Whose Life is it Anyway?

Whose Life is it Anyway? A simple question evoked by an image in a local English daily, showing an old mother hugging the blood-soaked dead body of her teenager son in Baquba, Iraq. The caption of the picture read that the boy was killed during a military operation by the US and Iraqi forces. Ironically, one could say that there was nothing new in the picture as quite a few similar images appear in the local and international newspapers reflecting the agony that Iraqis undergo every day. But this heart-wrenching photograph, if one stares at it for a few seconds, is bound to make one shudder. For the mother, the world has become irrelevant.

We have to take a pause here. Simple questions are difficult to answer, it is said. Let’s try this. What was the fault of that boy and his mother that they met such a tragic fate? Why is all this happening to the Iraqis? If we suppose that the woman and the boy had done nothing wrong (which is a great possibility), then why were they punished by the circumstances in such a horrible manner? On a bigger scale, there are hundreds of mothers and their children bartering their life for nothing in Iraq. How do we explain all this and the eerie silence that prevails on this question from the North to the South Poles and from the East to the West?

Without philosophising the matter further, let’s take it up materialistically to get down to what is happening to the weak – economically and politically. Some critics argue that today’s Iraq inherits this legacy of bloodshed and torture from the days of Saddam Hussein. They mention the name of people like Chemical Ali and the poisonous gas attack in northern Iraq against Kurds in 1988. Every massacre of human beings has to be condemned, true. But no amount of atrocities in Iraq committed in the past can come even close to what the US is doing in the oil-rich country since it ravaged it in the garb of destroying the weapons of mass destruction in 2003.

Well, is it not the usual US bashing, one could ask? Yes, it is. But why not point out the evil again and again even if one cannot step forward and kill the monster once and for all? This leads us to the question of unilateralism and economic imperialism in the shape of capitalism. We have to understand that the US is not just ruling over this world with the barrel of the gun – it is economics too. But this reality stands challenged with the fast-emerging economic and military power of China. How long will it take for China to overtake the US is debatable. For the time being, we have the private US security company Blackwater in Iraq that allegedly killed 17 Iraqis last year with its yearly contract renewed. In this situation, can we hope that no such murders will occur in the future? However bitter, we cannot ignore the reality.

The image is undoubtedly a slap in the face of the world community that does not lose its breath while championing the ‘cause’ of peace around the world. Billions of dollars are going down the drain every year in the name of maintaining ‘peace’ around the globe. This is agonising. While we write and talk and argue over the matter, innocent people are being robbed of their life not just in Iraq but also elsewhere. While it is easy to find out how many US military personnel have been killed in Iraq so far – more than 4,000 – it is a bit difficult to know the exact number of civilians killed in a war that was imposed on them.

Sadly, it is not just about numbers – how many have been killed and how many survived. It is also about those who have lost a part of their being, their sons and daughters and mothers and so on. Human misery knows no bounds. We cannot measure it, nor can we gauge it. Still, the only thing that we can do is sympathise with the wronged people, perhaps empathise with them. But the violence thus perpetrated does not go unnoticed. It reacts and has in it the seeds of destruction.