My city

There are many times when I feel insecure about my identity. I was born and raised in Iraq until I was ten and since then I have lived in the US. The obvious political tensions between the two countries reveal the complexity of being linked with both of them. I grew up in an environment that was heterogeneous and I have traveled and seen a lot of this world. The result is that I do not feel with and for just I came to this realization long before Sept 11 through many interactions with different people. An example of such an interaction was between an Irani girl and myself at Tufts. Iraq had been involved in an eight-year brutal war with Iran in the 1980s. The impacts of the war marked me dramatically as a child, because of experiencing bomb drills in schools, nightly air raids, losing friends and feeling uncertain about living to see the next day.

What I discovered from meeting this Irani girl, was that she knew exactly what I was referring to. Our experiences were mirror images of each other, except Iraq was Iran, Saddam Hussein was the Ayatollah Khomeini, Baghdad was Tehran. We were told we were "enemies" and living in our countries we consumed the labels and images our nations produced for us to eat and the result was we had bureaucratized our minds with misconceptions about each other.

What then am I, and this girl, and people like us, concerned about? Security. Traditionally and today, security means the defense of the state against internal and external threats. But it is much more than that. In order to attain true security, humankind must emancipate itself not only from war and the threat of war, but from poverty, scarcity, illiteracy, oppression, overpopulation, ethnic hatred, environmental destruction and disease.

Security needs to be looked at in human terms _ at the human level. A glance at television today reveals the US sending its military machine to Iraq. People will never forget the sight of NYC, but why can they not think about what may happen when these weapons are used against Iraq? Iraq is not just land but has its people too.

And when images of Arafat's compound are shown on television, to the average Palestinian, does this sight not look like ground zero in NYC? Does the average American not see that when looking at the rubble? The images of an Israeli mother crying at having lost a child in a bombing are the same as one of a Palestinian mother whose child was attacked by a settler _ the same cries as a New Yorker's.

My lack of fixed identity allows me to see this, to understand that a lot of us fail to see what is around us. We fail to see each other, we fail to see what we have in common and we fail to see the dangers of what is being thrown at us in the media. I will not be deceived by this nation, or any other nation that claims its security through insecurity of another's. That is not what true security is.

The world today seems to see the attainment of peace through acts of war, as one friend said to me once, it is like performing the sexual act as a claim to save all future virginity. Peace should be seen in its "positive" definition, an approach in which peace is viewed as the attainment of collective security, justice, welfare, freedom, and self-fulfillment.

I will conclude my thoughts with a poem by John O'Connor, a labor organizer in New York who captures our interconnectedness and the need to see what we all are going through in this world. It is entitled "My City."

What if life were long

and eternity short?

In my city innocent people

are killed by a thunderous

terror from above. Vendors

in the street are pummeled

by rubble. Men and women

on their way to work are greeted

with the anonymous hatred

of those they have never met.

Janitors, businessmen, clerks,

cooks, construction workers, the rescue

workers who risk all to help these.

My beloved city showered with death.

We cry up and ask, in the midst

of the screams of loved ones,

why do they hate us so?

Why do they do this to our city,

to our lives?

My stomach turns in on itself.

The people I love, burning, dissolving,

dying. The city I love, attacked

from above. My brothers in agony.

My sisters. Children. Mothers. Dead.

Who would do this?

Why my beautiful city?

How do we survive this

but by breathing the city's name

over and over like a mantra, a prayer?

Baghdad, Baghdad, Baghdad.

The Baghdad, Baghdad, Baghdad in italics can mean any city. Most people who read this poem assume the whole time that it is NYC, but it can be Kabul, Tehran, Paris _ any other city. All of these cities are my cities.

Rana Abdul-Aziz is a senior majoring in international relations and Middle Eastern studies.