BAGHDAD, 29 October 2003 — Leukemia victim Myriam Abed, long the symbol of Iraqi children’s ordeal under UN sanctions and protegee of maverick British MP George Galloway, sits quietly, forgotten by the world and blinded by malpractice.

In a cold classroom with wall paintings she cannot see, the eight-year-old girl who has been treated for leukemia since the age of three, feels raised dots on her green textbook at the run-down Al-Noor Institute for the Blind.

“Journalists?” the girl asks, raising her head as her face lightens up with joy at the idea of being remembered again.

Her father, Hamza Abed, is now saying it loud and clear: on top of her suffering, his daughter became blind and half-paralyzed due to malpractice at a Baghdad hospital.

The girl may not be aware of the controversy marking Galloway’s political career, all she knows is that she owes her life to the Scottish MP, who was expelled from the Labour party on Thursday for his outspoken criticism of the US-led Iraq war.

“I wish I could see George Galloway, he can cure me,” said the girl, whose pale, gentle face, with lush lips and big black eyes, has been splashed across front pages of newspapers worldwide since 1998.

Iraqi children were the first victims of the UN sanctions imposed after Saddam’s army invaded Kuwait in 1990. Children are still paying a heavy price for the chaos and isolation characterizing the country since Saddam’s ouster. At the time of sanctions, world viewers were shocked by disturbing images of children dying on hospital beds from a lack of medicine or of convoys of cars carrying small coffins during mass funerals for children.

Myriam’s case hit headlines when Galloway took her to Glasgow in 1998 for a six-month treatment and when, a year later, he sponsored an 11-country charity trip on a London double-decker bus bearing her name from Britain to Iraq.

After harsh cycles of chemotherapy and radiation, Myriam suffered more misery in August 1999 when a doctor in Baghdad took the liberty of changing the treatment prescribed and granted to her by foreign doctors and donors.

“Her doctors forced me out of her hospital room, then gave her a treatment which exceeded the prescribed dose. She became blind and half paralyzed,” said her father, while caressing her black hair.

“I tried talking to the media, but people from the Foreign Ministry threatened me. Then, for a whole year, they even forced me to stay in the hospital with Myriam, my wife and two other children,” he said.

After another intervention by Galloway, Myriam was taken to Amman for treatment to her paralyzed arm and leg and where the MP was “crushed” at her condition.

“They hugged each other and cried, both of them. It was very moving. She only giggled when Galloway whispered ‘chips, chips, Myriam’ in her ears. She loves chips,” said her father.

Myriam, whose family comes from the southern Shiite Muslim region of Najaf, was then taken to the United States by a Christian charity for six months of treatment to her eyes. There, her family was told that the girl “may regain her vision.”

Struggling to quieten seven other visually-impaired pupils in the class, Myriam’s teacher, who is also blind, helps the little girl to read Braille.

“Myriam is very smart, but she cannot properly use her right hand and so she was not able to make quick progress since starting school last year,” said Huda Jassem, a history university graduate and former student of the institute.

The institute, which was badly damaged and completely looted of furniture and specialized equipment and textbooks, has partly reopened with South Korean charity help, and is awaiting a renovation tender, said director Batul Sadek Tawfik.

“We saved a few Braille textbooks that we are using. Until we get new ones purified from the former regime propaganda, I make the children skip lines about ‘the leader Saddam’ or ‘my father returns from the front’,” said Jassem.