Landmine Victim, 10, Appeals for Help

Saeed is only 10 years old, but already his life has been shaped by conflicts that he knows nothing about and that have nothing to do with him. 

It happened about three months ago. He stepped on a landmine left over from Iran's war with Iraq — a war that ended 30 years ago — and lost his right hand and both eyes. 

According to the doctors, Saeed has a chance to regain his sight but only if he is operated on by a specialist eye surgeon. The expertise, however, is only available in the United States. Volunteers are doing everything in their power to help the child and to pay for his expenses. But Saeed’s family and volunteers are not very hopeful that they will succeed in getting him to the US because, even if volunteers and NGOs do manage to get enough donations from people, the chances of obtaining a US visa are extremely low. That's because, on orders of its president, that country has closed its borders to Saeed and others like him.

What is more, doctors have told Saeed’s brother that there is a time limit beyond which surgery will not work. Currently members of Iran Without Landmines are trying to find a specialist eye surgeon who would be willing to travel to a country near Iran and perform the surgery before time runs out for Saeed.

 

Accident Happened When Saeed was Playing with his Pet Lamb

Saeed was born to a nomadic tribal family. They live in a tent and migrate every summer and every winter. Their worldly possessions are more or less limited to that tent and the sheep that migrate with them.

“It was almost midday on a sunny Friday,” says Saeed’s brother Vahid Nyazi about the day of the accident. “Saeed was running around [outside] the tent with his little lamb and we could hear his laughter. We were preparing lunch when suddenly we heard a horrible explosion. I rushed to the site of the explosion and saw my bother soaked in blood, with his hand lying a little further away.”

The accident happened around the Karkheh River in Shush-Daniel area, which was a battlefield during the war. It is about 800 kilometers from Tehran and the capital’s well-equipped medical centers. Saeed’s family did not have even enough money to take their child to nearby medical facilities and since the accident, they have relied on help from members of the group Iran Without Landmines, good Samaritans and other volunteers.

Before the accident, Saeed was a lively and happy child, but now he is in a deep depression. A child who used to spend the whole day playing with flowers and butterflies and lambs in open fields now cowers in a corner of the tent.

Feryal Azari is one of the volunteers who now spends her days helping Saeed by taking him to the hospital and back and bandaging his wounds, and by talking to him. “That day my family were sitting under the shade of a tree,” Saeed told Feryal. “I was chasing my little lamb when suddenly I heard a scary explosion. There was a lot of pain and fire and after that I don’t know anything.”

The family has not told Saeed that his little lamb is dead. It was the lamb that stepped on the mine, took the brunt of the explosion and, perhaps saved Saeed’s life. According to Feryal, at first the family could not figure out what had happened and it took them a while to learn that an unexploded land mine had gone off.

Saeed was kept in a local hospital for a week and was then sent to Tehran. Saeed’s brother Vahid, who had been in Tehran for military service in the past, accompanied him. The rest of the family had never visited the Iranian capital and they only speak their local language, not Persian.

 

No Help from the Government

If victims of landmine explosions are strained financially, they will find themselves in a very difficult situation. Unfortunately, the Iranian government does not make provisions to help victims of landmines, though some individual officials did try to help bring down medical expenses. The only other help available is from volunteers and NGOs.

According to Feryal, every member of Iran Without Landmines chipped in to help Saeed. “Some government officials cooperated as well and tried to bring down some of the expenses of his treatment,” she says. “But not all expenses are about hospitalization. There are other expenses — for outpatient treatment, accommodation, traveling to and from Tehran and many other things.”

The volunteers are doing whatever they can. “Dr. Samieh Movahed came every day and cleaned Saeed’s wounds because the area where his hand was cut off was infected,” says Feryal. “Leila Ali-Karimi tried to get the government to set up a pension for Saeed as a war victim.” And there were others, including “a colonel who before retirement used to clear mines in war zones, a man who worked with the circus and who came to make Saeed laugh by playing the clown, and myself, because I have had the painful experience of breast cancer and numerous surgeries and was familiar with the medical system. I tried to accompany him on his way to the hospital and back.”

Saeed’s brother says that the surgeons tried a cornea transplant to return Saeed’s sight. The nerves in Saeed’s retinas are severely damaged. In the end they decided there was nothing further they could do for him in Iranian hospitals. “When the retina specialist said his eyes would not recover, he burst into tears and had a nervous breakdown,” says Vahid. “He cried and kept repeating that he wanted his eyes back.”

Saeed was forced to return to their tent in southern Iran. He has returned and sits crouching under a blanket, his face damaged. He does not talk to anybody and he is learning how to live with only his left hand.

During the time Saeed was in Tehran for medical treatment, volunteers for Iran without Landmines booked a hotel room for him and his brother. “In the course of these comings and goings Saeed is either strangely silent or, when he is being taken to the hospital, he becomes aggressive and attacks and shouts at his companions,” says Feryal Azari. “He is suffering from a great sadness. He is a child of meadows and open spaces and is not used to such darkness.”

“When I met Saeed, I realized that I could not leave him to his fate,” she says. “It is natural that the reporters are not very willing to publish news about child victims of land mines because the government has declared the area around the Karkheh River where Saeed fell victim to the mine as having been cleared of mines. If the news about mine explosions get out, the efficiency of the government in clearing mines in these areas will be called into question. So they would rather stay silent about such accidents.”

Like Saeed’s brother Vahid, Feryal Azari was upset that Saeed was not getting any help from the government. “The only favor that they granted this child was that if he were to be hospitalized, they would forego charging the 10 percent government franchise fee,” she says. “But the hospital did not agree to hospitalize him and our pleading for discount in treatment expenses got us nowhere. They said that the hospital was crowded and hospitalizing Saeed would increase the risk of infection in the hospital. But perhaps no other patient in the hospital needed emergency treatment as much as Saeed did. Unfortunately bureaucracy, insurance problems, stupid laws and problems that defy logic have hurt this child badly.”

Iran Without Landmines volunteers are trying to teach Saeed’s family to create a hospitable-like environment for him in the tent, and during their migration, as much as possible. They have to pay attention to every minor detail, and there is a lot to remember, like to administer his eye drops.

 

The Second Most Landmine-Infested Country in the World

Iran is the second most landmine-infested country in the world. Many areas that the government claims have been cleared are still strewn with mines — and victims like Saeed are proof of this. Many of the victims are children, kids  from poor families living in border areas, who come upon the mines while out playing in the wilderness. Five years ago, seven children in the village of Neshkash in Marivan county in the province of Kurdistan were badly injured while playing football all.

Vahid says someone should explain why landmines are still claiming victims in an area that was supposed to have been cleared. “What was Saeed guilty of except playing?” he asks. 

Volunteers who clear landmines say that six million hectares of land in Iran are still infested with landmines, and around 20 million anti-personnel mines are hidden in these areas. And Iran has yet to join the 1997 Ottawa Treaty —  the convention on the “prohibition of the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel mines and on their destruction.” According to this treaty, governments are required to clear all anti-personnel mines in the land under their jurisdiction within 10 years after the cessation of hostilities.

According to official sources, around 42 percent of the victims of landmines remaining from the Iran-Iraq war are children.

That war ended more than 30 years ago. But given the presence of so many landmines in Iran, in some ways the war has never really ended.