Today there are more than one hundred armed conflicts in the world.
Surprise.
He thought there were two, Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Palestine.
Well, no.
He had a vague idea that there were five or six more.
But a hundred?
It must be true because Martin Griffiths, the head of OCHA, the United Nations agency for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told me so.
Griffiths and his people are in the news today for the central role they play in the impossible mission of alleviating the horrors of war in Gaza.
But Griffiths says that even more desperate is what is happening in a civil war two thousand kilometers away, far from the television cameras, alien to the moral conscience of the West, of the "global south", of almost everyone.
“If there was a table measuring suffering in the world, Sudan would be number one,” Griffiths said.
This is what there is in Africa's third largest country: urban centers reduced to rubble;
seven million displaced;
25 million without enough food, famine in sight.
All in the last nine months.
In the last thirty years, 1.7 million deaths.
That is, murders.
Because let us not forget the irony that Orwell discerned, that killing for a political cause confers “respectability” to the murderer.
It frees him from punishment for what in normal life would be a heinous crime.
As has been the case of the main person responsible for the nightmare that more than half of the population of Sudan is experiencing.
Omar al-Bashir, dictator of that country from 1989 to 2019, the cause of the calamity that persists today, was accused of genocide in 2005 at the International Court of Justice, just like Israel today.
The judges ignored that particular accusation, but declared him guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Two international arrest warrants were issued against him in 2009 and 2010 but nothing happened.
Although it could have happened.
In 2015 Al-Bashir visited South Africa, the country that is currently leading the genocide trial against Israel in that same International Court of Justice.
The South African government's obligation was to arrest and hand over Al-Bashir to court, but he abstained.
Out of African solidarity, or something, he let her return to his house.
What am I going with all this?
Two things.
First, flagellate myself - and, I dare say, most of my dear readers - for paying so little attention to distant conflicts like the one in Sudan in which the victims are not people more or less like us. (the Ukrainians, for example), not “chosen” ones like the Israelis or the Palestinians, but black Africans or exotic Asians like the Rohingyas of Burma or the Uyghurs in China.
Second, and related to the above, point out that not all the hypocrisy or all the atrocities that exist have to do with rich countries or great powers.
In our self-absorption, we tend to believe that “the West,” or Russian imperialism, or Chinese cynicism pull the strings of the world.
They move a lot, yes, but understanding conflicts in strictly “geopolitical” terms does not take us to the crux of the matter.
More accurate, in my opinion, was UN man Martin Griffiths when I spoke to him this week.
“The hundred or more conflicts in the world are not in their essence battles between West and East, or between the global south and the privileged north, although these may in several cases be their manifestations,” Griffiths, who has spent half a century, told me mediating wars.
“It's worse than that.
It is more primordial.
“It is a betrayal of the fundamental values that societies have fought for for centuries.”
The fundamental value is “thou shalt not kill.”
What defines the advancement of civilization is the value of human life.
Barbarians like Al-Bashir or Putin or Netanyahu or Yahya al Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, kill for their causes, causes that may be more or less noble, more or less justified.
But what they all have in common is the predisposition to annihilate anyone if they consider that this will contribute to achieving their objectives.
The most prolific murderers of the last century were Stalin, Mao and Hitler, all three willing to exterminate millions to achieve their respective redemptive visions.
On a smaller scale of criminality, but similar in the essence of their mental processes, we have the case of the Argentine military who ordered the torture, disappearance and death of thousands in the seventies.
I saw a documentary on television about the 1985 trial, a welcome exception to the rule that someone who murders from power evades legal punishment.
Before they were condemned one after another he argued in his defense, with genuine indignation, that he had acted for the good of the country.
They would all say the same thing if they faced court.
Everyone - Putin, Netanyahu, Al-Bashir, Videla, Hitler, Stalin, Mao - did what they did for a noble, necessary and altruistic objective.
ISIS or ETA terrorists would also say it.
These characters horrify and fascinate me.
They are normal people in their daily lives (“the banality of evil”) who love their mothers or, as in the case of Hitler, their dogs.
But they become convinced of an idea, a great and sacred idea that erases compassion, that gives them license to betray what Martin Griffiths calls the fundamental values of humanity and that turns them into murderous fanatics.
And the terrible thing is that they will continue there, in their madness or self-deception, long after the falls of Yankee or Russian imperialism, or Hamas or Netanyahu, or communism or capitalism, or what we today call “geopolitics.” .
There will remain, in every corner of the earth, a defective gene in human DNA, a destructive deviation from the decency and civilization to which almost all of us aspire, including the population of Sudan.