Donna Mulhearn - Human Shield from Australia
Thoughts of a human shield from a hotel room in Jordan…
CNN flickers in the background: US soldiers boast about the ‘liberation’ they’re bringing to Iraq, the stock market is up and I can’t stop thinking about Omar.
I wonder if they’ve told him yet.
The nurses at the hospital - I wonder if they’ve told Omar that he’s lost his family and is now alone in the world. Omar’s face was cut apart from pieces of flying shrapnel after the US-led coalition bombed his quiet neighbourhood one night last week. He also suffered severe internal injuries. The nurses fear that when they tell him his mother, father and brother have been killed that the shock will kill him also. He thinks they’re in another hospital.
Omar is one of the many children I met on a visit to the Yarmuk hospital in Baghdad. He was one that survived. He’s a young Iraqi boy being “liberated” by the Americans. Now he’s left to experience ‘democracy’ alone, his face scarred, his body broken.
I also met the beautiful little Rosul. She sat motionless and looked at us blankly with her large brown eyes and a face that appeared wiser than her years. Rosul was playing at home when flying shrapnel ripped out pieces of her chest and right arm. The wounds are deep. Her father, so distressed he could hardly talk, fears she may lose her arm. I wonder what Rosul and her father think about all this ‘liberation’ stuff.
CNN declares: ‘there’s explosions now in Baghdad’. The presenter is excited and crosses live. I can’t watch anymore because it looks like an area near the food silo where I was stationed as a human shield. I feel dread for what the people there are experiencing now and bash my keyboard in anger.
I feel also for the people of Umm Qasr. They’ve had no clean drinking water for a week, since the imperial forces destroyed their water treatment plant. They have to drink water from puddles, they are sick, hungry and dying. They are also angry and feel betrayed. The liberators with the guns in their hands, forgot to bring clean water, food and medicine.
“If the coalition are serious about winning hearts and minds, from the evidence of the Iraqi’s we have spoken to, they are not achieving that,” says Patrick Nicholas from the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development.
The Iraqi people I spoke to in Baghdad feel the same. They see this war, not as the removal of a regime, but an attack on their families. They are taking it personally. They, like many millions around the world, knew there was another way.
They know that you can’t bomb a nation into democracy. You can’t win hearts by destroying lives. You can’t liberate with terror.
The Iraqi people have suffered much under Saddam Hussien’s regime. Does it make any sense that we make them suffer more? Is it logical that the coalition forces dish out the same type of terror and misery that their Government’s say justified the war in the first place?
The Iraqi’s I spoke to who sought a regime change, all agreed that a war was not the way to bring it about. They have experienced the misery of war. They did not want to suffer its pain again. "You can re-build a house, a marketplace a government office,” said my friend Osman, a father of three from Baghdad, "but you can’t re-build what’s damaged on the inside.”
Long term damage like effects of terror suffered by children, the grief of death, the mourning of the mothers who have lost their unborn children after suffering shock, the fears of a man who has lost his limbs and has no livelihood.
Liberation doesn’t come from people with guns in their hand and dollar signs in their eyes. It is an insult to this noble concept. The failure to convince our world leaders to pursue alternatives to war is a failure of the human race to respond to suffering with compassion. It suggests dark motives than are far from liberating.
I hope Omar survives the grief of his parent’s death. And I hope someone can go to him and explain what liberation means.
I don’t think he’ll be satisfied with the explanation. I think he’ll just want his Mum and Dad back.
