Iraq’s Little-Known Humanitarian Crisis
It is said that Iraq is the world’s best-known conflict but the least well-known humanitarian crisis.
In the United States, where public attention span is low but the capacity for denial high, Iraq’s daily carnage no longer commands headlines. American public discourse long ago shifted to the domestic political implications of Iraq for George W. Bush et al.
Those who do think of Iraq think mostly of the murderous sectarianism of the Sunnis and Shiites. If Muslims are killing each other, there’s not much America can do, Iraq being another Yugoslavia - once the iron grip of Saddam Hussein or Josip Tito was gone, all the old animosities re-emerged.
But in Iraq, there was no such suppressed hatred. Shiites and Sunnis had always lived in harmony. Inter-marriage was common. The bombed-out Shiite shrine in Samara was in a Sunni neighbourhood.
The more apt parallel is with the 1947 partition of British India that precipitated a mass migration and a massacre among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs who had lived in harmony for centuries.
When the state abrogates its most basic role of maintaining social order, anti-social forces and criminals can send scared people into a frenzy of primitive behaviour.
What’s happening in Iraq is the direct result of American war-mongering and criminal incompetence.
Since the 2003 U.S. invasion, between 75,000 and 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed (depending on who’s counting). This is in addition to the 1 million Iraqis, half of them children under 5, who died slow deaths during the 1991-2003 U.S.-led United Nations economic sanctions (a UNESCO estimate).
More than 4 million Iraqis have been displaced. Half have fled to Syria, Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere.
This is the largest forced migration of people in the Middle East since 1948, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency.
Nearly 8 million Iraqis - one in three - are in need of humanitarian aid.
Nearly half the internally displaced people do not have access to the Public Distribution System of ration cards and permits.
Only a third of Iraqis can access safe drinking water. The health system is collapsing. The drug distribution system has broken down. The sewage system has collapsed and only a fifth of Iraqis have access to a functional sanitary system.
Three-fourths of the internally displaced are either women (28 per cent) or children (48 per cent).
“Ninety per cent of those who die violent deaths are men, leaving huge numbers of widows and orphans without support,” according to a special Iraq edition of Forced Migration Review, a publication of the Refugee Studies Centre of the University of Oxford (fmreview.org/Iraq).
“In the short term, there appears to be no way to address the protection vacuum in much of Iraq. Multinational Force Iraq and the Iraqi Security Forces are incapable of protecting civilians.”
Prostitution is on the rise. “Young girls are increasingly obliged to contribute to family incomes. Consequently, the incidence of sexual and gender-based violence is on the rise,” say Jose Riera and Andrew Harper, of UNHCR (unhcr.org/iraq). “Child labour and other means of exploitation are increasingly reported.”
UNICEF estimates that 4.5 million children are under-nourished. One child in 10 is under-weight. One in five is short for their age. In some areas, up to 90 per cent of children are not in school.
This is one reality show you won’t see on your television.
Haroon Siddiqui, the Star’s editorial page editor emeritus, appears Thursday and Sunday. Email: hsiddiq@thestar.ca
If there was an occupation in the United States we would hope for a total unified front, but it is easy to see how as divided as this country is now that there could possible a lot of animosity between different groups vying for different positions and rights.
“In the United States, where public attention span is low but the capacity for denial high, Iraq’s daily carnage no longer commands headlines. American public discourse long ago shifted to the domestic political implications of Iraq for George W. Bush et al.”
Could this have something to do with MSM? I and others I know have been trying to get the war news on the front page for years.
FYI the present adminstration is really calling the shots on what news we see. In my area, war news was moved inside to be part of world news on page 10! When you combine this with a dearth of photo-ops showing the real carnage and dsepair our illegal invasion has caused, there is a pattern of censorship that reeks of hiding of war crimes from U.S. public notice.
Will it reach the point that each time I fill up my gas tank, I’m killing an Iraqui kid?
In the name of God, the All Merciful, the Mercy-giving
“What’s happening in Iraq is the direct result of American war-mongering and criminal incompetence.”
So true. And he really nailed it on the spot when he said that people here especially try to look at the situation in Iraq and blame it on sectarianism, and age-old issues that we simply can do nothing about.
Of course that is bogus. People here just do not want to come to terms with the fact that our invasion and occupation of that land completely destroyed the society structures, driving the people to desperation, with no where to go, with nothing to loose.
I find it obscene when I hear people talking about the sectarian violence there and how Iraqis should learn to get along. It’s totally skirting the issue. And placing the blame on truly oppressed human souls.
That society has been destroyed, and this country is solely to blame.
Amin, littlem85.
An art institute is opening an exhibition of life as it is now in Iraq and trying to portray the death and destruction caused by us (yes, I mean us - my gov’t and yours is responsible for ALL the current chaos and death).
Please look at the descriptions of all the events to get a perspective of the extent of grief and humiliation and hopelessness we have inflicted. Maybe we can all try to imitate this effort at some level to awaken our fellow travelers to the obscenities WE are responsible for inflicting on fellow human beings.
The events range from pictures taken by Baghadi women who had no photographic experience with gift cameras to a lecture by the colonel in charge of the investigation of the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.
http://www.villamontalvo.org/va_iraq.html
Another little known Iraqi humanitarian crisis is the plight of the Iraqi Christians. Although they only make up 4 percent of the population, they make up almost 40 percent of the refugee population according to the U.N.
That’s COMPASSIONATE conservatism for you…
annabelle, you know that’s only because people like you will never get behind lower taxes, vast giveaways to politically friendly corporations, and reductions of civil rights, which are clearly the only reasonable way to fight off an invasion. Your shrill calls for unity in repelling the invasion show that you’re not serious about protecting the country.
curmudgeon99: looked at it. It seems really fascinating, the exhibits.
I agree, we all do need to do our part, become more aware and communicate with others about it. Or else, it will never stop, and we’ll just be aiding and abetting in this human crime.
Someone I greatly admire once said that in times like these, people who say that they are not politically involved, in actuality are politically involved. The only thing is that their politics is that of the oppressor.
Just look at this site and try to read through it, it tells us exactly what coalition forces did to Iraq within 72 hours of this illegal invasion.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/occupation/report/index.htm
“The more apt parallel is with the 1947 partition of British India that precipitated a mass migration and a massacre among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs who had lived in harmony for centuries.”
An excellent-point, and an apt-analogy that is seldom used…
In point-of-fact, it was the British who also ‘fired-up’ (as a matter of intended/institutionalized ‘foreign-policy’) the existing-but-contained ‘issues’ betwixt minority-Sunni’s and Shites in/near Iraq [much like they abused their colony (and Recruitment-center) of Ireland by officially/purposefully driving-wedges between, and facilitating-violence by, Catholics and Protestants there — or how they invented the ‘Wahhabist-threat’ that “menaced the Western-World” and stood against the ‘appropriate’ Colonial-bearance of their ‘White Man’s Burden’…]:
http://www.counterpunch.org/pirbhai10272007.html
The Brits have only been exceeded/tutored in such covert and manipulated “divide and conquer” chicanery by the Zionists and certain ‘Persian-Politicians’, although all seem, now, to have high-hopes for their young/favored-protege…the US (who innovated the uses for such division at-home, while deftly applying it abroad).
It seems like the unquestioned assumption in Republican/Democrat dialectic is that the presence of U.S. troops on the ground stabilizes civil society in Iraq. As Siddiqui astutely points out, the opposite has proven true.
We broke it, but we can’t fix it. This is something the world will be dealing with indefinitely, and will continue to cause immeasurable suffering to millions of innocent people. Maybe Kurt Vonnegut was right, “we should just apologize and go away”.
Divide and conquer. It’s an old formula. Did Israel, at whose behest we invaded Iraq, want to split it up into three feuding states? Rumsfeld and Perle planned out this invasion in a paper for Netanyahu in 1996.