The Tribune

NO matter how much Nathan Chen defies gravity and figure skates like he is a swirling missile flying gracefully through the air or snowboarding legend Shaun White continues to dazzle in his fifth and final Olympic appearance, there is one moment that stands out above all others from the 2022 Winter Olympics underway in Beijing, China.

It’s a moment that should leave us quaking in our boots or sandals or whatever we normally stand on, even the ground beneath our feet.

It’s the moment that Russian President Vladimir Putin reached out to Chinese President Xi Jinping and said, Let’s be friends. The actual words were “in the spirit of friendship and strategic partnership”.

I may be totally wrong, but I grew up thinking that the only thing that kept the world safe was that Russia and China did not like each other much. Both had dictators called presidents, neither thought too highly of human rights, both had magnificent topography in some areas and lots of geophysical concerns in others. But the fact that they were not chummy gave all of us a little breathing room.

Now they come together at what is supposed to be the world’s greatest gathering of athletes and they act like good sports themselves. Apart, each can pose a threat, a path of prickly thorns the US must navigate. Together, they are the impenetrable gate from which a hidden automated arm reaches out and sucker punches you faster than you can duck.

Now I realise this is not top-level world politics analysis. This is as basic as it gets but for a country like The Bahamas that rises and falls on a lot of what the US does and decides, this is no small reason for fear.

A united front between China and Russia, which is now trying to broker enough natural gas to keep China running, would possess the power to squish America. Mr Nice Guy Joe Biden would be like the centre of an Oreo cookie, the sweet part everyone wants to get to that gets crushed by the outsides so you can get to the middle.

All this make-nice-in-the-sandbox talk in Beijing was happening while Russia was loudly mounting troops on the border of Ukraine, once part of the USSR but enjoying its independence since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992, now threatened with being gobbled up by Russia. Think how we in The Bahamas would feel if the UK suddenly decided that since we were once part of their united commonwealth, they could just come take back our territory, the heck with our believing that we were a free and sovereign nation. There’s a new sheriff in town and they run the show. Swallow hard and suck it up.

In case I am overreacting or being too harsh, let me calm down and turn back to the athletes who are performing feats that don’t even seem humanly possible.

The men and women and teens in the games have worked too hard to get where they are to worry about a maelstrom of political mischief by leaders of two of the three largest superpowers in the world. They have enough to worry about, including knowing they are competing in only the second Olympics the US has diplomatically boycotted with no government officials attending though no doubt rah-rahing every time an American athlete takes home a medal.

It’s a strange Winter Olympics all around, the lack of spectators, the daily testing and the bubble that athletes are living in, the high-tech light show for an opening ceremony, the departure from the alphabetical entry of countries into the arena, and the stars themselves shining in some ways brighter than ever to demonstrate that COVID stole time, but it did not steal their spirits. There will be the moments we never forget, the Shaun White snowboarding farewell performance, Eileen Gu, born and raised in America by an American father and Chinese mother, winning gold for China, saying she wanted to inspire young Chinese girls and Americans understanding that desire, forgiving, even if mourning the loss of a medal.

We saw hugs and tears and hopes dashed and exceeded. Surely, some friendships will emerge that will build bridges and not tear down world order. In those we have to keep the faith.

PRESSURE TO EXPOSE THE DARK SIDE OF COLD-BLOODED GREED

The February 3 Tribune front page photo of a young man perched atop a sunken boat in the middle of a stormy sea, the sole survivor of a smuggling operation that took the lives of 35 others, was a stark and chilling reminder that human smuggling is a heinous crime in which victims have little or no recourse and we in the public can cry out against but feel helpless in any attempt to help.

That image of Juan Esteban, found barely conscious off the coast of Florida after two days at sea when he saw others, including his own sister perish, symbolises the risk desperate people are willing to take. Trying to escape a life of fear or poverty or both they find themselves in the hands of cold-blooded smugglers who exact a high price for the promise of passage to a better life, a passage that too often ends in desertion or worse, as smugglers try to stay one boat length ahead of the law.

Esteban, 24, who talked his younger sister, Maria, into escaping the extreme poverty and daily dangers of life in Colombia and going to America to reunite with their mother whom they had not seen for 11 years since she had emigrated to Houston, made international headlines. He was one of 36 passengers from several countries who paid to be smuggled into the US on that fateful voyage, transferred from one boat to another in the middle of the night in The Bahamas. The second vessel, overcrowded and less seaworthy, was no match for the roiling seas. Swamped by one wave too many, it capsized, tossing its human cargo overboard. Esteban watched his sister get swept under the boat. He tried desperately to save her. Others were still alive, some clinging to the hull. In an interview days later, he told reporters that a boat came along and rescued the smugglers, promis-ing another boat would pick up those left behind, but no other boat showed up.

The question we must ask – and continue to ask until the need to pressure no longer exists – is where are those smugglers now? Who is protecting them? Smuggling is organised crime carried out in the dark of night. What do we have to do as a people with heart and compassion and outrage to keep up the pace of the investigation in this case, to keep the pressure on, and what do we have to do to stop this gut-wrenching practice that goes on off our shores day after day and night after night? We arrest someone for possession of weed yet fail to capture smugglers who pocket tens of thousands of dollars from the poorest people in the region and get away with murder. Do we need more tools, more light-seeking, night-vision drones, more infiltration into smuggling rings? Where is the desire to conduct undercover operations in this world of risk where a few get rich and the rest of us turn our backs on the tragedy that unfolds in our own backyard.

It is not someone else’s problem. It is ours.