Of silent screams.

Byline: Marria Sikandar Nagra

What hands are here? Ha! They pluck out mine eyes. Will all great Neptunes ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, This my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine Making the green one red, remarked Shakespeares Macbeth consumed with guilt, manifesting his emotional conundrum shortly after murdering King Duncan. Strange in its dynamics, this is what guilt does .It creates an ambivalence in your cognitive assessment, making you either deny the very occurrence of an event, or accept the grave realities in order to either work upon their eradication or to pass them into oblivion, to the deepest pits of plethora of supposedly unresolvable crisis.

Guilt is the only emotion that seems to highlight the state of the international community following the drowning of refugee toddler Aylan Kurdi, which seems to have afflicted us with all its might and potential. The heart wrenching images of young Aylan, clad in a red shirt and blue shorts, lying on the shores of the Turkish beach that went viral on the social media are enough to prick the consciousness of the stoniest hearts around. This little boy like many others did not happen to know that the world is a dangerous place for susceptible innocents like him. Inhabited by soulless monsters, who are ready to take arms on the slightest excuse ,this world presents a bleak picture, having no room for Syrian refugees like him who had to resort to illegal means to save their skins but ended up drowning themselves. Following the norms of discourteousness, the world would never give you more than you deserve and sometimes you might be even denied of your rightful share. Little did he know that the world in which he lives would be governed by an apathetic silence, silence whose screams form the very pinnacle of the humanitys pitch, yet these screams would not save the likes of Aylan. Such Silence that not only haunts humanity but taunts as well, jolting them to their cores to attempt to arouse them from their deep apathetic slumber.

Martin Luther King Jr could not have been more apt when he remarked, WE will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people .This is how notoriously potent silence of the seemingly good people is. It drifts them to the other side of a deep ocean metaphorically symbolizing their conundrums, from where recovery seems an onerous task, from where they stand to blankly stare at the status quo, with little will left in them to alter the course of the turbulent tides.

Silence has several contours to it. It is not merely staying quite over an issue of social political or cultural relevance, instead it involves being apathetic to the gory occurrences marring the status quo, altering the moral, social demographics of a state. Breaking this silence requires unparalleled courage, a vision not envisioned by many both of which qualify as a deficit factor in todays global society. Disturbing Incidents as that of Aylans drowning, an inevitable consequence of the Syrian crisis, marring the status quo have momentarily broken the silence of the international community, but the question arises is this the final blow to their apathetic attitude?

Crimes against children during war times have attained unparalleled heights in the twenty first century, compelling us to doubt whether we possess even a shred of what is termed as humanity? Had humanity been our religion, we would never have been oblivious to the suffering of millions like Aylan in the armed conflict that rages on in Palestine. A region wreaked by havoc due to continuous attacks by Israeli forces, fatally injuring children as young as three months old! According to Bill Van Esveld, a senior researcher of Human Rights Watch based in Gaza almost 50% of Gazas population comprises of children below the age of 18 years of age hence keeping the population ratio in mind any attack on Gazas civilian areas would kill its children. Even if these children manage to escape physical ruthlessness, their minds will be forever traumatized, scarred with grim reminiscences of the depravity of human kind in its lust for personal and national ends.

Are not children like Aylan living a life of misery in the hell that heaven Kashmir has transited into? Each day, innocent Kashmiri children bear the brunt of atrocities committed by Indian forces? Why is it that the suffering and plight of the Kashmiri children go unnoticed by the champions of peace in the international community?

The suffering of the Kashmiri children is commonplace, with no major reason being than the yearning of the paramilitary forces to assert their authority and manifest their grisly sadism .The height of shamelessness can be estimated from the fact that in just one day, in August 2010, three innocent children were brutally killed for no valid reason at all, if there exists a justifiable reason for killing. A disabled teenager was beaten to death, a girl was shot in the head during a demonstration and a seven year boy was bludgeoned to death by the Central Police Reserve Force. Were these three innocent victims not humans? Were not they someones offsprings or siblings? Did not they deserve to live and play around or was their very birth into this brutal world, an invitation to death itself?

The crimes against children during war times and turbulent crisis has negated the theory of just wars and the supposedly universal code by which it was mandatory for all participating nations in a conflict to protect civilians ,particularly children and women. This universal code seems to have been eroded in the postmodern age, where nations have succumbed to their vain desires, destroying everything and everyone for the attainment of their lusty aims.

In satiating their psychological yearnings they have mentally scarred the children of the world. Today around 10 million children of the world suffer from psychological trauma, mainly a repercussion of the chaotic war zonal bloodshed. Graca Machel, .the author of the groundbreaking 1996 UNICEF report titled Impact of Armed Conflict on Children remarked that For children the deepest scars of war and flight are the hidden ones. It is indeed these hidden scars that usually lead to an overall change in the personality of a child who embroiled in a mental conundrum, may socially isolate himself and develop a much more aggressive behavior only to repeat the cycle of violence that snatched away the beauty of his childhood: his innocence and naivety.

The silence that had afflicted the global stake holders seems to have temporarily ceded following Aylans demise, yet it needs to be seen whether they are going to come across as serious, contenders and live up to their notions of peace and harmony? Or are the talks of peace, simply a faade under which they want to conceal their designs for naked aggression and lust for power and material wealth? Only time will tell whether their souls have really awakened or have they woken up to doze off again in their deep apathetic slumber.

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Publication:	Frontier Post (Peshawar, Pakistan)
Date:	Sep 21, 2015
Words:	1193
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