Rajpal's Column

Look around, there might be a child somewhere

Analysts, pundits and commentators who have had a field day in the past few weeks with the World Trade Centre bombings in the news coupled with our own Sri Lanka First peace campaign, have never had it so good. It's almost as if the world had become a better place for them, when what was merely reporting conflict and carnage at home, has now become an enterprise of reporting disaster and tragedy both here and abroad.

Theories abound, and there are more doomsday scenarios than ever before, and that's all very good for conflict analysts and commentators who have lapped it all up with great almost audible relish.

Though the young are often in the media spotlight when a conflict is reported, it is rarely that children are the subject of discussion in any analysis, especially after a particularly spectacular attack,or a particularly spectacular enterprise, such as the hand linking campaign of last week.

CNN rarely talked of children in all of its 13 days of visual diarrhoea on the World Trade Centre attacks. "Visual diarrhoea" is not a term meant to be disparaging of the Americans, especially at a time when Uncle Sam's representative here, the avuncular Ashley Wills has thanked all Sri Lankans profusely in the newspapers for the messages of condolences offered.

But, whether it is talk of war, or talk of peace, all of themselves conspicuously leave out the children because the adults insist on making a mess of the state of global affairs.

These days, it seems, all flippancy aside, that everything has turned on its head. When the Sri Lankan elite was talking war, the American elite was talking peace, and was basically shoving peace to the point of throttling us right there in the jugular. Now, when the Americans are talking peace, our own elite in their business suits and ties with dutiful hair-dyed wives behind them, are standing straight - faced and handsomely for peace.

As much as the Americans didn't get war-like and fanatical when infants were getting killed (a million of them, through sanctions in Iraq) the Sri Lankan business elite was not concerned about peace until they got hit. Now big business is all in a lachrymose cry-cry state; but there were hundreds of children dying in the war before they got hit, and nobody got so Solo-U about peace at all.

Already, some conflict writers are sniggering, and commentators are almost embarrassed. A serious weekly commentary, talking of children. Tut- tut.

That's very childlike. Turn the page, and speak of greater concerns such as "the contours of the new emerging consensus on terrorism", and whether Osama bin Laden is a improvement of Prabhakaran or vice versa?

But, last week's happenings both here and abroad seem to have created an increasing feeling of liminality in terms of time. There is a greater sense of foreboding now. Gunadasa Amarasekera writes that the future is probably very bleak as a war between the Western powers and the Islamic forces will mean that Sri Lanka and similarly placed countries will have to fend for themselves.

It may mean that the present crop of adults will very soon work themselves into a global catastrophe, and that children will soon have to bear the brunt of it all, and take over the world prematurely. In fact, in one way, this seems to be what Gunadasa Amarasekera is suggesting. He says the JVP are the children in the mother and child reunion that is the PA-JVP axis. But then, he is talking metaphorically about children.

The real children, which CNN never shows, and Rupavahini or TNL never show, will be talking of this period perhaps 50 years from now, the way they talk of Pearl harbour or the year 1956 today. If any of the today's children are around, that is.

What will the "children" be saying then? One thing is for certain — they will not be talking of who the best conflict analyst or commentator was. But they will be talking of great wars that were rumbling in the landscape, ready to become full-blown, when there was supposed to be a great global case of prosperity due to globalization, and an advanced case of free-market success. They will talk of men of peace becoming men of war and men of war becoming men of peace, and how through all of it, they just knew that they are going to have to take over one day from a set of one hell of an addled bunch of adults. They will talk about how adults thought about peace and war in the same manner as campaigns to be waged.

And how the market brought about a lot of success, and made everybody hanker after the kind of riches the arms dealers possessed, but how in the end everybody was content with the crumbs, and looking at the advertisements. And how, even with their crumbs, they didn't have the time to enjoy some peace of mind, even in times of peace. Sure, I got carried away with all of this, but if CNN can, then who am I.

The Special Report

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