In a stunning display of bureaucratic inertia that would make a stunned sloth look energetic, a British inquiry has belatedly demanded accountability for the 1985 Air India Flight 182 bombing. The crash, which killed 329 people off the coast of Ireland, has been a monument to official forgetfulness, a kind of administrative amnesia that would be impressive if it weren't so tragic. The inquiry, led by a retired judge with the weary air of a man who has seen too many teaspoons of incompetence stirred into his tea, concluded that 'systemic failures' led to the overshadowing of the victims' families.
Fancy that. A system that operates like a runaway shopping trolley, careening from one catastrophe to the next, has failed again. The report is a masterpiece of understatement, describing the Canadian and Indian governments' responses as 'uncoordinated and inadequate.
' This is the diplomatic equivalent of calling a nuclear meltdown a 'slightly warm day.' The families, for their part, have been waiting for 38 years for someone to say the magic words: 'We're sorry, and we'll try harder.' Instead, they got a report that says, 'We noticed you were ignored.
' Progress, of a sort. The inquiry recommends a new framework for cross-border disaster responses, which will no doubt be rubberstamped by governments before being filed in the same bottom drawer as all the other well-intentioned recommendations. Meanwhile, the ghost of Flight 182 hovers over the Atlantic, a grim reminder that when it comes to air disasters, the crash is only the beginning of the victims' ordeal.
The real wreckage is in the corridors of power, where accountability goes to die.
