From Aberfan to Aleppo, the deaths of innocents count for nothing

Whenever I travel to the Middle East it is usually to document a war, the aftermath of a war or a massive tragedy which is more often than not the by-product of man-made blunders, power hungry leaders and political misjudgements. The only constants in all of this are the suffering of innocents and the charade of world leaders gathering at international summits to shed their crocodile tears while feigning concern for the benefit of the media.

Every now and again this whole show is brought to a crescendo as the image of one child forces the great and the good to pause and shake their collective heads in grief. Last summer it was the body of three year old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi, whose body was washed up on a beach in Turkey; it made headline news.

This August it was the dusty, shell-shocked face of Omran Daqneesh, just five years old, who brought the horrors of Aleppo in Syria to our attention as he sat staring blankly from the seat of an ambulance. His little face was caked in blood, his left eye was virtually closed and a mop of dusty, tousled hair completed the image. It was shocking, most probably because he just stared; there were no tears; there was no crying. He was silent; numbed and bewildered. We couldn’t tell if he was in pain, or in shock, but his lack of emotion was gut-wrenching. Moments earlier he had been pulled from the rubble of his family home.

On all of these occasions tear-stained mothers and neighbours shout and scream at the cameras; their cries are not usually translated but their words are always all too familiar: “Don’t your leaders care? How can they watch our children suffering like this? Do they have any humanity?” The answer, quite frankly, is “no”.

The truth is, there is little or no humanity in evidence among world leaders as their diplomat proxies, mainly Americans and Russians, slug it out behind closed doors. Don’t for one minute think that they pause to shed a tear in private over the suffering of the innocents as the testosterone flies during these encounters. Precious children like Alan and Omran have little or no value to these politicians other than to be exploited as useful media tools with which to try score political points and instil guilt. And before you rush to cry “racism, Islamophobia or bigotry” I have to say that the so-called great and the good treat all of us ordinary mortals exactly the same — with utter contempt.

I was reminded of this as the heroic little nation of Wales braces itself for the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster next Friday. On 21 October 1966, an entire mining community was traumatised and overwhelmed by grief as a mountain of coal waste swept into their village and swamped the local primary school, killing 116 children and 28 adults.

The victims of the Aberfan disaster were not killed by Russian or NATO bombs; their deaths were due to a mixture of negligence and incompetence. It was no natural disaster, but a direct result of greedy men in positions of power and influence who put profits before people.

Furthermore, just like the war criminals responsible for the suffering of millions of men, women and children in Syria today, not one person was prepared to stand up and accept responsibility for what happened in Aberfan. No one was ever held accountable or put through the courts; nor, I suspect strongly, will anyone ever be tried in the international criminal courts for the war crimes being carried out against the people of Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria.

If there is a lesson to be learned from Aberfan it is this: as long as the rich, arrogant ruling class can avoid accountability and responsibility for their actions nothing will ever change. Corporate negligence, state crimes and crimes against humanity will continue to mount just as the profits of arms dealers, dictators and despots rise in inverse proportion. We are to blame in many ways for not holding our leaders to account and the media is complicit by peddling the lies and propaganda of those in power.

Even today there are those beyond Wales who believe that Aberfan was a man-made disaster because of the evidently lazy journalism and propaganda pumped out to protect the powerful. Aberfan was no accident. This was not an act of nature but the deadly slide of a heap of coal waste which had been tipped onto the site of an underground stream. The National Coal Board (NCB) did its best to shift the blame for one of the biggest post-World War Two tragedies to hit Britain, but no amount of obfuscation by its officials could hide the truth.

In a just world where the victims are put first, the NCB should have been prosecuted along with its chairman, Lord Alfred Robens, a peer of the realm whose name “has been tarnished” by his reaction to the Aberfan disaster. The victims were almost all from the working class, so they were treated more or less with the same disdain with which the children of Syria are treated today. Like the Chilcot Inquiry into the invasion of the Iraq War, there appears to have been a largely cosmetic exercise post-Aberfan in which the real victims received no closure while the rich and powerful seem to have been absolved of all blame.

The chief reporter of the Western Mail newspaper in Wales, Martin Shipton, is an old friend and colleague of mine. “If the criminal negligence that led to the Aberfan disaster betrayed the whole community, the aftermath compounded the betrayal,” he told me. “Not one person received the slightest punishment for the 144 deaths, but an appeal fund for the villagers was plundered so what remained of the lethal tip could be removed.”

Although the inquiry report laid the blame for the disaster squarely with the NCB, Shipton added, not one person was demoted, dismissed or prosecuted, nor did the board face any corporate sanctions. “There was no prosecution either for manslaughter or for any regulatory offence. Lord Robens, the former Labour minister who chaired the NCB, remained in post. For public consumption he offered his resignation, but papers released decades later showed this was a sham and that he’d been assured his job was safe. Incredibly he was subsequently appointed to chair a committee that made recommendations to the government about health and safety legislation.”

When it came to compensating the families of those who lost their children, miserly payments of between £500-£1000 were given out because those in power thought it would be wrong to overwhelm the working class with too much money. Unbelievable as it sounds today, that is actually what happened, as a classified document released under the 30-year rule proved; the authorities in London felt that a more substantial sum “would have destroyed the working-class beneficiaries because they would not be used to large amounts of money.”

This week Britain’s grandest will no doubt come together in a show of unity to remember Aberfan and grieve in an appropriate manner for the benefit of the media. The real tears of grief, though, will be shed in the Welsh village as they always have been, behind closed doors.

So please don’t ask “where’s the humanity” when another bomb or missile made in the West is dropped on a child in Yemen, Syria, Palestine, Iraq or elsewhere. Human blood is cheap and it really doesn’t matter if your skin is olive, white or black; and it matters even less if your native tongue is Arabic or English. The rich and powerful couldn’t give a damn as long as they can continue to break international law, grab land and make a profit from the misery that they cause.

Politicians and arms dealers are all too often two sides of the same coin; the former prepare the ground for the latter to sell their deadly wares, and the innocent suffer. The French have a saying for it: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose — “the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing”. Never has this been more appropriate than in the tragedies of Aberfan and Aleppo; they may be fifty years apart in time, but they are united in the circumstances in which innocent children are killed; it is shameful to say it, but their deaths count for nothing in the game that we call international politics.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.