Aylan’s Destination Heaven! Poem by sisirachandra vaduge

The first disturbing photo shows a small boy. He is wearing a red T-shirt and long shorts that stop below the knee. His shirt is hiked above his waist, exposing his midriff. He is wearing black sneakers with no socks. And he is dead, face down in the rocky surf.
Surviving family members of Aylan Kurdi have revealed how the Syrian three-year-old came to be washed up dead on a beach in Turkey.
Aylan's distraught father, Abdullah Kurdi, tried and failed to hold on to his wife and two sons after their boat to the Greek island of Kos capsized. He has reportedly now said his only wish is to return their bodies to their home town of Kobani and then “be buried alongside them”.

The family had been making the treacherous journey across Turkey to Europe in the hope of joining Abdullah’s sister, Teema Kurdi, a hairdresser who has lived in Vancouver, Canada for more than 20 years.
A young Syrian boy, who drowned in his family’s attempt to reach Greece from Turkey, lies in the surf near Bodrum, TurkeyIt started as a sudden, stunned hush. Once a few seemingly eternal seconds had shifted us into the realm of prolonged silence – with a few heads shaking with empathic resignation – it was abundantly clear that this was a huge moment. The handful of journalists in the Guardian’s lunchtime news conference last Wednesday were reacting to seeing the shocking pictures that were about to become a symbol for an outpouring of condemnation. While most of this criticism was directed at EU and individual government inaction over the migration crisis, a fair amount was aimed at media organisations new and old for publishing the photos.So intense was the social media debate on the use of the images, the profoundly upsetting tragedy of the Kurdi family – in which three-year-old Aylan, the Syrian boy in the pictures, his five-year-old brother, Galip, and their mother, Rehan, all drowned – appeared in danger of being lost. Within hours the image had gone viral and become the top-trending picture on Twitter with the hashtag #KiyiyaVuranInsanlik (humanity washed ashore)
The debate focused on the justification of confronting readers with stark images of an innocent victim of the intensifying refugee crisis. I was not alone in feeling a deep sense of unease about the sight of a three-year-old victim of a war in the Middle East being washed up on the outskirts of Europe. It felt like the moment a crisis defined by abstract debates over ideology, statistics and terminology suddenly shifted to one about people.
Anger and revulsion at what the images told of humanity was not a visceral sensation exclusive to parents of vulnerable three-year-old boys. The Guardian received emails from at least a dozen readers, many of whom felt the decision to publish the “disturbing” pictures unpixellated – and alongside, rather than behind, a warning online – was a step too far. Many more readers on social media were supportive. Shortly after the pictures dropped on the news wires at 11.30am, discussions between the editor in chief, Katharine Viner, the deputy editor, Paul Johnson, and the web editors began. The stark human tragedy, pathos and sense of heartbreak were weighed up against potential privacy issues and the risk of repelling the reader with indecent bluntness. The Guardian’s editorial code is clear in such cases involving photographs and children that a “strong public interest justification” is necessary.
The outcome was that the pictures were published on the website early in the afternoon. “We didn’t rush to publish, ” explains Johnson. “We verified the photographs and waited for a full story before publication. The enormous poignancy and potential power of the photographs was evident from the start. Could they be the images that provided a tipping point? Would public sympathy, and perhaps anger at Britain’s role as an apparent bystander in this saga, be moved by them? We decided that both of these were highly likely. Those factors had to be balanced again the real shock that some readers would feel.”


A Turkish paramilitary police officer holds Aylan Kurdi’s body. Photograph: AP
The web story featured as its main image the picture of a solemn Turkish policeman gently carrying away Aylan’s body, while the arguably more vividly distressing picture of his lifeless body face down on the sand was used as a secondary image embedded beneath the warning to readers. As for the paper, the decision was made to run the striking image of human compassion – the policeman cradling Aylan – was run on the front page and the second image much smaller on an inside page.
Viner says: “It was very important to us that we placed Aylan’s death in context, with some serious reporting about what happened to him and the broader picture of current political and social attitudes towards refugees across Europe, particularly in Britain and Germany. I still think it was right to use the pictures, but I might be wrong about that, and I’m aware that good intentions and serious intent are not always enough.”
Johnson adds: “Importantly, we put a warning on the top of the web file and contextualised the photographs with the story from David Cameron saying the UK could not accommodate people fleeing from war zones. Some Guardian readers of both web and paper were upset – but the vast majority were supportive. This was not a moment for self-censoring.”
News photographs, when used in the context of reporting, can become tipping points in changing attitudes and awareness
Context is, of course, integral to news presentation. The Guardian’s coverage was scrupulously devoid of sensationalism. The images came on a day when David Cameron had refused to accept the case that Britain should take in more Syrian refugees. His words only intensified the feeling, in Britain and elsewhere, that there was a strong whiff of denial about the scale and urgency of an unfolding humanitarian disaster, especially on the back of months of pushing by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, for a system of mandatory quotas in the EU.
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This explains the juxtaposition of the picture in the paper, with the headline “The shocking, cruel reality of Europe’s refugee crisis”, alongside the Cameron story.
In the 15 years I’ve spent in and around the backbench on two national newspapers, I’ve seen many brutally arresting images – unusually potent yet often compelling symbols of searing grief, fatalities and unadorned tragedy. All have been under consideration to run. Many have been judged to be simply too intrusive, too gratuitously violent or indecently offensive.
Roger Tooth, the Guardian’s head of pictures, who revealed the Aylan images to us in the hushed conference room, wrote last year about the perennial quandary he faces when confronted with particularly harrowing images, often those involving dead children. He was reacting to a “bitter, bloody and deadly news week” involving the downing of Malaysian Airlines MH17 in Ukraine and an Israeli assault on Gaza.
Thankfully, it is only on rare occasions that our coverage requires a questionable image to be run in order to truly reflect the gravity and scale of the story. The heartbreaking pictures of little Aylan were one such case.

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The impact – particularly in Britain and the US – was stark. On Thursday, charities and NGOs told of a massive surge in donations attributed to the shocking images.
In Friday’s edition of the Guardian the front-page splash incorporated the anguished words ofAylan’s grieving father, accompanying a picture of the young boys together. Like the day before, adjacent to the compelling story of human tragedy – in the “column 5” slot on the front page – we ran the diplomatic developments. And there had been developments, of course, as the headline “PM bows to pressure to admit more refugees” made clear.
Although the details of this particular story are unique, the need for forensic consideration and the delicate treatment of profoundly distressing stories is not, of course, anything novel. Members of the Guardian’s corrections and clarifications team have been replying to concerned readers in an attempt to explain the nuances of the case.
In their replies they have drawn on a thoughtful response from Leslie Plommer, a former corrections editor at the Guardian, to criticism of a previous use of pictures that many found distressing, in which she brought a historical perspective to the issue.
With reference to the question of public interest, she wrote: “The picture I often refer back to, in my mind’s eye, is that of the little girl, Kim Phuc, running naked and screaming, down that road in Vietnam in 1972, against a backdrop of smoke from a napalm attack by America’s ally, the South Vietnamese air force. Given the heightened concerns of today about photographs of children, particularly unclothed children, could we publish such a photo today? Yet that picture brought home in a massive way to the US domestic audience the human effects of the Vietnam war.”

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The same could be said today. News photographs or footage, when used in the context of reporting, can galvanise public opinion and become tipping points in changing attitudes and awareness – and political responses to events such as conflicts and famine.
One such example was the compellingly tragic image of an unknown refugee who hanged herself in the cornfields of Tuzla after the fall of Srebrenica in 1995. The Guardian, along with many other newspapers around the world, published it on the front page. The impact was profound; the image of the woman, later named as Ferida Osmanovic, became symbolic of the unknown victim of the Balkan wars.Within months, a Nato bombing campaign had brought the Serbs to the negotiating table and the three-year Bosnian war was at an end.
Another similarly graphic image from the 1990s that lives long in the memory is the notorious picture by Kenneth Jarecke of the grotesquely charred Iraq soldier torched in his car in the first Gulf war. This was published in the Observer and the Guardian at the time.
It is too early to evaluate what long-term impact the pictures of Aylan Kurdi will have on the strength and unity of the world’s

approach to Europe’s biggest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War.
While the political machinations are being played out, people continue to die trying to escape the war zone in Syria, from where an estimated 4 million people have fled in the past four years of conflict.
However, one thing is clear: the next time such potentially history-changing and consciousness-shifting images crop up, although some readers might not agree with the outcome, the Guardian’s editors will try to reach a decision on whether to publish or not by judiciously considering all the above factors against the background of our acute journalistic imperative to reveal the true story in a humane, dignified and unprejudiced manner.