Joyce McMillan: Marie Colvin legacy of common humanity

IT’S ALMOST 400 years since the great English poet and churchman John Donne wrote his famous Meditation XVII. It’s the one in which he argues that “no man is an island” and asks us, in one of the most famous lines in English literature, not to send to know for whom the funeral-bell tolls, because “it tolls for thee”. His plea is for a kind of infinite empathy, for an understanding that no human being can stand entirely aloof from the death or suffering of another, without damaging something essential in him or herself.

Yet still, so many centuries on, we create our little islands, and live contentedly on them, surrounded by unexamined assumptions about whose suffering matters, and whose does not. So that this week, when the Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin was killed by a government rocket attack in the Syrian city of Homs, it was perhaps inevitable that for the British media, the horror of what is happening in Syria’s rebel cities suddenly came into much sharper focus than ever before.

Colvin herself was one of those exceptional journalists who cannot see human suffering as divisible, and who rate their own lives as less important than the story they are covering. If Colvin’s now-famous last report was about the death-struggle of a toddler fatally wounded in the chest by flying shrapnel, there is no doubt that she saw his life as having the same value as her own, and that she put herself in the firing-line – not only in Syria, but in Sri Lanka, East Timor and many other war-zones – so as to be able to write the kinds of news stories that make distant suffering real to us.

What we have to face about ourselves, though, is the truth that the death of the child in that last report would never, on its own, have made the headlines; it took the death of Colvin – the successful white woman, the American, the writer for a London paper, and the colleague of many eloquent journalists – to jolt our culture into full awareness of what this brutality means, in terms of human loss.

There is a continuing tension, in other words, between our capacity to empathise with all human beings – which certainly exists, and is exemplified by writers like Colvin – and the demonstrable fact that we often restrict our fellow-feeling to those with whom we have some kind of obvious kinship; and it’s a tension which has the most profound political consequences, at every level from the local to the global.

At global level, to take the most obvious example, this tension underpins the entire debate about what should be done to help the people of Syria, as it has underpinned every debate since the end of the Cold War about so-called “humanitarian intervention”, whether in Bosnia or Kosovo, Sierra Leone or Rwanda, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. And although the record of those interventions is in fact quite varied – it’s arguable that Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor, Sierra Leone and Iraqi Kurdistan are all in a better place than they would have been without an international presence – those which have gone badly, notably the Iraq debacle, have offered such spectacular examples of arrogance, mendacity, misjudgment and mixed motives, on the part of major western powers, that they have all but discredited the entire concept.

Nor is this debate about empathy and responsibility confined to dramatic issues of global war and peace; it pervades both the current crisis over the future of the European Union – where stereotyping the Greek people as “lazy” and “greedy” is easier than paying for a currency system that works – and, increasingly, the debate on Scottish independence, which involves a vague assumption that what David Cameron calls the “automatic solidarity” of the United Kingdom is gradually breaking up, as Scots seek to keep more of their resources for themselves.

If the European debate offers a powerful example of what happens when institutional development runs ahead of popular feeling, though, then the current impasse over Syria suggests that we are now in a situation where the effectiveness and capacity of many international institutions is failing to keep up with the strength of feeling generated by the plight of people faced with extremes of state violence.

The failure of the Arab League to act in the Syrian situation, despite much early sabre-rattling, is causing widespread concern across the Arab world. And although it currently suits the British and American governments to blame Russia and China for the lack of United Nations action in Syria, the truth is that even if a strong UN resolution were passed, immediate action to protect the people of Homs and other besieged cities would remain almost impossibly difficult, and therefore highly unlikely.

Nor, in these difficult times, is there any likelihood of this stalemate being resolved any time soon. When the Cold War ended, there was a moment of hope that a New World Order might begin to emerge, with a stronger United Nations, and a greater capacity to act even-handedly against those who flout international law. That moment is long gone, destroyed by those who sought to use and abuse it for their own cynical ends.

What has not changed, though, is the voice of those great reporters and truth-seekers who keep the image of human suffering before our eyes; or the exponential growth in the speed with which those images and words can be transmitted into our homes, our pockets, our hearts.

And if the lavish coverage of Marie Colvin’s death is a reminder of the old world, in which “our people” mattered and foreigners did not, then her life’s work should surely be recognised as a harbinger of the new – of a world in which the child whose death she described is no longer just a nameless victim, without personality or rights; and in which we do not abandon the task of trying to develop political institutions which express our sense of common humanity, alongside those which reflect our regional affinities, our national identity and our local pride.