Ground Realities
Kosovo and the dimensions of freedom
HOW you take Kosovo's declaration of independence is strictly a matter of opinion. Even so, there is that primeval stirring in the soul which keeps speaking of the beauty of freedom. We in Bangladesh understand, and readily too, what it means to be free, having gone through the collective travails involved in a grim struggle for freedom. Or ask the people of East Timor . They will tell you of their sufferings, their long tale of woe under Indonesian occupation, for years on end, until they came by freedom. And so it is that we are vicariously made aware of the beauty that brings freedom in a package to the people of Kosovo.
No matter what the men in Belgrade think, no matter what President Putin might suggest, the fact is that Kosovars are celebrating in Pristina. You cannot grudge them that.
Freedom is not something you can disagree with. Back in the 1960s, as the Igbos in Nigeria went to war against the federation in their struggle for a free Biafra, a good number of people around the world were not sure that Odumegwu Ojukwu was the right man to spearhead that struggle. And, of course, there were many who quite did not agree that Biafra needed to be free. And yet, it was the desperation of the Biafrans, made increasingly more desperate by the battering they were getting from Yakubu Gowon's Nigeria, that aroused the sympathy of the world.
Biafra lost; and Ojukwu made his way out of his short-lived country. But the memory of Biafra persists, sometimes as sad poetry. Ask any Igbo today. You just might hear him tell you how he has gone on believing in the old cause, decades after the cause turned out to be a lost one.
Speaking of causes, there are people who certainly undermine the principle of freedom through using it in obtuse manner. Ian Smith, a man with an extremely poor sense of history and a poorer understanding of culture, thought in November 1965 that Rhodesia's whites, a minuscule amidst a vast black majority, could secure for themselves a safe future by going for a unilateral declaration of independence.
For the fifteen years after that regressive step was taken, Smith found himself in a straitjacket. It was the blacks who took over. The proof of that is there before you, in the image of the much maligned and yet cantankerous Robert Mugabe. The point here is that your desire to be free must not sail against the winds of history and tradition.
Smith did not understand this lesson. He ought to have taken a leaf out of Charles de Gaulle's book on Algeria. The French leader turned into an instant statesman when he realised that men like Ahmed Ben Bella needed to have Algeria for themselves.
History is forever a changing, even transforming, process. Which is why the Nazis, with all their ideas of Aryan purity and Anschluss and the like, did not last. Which might also be why, someday in the far if not near future, Taiwan will need to get back to its old union with mainland China. Of course, Taiwan has been a rather tantalising model of westernised democracy. That is no reason, though, to think it can stay free of the mother country for an indefinite period of time.
Freedom and reality sometimes work at cross- purposes. In the old days, the big reality in our lives was the Soviet Union, until it was replaced by gusts of freedom in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, and in so many other places that used to be known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Ah, but then comes the significant question of the degree of freedom that leaves a society or a nation satisfied with the ambience of liberty. Freedom that leaves a country twisted out of shape and turned on its head is liberty that lengthens itself into an unending stream of horror. The partition of India, for all the lyrical tenor of Nehru's tryst with destiny, left in its wake a trail of devastation, the consequences of which are being felt sixty plus years after the slicing.
Was Pakistan an inevitability? Or was it a blunder that might have been avoided? These are questions you can go on trying to answer for a long, long time, arriving at no definitive conclusion. There are, in history, questions that have never been answered to human satisfaction. The world is not perfect.
And because the world is not perfect, we bump into the sad, sordid tales of colonised nations making their raucous way to freedom. It was an intensely emotional Patrice Lumumba who took King Baudouin of Belgium to task at the independence day celebrations in Leopoldville in 1960. We do not blame him, for the monarch had just heaped praise on his rapacious ancestor Leopold II.
Anyone with a fairly good understanding of history, with an appreciation of sensibilities, would have stayed away from an invocation of a man who literally stole Congo's resources for years.
Lumumba's indignation was right, of course. The manner of it was not. The biggest of shocks, though, came in the way the Belgians and their friends bumped him off. Not a trace of Lumumba was left anywhere. Freedom for the people of Congo, thus, came in post-colonial trauma and in a surfeit of tribal fury. First Moise Tshombe and then Joseph Mobutu ravaged the land. A free Congo still searches for peace, and slips deeper into trouble. The heart still wallows in darkness.
It is against this background of black and white, of black versus white, that you must consider the freedom the people of Kosovo have decided to give themselves. And when you do, you might not choose to forget the many pieces into which Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia, so meticulously crafted in the 1940s and so much a symbol of the human spirit in Cold War times, shattered in the 1990s. And then there were the efforts, in the 1950s, to build and broaden the base of freedom.
Gamal Abdel Nasser tried a marriage between Egypt and Syria and called it the United Arab Republic. It ended in a quiet divorce not many years later. And freedom, or a free state, has been a time-honoured demand of the Kurds -- in Iran, Turkey and Iraq. Theirs has been a long struggle, alternately fitful and persistent.
With Abdullah Ocalan in jail, perhaps till mortality overtakes him, the skies remain stark and bare for his people. For the people of Palestine, freedom remains hostage to the likes of Ehud Olmert, of men who profess to combat terrorism through their own horrifying versions of terror.
The people of Kuwait know the meaning of freedom. Their world having gone dark through Saddam Hussein's invasion in August 1990, they were not to see their world of equanimity restored until months later, when the West, its own economic interests prevailing over everything else, moved in to eject the Iraqis lock, stock and barrel. The biggest irony of all, at this point in time, is of course the rapidity with which Iraq saw its state of freedom dissipate when George W. Bush and Tony Blair decided to invade the country on pretexts that have since turned out to be monumental untruths. Iraqi freedom is a thing of the past; and Iraq has been reduced to a country where murder is practised to perfection.
In diverse regions of the globe, while states have graduated to freedom, their citizens have not. A whole swath of societies, beginning with Ghana in 1957, moved into freedom and then, pretty inexplicably, saw the ruling class imposing discipline on their peoples that was as unwarranted as it was preposterous. Sekou Toure ruled in freedom; his people stayed subjugated.
Founding fathers, men of the class of Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere, did not believe in democratic pluralism until late in the day. Between them, Milton Obote and Idi Amin destroyed Uganda, one through his dictatorial inclinations, the other through macabre buffoonery.
That said, let Kosovo stay free, as Eritrea has stayed free ever since Issaias Afewerki prised it out of its anti-historical union with Ethiopia. Men deserve to be free. That is the cardinal, sustainable truth we learned in 1776 and in 1789.
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