Dying in Sildavia
As I write the last column of this cursed year, a hail of Russian bombs rains down on eastern and southern Ukraine, wiping out everything in its path, not only the precious lives of its people but also destroying vital infrastructure. With each passing day I feel a greater contempt for all the dictators of the past and for the current ones who have set themselves up as totems of archaic systems that should have no place in a world where we all deserve to be free and live in peace.
Sometimes I am shaken by remorse when I return home with hot water, heating and a full fridge and I think irremediably of my Ukrainian colleague Olena Kurenkova and her family who have suffered this year an odyssey of destruction and death because a satrap wants to take over their country, its resources, its nuclear power stations, control of its ports, its strategic outlet to the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea and its millions of Ukrainian citizens.
I could not shake off the image of the soldier Yuriy Horovets, known to all as "Sviatosha", killed in combat defending Mariupol from the Russian siege. I saw his photo in the obituaries, dressed as a soldier, with his fair complexion, his youthful youth and virile gallantry, and I even felt so taken with him. But he is no more, he is another of the thousands of soldiers, sons of the Ukrainian homeland, who leave mothers dry with grief, widows with broken hearts and children they will never see grow up. War is Leviathan.
As I write these lines, the Taliban in Afghanistan have ordered to close access to universities to all Afghan women - without exception - and have banned the awarding of diplomas to all those Afghan women who, during the twenty years that they lived away from the terror of the Taliban regime, managed to go to school and get an education.
Of Afghanistan's population of 38 million 346,720 inhabitants, 45% are female, with an average age of 19.9 years; in other words, a large proportion of them were born when the Taliban regime was in exile during the US occupation. These girls went to early childhood education, primary school, secondary school, high school and university.
The return to power of the Taliban has brought back the demon of hatred and contempt for women in a system that subsumes them only to procreation and housework. It grants them only the possibility of education up to primary school level to learn to read and write.
These days off, in my daughter's room, I glance at her backpack with her books, and I sit in my mind gnawing with rage, imagining the immense pain and helplessness of these Afghan girls and young women whose fate is in the hands of rulers who hate them and despise them just because they were born women. And I wonder whether this is the 21st century or a lie and perhaps we are lost in time, one that is advancing for some countries and another that is at a more sluggish pace, stuck in the 15th century.
I shudder at all this fortuitous suffering and at the fact that a person's life depends on the will of obtuse and archaic people; of bitter and taciturn people; of liars and predators; of psychopaths and ignorant people... of monsters who drink from the suffering and needs of others to create rhetoric of manipulation that ends up destroying societies.
There is also Iran with its theocratic power imposing an iron persecution against thousands of young women and men who have taken to the streets to protest against the unpunished murder of Masha Amini, for not wearing the veil correctly.
The Ayatollahs' regime has ordered the hanging in public places of young people convicted of supporting demonstrations in favour of the rights of Iranian women and of their choice to wear or not to wear the veil. The lifeless bodies of pugilist Majid Reza Rahnavard and Mohsen Shekari hanged in public are a barbarity worthy of any of the past centuries.
How is a better society to be built on a global level if the sphere turns at different speeds and while some speak the language of peace, freedom and building; others speak of killing, controlling, destroying, clipping the wings of freedom and of men who count and women who are invisible?
A world of inequality, of equidistance, is a place where peace is a mirage in the midst of a desert of competition, rivalry, envy and two opposing models: freedom and democracy versus autocracy and control.
This year in particular, this struggle has been laid bare more than ever and we should all be concerned about defending our values because the shadow of evil always lurks like a thief waiting to turn our dreams into our worst nightmares.
And I am thinking of the Ukrainians who began this year with their wedding and christening plans, who had in mind to open a business, to travel or to start a business or perhaps to continue studying. On 24 February, their lives changed forever: men have been forced to defend their country, more than 6 million Ukrainians have left their country; families have been torn apart because only women, elderly men and minors can leave the country. The war has killed people who had their dreams, their goals, their families, their plans, their hopes, their lives and their country.
The bitterest lesson of 2022 is that Ukraine could be any other invaded country in a few decades; it could be Spain, France, Germany, Mexico, Japan, Algeria... it could be anyone because the struggle for natural resources will be frantic and because climate change provides another pretext. In the end Sildavia is not as it is painted... dying in Sildavia could happen the day after tomorrow.