How Easily WeTake
The Deaths
In Iraq For Granted
By Robert Fisk
29 August, 2005
Independent
Taking
things for granted. Or, as a very dear friend of mine used to say to
me, "There you go." I am sitting in Baghdad airport, waiting
for my little Flying Carpet Airlines 20-seater prop aircraft to take
me home to Beirut but the local Iraqi station manager, Mr Ghazwan, has
not turned up like he used to. Without him, I can't enter departures
or check in.
Back in January,
he was here, telling me he wouldn't forget to take me through security,
talking to an Iraqi officer who looked remarkably like him, telling
the officer to look after me. Ghazwan spoke careful, grammatical English
and would laugh at himself when he made mistakes.
So I call Ghazwan's
mobile and an old man answers. I want to speak to Ghazwan, I say. "Why?"
Because I need to know when he'll be at the airport. There is a kind
of groan from the other end of the line. "He was killed."
I sit there on my
plastic airport seat, unable to speak. What? What do you mean? "He
was killed by the enemy," the old man says and I hear the receiver
taken from him.
A young woman now,
with good English. "Who are you?" A passenger. English. I
start apologising. No one told me Ghazwan was dead. Even the Beirut
travel agents still list his name as a Baghdad contact.
The young woman
- it is his wife, or rather his young widow - mutters something about
him being killed on the way to the airport and I ask when this happened.
"On the 14th of March," she says. I had last seen him exactly
five weeks before his death.
And the story comes
out. His brother was a security guard at the airport - presumably the
officer who looked like him whom I had met in February - and the two
men were leaving home together to go to work in the same car when gunmen
shot the brother dead and killed Ghazwan in the same burst of fire.
I apologise again. I say how sorry I am. There is an acknowledgement
from the young woman and the mobile is switched off.
Taking things for
granted. I am back in Beirut, watching the new Pope visit his native
Germany. He meets Cologne's Jewish community. He talks of the wickedness
of the Jewish Holocaust. He should. He speaks warmly of Israel. Why
not?
Then he meets the
Muslim community and I see them on the screen, heads slightly bowed,
eyes glancing furtively towards the cameras. To them he lectures on
the evils of terrorism. It all seems logical even though I can never
quite shake off the knowledge that the Pope was a wartime German anti-aircraft
gunner. Anti-abortion, anti-gay and, once, anti-aircraft.
But then I sit up.
In his first address, there is no word about Israel's occupation of
the West Bank, its expanding settlements on other people's land, against
all international law. And the Muslims, well, they do have to be reminded
of their sins, of their duty to extirpate "terrorism", to
preach moderation at all times, to stop the scourge of suicide bombers.
And suddenly I am
shocked at this profound lack of judgement on the Pope's part. Yet meekly
aware that I had myself gone along with it. It was the Pope's job, wasn't
it, to apologise to the Jews of Europe. And it was his job, wasn't it,
to warn the Muslims of Europe.
Thus do we fall
in line. Yes, he should apologise for the Holocaust - to the end of
time.
But might not His
Holiness, the former anti-aircraft gunner, have also apologised to the
Muslims for the bloody and catastrophic invasion of Iraq - no, no, of
course there's no parallel in evil, scale, etc - but he might have at
least shown the courage of his predecessor who stood up against George
Bush and his ferocious war.
Taking things for
granted. In Baghdad and then in Beirut, I read of the latest "anti-terror"
laws of Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara. Of course, of course. After suicide
bombers on the London Underground, what else do we expect? Our precious
capital and its people must be protected.
Having been three
or four trains in front of the King's Cross tube that exploded on 7
July, I take these things seriously myself. And were I back on the London
Tube today, I'd probably be trying to avoid young men with backpacks
- as well as armed members of the Metropolitan Police.
And after all the
panjandrums in the press about our wonderful security forces, I'd also
be taking a close look at these fine and patriotic folk. These are the
men (and women?) who lied to us about weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq. These are the chaps who couldn't get a single advance trace of
even one of the four suicide bombings on 7 July (nor the un-lethal ones
a few days later). These are the lads who gunned down a helpless civilian
as he sat on a Tube train.
But hold on a moment,
I say to myself again. The 7 July bombings would be a comparatively
quiet day in Baghdad. Was I not at the site of the an-Nahda bus station
bombings after 43 civilians - as innocent, their lives just as precious
as those of Londoners - were torn to pieces last week.
At the al-Kindi
hospital, relatives had a problem identifying the dead. Heads were placed
next to the wrong torsos, feet next to the wrong legs. A problem there.
But there came not a groan from England. We were still locked into our
7 July trauma. No detectives are snooping around the an-Nahda bomb site
looking for clues. They're already four suicide bombs later. An-Nahda
is history.
And it dawns on
me, sitting on my balcony over the Mediterranean at the end of this
week, that we take far too much for granted. We like to have little
disconnects in our lives. Maybe this is the fault of daily journalism
- where we encapsulate the world every 24 hours, then sleep on it and
start a new history the next day in which we fail totally to realise
that the narrative did not begin before last night's deadline but weeks,
months, years ago.
For it is a fact,
is it not, that if "we" had not invaded Iraq in 2003, those
43 Iraqis would not have been pulverised by those three bombs last week.
And it is surely a fact that, had we not invaded Iraq, the 7 July bombs
would not have gone off (and I am ignoring Lord Blair's piffle about
"evil ideologies"). In which case the Pope would not last
week have been lecturing German Muslims on the evils of "terrorism".
And of course, had
we not invaded Iraq, Mr Ghazwan would be alive and his brother would
be alive and his grieving widow would have been his young and happy
wife and his broken father would have been a proud dad. But, as that
friend of mine used to say, "there you go".