"Margaret was a friend of the Arab world, to people of all religions". In this profoundly dignified sentence Margaret Hassan's brother and sisters yesterday summed up their anger and horror at the news that she has been murdered by those who captured her on October 19th.
She stood for solidarity and fraternity between peoples and religions and practised her beliefs in the most extraordinary way, by bringing electricity and water supplies to hospitals until the moment of her kidnap. Her death symbolises all the failures of the invasion and occupation of Iraq and how urgent it is to resolve the conflict there.
Her family's feelings will be shared all over the world, including this country, where the realisation that she was a citizen of Ireland, as of Britain and Iraq, reinforced identification with the war's many victims, especially after the similar murder of Kenneth Bigley. The fact that she worked on aid projects for 30 years in Iraq, helping an estimated 17 million of its people over that time, and vehemently opposed United Nations sanctions and the US-led invasion last year, makes her death all the more heartbreaking.
She became a pawn in a deadly game involving the closing stages of the US election campaign and the deployment of British troops to facilitate the attack on Falluja. Her kidnappers called for British troops to be withdrawn from Iraq and women prisoners released there, in a clear attempt to affect public consciousness about the war there by raising demands that were impossible to meet. It is appalling that such a remarkably good woman should have become so involved and that her kidnappers should have so callously disregarded the moving appeals for her release by her husband, Mr Tashen Ali Hassan, who insisted that she "dedicated her life to the Iraqi people". One can only hope that such inhumanity will help turn Iraqis decisively against those responsible for kidnapping her in the name of a war between peoples and their religions.
Inhumanity has been a feature of the assault on Falluja, shown in the lack of food, electricity and water for its remaining inhabitants during it and the film of a US soldier shooting dead an apparently unarmed man. Quite properly, he is being held for a suspected war crime. Margaret Hassan repeatedly denounced the lack of everyday security and justice for ordinary Iraqis, criticising the invasion's failure to bring them about. The battle for Falluja has been justified by the US-led coalition as necessary to do just this, clearing the way for democratic elections next year.
Its critics doubt that it can or will do so rather than disagreeing with such objectives. Many of the insurgents have transferred their struggle elsewhere. They will not be quelled until the burden of occupation is eased in Iraq by setting a timetable for withdrawal of the coalition troops, transferring security to a more acceptable international force and facilitating a return to genuine self-determination for the Iraqi people.