Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteRevenue from Kenya's tourism industry approaches $1 billion annually.
"In 16 years of working at resorts along Kenya's Indian Ocean coast, hotel manager Mohamed Hersi has never seen it this bad.
"His $200 a night five-star hotel in Mombasa is devoid of tourists who would normally be crowding its large, ornate dining area and its sunny beaches during the current high season." [1]
This is how contemporary conflict works.
The poor and struggling, whom retrograde intellectuals persist in calling "the masses", become subject to the political manipulations of a relative handful of wealthy politicians who have in mind for them contribution to the amplification of their own power and legend.
As their chosen pots simmer, heat, and boil over into violence, the first death associated with politics finds a second in the realm of trade, and from there the misery spreads by way of reduced cash supplies, cash diversions to weapons, militia, and political engines (could be tribal, could be The Revolution, could be the next dictator, etc.), emigration first and early by the wealthy followed, inevitably, by the same among select middle class professionals able to take their chances elsewhere. Keep going: the whirlpools suck down whole cultures into administrative chaos accompanied by the destruction of assets, including critical infrastructure, to arrive at bottom in the familiar cesspools of spilled blood, widespread disease and hunger, refugee camps, mass emigrations, and continuous political rivalry accompanied by criminal and political violence without end.
In Kenya, opposition leader Raila Odinga, the son of a Member of Parliament, has never been without means. [2] His constituents in Kibera Slum and elsewhere, by comparison, may have never known them.
In the mountains on the Afghani-Pakistani border, the same: Osam bin Laden, the son of a wealthy businessman has never been without means, but many of his followers too may never have known them.
Discontent and desparation have a sameness to them whether viewed through the prism of socialist ideology or that of religious fundamentalism.
I wanted to note elsewhere online yesterday that perhaps in Pakistan, "the best fear to shine while the worst appear out of and slip back into darkness."
Also possibly common among conflict cultures, not just those a part of the Islamic Small Wars: what might be called the "slipped disk" theory of rhetoric--that is the development of parties that insist on talking past one another rather than to one another.
No more stunning example might be found of that than having a leader of last year's Fatah al-Islam challenge at Nahr al-Bared in Lebanon claim leading the defense against Israeli aggression on behalf of the state, the Palistinians, and Islam while bringing on the complete destruction of what had become in effect a developed city-state for some 30,000 refugees.
I'd much rather provide those in the refugee camps of Lebanon with immediate dual citizenship in Lebanon, with all rights provided, and in the still emerging Palestine: game over for the moderate, the practical, the human, and the compassionate.
From there, one naturally moves on to the business of planning and caring for so many people.
Of the incumbent powers in conflict zones, one also may note quasi-intuitively (i.e., informed but suggesting with crayon rather than with the fine tipped point of an empirical argument) that conditions for the rise of divisive and violent charismatics have been woven into the cultural fabric and treated as latent in many places. An insult to humanity like Nairobi's Kibera Slum did not come out of nowhere, nor have the processes, economic and political, that nurtured it. Like the spoils portion of a garden, the depot for the struggling simply grew . . . and grew and grew.
With time, denial and neglect of social inequity exact a price.
2. "Raila Odinga." Wikipedia as experienced January 16, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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