Suffering of the innocent

By Kesava Menon

HALF A million children, the eldest of whom should have been approaching adolescence, are no longer alive due to causes attributable to the war and sanctions imposed on Iraq. Three generations of Palestinians, two of Saharawis, one generation each of Lebanese, Sudanese, Algerians and Iranians have had their lives blighted. The present and future of the Kurds seems as bleak as their past. Take your focus away from the rights and wrongs of political causes, constrain the inborn tendency to make judgments on events and what you are left with is the stark reality of how terrible war is.

Ordinary people in Iraq will talk about the U.S. role in keeping the sanctions in place. They will also talk about how the sanctions are being used as a means to bring about a change in regime and not for the purpose originally intended, which was that of ridding Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. Nowadays, they will also talk of their success in wearing down their international isolation and list the countries that are now dealing with Iraq. Some have even begun to express cautious hope for the future.

But politics surely does not occupy most of their time. It is also impossible for them to carry on with the usual routine of life. In a country where the people once enjoyed an enviable quality of life, working people have to worry every day whether they will be able to gather the extra income their families need. At the beginning of each new school year, parents have to worry how they will pay the amounts beyond that provided by the Government for school books and supplies. Items of luxury or decorations amassed over a life-time had been sold off to pay for food in the 1990s. There is a constant worry about the quality of water that is not as clean as it was before the Gulf War because treatment plants are not in very good repair. And there is constant worry about the quality of the air because no one knows the extent to which depleted uranium has polluted the atmosphere. Medical problems cause anxieties far more acute than in normal times because the availability of facilities and medicines is very chancy.

If the Iraqis have been experiencing a slow grinding misery over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been going through it for much longer. Many of those who went into refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria during the 1948 war have spent their entire lives in the camps and seen their children and grand-children enter into the same conditions. In some of these countries, the Palestinians have no hope of getting citizenship and are cut off from various forms of employment. They have become dependent on the U.N. and other relief agencies and under constant pressure to glean whatever supplementary income they can.

Those Palestinians who continued to live in their home territories had reason to think that the worst was behind them through much of the latter half of the 1990s. The presence of aggressive Jewish settlers on their soil was a constant irritant and the land confiscation and water appropriation which they represented were a constant reminder of their own deprivation.

However, as negotiations with Israel went ahead and one town after another was returned to full Palestinian control they could at least begin to see the end of the tunnel. Whatever the rhetoric from the various levels of the political leadership, the building boom in towns such as el Bireh seemed to belie assessments that Palestinian misery was being compounded.

Over the past year (almost to the date), that situation has been drastically and tragically reversed. Palestinians are locked into their home towns and villages as Israel has closed the roads between them. Unemployment has rocketed as Israel does not offer jobs in anywhere near the numbers once provided. Supplies get through only with difficulty to the towns and villages and indeed into the Palestinian territory as a whole as Israel has closed off the international borders.

Those going to colleges, offices or even hospitals have to spend miserable hours on the road for journeys which once took only minutes. All this without even considering the tension that must afflict people who are constantly worried about getting caught in the crossfire between Israeli soldiers and their gunmen.

In Algiers, at least the fears of a sudden terrorist strike have waned considerably. But in the countryside violence can still descend on the unsuspecting like a thunderclap. A visit to a beach or even sleeping in the courtyard of a village house can suddenly become a terrifying dance with death. In southern Sudan, it is not the possibility of sudden death alone that people have to contend with. Tens of thousands are in a constant state of displacement as success in the war between the Government and rebels shifts one way and then the other. Worse still are the reports of slavery, especially that of children.

Even when the war moves on, the people who have been afflicted are unable to resume normal life for long periods. Israel pulled out of southern Lebanon more than a year ago. But the villages still bear a beaten, defeated look; those who fled have not returned and agriculture and handicraft are yet to revive.

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