Dear Editor,
I remember wondering as a boy, why newspaper stories of monsoons in India that killed 200 people took only a few lines while other stories where maybe one person died or perhaps a dog fell down a well, were given disproportionate prominence in the same newspaper. I was merely a babe then.
A few days ago a US court awarded $2.65 billion to the families of 241 US servicemen killed in the 1983 bombing of their barracks in Beirut. The money is slated to come from Iranian assets seized from around the world; the bombing was linked to Hezbollah, a Lebanese group. If they get the money, and they well could – a proposed new law in Congress will make its collection easier – relatives will receive close to $11 million per soldier.
Now the flip side of the coin. The American Civil Liberties Union recently obtained a list of 500 claims for compensation in Iraq (released by the US army in response to a Freedom of Information Act request). The list makes for interesting reading.
An American soldier in a dangerous Sunni area in Baghdad killed a boy after mistaking his book bag for a bomb satchel. The Army paid the boy’s uncle $500. In Haditha the Marines paid residents $38,000 after troops killed two dozen people in November 2005.
The ACLU list represents only a fraction of actual claims but even here over 200 claims were rejected because they were deemed to be “directly or indirectly” related to combat. Yes, combat. To be claim-worthy, civilians had to find inventive ways of getting killed that had nothing to do with bullets, bombs, or B-52’s.
In Afghanistan the storyline continues. In March 2007, US troops near Jalabad, angry about a bomb attack on them, carried out a rampage along a ten-mile stretch of highway, shooting villagers apparently at random. They left 19 dead and 50 wounded. The US army, in May 2007, apologised and agreed to pay the families of the 19 killed – $2000 each.
I am now all grown up and nothing much has changed. Some lives are just cheap. Period. The irony is that this applies to most of the planet. Cheap lives, lost in almost total, and utterly depressing, silence. Even cheap lives have voices. Would that they could all roar at the same time.
Yours faithfully,
Tahseen Nasir
