Small-island trouble

Occasionally, Iceland makes the news. In the 1990s it was mainly because Bjork was among the biggest singer/songwriter stars in the modern music firmament, with dozens of her releases making the top 40 and top 20 charts. She is still considered one of the best female singers of all time. Any variety of music lover should sample her eclectic music and experience the sheer innovation of her pulling from all musical influences.

Iceland made the news again in 2008 when it famously ran out of money. It was the only country to collapse during that global financial crisis, with no foreign currency at all until the IMF bailed it out.

Now Iceland is on the international news agenda because of the murder of a 20-year-old woman whose body was found a few days ago after she had gone missing a week earlier. That is shocking news in a country of 330,000 people with an annual average murder rate of 1.8 people, and where there were no murders at all in 2003, 2006 and 2008. It has rattled Icelandic society.

The murder suspects are two fishermen from neighbouring Greenland, which also enjoys a very low murder rate. What is of interest to many Greenlander women, who have demonstrated in solidarity with their neighbours, is the fact that three women in Greenland have had rare violent deaths this year, two suicides and the murder of the third. That hardly compares with the killing spree that is on in TT, with the disappearance of young women becoming a sport, but it is enough to make us reflect on this cycle we find ourselves in.

I heard a radio interview with an Icelandic woman who remarked that people in Iceland have no reason to be violent or to kill anyone because they have everything they need, including a good public welfare service, the police are unarmed and no one carries weapons. What she did not say is that in common with many countries where the sun does not shine for several months a year, the incidence of depression, mental illness and alcohol abuse is extremely high.

It may be untrue (and who knows these days what is and what isn’t?) but I was told of an early middle-age woman in TT recently escaping capture because she was deemed “too old” when the two men, in a passing car, who had grabbed her finally saw her face.

We cannot claim to be suffering from SAD, and certainly the majority of Trinis do not have everything we need or want but there is something perverse in the preying upon young, vulnerable women. If girls simply disappear we could deduce that they are being trafficked, but the recent spate of disappearances have mainly resulted in death.

Was death unintended or the objective? The answer is irrelevant because we live in violent times, we always have done, but the comparative security, and technical and social advances of the last 50-60 years, lulled us into thinking that the base nature of the human being had changed.

It is clear that our socialisation is ongoing business and we have failed quite miserably in our politics and policies.

Law and order is breaking down here fast, and that places new burdens upon us as individuals, but it is hard to contain violence in an uncertain world so delicately poised for eruptions.

I suspect, sadly, that it will get worse since so many of our problems are structural and we just don’t seem to have the imagination or will to change anything.