I've been thinking all day about the now almost entirely forgotten assassination of the Russian Amb. to Turkey in 2016. Even at the time, it felt very strongly to me like a moment of great unraveling, the loudest shriek in what was already a period of cacophonous history.
This was Dec. 2016 - after Brexit, after the Trump elxn. To many it was a weird footnote in an already long, cruel, and brutal war in Syria. But it weighed on me like some omen. It was Yeats; "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world".
Maybe it's bc as a Bosnian events at the supposed "periphery" have always seemed as important, maybe even more important to me than the grand machinations at the "center"; likely bc my people, my family too have died and suffered in "obscure", misunderstood lands like Syria.
The onset of Turkey's assault on the Kurds in NE Syria today has occupied more of the collective attn in the West, and rightly so. Many are now warning, brooding, hinting at how severe, how cataclysmic all of this will likely become; more death, more destruction, more exile.
I'm not supposed to say this as a "social scientist" but it all feels so inevitable now, the terrible, suffocating weight of the coming butchery. The U.S., EU, the West, the international community have had nearly a decade to commit to a real policy for Syria. We *chose* not to.
Syria is the greatest moral, ethical, & political catastrophe of the 21st century. It will shame & stain our entire generation. And it should. This is not merely a betrayal of the Kurds, or of the Syrian civilians; it is a betrayal of humanity itself, of civilization.
Scholars will debate the tactics, the grand strategies, what the wise men in the important capitals knew, thought, anticipated, bargained for. It will be hard to capture the harrowing sorrow and the shame of it all though. This is history as a great, collective sin. /xxx
