Iraqi agony at new heights

Jan.7, 2008

Iraqi agony at new heights

A REPORT prepared by Al Jazeera has exposed yet another ugly face of the US-invasion and occupation of Iraq — Iraqi parents are forced to sell their children with hopes that the children would have a better life outside Iraq. And organised groups seem to be at work specialising in buying and even kidnapping Iraqi children to be sold outside Iraq.
Particularly touching is the case of Abu Mohammed, a Baghdad resident, who opted to sell his youngest daughter for $10,000 to a visiting Swedish couple claiming to be part an international non-governmental organisation. The couple's Iraqi translator was the intermediary.
"The war disgraced my family. I lost relatives including my wife among thousands of victims of sectarian violence and was forced to sell my (two-year-old) daughter to give my other children something to eat," Al Jazeera quotes Abu Mohammed as saying in what partly sums up the typical sentiment of an Iraqi parent forced to sell his or her child.
According to Omar Khalif, vice-president of the Iraqi Families Association, (IFA), a NGO established in 2004 to register cases of those missing and trafficked, at least two children are sold by their parents every week and another four are reported missing every week.
Police investigations have revealed that many have been sold by their parents to foreign couples or specialised gangs who in turn sell the children to families in foreign countries, mainly European.
There was never any reported case of sale of babies in Iraq prior to the US-led invasion in 2004 — even during the bitter years during which Iraq remained under sweeping international sanctions that were imposed when it invaded Kuwait in 1990.
The Iraqis, who are proud of and have always lived true to their Arab Muslim traditions and values, have been now forced into doing things for which that their conscience — or that of any parent for that matter — would torment them for life.
The trafficking in babies is only one of the numerous problems and crises facing the Iraqi society today. As it is rightly observed throughout the world, children and women pay the price first for military misdventures, and it is all the more pronounced in Iraq.
The US, by virtue of it being the key power that led the war against Iraq, destabilised the country and exposed its people to untold suffering, has to shoulder the blame for the misery facing the Iraqis today.
It has to shoulder the responsibility is to offer the people of Iraq — who it says it "liberated" from tyranny — the social security that allows them to lead a dignified life.
However, in reality, neither the US nor the government in power in Baghdad today is in a position to shoulder that responsibility. Such is the chaos that is pervading in Iraq today in the absence of a strong system that gives priority to the people rather than the vested political interests of external powers and ethnical/communal interests of various groups within the country.