The Iraqi parliament has proposed banning online multiplayer video games, amid fears they are corrupting young people and getting them hooked on violent fantasies, the Telegraph reported on Sunday.
Iraq’s cultural parliamentary committee submitted a draft law over
the weekend seeking to ban the games, singling out the multiplayer deathmatch
game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG).
Islamic clerics have also raised concerns about young people
becoming absorbed in scenes of glorified violence, considering their country's
own long history of war, destruction and bloodshed.
“The committee is concerned about the obsession over these
electronic games that ignite violence among children and youth. Its influence
has spread rapidly among Iraq’s society,” committee head Sameaa Gullab said at
a press conference in Baghdad.
The draft law, awaiting revision by parliament’s Speaker,
follows reports in the Iraqi media about young people spending vast stretches
of time playing the so-called "battle royale" games. There were
also reports of a wave of divorces and suicides being linked to the games and
their hold on young people.
Last Thursday, high-profile Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr wrote
on Twitter, the social media website : “It saddens me to see our youth are
brainwashed by PUBG. Iraq’s society is deteriorating as its youth are occupied
by the fighting in PUBG’s battlefields.”
Iraqi society has for 16 years been straining
under immense pressures, including invasion, nearly endless war, and the
destruction and on-going reconstruction of much of the Iraqi state.
The country has what demographers call a ‘youth bulge’, with
young people accounting for around 60 percent of the country’s 60 million
people.
Their future is daunting, to say the least, with long-standing
security challenges, frothing sectarian tension, unemployment well above 20
percent, and a government dogged by corruption allegations. For some of Iraq’s
young people, video games offer an escape from all of this, along with the
added bonus of keeping players off the streets and out of trouble.
Baghdad PUBG player Hassan Ahmed Ali, 21, told one Gulf
newspaper reporting on the issue that if Iraq’s parliament wants to ban
the game, it ought to consider a substitute for Iraqi youth to "keep us
occupied".