As many of you already know, yesterday the infamous 2000+ pages – nine volumes in all – report about the causes of the banking collapse of October 2008 compiled by a Special Investigative Commission (SIC) has been disclosed. The reading taking place at the Reykjavík City Theatre is still going on and it will keep on going for several hours. Many were those that in the last couple of days spent lots of words on the matter, though everybody agreed that what was contained in the long-awaited report didn’t add much to what people had already gathered from various sources, more or less official, in the past months. Responsibilities had been acknowledged and culprits had been singled out. The certain conclusion is a final resolution is far from near and there’s still a lot of work to do. Nothing truly groundbreaking according to the well-informed has really emerged from the report.
Despite the actual significance or weight of the SIC’s exposition on the causes of the financial crisis, what should be in any case taken into account is a fact that may be taken for granted here but it is not so obvious elsewhere – not even in many highly civilized and developed countries: the public opinion has still some degree of relevance in Iceland and people have still the right to be appropriately informed. It’s not so common for a report on a crisis such as the one that struck Iceland to be disclosed in full with such a profusion of means of diffusion, as for example the public continuous reading that is also being broadcasted no-stop over the internet. In many other countries, the government and its official information channels are not in any kind of contact with the population even in cases where it was the population itself to have chosen the government’s members as representatives for taking care of its own interests. Transparency is a crucial value in a democracy, and the bonds connecting people – the electors – and governments – those detainining the power – should never be excised. The original meaning of democracy as a form of legislation commands so. And it’s truly disconcerting to be reminded everyday that some contemporary democracies have reached such a degree of decadence that not only the electors have no clue about what the administration is doing nominally on their behalf, but also that the elections’ routine has become a meaningless travesty in the most outrageous instances. Affirming this brings waves of bitterness to my mouth, as I come from one of the countries that are more and more sinking into the latter category.
What I want to say with this useless little post – that maybe has not much to do with the current events in themselves – is that ultimately Iceland still retains a beautiful and precious value that is the awareness of the worth of the word democracy, a word that elsewhere is just a label attached to a way of running a country with no more meaning in it than the babbling of an infant. There’s much to be learnt from this lesson.
For those who are interested, the reading is still followable from the Reykjavík City Theatre page and excerpts in English language from the report will be available at Althingi‘s official site for consultation.