Early Saturday morning, poured myself a cup of coffee lazily threw myself on the sofa and turned the TV on, Aljazeera’s news. One suicide bomb after the other had torn people into pieces in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. When the news got to Afghanistan, I felt sick to my stomach. This bomb had taken its victims among children. 6 kids were blown up. The faces of their mothers and fathers came in front of my eyes, crying, pulling their hairs, kneeling on the ground, their faces covered with tears, blood and mud.
This is not any thing out of the ordinary any more. It is part of every day life in Afghanistan and Iraq. And exactly this is the problem. We have got used to it. This is human being’s defence mechanism; we get used to any thing and learn to live with it. And as we learn to live with misery and disasters, our humanitarian standards fall.
This piece of heart breaking news won’t even appear in the Guardian or independent. It is no news. It is said and forgotten. This is how people in Afghanistan and Iraq are forgotten. Their miseries have become irrelevant to us. It is there, we are here. Those parents whose lives are marked with grief and sorrow for the rest of their lives, those women who will only know life as a painful slavery, those girls who have been raped in jail, those women in Basra who are shut down every day for not being Islamic enough. They are there, we are here.
The irony is that British army officer in charge of Basra’s operation, calls this empowerment of the people. When they were planning to bombard Iraq to the middle ages, they were liberating people of Iraq. Now that they are being forced out, they call their withdrawal empowerment of Iraqi people. Sure, the non-conformist women of Basra would feel very empowered when they are being shot by Islamic death squad! According to Basra’s police chief at least 15 women are killed in Basra alone every month by the Islamists.
What has the world come to since September 11, 2001? How the war of terrorists have changed not only the lives of millions of human beings, but also our sense of justice, morality and humanity. The more the world is divided between there and here, us and them, Western and Eastern, the deeper it will plunge into madness and inhumanity.
We should see beyond all these divisions. We should stop the war of terrorists. This is not the war on terrorism. This is war between terrorists. We should uphold humanitarian, libertarian and egalitarian values. Remember, next in line is Iran. Stop this war; support the struggle of people in Iran against Islamic Republic.
