BASTARDS!

It was a sight I will never forget. A right Royal bum, encased in tight fawn trousers, being jarred and bruised in a four-wheel drive as we jolted along the corrugated sandy floor of a dry riverbed wadi in Africa. No allowances were being made for a princess.

Prince Anne was on a charity trip to The Sudan for Save the Children. And I was following her for an exclusive interview conducted outside a thatched hut near the Mali border. The day had been dusty and dirty plus hours of travel in baking heat. Plus relentless, continuing, images of little kids with distended, malnourished, potbellies and eyes filled with flies and pus.

And we saw many of them die.

(The dusk interview with the sounds of birds and braying donkeys in the background exposed me to one of the great putdowns of a journalistic career that has lasted nearly five decades. I sloppily said something like “…as patron of Save The Children” to which she haughtily replied: “No. I am the president. Mother is the Patron”. Cue the Queen.)

Those thoughts of well-meaning do-gooders – and I hope I can be classed as one of them -- came flooding back this week with the ghastly news that the Baghdad Chief of Care International, Margaret Hassan, had been executed. It was shocking and tragic news. A selfless, compassionate humanitarian woman, was murdered for being in the right place at the wrong time.

Margaret Hassan, was the local, tireless, boss of Care International. She had spent thirty years trying to improve the lot of the Iraqi people – especially children. One of her projects provided clean water for five million people. She built a school for the deaf. She developed a hospital project for people with spinal injuries. She became an Iraqi citizen. She married an Iraqi. And she truly cared.

Terrorists kidnapped her, imprisoned her, terrorized her and murdered her. For what? Do these people really care about the health and welfare of the Iraqi people? I doubt it. And what sort of religious fervour can people use to excuse the slaughter of an aid worker?

Care International has pulled its other aid workers out which means Iraqi kids will suffer. Medical programmes will crumble. Food and other relief projects will stumble.

I have always admired the work done internationally by groups like Care Australia and Oxfam and Community Aid Abroad and Save the Children. And Bob Geldof’s Band Aid – which this week re-recorded the Feed the World “do they know it’s Christmas” hymn.

Brave people like Phoebe Fraser have seen the suffering and felt the pain in places like Bangladesh and Rwanda and Somalia and Ethiopia. I have seen it first hand in places like India and Ethiopia and The Sudan.

These people put their personal safety at risk. Three aid workers are currently being held hostage in Afghanistan and Margaret Hussan is dead. Her murderers filmed the execution for television and propaganda. The Arab TV network Al Jazeera reported that her death was too graphic and too gruesome to put to air. Although they happily showed an American marine shooting a wounded Iraqi in a mosque.

And Margaret Hassan’s grieving husband was left to beg for her killers to at least return her body so a martyr could be buried with the respect not shown to her by her kidnappers.

We should never underestimate the work done by people like Margaret Hassan and Princess Di (over land mines and AIDS) and Hugh Jackman on bone marrow donors. I have self-deprecatingly said that we do it because we can. But there is much more to it than that. Personalities don’t HAVE to do it. Some live in their ego-fuelled worlds and never give anything back.

But around Australia yesterday singers and dancers and media and sports stars gave up precious Saturday hours to appear at McHappy Day. Putting in personal appearances at McDonald’s venues all over the country to help the Variety Club and Ronald McDonald ventures.

And they do it because they truly care. In a small way acknowledging what people like Margaret Hassan and Phoebe Fraser do at great personal risk every day.

In the best of all possible worlds it should not have to be. In a wealthy world there should not be kids in Africa with pus in their eyes or zonked out petrol sniffers in Outback Australia. There should not be dirty water in Bangladesh or cholera or eye diseases that make little kids go blind. But there is.

And groups like Care Australia and Save the Children and the Fred Hollows Foundation have made a difference. Sadly, tragically, it takes the ghastly slaughter of a dedicated, committed, well-meaning, woman to bring some of the sacrifices home to us.

I have said many times that I believe Australians are some of the most generous people in the world when it comes to supporting charity functions and putting the hand in the pocket and often paying stupid amounts of money for silent auction stuff you wouldn’t want to give cupboard space to.

And I rile when people cynically scoff that “it’s probably tax deductible anyway” or “they can afford it”. People don’t have to do it. Like McHappy Day personalities give up precious personal hours on a rare Saturday day off because they really care for kids.

In the case of Margaret Hassan her passionate commitment, cruelly, inexplicably, cost her her life.

In her death there was not a modicum of decorum for a woman who had spent her life trying to improve the quality of other people’s.

The futile death of such a good woman was truly an international obscenity.

November 21, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004