Georgia Conflagration Brings Us Back To the Bad Old Days

When I closed the last column with the statement ‘let the games begin’ I had no idea that the opening event would be so spectacular, so extraordinary or so total. For sure the visitors were being welcomed, Bush, Putin and Sarkozy amongst them. But also China was telling them, and the rest of us, that it was amongst the oldest societies on earth and certainly one of the most inventive.

Fats Waller used to sing ‘it ain’t the meat it’s the motion’. But viewers of the Olympic opener don’t need to be told that size really does matter. And, to be sure, something like Riverdance gave the emerging Celtic Tiger its own high-stepping entrée. But ya can’t beat the capacity to mobilise tens of thousands of worker bees and billions of yuan.
But lest the Chinese think everyone’s going to roll over and play dead, we should note that the Russian and Georgian armies got dug into each other just as the games began. Not only that, in the restive Chinese province of Xinjiang, just before the games began, two men drove a truck into a police station Such violence is notable for being in stark contrast to the general sense of goodwill that the Olympiad generates. And each atrocity, particularly the Xinjiang attack, also reminds us that terror is never far away.
That’s a sombre note but it’s apposite too because (in this year of many anniversaries) we have just passed the tenth anniversary of the Omagh bombing.
Yes, it was but one atrocity among many. The rocks and stones across Northern Ireland resonate with the sound of bomb and bullet and the screams of the dead and dying. So regular were the horrors that Belfast surgeons developed a whole range of innovative techniques that are now part and parcel of the modern medical toolbox. For example, each football star who has his cruciate ligament repaired can thank the doctors who treated victims of kneecappings…
But the Omagh bombing was an act of especial callousness and cynicism. Al-Qaeda would have been proud of it, the car-bomb left in a busy street packed with shoppers to explode without warning.
It was the work of dissidents and was intended, without doubt, to destroy the then fledgling peace process. The fact that it didn’t and that Northern Ireland has moved on so much makes it seem further away than ten years.
That’s good, and with each passing year it becomes harder to imagine a return to the world that spawned such gore. But it’s also important to remind ourselves that it happened. Nobody can be allowed to forget.
To those who swivel in their chairs and point to other victims and other atrocities one says sure, let’s not forget them either. But Omagh was the last and in many ways the worst. It is a blackly perfect expression of the worst tendencies of militarists who become so bound up in their actions that they lose sight of the world outside and of what the rest of us might consider normal morality.
The militarists of the Real IRA were and are merely the latest in a long line of physical force republicans. They have their counterparts on the loyalist side. In turn, their flaws are writ large in the actions of others, in the Balkans, in the Gulf, in Darfur, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan and so on.
It is one of the triumphs of our age that jaw-jaw has replaced war-war in Northern Ireland. On a greater scale it is one of the triumphs of civilisation that over the last fifty years Europe has managed to build a Union based on cooperation and alliance, one that emerged from the follies and horrors of five centuries of war and has given peace, stability and prosperity to a part of the world once more blood-soaked and war-riven than the present Middle East or Africa or indeed Georgia and Ossetia.
For this reason it was puzzling to find Irish anti-war activists campaigning against the Lisbon Treaty on the grounds that they opposed militarism, and in the company of some who have only recently abandoned militarism at that.
The whole point about the Northern Ireland peace process and of the European Union is that we can construct other ways of resolving conflict than blowing each other into smithereens. The Omagh bombing should be recalled to remind us of that. We can only look at the events in Georgia with sympathy – whatever the rights and wrongs you can bet your ass that the principal victims will be the innocent bystanders, as happens in wars throughout history and as happened in Omagh.
People don’t want to be scratching these old scars and raking over the embers of the past. They’d much rather be watching the Olympics. And many of those in positions of power don’t especially want to be reminded either. But, as the German Jewish writer Ingeborg Hecht puts it, ‘to remember is to heal’. And where Omagh is concerned, there’s still healing to be done.