ANOTHER VOICE

The possible explanation, which we're brought up to disbelieve, of why people kill each other

MATTH EW PARRI

An unmentionable thought has long troubled me. With elections in the former Yugoslavia over, it is time to mention it. Perhaps the people in the Balkans really do want to kill each other.

Perhaps it isn't just fear which has made them nasty, and insecurity which exacer- bates their nationalisms. Perhaps when their stomachs are full, their factories working, their fields tilled and order has returned to their lives they will not aban- don but return, reinvigorated, to the old hatreds which wrecked their farms, emp- tied their stomachs and tore apart their world. Perhaps it's what they desire.

Perhaps — heaven forbid — ethnic hatreds run on a fuel more potent than misunderstanding. Perhaps the Israelis would persecute the Arabs even if the Arabs stopped persecuting them; perhaps no ceasefire in the Middle East will end the Arab vendetta against the Israelis. Perhaps racism arises from more than ignorance.

Maybe education will not cure the sectar- ian divide in Ireland. Maybe Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi rape and pillage out of choice. Maybe tribes murder each other because they want to.

Like many of my generation, I was given a liberal, Christian education. Not only at school but by precept and explanation at home I was taught that peace, love and mutual respect are the desired states of all sane men and women. The savageries in other lands about which we read in newspa- pers arose from ignorance, from fear and from hunger. It followed that if poverty were eliminat- ed and security established, if men and women had jobs to go to, crops in their fields, chickens in their pots and good books to read, and if people lost the fear of attack by others, they too would turn into liberal Christians like me. We would all support the United Nations. With educa- tion, everyone in the world would grow more and more like my family.

The Christian optimism of the third quarter of our century has translated itself into the liberal consensus of the fourth with little substantial change. People no longer so readily claim to be Christians, liberals or internationalists — we talk now of social- ism, community values, 'democratic' values, 'combating ignorance' and 'the world order' — but the underlying assumptions are all still there: comfortable, untroubled, astonishingly unquestioned. They should be questioned. We might question first the trusty shield for which every liberal reaches when the rocks begin to fly: the doctrine of 'false consciousness'. Man borrowed it from Christianity. Liber- alism has taken it over from Marx.

It was Marx who coined the term 'false consciousness'; Christ said: 'They know not what they do'; your 1990s liberal falls back on key words like 'ignorance', 'illiteracy', `fear', `prejudice' or (recently) 'self-oppres- sion'. But such formulations are linked by a single strand of reasoning. Confronted by another's apparently free choice to do something hateful, our belief in choice col- lides head-on with our belief in civilisation. To our embarrassment others have chosen to be uncivilised.

Unwilling to abandon our commitment to democracy, we are obliged to insist that any settled decision to do something horrid could not have been a 'real' choice. It is therefore reclassified as a pseudo-choice. Jesus claimed that if people had not seen God, their dectOons would be unknowing — not in the full sense decisions. Marx claimed that the proletariat had been sub- liminally cowed by the class structure into acting against their own class interest. Modern liberals claim it is fear and insecu- rity, hunger and ignorance, sexual repres- sion, childhood abuse . . . anything, any- thing but that dreadful, nagging possibility, that thought we cannot quite banish, that individuals might as a matter of considered, unfettered choice, decide to behave like idiots.

The indoctrination begins early. 'No, Crispin,' one hears the middle-class mother in Sainsbury's reprove her child, 'you don't hate Rachel. You only think you do. But she's your little sister and you don't want to stick a green pepper in her mouth. You're just tired.'

'No, Mr Budgen,' one may hear Malcolm Rifkind reprove, kindly, the Member for Wolverhampton SW, 'the Serbs, the Croats and the Bosnian Muslims don't all want to kill each other. They only think they do. It's just because they're frightened and inse- cure. Give them peace, security and elec- tions, and they will choose harmony.'

Well, they haven't. But the liberal con- science has a fall-back position and you will

Classifieds — pages 76, 77 and 78

hear it from Western leaders in the run-up to the decision (around Christmas) not to withdraw our forces from the Balkans, con- trary to the undertakings given. It isn't (we shall be assured) that peace cannot civilise the Balkans, it's just that they haven't had enough peace. We must give them a bit more. That should do the trick.

Well, it won't. But even then there will be a fall-back position. This will be that the (only apparently) belligerent factions are 'badly led'. It's all Karadzic's fault.

One constantly hears this excuse for the bloody shambles into which Africa is turn- ing: 'Such lovely people; badly led.' I've used it myself because I do love Africa and I cannot face what I ought to face: her peo- ples are bloodthirsty, tribalistic and count life cheap.

Then there's another excuse, another evasion: the cult of the Victim. To any con- flict, one side must be an unwilling party, the other an unprovoked aggressor. By demonising one of the players we exoner- ate the others and are able to slot the drama comfortably into the category of `moral tale', leaving us with somebody to support. There has been an attempt to do this with the Balkan story.

Finally — and to this, too, the former Yugoslavia has lent itself — the liberal con- science is forced back upon its last excuse: history. 'The bitterness of the past', we say, 'casts shadows forward', often blaming our- selves in part for that past. And this is the greatest liberal evasion of all, the illusion of a fundamentally blameless present which is somehow polluted by memory, by experi- ence and by the sins of the dead; a future poisoned not by us and our friends, but by our grandfathers. History, not themselves, has foisted upon the Balkan peoples the future which they only seem to be choosing, but cannot choose.

And of course the past does have poten- cy — who can deny it? But were the tribes who began the wars different animals from those who now continue .them? Let us face the truth that some people do form tribes, and tribes do war, do seek war, choose war, do — dare I say it? — want war. When we have accepted that, we in Britain can make our own choice more honestly: what part do we wish our own sons and daughters to play in these wars?

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter of the Times.