Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: People quietly adjust to regime change simply to stay alive

Taliban fighters stand guard in front of the Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul).
Taliban fighters stand guard in front of the Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul). Taliban fighters stand guard in front of the Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul).

The terror of Afghan women, almost certainly in accurate judgment of the Taliban’s intent towards them, is likely to disappear and erupt again over the next weeks and months though often out of the world’s sight.

People clinging to and falling from planes is the nightmare version of regime change. Few have the stomach for daily nightmares. Stalwart support groups will try to keep advocating for the suppressed, struggling against the pressure of events.

Afghans have good reason to show loyalty fast now to the victors, although the lack of direction among those wandering groups of heavily armed men may be almost as dangerous as clear-cut targeting. Watching that clip of four women holding up handwritten pages, a Taliban group clustered nearby, it was possible to imagine the confusion of the nearest gun-toter turning into protectiveness towards them, if he didn’t lose his nerve and his head and open fire.

When one week the ruling class is of a distinct politico/religious colour and next week it’s the opposite not every new underdog can flee, or wants to. Out of desire for a quiet life women and men of all ages blend in, maybe even come to believe in the new order. Or they go underground.

Un-dramatic adjustments to new regimes have been made for centuries. Staying alive may depend on it. Often the prize instead has been social position, place in the world. Some are good at pivoting. They stand at a shop counter or queue at the chemist’s and offer for all to hear an opinion on the new order. ‘Couldn’t happen fast enough.’

Couldn’t happen here, you growl, sure everybody here knows where everybody else stands. That has never been true. As the years go by some become more open with others, perhaps more open with themselves. There are DUP voters apparently now rueing their support for the party, dismayed at the outcome of Brexit and at policy on same sex marriage, even on abortion provision, but still unwilling to say so out loud.

In the now distant past where the Troubles ended and Power-Sharing Take Two took over, a number of people began to vote for ‘the IRA’s political voice’ though some had sworn they never would. There are Sinn Féin voters today who went back and forth over more than two/three elections to the SDLP, a hefty share of them who kept their shifting allegiance to themselves. As the SDLP knows to its cost, some never switched back.

Some no doubt gradually came to share SF beliefs, if without completely white-ing out what the IRA had been doing for the previous 20-odd years. Adjusting to new political realities in such a bitterly divided place, criticising ‘your own’ or showing understanding for ‘the others’ can be as hard to negotiate as allegiance to a new regime. Open dislike for the IRA was easily translated into support for ‘the security forces’, willingness to spy. A million miles from James Bond with his shaken-not-stirred Martinis and cutting-edge gadgets, being deemed a spy meant a death sentence.

Changing religion in previous centuries at times meant being cast out by community as well as birth family whereas migrating for work was sanctioned, traditional. Others took themselves away to hell out of it to Handsworth or Hackney, by choice, somewhere the neighbours weren’t so clued-up about their seed, breed and generation. In every decade people have fled to give their heads peace, to London, European cities, America or Australia if they could swing it.

Novelist Brian Moore, lifelong emigrant, is at last celebrated in his birthplace though his depiction of the sexual or de-sexualised lives of his characters and swipes at Catholic Puritanism and Irish nationalism once offended communal piety. Not that he identified with Protestant unionism. He might well have said with Joyce that he’d lost his religion, not his mind. Instead he left and his books, when not banned, spoke for him.