We are burying our better nature under the rule of the mob

'When freedom comes," a despairing Aggrey Klaaste wrote some years ago, "I will take my family and emigrate to Beirut." It was the sort of remark that made you sit up or rub your eyes to clear the cobwebs. Beirut at the time was a byword for civil strife. It was seeing the last embers of a civil war that had claimed lives of thousands.