation is over.
Taking a little time off from his insurrectionary war, a war that sought to carve out further pieces of Russian territory, the Dagestan, and unite them with Chechnya to create a Greater Islamic Republic, the warrior Basayev declared: “When people ask me who’s going to benefit [that is, from the war, with all its slaughter and suffering], I say God. Allah will get a new part of the world.” Note, not Basayev, not Chechnya, not Dagestan but — Allah! The disruption of life, the kidnappings, general mayhem, rape, and bloodshed had to be understood as sufferings undertaken on behalf of — God! And what arguments can any mere mortal propose against a privileged leader who is evidently in direct satellite communication with God? Well then, a piece of real estate for the unreachable God, but what is in it for God’s representative on earth?
The answer of course is Power! The Ecstasy of Power.The Space of Domination. Basayev’s response would have been worthy of General Franco, or Mussolini. Or Pinochet. All of them great churchgoers, never known to miss a Sunday morning mass or neglect the pomp of the cathedral on national occasions. (“The Banality of Power,” Lettera Internazionale 80)
Basayev’s territorial ambitions on behalf of Allah finally engulfed the little town of Beslan, and with it the sense of pious fulfillment.When anticipation of, and salivation over, the trickle of power sinks to the level of cruelty to helpless children, one is tempted to accept that all that is left to say is — nothing. The rest is silence. It is an admission that humanity has finally touched the peak of apprehension and the nadir of impotence. In a grim irony, however, this may even spell the end of fear, since what many — across cultures — hold as a universal barrier to the unthinkable has surely, definitively, been breached, and there is nothing left to dread.
It is not the first time that children have served as sacrificial lambs. There are thousands of infant skulls in the open-air museums of Rwanda, they litter the killing fields of Cambodia, children’s throats are piously severed in the classrooms of northern Nigeria, children are abducted and forced into military service all over the African continent, and even infants were not spared the Nazi gas chambers of Germany. Beslan, however, was a graphic, unraveling event, a gloating performance before the eyes of the world, and the images remain to haunt human conscience. The retentive power of those images is not allowed to dissipate through considerations of an accidental triggering of a tragic chain of events. No, it is reinforced by the self-commendation of the mastermind himself as he recounts, in a statement published on a Lithuanian website, details of preparations for the assault, and the promise of more to come: “The fight continues without any rules, and without the connivance of the entire world, so we are not bound by any obligations to anyone and we will fight the way we find comfortable and beneficial.”
Basayev’s chilling itemization of the cost of the operation — eight thousand euros for close to a thousand lives, half of them children’s — compels one to withdraw inward and reexamine every proposition that has hitherto governed human coexistence. When the mind touches the emotion that is so inadequately conveyed in the words the rest is silence, therefore, it must be understood that this is not a literal silence. It does not equate to resignation. Each language, I am certain, carries its own equivalent, a collective sign that is the residuum of immobilizing experience, each one defiant of a literal translation, because it is always colored by the triggering experience itself. Drawing from mine, I would find an equivalent in Oro p’esi je: “The end of discourse.” The events of Beslan have profoundly impoverished normal discourse, even to the point of near extinction.
The gray zones of moral definitions where relativity reigns and remote causes are evoked to justify the abhorrent will continue to haunt certain casts of mind. The rest will insist on the primacy of an ethical will, one that dictates that some deeds demand to be judged within an identifiable and shared moral universe, however restricted. For clarity, therefore, on behalf of the latter position, with which I identify, we have to define just what constitutes the compass of morality that makes it possible to judge the events of Beslan.
It is plainly the opposition of the strong, as aggressor, to the weak — unsuspecting, unprepared, and innocent. A band of heavily armed, battle-seasoned adults invades a sanctuary of children. They deprive them of water and food, watch impassively as they drink their own urine in desperation, subject them to physical and psychological terror, bayonet one, shoot others in the back as they flee certain death, and finally incinerate them in the hundreds. The children were robbed of their dignity and deeply scarred in their very vulnerability. Once again, in a most harrowing setting to which the world was summoned as audience, we saw enacted the rhetoric: There are no innocents. Such rhetoric cannot be permitted to constitute the language of the world or delineate its moral compass.
Lapses in governance must be objectively examined, flawed and cruel policies of state identified and changed — in short, all remote causes, especially the political, subjected to a remedial process.To have these preponderate over a basic ethical imperative, however, is the beginning of the corrosion of the ethical will, a surrender that coarsens and then deadens humane sensibilities, reconciles society with absolute evil. The ethical will is the redeeming assertion that, even when all other considerations of social conduct are subjected to the fortuitous, one, an ethical core, remains inviolate.The matter of taking children as hostages does not require much exertion in the application of such a will. There has to be a guaranteed zone of the sacrosanct, even among the self-righteous, a zone that, when breached, draws down a sustained universal response. The zone of children is one such, and remains beyond expediency. Acceptance of any such violation makes moral cowards of us all, and leaves us in complicity with other cowards of any struggle who lay siege on the helpless.