Some photographs become iconic images. Incontrovertible evidence of crime, sworn witnesses to tragedy. In the early days of the US-Israel onslaught on Iran, one such image has already transfixed itself on the global mind. This photograph shows over a 100 graves being dug in the southern Iranian town of Minab, small graves placed in neat, orderly rows—appropriately so. For the bodies they are waiting to receive are also of small schoolgirls, used to dressing neatly for school and sitting in orderly rows.
Israel has denied responsibility in the attack on a functioning primary school that killed over 165 school girls aged between seven and 12. The US says the matter is under investigation; early verifications including one by The New York Times point to a strike by a US precision tomahawk missile on the school compound which was adjacent to an IRGC facility. President Donald Trump has blithely stated, between rounds of golf, that the strike was “done by Iran, because they’re very inaccurate with their munitions, they have no accuracy whatsoever”. Given the callous cynicism that characterises today’s ‘politics of gangster imperialism’ (a description I borrow from a brilliant essay in the London Review of Books), it is amazing that no one has claimed that Iran had hidden a nuclear facility under the school.
But prevarication, dissembling or glib whataboutery—the default resort of the morally lackadaisical—will not work. When the din of battle falls silent, posterity will wipe the dust off the face of truth. This photograph will be recalled whenever there is talk of wanton killing, of flagrant violation of the laws of war, of the waywardness of precision munitions. It will scream the murder of innocence. No amount of power, hubris, wealth or arrogance will be able to withstand its indictment. Quite simply, this bloodstain will not wash.
The past is witness to the power of such photographs. Recall the 1972 photograph of the Napalm Girl taken by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut. The photo shows Kim Phuc, a nine-year old Vietnamese girl covered with napalm which had been dropped on a civilian village, her clothes torn off, running naked, screaming in pain, arms widespread against the background of a burning village. Front-paged in American newspapers, this photo, to quote the critic Susan Sontag “probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities”. It won the photographer the Pulitzer and, not withstanding some later controversy, became a powerful anti-war symbol.
Or the haunting Migrant Mother, the 1936 photo by Dorothea Lange which shows a woman with her half comatose children during the Great Depression, her lined forehead and pained eyes capturing a range of human emotions from exhaustion to resilience. Or The Afghan Girl, the Steve McCurry photo of Sharbat Gula, whose fear-filled yet determined green eyes staring out of the cover of National Geographic brought home the desperation of Afghan refugees and became a symbol of the injustice that hapless innocents undergo during conflict.
I don’t know what happened to the Migrant Mother. But the Napalm Girl, Kim Phuc, underwent years of medical treatment, got married and had two children. She established a foundation for children in conflict and served as a UNESCO goodwill ambassador. Sharbat Gula, identified years later, faced some social and political censure in conservative circles because of that photo but finally found safe haven in Italy after the Taliban takeover of Kabul.
But Minab’s 165 schoolgirls have no prospect of any future. Their lives were snuffed out by men who were ostensibly bombing Iran to ensure that girls would not have to wear the hijab.
The author was India’s high commissioner to the UK and ambassador to the United States.