FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
"If we are not buried alive, we live oppressed by social, regional and global judgments and power struggles."
“Mom, why are they bombing us?” my eldest daughter asked me in 2019, as the Saudi coalition committed crimes with American weapons. Why? This is the eternal question.
When the Western-backed, Saudi-led military campaign began in March 2015, I began to make a list of all the ways the war was killing the concept of childhood in Yemen. How the war is taking parents away from their children and our children away from us. How the war is aging our children, and not just time.
On the streets of Sana’a, I come across photographs of young men who once left childhood for adulthood and then life for death, with flowers and the word “martyr” surrounding their images. Every time I pass by their fading smiles, I think about how many more boys will pass from play to the streets, to the battlefields.
Children who were not drafted into the army find themselves fighting another war, while hunger leaves their cheeks hollow and their eyes tired. This hunger steals the smiles from their faces and the breath from their lungs. They become very weak and walk around malnourished and vulnerable to disease.
The mothers in Gaza who lost their children to Israeli bombing and genocide had already lost them, because the war machine not only consumes flesh, blood and souls, but also hopes and dreams. Like us mothers in Yemen, they lost their children while suffering without medicine, starving without bread, unjustly imprisoned, tortured and bearing the psychological pain of losing hope.
The same is true for those who may survive the bombings in Gaza, as it is true for Yemen.
Survival is not about being saved or truly living, just as war is not measured by the number of people killed versus the number who survived. All lives are affected, because war has countless ways of turning life into death.
What options do those who survive a bombing have, when the only thing left is a life that feels like slow torture, a life that is worse than death? I know this all too well as a woman living in Yemen: if we are not buried alive, we live oppressed by social, regional, and global judgments and power struggles.
The international powers are aware of all this, from Yemen to Gaza. Many of them are complicit in the bloodshed and starvation of civilians, profiting from it and arming those who bomb us. This is the only explanation for their silence and inaction.
They don't want to hear complaints and cries of pain from their citizens, so they keep quiet about them too.
To my daughter's question, I replied: "They consider us weak in this world. Easy to swallow."
She seemed unhappy with my answer, so I added a few hopeful words about how we must be resilient during war and how we will one day rebuild our country through education.
Looking back, her initial discontent reflected my own wartime fatigue: why do we civilians blame ourselves? Sometimes, when my mind is weighed down by such questions, I tell my daughter: “The buyers and sellers of weapons are the ones who have the answers.”
We are witnessing a time when the strong take what they want, starting with the souls of children, breaking hearts and causing the world to collapse on the heads of mothers. True peace will only be achieved when vulnerable people are recognized as human beings and not as targets of powerful interests and greed./ Adapted from “Pamphlet” by “The Guardian”.
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