Making
Room for Casualties
Paul Vitello
March
22, 2003, 9:01 PM EST
American and British warplanes are dropping bombs on a teeming
city about the size of Chicago.The planes may be targeting government
buildings and military sites. But they are buildings and sites
in a city of five million people, with factories and shops where
people work, where they live in crowded tenement houses, two and
three generations in the same house; buy bread in bakeries, scour
markets for vegetables and milk.It is a city on a flat plain where
all water and sewage move only when there is electricity to pump
it; and when there is no electricity, there is no water, and the
sewage backs up into the houses.
Whatever else
Iraq may be -- President George W. Bush says it is a major producer
of chemical and biological weapons -- Baghdad is also a city of
hospitals.Before the first Gulf War of 1991, it was one of the
premier medical teaching centers in the Middle East. By any standards,
the population is educated, highly literate, technologically sophisticated.
There are a dozen major hospitals in Baghdad.
After the first war, when UN sanctions limited imports of drugs
and medical supplies, the hospitals had desperate shortages of
vaccines, insulin, antibiotics, cancer drugs. Disposable syringes
and needles made for one-time use were used 50 and 100 times.
Coupled with malnutrition, the collapse of the health care system
throughout Iraq resulted in the deaths of an estimated 750,000
children, according to UN studies. The hospitals became medical
holding cells where doctors did what they could for dying people,
and where parents sat beside their sick children fanning them
because there was not much else they or the doctors could do for
them.
Still, one dispatch on Friday from Baghdad described the anguish
of doctors forced to send their patients home from these poorly
equipped hospitals -- even the sickest children had to be evacuated
-- to make room for anticipated bombing casualties.
Was Huda Magid one of these evacuees? Or one of the casualties?
She would be about 12 years old now.
Dr. Michael Viola of Medicine for Peace, an organization that
has sent American doctors to Iraq since the end of the first war,
met Huda in 1991 soon after she was born, just after the first
American bombing campaign against Baghdad. She was born with the
kind of heart defect that would have been routinely corrected
in a Baghdad hospital before, but which went untreated for lack
of supplies after the bombing and the sanctions began. As a result,
she was more than a year old when Medicine for Peace managed to
get Huda to Stony Brook University Hospital for the surgery she
needed. By that time, oxygen deprivation had caused her to suffer
permanent brain damage.
Years later she might be prone to respiratory problems; she would
always need nursing care, would probably never walk on her own,
might be unable to say her own name, would probably be in a hospital
more than the average kid. But her parents would still love her
as much as you love your kid.
Was she one of the casualties again, or one of the people in one
of the beds cleared last week for new casualties?
The Magids are somewhere inside that city the size of Chicago.
They are dealing with this bombing campaign somehow -- with the
inevitable bitter flashback it must bring them of the first campaign,
which cost their daughter a chance at a healthy life. After a
decade of privation, they are being again bombed, this time with
a 12-year-old disabled child in the house to protect.
"One of our doctors visited Baghdad last year and made contact
by phone with Magid [the father]," said Viola, who still works
with Medicine for Peace. He was on the staff at Stony Brook when
Huda had her operation there, and now works in Washington, D.C.
"It was hard for Magid to talk. He was very paranoid about
speaking to Americans," Viola said. "He thought the line
was tapped. He said Huda was doing 'all right.' I don't know what
that means, exactly. But we know at least that much."
A group of Christian pacifists -- "human shields" they
call themselves -- are still embedded somewhere in Baghdad.In
the last dispatch they sent to the headquarters of the Chicago-based
Christian Peacemakers Teams organization before the intense bombing
began Friday, a group of them described what it felt like to be
in a big city under bombardment: "Inside the hotel, severe
pressure can be felt when the bombs explode... . Shrapnel can
be heard rattling. It lasted an hour, but it seemed like forever."
They were describing the bombing Thursday night. They have not
been heard from since the Friday attacks, which were far greater.
In a communication early Friday, Baghdad volunteers Lisa Martens
and Stewart Vriesinga also reported meeting with doctors at the
Al Mansur Pediatric Hospital, where the staff was forced to send
children home in order to prepare for bombing casualties. Martens
said she asked some of the departing children, "What are your
dreams?"
