Today there are more than a hundred armed conflicts in the world. Surprise. I thought there were two, Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Palestine. Well, no. He had a vague idea that there were five or six more. But a hundred?
It must be true because Martin Griffiths, the head of OCHA, the United Nations Organization for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told me so. Griffiths and his people are in the news today for the central role they play in the impossible mission of alleviating the horrors of the war in Gaza. But Griffiths says that it is even more desperate what is happening in a civil war two thousand kilometers away, far from the television cameras, alien to the moral conscience of the West, of the Global South, of almost everyone.
"If there was a table that measured suffering in the world, Sudan would be number one," says Griffiths. This is what we have in the third largest country in Africa: urban centers reduced to rubble; seven million displaced; 25 million without enough food, starvation in sight. All in the last nine months. In the last 30 years, 1.7 million deaths. In other words, murders.
Because let's not forget the irony that Orwell discerned, that killing for a political cause confers "respectability" on the murderer. It frees him from punishment for what in normal life would be a heinous crime. As has been the case of the main person responsible for the nightmare that more than half of the population of Sudan lives.
Omar al-Baixir, dictator of this country from 1989 to 2019, cause of the calamity that continues today, was accused in 2005 of genocide at the International Court of Justice, just like Israel today. The judges ignored that particular accusation, but found him guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Two international arrest warrants were issued against him in 2009 and 2010, but nothing happened. Although it could have happened.
In 2015, Al-Baixir visited South Africa, the country that at this very moment is leading the process for genocide against Israel at the same International Court of Justice. The obligation of the South African government was to arrest and deliver Al-Baixir to court, but it refrained from doing so. Out of African solidarity, or something, he let her go back home.
Where am I going with all this? two things First, to flog myself – and, dare I say, most of my dear readers – for paying so little attention to distant conflicts like Sudan's, in which the victims are not they are people more or less like us (the Ukrainians, for example), not "chosen" like the Israelis or the Palestinians, but black Africans or exotic Asians like the Rohingya in Burma or the Uyghurs in China.
Second, and related to the previous one, point out that not all the hypocrisy or all the barbarities that exist have to do with rich countries or great powers. In our confusion, we tend to think that the West, or Russian imperialism, or Chinese cynicism moves the strings of the world. They move quite a few, yes, but understanding the conflicts in strictly "geopolitical" terms does not take us to the crux of the matter.
More correct, in my opinion, was the UN man, Martin Griffiths, when I spoke to him this week. "The hundred or more conflicts in the world are not essentially battles between West and East, or between the Global South and the privileged North, although these may in several cases be their manifestations", Griffiths told me, who has spent half a century mediating in wars. "It's worse than that. It is more primordial. It is a betrayal of the fundamental values for which societies have fought for centuries", he stated.
The fundamental value is "you shall not kill". What defines the progress of civilization is the value for human life. Barbarians like Al-Baixir or Putin or Netanyahu or Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, kill for their causes, which may be more or less noble, more or less justified. But what they all have in common is the willingness to annihilate anyone if they think they will contribute to their goals. The most prolific murderous examples of the last century have been given by Stalin, Mao and Hitler, all three willing to exterminate millions to achieve their respective visions of heaven on earth.
On a lesser scale of criminality, but similar in the essence of his mental processes, we have the case of an individual that Jordi Évole recently interviewed for Netflix, ETA leader Josu Ternera. ETA committed 90% of its 850 murders after the death of Franco, once Spain had already reached democracy. (90%!) But Josu Ternera was unable to recognize the absurd atrocity of his actions. The cause, in this case that of Basque "freedom", had justified everything.
In different circumstances, but in the same way, the Argentine military leaders who ordered the torture, disappearance and death of thousands of people in the 1970s thought the same. I saw a documentary on TV about the 1985 trial in which they were prosecuted. One after the other they argued in their defense, with genuine indignation, that they had acted for the good of the country.
They would all say the same thing if faced with a court. All of them – Putin, Netanyahu, Al-Baixir, Ternera, General Videla, Hitler, Stalin, Mao – did what they did for a noble, necessary and altruistic goal. I am horrified and fascinated by these characters. They are normal people in their everyday lives (“the banality of evil”), who eat and shit and love their children or, as in the case of Hitler, their dogs. But they become convinced of an idea, a great, sacred, epic idea that erases compassion, that gives them license to betray what Martin Griffiths calls the fundamental values of humanity, and that turns them into fanatical killers.
And the most terrible thing is that they will always be there, in their madness or self-delusion, long after the fall of the Yankee or Russian imperialisms, or Hamas or Netanyahu, or communism or capitalism, or what we call today "geopolitics". There will always be, in every corner of the Earth, a defective gene in human DNA, a destructive deviation from the decency and civilization to which almost all of us aspire, including the population of Sudan.
