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The debating liars

What an accomplished liar Marko Gravic, the Serbian spokesman being interviewed on the BBC programme Hardtalk is! His performance this Friday was seamless, the smooth texture of his skin matching the slick surface of the untruths he presented. His greatest asset was his British accent, so similar to the one in which his interviewer Tim Sebastian spoke. In that accent, Gravic was able to give his fictions the credibility of a BBC news report. If we didn't have the accounts of the Albanian refugees, crying and hungry, pouring over the border of Kosovo into Macedonia, it would be easy to believe him.

There is a particular tactic that accomplished liars use in debates. They focus attention on a single feature related to their opponent's position, then extrapolate from that to the large picture. The Serb, for instance, tried to suggest that because Kosovar terrorists were claimed to have been guilty of killing 22 people in one reported instance, the current reports of execution and mass evacuation of Albanians by Serbs, resulting in tens of thousands of refugees fleeing their homes, were false or exaggerated. This is a bit like discrediting an entire news report on the basis of one typographical error.

Yet the power of a lie is that once it has been told, the doubts it raises are hard to erase. All the Serbs who have appeared on the BBC so far have repeatedly asserted that the reason that the refugees are fleeing Kosovo is because they are afraid of NATO's bombs. The Serbs go on to support their personal outrage at the bombings with impassioned accounts of their fears for their own families currently living in Belgrade. By diverting attention from the real problem to issues which are irrelevant within the context or simply untrue, they refuse to take responsibility for their own gross crimes and atrocities.

The Serbs are not the only ones to use this type of lie to discredit or dismiss the claims of legitimate victims in their search for justice. In recent weeks, in the wake of the growing instances of violence against Christians in India, a very similar tactic has been used to discredit the claims of Christians that they are being victimised.

In one article which appeared in The Asian Age, the author took up the report of a nun's rape and suggested that it had been blown out of proportion and may well not be true at all. The bulk of the article detailed the countless ways in which the so-called reports of this so-called rape were, in his view, suspect. Based on his suspicions of this one incident, he appeared to be willing to dismiss the notion that Christians were alone in his beliefs, it would perhaps not matter much.

But in an earlier instance, while browsing Rediff on the NeT, I noticed how responses to an article condemning the Staines incident used this same approach to minimise the significance of the murders. The writers of these responses seemed to feel that if they could find any grounds on which to discredit Christians, including historical events such as the Spanish Inquisition, those grounds were sufficient to dismiss the fears of Christians that they were going the way of other victimised minorities.

Instead of focusing on the crime, attention was diverted to issues such as the conversion policies of Christian missionaries. The poverty and despair which inspires converts to sign on to a religion which feeds their desire for a better deal in this life rather than the next was ignored, while the zeal of the converters was belittled and condemned.

On the BBC, one of the refugees, while describing the anguish and terror which she and thousands of others flooding into Macedonia experienced, asked the poignant question: What scale of atrocity would convince the world community that the Albanian cause was worth supporting? It is a question that we could be asking ourselves, in reference to the Christian community in India.

A Christian friend of mine says that she has been saddened to notice how, in recent months, so few non-Christians have written to condemn the events taking place around the country. It may be a quirk of national, if not human, character that if a turbaned man falls unconscious in the street, and there happens to be another turbaned man close by, the second man will be expected to take care of the first.

But these divisions of the world into sects, identified variously by crosses, crescents, marks on the forehead or colours on a flag are all artificial when compared to the single yearning that binds us in one human community: The desire to live a safe and decent life. This truth must prevail over the lies told by despots and misguided commentators everywhere in the world.