Attempting Understanding

When something occurs on a massive scale, a person can often times say they have heard about it or learned something about it, but actually relating to and understanding what’s happened is completely different. Try thinking of numbers in the billions. The U.S. is trillions of dollars in debt . We can recite this fact, but actually comprehending it’s immensity is practically impossible. This is often how I and I’m assuming many others feel when we hear words like genocide and reports of thousands of people dying. Maybe a report comes up in the news. We listen, feel terrible, and then are able to go on with our day, or maybe we are moved and try to raise awareness. Still, the atrocity is so incomprehensible and we are so far removed that life can resume with relative invariability. In preparation for my trip to Kurdistan, I have read a few things about the Kurds. Statistics, stories, and other things have made my heart break for these people, but in the relative ease of my life there’s still a huge gap in my understanding and their reality.

However, there are times when something occurs that allows a part of us to be able to further relate or attempt to understand an atrocity. Maybe that something is a particular child’s face or a story of a person that seems so much like a person you know, causing you to feel connected. Our trip to Halabja this past wednesday was one of those moments for me.

In Halabja, a memorial has been built to commemorate the day the town was destroyed by gas attacks. Just to inform, March 16th, 1988 was the day when Saddam’s Hussein’s military dropped bombs filled with mustard and various other gases on the Kurdish village of Halabja. Even before the gas bombs were dropped, other explosives were planted inside buildings to break windows preventing victims from escaping the gas indoors. Within moments following the attack 5,000 people lay dead, many more would die in the days and months to come, and still more would feel the lasting impact for years. As we first entered the memorial building, we were led to a room depicting the rich culture of Halabja before the bombings, and immediately following we were led to a hall filled with a diorama of the terrible scenes from the day of the bombings. Gruesome depictions of a dead father holding his child, dead cattle, and a truck bed filled with dead bodies encompassed the hall. The visual was hard to digest, and after we were led to a large circular room with each wall covered in the names of those who were brutally killed. One name, however, was outlined in green because the person was found just in the last year to be alive, living in Iran. He was rescued as a baby and taken to Iran. The next room we were led to was what made it all sink in. The walls of the room were covered in photos taken by Iranian photojournalists captured just days after the attacks. As we passed the pictures, each was explained in great detail. Some showed scores of bodies lying on the ground. Others depicted whole families frozen in the positions they were in when the explosions hit, and as our guide passed across one picture his finger stopped. The photo was of a truck packed with dead bodies, all with sheets on them declaring the person to be dead. HE WAS ONE OF THEM. The man standing in front of us, recounting the tragedy, was declared officially dead, loaded on to a truck of corpses and almost taken away. Speaking becomes difficult at this point, the point when I realize that I am standing on the exact ground in which Saddam implemented his ethnic cleansing through the Anfal campaign, which was designed to extinguish the Kurds. This isn’t some photo in a news story. The ground on which I stand is real, the brave, enduring, miracle of a man standing in front of me is real, and I am here. The only words I can think of at this point are “This is real,” and the gap between my reality and the reality of the Kurdish people is lessened just that little bit. These people experienced tragedy, and neither their nor any other government (except for maybe Iran) chose to care about them at the time. In fact, many of the weapons used were constructed in and purchased from the U.S., Germany and France. Not until the 90’s did it become much of an issue in the U.S.

All being said, I know I can never truly understand the tragic immensity of that day, nor do I understand the politics behind the international response. However, the effects of this atrocity are still felt by the Kurds of today and will be felt for generations to come. Congenital disease is one of these effects, and this is the reason I’ve grown connected to the cause of PLC. It might seem silly to say, but there are real children here with real genetic heart conditions that are a result from a real tragedy, and from my perspective the community of PLC provides real help.

Pictures: (top) Memorial room with names of all the victims, (bottom) Outside the memorial