Six teachers were assassinated in Iraq in the course of the past week.
The toll, according to Saturday's issue of The Guardian:
Balad Ruz: Gunmen kill 4 primary school teachers. (Monday)
Kerbala: Gunmen on a motorcycle shoot a school teacher dead. (Thursday)
Kirkuk: Gunmen shoot dead a school teacher and a student. (Thursday)
(And in another attack on teachers and learners, a bomb at al-Mustansiriya University killed one and injured eleven...) (last Sunday)
How can the children ever feel safe again?
Where is humanity?
22 May 2006
20 May 2006
Forgiveness
My mother has shown me an article by Amelia Thomas, Enemy Soldiers gather - to strive for Peace which appeared in The Christian Science Monitor in April. It's about Combatants for Peace, an alliance of former Palestinian 'freedom fighters' and Israeli ex-soldiers. One of them commented, "It doesn't cease to be hard. But you must listen, and you must forgive, even for the most difficult things."
The issue of forgiveness has been explored recently by bloggers like Rachel from North London in The F Word. This post has links to the efforts of other survivors to respond to a request to write about whether they could forgive the bombers.
People often hold up South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an example of what can be achieved in reconciling former enemies. It certainly provided the opportunity to reveal more of the 'Truth', i.e. in the form of the 'facts' - but real 'Reconciliation'? I suppose it's easier to come to terms with a 'wrong' if you feel that justice has been served, and that there is hope for the future.
In South Africa in the Eighties, when I fretted over police actions, someone, to reassure me, told me that a woman we both knew, prominent in the Anglican Church, was quietly recording who had done what to whom, so that one day, when the struggle was over and we had that justice and a moral government for which we were working, the guilty could be brought to trial.
Instead we got a new government and we got the TRC. So did the victims feel cheated when the truth was out and the culprits walked free? Percy, I think they might have.
Interesting too, that amongst the King's Cross survivors, some of the rage has simply been re-directed from the now unavailable home-grown bombers to home-grown institutions. It's even easier to do this when a government is clearly morally wrong. In South Africa there was a tiny, tiny chance that 'agitators' from other parts of the country, might come across me, a 'Whitey' in the course of their anger and, not knowing me, might necklace me. Pretty melodramatic I know, but I still come across, amongst my box of 'important' papers, a note I left there for my husband, instructing him to make it clear at any trial, that I blamed the government, not the accused. (Even though the risk of 'accidental' necklacing is now rather remote on several accounts, I continue to leave this scribble amongst the papers - Why? As some kind of a souvenir? Perhaps it's time to move on, Percy...)
Antjie Krog calls reconciliation a cycle, rather than a process. However it happens, or whatever brings it in to settle over victims of horrors, it's not the full forgiveness Monty.
I digress. This blog isn't about forgiveness. It's about finding a flickering candle in the pitch-dark stadium of war.
The issue of forgiveness has been explored recently by bloggers like Rachel from North London in The F Word. This post has links to the efforts of other survivors to respond to a request to write about whether they could forgive the bombers.
People often hold up South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an example of what can be achieved in reconciling former enemies. It certainly provided the opportunity to reveal more of the 'Truth', i.e. in the form of the 'facts' - but real 'Reconciliation'? I suppose it's easier to come to terms with a 'wrong' if you feel that justice has been served, and that there is hope for the future.
In South Africa in the Eighties, when I fretted over police actions, someone, to reassure me, told me that a woman we both knew, prominent in the Anglican Church, was quietly recording who had done what to whom, so that one day, when the struggle was over and we had that justice and a moral government for which we were working, the guilty could be brought to trial.
Instead we got a new government and we got the TRC. So did the victims feel cheated when the truth was out and the culprits walked free? Percy, I think they might have.
Interesting too, that amongst the King's Cross survivors, some of the rage has simply been re-directed from the now unavailable home-grown bombers to home-grown institutions. It's even easier to do this when a government is clearly morally wrong. In South Africa there was a tiny, tiny chance that 'agitators' from other parts of the country, might come across me, a 'Whitey' in the course of their anger and, not knowing me, might necklace me. Pretty melodramatic I know, but I still come across, amongst my box of 'important' papers, a note I left there for my husband, instructing him to make it clear at any trial, that I blamed the government, not the accused. (Even though the risk of 'accidental' necklacing is now rather remote on several accounts, I continue to leave this scribble amongst the papers - Why? As some kind of a souvenir? Perhaps it's time to move on, Percy...)
Antjie Krog calls reconciliation a cycle, rather than a process. However it happens, or whatever brings it in to settle over victims of horrors, it's not the full forgiveness Monty.
I digress. This blog isn't about forgiveness. It's about finding a flickering candle in the pitch-dark stadium of war.
19 May 2006
Day after day after day
Day 1 having involved the somewhat impulsive setting up of this weblog, Day 2 started with some serious stalling tactics like trying to make sense of the sidebar's HTML code, followed by searching for a good example of a magnanimous enemy from the 1945 compilation.
Suddenly somehow, the language of the anthology seemed so foreign and stilted that I began to feel myself at such a distance from it, that I began to ask myself: Have I, in my naivete, simply failed to recognise that, like the changes in the way we speak and write, we are all utterly changed since 1945. Am I not in pursuit of something that no longer exists?
I woke to "Nineteen dead in Baghdad" and, heavy-hearted. typed www.baghdad.com instead of www.blogger.com I use Google Earth to look at Baghdad even though I realise that this is just making me even more moved by the plight of those who will walk along those roads today. Right now they may be brushing their teeth, reaching for labneh - only to be slaughtered before noon, while queueing for work.
I also remembered reading, I think in one of the colour supplements, the mention by a Palestinian of a single occasion on which his family had been 'shielded' by an Israeli soldier amongst a search party . I spent part of this morning trying to find some reference to the report online, but without success. I need to enlist help here - collaborators!
Suddenly somehow, the language of the anthology seemed so foreign and stilted that I began to feel myself at such a distance from it, that I began to ask myself: Have I, in my naivete, simply failed to recognise that, like the changes in the way we speak and write, we are all utterly changed since 1945. Am I not in pursuit of something that no longer exists?
I woke to "Nineteen dead in Baghdad" and, heavy-hearted. typed www.baghdad.com instead of www.blogger.com I use Google Earth to look at Baghdad even though I realise that this is just making me even more moved by the plight of those who will walk along those roads today. Right now they may be brushing their teeth, reaching for labneh - only to be slaughtered before noon, while queueing for work.
I also remembered reading, I think in one of the colour supplements, the mention by a Palestinian of a single occasion on which his family had been 'shielded' by an Israeli soldier amongst a search party . I spent part of this morning trying to find some reference to the report online, but without success. I need to enlist help here - collaborators!
18 May 2006
"Atrocity-mongering is the rule in every war..."
The rule, yes? Or not?
This post's title comes from the Foreword to Above All Nations. The original book, a slim volume, not even available today on Find in a Library, was published by Victor Gollancz in 1945, as the war drew "to its close in a welter of terror and agony for millions".
I came across a second-hand copy of the book in Fish Hoek, South Africa, last October, at a time when I was transcribing letters that my mother had received from a close friend during the Second World War, and was consequently particularly curious about contemporary feelings and attitudes.
The intention of the compilers, George Catlin, Vera Brittain and Sheila Hodges was to show "that even amidst the illimitable degradation of modern warfare men of all nations [could] be decent and merciful to those who, at the very moment [were] their mortal enemies".
"Hope must come, if it is to come at all" he continued, "from...the faith that in every human being some goodness is latent". Can we feel that hope today? Can we find magnimosity in a bleak landscape?
Today, with this blog, I have taken the first steps towards creating something like a sequel to Above All Nations. I'm planning to use a Google Page to create a web site that will record humane acts towards enemies, whether hostages, civilians or soldiers - even though this record may well be a mere mole-hill beside a noisy mountain of atrocities - anything, anything to counter my heavy sense that, as Auden wrote, suffering is taking place "while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along" - or blogging...
This post's title comes from the Foreword to Above All Nations. The original book, a slim volume, not even available today on Find in a Library, was published by Victor Gollancz in 1945, as the war drew "to its close in a welter of terror and agony for millions".
I came across a second-hand copy of the book in Fish Hoek, South Africa, last October, at a time when I was transcribing letters that my mother had received from a close friend during the Second World War, and was consequently particularly curious about contemporary feelings and attitudes.
The intention of the compilers, George Catlin, Vera Brittain and Sheila Hodges was to show "that even amidst the illimitable degradation of modern warfare men of all nations [could] be decent and merciful to those who, at the very moment [were] their mortal enemies".
"Hope must come, if it is to come at all" he continued, "from...the faith that in every human being some goodness is latent". Can we feel that hope today? Can we find magnimosity in a bleak landscape?
Today, with this blog, I have taken the first steps towards creating something like a sequel to Above All Nations. I'm planning to use a Google Page to create a web site that will record humane acts towards enemies, whether hostages, civilians or soldiers - even though this record may well be a mere mole-hill beside a noisy mountain of atrocities - anything, anything to counter my heavy sense that, as Auden wrote, suffering is taking place "while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along" - or blogging...
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