But their environment right now is one of horror and death. The lucky ones who survive will be traumatised for decades. A Unicef report says nearly half a million Iraqi children will be traumatised for a good part of their lives.
Ali Ismail Abbas will live with such trauma perhaps all his life. All it took was an instant and a single missile to leave him orphaned and without both his arms. The shack which Ali called home in downtown Baghdad was in the line of fire because it was surrounded by military installations.
The heartrending picture of a weeping Ali, with two bandaged stumps just below his shoulders, was carried in this newspaper on Monday.
They say strong men don't cry but your reporter has no problem in admitting that his eyes filled with tears as he looked at that picture and read that story that morning. The reality of an unkind universe was brought home to a so-called hardboiled newspaperman as he said goodbye to his own 12-year old boy, wishing him a good, safe day in school.
Ali is in this pitiable situation because he had no bunker to hide in. Unlike his 'president' who does. With all the comforts of home and more to boot..$66 million worth. Ali also paid this absurd price because his 'president', who claims to care about the Iraqi people's welfare, placed his military installations smack in the middle of where those people lived.
As the world prays for peace and a quick end to this war, it also perhaps grudgingly accepts that it was the only way to bring to an end a tyrannical regime and concentration of state power seen only a few times in history.
When the guns fall silent and a free Iraq limps back to normalcy, and decidedly a life of hope, the international community and concerned individuals everywhere will have a great deal to do. The United States, Britain and any other nations it decides to include in Iraq's reconstruction could quite easily take the old familiar macro route with mega projects.
Governments, NGOs and voluntary organisations won't have far to look to find poignant symbols of Iraq's pain and sacrifice. All they have to do is visit Ali Ismail Abbas, and others like him. Even as the countdown begins for the departure of a regime which has brutalised a dignified people, those with the means to bring succour to hundreds of thousands of sanctions-weary souls can begin to put the systems in place to do so.
Let them begin with a special fund for Iraq's children. While the immediate concern of such a fund would be medical care and nutrition, the long-term goals will encompass, in the main, education and vocational training.
It will be a truly committed NGO, social institution or even group of individuals that will adopt Ali Ismail Abbas (and hundreds like him) to support him over the next decade into his adulthood and see him play a productive role in the new Iraq.
All of us, cocooned in the safety of this blessed land, can...indeed must...reach out now to those innocents in Iraq. Let us make a citizens' appeal to the UN office in Abu Dhabi, the Red Crescent Society and other established social service organisations to start a fund to which we could all contribute.
The United Nations, rightly making a case for a central role in the reconstruction of Iraq, can begin, symbolically, by turning Saddam Hussein's palaces into children's clinics. And until the health infrastructure is revamped, let the West and the Arab world come together in moving all the Iraqi children in need of urgent medical attention to hospitals in the region and beyond, no sooner Baghdad is taken.
In the long haul, reconstruct Iraq, by all means. But let it begin, as it must, with the children.Let the healing begin...
Gulf News
