Who and What Killed Margaret Hassan?
Christian Harleman and Jan Oberg, Counterpunch, November 17, 2004

Margaret Hassan has been murdered. That is the most probable conclusion from a video given to Al Jazeera yesterday. For one who met her and got to know her, even if just a little, it is hard to write and read that sentence. But Margaret Hassan--Umm Margaret--in Baghdad has been murdered.


Who killed her?

Desperate, fanatic people who thereby cast a dark shadow over their nationality, organisation, religion and philosophy. People who mistakenly believe that a better Iraq will emerge from such a crime and who cares nil for the welfare of the Iraqi people to whom she devoted most of her life and work. Or someone related to the occupation forces seeking to discredit the image of all Iraqi resistance.


Why she of all?

Because she was a courageous, principled and determined humanist who defied danger and could not be intimidated. She represented the best of the Western and the Arab world in one person and, thus, was a threat to the worst elements in both. For, alive she would remind everyone about the essential difference between genuine goodness and the grim reality of the self-proclaimed "good" policies of George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Ayad Allawi.


What caused her death?

The occupation itself and the governments responsible for it.

Margaret Hassan was married to an Iraqi, lived for more than 30 years in Iraq, by and large simultaneously with Saddam Hussein's brutal rule. She could live and work there, both with the British Council in the 1980s and with CARE. She considered herself an Iraqi and never thought of leaving the country during the various wars and constant human rights violations. Time and again, she voiced her deep concern to everyone she met--including us--about the inhuman consequences of the economic sanctions and the further suffering of the citizens in case the country would be attacked and occupied.

Margaret Hassan was not killed in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, she was murdered in the Iraq that has been created by Messrs Bush, Blair, Berlusconi, Fogh Rasmussen and other Western leaders and by U.S. ambassador John Negroponte as well as by the former exile CIA hand and hand-picked prime minister Ayad Allawi.

In their Iraq people are angry, very very angry. They are hateful of the West that has promised them a better life and delivered them one that is, in all ways but one--that Saddam dictatorship is gone--much worse than under Saddam.

Bush recently asked Blair to move British troops from the south to the troubled central Iraq including Baghdad. We heard Margaret Hassan on video, "Please help me. The British people, tell Mr Blair to take the troops out of Iraq and not bring them here to Baghdad. That's why people like myself and Mr Bigley are abducted, and we might die."

BBC put it all in perspective: "Her plea follows UK Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon's announcement that 500 Black Watch soldiers and 350 support personnel will move from Basra to the US sector in central Iraq."

That is the what--not who--that murdered Margaret Hassan.

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Now And Then: 2004 vs 1860
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 2:22 pm