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THE PRINTS OF WAR

July 31, 2007 2:30 PM

Some time ago a good friend, Chris Morris, a photographer for TIME magazine, told me how he had been traveling through Somalia during the bad days there and had come across a makeshift medical station in an abandoned house north of the capital Mogadishu.  There was one doctor, an English-speaking Somali surgeon, who was dealing with a large number of wounded civilians and soldiers who had been brought there from the fighting further south.  His equipment was rudimentary – a small number of scalpels and forceps, not many drugs, a wooden table on which he was operating. 

Chris, with a photographer’s eye, noticed that the whitewashed walls of the room where the operations were carried out had been decorated with red palm prints.  He shot a few frames, and asked about the significance of the designs.  The doctor was blunt.  There was no water in the building, and he had no latex gloves, so the only way to get the blood off his hands after each operation was to slap them against the wall, before moving on to the next patient.

That image stayed with me, and it popped back into my mind today during a conversation I had with an Iraqi surgeon who has become a good friend to the ABC bureau here, Dr Jamal Taha.  Dr Jamal works in the ER of Yarmuk Hospital, one of the busiest in Baghdad, and over the last four years he has seen an unimaginable array of human suffering – gunshot victims, carbomb survivors, victims of torture – and many dead bodies.  We talk to him frequently, and he has become a bellwether for us on the level of violence on the streets.  He sees the effects first.

I asked him today about supplies of drugs and medical equipment  for his hospital – there has been some news recently about how corrupt officials in the ministry of health here have been diverting drugs from hospitals onto the black market to make profit for themselves.  Dr Jamal said yes, there was a shortage of drugs, but that wasn’t the worst of his problems.  “Many times,” he said, “we have to delay our operations because there is no tap water to wash our hands.” 

History repeats itself, often for the worse.  The movie “Blackhawk Down” about the war in Somalia starts with a quote from the Greek philosopher, Plato:  “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”    Iraqis understand that with a tragic sense of the inevitable. 

And they desperately need running water in Yarmuk hospital.

July 31, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (1)

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Posted by: Lydia Cornell | Aug 11, 2007 4:40:06 PM

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