14 January 2016
On The Wire
One false step…
by Neil Tidmarsh
The Times published a spectacular photograph this week by film-maker Seb Montaz-Rosset of a man walking a slackline between two hot air balloons high up in the sky. It’s beautiful but disturbing – even downright frightening – full of stress and danger and dread and potential disaster. Just like the world at the beginning of this brand new year of 2016.
More than one country is poised on the edge, only one false step away from complete destruction. You may think that Syria has already taken that step. But no; the civil war may be terrible, but what if it morphs into that threatened and dreadful showdown between the regional super-powers of Saudi Arabia (backed by the West) and Iran (backed by Russia)? The people of Yemen may well think that their country took that step into destruction a year ago, but the proxy-war there could go exactly the same way. Has Libya gone over the edge already? No. Warring factions have been tearing the country apart ever since Gaddaffi’s downfall, true, but Isis has barely begun there.
And in Venezuela, can things possibly get worse? After seventeen years under Presidents Chavez and Maduro, the country’s economy has collapsed. It has the second highest murder rate in the world (after Honduras), 12 million illegal weapons on its streets, and a colossal drugs trade dominated by ruthless mega-gangs, many of them operating from prisons which they run themselves. The US claims that Venezuela is the primary trans-shipment hub for drugs from Colombia, the world’s biggest cocaine producer, and that the trade goes right to the top – last month, the US drug enforcement agency arrested two nephews of President Maduro in Haiti and accused them of attempting to smuggle cocaine into the US. Last year, a defector and former bodyguard of the late President Chavez reportedly accused a high-ranking army-officer who became the speaker of parliament of having run a drugs cartel inside the army. Yet you could argue that until all those newly elected MPs get stuck into their opposition role, the country hasn’t even got up onto the wire yet.
Ominously, the photo in The Times was illustrating a piece about the tragic death of the young French daredevil and highwire artist Tancrede Melet, who fell 100 feet to his death from a rope attached to one of the hot-air balloons. Didn’t he have a safety harness? Wasn’t there a safety net? Do any of the countries mentioned above have a safety harness, a safety net, a life-line, a life jacket, body-armour, anything?
This is where things begin to seem a little less desperate as we peer ahead into the months to come. Venezuela has already thrown itself a life-line, in electing the whopping two-thirds majority the opposition needs to challenge the President’s power. A cease-fire is due to start in Syria on the 25th January: then the timetable and journey to peace and democracy thrashed out by nineteen countries in Vienna last year, and adopted by the UN last month, will begin, and all those parties in the civil war willing to sign up for democracy should be invited to join peace talks in Geneva. Cease-fires and peace negotiations have come and gone for the Yemen, but the UN is still working hard to bring them round again, and just because they have failed in the past does not mean to say that they will inevitably fail in the future, particularly with the war proving so expensive for Saudi Arabia. And in Libya, the UN has brokered a partnership between the government they recognise and the rival administration which controls at least half of the country, a partnership which the UN hopes will give them permission for international intervention to help the country sort out its problems, not the least of which is Isis’s metastasis there from Syria and Iraq.
And yet, and yet…
President Maduro is fighting hard to castrate the newly elected opposition. The Supreme Court (which he controls) has just barred three of the MPs from taking their place in parliament, thus robbing them of their two-thirds majority. They have been sworn in regardless, and now the Supreme Court is refusing to recognise parliament.
In Syria, the high-wire has been given a severe shaking by conflict between Russia and Turkey over the shooting down of the Russian warplane, and between Saudi Arabia and Iran over the execution of the Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, and this week by the Assad regime’s new offensive (reportedly backed by Russian planes) against the Southern Front alliance, a group committed to democracy and religious tolerance and described by the Carnegie Institute as Syria’s “last best hope”. Now the Army of Islam, one of the largest rebel groups, is reportedly threatening to boycott the peace talks. And the role of Assad in the peace talks remains unresolved.
In Libya, hardliners in both the government and its rival administration are refusing to recognise those elements who formed that partnership under UN auspices. And of course there are many more competing powers – armed militias, tribal groups, criminal gangs – to keep balanced on the high-wire than just those two rival authorities.
Two other stories in the news this week seemed to symbolically inhabit the same area as that photograph of the high-wire walker. One of them was darkly amusing. The other was just dark.
In Israel, where random knife attacks have become frequent recently, a journalist was trying out a protective vest on television. “Go on, stab me. Hard as you like.” The knife went straight through the vest and he was rushed to hospital with a bleeding wound to be stitched up.
In Turkey, police raided a factory and seized 1263 extraordinarily cheap ‘life-jackets’. They were cheap because they were fakes – the filler was not buoyant. Such ‘death-jackets’ were being sold to refugees making the sea crossing to Greece.
When assessing the safety harnesses, safety nets, life-lines, life jackets and body-armour thrown to those countries edging carefully along that high-wire in the months to come, it’s as well to bear in mind that they simply might not be up to the very demanding task, or that they might have been sabotaged by other parties. Or even that some of the suppliers might have hidden, sinister and ruthlessly selfish motives not related to their successful function.
