Dangerous signals

In other words, too bad some people lost their lives in the bargain; they shouldn’t have been there in the first place furthering their country’s evil designs. And everyone knows the media does have its professional hazards.So what should the TV centre employees have done? Boycott the night shift in the face of persistent rumours that the media installation might be struck by NATO bombers? They’d have lived if they had, but what’s a life minus bread and butter. In the event, they were all hunched over their workstations when the fatal cruise missile came swishing along, blowing them to smithereens before anyone had any inkling of what hit them. One moment you are straining to keep a transmission relay link going and the next, boom, it’s all over them.

Does it matter anymore whether they should have been classified as enemy targets in their status as employees of a state-run TV channel? Did they deserve to be sacrificed even if they were helping keep their fighting countrymen’s morale high? In the face of relentless bludgeoning by a superpower whose only interest in the matter is keeping its global cop image intact for others to fear.

For it would seem the US is in a hurry to make up for its failure to budge Saddam Hussein one inch despite sending in their own forces. Or maybe they just can’t help being trigger-happy. We are after all talking of a community which helplessly stands by watching its 15-year-old kids spraying death on their school-fellows as an expression of their individuality. Where a motorist could expect to be shot in cold blood for ignoring the honking of a following vehicle. Where toddlers amuse the-mselves by kicking around new-bo-rn kittens in a gory version of soccer.

Then again, maybe the self-appointed keeper of capitalism simply needs to expend its munitions to keep the industry producing them happy back home. And there’s nothing like a dozen downed choppers to stimulate the segment and bag fresh orders to keep the cash-flow going smoothly.

It’s not over yet, though it’s going to be a month since death-spewing warplanes began screaming overhead in the Balkans, shooting down a Yugoslav MiG-29 here and a Kosovar refugee convoy there, the latter truly representing the grass being smothered underneath two marauding armies.Except that the dead television crew is beyond all ideology now, beyond all care in the world. What do they care anymore whether it’s their stubborn political leadership or the Western alliance which blinks first.

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