The photo of the dead 3-year-old Syrian boy on a Turkish beach is haunting.
It captures
everything we don't want to see when we tap our phones or open our
newspapers: a vicious civil war, a surge of refugees, the death of an
innocent.
The image of little
Aylan Kurdi is hammering home the Syrian migrant crisis to the world,
largely through social media. Aylan died along with his 5-year-old
brother and their mother when their small rubber boat capsized as it
headed for Greece. The Associated Press distributed the photos to its
subscribers. The photos were from the Turkish news agency DHA.
"It
is a very painful picture to view," said Peter Bouckaert, who as
director of emergencies at Human Rights Watch has witnessed his fair
share of painful scenes. "It had me in tears when it first showed up on
my mobile phone. I had to think hard whether to share this."
But
share, he did. Bouckaert, who is in Hungary watching the crisis unfold,
said people need to be pushed to look at the "ghastly spectacle" so
they can, in turn, prod governments to help the suffering Syrian people.
Still,
will the disturbing image galvanize people into action? Will it be like
other seared-in-our-memory photographs — a vulture hovering over
starving child in Sudan, a girl fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam, the
child in a firefighter's arms after the Oklahoma City bombing?
Or will it become just another of the many images on social media, lost amid the din?
"One
of the things about this story is that it's really difficult sometimes
for the world to get a handle on it," said Al Tompkins, a senior faculty
member at the Poynter Institute, a center for media studies in St.
Petersburg, Florida. "Regardless of the technology, a singular iconic
image can still touch us in ways."
And that singular image is often of a child. That was the cold fact that unsettled people around the globe.
Kathleen Fetters-Iossi, a
47-year-old fiction writer from Wisconsin, said she hopes people share
the images to create awareness, then go beyond that to try to help in
some way. But she has her doubts any concrete action will come of it.
"Most
Americans, if they're just now becoming aware of this issue, will
ultimately feel there's nothing we can do," she said. "They feel like we
can't handle our own immigration problem, let alone Europe's. Social
media can help by creating wider awareness, but ultimately,
'clicktivism' didn't help the Nigerian girls, and it's not going to help
those migrants."
In Greece, Alicia Stallings, a mother of two, said she won't link to the photo. It's too close to home.
"I
watch my kids swim and play in the Aegean and am sometimes struck by
horror when I think this is the same water in which children just like
them are drowning every day," she wrote in an email.
(While Turkish authorities gave the boy's first name as Aylan, an aunt in Canada gave a different transliteration: Alan.)
The
photo of the body washed up on the sand was splashed on the front of
all major newspapers in Brazil, a nation with more homicides than any
other, according to the United Nations. Still, the picture ignited
despair and indignation.
Ary
Cordovil, a 35-year-old barber, lives near one of Rio de Janeiro's
slums, where a drug gang war has meant nobody leaves home after dark and
schools have been shut for weeks.
"I'm
used to violence. Brazil is used to seeing violence. But this — this is
just painful," he said, staring hard at the image in a newspaper. "He's
just a baby trying to flee a war. The absurdity of this is extreme even
for us."
While the image of
the body on the sand was on many international websites, many U.S. sites
ran a photo of a Turkish police officer carrying the limp boy in his
arms. The boy's face is obscured.
Mike
Wilson, editor of The Dallas Morning News, decided to run the tamer
photo. He received an email from a reader who said the picture was
"gory."
"I wrote back and told her that I appreciated her
sensitivity," he said. "We chose it specifically because it wasn't gory.
It's just a forlorn, heartbreaking image that tells the reality of
what's happening."___
Associated Press reporters Brad Brooks in Rio de Janeiro and Almudena Calatrava in Buenos Aires contributed to this report.
___
Follow Tamara Lush on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tamaralush