“Each betrayal begins with trust.”
–-Martin Luther
On September 11, 2001, I was a Political Advisor at the Office of the High Representative in Sarajevo, BiH. Late that afternoon, somebody came into the office I shared with a couple of the other advisors and said “turn on the television, a plane has hit the WorldTrade Centre in New York.”
We turned on the TV and found the right satellite channel just in time to see the second tower collapse like a stage set.
This is what I wrote in my journal when I got to it a couple of days later:
“A few days ago I was thinking about a 1500 year old mosque that was destroyed during the war here in Bosnia. After blowing the thing up, some idiots took the pieces and dumped them in the city landfill, where they have stayed, surrounded by rotting food, dead animals, etc. for the last six years. I was going to ask what kind of person craps so much on somebody else’s faith and culture, just because it is different from their own.
And now this. It’s unbelievable, like the plot of a comic book or a bad movie, where the Evil Villain Plots to Crash Planes into the WTC. I can’t comprehend it, and I doubt anyone can. CNN reports that the US has ordered 6000 body bags. That’s almost the entire population of the town I grew up in. All of my friends in NY and Washington are accounted for but I can’t shake the knowledge that thousands of others were not so lucky.
On a personal level, I’m hollow-eyed, freaked out, unable to sleep, barely keeping memories of the 1998 Nairobi bombing from taking over my waking hours. They already dominate my dreams. There are thousands of others in the same situation, I’m sure. I keep reminding myself not to make any decisions, not to react to anyone or anything while the adrenaline was floating so aimlessly through my system.
ILuckily, I have good friends here, and they are patient with me. The hardest part for all of us is knowing that the age of diplomacy is over, the fact that this event even took place means that our way of doing things hasn’t worked. It’s not often you see an entire profession made aware of its irrelevance in one 60-minute period.
Our lives have changed in ways that we won’t even know for a while. Those of you watching US tv may not be aware of the fact that the Israelis razed Jericho a couple of days ago. I didn’t see any mention of it on CNN, only on BBC. The US needs Pakistan’s help to launch its attack on Afghanistan, but complicated regional alliances will make that difficult. South Asia is the Middle East with nukes all around. And Nato has invoked Article Five, which means we’re all in it together. Time to dig out the Nostradamus.”
This past summer I ended up in a lineup front of two Americans and overheard one comment on the low turnout for their events. The other responded, loudly enough for everyone around to hear “well, if you’ve been freeloading for the last 50 years, and now you’re getting called out on it, I guess you don’t like it.”
I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from turning around and snarling “oh, says the only country to ever invoke the collective defence provisions of the NATO Charter??” But I am a diplomat after all.
Still, I doubt Canadians will be rushing to the next American-led event the way we did to Afghanistan any time soon.
Unless it’s this one, of course.