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Iraqi girl in a water taxi. Photograph by Alan Pogue
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Children
that survived, wrote Professor Magne Raundalen, possibly the
world's foremost expert on children in war zones, who heads the
Centre for Crisis Studies, in Bergen, Norway, were “amongst
the most traumatised child Population” on earth. And there was
no chance of recovery. Count Hans von Sponeck, who resigned as
UN Co-ordinator in Iraq, like his predecessor Denis Halliday
(who had cited the sanctions he was there to oversee as
generating “the destruction of an entire nation, it is as
simple and terrifying as that”), spoke of not only of medical
and nutritional problems, but “intellectual genocide.”
School
books were vetoed. All professionals - doctors, engineers,
architects -qualified from 1989 course material. An Iraqi doctor
qualifying in 2003 was fourteen years behind in clinical
developments, though never in commitment.
Children,
Iraq's future, were also marooned in the academia of the 1980s.
Isolation was searing. On one visit, this writer was asked for a
radio interview and the usual ground rules were laid down: no
politics. It was a pleasant half-hour of history, culture - and
only mildest current politics. Then the presenter said that all
guests were asked to select a piece of music and dedicate it to
whom they wished. (“We like to think of ourselves as Baghdad's
BBC Radio 3.”) I chose Stevie Wonder's “I Just Called to Say
I Love You” and dedicated it to the children of Iraq.
Children that survived were “amongst the most traumatised child Population” on earth. |
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The
next day I had a crash course in human relations. I was
repeatedly stopped in the street, whispered to at a conference,
by people from all walks of life. Was I the lady on the radio
last night? On affirmation, the comment was always virtually the
same: “Thank you so much, we are so isolated, my wife (or
husband) was in tears, I was in tears, my children…thank
you.” And no, I know orchestration; this was not.
Several
years ago, I talked to the young who should have had all before
them - a social mixture, between 18 and 21 years old - and asked
them about their hopes, dreams and fears. None had a dream. “I
dream of having enough milk for my baby,” said a young mother.
“I am too tired to dream,” said a youth who had dreamed of
being a doctor, but was working in a smelt, in the searing heat
of a Baghdad summer, to help support his family. A vibrant,
beautiful young woman from a formerly privileged family waited
until her mother had left the room and whispered, “Nothing
awaits us, only death.” She was 18.
And
for much of the country there were the often daily, ongoing
bombings of the patrolling by the United States and United
Kingdom of the “no fly zones” or misnamed “safe havens”
in the north and south, an illegal exercise not sanctioned by
the United Nations. For reasons unknown, aircraft returning to
their bases in
Turkey
and Saudi Arabia routinely bombed flocks of sheep - and with
them the child shepherds who minded them.
An
abiding memory is of watching a tiny illiterate woman, who had
lost her three children -the youngest 5 and the oldest 13 - her
husband and father-in-law to one of these bombings, as she
walked with leaden feet to their graves in a tiny dusty cemetery
near the northern city of Mosul. She sat hunched, fetal, on the
smallest grave, that of five-year-old Sulaiman.
Their flock of nearly 200 sheep were also blasted to pieces on a
barren plain where they would have been visible for exactly what
they were. “We searched all day for parts to bury,” said a
villager who had rushed down to help, on hearing the bombing.
Then he lowered his eyes and whispered, “There was so little
recognizable, we still don't know whether the graves contain all
human or some sheep remains.”
Asked
why flocks of sheep were being bombed, the British Ministry of
Defence - surreally - responded, “We reserve the right to take
robust action, when threatened.” At St. Matthew's Monastery on
Mount Maqloub, which overlooks the plain, the priest in charge
commented of the bombings, “Every day, there are new widows,
new widowers, new orphans.” Then he said solemnly, “Please,
will you tell your Mr. Tony Blair that he is a very, very bad
man.” The ancient monastery is Iraq's Lourdes, where people of
all religious beliefs bring their sick to the site of the
saint's believed burial, to benefit from the healing powers
legend holds he still possesses from the grave. The ongoing
grief and carnage on the plains below were in contrast to all
the monks and monastery stood for. The gentle, sorrowful
admonition from a spiritual soul was especially poignant.
Continue>>
Felicity
Arbuthnot is
a journalist and activist who has visited Iraq on numerous
occasions since the 1991Gulf War. She has written and broadcast
widely on Iraq, her coverage of which was nominated for several
awards. She was also Senior Researcher for John
Pilger's award-winning
documentary - Paying
the Price Killing the Children of Iraq
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