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What about the Iraqi Children?
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By Charlotte Aldebron** |
15/07/2003
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The
following is a transcript of a speech given by now 13-year-old Charlotte
Aldebron at a peace rally in Maine, USA.
When
people think about bombing Iraq, they see a picture in their heads of Saddam
Hussein in a military uniform, or maybe soldiers with big black mustaches
carrying guns, or the mosaic of George Bush Senior on the lobby floor of
Al-Rashid Hotel with the word "criminal". But guess what? More than
half of Iraq’s 24 million people are children under the age of 15. That’s 12
million kids. Kids like me. Well, I’m almost 13, so some are a little older,
and some a lot younger, some boys instead of girls, some with brown hair, not
red. But kids who are pretty much like me just the same. So take a look at
me—a good long look. Because I am what you should see in your head when you
think about bombing Iraq. I am what you are going to destroy.
If
I am lucky, I will be killed instantly, like the three hundred children murdered
by your “smart” bombs in a Baghdad bomb shelter on February 16, 1991. The
blast caused a fire so intense that it flash-burned outlines of those children
and their mothers on the walls; you can still peel strips of blackened
skin—souvenirs of your victory—from the stones.
But
maybe I won’t be lucky and I’ll die slowly, like 14-year-old Ali Faisal, who
right now is in the "death ward" of the Baghdad children’s hospital.
He has malignant lymphoma—cancer—caused by the depleted uranium in your Gulf
War missiles. Or maybe I will die painfully and needlessly like 18-month-old
Mustafa, whose vital organs are being devoured by sand fly parasites. I know
it’s hard to believe, but Mustafa could be totally cured with just $25 worth
of medicine, but there is none of this medicine because of your sanctions.
Or
maybe I won’t die at all but will live for years with the psychological damage
that you can’t see from the outside, like Salman Mohammed, who even now
can’t forget the terror he lived through with his little sisters when you
bombed Iraq in 1991. Salman’s father made the whole family sleep in the same
room so that they would all survive together, or die together. He still has
nightmares about the air raid sirens.
Or
maybe I will be orphaned like Ali, who was three when you killed his father in
the Gulf War. Ali scraped at the dirt covering his father’s grave every day
for three years calling out to him, "It’s all right Daddy, you can come
out now, the men who put you here have gone away." Well, Ali, you’re
wrong. It looks like those men are coming back.
Or
I maybe I will make it in one piece, like Luay Majed, who remembers that the
Gulf War meant he didn’t have to go to school and could stay up as late as he
wanted. But today, with no education, he tries to live by selling newspapers on
the street.
Imagine
that these are your children—or nieces or nephews or neighbors. Imagine your
son screaming from the agony of a severed limb, but you can’t do anything to
ease the pain or comfort him. Imagine your daughter crying out from under the
rubble of a collapsed building, but you can’t get to her. Imagine your
children wandering the streets, hungry and alone, after having watched you die
before their eyes.
This
is not an adventure movie or a fantasy or a video game. This is reality for
children in Iraq. Recently, an international group of researchers went to Iraq
to find out how children there are being affected by the possibility of war.
Half the children they talked to said they saw no point in living any more. Even
really young kids knew about war and worried about it. One 5-year-old, Assem,
described it as "guns and bombs and the air will be cold and hot and we
will burn very much." Ten-year-old Aesar had a message for President Bush:
he wanted him to know that "A lot of Iraqi children will die. You will see
it on TV and then you will regret."
Back
in elementary school I was taught to solve problems with other kids not by
hitting or name-calling, but by talking and using "I" messages. The
idea of an "I" message was to make the other person understand how bad
his or her actions made you feel so that the person would sympathize with you
and stop it. Now I am going to give you an "I" message. Only it’s
going to be a "We" message. "We" as in all the children in
Iraq who are waiting helplessly for something bad to happen. "We" as
in the children of the world who don’t make any of the decisions but have to
suffer all the consequences. "We" as in those whose voices are too
small and too far away to be heard.
We
feel scared when we don’t know if we’ll live another day.
We
feel angry when people want to kill us or injure us or steal our future.
We
feel sad because all we want is a mom and a dad who we know will be there the
next day.
And,
finally, we feel confused—because we don’t even know what we did wrong.
**Charlotte
Aldebron, 13, attends Cunningham Middle School in Presque Isle, Maine, USA.
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