More than 1,000 words: a picture worth action
Written by Caroline Vent, Humanitarian Affairs, UK Mission to the UN
In the most dangerous situations imaginable, there are those who are tirelessly working for the benefit of others less fortunate than themselves.
With the theme of “One Humanity”, World Humanitarian Day this year recognises the countless aid workers that risk their lives in humanitarian service.
Extraordinary human beings like Khaled Omar, one of around 2,600 volunteers working with the White Helmets, a Syrian civil defence group that has rescued countless civilians during the country’s five-year civil war. He became its most famous member in June 2014, when he arrived at a collapsed apartment building to find a woman sobbing that she could not find her newborn son. The White Helmets searched for hours and were preparing to give up when they heard a cry from the rubble. They kept digging well into the night before, in extraordinary scenes caught on camera, Khaled reached into the debris and pulled the child out alive.
Sadly, Khaled was himself killed himself last week by a suspected Russian airstrike while carrying out a rescue mission in Aleppo. He leaves behind his own baby daughter.
This year’s theme of One Humanity also speaks to how our shared human experiences bind us across divides, and create a common responsibility to demand action for a more humane world.
Parenthood is one such shared human experience. Six years ago I may not have been so affected by the fact that Khaled was a parent. I could appreciate the poignance on an intellectual level, but it wouldn’t be the key detail of the story that would strike me the most deeply. Now it is.
I fell pregnant with my daughter Yasmina in Syria in 2009, having lived there for three years. I named her after the City of Jasmine, as Damascus is known. Having her has changed me, utterly and forever and in a highly positive way. American aphorist James Lendall Basford put it well when he said “The love of children inspires an interest in the welfare of all humanity.”
Becoming a parent is an intensely personal experience. The experience is fundamentally different for every new parent in the world, and yet children are the one universally shared thing that binds our giant collective chain letter of human beings together, regardless of nationality or language. That’s why I identified this week with the words of journalist Anne Barnard on seeing the below picture, which has gone viral:
“We can get numb seeing dead and injured children remotely day after day, but some pictures particularly get to the mom in me and this is one. The orange chair. The expression. I want to give him a hug”.
This simple image of a shocked and bloodied Syrian boy, the same age as my daughter, sitting alone in an ambulance, summed up the suffering of the children of Aleppo, where in recent days doctors have described the bombing of civilians, use of cluster bombs, and the bombing of roads so that patients can’t be transferred to hospitals. There is a resurgence in reports of alleged chemical weapons attacks — including reports of chlorine gas attacks in Aleppo on 10 August. This week alone, Syrian regime and Russian forces carried out more than 200 airstrikes on Aleppo, putting hundreds of thousands of civilians at risk.
The fact that this picture went viral gives me hope that it will galvanize attention around Aleppo and ignite a new kind of conversation about what is happening in Syria. Just like the pictures of 3-year old Alan Kurdi whose body was washed up on a Turkish beach last September had a huge impact on policy and public opinion, and as Nick Ut’s image of a young Vietnamese girl running naked from a napalm attack is credited with helping to shift world public opinion against the war in Vietnam.
“I fell pregnant with my daughter Yasmina in Syria in 2009, having lived there for three years. I named her after the City of Jasmine, as Damascus is known.”
The horrifically high number of dead children, aid workers, first responders, doctors, and civilian adults in Syria is not the inevitable consequence of war. A cleaner war is possible and we should demand it. But in Syria the norms that safeguard humanity have been tossed aside. Civilians, aid workers, medical workers, are deliberately or indiscriminately killed every day.
My hope is that this image will not just shock us but push our leaders, today on World Humanitarian Day, to take a personal commitment to take meaningful action to stop these senseless deaths in Aleppo and across Syria. If it accomplishes that, it will be an image that has contributed a lot towards a kinder, more humane, world.
