Shared
Values Of Fragile Humanity
By Mary Riddell
05 September, 2004
The
Observer
Even
the living have dead eyes. Cradled in adults' arms, faces smeared with
blood, the children of Beslan stare out. Their gaze is focused on a
point beyond consolation and beyond childhood. Grown old before their
time and burnt by memories no human being should endure, these are the
lucky ones.
Today, parents still search hospital wards and mortuaries, hopeful and
terrified of what they may find. Others bury those too slow, too scared,
too small or too exhausted to escape their assassins' bullets. And westerners,
watching the carnage of Number One School unfolding in the media, cannot
believe what they are seeing.
It is not the death
of innocence, for that myth crumbled long ago. Composers of fairy tales,
and charity fund-raisers, have always used children to tell the most
terrible stories. Though the purpose has mostly been kindly, the border
between generosity and exploitation is frail. The faces of the young
gaze out from famine posters or from campaigning adverts warning of
abuse behind closed doors. Other children, less anonymous, remind us
of the brutality of war.
Kim Phuc, the nine-year-old
girl pictured running down the Trang Bang road, ablaze with napalm,
summed up the enduring story of Vietnam. Little Ali, the boy with his
limbs blown away, encapsulated Iraq. From Darfur to Baghdad, suffering
children touch a universal pulse confirming our basic kindness. They
touch our consciences but they also salve our fears. Kim and Ali supplied
the happy endings craved by adult society.
We may care much too little that children fight wars, or go to prison,
or starve, but the victims we do notice confirm that our human sensibilities
are intact.
In the past, the
lost children have belonged to other people. Not now. The images of
Beslan have eroded barriers of distance and bonds of nationality and
blood. These, the victims of basest cruelty and purest chance, could
be our own sons and daughters. No boundaries remain when a flock of
primary pupils who took new books and balloons for the first day of
term can stagger, damaged and dying into the playground, if they ever
emerged at all. Their parents, families whose politics and troubles
we had never known much about, have held up, in their torment, a mirror
to our deepest loves and wildest fears.
And yet, the unthinkable
was perhaps inevitable. This is an age when war and terror constantly
reinvent torturers and victims. Just as Abu Ghraib showed women as monsters,
Russia's children illustrate the carelessness of depravity in the week
when evil, the most overworked word of the 21st century, came to Beslan.
For all the repulsion,
there is some small consolation, too. The vision of parents with their
children cocooned in their arms is an emblem of a world of shared compassion
and enduring values. But, suddenly, how fragile humanity looks.
The aim of every
parent is to forge a world in which their children can find peace. The
impact of this crime goes beyond horror for the murdered of Beslan,
or pity for the living. We see, in the agony of strangers, the threat
to all our tomorrows.