compassion fatigue

... I came across this article in June and felt it was an important share... since when does the loss of human life grant a simple mention on the evening news and a forgotten change of the remote? These stats are obviously much larger in their current state and we still have no end in sight. What was started as a noble act of humane patriotism has now landed us in an endless sea of "one more lost". May we NEVER forget the sacrifice of these... compassion fatigues.


A Grim Toll

By David Fickling

We are so used to the compassion fatigue engendered by three years of Iraqi bloodshed that even yesterday's announcement that 100 Iraqis a day are dying (pdf) invites a ho-hum response. Most news organisations subsumed the news into more dramatic accounts of a suicide car bomb attack that killed 53 in southern Iraq.

The editorial decision is understandable: we already know that Iraq is unspeakably bloody, and eyewitness accounts of suicide bombers driving into queues of labourers make for more dramatic news stories than the search through morgue and hospital records that produced the UN human rights office's 100-a-day figure.

But let's try putting it into context. More people are killed in a month in Iraq than in 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland. In two months, more are killed than in the first world war's Battle of Jutland, the biggest naval battle of all time.

More are killed in 10 weeks than were killed in the Halabja poison gas attack, Saddam Hussein's single most brutal assault on his people. And in 12 weeks, more are killed than died in the Srebrenica massacre.

Think of it another way: a packed-out concert at the Wembley Arena holds 12,300, so it you've ever been to the venue you can tell yourself that it would take just five-and-a-half months of violence in Iraq to kill every person who was there with you.

Or you could try setting yourself an alarm to go off every 15 minutes, day and night, giving you a reminder of the average frequency of violent death in post-conflict Iraq.

All of this rarely makes headline news around the world because, although the violence in Iraq is constant and relentless, there are few major incidents to attract our attention.

There have so far only been five days since the fall of Baghdad when major coordinated attacks caused the deaths of more than 100 people in a day - in Irbil in February 2004, in Karbala and Baghdad the following month, in Hilla in February 2005, in Baghdad and other towns in September 2005, and in Karbala and Ramadi this January.

There will inevitably be further examination of the UN's figures. Iraq Body Count estimates a total of 44,000 deaths, while a 2004 Lancet study (pdf) calculated that there had been 98,000 "excess deaths" since the Iraq invasion.

What is without question is that the toll is rising. According to Iraq Body Count, the daily death toll has gone up from 20 in 2003, to 30 in 2004, 40 in 2005 and 50 this year. And according to the UN report, nearly a third of the 50,000 people killed since 2003 have died in the past six months alone.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2006/07/19/a_grim_toll.html