Bomb Haters, Unite!

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Who was it that said, if you live with a cripple, you would learn to limp.

By Anwaar Hussain

kandahar_crutch.gif Walk down a busy Kabul street and try coming back unscarred.

Legless men rattle down bazaars in wheelbarrows, little children with missing limbs crab along like some decapods, one-legged men hobble about on ugly crutches among the throng of people. The common threads; they are all war victims, they are all beggars. Welcome to the land of the wretched.

Perhaps no other place on earth has a larger proportion of disabled citizens living out their miserable existences in such heart rending circumstances as Afghanistan. Three decades of war, millions of mines and unexploded ordinance (UXO) for children to trip over, not to include the hordes of suicide bombers now killing in the name of God, have turned Afghanistan into a wasteland of the mutilated and the crippled.

War-related disabilities, primarily loss of limbs, account for an overwhelming proportion of non-birth-defect cases. Cluster munitions and land mines are among the main causes. Out of a population of 25 million, 123,000 Afghans have directly been so incapacitated by war and its consequences.

The Afghans are not alone in their suffering though. Owing to these horrific weapons of war, countless more human beings today live in similar misery in Laos, Iraq, Chechnya, Kosovo, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

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Anwaar’s articles appear simultaneously here at Truth Spring and at Soul Vibes in The Pakistan Tribune.


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