Murky waters
Morning. The 16th of July. The families of Sgt. First Class Ehud Goldwasser and Staff Sgt. Eldad Regev are waiting, frozen with terror, for their sons’ return from a two-year imprisonment. The two soldiers were captured by the Lebanese Shia militia, Hezbollah, in a cross-border raid on July 12th, 2006, an assault that provoked the month-long Israeli-Lebanese war. Now, the Israeli government has finally yielded to the augmenting pressure: it would trade five Lebanese prisoners along with the bodies of many more for its two missing soldiers. Finally the two-year-long nightmare for the beleaguered families can end. Finally they can resume a worry-free life. At least that’s how they thought back when Israel announced the exchange. Now, alas, they are torn between so many different possible scenarios. They’re minds are racing.
For the last two years, Hezbollah had adamantly avoided shedding light on the state of the prisoners, no one really knows if they are alive or not. A couple of days before, Hizbullah officials had apparently changed their minds and decided to let Israel know that one of the kidnapped soldiers is dead. The border had been reinforced, the entry point well prepared. Nearly all televisions are broadcasting the moment, while Israel’s citizens sit down to watch the exchange, falling prey to that increasingly spreading sinister silence. All cameras focus on Wafiq Safa, a Hezbollah representative. “The fate of the soldiers will now be revealed”, he declares, as he opens a jeep’s back doors.
I end the use of present-tense, further words cannot fully grasp the ending. One can only imagine the shock and horror felt by thousands as two coffins were unveiled.
Emotions aside, it is easily noticeable the script of the story shares a remarkable resemblance to others from the same region. The Middle-East is full of oxymorons. Bittersweet, both permissive and hard-lined, both peaceful and bellicose, of a cruel tenderness. Be that as it may, but it is also brilliantly characterized by a thick omnipresent layer of fog. A murk that is clearly not healthy. A murk that is almost sure to bring about tragedies like the above mentioned.
Accountable for this mess is no other than the world’s twisted political stage. Take Pakistan, for example. The army-backed dictator Pervez Musharaf has been Pakistan’s president for little less than a decade. Facing imminent impeachment, on August the 18th he resigned (continuously declaring that everything he stood for was democracy). In translation, he was thrashed by the first fairly-elected government in Pakistan. Thumbs up for that. Too bad the good news ends there. Musharaf’s sacking occurs in a time of great instability in Pakistan. The north is begging for peaceful leadership, inflation is a mile high and politicians lack a great deal of confidence.
Miles away, Israel’s prime-minister, Ehud Olmert, fought with a corruption scandal for months, just to be defeated in the end: he promised to leave post after his party decides on a new leader. Mr Olmert’s party is likely to have lost credibility, leaving the opposition Likud party and its hawkish leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, a lot of space for maneuvers. It is worth underlining that Mr Netanyahu is prone to make even fewer peace efforts.
A little to the north, Syria hosted Lebanon’s president, Michel Suleiman and brags about a new diplomatic relationship with Lebanon, a normal, friendly one. In the same time, Syria continues to charge a couple of its own citizens on the grounds of ‘publicly calling for normal relations with Lebanon’. Figure that out.
These are truly perilous waters, sailed by the shrewd and cunning. What’s saddening is that the importance of keeping the lights on is dismissed and so wreckages befall, affecting the masses, the bystanders. Nevertheless, the silver lining is present, although currently vague and hardly noticeable. No one really knows what it looks like, but, who knows, it may look a bit like this:
