A Mighty Heart

A Polish geologist's murder by the Pakistani Taliban ressurects the memories of Daniel

Pearl's gruesome killing

Amit Sengupta, New Delhi, Hardnews

The last few moments of the tense film, A Mighty Heart, on the gruesome beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl by Islamic fundamentalists somewhere in Pakistan, is a revelation. Marianne Pearl, his wife, in a television studio, after the murder, is holding onto her last reserves of patience, sanity and resilience, having tried the meticulous detailing and organised efforts to reach out to the faceless kidnappers when Daniel was still alive. (Clearly Omar Sheikh was involved in this - something Jaswant Singh would know.) She says that she hopes that this is the last time, and that peace will return, that she is not the only one who is suffering, that this suffering is becoming an universal, infinite spiral and must stop. In a sense she hopes that good sense and rationality will return.

Wherever she is, she might be yet again resurrecting those terrible days of waiting and fear, even while her message doesn't seem to have reached the killers and their inheritors. The latest possible beheading of Polish geologist Piotr Stanczack, who was kidnapped in the twilight border zones of Afghanistan and Pakistan by the 'Pakistani Taliban', is a stark reminder of the 'Mighty Heart's' crushed aspirations in compassion, humanity and justice. It is also a reminder that we are dealing with not human beings who have an argument, a discourse and a possible vision  - but barbarians without a soul or sensibility, bereft of either character or critical thinking, neither man nor animal nor beast.

In this vicious and savage cycle of the clash of civilizations, where is the civilization? Is it a civilisational logic, based on cardinal principles of basic humanism and social conduct, or international protocol of the united nations of the world, that occupation wars, mass murders and murders of innocents can be so easily sanctioned, indeed videographed for the whole world to be seen, so proud are they of this act of beheading a human being. Indeed, Israeli hardliners refused to allow the massacre of Gaza to be reported - all we got later were ruins and rubbles, and the theatre of death, children being buried in little holes on the devastated earth. In many ways the Fallujah massacre in Iraq too reminded of this invisibility of mass murder - even the death count was not visible.

Tactics of visibility apart, between state and non-state actors, how do you count 800,000 dead in a ravaged civil war started by the Bush-fire of neo-con occupation - blood for oil in Iraq? Or the fact that the Al Qaeda and the Taliban were actually the dubious products of the dubious foreign policy of the United States, as was Saddam Hussein, as is the hardline bloodthirsty Israeli regime today?

Will Barack Obama create a new language, as he has promised?