World on Fire - An Extract

In the Serbian concentration camps of the early 1990s, the women prisoners were raped, over and over, many times a day, often with broken bottles, often together with their daughters. The men, if they were lucky, were beaten to death as the Serbian guards sang national anthems. If they were not so fortunate, they were castrated or, at gunpoint, forced to castrate their fellow prisoners, sometimes with their own teeth. In all, thousands were tortured and executed.

In Rwanda in 1994, ordinary Hutus killed 800,000 Tutsis over a period of three months, typically hacking them to death with machetes. Young children would come home to find their mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers, on the living room floor, in piles of severed heads and limbs.

In Jakarta in 1998, screaming Indonesian mobs torched, smashed, and looted hundreds of Chinese shops and homes, leaving over 2000 dead. One who survived - a 14-year-old Chinese girl - later committed suicide by taking rat poison. She had been gang raped and genitally mutilated in front of her parents.

In Israel in 1998, a suicide bomber driving a car packed with explosives rammed into a school bus filled with 34 Jewish children between the ages of six and eight. Over the next few years, such incidents intensified, becoming daily occurrences and a powerful collective expression of Palestinian hatred. “We hate you” a senior Arafat official elaborated in April 2002 “and the air hates you the land hates you the trees hate you there is no purpose in your staying on this land.”

 

On September 2001, middle eastern terrorists hijacked for American airplanes. They destroyed the World Trade Centre and the south-west side of the Pentagon, crushing and incinerating, approximately 3000 people. “Why you are hated all over the world.” proclaims a banner held by Arab demonstrators. Apart from the violence, what is the connection between these episodes? The answer lies in the increasing relationship and the explosive collision between the three most powerful forces operating in the world today: markets, democracy, and ethnic hatred.

Amy Chua