The murder of Margaret Hassan, the kidnapped foreign-born Iraqi aid worker, represents a new low in the depravities that are being visited upon Iraq since the US ouster of Saddam. What is now thought to be the mutilated body of Hassan was discovered in Fallujah as Iraqi and US troops were in the final phases of their operation to take the city. The murder, if confirmed, would cross another red line. It would mark the first time a female hostage has been killed by kidnappers.
The murder has caused widespread revulsion in Iraq and beyond. Those who protest that far less fuss is made over the seizure and murder of Iraqis who have been held for ransom are missing the point. Hassan was an Iraqi, married to an Iraqi. Though she also still held Irish and British citizenship, her heart was in Iraq where she had made her home for over 30 years. Much of that time she had devoted herself to the cause of the poor and disadvantaged. She was a humanitarian who began her work in Palestinian refugee camps, a charity worker who was as critical of the effects of the US invasion as she was of the ruthless rule of Saddam. Yet even Saddam’s Baathist thugs did not try to kill or even harm her. It took an even more evil bunch of individuals to do that and herein lies the greatest mystery of Hassan’s abduction and murder.
Immediate suspicions fell upon the Al-Qaeda offshoot headed by Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi. Yet as the different pleas for the charity worker’s release mounted, Zarqawi apparently added his own voice to the campaign. When the abductors threatened, at one stage of the drama, to hand her over to Zarqawi, he was reported as saying that, in case that happened, he would release her. The question must therefore be who perpetrated this murder, who were these criminals and what possible purpose did they think it could achieve?
Whoever they are, one thing is absolutely certain: This wicked deed, along with the murder of many others who were in Iraq to serve Iraqis, has helped no one other than those who would love to portray Iraq’s resistance as a bunch of killers. Margaret Hassan represented the anxious and suffering majority of decent Iraqis. She saw no barriers of class or country. Not for her political factionalism and hatreds. Her motive was the determination to work among the postwar chaos to do what she could to make things better for her most-disadvantaged fellow Iraqis. Virtually all other aid officials had fled but she carried on working, trusting in the inherent decency of Iraqis to protect her. Though she has been horribly murdered, in one sense her trust has not been misplaced. Her killing seems to have appalled an extraordinary range of Iraqis, whatever their loyalties in the current conflict which threatens to tear the country apart.
One day when Iraq is finally at peace Margaret Hassan will be honored as representing all those good people who bravely risked and tragically lost their lives for the noblest humanitarian reasons.
