Die-in

Die-in at the end of an anti-war demonstration in Boston, a few weeks before the Iraq war started. The people in the photo wanted to remember the civilian casualties of all war, too often ignored and uncounted. The demonstration, which included a march through the center of Boston, was the largest in many years (dwarfed, of course, by the parade to celebrate the Red Sox victory in the baseball “world” series, but people knows when something is really important). The striking part of the demonstration, however, was the kind of people participating at the march. Not the usual left-wing students and radicals, but a lot of common people, families with their children, elegantly-dressed retirees. One guy I met there said that he never saw that many people since the demonstrations against the Vietnam war.

Of course everybody knows how things ended, just a few weeks later. The mission is not exactly accomplished as somebody was too eager to declare, but Iraq has been invaded and occupied by the US army, and a lot of people have died. The anti-war movement is now much less vocal (in US, it is not the same in other countries) and the people supporting the war have an easy game saying that the apocalyptic predictions of the peace movement were after all exaggerated. But, where they? How many Iraqi civilians have actually died as a consequence of this war?

The web site Iraq Body Count tries to give an answer, keeping the tally of all Iraqi deaths connected to the american occupation. They only count the deaths reported by the international media, and only if different sources confirm the number. Their current estimate is above 15,000 deaths. This is 5 times the deaths of 9/11. And the carnage is not finished. And it is most probably a lower limit, as the media cannot really reach everywhere in Iraq, and many deaths are bound to go unrecorded. Moreover, the deaths due to indirect causes (people that cannot reach an hospital because of the curfew, people that dies several days after being injured, people that dies because of the scarcity of food, drugs and fresh water due to the collapse of the Iraqi society following the invasion, etc...) are likely to go unnoticed by the media. A scientific study published by the peer-reviewed medical journal “Lancet” estimates with a statistical method the total death from the beginning of the war as being as much as 100,000.

How many civilian casualties qualify as an humanitarian disaster? Maybe we need more die-ins to remind us of the harsh reality of war and of what it really means to be “liberated” by a superpower army.