Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The death of Shamima Begum’s baby is a tragedy – but not Sajid Javid’s fault

It would take a heart of stone – and occasionally I possess just such an organ – not to feel sympathy for Shamima Begum after she lost a third baby, her son Jarrah, barely three weeks old, in a Syrian refugee camp. But should we feel guilt as well as compassion for leaving the child – all unbeknown to him, a British citizen and possibly Dutch too – to fester in the camp occupied by IS refugees? More precisely, how responsible should the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, feel, having deprived Miss Begum of her British citizenship? The BBC news all day long has linked him to the death: criticism of Javid as child dies. That’s its line. Diane Abbott has been keen to draw a link. She tweeted that ‘an innocent child has died as a result of a British woman being stripped of her citizenship. This is callous and inhumane.’ Later she declared that the Home Secretary had ‘behaved shamefully’, going as far as she can to assign moral culpability to him. The aid agencies like Save the Children have called on Britain to take responsibility for its citizens.
 

 
The situation in which Miss Begum finds herself is, of course, as a result of the elimination of IS forces from the last rump of its caliphate, a far bigger story, and the culmination of the entire tragedy that began when IS took Mosul in 2014. It is the happy ending of one miserable chapter of history, that of the IS caliphate: there are hundreds of thousands of casualties of that struggle and it suggests a curious loss of perspective for Britain to focus obsessively on one of them. There are still hundreds, reportedly thousands, of Yazidi sex slaves, for instance, in the possession of IS and they, unlike Miss Begum, did not sign up as volunteers for the caliphate.



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