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On the 17th July a missile was
fired at civilian flight MH17 bringing it down inside the conflict region of
All 298 passengers and flight crew including 80 children on board perished.
I don’t even know where to begin with this.
As a father with young children I am particularly sensitive the images of
children’s belongings strewn across the wheat and sunflower fields.
This is a landscape I am very familiar
with, I live and work in it, the images on TV might show what looks like
another world but it is in fact the same one we all inhabit.
The ground war is dreadful, the
indiscriminate bombing of civilians, the confusion, the
destruction, the broken shredded bodies, this is not a Ukraine I am familiar
with.
Then bodies, body parts, bits of aircraft
and private possessions started raining down out of the blue sky on to the
innocent villagers living below.
Peasant villagers doing nothing more than anyone of
us would be doing under the circumstances, trying to live as best as they could, hoping and praying the distant thunder of guns would pass by without visiting death and misery.
This war is difficult to penetrate to understand what is happening and I’m not going to try and explain it
here, what I will say is the
downing of MH17 may have shifted the outcome of the war in to its final
stages.
How much the shooting down of MH17 has to
do with this is speculation but I imagine that bringing the eyes of the world
on to this squalid war must have some impact on those who find themselves in de
facto charge.
One thing I am fairly certain of, as bodies
remain unaccounted for and as the war passes over the wreckage
destroying evidence, is it will not be forgotten.
Someone will be held accountable for the crime, be it at the Hague or elsewhere be it next year or within in the
next ten.
This crime will not simply pass.