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Through My Eyes

Through My Eyes

Author: Kasia Yoko
Date: 2014-07-25
It started off as a quiet Sunday morning. My son and his friend came to join me for a late breakfast; talking about the night of fun they had enjoyed the previous evening. Discussing surf checks for later. Softly in the background the RT News Channel was doing its thing.

A Ukraine news item caught my eye and I decided to watch it for a moment. As the images of people fleeing for the borders emerged I told my son that this was how my parents together with my brother and I were running away thirty-three years ago from Poland.

Except in my case, we were queuing at the borders in the dead of the night, the army tanks lining the roads preparing for the unknown. There were no killings yet! The only danger was that we would be found out. Instead of going to Rome to visit the Pope we were heading to one of the biggest refugee camps in Europe, Traiskirchen near Vienna.

As I was relating the story I looked again and my fifty-inch television screen was suddenly filled with the most obscene images of blown up bodies. They were fully    exposed; there were no blurring lenses, hiding the macabre spectacle of the carnage. It was raw and bloody and horrific.

The boys start screaming , yelling at me to switch it off. ?Please mom, please switch this off,? my son yelled. By this time I was sobbing uncontrollably, it?s the first time in my life I have seen something so cadaverous and the shock was excruciatingly unembellished and instantaneous.

The documentary about Ukraine showed the aftermath of a street hit by rocket  fire. The street was lined with dead bodies, distorted, crushed, broken and hard to recognise, pools of blood featured at each site. It was horrendous. Really.

Shocked, the boys declined any more breakfast. My son looked at me with horror in his eyes and said, ? And people here complain about the ANC?

At that point I started asking myself why would RT News Channel be so insensitive as to show this massacre? Why did they not block those scenes like other news channels?

Its sad to say, but I truly believe that the   West is shaping the Ukraine conflict and the international media is having a fields day with it. The West believes its views must be adhered to, or else, but is perfectly happy to meddle in others such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya etc. For its own agenda.

Its sad to say but it seems like we are back to the Cold War.

Sunday night I failed to fall asleep. Those images of dead bodies appeared before me every time I closed my eyes. So I decided to do some work. At 2am I heard my son struggling with nightmares. I went to his room, he was awake. When I asked what was wrong, he told me he was hearing terrible sounds.

I stayed with him for a while, listening to his breathing, feeling immense sadness for mothers in conflict zones. Not just the mothers in Ukraine, but mothers in Palestine, Syria, Afghanistan and even mothers in KZN.

How helpless we all are in  the face of conflict?