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| Malala Yousafzai - wearing a veil |
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| Irish president Mary McAleese |
I am writing this having just returned from Ireland. The local people extended more goodwill towards us in just over a week than any of our British neighbours have done in years. This comes from living in a rural location where people are more likely to greet strangers but it is also a part of the Irish character.
You get a good sense of this Irish character by reading Here’s the Story, the memoir of the former Irish president Mary McAleese, which I did while over there. She was brought up in the north of the country, where I spent most of the first ten years of my life, moved to the south and said that, as president, she would represent all Irish people, Protestant and Catholic, unionist and nationalist, those who considered themselves British first and Irish second and those who thought they were Irish only.
Ireland was divided in two because of the irreconcilability of these two sides. The British parliament had recognised Ireland’s right to independence in 1914 and said that it would have its own government – something like the Scottish parliament today – but that there was the small matter of defeating Germany in the meantime.
That was not enough for the Irish rebels who, following the old adage that England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity, tried to overthrow British rule by force in the Easter Uprising of 1916. This was both a total failure and a huge success. Militarily the Irish rebels were no match for the British army which sailed into Dublin harbour to regain control of the city. The leaders of the uprising were forced to surrender at the Dublin Post Office and were taken to Kilmainham Gaol where they were executed, thus becoming heroes and martyrs of the Irish freedom movement.
The long and short of this was that Ireland was divided in two a hundred years ago and Mary McAlese, growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland, had plenty of early experience of the resulting sectarian violence. She, however, had the sense to know that the way to respond to violence is with non-violence and made sure that the men who had terrorised her youth were made to feel part of the peace process once it began. They were involved in the talks that led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement and she made sure that they were invited when the Queen came to the Irish Republic on a state visit. The republican movement Sinn Fein boycotted the visit while the Ulster paramilitaries fell over themselves to sit at (or near) the same table as Her Majesty.
No prizes for guessing who came out of that one better. The Sinn Fein mayor of Cashel defied his own organisation to greet the Queen when she went there. He had cancer and only two months to live so he did not care what happened to him. Sinn Fein realised they had missed the boat and their leader Martin McGuiness later went to Windsor Castle for a state banquet with the queen and McAlese’s successor, Michael Higgins.
As we were in Ireland, Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. The fact that they took over the country and its capital Kabul with such ease as soon as, almost before, the Americans had withdrawn their troops was both predictable and infuriating. The promises that Afghanistan would be a safe place for emancipated women and western values seemed like so many empty vacuous promises detached from reality, just the sort of things our Prime Minister Boris Johnson would - and has - said since.
The Taliban shoot and kill teenage girls who have the temerity to try and gain an education. That is what they did to Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan before her life was saved and she came to Britain with her family, one place where she could hope to live safely. In Taliban eyes females should not only be covered up and confined to the home but illiterate and permanently pregnant – that or they face death by men brave enough to shoot an unarmed teenage girl.
I have no faith in the promises that the Taliban will change their ways and that they will show compassion and understanding towards the thousands of women who have started to enjoy freedom from oppression. They can expect as much or as little mercy as the men who worked for the western powers when they held Afghanistan.
The soldiers who were needed to prop up this version of an enlightened society are leaving now. That is the problem with occupying a foreign country. Eventually the men sent abroad get fed up and want to come home. The occupied may not have the firepower to defeat the occupiers but they just have to wait until the invaders decide to leave because they feel guilty, frustrated or just plain homesick. The British army eventually left Ireland, the Americans left Vietnam and we are both now abandoning Afghanistan. The rebels only needed to wait, having nowhere else to go.
Hope is not lost entirely. As we found in our time in Ireland, the people are very friendly now that the British are visitors rather than invaders. Likewise, Vietnam has now adopted a western style economy and shrugged off communism. It may have been the best means to defeat America but in the end capitalism is more fun to live under than communism (or fundamentalism) and provides a better standard of living. We can only hope that the people of Afghanistan come to the same conclusion.
Both Mary McAleese in Ireland and Malala Yousafzai have looked down the barrel of a gun held by men who fear female power and independence. Both survived traumatic events and now represent a version of female emancipation that is not automatically anti-male but recognises the desire and needs of a woman to think for herself. Here is to them – M and M.
Edwin Lerner
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide
