For Every Life Matters: Save Humanity When Saving Rayan!
By Zeinab Abdallah
Imagine that you have the chance once in your lifetime to prove that your humanity is still valid.
Rayan’s story proved that it is not a time issue to draw the world’s attention to humanitarian sufferings. While the world was busy praying for Rayan’s safety, thousands of Yemeni children were terrified by Saudi warplanes bombing their houses.
Spending several tough nights deep in the well, Rayan experienced some of the endless toughness children in Yemen and Palestine have been through.
Rayan’s story exposed the world’s double standards at their most impudent level.
The mental health of Rayan matters, and so does that of the Yemeni children who had the shattered bodies of their loved ones stuck deep in their memories. The injuries Rayan will be treated for will hopefully disappear, but the maims in the bodies and faces of the children of Yemen and Palestine will last as scars forever, as no hand was extended to lend them support. Some of them will continue their lives as disabled due to the deprivation of the necessary medical care that has no tools available in their country.
It was mind-blowing how the same world that decided to remain blind, deaf, and silent towards all the massacres, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and childhood was watchful enough to stand in solidarity with the poor Rayan. For those who don’t know him, I doubt, Rayan is a five-year-old Moroccan boy who fell down a 32-meter deep well on Tuesday, as darkness fell with diggers clawing out dirt under floodlights to create a hole next to the narrow shaft.
Messages of solidarity poured from all over the world. Different satellite channels opened live coverage as rescue teams rushed to the place. By this accident, Rayan have experienced for several days the seven-year-long suffering of the children of Yemen; insecurity, hunger, fatigue, mental anxiety, and the unknown fate.
Little has been known about Rayan’s peers in Palestine, and Gaza in particular, during the 11 days of the May 2021 ‘Israeli’ war. When children were celebrating Eid al-Adha across the Muslim world, perhaps Rayan’s parents bought him some new clothes and delights, but Gazan kids either had their parents killed, injured, or in case they survived, none of the features of festivities was something suitable to ask for. The same case applies for the children of Yemen.
Early grownups are children in those spots of the world…
When Rayan recovers and returns to school, children in the other part of the world, which is not in the spotlight of mass media and social media, will remain unschooled. This will not be due to their injuries, although they exist. It is because their schools have been bombed by the Saudi warplanes. But almost all Saudi crimes, massacres, and grave human rights violations go uncovered as the petrodollars have the power to shut up those who might report about them.
The absentminded international community, the one that composes the United Nations, a body that once wrote the Convention on the Rights of the Child, claims in its text that: All children have all these rights, no matter who they are, where they live, what language they speak, what their religion is, what they think, what they look like, if they are a boy or girl, if they have a disability, if they are rich or poor, and no matter who their parents or families are or what their parents or families believe or do. No child should be treated unfairly for any reason.
Perhaps Rayan was lucky to grab the world’s attention as his tragedy was not caused by any dictator who spends hush-money to keep his image shining. However, hope still lies in the few voices that took it upon themselves to say it loud: Whether in Yemen, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bahrain, and the Arabian Peninsula, as same as Rayan’s, every life matters!
