Bulletin

Issue: January/February 2007

News

Helping Kurds to help themselves

La Trobe University lecturer Wes Pryor, left, encountered first hand some of the grim legacies of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime during a recent consultancy to advise Kurdish authorities on prosthetic and orthotic rehabilitation training.

In two Iraqi orthopaedic clinics less than 200 kilometres apart - one in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj, the other in Halabja on the Kurdish-Iranian border - he found a procession of up to 200 people a month seeking emergency treatment for injured or amputated limbs.

Between 80 and 90 per cent of them were victims of Iraqi land mines placed behind Kurds as they fled their border villages for Iran and Turkey during the 1988 Iran-Iraq War - in the knowledge that as the war ended the Kurds would attempt to come home again. They did, and they paid the price.

If that wasn’t enough (the villagers of Halabja also took the brunt of the late dictator’s vengeful gassing of Kurds), people were losing limbs to diabetes, gunshot, and traffic accidents as well.