Rene — Silenced Witnesses
Topic(s): Palestine / Israel | Comments Off on Rene — Silenced WitnessesSilenced Witnesses
Thursday, October 30, 2003
lndependent/UK
In a seven-week period this spring, two overseas observers were killed by the
Israeli army in the Gaza Strip, and a third left brain dead. But has the
truth yet been told?
by John Sweeney
James Miller taught my children to surf. Together, the two of us went
to Kosovo, Chechnya and Zimbabwe. He was funny, decent to the core,
a genius behind the camera lens. Together, we celebrated winning a
Royal Television Society gong by having one shandy too many. I fell
into an argument with an irritating cove in a penguin suit. James
stepped in, threatening to take said cove outside and sort him out. At
which point, some PR floozie whispered in my ear: “Do you know who
that is?” No. “It’s the head of ITV.” Don’t watch it much anyway.
James and I had so much fun and, occasionally, we did the work.
I was in Baghdad when I heard the news. He had been shot in Rafah,
at the fag-end of the Gaza Strip, and was dead.
I phoned his widow Sophy immediately, and wept buckets. When the BBC
decided to investigate James’s killing, they asked me to report for
the film. I couldn’t say no.
James was not the first international witness to fall silent in
Rafah. He was the third. This spring, in less than seven weeks, and
within a radius of less than three miles, the American human-shield
activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer;
the British photographer and peace activist Tom Hurndall was shot in
the head and rendered brain-dead; and James Miller was shot dead.
To understand what happened to James, it made sense to investigate
the killing of Rachel and the maiming of Tom, whose family are
currently discussing with doctors whether or not his life-support
machine should be switched off. One day we filmed Tom lying in his
hospital bed at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in Putney,
south-west London. On the wall was a battery of photographs showing
Tom with a whole life ahead of him. The bleep-bleep of the monitor was
the only sound. That afternoon, we has traveled to a Devon village
to film Sophy Miller, James’s widow, and their children, Alexander,
three, and Lotte, not yet one.
Making our film, When Killing Is Easy, has been the most harrowing
ordeal of my professional life. But it is vital that it isevidential –
and that is really tough when the Israeli government and the Israeli
Defense Force (IDF) have refused to speak to us. From mid-August we
faxed and telephoned the Israelis repeatedly, asking them to explain
their actions. All we got was a series of old press releases.
Rachel Corrie was the first of the three victims. She was a member
of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). They are young
idealists, mainly European and American, who offer themselves as
human shields. You could call them naive, even foolish. There is no
doubting their guts. They stand between the Israeli bulldozers and
their targets, the Palestinians’ homes that the IDF wants to flatten.
The Israelis have their reasons. Rafah is a stronghold of Islamic
extremism in Gaza. The Palestinians dig tunnels underneath the
Israeli-controlled border to their relatives in Egypt. The tunnels,
the Israelis say, are used to smuggle guns and bombs. It is fair to
point out that few, if any, suicide bombers have come from Gaza,
for the simple reason that the Israelis have made it virtually
impossible for ordinary residents to leave the strip. Even so,
to make the tunneling more difficult the IDF has created a Berlin
Wall-style “death strip”. The ISM people come along and get in the
way. The Israeli government calls them “irresponsible”, “illegal”
and “terrorist sympathizers”.
All of this must be seen in the context of the second intifada,
where Israeli military actions have frequently occurred in response
to Palestinian suicide bombings. So far, 800 Israelis have been killed
and 2,200 Palestinians.
On 16 March this year, Rachel and her friends from the ISM were
defending the home of Dr Samir Nasser Allah from the bulldozers. The
human shields had been successful in getting in the way. Tom Dale and
Alice Coy, fellow ISM activists, watched a bulldozer rumble straight
towards Rachel. She stood her ground. The bulldozer didn’t stop. Dale,
an Oxford undergraduate, had a clear view of the incident. “He [the
driver] knew absolutely she was there. The bulldozer waited for a few
seconds over her body and it then reversed, leaving its scoop down
so that if she had been under the bulldozer, it would have crushed
her a second time. Only later when it was much more clear of her body
did it raise its scoop.”
Rachel was able to tell Coy: “My back is broken.” She died soon
afterwards. A still photograph of the scene clearly shows the
ISM activists gathered around the mortally wounded Rachel. In
the background is the bulldozer. Connecting the two are straight
bulldozer tracks.
The Israeli pathologist Dr Yehudah Hiss noted that Rachel appeared to
have been run over by a bulldozer, and found the cause of death to be
“pressure to the chest”. Rachel’s shoulder blades had been crushed,
her spine broken in five places and six ribs broken. Her face was
apparently slashed by the blade.
The IDF produced a field report that stated that “Corrie was not run
over by an engineering vehicle”, and, for good measure, that she was
“hidden from view of the vehicle’s operator”. The IDF backed up its
version by allowing Israeli television to do a sound-only interview
with the soldier who drove the bulldozer. He said: “When I was doing
the earthworks, I picked up a load of earth and pushed it along. Nobody
was there at the time. Maybe she was buried there. I don’t know. I
didn’t see her.” There was a second soldier in the bulldozer.
What did he see? We don’t know.
The IDF report goes on to assert that Rachel “was struck by dirt
and a slab of concrete, resulting in her death”. But what about the
Israeli pathologist’s finding of multiple crush injuries, which is not
consistent with a single slab of concrete falling on her? Curiously,
when the military police later carried out a criminal investigation,
they concluded that she was not “hit by a bulldozer” but had stumbled
on building waste.
The family of Rachel Corrie believe the Defense force’s version
of events to be a blatant fabrication. The IDF wouldn’t talk to us
about Rachel’s death; the Israeli military police’s investigation is
complete and no Israeli soldier has been charged with any wrongdoing.
Tom Hurndall was shot in the head on 11 April. The IDF has admitted
shooting Tom, but they imply that they had good reason to do so; he was
wearing camouflage fatigues and firing a gun at an IDF outpost. The
IDF’s field report even provides two diagrams showing the location
of the gunman firing at them.
Tom’s father, Anthony Hurndall, a City of London property lawyer, has
investigated his son’s shooting. The two diagrams in the IDF report
locate Tom’s position when he was shot in two different places. The
sites are contradictory. Thirteen eyewitnesses and two chains of
photographs locate Tom in a different place, about 100 meters further
away from the death strip. The eyewitnesses say that Tom was not
firing a gun at the Israelis, but helping a Palestinian toddler who
had frozen under Israeli fire.
Immediately after Tom was shot, he was moved out of the firing line by
two Palestinian youths to a safer place where he could be given first
aid. Two photographers took a series of stills showing Tom being picked
up. Blood is spurting from his head, so you can tell the pictures
were taken within seconds of him being shot. In the background of both
sets of photographs are some distinctive Hamas graffiti, nailing the
site of Tom’s shooting to the location identified by the eyewitnesses.
The IDF field report asserts that Tom was wearing camouflage
fatigues. ISM activists deliberately wear bright fluorescent jackets,
to identify themselves and to distinguish themselves from Palestinian
terror groups. The South African photographer Garth Stead took
black-and-white pictures, but one of them shows clearly that Tom is
wearing a distinctive jacket. The second set of stills and an amateur
video recording prove the jacket to be, not camouflage fatigues, but
orange. I asked Stead whether it would be possible to mistake orange
for camouflage. He replied: “Not unless he was an orange-picker.”
The family of Tom Hurndall also believes the IDF’s version of events
to be a fabrication. His father, after six weeks of investigation,
reluctantly came to the conclusion that “this is a case of attempted
murder. If Tom dies, and that is a likelihood, then it will be
murder.” A military investigation continues.
James Miller was shot on 2 May. He had been in Rafah for more than
two weeks, for a good part of the time basing himself in a private
home that the IDF called “the house of the journalists”. On the last
night of filming there had been some gunfire, mainly or exclusively
from the Israeli armored personnel carriers, at Palestinian targets.
Quiet followed, and then the troops in the personnel carriers addressed
James and his reporter Saira Shah. (The pair had made two stunningly
successful films in Afghanistan, winning many awards.) James’s
camera recorded that the Israeli troops were calling out to them,
not in Hebrew, but in Arabic. It is believed that they were from
the Bedouin Desert Patrol Unit; Arab volunteers who fight for the
Israelis for money. The Bedouin are not nervous Israeli reservists but
battle-hardened volunteers who serve in Rafah for long periods of time.
They called out in Arabic: “Do you like Fairuz?” (a Lebanese folk
singer) and: “Do you wear perfume?” – a catchphrase from an Egyptian
sitcom. Saira Shah thought them so outspoken that they might have
been high on something.
There were two cameras recording the scene; James’s and that of a
Palestinian stringer working for Associated Press TV News (APTN). Two
personnel carriers that had been in the area shut off their engines
and switched off their lights. It’s an old soldier’s trick; to see in
the dark you douse your lights and your natural night vision improves
dramatically. You can see them; they can’t see you. Moreover, thanks
to American military aid, the IDF has some of the best night-vision
equipment in the world. The armored personnel carriers in Rafah
routinely carry two rifles equipped with Aquila night-sights, which
draw in the available light and give fourfold magnification. James
and his team were sitting in a well-lit veranda. The soldiers in the
personnel carrier would have seen them clearly with their natural
night vision and brilliantly through their night-sights.
The IDF field report into James’s death remains confidential, but
we have seen a leaked version. It clearly states that, after some
shooting, the night fell quiet.
James had been filming in the hope of recording the Israelis dynamiting
one of the abandoned homes on the edge of the death strip, but it
looked as though the IDF had stopped work for the night. The team
decided to leave the house from where they had been filming and return
to their (much safer) flat in the center of Rafah. It was the last
day of filming.
They decided to be open and straightforward; to approach one of
the personnel carriers directly and ask for safe passage. James,
Saira and their local fixer Aboud headed directly for the vehicle,
shouting in English and Arabic. Saira was holding a British passport,
Aboud held a white flag on to which James was shining a torch. From
the veranda, the APTN cameraman filmed the scene. On tape you can
clearly hear that the night is deathly quiet. There is no sound of
crossfire. Had there been any, the team would not have taken the risk.
They had walked about 20 meters from the veranda when the first shot
rang out. The team froze. For 13 seconds, there is silence broken
only by Saira’s cry: “We are British journalists.” Then comes the
second shot, which killed James. He was shot in the front of his
neck. The bullet was Israeli issue, fired, according to a forensic
expert, from less than 200 meters away.
Immediately after the shooting, the IDF said that James had been shot
in the back during crossfire. It later retracted the assertion about
where in his body he was shot, but until today it has maintained that
he was shot during crossfire. There was no crossfire on the APTN tape.
The Israeli Defense Force and the government of Israel chose not
to talk to us about James Miller’s case. A military investigation
continues.
Since the start of the second intifada, 2,200 Palestinians have been
killed. Nine Israeli soldiers have been indicted for various offences,
but none has been convicted of unlawful killing. But this, from the
killing fields of the Occupied Territories, is something new: the
killing and maiming of Western journalists and peace activists. And,
unlike the Palestinians, the families of the international victims
have been able to bring pressure to bear. They have, however, had
precious few satisfactory answers.
We showed the APTN film of James’s shooting to a serving Israeli
soldier. He noted that the television team did not look like Islamic
terrorists and concluded: “That’s murder.”
‘When Killing is Easy’ by John Sweeney, produced by Bill Treharne
Jones, is shown on Sunday at 7.10pm on BBC2