As
a newspaper beat reporter for more than a decade, I’ve long been proud of my
ability to craft stories from complex subjects on tight deadlines.
But
a half-year after returning from Ethiopia’s South Omo River Valley, I am
discouraged by my incapacity to fully explain what I learned there about ritual tribal infanticide.
The
who, what, where and when are simple enough, horrifying as the subject may be:
Many among the Kara, Banna and Hamar tribes believe in an evil spirit called
Mingi. They fear that, if ignored, it will cause the sun to grow hotter and the
rains to stop falling. Crops and animals will die. And then people will die.
The
spirit takes many forms, but within these tribes, the most common way Mingi
materializes is in infants and small children — those born before proper
ceremonies are performed; those born different in some discernable way; those
whose top teeth come in before their bottom teeth.
They
are suffocated, drowned, bludgeoned and then tossed away to be eaten by wild
beasts. Tribal leaders estimate that hundreds of Mingi children are killed in
these ways each year.
They
do not relish this rite.
“They
are human,” one Kara village chief told me. “But we do this for the good of the
tribe.”
And
here is where we get to the why. And this is where I have been failing, quite
miserably, to bridge the immense social, cultural, religious, geographic and
economic chasms between this world and that.
Many
have tried to change these hearts and minds. So why is it that no one has been
able to convince these people that this spirit has no real power over them —
that they have sacrificed their children for nothing?
I
cannot explain. I can only seek to make meaningful connections. And as we begin
to write the first chapters of our nation’s post-Iraq history, I am reminded
that we are no less subordinate to the power of fear — and no less seduced by
the notion that there is no security without sacrifice.
There
were about 160,000 U.S. military members in Iraq when I first visited that
country in 2005. Today the war is over. And by the end of this month, our
troops will be gone.
Nearly
4,500 U.S. military members have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of
that war, nearly nine years ago — including 26 from Utah who died during my
tenure as national security reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune.
I
met many of their families. Some I got to know quite well. They let me into
their homes. They told me their stories. They shared their pain. And they
continued to allow me into their lives, time and again, in the years that
followed their loved ones’ deaths.
In
2010, I was invited to join a delegation of “Gold Star Mothers” — those who
have lost sons and daughters in the military — that was traveling to Iraq. The
trip, to the war-torn nation’s relatively peaceful and semiautonomous Kurdish
north, was intended to provide these women with an opportunity to better
understand the place where their children fought and fell. And it did.
But
Iraq is a complicated place. And even in the region of that nation that has
long been most supportive of the U.S. intervention, the experiences these women
had were hardly a single-sided confirmation of the righteousness of the cause
for which their children died. In Iraq they had a chance to better understand the
perils of democracy in a highly charged, sectarian society. They came
face-to-face with the shocking ways in which some Iraqis have chosen to
celebrate religious freedom. They saw the effects of political impasse on
desperate people.
Having
earlier reported from some of the very cities where their children had died, I
spent a lot of time in quiet corners of our hotel with women who wanted to know
more about how what they were seeing in Iraqi Kurdistan was representative of
the nation as a whole.
What
they so desperately wanted to know — needed to know — was that their children
had not died in vain.
But
I did not always have the answers they seemed to be seeking.
We
spoke a lot, during those weeks, about the ways in which the lives of ordinary
Iraqis had changed — for better, worse and not at all — as a result of American
intervention and occupation. We spoke of the idea that our nation needed to
“prevent another September 11,” about the premise that Saddam Hussein had to be
stopped “at all costs,” and, especially, about the time-worn adage that
“freedom isn’t free.”
There
is fair debate on the question of whether or not most Iraqis are better off
today than they would have been if the U.S. had stayed away. But, alas, there
is very little evidence that the U.S. adventure in Iraq has prevented acts of
terror; that Saddam was any greater threat to his people than other murderous
tyrants our nation has simply ignored; that Saddam was any threat, whatsoever,
to us; or that the deaths of American service members in Iraq have had any
impact on the freedoms we enjoy at home.
But
for families who have lost so much, the alternative to believing in the
absolute necessity of their sacrifice can be tremendously painful. And it is,
for some, simply unthinkable.
In
the Mingi mothers of the South Omo tribes, I saw a hauntingly familiar plight.
These were desperately grief-stricken women, victims of culture and
circumstance, who would carry their anguish to their graves. But the one thing
they had — the only thing they really had — was the belief that their sacrifice
had bought safety for the rest of their tribe.
And
they clung to that. Like a mother holding her child, they clung to that.
For
if that were not the case, then what had their tribe done to them?
My
God, what had it done to them?
Matthew D. LaPlante
is an assistant professor of journalism at Utah State University.
