Not all dead are equal?

Over the last three years, refugee health has become a major part of my research activity both in the lab, through development of context appropriate technology and through fieldwork. I have had the pleasure to learn from colleagues on the ground, largely in Lebanon but also in Jordan and Uganda. I have gone to the camps, or the informal settlements (depending upon your definition), where I have met people full of grace and dignity, but living with a sense of deep loss and despair.

I have taken my students to these camps and have helped create a programme that provides exposure to my students in the US, with the ground realities in the camps. The impact of seeing things firsthand is palpable, both on them and on me. Closer to home, in the suburb of Boston where we live, the community has hosted refugees from Syria, including a family that lost several young children and elders in a bombing raid by the Assad regime. The loss of the families in the camps, and the families that are part of our suburb is real, deep and lifelong. I wish I could do more for the mother who lost her husband and her son in Syria and is now living in squalid conditions in a tent at the Lebanese-Syrian border. I wish I could offer more to the young boy, Ahmad, who now has to work illegally in hazardous conditions at a construction site near Beirut because his father has mental health issues and his elder siblings died, and he has to help to make ends meet. I wish I could stop the child marriages in the camps that tie girls as young as 12 in a modern-day slavery.



As we reflect on another set of military engagement in Syria, this time by the US, the UK and France, in response to the supposed chemical weapons use by the Assad regime, I ask why were we not outraged by the death of hundreds of thousands since 2011? How come, the death due to a chemical weapon is morally outraging and the death due to a sniper, a rocket, a bomb or a missile less worthy of our anger? Those who lost the loved ones due to the chemical weapons (regardless of whoever used them) are rightfully angry, frustrated and deeply hurt. They have been wronged and their grief is real. But the collective condemnation of the world, reserved only when chemical weapons are used, is highly hypocritical. It is insulting to all those grieving fathers and mothers, siblings and family members, who lost their loved ones by ‘conventional’ weapons.

The message to the grieving families is simple — not all dead are equal.

The hypocrisy of outrage is also based on our allies, not on the basic tenets of humanity and sanctity of life. The thousands killed in Yemen due to Saudi bombing, and hundreds of thousands dead in Yemen by the worst cholera outbreak in human history, are barely discussed by those in power in Pakistan. The fact that the ‘coalition forces’ are led by a Pakistani is disturbing to say the least. The crisis in Yemen may render the country an unstable land of warring factions for generations — and we should ask ourselves what have we said, or done, for those who are just as vulnerable and as precious as those killed in Syria by the chemical weapons. The crisis in Yemen is perpetrated by the richest country in the region against the poorest and we refuse to condemn this aggression.

Once again, the message is clear. The innocent children dying by the aggression of our allies are less important than those who are killed by others. Loud and clear we say, not all dead children are equal.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 17^th, 2018.

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