Terror and the global increase in acid attacks
According to reliable news sources, there has been over 400 acid attacks this year alone in some parts of our globe. Most of these attacks are on women but it is obvious that a lot of them are targeted at people based on their religious beliefs exemplified in their dressing. Women wearing hijab are prime […]
According to reliable news sources, there has been over 400 acid attacks this year alone in some parts of our globe. Most of these attacks are on women but it is obvious that a lot of them are targeted at people based on their religious beliefs exemplified in their dressing. Women wearing hijab are prime on the list. Such stories sometimes tend to humanize us all. Several years ago, long before social media spontanized breaking news, it appeared that this was a Naija, African or even a third world malaise. Who would have thought that there are undeveloped minds in the developed world?
We live in a world where we are kidnapped by kidnappers, mauled down by sadists and terrorized by terrorists. Such news coming from other parts of the world where nothing evil ever seems to show could be humbling.
If you follow the news as closely as some of us, you need to constantly call your shrink for sanity assessment. Skin pigments may be different and oceans may divide us but the human race shares the same fate- from Calabar to Cairo, Hadejia to Houston and everywhere else in-between. Scriptures describe the heart of man as evil and desperately wicked with a question ‘who can know it’? We have conquered battles, installed nuclear armaments and moved beyond the moon but one thing we are yet to conquer is the depravity of the human mind.
In our battle with terror as with our other battles against evil, the terrorist is a usually one or two step ahead. Planes ferry people and are sometimes used to drop bombs, but no one ever thought of using ones loaded with innocent souls as attack weapons until Osama bin Laden pioneered it on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2011. Global intelligentsia in all its sophistry is playing catch-up with human depravity. Whether it be Anders Bering Breivik who mauled down 77 young people in one swoop or Ted Kaczynski eleven years earlier – we are behind the depravity of the human mind. In the last year alone, while global security is focused on terror cells, lone wolves have unleashed ingenious premeditated terror leading to the death of many. Someone thought of ramming vehicles into crowds in London and was copied in Paris.
The terrorist is ahead of us, but no match for the human will. The human will is strong and powerful. That is the reason you probably rushed out this morning to grab a copy of your Daily Trust. You were not unaware of the potential dangers a pregnant day might deliver; just hoping it would not be your last. In spite of the imminent and present dangers surrounding us, we find the will to soldier on.
Every act of terror in any corner of the globe betrays the ingenuity of the human mind in hatching terror. Not many Naija remember Rita Agbakuru. She was a beautiful citizen whose attempt to break from a relationship turned her world upside down. Doused in acid and left to scald, her scars opened a new world of vengeance to others. There was Dele Giwa, killed by a parcel bomb, but there was also Alifa Daniel, doused with acid for doing his job. We would never know who killed Bagauda Kaltho, Godwin Agbroko and several others. After each attack, we wish that it would end, but it continues.
Barely a month ago, Jameel Mukhtar and his cousin Resham Khan were driving through a British neighbourhood to celebrate Khan’s 21st birthday. At a busy intersection, both were splashed with something they thought was water – it turned out to be acid and both were scalded. The attacker did not appear to personally know either of his victims. It sufficed that they were different and only their pain and permanent scar could cure that thought in his twisted mind. That was June. Several other assailants are resorting to acid as forms of attacks.
John Donne, the legendary Vicar of St. Paul’s posited that no man is an island. “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,” he wrote. In this sad and lonely world, we are diminished by tragedies; no matter what corner of the globe it rears it’s ugly head. One feels the pangs of abnormality unleashed on Maiduguri by Boko Haram as well as the inexplicable carnage in Syria. We are diminished by a tsunami in any part of the globe as much as a flood in Lekki. The depravity of the human mind notwithstanding, we should stand in solidarity as potential victims. Donne surmises it aptly, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” We could paraphrase Shakespeare even today in saying “as flies to wanton boys are we to terrorists, they kill us for their sport. If you see or know something, its in the interest of the universality of brotherhood to say something, else we share the same destiny. For when a bomb goes off or acid is splashed, who knows who would be its victim?