NEWS

An Appeal for Sajida
The daily risk of intimidation, murder and kidnap is well documented in Iraq. The scale of the country’s health and humanitarian crisis is less understood. Journalist, photographer and human rights activist Sajida al Ebadi, 32, from Basra in southern Iraq, is a victim of both horrors. In 2003, the mother of three set up the […]
24 Jul 07

The daily risk of intimidation, murder and kidnap is well documented in Iraq. The scale of the country’s health and humanitarian crisis is less understood. Journalist, photographer and human rights activist Sajida al Ebadi, 32, from Basra in southern Iraq, is a victim of both horrors.

In 2003, the mother of three set up the Basra Women’s Union to provide training support for a new generation of Iraqi women journalists and activists, and courses ranging from using the web and health education to sewing and literacy for local women and children.

Her work earned her threats of death. One chilling message left on her phone in January of this year warned her: ‘We are closer to you than your veins. Death is coming to you.’

But a few months later Sajida received notice of a very different threat, one no less deadly, and no less common, in today’s terrifying world for Iraqi women.

In May 2007, Sajida was diagnosed with breast cancer.

After 13 years of sanctions and four years of occupation, insurgency and the failure of international assistance, Iraq’s hospitals are starved of medicines, equipment and even doctors.

In nightmare circumstances she had a mastectomy and her lymph glands removed. Today she is trying to complete a programme of chemotherapy.

Before her diagnosis, Sajida was a key contributor to a documentary arts project devised and run in Iraq, with Index on Censorship’s support, by the participatory photography group Open Shutters, led by UK photojournalist Eugenie Dolberg. Her work [above] paints a painfully beautiful portrait of a city in which her own identity is reflected.

Sajida’s words and pictures resonate with loss and the destruction wrought by both the occupation and the militias who rule the city. And Basra, like all of Iraq, exists under the shroud of radioactivity left by the west’s use of depleted munitions there, weaponry that Iraqi doctors and foreign experts link to the rise of cancers in the country.

In the months to come, Index on Censorship and Open Shutters, supported by the United Nations Development Programme and the Spanish government, plan to put Sajida’s stories, and those of other Iraqi women who have contributed to the project, into a series of books and exhibitions across Europe and the Middle East.

But these are months that Sajida may not have. So Index on Censorship is supporting an appeal on her behalf led by Eugenie Dolberg for Open Shutters and Maysoon Pachachi, the Iraqi TV documentary maker who has filmed the Open Shutters creative process.

The aim is to collect funds to support Sajida’s treatment, abroad if necessary, to see her as safely as possible through the next few weeks of care.

We hope to see her well enough to stand alongside the other Iraqi women – and a six-year-old girl – who have turned Open Shutters into what may yet be one of the most moving and powerful accounts of women’s lives ravaged by war ever presented.

Maysoon Pachachi has organised a fund for Sajida’s medical care. People who wish to help can contact Maysoon directly at Oxymoron Films at .

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