by Celia Duff, deputy regional director of public health
BMJ The general medical journal website

This time the gerbera daisies will evoke memories for me. Last time it was poppies—deep blood red poppies. Back then, in May 1999, the poppies lit the Macedonian fields outside the refugee camps—camps full of Kosovar Albanians fleeing ethnic cleansing. A splash of colour, incongruous amidst the misery of people who had lost everything. The daisies—pastel shades, covered in dust, struggling to survive without water—symbolise for me that there is hope amidst neglect.

I found them in a corner of the palace garden. The palace is magnificent: huge, high ceilinged rooms, miles of corridor, marble floors, and surrounded by a high wall and protected by acres of landscape that deny the outside. Opulence and gross extravagance on a scale you could not imagine, reflecting great wealth and self importance. Strange that the man for whom the palace was built liked the same flowers as I do.

I am in Iraq, seconded to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Three of us from the Department of Health are here in Basra. We work in the southern office of the Coalition Protection Authority, which covers an area the size of Scotland. We are the regional government working within a multinational effort alongside Iraqi technocrats to regenerate a country. The politics of the conflict are not my concern. I see only a country systematically starved of resources, whose people were punished through purposeful withdrawal of the basic necessities for life, a people subjugated by fear and corruption. This is how they were repressed.