At Delhi airport, India, a lady who managed to flee laments: “I can’t believe the world abandoned Afghanistan. Our friends are going to be killed.” Well, good lady, that’s the world for you. In reality, for you, that “world” is the “world community”. And the “world community” is a community that has nothing to do with the world, as we know it. It’s a community of self-appointed guardians of their brand of democracy, busy trying to shove it down our throats and bullying us into swallowing it whole. The bullies have appropriated a nomenclature that none dare share, even if it’d rightly refer to others, too. They are “The West”, albeit not being the sole residents there. In effect, we know them as the USA and its ‘henchhunks’ (‘tough’ “henchmen”) from those in Europe that have the muscle to qualify as associates. But there are others. Those who were bundled out of prisons and taken across oceans, there to swat the natives out of existence or put them into permanently silent silos. The head of the ‘henchhunks’ ‘themselves’ started off by braving the furious waters of the Atlantic, just like the boatpeople taking on the death-traps that are the Mediterranean waters. The difference being that the poor souls who survive the Mediterranean never lay claim to the continent of their destination, much less their native hosts-to-be. It’s thus that Western Europe and its surrogates have lived to create “the world”. And so, for as far back as history-book records can stretch, this West has put its stamp of destructive force on practically all other countries. Some have managed to rise, despite it, and build muscled self-determination of their own. But many are still wallowing in the gloom they were confined to, if not still bearing the brunt of that ruinous boot-on-the-head. Lady, believe it or not, Russia, China and Japan have tasted that boot! Not to mention easy streets like Mexico, misfortune-ridden Haiti, others. Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Libya, on; the huffy hunks have passed there, leaving dislocation, disorder and distress in their wake. So, in their true-to-form kabuki dance, they came to Afghanistan with bombast and bluster to protect you from the ferocity of the insurgent Taliban, again. Bomber-planes, helicopter gunships, destroyers, missiles, more; who could stand in their way? Yet when they saw the Taliban were going to make minced meat of them, your ‘protectors’ cut and ran, leaving you high and dry. The more than 3,500 lives of their youth lost to their 20-year effort, the more than $2 trillion sunk in and, especially, their hapless protégés, all forgotten. Their war on terror lost, as other wars elsewhere before, their only win as we speak having been during WWII, as a friend tells me. But trust them for expertise on evacuation, if you remember the rooftop one of Vietnam! And so their giant airships were in attendance at Kabul, evacuating their citizens and their felines, wood and leather as furniture. This, even as they saw their Afghan collaborators of all these years, who clang on these planes for dear life, drop to their possible death, on take-off. All this, lady, is déjà-vu to Rwandans. In 1994 we saw, on the pain of our near-extermination, that that world does not exist. The “world community” is a fallacy. Just like in your case, when their UN and their embassies saw simple killing implements cutting up innocents they’d sworn to protect, they gathered their all and took to their heels. That’s when we realised that there is no folly like entrusting your peace, security, stability and defence in the hands of others. Your destiny is your business; nary a nation has had it built for it. As a society, all without the least discrimination of any kind, you must find cords that have always connected you in your history and build on those to get your own robust security apparatus. When state authority is in sync with the citizenry, you cannot go wrong. Religion, ethnicity and whatever else, their diversity need a turnaround to be the pillars of your unity. That unity will serve your empowerment and progress as a secure nation. When the world abandoned Rwanda and left her on what it thought was a wing-and-a-prayer base, she saw that as a chance to architect her own destiny. Today, we are all the stronger for it. The West has never been happy for not being consulted (where they’d have had the chance to keep us “in our place”) and it has been insults galore but, for us, it’s been like water off duck feathers. Nossa luta continua! For that, human life everywhere is of utmost importance to us. Eager to protect the dignity of that life, we are involved in many peacekeeping and bilateral life protection arrangements. That way, we can create our own world; a humane world. However, making sure not to cut relations with the other world, in the hope that we can give our ten cents in bending it towards humaneness. Then we can all finally have a true common world that’s harmonious. The views expressed in this article are of the writer.
