Rene — Fisk — Secret slaughter by night, lies and blind eyes by day
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Secret slaughter by night, lies and blind eyes by day
In the suburbs of Baghdad and the Sunni cities to the north the
American military policy of ‘recon-by-fire’ and the breakdown of law
and order is exacting a heavy toll on a war-torn people.
Robert Fisk
14 September 2003: (The Independent. UK)
In the Pentagon, they’ve been re-showing Gillo Pontecorvo’s terrifying
1965 film of the French war in Algeria. The Battle of Algiers, in black
and white, showed what happened to both the guerrillas of the FLN and
the French army when their war turned dirty. Torture, assassination,
booby-trap bombs, secret executions. As the New York Times revealed,
the fliers sent out to the Pentagon brass to watch this magnificent,
painful film began with the words: “How to win a battle against
terrorism and lose the war of ideas…” But the Americans didn’t need
to watch The Battle of Algiers.
They’ve already committed many of the French mistakes in Iraq, and the
guerrillas of Iraq are well into the blood tide of the old FLN. Sixteen
demonstrators killed in Fallujah? Forget it. Twelve gunned down by the
Americans in Mosul? Old news. Ten Iraqi policemen shot by US troops
outside Fallujah? “No information,” the occupation authorities told us
last week. No information? The Jordanian embassy bombing? The bombing
of the UN headquarters? Or Najaf with its 126 dead? Forget it. Things
are improving in Iraq. There’s been 24-hour electricity for three days
now and – until two US
soldiers were killed on Friday – there had been five days without an
American death.
That’s how the French used to report the news from Algeria. What you
don’t know doesn’t worry you. Which is why, in Iraq, there are
thousands of incidents of violence that never get reported; attacks on
Americans that cost civilian lives are not even recorded by the
occupation authority press officers unless they involve loss of life
among “coalition forces”. Go to
the mortuaries of Iraq’s cities and it’s clear that a slaughter occurs
each night. Occupation powers insist that journalists obtain clearance
to visit hospitals – it can take a week to get the right papers, if at
all, so goodbye to statistics – but the figures coming from senior
doctors tell their own story.
In Baghdad, up to 70 corpses – of Iraqis killed by gunfire – are
brought to the mortuaries each day. In Najaf, for example, the cemetery
authorities record the arrival of the bodies of up to 20 victims of
violence a day. Some of the dead were killed in family feuds, in
looting, or revenge killings. Others have been gunned down by US troops
at checkpoints or in the
increasingly vicious “raids” carried out by American forces in the
suburbs of Baghdad and the Sunni cities to the north. Only last week,
reporters covering the killing of the Fallujah policemen were
astonished to see badly wounded children suddenly arriving at the
hospital, all shot – according to their families – by an American tank
which had opened up at a palm grove outside the town. As usual, the
occupation authorities had “no information” on the incident.
But if you count the Najaf dead as typical of just two or three other
major cities, and if you add on the daily Baghdad death toll and
multiply by seven, almost 1,000 Iraqi civilians are being killed every
week – and that may well be a conservative figure. Somewhere in the
cavernous marble halls of proconsul Paul Bremer’s palace on the Tigris,
someone must be calculating these awful statistics. But of course, the
Americans are not telling us.
It’s like listening to Iraq’s American-run radio station. Death –
unless it’s on a spectacular scale like the Jordanian or UN or Najaf
bombings – simply doesn’t get on the air. Even the killing of American
troops isn’t reported for 24 hours. Driving the highways of Iraq, I’ve
been reduced to listening to the only radio station with up-to-date
news on the guerrilla war in Iraq: Iran’s “Alam Radio”, broadcasting in
Arabic from Tehran.
It’s as if the denizens of Mr Bremer’s chandeliered chambers do not
regard Iraq as a real country, a place of tragedy and despair
whose “liberated” people increasingly blame their “liberators” for
their misery. Even when US troops on a raid in Mansour six weeks ago
ran amok and gunned down up to eight civilians – including a 14-year-
old boy – the best the Americans could do was to say that they
were “enquiring” into the incident. Not, as one US colonel quickly
pointed out to us, that this meant a formal enquiry. Just a few
questions here and there. And of course the killings were soon
forgotten.
What is happening inside the US occupation army is almost as much a
mystery as the nightly cull of civilians. My old friend Tom Friedman,
in a break from his role as messianic commentator for the New York
Times, put his finger on the problem when – arranging a meeting with an
occupation official — he reported asking an American soldier at a
bridge checkpoint for his location. “The enemy side of the bridge,”
came the reply.
Enemy. That’s how the French came to see every native Algerian. Talk to
the soldiers in the streets here in Baghdad and they use obscene
language – in between heartfelt demands to “go home” – about the people
they were supposedly rescuing from Saddam Hussein. A Polish journalist
in Karbala saw just how easily human contact can break down. “The
American guards are greeting passers-by with a loud ‘Salaam aleikum’
[peace be with you]. Some young Iraqi boys with a donkey and cart say
something in Arabic and suddenly, together, they run their fingers
across their throats.
“‘Motherfucker!” shout the Marines, before their translator explains to
them that the boys are just expressing their happiness at the death of
Saddam Hussein’s sons …” Though light years from the atrocities of
Saddam’s security forces, the US military here is turning out to be as
badly disciplined and brutal as the Israeli army in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip. Its “recon-by-fire”, its lethal raids into civilian homes,
its shooting of demonstrators and children during fire-fights, its
destruction of houses, its imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis without
trial or contact with their families, its refusal to investigate
killings, its harassment – and killing – of journalists, its constant
refrain that it has “no information” about bloody incidents which it
must know all too much about, are sounding like an echo-chamber of the
Israeli army.
Worse still, their intelligence information is still as warped by
ideology as was the illegal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Having
failed to receive the welcome deserved of “liberators”, the Americans
have to convince themselves that their tormentors – save for the famous
Saddam “remnants” – cannot be Iraqis at all. They must be members
of “al-Qa’ida”, Islamists arriving from Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia,
Afghanistan, Pakistan … Among its 1,000 “security” prisoners at
Baghdad airport – the total number of detainees held without trial in
Iraq is around 5,500 – about 200 are said to be “foreigners”. But in
many cases, US intelligence cannot even discover their nationalities
and some may well have been in Iraq since Saddam invited Arabs to
defend Baghdad before the invasion.
In reality, no one has produced a shred of evidence al-Qa’ida men are
streaming into the country. Not a single sighting has been reported of
these mysterious men, save for the presence of armed Iranians outside
the shrines of Najaf after last month’s bombing. Yet President Bush and
Donald Rumsfeld have talked up their supposed presence to the point
where the usual right-wing columnists in the US press and then
reporters in general write of them as a proven fact. With powerful
irony, Osama bin Laden’s ominous 11 September tape suggests that he is
as anxious to get his men into Iraq as the Americans are to believe
that they are already there.
In practice, fantasy takes over from reality. Thus while the Americans
can claim they are being assaulted by “foreigners” – the infamous men
of evil against whom Mr Bush is fighting his “war on terror” – they can
equally suggest that the suicide bombing of the UN headquarters in
Baghdad was the work of the Iraqi security guards whom the UN had kept
on from the Saddam regime. Whatever the truth of this – and the
suicidal expertise of the UN attack might suggest a combination of both
Baathists and Islamists – the message was simple enough: Americans are
attacked by “international terrorists” but the wimps of the UN are
attacked by the same Iraqi killers they helped to protect through so
many years of sanction-busting.
There are foreign men and women aplenty in Baghdad – Americans and
Britons prominent among them – who work hard to bring about the false
promises uttered by Messrs Bush and Blair to create a decent,
democratic Iraqi society. One of them is Chris Woolford, whose account
of life in Bremer’s marble palace appeared only in the internal
newsletter of the UK regulatory Office of Telecommunications, for whom
he normally works. Mr Woolford insists that there are signs of hope in
Iraq – the payment of emergency salaries to civil servants, for
example, and the reopening of schools and administrative offices.
But it’s worth recording at length his revealing description of life
under Bremer. “Life in Baghdad can only be described as bizarre,” he
writes. “We are based within a huge compound… in Sadam (sic)
Hussein’s former Presidential Palace. The place is awash with vast
marble ballrooms, conference rooms (now used as a dining room), a
chapel (with murals of Scud
missiles) and hundreds of function rooms with ornate chandeliers which
were probably great for entertaining but which function less well as
offices and dormitories … I work in the ‘Ministries’ wing of the
palace in the Ministry of Transport and Communications. Within this
wing, each door along the corridor represents a separate ministry; next
door to us, for example, is the Ministry of Health and directly across
the corridor is the Finance Ministry. Behind each door military and
civilian coalition members (mainly American with the odd Brit dotted
about) are beavering away trying to sort out the economic, social and
political issues currently facing Iraq. The work is undoubtedly for a
good cause but it cannot but help feel strange as our contact with the
outside world – the real Iraq – is so limited.” Mr Woolford describes
how meetings with his Iraqi counterparts are difficult to arrange and,
besides, “key decisions are still very much taken behind the
closed doors of the CPA (the Coalition Provisional Authority), or for
the most significant decisions, back in Washington DC”. So much, then,
for the interim council and the appointed Iraqi “government” that
supposedly represents the forthcoming “democracy” of Iraq. As for
contacting his Iraqi counterparts, Mr Woolford admits that Iraqi
officials are sometimes asked to “stand outside in their garden between
7pm and 8pm so that we can ring them on satellite phones” – a process
that is followed by the departure of CPA staff for their meeting
with “bullet-proof vests and machine-gun mounted Humvees (a sort of
beefed-up American Jeep) both in front and behind our own four-wheel
drive…” Thus are America and Britain attempting to “reconstruct” a
broken land that is now the scene of an increasingly cruel guerrilla
war. But there is a pervading feeling – among Iraqis as well as
journalists covering this conflict – that something is wrong with our
Western response to New Iraq. Our lives are more valuable than their
lives. The “terrible toll” of the summer months – a phrase from a New
York Times news report last week – referred only to the deaths of
Western soldiers.
What is becoming apparent is that we don’t really care about the
Iraqis. We may think we want to bring them democracy but, on an
individual level, we don’t care very much about them or their lives. We
liberated them. They should be grateful to us. If they die now, well,
no one said democracy was easy.
Donald Rumsfeld – who raged away about weapons of mass destruction
before the invasion – now admits he didn’t even discuss WMD with David
Kay, the head of the US-led team looking for these mythical weapons, on
his recent visit to Baghdad. Of course not. Because they don’t exist.
Mr Rumsfeld is equally silent about the civilian death toll here. It’s
the followers of his nemesis Bin Laden that now have to be publicised.
Bin Laden must be grateful. So must the Palestinians. In the refugee
camps of Lebanon last week, they were talking of the events in Iraq as
a form of encouragement. “If Israel’s superpower ally can be humbled by
Arabs,” a Palestinian official explained to me in one of the Beirut
camps, “why should we give up our struggle against the Israelis who
cannot be as efficient soldiers as the Americans?” That’s the lesson
the Algerians drew when they saw France’s mighty army reduced to
surrender at Dien Bien Phu. The French, like the Americans, had
succeeded in murdering or “liquidating” many of the
Algerians who might have negotiated a ceasefire with them. The search
for an interlocuteur valable was one of de Gaulle’s most difficult
tasks when he decided to leave Algeria. But what will the Americans do?
Their interlocuteur valable might have been the United Nations. But now
the UN has been struck off as a negotiator by the suicide bombing in
Baghdad. And the Bin Ladens and the adherents of the Wahabi sect are
not interested in negotiations of any kind. Mr Bush declared “war
without end”. And it looks as though Iraqis – along with ourselves —
are going to be its principal
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/