No politics in tragedy

The stampede that caused the death of 769 and the injury of over 900 pilgrims performing the final rituals of Hajj is a tragedy, no doubt, but no country should use the disaster for political ends.

The government of Saudi Arabia pledged to investigate the causes of the stampede and deal with them, yet Iranian officials, levelling particularly vocal criticism, seem bent on making a political issue of the tragedy, before the results of the promised probe are out.

Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called for a thorough investigation into the tragedy — certainly understandable when so many people lost their lives and among them 144 were Iranians — but also called for an apology from Riyadh as if Saudi Arabia had caused the death of so many people on purpose.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani echoed the sentiment, using an address to the United Nations Saturday to call for an investigation.

Obviously there were omissions and lapses in the way the flow of millions of pilgrims was conducted, and they need to be identified and properly addressed.

Yet in all fairness, the government of Saudi Arabia has done a great deal to improve the infrastructure at the sites where Muslims conduct their Hajj.

The results of the investigation will take a while, but preliminary information points to pilgrims themselves, as having failed to observe the rules set by the security personnel.

Pilgrims blamed the stampede on police road closures and poor crowd management, during searing temperatures.

Whatever the case, “we will reveal the facts when they emerge. And we will not hold anything back. If mistakes were made, whoever made them will be held accountable,” Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir said, adding that the Iranians “should know better than to play politics with a tragedy that has befallen people who were performing their most sacred religious duty”.

There are many lessons to be learnt from the tragedy that befell so many pilgrims performing Hajj, but there is no reason to doubt that Saudi Arabia will work both to discover the reasons for it and to prevent such a thing in the future.