Of Medals, Medals, and Metal

Today, on the first day of the Olympic games, Russia won a Silver Medal and also killed 1,500 people. In the ensuing days, their Olympic team of over 500 people will be painted as heroes, while their political team of precisely two will likely be vilified. Just one of Lioubov Galkina's air rifle pellets failed to find its mark, but as many as ten Russian planes were shot down over Georgia.

Remember eight years ago in Sydney when governments weren't quite so keen on shooting each other? When words like "self-determinism," "ethnic cleansing," and "insurgency" didn't appear in headlines next to "Michael Phelps Wins Gold?"

My housemate, Jeff (more on my new house in a later post!), is a big Free Tibet activist and is friends with a lot of people who are getting arrested in protests throughout Beijing. Jeff himself was arrested in Dharamsala earlier this year. He's been watching things very, very closely, and we've both been expecting some disturbances and are aware of the obvious China Olympic/human rights hypocrisy that has been getting plenty of press.

But I sort of think that Georgia and Russia take the cake on this one. Since the Soviet Union fell, Georgia has attempted to hold on to Southern Ossetia, a province that contains predominantly ethnic Russians. Southern Ossetia won "de facto autonomy" from Georgia roughly fifteen years ago, but for some reason this week Georgia decided to roll the tanks through that region, removing UN Peacekeeping forces and effectively invading Russia; somewhere between 60 and 1,500 civilians died during the clash.

Russia responded by bombing a city that is in Georgia proper, roughly 30 miles south, extracting a matching death toll of 1,500.

I'm writing this now, in a bit of a state of shock, because I had no idea that a war had started until I checked the New York Times website 30 minutes ago. I watched a fair bit of Thai TV today, and there was absolutely no mention of it. News here is censored heavily, and frankly, it makes sense why this story wouldn't be allowed to be published: there are eerie parallels between the situation in Southern Ossetia and Southern Thailand.

The population of Thailand is approximately 95% Buddhist, but the four southern-most provinces (adjacent to Malaysia) are predominantly Muslim. For a number of years, these Muslim groups have been asking for independence so that they can join Malaysia, which, as a predominantly Muslim nation, would surely welcome them. There is ongoing terrorist activity in the south as the Thai Muslims not only vie for independence, but also for basic human rights: for the past few years, partially using the violence as an excuse, the Thai government has failed to provide roads, electricity, water, or education to the Muslim populations in the south.

So in both parts of the world (not to even mention Tibet...), we see the same pattern: a locally dominant ethnic group wishing to move a border so that they can be a part of a nation that shares a history and ethnicity with them and that would surely provide them with better services. And why don't we just let this happen? Why can't we let marginalized populations near borders determine their own nationality?

For the same reason that we love for our team to win in the Olympics! Pride! Nationalism! A completely artificial sense of internal harmony while embracing Diversity!

So doesn't it actually make sense that this war would have started today, when an athlete becomes merely an agent for his Nation, and when people around the globe are glued to their TV's to see how many medals the people who were born on the same side of some line on some map as they were manage to accrue?

Do Purple Hearts count?