Social: "Ask not what the country has done for you - Ask what you can do for the Country"

By Bindu Chaudhary

What makes news is not when a dog bites a man but when a man bites a dog. Before the Maoist insurgency, what generally used to be news is not a news anymore and vice-versa. Casualties and murder once upon a time used to be a news, but no more. What makes news today is not listening about any casualties at all.  If anybody called Nepal a peaceful country now, that would be a big news. News about abductions, shoot-outs, suicide, murder... no more increases blood-pressure or causes heart to palpite faster. We are all becoming immune to such events; children are growing up with the sounds of guns instead of the rattles. It is such a shameful apathy. Armed conflict has brought no good to the nation. People are frustrated and have started losing hope. They are terrified about their uncertain future and that of the country. Many are being killed and many more others are killing themselves.

After the Maoist insurgency, the number of suicide cases have escalated. This is but a cry for help. Statistics show that on an average, 4.18 people died of armed conflict per day in the last five years, but to the utter surprise and dismay, on an average, 6.72 people a day killed themselves. It is a pity of a nation that 7,640 people lost their lives due to the armed conflict, and it is a pity of the Governance that more than 12,277 people had to take away their own lives during the same period of armed conflict. It is also important to note here that since suicide is not illigal in Nepal, not all cases are reported to the police. Therefore, one cannot rule out the possibility that the number of suicide cases could be higher than reported. Suicide has become the second leading causes of
untimely deaths in Nepal after the Maoist insurgency.

Suicide is an indicative of the environment and the social structure, because the tendency towards suicide depends less on the individual psychology or the physical environment, but more on the individual's association with the broader society and faith in the outside world. It is hence that during war time when the relationships seem to get apart due to bereavement, when people seem to lose hope due to violence and torture in the environment; when they feel isolated due to restraints in normal activities, the frustration level and mental distress gets high. There are studies and reports which confirm that one of the dreadful side effects of war is self-murder.

The UNICEF report Impact of Armed Conflict on Children by Graça Machel, the expert of the Secretary-General of the United Nations writes about the effect of armed conflict on adolescents, saying that the extreme and prolonge circumstances of armed conflict can interfere with their identity development and that the distressing experiences, hopelessness, and sudden changes in family circumstances such as death or dissappearance of parents may lead them to lose trust in people, view their lives very pessimistically, suffer from serious depression or even commit suicide.

Similarly, a landmark report issued by the World Health Organization in 2002 on Violence as a Global Health Problem mentions that on an average day, a person commits suicide every 40 seconds, that more than 1,400 people are the victims of homicide, and that nearly 35 people are killed every hour as a result of war or armed conflict. The report adds that in the year 2000, 815,000 people lost their lives to suicide, more than double the number of people who die as a result of armed conflict every year (306,600).

The Kashmir Record and Research Council (KRRC) in India too has reported
the increasing trend of suicide in the valley of Kashmir after the military activities. According to a recent Associated Press review of Army casualty report, fifteen American Army personnel and two Marines have committed suicides in Iraq over the past seven months. In addition, over 500 Americal soldiers have recently been evacuated from Iraq for mental health reasons.

G.J. Fairburn, in his book Contemplating Suicide: The Language and Ethics of Self-Harm gives nine categories of suicide: His first category is "no hope suicide", in which the individual feels hopeless and thinks that there is no way out of their present distress. This form of suicide is linked to depression and the distorted worldview. The second category of suicide is the "existential suicide"- the person may be happy in his/her life, but may be too anxious or frightened about the future and that fear acts as a force to commit suicide.

Fairburn gives an example of a fear of nuclear war in the future and the person feeling that the life cannot take the trouble caused by the incident as an example of existential suicide. Fairburn's another category of suicide is the "dutiful suicide", like the sati system wherein it was expected of a widow to die on a pyre of the husband.

The persons who come under the category of altruistic/philanthropic/ sacrificial suicide" are the elderly or the terminally ill who kill themselves to help others. "Revenge suicide" is another possible motivation for suicide that is committed by a peron to harm others or to make them feel sorry, guilty and distressful. The "political or ideological suicide" are committed in order to make a political point, and he gives an example of the Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire to protest the Vietnam war. Another category of suicide he calls is the "judicial suicide", where a person takes his/her life believing that there is a legalistic reasons to it and that they deserve death because of their wrongdoing. In the "other- driven" suicide, a person commits suicide because of the actions of others, for example Socrates was ordered that he commited suicide. The final category of suicide, Fairburn calls is the "mass/ multiple suicide", which can include anything like suicide pacts involving a couple or family, to mass suicides. There could be many reasons to mass suicide, including the motivatios of the different categories mentioned above.

The reasons for people committing suicide during war could be more of a type of no- hope, existential, ideological, judicial, other- driven or the mass suicide. In situations of armed conflict, many factors that may cause severe social and mental stress  and encourage them to end their trouble permanently could be: the death, separation and loss of family and friends; witnessing and experiencing violence and torture, loss of home and distruction of the physical environment; loss of income and livelihood opportunities; material deprivation; changes in social interaction; restrictions in movement; living in an environment exhausted by stress, threat, fear, insecurity, frustration, apathy and hopelessness; besides a feeling of guilt about not being able to protect their children and family from being killed or suffering, etc. 

Also, the reasons for suicide could be different for different people depending on their individual circumstances and their coping capabilities. During war, there are media reports of not only the general public contemplating suicide, but also the terrorists and army/security force. The reasons for them to end their lives may vary because of the different challenges and life threats that are unique to each of them. One of the reasons, besides the others, for the rebels and the security forces to end their lives could be the stress and strain related factors because of the kind of work they do and the possible burnout or emotional fatigue due to their constant exposure and involvement to violence and killing.

Nepal is a country so tiny and the population so megre, one cannot afford to lose any more. Martin Luther King, Jr. has rightly said, "History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people." The concerned should come out of their vested interests and act like "good people" to at least hold the hand of those who are ending their lives. People have already started showing burnout symptoms- and perhaps suicide was their last cry for help.

Let suicide merely remain a news- a story once upon a time. Let people not get immune to the news of people killing themselves, if the country has to be saved from becoming a full blown grave. It may not be far when people start to question the famous  "Ask not what the country has done for you - Ask what you can do for the Country." Save people from getting killed, save people from killing themselves before there are nobody to govern, or before the country starts to lose citizens who could probably have saved the country.

(Author can be reached at binduchaudhary@yahoo.com)