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Our
elected representatives seem to be striving to outdo
each other in language to depict the situation in
the Short Strand. The SDLP’s Alasdair McDonald
claims it is like the Warsaw Ghetto of World War 2
and Joe O'Donnell of Sinn Fein compares it to the
days of civil war Beirut. If one set of combatants
were to throw a canister of tear gas at the other
someone with an eye on a new Government Department
of Dunces will pop up to tell us that what stands
before us is the Auschwitz of our times.
What
is taking place in the Short Strand on a nightly basis
is of serious concern for the people who live there.
Constantly fearful of attack, permanently concerned
about their safety and the lives of their children,
alarmed, given the RUC reputation, that the forces
of the state - more concerned with smashing the heads
of former republican prisoners like Pod Devenney than
with providing security - will allow the area to be
overrun all aggregates to form a legitimate conclusion
which allows for comparisons to be made with 1969
and the anti-Catholic pogroms of three to four decades
ago.
But
this is a far cry from likening it to the obliteration
that existed in both Warsaw and Beirut. Although Pod
Devenney was lucky to escape with his life and the
children of Martina McGuigan were fortunate to escape
with their own, no one has been killed in the Short
Strand nor have there been forced major population
movements. In terms of the international historiography
of conflict it is unlikely that the area will acquire
even the status of a footnote.
Beirut
and Warsaw were cities completely engulfed by war
and widespread destruction accompanied by significant
loss of human life. The devastation in both was massive,
the death toll in their hundreds of thousands. It
is the politically crafted contorted imagery projected
from a gross distortion of language that ensures that
the people of this place are depicted pejoratively
as MOPES (Most Oppressed People Ever) usually by people
who would not bat an eyelid even if the Short Strand
were to be razed. It is not the residents of the area
who are responsible for this imagery but their politicians
who appear ever eager to inflate the seriousness of
the situation which in turn can enhance their own
status. It is as if they, with their honed political
entrepreneurial antennae, sense a market for stories
of oppression which they can buy into with their below
standard goods.
There
needs to be some sense of perspective. People who
lived in Beirut or Warsaw would have loved to swap
their regime for a Short Strand type of existence.
Imagine any one today who went through the Warsaw
uprising or the Lebanese civil war trying to convey
the horror of their existence to an international
audience claiming ‘it was like the Short Strand
in Belfast in 2002’. If the audience were inclined
to listen any longer it would only conclude that both
Warsaw and Beirut no longer merited reference in history
books as great historic events.
While
it might be somewhat unpalatable for bloated political
egos to have to swallow, their Belfast is increasingly
being seen elsewhere, as one writer recently commented,
pretty much like any other European city - only blighted
by a squalid sectarian problem. Replacing the need
to state what is with a penchant for the ridiculous
only invites ridiculing of the needs of people going
about their daily lives in a climate of adversity.
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