Bangladesh News

COPENHAGEN is more than a summit on a theme that affects all of us. It is a reminder to us, across the world, of the existentialist threats we live with, have lived with for ages on end. No, you do not need to travel back across millennia. You are not even called upon to peer back into the centuries to understand the complexities we have been going through in our times. There is the historical record that remains for us to consult any time we need to check and cross-check for reference.

Ignore all that and only focus on the turbulence we have lived through in these past three decades, the calamities we have come through and the dreams we have seen taking shape. And you do that because you try to understand the universe you are part of, the cosmic pattern of things you know underlies your existence.

The times we have inhabited may not have been as momentous as those that once shaped the lives of our fathers and of their fathers before them. But they have certainly shocked us into knowing that there are realities we cannot look away from, the illusions we cannot feel comfortable with. In the mid-1980s, the famine in Ethiopia galvanised a whole world into action; and it did because of the compassion that men like Bob Geldof brought into feeding the hungry in that unfortunate country.

That was one rare instance of people across cultural barriers, across political frontiers banding together in the job of saving a part of themselves from destruction. Tens of thousands died of hunger and yet there were many others who were saved. You sit back, after all these years, and ask yourself why governments around the world could not or would not do anything before Geldof did something in 1984.

Ah, but since when have governments (before Copenhagen) understood politics on a global scale? That all politics is local (with apologies to he who first voiced that sentiment) is an idea which has by and large been acknowledged by political classes everywhere, even in the matter of dealing with other nations. Think of Vietnam, of Tonkin. Or, in more recent times, focus on Iraq. In both instances, American politicians (include Britain’s Tony Blair in the second) have tried shoring up support for their domestic policies through undertaking pointless adventures abroad.

In Afghanistan, for reasons that were not to stand up to logical scrutiny, Leonid Brezhnev pushed the Soviet Union into a misadventure that was to lead to tragedy not just for Afghans but for other societies as well. The agony of Afghanistan, beginning with Moscow’s invasion, has not ended. And much as you admire Barack Obama for turning us all away from the dark legacy of the Bush-Cheney years, you have that certain queasy feeling somewhere inside you that Afghanistan could turn out to be his unravelling as a global leader.

Lyndon Johnson kept sending troops to South Vietnam. We remember the consequences. Which is why putting in 30,000 more American soldiers in Afghanistan only raises the level of fear in us — that Obama may go the way of LBJ. Do not forget that Johnson went for the noble cause that was the Great Society. Obama comes in that same mould. Like Johnson, America’s current leader is trapped in a conflict he is not sure will end soon.

Now, Copenhagen is not about war. And yet it is a struggle which seeks to raise nations around the world to a new level of awareness about the natural disaster that looms because of the predatory instincts in the more powerful among them. You hear all this talk of gas emissions, of the ozone layer coming apart, and you wonder why statesmen thirty or forty years ago could not peer into the future and spot the dangers that were likely to emerge through a relentless bashing of nature.

Of course, there is Winston Churchill for you to draw strength from. It is a mistake, he said once, to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time. That is well put, is eminently quotable. But it misses the point, which is that you do need to look far ahead, indeed aim for a philosophical examination of life and its profundity through looking beyond the stars in order to discern the world of the future.

That discernment was not there in the weeks and months before the Hutus went hunting for the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. The United Nations looked away from those who carried dire warnings of the impending disaster. Governments were dismissive of what they saw as rumours or tales that were too far-fetched to be accorded any credibility. The results were horrific. More than 800,000 people were hacked to death in just a few days. Efficiency was what the murderers and their political patrons, in this case the Hutu-led government in Kigali, put into operation. The world watched in horror and helplessness, as it had earlier watched Pakistan’s genocide in Bangladesh and the killings perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Copenhagen, in such light, is change we think should cause hope to rise. It is about saving Bangladesh, about letting vulnerable nations everywhere know that they are not alone in this twilight battle to save the earth from its more rapacious men. Copenhagen informs the Maldives’ Mohammad Nasheed that his undersea cabinet meeting has made its point.