Robert Fisk: Kidnapped -- The Heroine Who Offered Hope for Iraq

[Jack Rabbit]

From the London Independent via CommonDreams
Dated Wednesday October 20

Kidnapped - The Heroine Who Offered Hope for Iraq
by Robert Fisk

Margaret? Margaret Hassan kidnapped? She who said to me that soon, very soon, "there will be more than one lost generation" in Iraq?
Is there no end to the kidnappers' targets? Margaret Hassan was abducted at 7.30 yesterday morning on her way to work running Care International's Iraq operation. Soon afterwards, Arabic al-Jazeera television showed her sitting in a room looking calm, if concerned. It also showed close-ups of her identification papers and said an unnamed Iraqi group claimed it had kidnapped her.

Margaret was the enemy of United Nations sanctions on Iraq. She is the symbol of all those who believe that Iraq - a real, free, unoccupied Iraq - has a future; and all we can be told is that she, too, has joined the legion of the unpersons, the "disappeared", the list of those who, because of their language or the colour of their eyes or their nationality, have slipped into Iraq's dark hole.

The ultimate disgrace yesterday was to hear British diplomats who supported those deadly sanctions weeping their crocodile tears for "Margaret".

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