Poem on Bosnian boy and the helpless Kashmiri girl by Senator A. Rehman Malik

The Martyrs Memorial Cemetery Kovači for victims of the war in Stari Grad.

I recently attended a Commemoration Seminar as chief guest in the memory of Bosnian massacre of Muslims that took place during 1995.

It was a pleasant surprise to see Mr. Amir Ghouri in the event who was also invited to speak on the matter as a senior journalist. The other speakers also spoke one by one about the historic aspects of the happening by remembering July as the month of the Srebrenica massacre, which occurred in 1995, in which more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia. This was the killing of innocent Muslims who just wanted the right to live in their own home towns which belonged to Bosnian Muslim.

It was very impressive to see Mr. Amir Ghouri starting his speech with a heart moving poem which he wrote when he happened to see a photograph of young Bosnian Muslim boy leaving his native home while waving a last goodbye to his father. The picture captured the emotions of young boy and war affected father who wanted his son to go away and save his life.

This picture was released during the active war days when the Muslim community was besieged just like the community of our innocent Kashmiris in the hands of Indian Army which is even worse than Serbs.

Amir being a poet rightly pointed out that he felt as if the boy in the photo was like his own son who was of the same age. He wrote this poem with full of fatherly emotions imagining as if it was happening to him.

I would like my readers to see the depth of emotions and live suffering of fears of war in this poem. I should say this poem is a visual display of miseries and agonies of this unwarranted war.

Jet black tires strain to in an effort to roll

In an effort to leave the haunted.

Towards safety? Who knows

As metal eagles to dives to deliver death

And tanks trespass into tattered tranquillity

Bullets, bangs, blasts the earth spits blood

Everything shattered, windowpanes, dreams

Perplexing peace proposals and paralysed population

Convoys of hope snake through corpses

Death within and death without

Blizzard of barbarism fails to shake the human conscience

Cause they prefer to sleep in soothing silence

Or discuss devastation over a cup of coffee

In cosy drawing rooms

The agenda changes with clinking laughter

From farm trade to failing economies

From AIDS to life on Jupiter

And in Bosnia

Snow falls to cover, camouflage

Brutalities, butchering, bruised burnt bodies

Humans running from their breed to find a safe haven

On an unsafe planet

And he waves his little hand to his father left alone

In a city wrapped in fear

To fight till his loved ones succeed in escaping

To future, to uncertainty

–Aamir S. Ghauri

Amir Ghouri is known to me back from the days of my exile and SMBB had great respect for him for his qualitative and professional journalism.

It was first time that I came to know through that seminar that there is a great hidden poet in him. He took a daring step to go to Bosnia in the middle of the war which was the native town of the child in the photograph.

While I was listening to his poem I started to think about the countless number of small boys and girls whose fathers are killed mercilessly in front of these innocent souls in held Kashmir by Indian troops. The only thing these poor children can do is to wave at the passing dead bodies of their fathers towards the graves where there is no chance of coming back unlike the Bosnian boy who waved the last to his living father while wishing to see his father again.

The boy in the poem might have come back to his native home see his father but Kashmiris innocent children in many cases cannot even identify the graves of their fathers who are buried in mass graves by Indian Army.

I urge upon Mr Amir Ghouri to write another poem and portray the mass killing / pelleting of children and the expressions of the blind children who are the victims of Indian army in Kashmir.

Once this poem is written I would love to see both of the poems to be hanging on the walls of UNO and every office of human rights.

I expect the government of Bosnia to grant the highest award to our young poet who risked his life for reporting from the warzone as these were the historical moments captured in the form of this poem.

In the end I would like to give a wakeup call to UN and International communities to work together in order to block such brutalities as we need to give message of peace and to ensure that the hopes of children should not die. The innocent children should inspire from the leadership and not get scared from them and their actions. I hope PM Modi will give up his pelting on the innocent Kashmiris and will save them rather than killing them. The children either from Bosnia or Kashmir are in fact the gifts of God and we must protect them.

Thanks Amir for such an inspiring poem to wake up the sleeping international community and UN to protect the new generation.

The article was published in "The Nation" on August 5th, 2019 and the link to the original  Poem on Bosnian boy and the helpless Kashmiri girl by Senator A. Rehman Malik