Death Takes Many Forms

Abstract

Disturbing things are happening to the world's demography. While a child born today in the West can reasonably hope to live to perhaps 100, in Africa 9,000 people a day are dying of Aids and life expectancy is falling alarmingly. Statistically, a 16-year-old in Botswana can expect two decades of adult life, just half that of her parents. There are villages in Malawi that are in effect orphanages. Alex de Waal looks at the social and political implications of all this and tells the story (p87) of the spread of Aids in Africa through armies, where HIV levels are two to five times greater than they are in the general population. Death takes many forms, and this issue of Index explores some of them, and their hidden stories. In the rich West, we can afford to have big and troubling debates — the right to death and the right to life — which must seem unthinkable in other parts of the world. AC Grayling argues for the right for an individual to choose when and how to die (p26), while Mary Kenny (p35), acknowledging that 'edge of life' questions are difficult, reflects on her opposition to abortion and support of the death penalty. And how do we price individual lives? Peter Pringle (p93) compares the ^80 million spent so far on the Saville inquiry into Northern Ireland's Bloody Sunday with the miserable compensation paid to the families of the 13 dead; he worries, too, about how much of the evidence is still stamped SECRET. Our regional file looks at India and Pakistan — both countries which, from time to time, casually threaten to use nuclear weapons in a war over Kashmir that has already cost 80,000 lives (pi36). There are other forms of dying we discuss. Carl M Cannon (p40), looking at the death of innocence, asks why it took more than 15 years for the paedophile priests scandal in the US to come properly to the world's attention. Stacy Marking examines the disorderly phenomenon of book-burning (p63), while Helena Drysdale tells us about the death of a language — with its loss of collective memory, a culture buried; and warns us about the 40 or so endangered minority languages spoken in the EU (p69). Even nations die: Aminatta Forna, returning to Sierra Leone (p75), walks through buildings that symbolise the gradual crumbling of systems, organisations, services and the cohesive set of values that bind a nation together. Yet in Romania, as in much of Eastern Europe, Irena Maryniak discovers ghosts and myths of communism still unburied (p49), silence competing with truth for the public ear. •