Unequal tragedy: Young victims of drone attacks

When I saw the images of the children who had died in the school attack in Connecticut, I was horrified. Attacks on children ought to provoke outrage in all of us.
Some malicious folks suggested that this was God’s way of avenging the American foreign policy overseas; they should have been ignored. Nonetheless in cyber space, such inflammatory comments provoked countless tweets and Facebook debates.
One altogether separate distinction, however, must be made. Earlier this week Guardian columnist, Goerge Monbiot, questioned why children’s deaths via drone attacks are acceptable? Why, Monbiot asks, does US President Barack Obama become tearful at the Connecticut shootings, and stoic, stone-hearted by the deaths of children, killed as a result of drone attacks on Pakistani soil? Though George Bush’s administration launched the drone programme, Obama has, unquestioningly, continued it.
But to illustrate the point about the loss of innocence, let’s look at a 2006 drone attack on a school in Bajaur Agency in the tribal areas bordering Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The target was the principal of this madrasa — an alleged militant. The ‘collateral damage’ — was 69 children. The elite of Pakistan may have paused briefly to mourn the losses over coffee table conversations but their anger would have been misplaced — they would be ranting about American imperialism but not for the lives of the children. As for Americans, they likely didn’t know about them.
Why don’t we care about them? Even if you believe that every madrasa is a militant academy (which it isn’t), surely you can’t believe that every child is guilty. If anything, a concerted effort should be made to create a healthier environment for children. Surely the US government understands that a long-term development agenda would have been a better approach than “smokin’ ’em out”.
Why we don’t care, sadly, has something to do with class, a disease that ails us all. The reason we cared so much about the little children in Connecticut is probably because we relate to them, their parents and their lifestyles more than we do to a little six-year-old — now dead — playing cricket in the backyard of his madrassa. That child has no name. No face. No newspaper story. No reporter told us that when he was offered a sweet he always took an extra one for his little brother. We didn’t care to report, read or retweet precious moments in his life. In his op-ed, Monbiot refers to a September 2012 Stanford University-NYU report — Living Under Drones — on the social impact of this distanced US defence policy: Living Under Drones. Over the course of nine months and 130 interviews, researchers reveal the damaging psychological, social and environmental impacts of drones on those who live under their daily threat. One impact is a significant drop in number of school-going children, for fear of attacks.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that at least 25% of the people killed in drone attacks are innocent civilians; 175 assuredly children.
Part of the problem in how we perceive tragedy is how closely we associate with the protagonists of those stories. Perhaps it’s time for a re-think, not just in what issues we highlight, but also whose stories we choose to tell. There lies the bigger, unequal tragedy.
The author is a Delhi based Pakistani journalist.