Friends-
Our team in Baghdad just called. It is difficult for us to convey the obvious relief that we experienced upon hearing from them. The phone disconnected three times giving us less than 10 minutes to communicate with them. They told us U.S. soldiers and tanks are on streets and street corners, they seem to be everywhere. Further, they expressed with great emphasis that an excessive amount of bombs have rained down on Baghdad for the last week.
Today as we watch on television the countless hours of reporting on the tangible and symbolic destruction of a Saddam Hussein statue, the number of injured civilians, families losing loved ones, lootings, fires, and fighting increases. Meanwhile our team in Amman attended a press briefing where they heard statements from United Nations humanitarian coordinators. These statements have gone unmentioned in the mainstream media.
Carel de Rooy director of UNICEF in Iraq stated, "Before this conflict took place UNICEF had networks and systems in Iraq that helped achieve our life-saving vaccination campaigns, nutrition campaigns, and work in education. What is horribly worrying about the looting, chaos, and break down of order, is that those systems we counted on may completely collapse," he added that at the beginning of this week, the UNICEF Iraq appeal has received just 1/5th of its funding. "This is obviously and simply not enough. We have an emergency on our hands. Our actions in the next few weeks will determine the physical and mental well-being of a generation of Iraqi children."
A representative from the World Health Organization, speaking to the increasing humanitarian crisis added, "Reports from Baghdad tell of serious civilian casualties and growing pressure on hospitals and health workers. Electricity supplies are erratic, the standby generators are being overworked to the point of collapse; many hospitals are running short of clean, safe water, staff are working extremely long hours in unimaginable circumstances and some vital surgical and medical supplies are running short...in a hospital with a basic infrastructure not functioning, and where doctors and nurses have to perform difficult emergency surgical operations and provide intensive care without access to some of the most basic services and supplies."
Months prior to the "shock and awe" onslaught, UN officials, as well as delegates with the Iraq Peace Team, had warned and protested against the use of such violence due to the realities Iraqis are faced with today, the realities as outlined in the statements above. Adding greater concern to an already desperate situation, UNHCI commented on the inability for UN agencies to enter Iraq at the current time, because of the lack of safety on the roads and access to warehouses and offices.
As our team in Baghdad continues to bear witness, we ask all of you to continue to do the work that has just begun. The urgency for water and relief that is felt by many civilians throughout Iraq is one that must be heard and echoed throughout the world until their needs are met. In the most recent diary from our team in Iraq, Cynthia Banas wrote, "Death, destruction, maiming, and lifetime trauma are the consequences of war. We have witnessed children frightened beyond their years, and have seen their mangled bodies in the hospital. War for them will never end."
-Bitta Mostofi
for Voices in the Wilderness
http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw
Posted by Brian Stefans at April 11, 2003 08:04 AM | TrackBackFor this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.
Posted by: Hector on January 18, 2004 07:29 PMOur next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.
Posted by: Martin on January 18, 2004 07:31 PM