When up to five million Ukrainians died in the famine that they suffered in 1932-33, scholars would later classify it as genocide committed by Joseph Stalin’s government thus redefining the original and more universally accepted meaning of the word: which is the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Most of the world thinks of mass killings as the classic definition of genocide – of, for example, the extermination of 6 million Jews by Hitler; of the ethnic-cleansing wars in Yugoslavia and Rwanda etc., but in scholars redefining its meaning and incorporating death by famine via a State’s action or inaction, genocide attained a new meaning – which is essentially more embracing.
Thus, if a government feels it could shirk its responsibilities by trivializing serious dangers its citizens face and they suffer, even die; if because it suffers from a worse case of hubris – that it could do whatever it wants or feels it doesn’t have to do anything or face the consequences when danger looms large over its people, should it be left to remain unscathed even though hundreds of its citizens perish due to its actions or inactions?
We all know the history of the gargantuan faux pas this government committed in not making the appropriate and timely effort to obtain the Covid vaccine when it might have done so, when hundreds of persons who died from the virus might still have been alive had the vaccine been received in this country long months before it started trickling in and when it was too little too late to save those already passed on to the great beyond.
What makes this an ethnic-snobbery case of apartheid-esque chauvinism practiced is the fact that while India, a global producer of pharmaceuticals was donating the vaccines freely to the world, this government foolishly went to the African Union – which is a recipient not a producer of the vaccine.
For whatever reason we went there, the ICC should hold the decision-makers responsible for this act on the basis of insanity and thus incapable of running a country; and when the PM compounded this madness by saying to ask for help is to beg and he is not doing that (even if the country is wiped out) he confirmed that he, not the virus, is the country’s worst enemy.
Now we are getting the sub-standard Sinopharm vaccine from China, and already there are lots of cases of persons getting infected by the virus although having had two shots of this bootlegged Chinese vaccine – which poor countries across the world are refusing, actually dumping.
Why are we treating this questionable vaccine with pomp and pageantry when this is a no-no for other countries in the know; and why is there talk of mandatory vaccination when citizens are not given the option to choose which vaccine they prefer to take?
