The chaps in Whitehall are positively frothing this morning. News has arrived that a rebel village in Myanmar has been reduced to a smoking crater, with dozens of souls sent to meet whichever deity they favoured. The Foreign Office, in a fit of diplomatic outrage, has called for a UN inquiry. How terribly predictable.
Let’s be clear: this is a tragedy. But let’s also be honest. Britain calling for a UN inquiry is like asking a drunk to moderate a temperance debate. The UN will form a committee. The committee will meet. They’ll issue a report with many paragraphs and no teeth. Then everyone will pat themselves on the back and go back to selling arms to both sides.
Myanmar’s junta, those delightful chaps who think democracy is a mild inconvenience, have already blamed the rebels. The rebels, naturally, blame the junta. The truth, as ever, lies somewhere in the middle, probably buried under rubble and lost to the world’s collective amnesia.
But what of the poor souls in that village? They were not politicians. They were not soldiers. They were farmers, mothers, children. They were the collateral damage in a game of chess where the pieces are real and the board is on fire. Britain’s call for an inquiry is the equivalent of sticking a plaster on a decapitation.
Let’s not forget our own glorious history. We’ve bombed villages, sanctioned countries, and called for inquiries when it suited us. The Sarajevo of our conscience is a crowded place. Now we tut at Myanmar, as if our own hands are clean. They are not. They are stained with the same blood, just packaged more nicely.
The tragedy here is not just the blast. The tragedy is the charade that follows. The solemn-faced diplomats, the carefully worded condemnations, the hope that the world will forget by the next news cycle. And it will. Because there’s always another disaster, another outrage, another tragedy to briefly distract us from the one before.
So yes, call for an inquiry. Form a committee. Spend millions of pounds on reports that will gather dust in Geneva. The bodies in that village are already cold. They don’t care about your inquiries. They care about silence, and they have it in abundance.
The only honest response would be to acknowledge that we are all complicit. We buy the goods, we ignore the wars, we change the channel. The blast in Myanmar is a horror, but it is a horror of our making. We just pay others to pull the trigger.
God save the queen, if she’s not too busy worrying about her corgis.
