The
story of Nick Berg - A Tale
That Haunts America
By Andrew Buncombe
13 May 2004
The Guardian
Nick Berg liked to play the saxophone.
When he was at high school he was a member of the marching band and
neighbours would hear him practising in the evenings at his parents'
house, the music seeping out through the walls.
He was a friendly
young man. His friends said he had an independent spirit. The 26-year-old
liked science and he liked to travel. When he was at college he went
to Ghana and helped build houses out of mud, returning home considerably
thinner and with his pockets empty because he gave away most of his
money. Now Mr Berg is dead, murdered in the most terrible way in a place
thousands of miles from his home and light years away from the life
that he led in the Philadelphia suburbs.
His family is heartbroken
while his friends and neighbours, probably along with every other American,
are sickened to the core. "It's a very sombre mood," said
one neighbour, Janet Conrad, yesterday. "He was very well liked.
It's an unbelievable tragedy."
Mr Berg was beheaded
in Iraq by extremists apparently closely linked to the senior al-Qa'ida
operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who took him hostage and then made a
video of his execution which they posted on to an internet website.
In a statement they read out before sawing off Mr Berg's head with a
knife, the five masked men claimed they were killing the self-employed
telecommunications engineer in revenge for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners
by US troops at Abu Ghraib prison. It is not certain whether Zarqawi,
on whose head there is a $10m (£6m) reward, was among the killers.
Mr Berg's body -
discovered dumped next to a road in Baghdad last Saturday - was due
to be returned to the US last night or later today. But for many Americans,
the coffin being flown to Dover Air Force base in Delaware will be bringing
home not just the young man's remains but also the visceral horror of
the war and the ongoing occupation by US forces.
"I was adamantly
opposed to the war," admitted another of the Bergs' neighbours,
who asked not to be named. "But here it is."
One senses that
Mr Berg's murder has shocked America in a way perhaps more powerful
even than the 700 US soldiers who have been killed in prosecuting President
Bush's mission to oust Saddam Hussein. He, after all, was not a soldier
but a communications engineer who had travelled to Iraq independently
to try to secure contracts to repair radio antennas - another thing
he used to practise in the back garden of his parents' home in West
Whiteland, Pennsylvania.
He had supported
the war and wanted to help rebuild Iraq, said his father, Michael, a
retired schoolteacher, who was opposed to the invasion. "He's a
helping guy," Mr Berg Snr told reporters: "He looked at it
as bringing democracy to a country that didn't have it."
The brutality of
Mr Berg's murder and very public way in which he was killed has stunned
America and horrified his family, who collapsed sobbing when they learnt
of the video's existence. While newspapers declined to print the most
graphic of the images, they were available on websites such as the Drudge
Report, where the execution, complete with Mr Berg's screams as the
knife was placed to his throat, could be viewed.
One could argue
that the pictures of Iraqi hospitals full of children maimed and killed
by American and British cluster bombs are, in their own way, equally
horrific, but that would miss the point.
Most Americans -
even here in the middle-class suburbs of Philadelphia - never see, or
never choose to see, images that portray the horror the war has wreaked
on Iraqi civilians. But thanks to the same digital technology that ensured
the pictures of the abuse at Abu Ghraib were dispatched around the world,
Mr Berg's five killers carried out what was, in effect, a public execution.
As a result, the
image of Mr Berg, wearing an orange jump suit and bound to a chair shortly
before he was beheaded, will probably become as much a fixture of the
iconography of Mr Bush's so-called war on terror as the photograph of
the Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl shortly before he
was beheaded by an al-Qa'ida gang in Pakistan in 2002.
"I just do
not want to see those pictures," said Susan Mattern, 32, who used
to catch the school bus with Mr Berg's brother and sister, and who organised
a candlelit vigil of prayers and remembrance outside the family home
on Tuesday night. She said: "There was nothing we could do. I just
rang some people so that we could show our support. I know that if I
was in their position I would want some support. I am so upset by what
has happened. Yesterday I think I was in shock because it was so close
to home but today it has really hit me.
"I just think
that now we need to get the hell out of there. If they want to kill
each other then let them."
While the US authorities
have vowed to find Mr Berg's killers, his friends and family are also
demanding an explanation as to what happened to him in Iraq after he
was detained in early March by Iraqi police in the city of Mosul, who
apparently questioned the authenticity of some of the documents he was
carrying.
Mr Berg's father
said that his son had told him in a telephone call he had been handed
over to the US authorities who held him for 13 days without access to
a lawyer and that he was questioned about what he was doing in Iraq.
His family filed a lawsuit in the federal court in Philadelphia on 5
April asserting that he was being held by the military in violation
of his civil rights. A day later, he was released.
He told his parents
that the State Department had been unable to get him a flight home and
that he was seeking instead to return overland. They last heard from
him on 9 April.
A US spokesman in
Baghdad said yesterday that Mr Berg had never been in American custody
but that the US authorities had helped secure his release from the police
cell. The spokesman said Mr Berg had been warned that it was unsafe
in Iraq and that he should leave.
It is not clear
where or when Mr Berg was kidnapped or killed but analysis of the videotape
suggested there was a gap of several hours between the time the masked
men read their statement and when he was actually beheaded.
It is impossible
to predict the effect Mr Berg's execution will have on US public opinion
in the weeks ahead as the Bush administration prepares to return sovereignty
to Iraq by 30 June. Those opposed to the war will probably be hardened
in their opinion that this was the sort of horror that should have anticipated
from the outset. Others may argue that the savagery supports Mr Bush's
purported mission to bring democracy to Iraq. One neighbour recommended
the solution should be to drop a bomb.
But among the birdsong
in the quiet neighbourhood where Mr Berg grew up, most people's thoughts
were simply of him and his family, of someone they knew and whose death
had brought the horror of Iraq to their doorsteps.
A few yards from
Mr Berg's parents' home, Kathy McCauley was busy with the youngest of
her three children.
"A lot of the
mothers were terribly distraught," she said. "I was just looking
at my own children this morning, my daughter getting the bus to school
and I was just thinking that he used to do that."