By TEE NGUGI

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It must be horrible to be buried in October, says the colonel’s wife, a protagonist in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic, No One Writes to the Colonel. The elderly impoverished couple had woken up to find the cold grey sad month sprawled on their porch.

But for parents in Gaza, Israel, Russia, and Afghanistan, May must be a dark horrible month, and will be so for the rest of their lives.

Earlier this May, a gunman walked into a school in the Russian town of Kazan and shot seven children dead. Some of the children, trying to escape, had jumped from a second-floor window to their deaths.

Parents who had dropped off spritely eager children in the morning came to collect or view their small cold lifeless bodies. Then in Afghanistan, suspected Islamic State jihadists bombed a school in Kabul, killing at least 60 teenage girls as they emerged from class. The street, on that warm spring afternoon, was discoloured by shreds of uniforms, books and backpacks. And in Gaza, Palestine, children were being pulled from underneath the rubble of their collapsed homes, their bodies still warm but without life.

In one heartbreaking instance shown on a global TV network, a child and her father hold hands across adjacent hospital beds. The man’s eyes are bandaged and his face is caked with blood.

The child, with stains of blood on her face, stares sadly, her pain no longer physical. The father and daughter were the only survivors in their family. They escaped with their lives but what life will they have?

And in Israel, two children have been killed by indiscriminate Hamas rockets. They, too, had their lives and dreams ahead of them, and their deaths have left their parents to live joyless lives.

What is the motive for these killings of children? In Kazan and Kabul, the children were deliberately targeted. The Kazan gunman could be a deranged individual egged on by demonic delusions or he could be a terrorist pursing a messianic agenda. Did he celebrate after each child fell? Did his unknown accomplices celebrate his ‘success’? In Kabul, the massacre of school girls was in pursuit of a puritanical religious goal of creating an Islamic society modelled on medieval moral notions. So one wonders: When the perpetrators saw the dead bodies of the girls, their books and backpacks strewn in the street, did they pray and thank God for the success of their mission?

And when Israeli defence forces see the lifeless bodies of children being pulled from the rubble of their homes, do they congratulate themselves on the success of their military action? Do they put on a skull cap and go to the synagogue to give thanks to God? And when Hamas fires indiscriminately into Israel and kills children, do they raise their clenched fists in a gesture of triumph? Do they chant “God is Great!”?

These questions speak to our collective damned evil soul.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator