Let them die: Civilian deaths in war zones evoke no sympathy

http://www.dailymirror.lk/2007/04/20/opinion/01.asp

Tuesday was one of the worst days in Iraq, especially for civilians. Some 302 people were counted dead, a majority of them civilians. Most of them died in a series of coordinated bomb attacks that shook Baghdad just hours after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said that security would be in Iraqi hands by the end of the year.

In 2006, the British medical journal Lancet and the Johns Hopkins University in the United States said some 650,000 Iraqis, most of them civilians, had died since the invasion. Before the invasion, more than one million Iraqis, half of them children, died as a result of 12 years of US-sponsored UN economic sanctions.

According to the Lancet/Johns Hopkins survey, Iraq's violent death rate rose from 3.2 deaths per 1000 people in 2004 to 12 per 1000 people in the 12 months to June 2006. Judging by the goings on in Iraq these days, there should be an increase in the "violent" mortality rate.

Yet, there appears to be little or no concern in the West about the deaths of civilians in Iraq. The question is why do civilian deaths in Iraq fail to generate much sympathy in the West while the plight of civilians in Sudan's Darfur region makes headlines there. Is it because the West is also responsible for the killings in Iraq while in Sudan it is the Arab government that is said to be committing the crimes?

When the Lancet/John Hopkins report was first published in October last year, both the United States and Britain rejected the findings, alleging that the survey was flawed.

Lancet said the survey report had been examined by four separate independent experts.

Those deaths evoke no sympathy because the publics at home are seeing their own soldiers dying regularly for Iraq and Afghanistan. Darfur makes great headlines because British and American soldiers aren't dying for that cause... yet. The Somalia intervention became less popular after the botched raid on Aidid that resulted in a US soldier being dragged through the streets on camera (something the media has never been forgiven for). And so on.

We still haven't dealt, as a nation, with the 1 million we killed in Vietnam.

These things are abstract to Americans. They're "statistics."

And as people are fond of saying, welcome to DU.

Here, let's do a google news search:

Results 1 - 10 of about 12,211 for iraq bombing
Results 1 - 10 of about 9,522 for darfur

And that would only return articles about both Iraq and bombings, versus every article about the Darfur region. But other than that, yeah, I suppose the writer had a point.

i think many people are concerned about the civilian as well as the military death toll but have no place to take their concern since our gov't doesn't listen or care

reflection of Bush's brutal war. When Bill Clinton was President the murder rates dropped, now these rares are going back up. Bush's scheme is to protect the rich from his war, but use the poor and less fortunate as canon fodder. It compounds the problem when the christian fundies back Bush's war. I'm an Atheist, but I still believe human life must be held sacred where ever possible.