Georgia Conflagration Brings Us Back To the Bad Old Days
A glorious Olympic opening ceremony suggests a world at peace. But burning villages in Georgia and South Ossetia reminds us that human conflict is never far away.
The Whole Hog, 15 Aug 2008
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.
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