Margaret Hassan is dead. Why?
She was a Westerner, born in Dublin and a subject of Great Britain. She worked for a Western agency, bringing assistance to the distressed. She was an outsider.
That's the story we tell about her. Characteristic is this comment from a BBC reader:
" If there was ever a clear cut signal to all Foreign Civilians to pull out of Iraq, then this is it. We should leave these people to it - enough Western Blood has been spilled. "
Margaret Hassan was a Westerner and they killed her. This is what we say, here in the West, on our front pages and in our media and in our letters to the editor and on our blogs. " She didn't belong and they killed her ".
That's the story, comforting in its way - everything so simple, the issues black and white, all the pieces in their places and a picture of the world neatly and clearly divided into Islam and West, Outsider and Iraqi, Them and Us.
But for one thing: Margaret was not an outsider. There is another story:
Margaret Hassan was an Iraqi. She was a Muslim. While she worked for an international agency, she worked in her own country with her own people.
The people who killed Margaret Hassan see the world starkly divided. Islam against the West. They looked at Margaret and saw only the first story. And in the case of Margaret Hassan they convinced us that was the important story. In the person of Margaret Hassan the world had a bridge between Islam and the West, but when the crisis came, we denied Margaret her own story and denied the connection.
The terrorists are winning. They are winning because we agree to their definitions and their divisions.
Posted by MartialNicely said. Hassan had been doing this kind of work for I think 30 years? Through all that time, even during the harshest repression of the Hussein regime, she survived to help her people as best she could, no doubt probably having to outwit the Baathists and to hide and god knows what else. So it fills my heart with a deep sadness to think that it was the condition of Iraq's liberation, so to speak, that facilitated her capture and murder. Which is not to blame America first (so, again, to speak), but to recognize that the chaos wrought by the poorly planned post-invasion strategy has compromised the ability of talented and dedicated folks like Hassan to do the work that the Iraqis need to be done.
I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem the strategy represented by the Fallujah campaign will improve the situation.
Posted by: Kevin Moore on November 22, 2004 11:46 PM