Quotes of the Day
Ever since Oct. 19, the day when Margaret Hassan, CARE International's Iraq country director, was taken hostage, I have been remembering moments of working with her. During the early days of the war we would occasionally see each other in Baghdad, almost always for work — we were all busy dealing with the countless emergencies that war produces. As the fighting advanced, every day we counted the dead and wounded: soldiers, civilians, rebels, women, children. The daily bulletin was catastrophic, as Margaret had predicted it would be.
Every day she faced down a different problem, healed one more wound. Now she is gone; Dante's Hell is here on earth. It's not how I expected it to end. Of all of us in Baghdad's international aid community, she was the most Iraqi, which is why her murder at the hands of insurgents in Iraq cuts so deep. So many Iraqis lived inside her, thanks to her 25 years of service to the country. You could see them in her eyes. She was part of the world she served, and the rest of us admired her deeply. She knew, as few do, how to analyze the Iraq question with clarity and care.
When I first met her, in Baghdad in 1998, she was a forceful critic of the U.N. sanctions regime that took so many Iraqi lives, and she never lost her commitment to the people. Dearest Margaret, you will continue to live inside each one of us, those of us who knew you and the tens of thousands you touched through your work. We will all miss you.
The first time I met Margaret Hassan I was puzzled. It was in an Iraqi government office in 1998. Here was a petite Irishwoman with an English accent speaking fluent Arabic in one of the world's most dangerous pariah states. The U.N. sanctions that had wedged the Iraqis between an evil regime and an uncaring world had been in place for eight years. She fixed her strong brown eyes at me and gave me the facts: children were dying by the thousands; Iraq was ceasing to exist as a unified nation-state; the people were experiencing an African-scale catastrophe of malnutrition. She knew the situation on the ground and cared passionately about the suffering around her. She looked younger than her 53 years.
In 2003 as American bombs fell around Baghdad she again warned me of the catastrophe that was on our doorstep. She was visibly distressed and looked tired. The lines under her eyes were deeper but her anger at the condition of the Iraqis was undiminished. After the war, while all around crumbled, she worked tirelessly to provide water, shelter and medical aid for the poor.
The unspeakable hostage videos taken by Margaret's murderers are not the images we'll remember. Her family, her colleagues, the foreign correspondents who cherished her advice and the Iraqis who benefitted from her work will never forget all the good she did.
At a time when the murder of innocents in Iraq seems to have lost the power to shock, Margaret Hassan's killing has left me — like millions of my countrymen — deeply traumatized.
I first met her in 1978, when she was teaching English at the British Council in Baghdad: I was one of her more difficult students. (I've never been able to shake the habit of calling her "Mrs. Hassan.") At 20, I was a little old to be learning a new language, and I had a hard time with the alphabet and numerals.
In particular, I could never quite get the hang of writing '5' and the capital 'I'. Most teachers would have given up on me, but Mrs. Hassan never did. She wrote '5' and 'I' on my notebook, over and over again, gently encouraging me to look closely and follow her example. Her warmth, her kindness, and above all, her patience helped me eventually learn the language — at least to an extent that allows me today to work as a translator. In a sense, I owe Mrs. Hassan my livelihood.
Years later, when I heard she had joined CARE, I remember thinking it was a job perfectly tailored to her best qualities — empathy, generosity, patience. And sure enough, despite the horror and desperation she witnessed, she never lost her calm, much less her compassion.
Murder is always senseless, but Mrs. Hassan's killing more than most. She never did anything but good for Iraq and Iraqis. Wherever she was born, to my mind she was an Iraqi, one of my people. She was one of the finest of my people. 
- Three writers share their thoughts on the death of a hostage