Republican News · Thursday 30 May 2002

It's not the end of the world - we hope

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While the nation convulsd over Roy Keane this last week, the world was arguably facing its most dangerous nuclear crisis since 1962, but most of us appeared remarkably unconcerned. MICK DERRIG discusses our strange sense of priorities.

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It goes without saying that Derrig is a soccer fanatic. I dander through life with my Bhoys, Glasgow Celtic, as my constant reference point. Soccer - or where I come from - "Fitba" -is the only game I love. I grew up playing on the streets of Glasgow's East End.

However lads, it is only a game. A wonderful game, a great game, but at the end of it, a game. Even the World Cup is merely a series of games. So it was with this in mind that I - like everyone else on this island to some extent or other - was drawn to the McCarthy/Keane dispute. I looked at the media treatment of this on our wee island and concluded - in a moment of epiphany - that it had gone too far - far too far.

The Sunday Tribune and The Sunday Independent could find no other issue worthy of their editorial column but a young Corkman who gets paid £70,000 per week for kicking a ball. No other subject. Nothing at all was happening on the planet that deserved their attention. Really?

Well here's what they might have written about in their editorials. The world was arguably facing its most dangerous nuclear crisis since 1962 last week, but most of us appeared remarkably unconcerned in the face of a crisis that threatens to send South Asia into an uncontrollable downward spiral.

After a series of frightening events cranked up the tension between India and Pakistan, the subcontinent's nuclear-armed neighbours seemed just a couple of massacres and a border clash away from the unthinkable. Most Indians have lined up behind the government's policy of confrontation, despite its terrible dangers, because of growing anger with Pakistan.

The last time the two nations were eyeball to eyeball was in January, when a Fedayeen suicide squad attacked New Delhi's parliament, nearly wiping out the country's MPs at a stroke. The army was mobilised and moved up to the border, ready to punish Pakistan. But after a few tense weeks - and some frightening talk on both sides about the nuclear options - Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf made some vaguely conciliatory noises and the situation died down to its usual uneasy stalemate, without India winning any real concessions.

There is now a real danger of the world's first atomic attack since Nagasaki, rather than simply a return to the blackouts and food shortages of 1965 and 1971, the two previous wars India and Pakistan have fought over Kashmir. What has made it different and more dangerous this time is that India's patience is exhausted - and so is its willingness to trust Pakistan after years of broken promises and what they consider to be cynical manoeuvres dressed up as peace initiatives, which time and again have left India's leaders looking foolish.

New Delhi feels it has been goaded and tormented by Pakistan-backed jihadis, and outsmarted by its politicians, for too long. The jihadis claim to be fighting for the freedom of Kashmir, but to most Indians they are simply engaged in a proxy war conceived by Pakistan's secret service. Attacks such as last week's army camp massacre, the spark for the current crisis, are seen as part of a policy to bleed India as revenge for the humiliating 1971 defeat that split Bangladesh from Pakistan. The attack seemed calculated to enrage the army - soldiers' wives and children were murdered - and push the two countries into war.

Attacks like this may be the work of rogue Pakistan army factions or out-of-control jihadis, but in India they are believed to be ordered by Islamabad. Last week's assassination of Abdul Ghani Lone, a moderate Kashmiri separatist, only reinforced the belief that Pakistan is orchestrating a new wave of attacks.

Lone appeared to be moving away from militancy towards talks with Delhi, perhaps the best chance in ten years of an end to the increasingly futile militancy in the state and a return to peace which would end Pakistan's proxy war. He may have been preparing to stand in September's state elections, which Islamabad wants to wreck.

His son quickly blamed Pakistan's notorious ISI intelligence service for the assassination. But it was the army camp atrocity that had the real impact, unleashing a wave of war frenzy in the armed forces. One general said: 'We are ready to die. We are resolved to go to war.' Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee told the revved-up troops to make ready for a 'decisive battle', then, with nuclear fears growing, the poet-politician waxed lyrical about lightning striking out of an empty sky.

The hawks in Delhi's military and political circles argue that India must forget the international community and strike out for itself if it is ever to protect India. Some of the hawks hold truly frightening ideas about settling with their tormentors in Pakistan once and for all - even if millions of lives are lost and Delhi and Bombay are sacrificed.

The lunatic fringe has been active. Hindu extremist groups are cranking up the pressure. One volunteer from the fascist RSS movement said: 'We must have a nuclear war, we would win. What matter if millions are sacrificed? Hindu India is millennia old; this would be a blip in time. What matters is destroying Pakistan.'

The last time the planet was this close to a nuclear exchange was the Yom Kippur war in 1973. The decisive moment in that war was the biggest tank battle since the battle of Kursk in World War II.

During that Arab-Israeli chaos, the US and the USSR moved their nuclear forces to almost full readiness. The newspapers in England carried hardly a mention of either the conventional slaughter in the Sinai or the prospect of Mutually Assured Destruction everywhere else.

All they could write about was about one Jan Tomaszewski. He was the Polish 'keeper who cost Sir Alf Ramsey his job and England a place in the 1974 World Cup.

Perhaps that is the role that Roy Keane has played this week. By concentrating on the trivial we can pretend that the serious isn't happening. But make no mistake - Keane and McCarthy in Saipan is just that - trivia.