Children of war

Iftekhar A Khan

As we usher in the new year, a year when the US-led Nato forces are expected to leave Afghanistan, what’s the state of the women widowed and children orphaned in the war for regional domination? What about the hundreds of thousands of homeless children forced to live in refugee camps during the bitterly harsh Afghan winters?

Equally, what does the future hold for hundreds of thousands of young women widowed by the war? Is this not a human tragedy?

To hear or read the terms ‘war widows’ and ‘war orphans’ is indeed heart wrenching. Typically, a British war widow reveals to the Daily Mail the pain she and her two children have suffered since her husband was killed in Afghanistan. Her grief intensifies when the children insist on phoning their daddy on Christmas and New Year.

At least the war widows of the western troops are able to share their anguish with the western press. What about the Afghan widows and orphans?

In the UK, there’s a War Widows Association when such widows are merely few; in Afghanistan, the widows who have lost their earning heads in the imperial war are spread over the whole country. And all of those who lost their lives were not necessarily fighting against the invaders; most of them were the ordinary people who happened to be at a wrong place at wrong time and only got sucked into it.

The picture of the young widow of the British soldier in the Daily Mail shows her sitting with her two small children, a boy and a girl. Both the innocent children have red cheeks just like the Afghan children. While the British children have no dearth of pure food and supplements, the Afghan children languishing in refugee camps survive on leftovers and crumbs.

Now spare a thought for the widows and children of the Iraq war where the count of war casualties touches a million and half, not to mention hundreds of thousands infants and children that died in Iraq after the Gulf war because of UN sanctions on supply of medicines and medical equipment.

On December 1, 1995, the New York Times reported, “As many as 576,000 Iraqi children may have died since the end of the Persian Gulf war because of economic sanctions imposed by the Security Council, according to two scientists who surveyed the country for the Food and Agriculture Organization”. And recall how the then US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, commented over the human horror when asked if embargo on medicine supplies was the right step: “I think this is a very hard choice. But the price we think is worth it.”

Afghanistan is perhaps the most unfortunate country on earth. The Russian tanks rolled in the parched land in the end of 1979. The Soviets failed to put down the resistance despite the massacre of the local population. To cast the Soviets in bad light, even James Bond entered the Afghanistan fray in one of the 007 movies.

Nevertheless, the Russians took ten years to learn that Afghanistan is an abyss in which it is easy to roll but difficult to get out unscathed. About twelve years later, the Americans were to learn the same lesson in almost the same period. The difference, however, is that the Russians had invaded overland and the westerners by air.

It troubles me to find how writers from the west protest against the atrocities their governments are committing in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, while writers from Muslim countries sit smug. Maybe they’re bitten by the so-called modernity bug, which doesn’t allow them to raise a voice – not even against the suffering of the children orphaned by the wars of human greed.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Lahore. Email: pinecity@gmail.com
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