Our deafening silence

It struck close to home. The colleague on the other side of the telephone was inconsolable. Innocent was one of the many family members struck by grief at the passing of a loved one who died in a faraway country defending our country.

"Thank you for giving us your brother who died for us," I later wrote in an obvious loss for words.

All 13 of the dead were from One Parachute Battalion in Bloemfontein.

Most people who think about their closing days imagine dying at home in an old age in a warm bed, surrounded by loved ones holding your hand as you drift away.

Now imagine you are in the prime of your life. You had never heard of the Central African Republic, except perhaps as a result of a soccer team by that name which would play against your country in a qualifier for the Africa Cup of Nations. You are deployed there to, officially, provide training and support, including "driving lessons".

The next thing you know is that you are in the middle of a war-torn country run by a despot who himself came to power through a violent coup. Suddenly bullets rain around you as you are called on to defend with a band of 200 South African soldiers against a flood of 3000 rebels. You are about to die in a place you hardly know, never to see your family again.

I really hope the opposition parties do not play politics with this terrible loss of life. Yet we must as ordinary citizens ask questions.

Our usually voluble public commentators have been remarkably silent about what some call "the worst military setback since apartheid." Is it because we are too scared to question authority in the wake of such a terrible disaster? Is it because we have become so used to death around us every day that it no longer matters that another 13 bodies arrived home by plane? Is it because we calculate that defence force personnel who go into battlefields should be prepared to die? Or is Bangui (the capital) too far away and insignificant to merit question, this "black hole of governance in the centre of the continent"? There must surely be more "interesting" things to air views about in our virulent talk show culture?

What really concerns me, though, is the silence of our universities. I do not know of a single institution planning to hold open meetings, seminars or debates on questions about our involvement in one of Africa's most unstable, fragmented and dangerous countries.

In another country there would be regular "teach-ins" for students not only to learn the politics and geography of their nation's war adventures abroad, but also to question the ethics, morality and (almost always) economics behind sending young people into deadly parts of the world.

Unless we raise a generation of youth not only consumed by internal struggles (service delivery, political succession, acquisitive wealth) but also by international questions that affect all of us, we will continue to allow our government to send citizens into harm's way.

Our open forums on campuses must ask questions such as why are we fighting in a foreign country. If we are not fighting, but building, why are we shoring up a dictatorship whose leader just fled the country? What is the state of our intelligence? Our spooks are good at tapping the cellphones of those who allegedly threaten to derail presidential contenders - as Frank Chikane's latest book reveals. So where is our intelligence capacity when it comes to that most dangerous of situations, our soldiers fighting in foreign lands?

Why are some soldiers "on the ground" claiming the training mission is a lie? Who killed our soldiers? Where was the air and ground cover in this war zone where we placed our men and women?

War must always be an opportunity to learn.

Unless these questions are posed in civil society and in university classrooms, we run the real risk of having this happen again and again simply because of a lack of vigilance by our people.

Tonight a mother will cry herself to sleep because of a son lost in Bangui; a wife will wonder about the loss of a breadwinner; a teen son or daughter wants to know: "How did my father really die?" And a country should be wondering: what is the truth about what happened more than 4000km from Bloemfontein?