G
gilliam
Guest
By Clifford D. May Scripps Howard News Service January 6, 2005
http://www.defenddemocracy.org/doc_img/255161.gif When more than 100,000 people have been killed, and thousands of others are in danger, the international community has a moral obligation to do what it can to limit the damage and reduce the suffering of survivors.
So why is it that the international community so rarely even tries? Oh yes, an unprecedented relief effort is taking place now in the areas of South Asia struck by last month’s tsunami. That’s laudable.
But when, in 1987-88, more than 100,000 people were killed in the Kurdish areas of Iraq, the international community turned a blind eye.
Those Kurdish victims were overcome not by waves of water but in some cases by waves of poison gas. Why should sympathy for those drowned on a beach be so much greater than for those choked in the streets of their village? More to the point, why should an act of God elicit more empathy than an act of man? The man in question, of course, was then-Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Having slaughtered the Kurds with impunity, two years later he attempted to wipe Kuwait off the map
Only because President George H.W. Bush determined that such aggression “would not stand” were Saddam’s troops forced out of Kuwait. But then, in 1991, Saddam began slaughtering Iraqi Shi’a, and he intentionally destroyed the environment inhabited by the Marsh Arabs, an ancient people of southern Iraq, leaving tens of thousands homeless.
And, again, the international community shrugged its shoulders.
read the rest.
http://www.defenddemocracy.org/doc_img/255161.gif When more than 100,000 people have been killed, and thousands of others are in danger, the international community has a moral obligation to do what it can to limit the damage and reduce the suffering of survivors.
So why is it that the international community so rarely even tries? Oh yes, an unprecedented relief effort is taking place now in the areas of South Asia struck by last month’s tsunami. That’s laudable.
But when, in 1987-88, more than 100,000 people were killed in the Kurdish areas of Iraq, the international community turned a blind eye.
Those Kurdish victims were overcome not by waves of water but in some cases by waves of poison gas. Why should sympathy for those drowned on a beach be so much greater than for those choked in the streets of their village? More to the point, why should an act of God elicit more empathy than an act of man? The man in question, of course, was then-Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Having slaughtered the Kurds with impunity, two years later he attempted to wipe Kuwait off the map
Only because President George H.W. Bush determined that such aggression “would not stand” were Saddam’s troops forced out of Kuwait. But then, in 1991, Saddam began slaughtering Iraqi Shi’a, and he intentionally destroyed the environment inhabited by the Marsh Arabs, an ancient people of southern Iraq, leaving tens of thousands homeless.
And, again, the international community shrugged its shoulders.
read the rest.