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SANKOH & SIN: There are, at the very heart of the British Government, those who once breached the sacred portals of the University of Cambridge Senate House and the imposing gates of many Colleges bearing aloft the red flag with its then familiar hammer and sickle, implements that mocked the soft hands of the banner wavers.
As a mob rampaged through London, protesting at global capitalism, I wondered how many of its number would end up inside the Houses of Parliament instead of uprooting the grass and planting marijuana outside them. Certainly anarchists and machine politicians of all stripes have more in common than any of them have with the apathetic.
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What spoiled the event was the inevitable presence of thugs who clothe their undiluted psychopathic nastiness in political garb. They did not care that they again destroyed most of the goodwill for the other marchers by wielding large pieces of metal and wreaking damage on everything in their path.
We saw a cousin of theirs, later on in the week, sending Sierra Leone back into turmoil, sadly aware that the only resolution to that problem is a putsch or an assassin's bullet.
The heart sinks further when reminded that Foday Sankoh is also Minister responsible for the diamond mines in the supposed coalition of reconciliation. Some commentators, who ought to know better considering their salaries, have stupidly equated Sankoh with Robert Mugabe, the double-dealing, land-grabbing, racist dictator of Zimbabwe, but there's no comparison. There is a fine line between political terrorism and straightforward criminal behaviour and Mugabe, a Marxist, is on one side of it with the political protesters from my Cambridge days now in power while Sankoh is on the other side with London's riotous thugs.
What is more, Mugabe's cynical land grab has a certain coherence whereas the relationship between all Sierra Leone's Governments and factions, military and civilian, and the Lebanese diamond mine owners has been shameful unto death; its wealth has been the ruin of this sad and fragmented, indifferent piece of bush. Once, inside a mine owner's compound in Sierra Leone eating the kind of meal that one would be hard pressed to find in Paris, I wondered how long it would be before the dogs and barbed wire would prove useless. But a scratch from a girl's best friend produces hundreds of gallons of blood.
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I would not put the authors of the vanity virus in the same class as Sankoh or many of the other petty dictators and warlords that have tramped up and down West Africa since the infinitely squalid arrival of Master Sergeant Samuel Doe. It is precisely the juxtaposition of extreme wealth and poverty and the chaotic nature of the international arms trade that have rendered most of West Africa ungovernable. But it has also fallen prey to a remarkable collection of people who would be better off in prison, or dead.
One could not quite say that of the perpetrators of memory-eating e-mails but I expect a good number of people will.
The single greatest tragedy in Western democracies is that every one of them values property more highly than people in their own laws and in their international dealings. It is then, somewhat ironic that Churchill should have got it in the pate from an anti-capitalist march because he was the only great leader of the Twentieth Century who persevered in a war that had no economic purpose whatsoever. There have been some smaller, similar events, such as the invasion of Kosovo but, by and large, it's the money that counts.
There has been a lot of demonstrating against capitalism but successive genocidal bouts have left our streets uncomfortably quiet. I can only add, for the sake of inserting a timely reminder to my compatriots, that the British have the added shame of demonstrating more often and vehemently about animal than human welfare; the very same people who protest at the transportation of live sheep would readily treat refugees less well.
Viruses will encircle the earth at regular intervals until immunising technologies are much more effective but AIDS will ravage the earth in spite of a rather intelligent assessment by the State Department that it poses a threat to political stability. It is now in a grave-to-grave contest with malaria for statistical supremacy but it has had a disproportionately ruinous effect on Africa's tiny and fragile middle and upper classes.
These we may count as sins of omission but the ground becomes much less clear in the arms trade where a blind eye is sometimes turned but where, too, we make calculations about domestic jobs and foreign death. It is an odd kind of greed because arms production (with the exception of hand guns which afford otherwise sane Americans the pleasure of killing each other) is always inflationary because it increases the money in the economy without increasing the goods in circulation. In spite of the many horrors on this earth I still thank God for the incompetence and short-sightedness of the greedy; if they were as effective as Sankoh and his ilk we would be in real trouble, forever.
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