By Mayank Jain:
Incident 1: Heavily armed Taliban militants took over the Kabul airport and attacked it with grenades fired from a rocket launcher. Only two days back, 42 people were killed in a suicide attack in Paktika province.
Incident 2: Israel launches ‘less lethal’ projectile to warn the inhabitants of Gaza’s small towns that they are about to be attacked by ammunition soon.
Incident 3: A Malaysian Airlines aircraft is shot down by militants mid-air and all of the 295 people on board lose their lives.
These are just some of the international headlines from past two days. It should bring shame to each one of us that we live in a world where propensity to be violent is ever increasing. We have all become inhabitants of a battlefield which is burning on all sides and as if that weren’t enough, governments are indulging in air strikes which take the form of sanctions and socio-economic oppression for those who don’t toe the line.
As I write this piece, the probe has already begun in the second major aircraft disaster of this year by the same airline. No matter what the result is, 295 innocent lives are lost forever. Among those dead were AIDS experts, including a former president of the International AIDS Society as they were heading to a conference in Melbourne, Australia. Irony looks us in the eye when another teenager on board the aircraft had ‘don’t panic’ stamped on his shirt, who had his whole life ahead of him was found lying dead in the marshlands near the city of Donetsk, which is a stronghold of pro-Russian protesters.
This incident of reckless violence has brought to light the real cost of ‘wars’ we fight, which are never limited to the countries fighting it. The 154 Dutch nationals possibly had nothing to do with any of Russia’s aggression into Ukraine but they paid for it with their lives. Aren’t these the dark times which we have all been scared of, even when we read about it in tales?
The wrongs of one government/country are responded with an equally heinous action by its counterpart and those who sit far away and choose not to intervene become perpetrators of this war. Yes, we all have collectively started these wars no matter how much we deny it.
Ukraine has cried foul at the part of Russia and blamed it on the missile system called Buk. It is said to be the weapon of destruction here which fires a 5.7-metre, 55-kg missiles for up to 28km. “MH17 is not an incident or catastrophe, it is a terrorist attack,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko tweeted.
Meanwhile, a conversation transcript as released by Ukraine’s security agency, the SBU has brought to light a conversation between Russian security forces and the militants just after the aircraft was shot down and they descriptively discuss the aftermath and loss of lives in the ‘accident’.
While we contemplate on the facts of the incident, a Malaysian Jihadist has blamed lack of access to technology with the militias to ascertain whether an aircraft is of a “friend or a foe”. This argument conveniently ignores the basic reality that killing hundreds by mistake makes no case for killing more people to take over a troubled country out of heedless jingoism instead of helping it recover from the crisis.
How despicable is it that we have countries fighting for dominance over each other and their own populace cries and howls for peace? How unfortunate are the times we live in where almost 300 hundred people lose their lives because of some war mongers who are out to kill and demolish every single iota of humanity that is left in the world.
As we switch channels and conveniently flip the newspaper pages and run away from the wretched reality of the world, the victims of the war will grieve and hope to last another day among the animals we have raised, whom we call ‘humans’.
Why is a human life worth so less? Is it already too late to ask?
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