But for our good fortune, it could have been one of us instead of Aylan Kurdi and his family. It is part of our responsibility to stand by humanity in distress.
A profound sadness gripped me as I watched the picture of young Aylan Kurdi’s body lying on a beach at Bodrum, Turkey. What, I asked myself, did the child, his brother Ghalib and mother Rehan, do to deserve the horrible deaths they have sufferedIJ Or their father, Abdullah, who has to live with memories that will burn him throughout his lifeIJ Nothing. They were victims of a conflict they never started, of which they never wanted to be a part, but that descended on them with savage ferocity, wrecking their settled lives in such a manner that they felt compelled to leave their home in Syria, for a totally uncertain future.
It is, one will be told, pointless to ask such rhetorical questions and brood over their obvious answers. Refugees have existed throughout history, and will continue to do so. The West, including the United States, did little to welcome Jews trying to flee Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’, which sent millions of them to concentration camps. It did little that was effective against Japan when the latter unleashed unspeakable atrocities on China before World War II. Nor did it, or for that matter, even Asian and African countries, do much to end the conflict in Biafra in the 1960s or the genocide that claimed close to a million lives in Rwanda just in 100 days or so from April to July, 1994. The plight of Palestinian and Rohingya refugees speaks for itself.
All this is true. The US did not enter World War II until Pearl Harbour, Britain and France not until all efforts to pander to Hitler had failed. The world will not easily forget British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s surrender at Munich and his proud announcement thereafter that, he had ensured “Peace in our time.” All this is perhaps understandable. Governments are rarely moved by compassion. Power and strategies take on autonomous trajectories, relegating to the margins concern for people these are supposed to serve. Physical and administrative distances reduce deaths to numbers, particularly when the absence of ethnic, communal and other ties hinders emotional identification.
That, however, does not mean that we resign ourselves to things remaining unchanged. All of us, especially those who write, shoot photographs or do both, have a responsibility to dwell on the plight of the victims of the raging conflicts in Syria, Iraq and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, and demand that humanity worldwide reacts to their tragedy. This, in turn, is a part of our wider responsibility that overarches everything else we do — to stand by humanity in distress everywhere.
Significant results are liable to follow, over time if not immediately. The power of the written word and the visual image is immense. It was the clinical description in John Hersey’s Hiroshima that did much bring home to the world, shell-shocked in the aftermath of World War II, the enormity of the devastation and tragedy that had descended on the city. It was Nick Ut’s Pullitzer prize-winning photograph of nine-year old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running away, naked and screaming, from a napalm attack, that brought home to the world the horrors of the Vietnam War. And now, Nilufer Demir’s photograph of little Aylan, lying on beach, as if peacefully asleep, has shaken the world’s conscience.
We can do a lot. More and more of us have to wake up to our power as well as responsibities. We owe this to Aylan Kurdi and other little children and their parents who have perished in perilous waters in search of safety. And we need to remember John Donne’s famous lines: “Any man's death diminishes me,/Because I am involved in mankind,/And,therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls;/It tolls for thee.” Remember, but for our good fortune, it could have been one of us or someone we love instead of Aylan Kurdi and his family.